10 ms·

This really feels farcical, and kind of like vc bros hyping up a product. Considering this was a serious issue of life and death of a patient, it was surprising

This really feels farcical, and kind of like vc bros hyping up a product. Considering this was a serious issue of life and death of a patient, it was surprising how it read like a prank or like the scene from Harold and Kumar, where Kumar plays a fake doctor and saves an ER patient through sheer luck. I know some doctors are full of baloney but c'mon. I really hope maybe that we create better doctors that have a lot of empathy, and are able to wield technology to make themselves 10x better like we're doing with programming. But, this is not the way. Edit: I realized its fake...I think, it has to be. It doesn't make sense, like others mention. You're not reading a 5 para speech to a patient's family while they are being treated. And also, in the article, they say to double check and verify what is being said. You better proofread that too! Or it might invent something absolutely crazy, and you may be liable.

__loam 3y ago
> are able to wield technology to make themselves 10x better like we're doing with programming lmfao
seabombs 3y ago
The author is a doctor, but also an executive at a health-focused VC fund, with several AI companies in it's portfolio. Helpful context to have before reading his article I think.
- elliotpage 3y ago
  Gotta love a classic Conflict of Interest!
- fifteenforty 3y ago
  The most unbelievable part of this story is that he claims to have read it out to the family.
  - zikzak 3y ago
    I am currently looking for a new Team Lead. I interviewed a guy yesterday who performed well in a soft skills interview and so this was his tech interview with a senior dev and myself. He was doing OK at first. As the questions got a little more nuanced, there were these pauses. Eventually, he got flustered and asked to resume later. We agreed to this since he said he'd been dealing with a production issue for several hours before the scheduled time (I had offered to reschedule at no detriment to him before we began but he insisted on doing it then). The developer and I met after this first interview and discussed his answers. We both thought he was "googling" (we are older people, stuck in the past). Later that day, back on another call with this guy, my senior dev starts typing my questions into ChatGPT and getting back essentially the answers he's giving us. I start with more nuanced questions and he's done. He just kept reiterating platitudes could not explain why he was saying them, etc. I felt bad for him, he was trying to get a job beyond his technical knowledge. But ultimately, this was dishonest and I would have found out very quickly he was not ready for the job. If anyone is wondering, I gave him a chance to tell me why he was pausing for so long before answering and why his answers didn't seem to directly address my questions and he just insisted he was NOT pausing (he was, for up to 30 seconds at a time). It was generally just a really disappointing experience for all of us, I would imagine.
- garfieldandthe 3y ago
  [flagged]
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  So literally it is impossible to know what, if anything, actually happened because this is just more ai Hypebeast trash.
  - catchnear4321 3y ago
    always has been
Dalewyn 3y ago
Putting aside the question of if the linked is fake, I don't necessarily fault medical workers for handling their work dryly. Those doctors and nurses and technicians have to deal with all manners of disgust, biohazards, sadness, and most significantly death each and every single day. I cannot in good faith demand them to treat everyone with empathy, that might as well be psychological torture for the medical workers. This isn't to say they shouldn't be courteous, professional, and kind to their patients, that should go without saying.
- firebirdn99 3y ago
  I understand this point. Many doctors I see always being very social, and smiling in public even though they have seen horrors in the ER room, etc. I kind of get a bit of the callous, emotionally stable, and always cheery, positive nature but isn't too emotionally deep (think of the doctor in movies, where they give the bad news with a straight face) they need to have to be able to operate like a robot, ironically enough. But, maybe instead of what this article proposes, we do the opposite, we make our doctors more empathetic, and leave the robot to do the grunt work, machinery, surgery, etc. A lot of comments are saying they find the empathy useful. I'm not sure if I will be able to tell if someone sends me a crafted message, but I don't like the idea of a message being sent by ChatGPT that is meant to artificially create empathy, to me it's fake empathy. This is all theory, but I don't think robots creating fake empathy would resonate with humans once this is widespread. Maybe it creates a sort of disconnection, where people just blatantly avoid falling for text messages and paragraphs that sound empathetic. There are some similarities too with the movie Big-Hero 6, and the Bayman robot that was created as a care robot. Initially, Hiro is very annoyed by it, because of it's rote "artificial empathy" voice and messages. But it's intelligence is what brings him around, when it understands things like contexts better.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > Maybe it creates a sort of disconnection, where people just blatantly avoid falling for text messages and paragraphs that sound empathetic. That would be good to a degree. Right now, people are constantly falling for maliciously crafted empathetic/emotional messaging, coming from the mounths and from under the pens of journalists, salesmen, politicians, advertisers, pundits, and social media influencers. In some sense, it's really saddening that people find issue with emotional text written by a bot, while they don't seem to find any problem with being constantly subjected to malicious emotional messages from aforementioned ill-intentioned parties.
protastus 3y ago
I believe it. I've used chatgpt for inspiration on how to craft difficult messages with empathy. I've been managing people for a long time and could've done it independently, but it's good to get help. It can be tough to express empathy when exhausted after a long day of urgent demands and responsibilities. This is no different than asking chatgpt to draft code that I could otherwise write from scratch. It's like having an assistant.
- johndhi 3y ago
  I also believe it. When you're focused on the best treatment it can feel like it takes too much effort to explain it well.
- gf3 3y ago
  [dead]
- firebirdn99 3y ago
