3 ms·

The way med school works by definition is that it filters for very conformant hard working individuals and then fills them up with the most common symptoms, dis

The way med school works by definition is that it filters for very conformant hard working individuals and then fills them up with the most common symptoms, diseases and treatments and turns them into human dictionaries. There are of course many exceptions to that rule, but if you look at medical textbooks that is the structure most of them follow. A human competing on who's the best dictionary is a terrible way to solve this problem although it might have historically been helpful. I recently had a retinal detachment, not entirely sure why, no doctor can tell me anything useful besides you must have been stressed, but I got it lasered despite my better judgement, because I knew fixating something in the eye somewhat arbitrarily must cause problems, so it left me with blurriness and aniseikonia(a condition with one eye seeing things smaller). I don't need an LLM for that, just the right google queries do the trick. This is by far not the only issue I have with doctors, but my experience with doctors has been vastly different between exceptional doctors and people with absolutely no interest into any kind of in depth root cause analysis, but the vast majority of them has been in the latter category.

bidandanswer 3y ago
> I don't need an LLM for that, just the right google queries do the trick. LLMs are clearly superior at presenting the information and have tangible room for improvement, whereas Google has regressed over the last decade and is getting more brittle by the day. Open technology (LLMs) are going to offer much more robust and reproducible solutions to such questions as "here are my symptoms, what's wrong with me?" than Google. You can nitpick my statements all you want and I will probably agree with you, but the overarching takeaway should be that LLMs are a much better solution, especially for laypeople who cannot use Google effectively.
- pants2 3y ago
  LLMs are excellent at presenting more common diagnoses first. With Google you can easily find some rare and scary disease that fits your symptoms, that trips up a lot of casual Googlers.
  - rjzzleep 3y ago
    Sometimes when you look at studies, those rare diagnosis turn out to be really common, just not part of the standard curriculum. In those cases LLMs perform more like a normal doctor giving you all the normal junk a doctor would say. What google needs is a "search journals" toggle on its normal search, not related to scholar.google.com since those results are also different.
  - kaycey2022 3y ago
    You’re unlikely to find anything useful because everything has been SEOed up af. Useful results, if not already in the SEOed sites, are buried pages deep into the search. Content explosion did not start with generative AI, so search quality has been deteriorating for quite a while.

bidandanswer 3y ago

> I don't need an LLM for that, just the right google queries do the trick. LLMs are clearly superior at presenting the information and have tangible room for improvement, whereas Google has regressed over the last decade and is getting more brittle by the day. Open technology (LLMs) are going to offer much more robust and reproducible solutions to such questions as "here are my symptoms, what's wrong with me?" than Google. You can nitpick my statements all you want and I will probably agree with you, but the overarching takeaway should be that LLMs are a much better solution, especially for laypeople who cannot use Google effectively.

pants2 3y ago
LLMs are excellent at presenting more common diagnoses first. With Google you can easily find some rare and scary disease that fits your symptoms, that trips up a lot of casual Googlers.
- rjzzleep 3y ago
  Sometimes when you look at studies, those rare diagnosis turn out to be really common, just not part of the standard curriculum. In those cases LLMs perform more like a normal doctor giving you all the normal junk a doctor would say. What google needs is a "search journals" toggle on its normal search, not related to scholar.google.com since those results are also different.
- kaycey2022 3y ago
  You’re unlikely to find anything useful because everything has been SEOed up af. Useful results, if not already in the SEOed sites, are buried pages deep into the search. Content explosion did not start with generative AI, so search quality has been deteriorating for quite a while.