Bibliographic record
Abstract
I shall respond to Wodak, Ziegler and Morris1 on two broad points. First, I correct their misinterpretation of the overall purpose of my paper;2 second, I critique the reasoning behind their claim that the circumcision debate is not ‘deadlocked’. In my paper, I neither suggest that those at either end of this polarised debate are ‘belligerents’, nor do I call for a compromise ‘down the middle’. In fact, I call for continued discussion and campaigning. I note that, despite polarised opinions on this issue, paediatric medical bodies in the Western world, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), make very similar practice recommendations. I then point out that, in Australia, we are currently failing dismally to provide this widely recommended standard of care. I note that there are robust human rights arguments against infant circumcision, but pragmatically call for an urgent harm minimisation approach, with legislative reform to mandate adequate pain management for infants and to regulate the training of practitioners who perform circumcision. I stress that the focus needs to remain firmly on the wellbeing of the infant, and decisions should not be made based on the financial and other interests of invested adults. Wodak, Ziegler and Morris disagree that the circumcision debate is ‘deadlocked’ on the basis that the position of the AAP and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be considered authoritative. This is essentially claiming that the debate would not be deadlocked if only everyone would concede that one extreme position is the correct one, and so we return to the familiar territory of a polarised debate. As I noted in my paper, the AAP is an outlier in its interpretation of the evidence for and against routine circumcision. To insist that the AAP position is authoritative is to insist that analogous organisations in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe have all failed to identify relevant evidence, to interpret this evidence correctly and apply it reasonably to their populations. A thorough and systematic review and comparison of the processes of each of these organisations may help shed light on which position is the most robust. To ensure the process is ‘transparent and impressive’, an integral part of such a review would be to examine the conflicts of interest of each of these organisations. One possible explanation for the significantly different recommendations of the AAP compared with multiple other similar bodies is the profit-driven context in which many of its members practise, and the lucrative nature of ‘routine’ minor surgical procedures done in privately funded systems. This is also a possible explanation for the deafening silence on this issue from our own Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. Scrutiny of the scientific evidence and thoughtful debate on the ethical issues related to circumcision should continue. However, I call again for harm minimisation to be an urgent priority in Australia, and encourage all involved in this debate to make progress through this small piece of common ground.
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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 | 0.029 | 0.118 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.075 | 0.176 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.005 |
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".