Scientific Controversies: Authentic and Contrived [post-print]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Characteristics of Real Science and Real Scientific ControversyScience is more of a journey than a destination.And, as to be expected of any journey taken by diverse travellers to an unexplored place, there may arise disagreements over how to get there, what is seen, and what it all means.If the place is relatively unimportant and the number of travellers few, the discord rarely spreads far.But if the destination is important, the travellers are many, and the outcome of getting there (or not) is consequential, disagreements can escalate into a broadly sweeping controversy with a lot at stake.Some 25 years ago, I had the pleasure of contributing an invited paper (M P Silverman, 1992, "Raising Questions: Philosophical Significance of Controversy in Science", Science & Education 1: 163-179) to the inaugural volume of this journal on the provocative topic of the significance of controversy in science.The article was based in part on a course I was teaching-Role and Resolution of Controversy in Science-since about 1987.One objective of this course was to counter what I perceived at the time to be an unhealthy tendency of the public to accept uncritically the daily reports in the news media of scientific advances.What made that tendency societally unhealthy in my view was (a) news reports of such advances were often premature, inaccurate, or totally false-a state of affairs effectively (and hilariously) highlighted in recent times by "philosopher-comedian" John Oliver (Scientific Studies: Last Week Tonight, HBO, 8 May 2016); and (b) the misunderstanding by the public that scientific knowledge was certain and unassailable.In the opening words of my 1992 article:Turn on the radio; hear the announcer report: "Scientists have found that…"; and you can be sure that one more seemingly unimpeachable fact has entered the mainstream of public belief.
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.
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 | 0.003 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.107 | 0.051 |
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".