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This argument is comparable to thinking that a painting is only worth the materials it’s made out of, and everything else is worthless. A doctor and their staff

by soared 7y ago

This argument is comparable to thinking that a painting is only worth the materials it’s made out of, and everything else is worthless. A doctor and their staff have trained for decades in order to handle your health, why in the world do you think you can do it after some googling? Compare it to your own job - if I had the same tools as you, could I walk in and do the same job you do?

mrfredward 7y ago
>Compare it to your own job - if I had the same tools as you, could I walk in and do the same job you do? Should access to a compiler be gated just because amateur programmers probably don't know as much as people with a degree? The fact that you need to go to a doctor, to get referred to a facility which will run a test, which will then send that test data back to the doctor, and at the second appointment the doctor will go over the data with you to see if you needed to go to the doctor in the first place...is just an absurd waste. It shouldn't be so hard to get a few measurements done on your own body.
- soared 7y ago
  My point is that a random person with access to any highly specialized tool will not output usable results. If I try to use a compiler and mess up, nothing bad happens. If I go get myself an EKG and mess up the reading, well.. death is somewhere in the list of possibilities. (To be fair, I fall into the group of people who believe in very strong government regulation to protect people from themselves, because the world is too complicated to make well-informed decisions. Easy example is seatbelts - if Ford could sells cars for $1500 cheaper if they didn't have seatbelts then some people would buy them and they'd die. Not everyone will do the proper research, so everyone needs protecting.)
khafra 7y ago
> A doctor and their staff have trained for decades in order to handle your health, why in the world do you think you can do it after some googling? Counterpoint: Doctors have an average IQ of 115, and train across a huge variety of disciplines; mostly while sleep-deprived. Many doctors' training was decades ago. Anyone with a somewhat abnormal condition, access to Google Scholar, and able to learn how to follow citations and simultaneously weigh competing models can outdo anybody except a dedicated specialist. The relevant job comparison isn't to a painter, it's to a programmer with a hundred clients, each of whom he talks with for 30 minutes, once a year. Sure, the programmer has much more knowledge and skill--but is he really going to be able to adequately replace the every client's home-brewed solution spread across 4 excel sheets, 3 batch files, and an archived website? Should the client really be restricted from downloading Python or Visual Studio for their own use, unless a real programmer signs off on the requirement and supervises them?
- haste410 7y ago
  You mention the average doctor but what about the average patient? How many people out there do you think will take the time to read through papers and citations and have the understanding to weigh options vs googling symptoms and going with the first result?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Why should the behavior of "the average person" limit everyone else?
- GarrisonPrime 7y ago
  The variety of disciplines and sleep deprivation is only about 2 years early in the training. After that the training is highly focused, and again only 2 years or so are sleep deprived. And today, the majority of doctors in practice are less than 20 years from their training. You make it sound like doctors are an outdated mass of idiots, and I can only assume your personal experiences have biased you. The real training is objectivity, which is very difficult for even doctors to maintain, despite knowing just how misleading research results can be and so how they must be wary, how to rationally follow the literature, etc. I seriously doubt more than single-digit percentages of people googling things, even intelligently, are going to be following citations and weighing competing models. Likely less than a fraction of one percent. And, unless they have personally done similar research and so can understand the data and potential pitfalls more clearly, even that enlightened fraction is highly likely to make some biased misinterpretation. How can they not, when it is their own health they are investigating? Even a genius layperson examining the literature flawlessly would benefit from an interpretation provided by a neutral third party.
- theshadowknows 7y ago
  The comparison isn’t to the tools. Visual studio is the doctors blood analysis. The stack trace that visual studio spits out is the results of the blood analysis. Can anyone with some googling figure out what a stack trace means and what to do about it? MAYBE at best but realistically no. Now do you want to do the same with your heart? Brain?
dkdk8283 7y ago
If you gave a common health problem chances are your doctor is more than capable of handling it. If you have a difficult to diagnose problem that’s the time to take control over your health. You have to put in the time to trust but verify your own care. Same thing with a difficult to debug code problem. It’s typically a function of time.
gowld 7y ago
Right. This is why we don't allow consumers to access the Internet unless under the supervision of an IT professional never of the American Sysadmin Association guild. Lives are too important to be entrusted to the people who live them.