  Now it feels kind of neat, and maybe works when others are reading well crafted messages. What happens when everyone has a bot, and a bot is talking to a bot, because I for one, don't want to be sent or fall for emotionally manipulative messages, or that try to sound empathetic, maybe even are empathetic. When this type of messaging is so widespread, I wonder what will happen. I think people will ignore most of this type of messaging. Maybe we'll evolve to not be emotional anymore, when emotions are everywhere? I don't know, but an interesting hypothetical.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Will it really be a difference? Corporate speak is already a thing, people already feign emotions and sympathy. Sure, this is more, but it feels to me like more of the same; I don't think it even magnifies the problem that much.
  - protastus 3y ago
    The person sending the message is accountable for its content, no matter how it was authored. Maybe I want to be tactful around a delicate issue, but am struggling to find the right words. An LLM can help me. Alternatively, someone who wants to be manipulative and deceitful might also optimize their message using an LLM. The tool is of course not inherently good or evil. But one can use the tool for different moral outcomes.
heliodor 3y ago
The concept is right on point though: ChatGPT is excellent at writing "fluffy" pieces full of empathy, compassion, PR talk, politician speech, and any other wordy flavor you need. As an engineer who is unable to produce such writing, this tool is quite helpful!
- throwaway426079 3y ago
  That makes sense assuming engineers don't need to practice this skill very often. But doctors need to do fluffy, compassionate every shift. Nothing about the story makes sense. Doctors and nurses say these kinds of things to patients every day (I'm an EMT, I've watched them do it and I do it myself). I'm seriously wondering if the relatives were responding to the fact that the clinician was visibly reading from a piece of paper and that somehow made it more 'official'.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Empathy and compassion isn't in the words. It's in the intent behind them. Faked empathy literally isn't empathy. (Fake compassion is a little more arguable; there are clearly situations where faked compassion is better than no compassion.) Not everyone needs this or can do this on the same scale. I have really had to learn to find empathy and be unafraid of it, and I definitely have nearly zero tact (if you have no tact, you practise thinking good things). But if you need to be able to practise empathy and compassion regularly, and you are incapable of it, find someone who can to that for you. Celebrate their ability to do it and you'll benefit from it yourself. Trade them something they don't do so well.
- firebirdn99 3y ago
  Many comments are saying it's helpful. But what happens when it's widespread, everyone crafting Hallmark type empathic messages to everyone. Or once everyone has bots, then most likely they will all be sent straight to spam or something. We will be inundated with such messaging.
  - suoduandao2 3y ago
    "Chatgpt, write an email based on these bullet points!" "Chatgpt, summarize this email into a few bullet points!" Somehow, I doubt we'll notice. The reason we don't send the bullet points email today is that the receiver will think we're angry with them. In University the engineers all needed alcohol as a social lubricant, if chatgpt replaces it I expect we'll trade hangovers for higher electricity bills and carry on.
Spooky23 3y ago
Some specialties attract different personalities. If you’ve ever been in a hospital setting around a lot of neuro residents, many of them will present… oddly. It’s a feature. Likewise, a lot of ER docs are kinda adrenaline people who are great at triage and quickly stabilizing you, but maybe not so much good at relating with people. That’s a feature — you don’t need a soft touch dealing with trauma. If ChatGPT can help someone perform better in their area of weakness, great. If it can help super smart people get information out of their heads, great.
- bohner 3y ago
  Have worked with many poor communicators and outright idiots but there is virtually no one graduating a decent medical school with native speaker skills that cant explain in simple terms why giving more fluids to someone that is overloaded with fluid is a bad idea (oh and without using any jargon like edema or diuresis, another thing missing in this whole farce, any 1st year let alone decent attending will explain clearly and simply what is being done. you’re not giving fluids then what the fuck is your plan doctor?). I’ve yet to meet the combo of poor communicator/idiot that would believe reading a canned “empathy” script would somehow be helpful. Seriously is there anyone here that would feel confident in their doctor if they came reading a plan off a sheet like a teleprompter? This guy is trying too hard and assumes most of his audience won’t realize how idiotic this sounds.
  - dkarras 3y ago
    You can explain it in simple terms. Does not mean they'll listen or agree. Some people just want to feel validated, and they need it repeatedly.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    It only sounds idiotic with sufficient levels of cynicism coupled with a lack of empathy. Two years ago I rushed to the ER suffering from pulmonary edema caused by misdiagnosed endocarditis which required emergency open-heart surgery. The most qualified of the surgeons were very terse and very busy with, you know, prying people’s rib cages open and such. Do the math and think about what else the ER could have been dealing with at that time…
kelnos 3y ago
Ironically, your comment about the state of doctors is quite lacking in empathy for the doctors themselves. Regardless of whether or not this article is a fake, I think you don't quite understand how overworked most doctors are, and how little time they have been given per patient to take care of what needs to be done.
- dsr_ 3y ago
  Remember that the AMA has been limiting the supply of doctors in order to maintain high wages, and the working conditions for interns/residents amounts to hazing.
  - sarchertech 3y ago
    That’s not how that works. The AMA doesn’t control the number of physicians. 20+ years ago the AMA supported congress reducing the number of residencies because at the time there was a predicted glut of doctors. However the AMA has reversed that position and supports increasing the number. Again though they don’t control the number of physicians.
kodah 3y ago
Fake or not, people are incorporating ChatGPT into their work. We had a pipeline break today and when we looked at the PR that introduced the change it was in the PR notes that the tooling configuration was derived from a ChatGPT prompt. What do you even say or do about that?
- nevi-me 3y ago
