HEROES AND MARTYRS Making the right decision: Benjamin Franklin’s son dies of
Bibliographic record
Abstract
enjamin Franklin in his autobiography said: ‘‘In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of the parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.’’1 Good medical care requires making the right decisions—to test, treat or do nothing—in the face of uncertainty.2 Franklin came to believe he made the wrong decision to forgo smallpox inoculation for his son in 1736. We have enough information about Franklin’s decision, made over a quarter of a millennium ago, to evaluate his choice. Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. He worked as an apprentice to his brother James in a printing business in 1716 before moving to Philadelphia in 1723.3 4 During this era smallpox came periodically to these isolated commercial towns perhaps by way of an infected person on a merchant ship and swept through the town. Those who had been infected in the past and survived were immune. Most of the rest took smallpox ‘‘in the natural way’ ’ and lived or died from it. A few escaped the contagion all together. For about a decade afterwards, the town was immune to smallpox. A new generation of children were born and new people moved in. With time the unprotected proportion of the population grew. With each passing year without smallpox the risk of a new epidemic grew greater and the cycle would repeat itself. Boston had such epidemics in
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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 | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
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".