by soared 7y ago

mrfredward 7y ago

>Compare it to your own job - if I had the same tools as you, could I walk in and do the same job you do? Should access to a compiler be gated just because amateur programmers probably don't know as much as people with a degree? The fact that you need to go to a doctor, to get referred to a facility which will run a test, which will then send that test data back to the doctor, and at the second appointment the doctor will go over the data with you to see if you needed to go to the doctor in the first place...is just an absurd waste. It shouldn't be so hard to get a few measurements done on your own body.

soared 7y ago
My point is that a random person with access to any highly specialized tool will not output usable results. If I try to use a compiler and mess up, nothing bad happens. If I go get myself an EKG and mess up the reading, well.. death is somewhere in the list of possibilities. (To be fair, I fall into the group of people who believe in very strong government regulation to protect people from themselves, because the world is too complicated to make well-informed decisions. Easy example is seatbelts - if Ford could sells cars for $1500 cheaper if they didn't have seatbelts then some people would buy them and they'd die. Not everyone will do the proper research, so everyone needs protecting.)

khafra 7y ago

> A doctor and their staff have trained for decades in order to handle your health, why in the world do you think you can do it after some googling? Counterpoint: Doctors have an average IQ of 115, and train across a huge variety of disciplines; mostly while sleep-deprived. Many doctors' training was decades ago. Anyone with a somewhat abnormal condition, access to Google Scholar, and able to learn how to follow citations and simultaneously weigh competing models can outdo anybody except a dedicated specialist. The relevant job comparison isn't to a painter, it's to a programmer with a hundred clients, each of whom he talks with for 30 minutes, once a year. Sure, the programmer has much more knowledge and skill--but is he really going to be able to adequately replace the every client's home-brewed solution spread across 4 excel sheets, 3 batch files, and an archived website? Should the client really be restricted from downloading Python or Visual Studio for their own use, unless a real programmer signs off on the requirement and supervises them?

haste410 7y ago
You mention the average doctor but what about the average patient? How many people out there do you think will take the time to read through papers and citations and have the understanding to weigh options vs googling symptoms and going with the first result?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Why should the behavior of "the average person" limit everyone else?
GarrisonPrime 7y ago
The variety of disciplines and sleep deprivation is only about 2 years early in the training. After that the training is highly focused, and again only 2 years or so are sleep deprived. And today, the majority of doctors in practice are less than 20 years from their training. You make it sound like doctors are an outdated mass of idiots, and I can only assume your personal experiences have biased you. The real training is objectivity, which is very difficult for even doctors to maintain, despite knowing just how misleading research results can be and so how they must be wary, how to rationally follow the literature, etc. I seriously doubt more than single-digit percentages of people googling things, even intelligently, are going to be following citations and weighing competing models. Likely less than a fraction of one percent. And, unless they have personally done similar research and so can understand the data and potential pitfalls more clearly, even that enlightened fraction is highly likely to make some biased misinterpretation. How can they not, when it is their own health they are investigating? Even a genius layperson examining the literature flawlessly would benefit from an interpretation provided by a neutral third party.
theshadowknows 7y ago
The comparison isn’t to the tools. Visual studio is the doctors blood analysis. The stack trace that visual studio spits out is the results of the blood analysis. Can anyone with some googling figure out what a stack trace means and what to do about it? MAYBE at best but realistically no. Now do you want to do the same with your heart? Brain?

dkdk8283 7y ago

If you gave a common health problem chances are your doctor is more than capable of handling it. If you have a difficult to diagnose problem that’s the time to take control over your health. You have to put in the time to trust but verify your own care. Same thing with a difficult to debug code problem. It’s typically a function of time.

gowld 7y ago

Right. This is why we don't allow consumers to access the Internet unless under the supervision of an IT professional never of the American Sysadmin Association guild. Lives are too important to be entrusted to the people who live them.