The Computational Fallacy: A New Model for Understanding the Role of Computers in Humanities
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper tries to counter some misassumptions about the computer and computation especially in relation to humanities and human behavior and they amount to what the author calls “the computational fallacy. The paper discusses a number of points such as the physiology of the computer, the Etymology of basic terms in the field, and the current approaches especially in mainstream digital humanities which reduce computation to a set of “tools”. The paper then proceeds to discuss some counter arguments such as rethinking the notion of programmability which should substitute “calculation” as the core of computation, considering the transformative nature of the computer and its media using the ideas of some theorists like Manovich and Drucker, and some new approaches that view computation differently like Computational Thinking, Algorithmic criticism, and Speculative computing.Cet article essaie de contrer quelques suppositions erronées sur l’ordinateur et la computation, plus particulièrement leur relation aux sciences humaines et au comportement humain qui équivaut à ce que l’auteur appelle « the computational fallacy » ou l’erreur computationnelle. Cet article aborde de nombreux points, tels que la physiologie de l’ordinateur, l’étymologie de termes de base dans ce domaine, ainsi que les approches courantes, particulièrement les approches dominantes dans les humanités numériques qui réduisent la computation comme un ensemble « d’outils ». Ensuite, l’article poursuit en discutant les contre-arguments comme les nouvelles réflexions des notions de programmation qui devraient substituer le calcul au cœur de la computation, considérant la nature transformante de l’ordinateur et ses médias utilisant les idées de quelques théoristes dont Manovich et Drucker, et quelques nouvelles approches qui voient la computation différemment comme « Computational Thinking » ou la pensée computationnelle, « Algorithmic criticism » ou la critique algorithmique et « Speculative computing » ou la computation spéculative. 
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it