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PeterJemley / popper-content-probability.html
Created March 16, 2026 15:58
Popper: Content vs. Logical Probability
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PeterJemley / animal-intelligence-from-probabilities-to-amplitudes.md
Created March 3, 2026 18:00
Explores whether the mathematical distinction between probabilities and amplitudes — signed quantities that interfere constructively and destructively — offers a framework for understanding intelligence from animal cognition through neural networks to transformers. Draws on Deutsch, Everett, Hopfield, Arendt, Shannon, and Darwin.

Animal Intelligence & ChatGPT: From Probabilities to Amplitudes

"With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy." — Charles Darwin, Notebooks 1836–1844

I. Resonance Across the Barrier

I have loved and shared my life with animals since I was young. From the first birds I remember, to the elephant in the Düsseldorf Zoo who, when I called her name, trumpeted from across the sunken barrier and put her trunk to my face with the strength of an industrial vacuum cleaner, to our exceptionally intelligent and brave dog Marais who died last year but who still lives in my family's hearts, to our puppy Freyja: I have consistently been in awe of animals' other-than-human intelligence.

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PeterJemley / participatory_development_pathology_reports.md
Last active February 24, 2026 23:27

Participatory Development of Digital Technologies & Clinical Documentation Standards for Digitally-Created and -Stored Pathology Reports

Commitments to patient engagement, patient safety, improving treatments, and research begin with consistency

Abstract

Pathology reports and the data which comprise them are essential for diagnoses and differential diagnoses of acute and chronic diseases, in the decision-making processes for those diseases' interventions, and for evaluating the courses of disease. Pathology reports and their data are subject to many formal specifications. Legal requirements frame these specifications in both their written and digital formats. Yet few digital formats for pathology reports both comply with legal frameworks and uphold interoperability standards across computer systems. Pathology-based institutions and laboratories, medical administrators, and hospital electronic health record systems therefore use digital pathology reports less effectively than is achievable. An

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PeterJemley / bad-citizen-review.md
Created February 2, 2026 18:44
Review & Analysis of: Matthew R. Christ, The Bad Citizen in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Shifting the Foundations — Bad Citizens Then & Now

Review & Analysis of: Matthew R. Christ, The Bad Citizen in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pp. 266.

Between 1962 and 2006, the year in which Mathew R. Christ's The Bad Citizen in Classical Athens appeared, prominent scholars have made extravagantly glorified claims about Athenian Democracy. There are two reasons why speculation about this state of affairs is unnecessary, and Christ addresses them both. First, we can make the most of the evidence which survives from this period if we ask the right questions. Second, and more trenchantly, previous claims about the virtues of Athenian citizens, even if it those claims are reproducible, can nonetheless be wrong.

Christ argues that the pressures that shrewd self-interest exerted in Athenian democracy have been elided by previous scholars of the period. Athenians themselves, he demonstrates, were acutely aware that self-interest complicated good citizenship. He tri

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PeterJemley / ben-amotz-lauterpacht-individual-identity.md
Created January 31, 2026 23:44
Applying Popperian epistemology to the Lauterpacht-Lemkin debate and Dahn Ben-Amotz's identity masks—identity categories as unfalsifiable theories, rights as error-correction mechanisms, and the open problem of institutional support for revisable selfhood.

The Individual Against the Category: Ben-Amotz's and Lauterpacht's Unfinished Argument

Hersch Lauterpacht, the Galician-born international lawyer who shaped post-war human rights doctrine, insisted that legal protections must anchor in the individual, not the group. His famous disagreement with Raphael Lemkin turned on precisely this: Lemkin wanted to protect groups as such; Lauterpacht feared that group identity frameworks would inevitably essentialize, constrain, and ultimately subsume the person.

Roy Holler's recent article on Dahn Ben-Amotz—the Polish-born Israeli writer who reinvented himself as the quintessential Sabra—puts this tension in literary relief. Ben-Amotz (né Musia Tehilimzogger) burned his family photographs at fifteen, answered "Tel Aviv" when asked where he was born, and spent a career oscillating between identities that Israeli literary criticism insists must be in conflict: the diaspora Jew, the New Hebrew, the Holocaust survivor, the irreverent provocateur.

Holler argues that criti

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PeterJemley / human-in-the-loop-machine-learning-healthcare.md
Created January 8, 2026 14:22
Evidence of Success in the Health Care Space with Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning

Evidence of Success in the Health Care Space with Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning

It was a scientist at IBM, Arthur Samuel, who in 1959 first coined the term machine learning (ML). Samuel defined ML through the use of an early form of artificial intelligence in which an algorithm (which is very similar to a recipe) was able to learn to play checkers. It is this ability to learn which distinguishes machine learning from artificial intelligence (AI).

