Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the more profound effects of 60 years of neoliberal capitalism is the taken-for-grantedness with which neoliberal ontic and epistemic norms have become accepted as a permanent condition of life without historically available alternatives.That is, neoliberal capitalism's pervasiveness as not simply an economic or even political approach, but rather as a totality that envelops existential purpose, translates to a seamless discourse of marketization, accountability, and individualism in every realm: education, healthcare, culture and entertainment, and family life.In the here and now of a globalized yet deeply unequal market, our decisions are framed according to values of relentless economic growth, personal choice, and competition.Amid such a polished and wellfunded discourse, it can be easy to lose sight of other possibilities for our lives.It can feel as though entirely new solutions need to be engineered to disrupt the status quo.The remnants and recollections of other, historical ways of being and doing fade from our collective consciousness and, despairing that there is no alternative, we are compelled to traverse the structure of the present with a sense that it is not only the correct but also the sole possible mode of existence.In her latest book, exploring how two texts from Max Weber may prove useful in addressing present-day nihilism, Wendy Brown (2023) describes our current moment as a "disorienting contemporary condition, in which philosophical, social, economic, ecological, and political coordinates for value and values are profoundly unsettled, both in knowledge practices and the world" (p.2).She goes on to note that nihilism is intensified by "neoliberal economization of all value" (p.21) and that "nihilism both facilitates the neoliberal economization of everything and is intensified by this economization" (p.27).In this way, we are inscribed into an ouroboros of meaning making, trapped in an embrace of the very conditions that mobilize our anxieties-"absorption with the self, and its desires and safety" (Brown, 2023, p. 28).First, the solutions neoliberal "values" provide, like individualism and competition, worsen feelings of alienation by encouraging behaviours and actions that reify the circumstances of nihilism.Second, because neoliberal "values" are not really values tethered to anything other than the market, they remain superficial and unfulfilling, even in the rare occurrences of one's "success."One solution Weber proposes, which Brown critiques, is to strive to isolate values from knowledge in educational contexts.With Brown and for many reasons, I believe this radical suggestion for an epistemic approach drained of values would be impractical in a highly polarized world of information
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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 | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".