Bibliographic record
Abstract
The request to write an essay on ‘wisdom’ that could be passed on from an old and retired paediatrician, such as myself, to a young and aspiring trainee in paediatrics just starting out, led me to ask myself what wisdom really is. The dictionary defines the word as “knowledge and experience”, “accumulated learning” and “good sense”. If ‘knowledge’ (as the dictionary adds) is “understanding gained by experience”, what then is “experience”? This is a definition I came across many years ago: “Experience is the ability to make the same mistake with increasing confidence”. All of which didn’t get me very far. Instead, I prefer to write briefly on a few topics that sometimes cause difficulties in the practice of paediatrics and particularly about their management, which seems to have worked reasonably well for me. ... Parents are all different. Most that I had contact with were nice people, devoted to their children, who understood that I would give them good advice about how to manage the problems of their sick children. A few were different. Some were demanding, downright rude and inconsiderate. These parents, I felt, often had some underlying problems themselves, such as guilt or a broken marriage. I spent no more time with them than was necessary and avoided a quarrel whenever possible. If conversation in the clinic or office began to get heated, I always left the room for a short time on some pretext or other to let them cool off. Then there were the silent parents, those who could not be persuaded to talk and only answered questions with monosyllables. One mother I remember sat silent and grim on her chair for 10 or 15 minutes until I accidentally dropped my stethoscope on the floor while examining her daughter. This resulted in gales of laughter from both mother and child, and from that time on they chatted away happily. What wisdom can I offer for dealing with difficult parents? Above all, I believe one should never withhold information from them, however upsetting they might find it, and give them every piece of new information as it becomes available. Only in this way can trust between doctor and parents be built. All information, naturally, should not be given initially in the presence of a young patient.
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 | 0.010 | 0.043 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.007 |
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".