Bibliographic record
Abstract
"Look before you leap!" they say. I may not. This proverb captures the gist of the prevalent accounts of rationality. It suggests that one who wants to act in a rational way needs to deliberate about the relevant features of the context of action. I argue that there are cases in which people do not look before they leap, and yet they leap successfully because they possess certain capacities. I show that these capacities are rooted in one's habits and in what it takes to put those habits into work in a right way. One who wants to leap successfully in a habitual way needs to cultivate the relevant reliable habits, know how to execute those habits, and know what reliable habit to act from in the situation at hand. The result is an account of rationality that suggests "don't look before you leap!" if certain conditions are met. My account of rationality is informed by under-explored conceptual resources articulated in Frank Ramsey's philosophy and John Maynard Keynes's economics, which were developed during the interwar period in Cambridge. I bring these resources to light by developing a historical narrative of the interdisciplinary debates on human nature and rationality that emerged in the wake of the Great War in Cambridge. The experience of war prompted many Cambridge-based psychologists, economists, and philosophers to explain a huge gap observed between actual human behavior and the ideal form of conduct in epistemic terms. They held that this gap partly originated from human irrationality, ingrained in the propensity to leap without looking. Consequently, two types of normative proposals emerged: one advocating that individuals should always look cautiously before they leap, while the other posited the necessity for individuals to cultivate the ability to make rational leaps without looking. Advancing normative proposals aligned with the second type, Ramsey and Keynes left us rich conceptual resources to address what it takes for one to have the capacity to leap successfully without looking. I employ these resources to begin to construct an account of rationality that has us acting on intelligent habits in highly uncertain situations.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.075 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".