“The Case of Professors” in 1821 at St. Petersburg University in the history of Russian statistics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This publication is written in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the “Case of Professors" of St. Petersburg University, which heralds the important stage in the formation of conservative policy of the Russian government in the sphere of science and education. The object of this research is the impact of the events of 1821 upon the development of government science in Russia – the early direction of statistical science. The author analyzes the prerequisites for the emergence of political-economic direction of government science in Russia, draws parallel with the traditional German school, outlines the key peculiarities – attempt to determine the advantages and disadvantages of the phenomena under review, establish causal relationships between them, appose government science with political economics. In the course of the “Case of Professors”, two of the most prominent representatives of this scientific direction – C. T. Hermann and K .I. Arsenyev were exposed to harsh criticism by the officials of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education. Leaning on the published and archival sources, the article explores the arguments of M. L. Magnitsky, I. S. Laval, A. N. Golitsyn on the topic of teaching statistics at the university. The conclusion is made that the major complaint of the officials to the teaching techniques and scientific works of Hermann and Arsenyev was their extensive interpretation of the subject of statistical science. The opponents of the scholars sought to bring the government science back to the traditional for the XVIII century descriptive school, as well as limit it solely to the empirical methods. It is indicated that the prohibition against using the works of Hermann and Arsenyev in the educational institutions entail significant consequences and halted the development of political-economic direction of government science for over two decades. The university statistical education returned to this tradition only after 1835, with the adoption of the new university charter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".