Bibliographic record
Abstract
PrefaCeThis book is about whether our society, specifically North American society (the United States and Canada), 1 has the decision-making capabilities that would allow it to take pre-emptive action to prevent a crisis.This is not about being blindsided by that which simply cannot be known.But if we can foresee disaster looming, not with certainty but with some reasonably high probability, can we make provisions to alter course in any fundamental way?Simply put, can our private or public institutions be prudent in their behaviour-not in what they say, but in what they actually do?Or must we drive forward until the crisis befalls us, before we can act in any material way?I will argue that our institutions are designed in such a way as to make prudent behaviour highly unlikely.2 Their almost exclusive purpose is to maximize economic growth, preferably with low levels of unemployment.In pursuit of this objective, they are designed to encourage risk-taking, to avoid tough decisions, and to deal with the consequences later, if they arise.Lack of knowledge of risk is not the problem.The problem is embedded more deeply in our institutional architecture.That is, the compulsion to proceed, no matter the risk, is dictated by the values, rules, and organizations (public and private) that comprise our society.Accordingly, we must wait until a problem that is now on the horizon, or just over the horizon, becomes a widely recognized "clear and present danger" before we act.3 The review here of the decision-making capabilities of our dominant institutions-markets, private corporations, households, and federal governments-has import for any policy decision.But I will use energy policy issues as my primary example.As we shall see, energy-because of its essential role in human life and its overwhelming scale of use in modern complex civilization-elevates what is being decided upon to a global and existential level.Our entire experience of economic growth under market capitalism, although brief, has been made possible by our access to fossil fuels.When something goes wrong with our energy supply (including food, which is simply energy fit for human consumption), it has a profound and negative macroeconomic impact on North American society, even though we are also very large energy and food producers.The negative impact increases the more a society depends on importing these vital energy commodities.So
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.516 | 0.355 |
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".