Response to Merritts et al. (2023): The Anthropocene is complex. Defining it is not
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
Merritts et al. (2023) misrepresent Paul Crutzen’s Anthropocene concept as encompassing all significant anthropogenic impacts, extending back many millennia. Crutzen's definition reflects massively enhanced, much more recent human impacts that transformed the Earth System away from the stability of Holocene conditions. His concept of an epoch (hence the ‘cene’ suffix) is more consistent with the strikingly distinct sedimentary record accumulated since the mid-20th century. Waters et al. (2022) highlighted a Great Acceleration Event Array (GAEA) of stratigraphic event markers that are indeed diverse and complex but also tightly clustered around 1950 CE, allowing ultra-high resolution characterization and correlation of a clearly recognisable Anthropocene chronostratigraphic base. The ‘Anthropocene event’ offered by Merritts et al., following Gibbard et al. (2021, 2022), is a highly nuanced concept that obfuscates the transformative human impact of the chronostratigraphic Anthropocene. Waters et al. (2022) restricted the meaning of the term ‘event’ in geology to conform with usual Quaternary practice and improve its utility. They simultaneously recognized an evidence-based Anthropogenic Modification Episode that is more explicitly defined than the highly interpretive interdisciplinary ‘Anthropocene event’ of Gibbard et al. (2021, 2022). The advance of science is best served through clearly developed concepts supported by tightly circumscribed terminology; indeed, improvements to stratigraphy over recent decades have been achieved through increasingly precise definitions, especially for chronostratigraphic units, and not by retaining vague terminology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.026 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.023 |
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