391–400 of 677 posts
I’m kind of torn on this. From one side, I can’t seem to trust doctors any more. I recently had a tooth removed (by the advice of two different doctors), in a claim that it will resolve my pain, which it did not, and now 3 different doctors don’t know what’s causing my pain. Most doctor advice boil down to drink some water and take a painkiller, while glancing for 15 seconds at my medical history before they dedicate…
My uncle had an issue with his balance and slurred speech. Doctors claimed dementia and sent him home. It kept becoming worse and worse. Then one day I entered the symptoms in ChatGPT (or was it Gemini?) and asked it for the top 3 hypotheses. The first one was related to dementia. The second was something else (I forget the long name). I took all 3 to his primary care doc who had kept ignoring the problem, and asked…
I've heard a lot of such anecdotes. I'm not saying its ill-intentioned, but the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement. I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcome…
Also the anti vax movement isn’t completely wrong. It’s now confirmed (officially) that the covid-19 vaccine isn’t completely safe and there are risks taking it that don’t exist in say something like the flu shot. The risk is small but very real and quite deadly. Source: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/12/myocarditis-v... This was something many many doctors originally claimed was completely safe.
The role of LLMs is they take the human bias out of the picture. They are trained on formal medical literature and actual online anecdotal accounts of patients who will take a shit on doctors if need be (the type of criticism a doctor rarely gets in person). The generalization that comes from these two disparate sets of data is actually often superior to a doctor.
Key word is “often”. Less often (but still often in general) the generalization can be an hallucination.
Your post irked me because I almost got the sense that there’s a sort of prestige, admiration and respect given to doctors that in my opinion is unearned. Doctors in my opinion are like car mechanics and that’s the level of treatment they deserve. They aren’t universally good, a lot of them are shitty, a lot are manipulative and there’s a lot of great car mechanics I respect as well. That’s a fair outlook they deserve… but instead I see them get these levels of respect that matches mother Theresa as if they devoted their careers to saving lives and not money.
No one and I mean no one should trust the medical establishment or any doctor by default. They are like car mechanics and should be judged on a case by case basis.
You know for the parent post, how much money do you think those fucking doctors got to make a wrong diagnosis of dementia? Well over 700 for less than an hour of there time. And they don’t even have the kindness to offer the patient a refund for incompetence on their part.
How much did ChatGPT charge?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
General doctors aren't trained for problem solving, they're trained for memorization. The doctors that are good at problem solving aren't general doctors.
You still need 2 deviations above the average college student to get to med school. As a rough proxy for intelligence. The bottom threshold for doctors is certainly higher than lawyers
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a tip I recommend people to try when they are using LLMs to solve stuff. Instead of asking "how to..", ask "what alternatives are there to...". A top-k answer is way better, and you get to engage more with whatever you are trying to learn/solve.
Same if you are coding, ask "Is it possible" not "How do I" as the second one will more quickly result in hallucinations when you are asking it for something that isn't possible.
But it seems "is it possible" also leads it into answering "no, it can't" probably modelling a bunch of naysayers.
Sometimes, if you coax it a little bit, it will tell you how to do a thing which is quite esoteric.
My uncle had an issue with his balance and slurred speech. Doctors claimed dementia and sent him home. It kept becoming worse and worse. Then one day I entered the symptoms in ChatGPT (or was it Gemini?) and asked it for the top 3 hypotheses. The first one was related to dementia. The second was something else (I forget the long name). I took all 3 to his primary care doc who had kept ignoring the problem, and asked…
I've heard a lot of such anecdotes. I'm not saying its ill-intentioned, but the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement. I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcome…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re not even trained for memorization. They’re trained for mitigation and I don’t really blame them for the crap pay they receive. Over the course of a 40-year career they basically make what a typical junior dev makes. It’s fast becoming a rich man’s hobby career.
What ? In most countries, including the U.S, they are a very highly paid profession (I'm not talking about the internship phase)
In the rest of the world doctors are basically like white-collar car mechanics, and often earn less money and respect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You still need 2 deviations above the average college student to get to med school. As a rough proxy for intelligence. The bottom threshold for doctors is certainly higher than lawyers
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My uncle had an issue with his balance and slurred speech. Doctors claimed dementia and sent him home. It kept becoming worse and worse. Then one day I entered the symptoms in ChatGPT (or was it Gemini?) and asked it for the top 3 hypotheses. The first one was related to dementia. The second was something else (I forget the long name). I took all 3 to his primary care doc who had kept ignoring the problem, and asked…
I've heard a lot of such anecdotes. I'm not saying its ill-intentioned, but the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement. I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcome…
maybe the openai moat is the data we shared along the way. no seriously, openai seemingly lost interest in being the 'best' model - instead optimizing for other traits such as speech and general human likeness? there's obviously codex but from my experience it's slower and worse than the other big 2 in every single way: cost, speed and accuracy. codex does seem to be loved by vibe coders the most that don't really kn…
The “Codex” models suck.
Claude, even Opus, creates major side-effects and misses obvious root causes of bugs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
General doctors aren't trained for problem solving, they're trained for memorization. The doctors that are good at problem solving aren't general doctors.
They’re not even trained for memorization. They’re trained for mitigation and I don’t really blame them for the crap pay they receive. Over the course of a 40-year career they basically make what a typical junior dev makes. It’s fast becoming a rich man’s hobby career.
https://www.pnc.com/insights/personal-finance/borrow/physici...