There’s No Such Thing as We: A Theory of Difference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nain is the most northern settled Inuit community in Nunatsiavut and was one of the first municipalities in Canada to ban plastic bags in 2009.As I (Liboiron) walked along the shoreline in Nain in 2018, nearly a decade after the ban went into effect, I counted well over 100 washed-up plastic bags, roughly 8 percent of all shoreline plastics.The provincial average is 2 percent.Even more confounding, a community called Fogo Island further to the south that also has a bag ban had less than 1 percent plastic bag waste (Liboiron et al. 2020).There's something different about Nain.In this chapter we talk about difference and the way it matters to discard studies.Differences between things might seem obvious, but there are various theories of difference, including what difference is, how it works, and what makes processes of differentiation good or bad, beneficial or harmful (and to whom).Classifying, defining, sorting, ranking things by value, and other forms of differentiation-creating and acting on difference-are central to discarding.These activities
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 teacher head, 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".