Learning from Elders about Autonomy, Meaningfulness, and Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, we appeal to conceptual and empirical research to establish that autonomy and meaningfulness, when understood concretely and realistically, remain possible for frail and dependent elders. Contrary to ageist cultural attitudes, relationships render frailty and dependence compatible with the exercise of autonomous agency and with a life of meaning. This conclusion is important not only for the goal of supporting frail elders but also for developing a realistic understanding of the way relationships and spirituality are required for autonomy and meaning in the life of any human person, regardless of what state of dependence or independence they may be in. Each of us develops and continues to exist in radical dependence on others. Seeing the way autonomy and meaning manifest in the context of frailty and dependence thus helps us better appreciate what these crucial aspects of being human mean for all of us. In other words, we can learn important lessons about autonomy, meaningfulness, and relationship from the experience of our elders, and in particular from those who experience significant frailty and dependence.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".