  I've been embarrassed by a Copilot code snippet that I proofread to seem correct, but was incorrect due to some subtle comparison logic. I can only imagine the risks in professions that aren't dealing with logic that has a very finite list of options or where the answers AI produce require researched effort to validate. It's probably worse in law if you're given a case reference as you're professionally supposed to read the document in substance to not be muddled by selective quoting, then if it's from a foreign jurisdiction you have to also check if it's applicable to you.
  - licebmi__at__ 3y ago
    > I can only imagine the risks in professions that aren't dealing with logic that has a very finite list of options or where the answers AI produce require researched effort to validate This can be done the same way as it’s done in the non ai-assisted process. Mistakes are made then the trained professionals correct the course of action. The problem is with people dealing and selling the problem like it’s a simple logical procedure. Then the layman will think that since a machine crafted the answer, and since machines are logical, the answer must be right.
    - __loam 3y ago
      And of course, there's no way to verify the output of an llm without professional experience or training, so what's the point?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - weatherlite 3y ago
Kiro 3y ago
Actual ER doctors disagree with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36336615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36336615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36337227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36337227 Classic HN to confidently dismiss something in areas we're actually clueless about.
- notahacker 3y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that most people on HN have some experience of the patient family side of medical problems, some of them no doubt significant and regular. We're not doubting the medical situation the ER doctor agrees sounds plausible, that GPT could have produced that response or that doctors finding it difficult to communicate with family members in intelligible and empathetic terms is a real problem. But if you're the sort of person that would "melt into calm agreeability" when basically the same explanation was offered with generic corpspeak appended (i.e. they'd trust the doctor more if he was answering your question by reading from a script so non-specific and non-empathetic it finished up with "if you have any questions or concerns please contact the medical team"!), and would also be delighted to get the same script read out to you each time you asked a different staff member the same question, I think you're very much in the minority. Certainly in my limited experience, I can assure you that I was more reassured by the empathy levels of professionals completely misunderstanding my question and thinking I was threatening to make a complaint about their standard of care than I would have been if they pulled out an index card and read that they were all doing their best, the treatment is [boilerplate], please do not hesitate to contact medical team in case of any questions and we will reread index card to you. At best, I suppose, my reaction might be to interpret the index card boilerplate repetition as a polite way of telling me to fuck off and not offer any followup questions. You could even make an argument that this is medically useful; a more specific version of "here's a leaflet" so they can get on with doing their job. But as written where everybody loves the GPT boilerplate, the story reads like a classic of the LinkedIn/politician people miraculously came round to supporting me and everybody cheered genre.
- Calavar 3y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm a doctor and I find this story hard to believe. It does sound to me like wishful thinking by an AI hype guy. In my experience, these sorts of situations happen when two things come together: 1. The patient's family has just enough medical knowledge to fall onto the wrong part of a Dunning-Kruger curve. 2. The family has certain beliefs about the medical establishment. Namely, that medical staff (especially doctors) are trained in medical school to have an inflexible way of thinking and that the doctors are dismissive of the family's proposed treatment because they are married to textbook thinking and rigidly following hospital protocols. #1 happens all the time - maybe even the majority of the time - but it isn't enough to cause conflict on its own. #2 is the special sauce that makes the situation boil over. What is the absolute last thing you want to do given #2? Probably something along the lines of handing every member of the staff a pre-written script to recite every time a family member asks questions. This will make them feel like they are being stonewalled, not like they are being listened to. This will confirm their fears about point #2, not ameliorate them. I can't say I've ever seen someone print off a script quite like this before, but I have seen some doctors piss off patients/families by relying too much on pat phrases or repeatedly pointing to a particular clinical guideline or hospital policy as the rationale for their decision.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
Problem is with high empathy is that it affects you too. That might be pretty exhausting in a stressful hospital environment.
- firebirdn99 3y ago
  Yes well summarized. I understood this too, and replied in another comment, which is how doctors many times come across as callous and really like robotic people, but it's bc they have to be ready to take on another case. The people who are sensitive don't stay for long, or make it all the way. One one hand I feel, many developed that way as a means of adjusting to their profession. I'm not sure if they necessarily are the happiest versions of themselves if they are like that. What I mean is if they could choose to be more empathic without suffering would they? I'm thinking they would, as it's a human thing to feel more. Reducing the suffering is another point to solve. Essentially, I don't know how comforting AI's would be as opposed to another human. In that case, how can we make robots/AI do the dirty work, and make humans do the more empathic work. Maybe have separate doctors that just do the communicating part, while doctors+specialty AI robots(in the short term transition until it's fully autonomous robots?) do the surgeries, etc that require steady, stable minds, and lower empathy.
ansc 3y ago
Alright, I'm going to miss the point entirely here, but I'm swinging any way: if I recall correctly, Kumar had basically studied and become a doctor, but was scared to take the final test due to his fathers pressure yada yada something like that, and it wasn't through sheer luck he saved the patient.

