A Historian's Plea for Humility among World Leaders: J.B. Brebner's Address at Columbia University's Bicentennial, 1954
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two hundred years after its founding, Columbia University celebrated its bicentennial with yearlong activities, and on its Charter Day of 31 October 1954 gathered some of the most prominent political dignitaries in the Western world. Historian John Bartlet Brebner provided an opening address wherein he asked his esteemed audience to admit to uncertainty, search out knowledge, and accept a posture of humility on the world stage. Brebner had taken part in Columbia University's intellectual mobilisation during the Second World War. After the war, he held discreet consultations with British statesmen, yet reserved a prudent tone to remind leaders not to abandon self-doubt or fall recklessly into being led by pride. The advice was timely back in 1954, and seventy years on, the professor's counsel has aged well.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".