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My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

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Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#111

Post by bpavuk »

tedggh wrote: post #110
kingstnap wrote: post #12

> she said she was aware that DeepSeek had given her contradictory advice. She understood that chatbots were trained on data from across the internet, she told me, and did not represent an absolute truth or superhuman authority With highly lucid people like the author's mom I'm not too worried about Dr. Deepseek. I'm actually incredibly bullish on the fact that AI models are, as the article describes, superhumanly em…

My experience with doctors in the US is that they often not only give you contradictory advice but just bad plain advice with complete lack of common sense. It feels like they are regurgitating medical school textbooks without a context window. I truly believe doctors, most specialists and definitely all general practitioners, are easily replaceable with the tech we have today. The only obstacle is regulations, insur…

so, poor healthcare workforce quality is not just an "issue of an economically poor country", as I thought!?

like, I tried to treat the bloating in one municipal clinic in Ternopil, Ukraine (got "just use Espumisan or anything else that has symeticone" and when it did not work out permanently, "we don't know what to do, just keep eating symeticone") and then with Gemini 3 (Pro or Flash depending on Google AI Studio rate limits and mood), which immediately suspected a poor diet and suggested logging it, alongside activity level, every day.

Gemini's suggestions were nothing extreme - just cut sugar and ban bread and pastry. I was guilty of loving bread, croissants, and cinnabons (is this how they are translated?) too much.

the result is no more bloating on the third week, -10cm in waistline in 33 days, gradually improving sleep quality, and even ability to sleep on a belly, which was extremely uncomfortable to me due to that goddamned bloating!

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#112

Post by TeMPOraL »

magarnicle wrote: post #81
repiret wrote: post #41

I'm reminded of the monologue from Terminator 2: > Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop, it would never leave him... it would always be there. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him or get drunk and hit him, or say it couldn't spend time with him because it was too busy. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over th…

But the top of their game includes them make things up and getting things wrong. They always give their best, but they always include mistakes. It's a different trust proposition to a human.

All doctors make things up and get things wrong occasionally. The less experienced and more overworked they are, the more often this happens.

Again, LLMs aren't competing with the best human doctors. They're competing with doctors you actually have access to.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#113

Post by meroes »

Not a single response how the doctors got her all this data to be able to be fed into DeepSeek?

AI is doing the last mile and all these posters are saying it’s replacing doctors. Scary stuff.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#114

Post by jact »

kingstnap wrote: post #12

> she said she was aware that DeepSeek had given her contradictory advice. She understood that chatbots were trained on data from across the internet, she told me, and did not represent an absolute truth or superhuman authority With highly lucid people like the author's mom I'm not too worried about Dr. Deepseek. I'm actually incredibly bullish on the fact that AI models are, as the article describes, superhumanly em…

A chatbot can’t be empathetic. They don’t feel what you feel. They don’t feel anything. They’re not any more empathetic than my imaginary friend that goes to another school.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#115

Post by slfnflctd »

jact wrote: post #114
kingstnap wrote: post #12

> she said she was aware that DeepSeek had given her contradictory advice. She understood that chatbots were trained on data from across the internet, she told me, and did not represent an absolute truth or superhuman authority With highly lucid people like the author's mom I'm not too worried about Dr. Deepseek. I'm actually incredibly bullish on the fact that AI models are, as the article describes, superhumanly em…

A chatbot can’t be empathetic. They don’t feel what you feel. They don’t feel anything. They’re not any more empathetic than my imaginary friend that goes to another school.

Except that they can talk with you, at length, and seem empathetic, even if they're totally unconscious.

Which, you know, humans can also do, including when they're not actually empathizing with you. It's often called lying. In some fields it's called a bedside manner.

An imaginary friend is just your own brain. LLMs are something much more.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#116

Post by District5524 »

I don't understand: if there is a shortage of doctors, why are we trying to solve that by training AI models modelled on influencers that spits out (hopefully improving) advice at 10x the rate of a human doctor? Is it impossible for highly advanced societies like ours to pay more for people to get trained as doctors, nurses or whatever is missing? Or to convince them to choose a profession that deals with other humans instead of UBI?