__loam 3y ago

> are able to wield technology to make themselves 10x better like we're doing with programming lmfao

seabombs 3y ago

The author is a doctor, but also an executive at a health-focused VC fund, with several AI companies in it's portfolio. Helpful context to have before reading his article I think.

elliotpage 3y ago
Gotta love a classic Conflict of Interest!
fifteenforty 3y ago
The most unbelievable part of this story is that he claims to have read it out to the family.
- zikzak 3y ago
  I am currently looking for a new Team Lead. I interviewed a guy yesterday who performed well in a soft skills interview and so this was his tech interview with a senior dev and myself. He was doing OK at first. As the questions got a little more nuanced, there were these pauses. Eventually, he got flustered and asked to resume later. We agreed to this since he said he'd been dealing with a production issue for several hours before the scheduled time (I had offered to reschedule at no detriment to him before we began but he insisted on doing it then). The developer and I met after this first interview and discussed his answers. We both thought he was "googling" (we are older people, stuck in the past). Later that day, back on another call with this guy, my senior dev starts typing my questions into ChatGPT and getting back essentially the answers he's giving us. I start with more nuanced questions and he's done. He just kept reiterating platitudes could not explain why he was saying them, etc. I felt bad for him, he was trying to get a job beyond his technical knowledge. But ultimately, this was dishonest and I would have found out very quickly he was not ready for the job. If anyone is wondering, I gave him a chance to tell me why he was pausing for so long before answering and why his answers didn't seem to directly address my questions and he just insisted he was NOT pausing (he was, for up to 30 seconds at a time). It was generally just a really disappointing experience for all of us, I would imagine.
garfieldandthe 3y ago
[flagged]
mnky9800n 3y ago
So literally it is impossible to know what, if anything, actually happened because this is just more ai Hypebeast trash.
- catchnear4321 3y ago
  always has been