AI is strictly methodical: computing devices are coded with sets of rules from which data applied to those rules are analyzed and their output is certain. This means that all possible outputs must be known in advance when coding the computing devices for data analysis, or obversely, no computing device coded in this manner will ever produce a result which was not already expected (Rhys, 2020).

ML, in contrast, represents coding computing devices in such a way that when their code encounters data their devices are able to infer and learn patterns in the data

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PeterJemley / deuteronomy-grotius-geneva-hague-nuremberg.md
Created January 8, 2026 13:57
Deuteronomy, Grotius, the Geneva & Hague Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles

Deuteronomy, Grotius, the Geneva & Hague Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles

Review & Analysis of: "Warfare and Wanton Destruction: A Reexamination of Deuteronomy 20:19-20 in Relation to Ancient Siegecraft," by Jacob L. Wright, Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 127, No. 3 (Fall, 2008), pp. 423-458.

Systematic devastation of cities and their surroundings is found throughout the history of warfare. Jacob Wright challenges the interpretation that Deuteronomy 20:19-20, the law which condemns the destruction of fruit trees during a siege, was intended to subvert a foreign imperial ideology. He argues that it stemmed from, and was directed at, the military conduct of ancient Israel itself.

Wright begins by analyzing the law in modern context. His first example is Hugo Grotius' On The Law of War and Peace, from 1625, regarded as one of the foundations of international law. Grotius detailed the frequency with which several Jewish and medieval authors condemn the destruction of property. He invested t

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PeterJemley / triple-aim-healthcare-international-comparisons.md
Created January 8, 2026 13:25
Why Some International Comparisons Aren't Meaningful for the Triple Aim

The Triple Aim of Healthcare Policy: Why Some International Comparisons Aren't Meaningful

Because the quality of health care is an essential feature for evaluating how health systems perform, consistent, well-founded systematized indicators have become progressively more accessible (Piotrowicz et al., 2009; Smith, 2009). Developed by internationally-cooperating governmental institutions who originally intended these criteria to work towards outcome improvements in a wide range of healthcare contexts, these indicators now constitute an affordance—a concept referring to potential purposes which objects and information offer users (McDermott et al., 2018)—with which they can weigh and balance similarities and differences across health systems, and for tracking, managing, and policy making within and between those systems (Forde et al., 2013; OECD Publishing, 2010).

In 2001, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched the Health Care Quality Indicators (HCQI) Project which aspire

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PeterJemley / nice-intervention-investment-decisions-uk.md
Created January 8, 2026 13:20
NICE's Investment Decisions

Transparent & Reproducible Intervention Investment Decisions in the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)

All project investment decisions involve making inferences about unknown quantities. When quantified, those uncertainties can be evaluated then used to invalidate investments in some projects in favor of others. In healthcare, investment decisions for interventions carry additional responsibilities, especially when they affect patients' overall survival.

A high proportion of treatments assessed by the UK government's health care investment agency NICE are interventions which have significant effects on survival. NICE's decisions require a broad spectrum of metrics prior to approving new interventions, principal among which are survival modeling based on their treatments, and analyses of the uncertainties the interventions impose. This modeling also takes into account potential interventions' impacts on survival in terms of patients' quality of life and the interventions' overal

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PeterJemley / blue-sky-thinking-hba1c-wearable-pricing.md
Created January 8, 2026 13:16
TCO clouds over Blue-Sky Thinking, or vice versa?

Is Blue-Sky Thinking Clouded Over by Total Cost of Ownership, or Vice Versa? Imagining the Pricing Methodology of a Wearable Device Which Can Predict HbA1c Three Months in the Future with 99% Accuracy

Update: "Apple Makes Major Progress on No-Prick Blood Glucose Tracking for Its Watch" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-22/apple-watch-blood-glucose-monitor-could-revolutionize-diabetes-care-aapl

Any methodology for pricing such a device for individuals with type 2 diabetes requires exploring the full context of HbA1c measurements, i.e., this domain's total cost of ownership.

The clinical guideline which sets the HbA1c target level at less than 7% for most type 2 diabetics is based on observational studies whose results were proven to be inaccurate in 2008 with the results of the ACCORD trial. This trial found HbA1c to be an imperfect surrogate for the many harms diabetes causes for these individuals. The results of ACCORD found that lowering HbA1c levels to or below the clinical guideline