Spiral-scaling climate action: lessons from and for the academic flying less movement
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 notion that scholars should reduce consumption of workrelated flight travel as a form of climate action has become common in academia. Proponents of this idea have coalesced into a sectoral movement seeking to have a more significant impact. This article critically reflects on the case of the Academic Flying Less Movement (AFLM) to conceptually explore how the environmental concerns of individual scholars might cohere and coalesce into something more powerful. We draw lessons from the AFLM’s existing efforts to change common academic practice through norm diffusion, while also interpreting lessons for the AFLM by developing a spiral model of strategic multi-scalar climate action, wherein the limitations of various modes of action compel scalar shifts towards different forms of action. Our analysis contributes to ongoing efforts in the field to develop more nuanced understandings of the value and limitations of small-scale, demandside actions within the broader constellation of climate action.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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