Dalewyn 3y ago

Putting aside the question of if the linked is fake, I don't necessarily fault medical workers for handling their work dryly. Those doctors and nurses and technicians have to deal with all manners of disgust, biohazards, sadness, and most significantly death each and every single day. I cannot in good faith demand them to treat everyone with empathy, that might as well be psychological torture for the medical workers. This isn't to say they shouldn't be courteous, professional, and kind to their patients, that should go without saying.

firebirdn99 3y ago
I understand this point. Many doctors I see always being very social, and smiling in public even though they have seen horrors in the ER room, etc. I kind of get a bit of the callous, emotionally stable, and always cheery, positive nature but isn't too emotionally deep (think of the doctor in movies, where they give the bad news with a straight face) they need to have to be able to operate like a robot, ironically enough. But, maybe instead of what this article proposes, we do the opposite, we make our doctors more empathetic, and leave the robot to do the grunt work, machinery, surgery, etc. A lot of comments are saying they find the empathy useful. I'm not sure if I will be able to tell if someone sends me a crafted message, but I don't like the idea of a message being sent by ChatGPT that is meant to artificially create empathy, to me it's fake empathy. This is all theory, but I don't think robots creating fake empathy would resonate with humans once this is widespread. Maybe it creates a sort of disconnection, where people just blatantly avoid falling for text messages and paragraphs that sound empathetic. There are some similarities too with the movie Big-Hero 6, and the Bayman robot that was created as a care robot. Initially, Hiro is very annoyed by it, because of it's rote "artificial empathy" voice and messages. But it's intelligence is what brings him around, when it understands things like contexts better.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Maybe it creates a sort of disconnection, where people just blatantly avoid falling for text messages and paragraphs that sound empathetic. That would be good to a degree. Right now, people are constantly falling for maliciously crafted empathetic/emotional messaging, coming from the mounths and from under the pens of journalists, salesmen, politicians, advertisers, pundits, and social media influencers. In some sense, it's really saddening that people find issue with emotional text written by a bot, while they don't seem to find any problem with being constantly subjected to malicious emotional messages from aforementioned ill-intentioned parties.

protastus 3y ago

I believe it. I've used chatgpt for inspiration on how to craft difficult messages with empathy. I've been managing people for a long time and could've done it independently, but it's good to get help. It can be tough to express empathy when exhausted after a long day of urgent demands and responsibilities. This is no different than asking chatgpt to draft code that I could otherwise write from scratch. It's like having an assistant.

johndhi 3y ago
I also believe it. When you're focused on the best treatment it can feel like it takes too much effort to explain it well.
gf3 3y ago
[dead]
firebirdn99 3y ago
Now it feels kind of neat, and maybe works when others are reading well crafted messages. What happens when everyone has a bot, and a bot is talking to a bot, because I for one, don't want to be sent or fall for emotionally manipulative messages, or that try to sound empathetic, maybe even are empathetic. When this type of messaging is so widespread, I wonder what will happen. I think people will ignore most of this type of messaging. Maybe we'll evolve to not be emotional anymore, when emotions are everywhere? I don't know, but an interesting hypothetical.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Will it really be a difference? Corporate speak is already a thing, people already feign emotions and sympathy. Sure, this is more, but it feels to me like more of the same; I don't think it even magnifies the problem that much.
- protastus 3y ago
  The person sending the message is accountable for its content, no matter how it was authored. Maybe I want to be tactful around a delicate issue, but am struggling to find the right words. An LLM can help me. Alternatively, someone who wants to be manipulative and deceitful might also optimize their message using an LLM. The tool is of course not inherently good or evil. But one can use the tool for different moral outcomes.

heliodor 3y ago

The concept is right on point though: ChatGPT is excellent at writing "fluffy" pieces full of empathy, compassion, PR talk, politician speech, and any other wordy flavor you need. As an engineer who is unable to produce such writing, this tool is quite helpful!

