Chimaera Modelling – when the modellers must reconcile inconsistent elements or purposes
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
Socio-Ecological System modelling projects are becoming increasingly complicated, with multiple actors and aspects being the norm. Such projects can cause problems for the modellers when this involves different elements, goals, philosophies, etc., all pulling in different directions – we call this “Chimaera Modelling.” Although such situations are common when you talk to modellers, they do not seem to be explicitly discussed in the literature. In this paper, we attempt to turn this perceived “inside” phenomenon into an “outside” phenomenon and to start a debate to increase transparency among the modelling community. We discuss the different aspects which may be relevant to this problem to start this debate, including: the underlying philosophy, modelling goals, extent of choice the modellers have, different stages of modelling, and kinds of actors that are involved. We further map out some of the dimensions with which Chimaera Modelling connects. We briefly discuss these and propose to the community as a whole to work on their methodological development, feasibility, risks and applicability as their resolution is far beyond the scope of this paper. We end with a brief description of the broad possible approaches to such situations. Our main message is a call for recognition of Chimaera Modelling as a likely side-effect of multi-stakeholder, multi-purpose projects, and to take this into account proactively at the project team level and be transparent about the tensions and contradictions that underly such modelling.
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 | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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