I don't think people are afraid of doctors using imperfect tools. That is the easier part. But that will not solve the problem of too many patients for a single doctor and what leads to the lack of empathy. This was a problem even before AI. It seems society does not have empathy for these kind of "professional problems". Offering tools instead of humans is an even riskier approach, not for that particular individual, but for how society tends to build trust and empathy. We tend to see everything now as a problem with a technical solution because we only have confidence in solving technical problems.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#117

Post by spicyusername »

District5524 wrote: post #116

I don't understand: if there is a shortage of doctors, why are we trying to solve that by training AI models modelled on influencers that spits out (hopefully improving) advice at 10x the rate of a human doctor? Is it impossible for highly advanced societies like ours to pay more for people to get trained as doctors, nurses or whatever is missing? Or to convince them to choose a profession that deals with other human…

Making new doctors takes decades, lots of policy changes with uncertain outcomes, and demographic shifts nobody controls.

Using ChatGPT takes... nothing, it's already here.

Not too surprising to see one and not the other.

Also, the kinds of changes that result in more doctors don't tend to get media coverage. That's that boring, keep the lights on, politics that modern rage-bait driven media abhors, so it may even still be true that the changes we need for more doctors are also already happening. We'll find out in another decade or two.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#118

Post by bondarchuk »

District5524 wrote: post #116

I don't understand: if there is a shortage of doctors, why are we trying to solve that by training AI models modelled on influencers that spits out (hopefully improving) advice at 10x the rate of a human doctor? Is it impossible for highly advanced societies like ours to pay more for people to get trained as doctors, nurses or whatever is missing? Or to convince them to choose a profession that deals with other human…

>Is it impossible for highly advanced societies like ours to pay more for people to get trained as doctors, nurses or whatever is missing? Or to convince them to choose a profession that deals with other humans instead of UBI?

This is the point where it becomes important to distinguish two senses of "advanced", i.e. advanced in technological sense on the one hand and advanced in social/societal and especially large-group-long-time-horizon coordination terms on the other. In the former we are quite advanced, in the latter quite primitive and regressing by the day, it feels like. (But sorry to end on a doomer note, take it with a grain of salt.)

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#119

Post by throwaway173738 »

Marsymars wrote: post #70
mapt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that 90% of what we get from doctors on musculoskeletal injuries that aren't visible on a simple X-ray is either oversight, or a bias towards doing nothing specifically because treatments have health, administrative, and financial costs and they might not help. There is no time authorized to do deep diagnostic work unless something is clearly killing you.

I’ve had good results with doctors for soft tissue injuries, but it doesn’t feel like something that GPs are generally equipped/motivated for. The good results I’ve had have been from doctors at high performance sports clinics, or with doctors I’ve been referred to by my (awesome) sports physiotherapist.

Yeah my dad would always go to sports medicine docs specifically because GPs are basically going to tell you to stop whatever hurts but sports medics will tell you how to do it without pain.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#120

Post by bondarchuk »

bpavuk wrote: post #111
tedggh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with doctors in the US is that they often not only give you contradictory advice but just bad plain advice with complete lack of common sense. It feels like they are regurgitating medical school textbooks without a context window. I truly believe doctors, most specialists and definitely all general practitioners, are easily replaceable with the tech we have today. The only obstacle is regulations, insur…

so, poor healthcare workforce quality is not just an "issue of an economically poor country", as I thought!? like, I tried to treat the bloating in one municipal clinic in Ternopil, Ukraine (got "just use Espumisan or anything else that has symeticone" and when it did not work out permanently, "we don't know what to do, just keep eating symeticone") and then with Gemini 3 (Pro or Flash depending on Google AI Studio r…

Over here it feels like there is a taboo among doctors to just tell people "you are fat and unhealthy, fix it", I guess since the idea is that this would discourage people from going to the doctor in the first place...
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