throwaway426079 3y ago
That makes sense assuming engineers don't need to practice this skill very often. But doctors need to do fluffy, compassionate every shift. Nothing about the story makes sense. Doctors and nurses say these kinds of things to patients every day (I'm an EMT, I've watched them do it and I do it myself). I'm seriously wondering if the relatives were responding to the fact that the clinician was visibly reading from a piece of paper and that somehow made it more 'official'.
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Empathy and compassion isn't in the words. It's in the intent behind them. Faked empathy literally isn't empathy. (Fake compassion is a little more arguable; there are clearly situations where faked compassion is better than no compassion.) Not everyone needs this or can do this on the same scale. I have really had to learn to find empathy and be unafraid of it, and I definitely have nearly zero tact (if you have no tact, you practise thinking good things). But if you need to be able to practise empathy and compassion regularly, and you are incapable of it, find someone who can to that for you. Celebrate their ability to do it and you'll benefit from it yourself. Trade them something they don't do so well.
firebirdn99 3y ago
Many comments are saying it's helpful. But what happens when it's widespread, everyone crafting Hallmark type empathic messages to everyone. Or once everyone has bots, then most likely they will all be sent straight to spam or something. We will be inundated with such messaging.
- suoduandao2 3y ago
  "Chatgpt, write an email based on these bullet points!" "Chatgpt, summarize this email into a few bullet points!" Somehow, I doubt we'll notice. The reason we don't send the bullet points email today is that the receiver will think we're angry with them. In University the engineers all needed alcohol as a social lubricant, if chatgpt replaces it I expect we'll trade hangovers for higher electricity bills and carry on.

Spooky23 3y ago

Some specialties attract different personalities. If you’ve ever been in a hospital setting around a lot of neuro residents, many of them will present… oddly. It’s a feature. Likewise, a lot of ER docs are kinda adrenaline people who are great at triage and quickly stabilizing you, but maybe not so much good at relating with people. That’s a feature — you don’t need a soft touch dealing with trauma. If ChatGPT can help someone perform better in their area of weakness, great. If it can help super smart people get information out of their heads, great.

bohner 3y ago
Have worked with many poor communicators and outright idiots but there is virtually no one graduating a decent medical school with native speaker skills that cant explain in simple terms why giving more fluids to someone that is overloaded with fluid is a bad idea (oh and without using any jargon like edema or diuresis, another thing missing in this whole farce, any 1st year let alone decent attending will explain clearly and simply what is being done. you’re not giving fluids then what the fuck is your plan doctor?). I’ve yet to meet the combo of poor communicator/idiot that would believe reading a canned “empathy” script would somehow be helpful. Seriously is there anyone here that would feel confident in their doctor if they came reading a plan off a sheet like a teleprompter? This guy is trying too hard and assumes most of his audience won’t realize how idiotic this sounds.
- dkarras 3y ago
  You can explain it in simple terms. Does not mean they'll listen or agree. Some people just want to feel validated, and they need it repeatedly.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  It only sounds idiotic with sufficient levels of cynicism coupled with a lack of empathy. Two years ago I rushed to the ER suffering from pulmonary edema caused by misdiagnosed endocarditis which required emergency open-heart surgery. The most qualified of the surgeons were very terse and very busy with, you know, prying people’s rib cages open and such. Do the math and think about what else the ER could have been dealing with at that time…

kelnos 3y ago

Ironically, your comment about the state of doctors is quite lacking in empathy for the doctors themselves. Regardless of whether or not this article is a fake, I think you don't quite understand how overworked most doctors are, and how little time they have been given per patient to take care of what needs to be done.

dsr_ 3y ago
Remember that the AMA has been limiting the supply of doctors in order to maintain high wages, and the working conditions for interns/residents amounts to hazing.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  That’s not how that works. The AMA doesn’t control the number of physicians. 20+ years ago the AMA supported congress reducing the number of residencies because at the time there was a predicted glut of doctors. However the AMA has reversed that position and supports increasing the number. Again though they don’t control the number of physicians.

kodah 3y ago

Fake or not, people are incorporating ChatGPT into their work. We had a pipeline break today and when we looked at the PR that introduced the change it was in the PR notes that the tooling configuration was derived from a ChatGPT prompt. What do you even say or do about that?

nevi-me 3y ago
I've been embarrassed by a Copilot code snippet that I proofread to seem correct, but was incorrect due to some subtle comparison logic. I can only imagine the risks in professions that aren't dealing with logic that has a very finite list of options or where the answers AI produce require researched effort to validate. It's probably worse in law if you're given a case reference as you're professionally supposed to read the document in substance to not be muddled by selective quoting, then if it's from a foreign jurisdiction you have to also check if it's applicable to you.
- licebmi__at__ 3y ago
  > I can only imagine the risks in professions that aren't dealing with logic that has a very finite list of options or where the answers AI produce require researched effort to validate This can be done the same way as it’s done in the non ai-assisted process. Mistakes are made then the trained professionals correct the course of action. The problem is with people dealing and selling the problem like it’s a simple logical procedure. Then the layman will think that since a machine crafted the answer, and since machines are logical, the answer must be right.
  - __loam 3y ago
    And of course, there's no way to verify the output of an llm without professional experience or training, so what's the point?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- weatherlite 3y ago

