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Record W7133091696

Managing the Human Herd in the Digital World

2025· dissertation· W7133091696 on OpenAlexaff
Jovy Chan

Bibliographic record

VenueTSpace · 2025
Typedissertation
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicEvolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLeverage (statistics)Agency (philosophy)Work (physics)Social groupHerdHerd behavior
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Humans herd. Sometimes this is good. It helps us survive in and adapt to new environments; it allows us to cooperate and work together as a group. But sometimes following the herd is bad. It perpetuates false beliefs, and it allows bad norms to spread. Technology has amplified these crowd follies that result from herding. The internet’s unprecedented speed andreach allow fake news to go viral, and dangerous norms to trend. Most traditional frameworks for understanding group agency and collective decision-making are designed for (somewhat) structured groups. Unfortunately, when applied to the fast-changing and structureless digital world, the existing frameworks struggle to keep pace. New approaches are needed to manage the rapid and large-scale spread of beliefs and norms online, especially on social media. In this dissertation, I will leverage insights from social epistemology, evolutionary psychology and economic game theory to propose novel solutions for managing the human herd in the digital world.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.004
Threshold uncertainty score0.013

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.002
Scholarly communication0.0030.005
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0020.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.367
Teacher spread0.344 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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