Mark Coeckelbergh, Self-Improvement: Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. Pp. 144.
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
I think that it would be no exaggeration to say that 'self-improvement' has become a pressing ethical and political problem in the 21st century.Thankfully, it has also been problematized recently across numerous academic disciplines and in both specialist literature and popular writing.Mark Coeckelbergh's Self-Improvement, belonging somewhere between the latter two registers, addresses this serious and complex issue and strives to offer a clear analysis for a general public, using short sentences and simple prose. 1 The moment is right for such a work.As Coeckelbergh writes, "self-improvement is no longer optional; it has become an imperative.[…] We are self-improving ourselves until we have to give up.We are burned out by our jobs and family lives but also, ironically, by the self-improvement work that was meant to do something about that" (p.3).We seem to be at an impasse.We do not (or should not) wish to continue "improving" in this way, but we are not free simply to opt-out if we wish to remain competitive -and therefore survive -in our neoliberal economy.Quite often now, the response of our various professional institutions to a crushing work environment built on an expectation of constant and constantly improving performance is to proffer more "wellness": wellness newsletters, ten-minute chair messages for employees, meditation app suggestions, cat and dog petting sessions, etc.As it becomes increasingly clear that we are now (sometimes literally) killing ourselves in and for our self-improvement culture (p. 2), these responses seem to many to be, at best, highly ineffective and, at worst, complacent or complicit responses.This wellness culture provides something akin to food and sleep in the classic Marxist theory of labour: a merely necessary moment in the cyclical reproduction of our productive forces.Or, as Coeckelbergh puts it, wellness capitalism now "exploits people doubly: first as workers who try to improve their performance during the working hours, then as consumers of 'wellness' during their leisure time, when they try to recover from their work" (p.47).
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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