Kiro 3y ago

Actual ER doctors disagree with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36336615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36336615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36337227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36337227 Classic HN to confidently dismiss something in areas we're actually clueless about.

notahacker 3y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that most people on HN have some experience of the patient family side of medical problems, some of them no doubt significant and regular. We're not doubting the medical situation the ER doctor agrees sounds plausible, that GPT could have produced that response or that doctors finding it difficult to communicate with family members in intelligible and empathetic terms is a real problem. But if you're the sort of person that would "melt into calm agreeability" when basically the same explanation was offered with generic corpspeak appended (i.e. they'd trust the doctor more if he was answering your question by reading from a script so non-specific and non-empathetic it finished up with "if you have any questions or concerns please contact the medical team"!), and would also be delighted to get the same script read out to you each time you asked a different staff member the same question, I think you're very much in the minority. Certainly in my limited experience, I can assure you that I was more reassured by the empathy levels of professionals completely misunderstanding my question and thinking I was threatening to make a complaint about their standard of care than I would have been if they pulled out an index card and read that they were all doing their best, the treatment is [boilerplate], please do not hesitate to contact medical team in case of any questions and we will reread index card to you. At best, I suppose, my reaction might be to interpret the index card boilerplate repetition as a polite way of telling me to fuck off and not offer any followup questions. You could even make an argument that this is medically useful; a more specific version of "here's a leaflet" so they can get on with doing their job. But as written where everybody loves the GPT boilerplate, the story reads like a classic of the LinkedIn/politician people miraculously came round to supporting me and everybody cheered genre.
Calavar 3y ago
For what it's worth, I'm a doctor and I find this story hard to believe. It does sound to me like wishful thinking by an AI hype guy. In my experience, these sorts of situations happen when two things come together: 1. The patient's family has just enough medical knowledge to fall onto the wrong part of a Dunning-Kruger curve. 2. The family has certain beliefs about the medical establishment. Namely, that medical staff (especially doctors) are trained in medical school to have an inflexible way of thinking and that the doctors are dismissive of the family's proposed treatment because they are married to textbook thinking and rigidly following hospital protocols. #1 happens all the time - maybe even the majority of the time - but it isn't enough to cause conflict on its own. #2 is the special sauce that makes the situation boil over. What is the absolute last thing you want to do given #2? Probably something along the lines of handing every member of the staff a pre-written script to recite every time a family member asks questions. This will make them feel like they are being stonewalled, not like they are being listened to. This will confirm their fears about point #2, not ameliorate them. I can't say I've ever seen someone print off a script quite like this before, but I have seen some doctors piss off patients/families by relying too much on pat phrases or repeatedly pointing to a particular clinical guideline or hospital policy as the rationale for their decision.

raxxorraxor 3y ago

Problem is with high empathy is that it affects you too. That might be pretty exhausting in a stressful hospital environment.

firebirdn99 3y ago
Yes well summarized. I understood this too, and replied in another comment, which is how doctors many times come across as callous and really like robotic people, but it's bc they have to be ready to take on another case. The people who are sensitive don't stay for long, or make it all the way. One one hand I feel, many developed that way as a means of adjusting to their profession. I'm not sure if they necessarily are the happiest versions of themselves if they are like that. What I mean is if they could choose to be more empathic without suffering would they? I'm thinking they would, as it's a human thing to feel more. Reducing the suffering is another point to solve. Essentially, I don't know how comforting AI's would be as opposed to another human. In that case, how can we make robots/AI do the dirty work, and make humans do the more empathic work. Maybe have separate doctors that just do the communicating part, while doctors+specialty AI robots(in the short term transition until it's fully autonomous robots?) do the surgeries, etc that require steady, stable minds, and lower empathy.

ansc 3y ago

Alright, I'm going to miss the point entirely here, but I'm swinging any way: if I recall correctly, Kumar had basically studied and become a doctor, but was scared to take the final test due to his fathers pressure yada yada something like that, and it wasn't through sheer luck he saved the patient.