Blame games, problem denial, and relational distance
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
Problem denial is the blame-avoider’s strategy of choice. If alleged harms can be rebutted or reframed, the blame game is forestalled before it begins. In current theory, problem denial is thought to be limited by plausibility and reputation. If denials stretch credulity, or if the denier has a track record of denial, the strategy will be short-lived. Conversely, this article investigates whether problem denial is enabled by seniority within the machinery of government. By observing how different tiers of UK central government respond to 235 inquiries by the Public Accounts Committee, it shows that the core executive does indeed rebut more criticism than ordinary line ministries, whereas ministries and administrative agencies show no difference. Qualitative analysis of committee transcripts indicates that this is explained by lower relational distance between committee and finance ministry, which is regarded as an ally in promoting value-for-money and so granted more licence to deny.
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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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