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Intralexicaltoday at 1:54 AM1 replyview on HN

Not only is the study testing something which only vaguely resembles how doctors diagnose patients, but isolated accuracy percentages are also a terrible way to measure healthcare quality.

If 90% of patients have a cold, and 10% have metastatic aneuristic super-boneitis, then you can get 90% accuracy by saying every patient has a cold. I would expect a probabilistic token-prediction machine to be good at that. But hopefully, you can see why a human doctor might accept scoring a lower accuracy percentage, if it means they follow up with more tests that catch the 10% boneitis.


Replies

arcfourtoday at 5:45 AM

What percentage of patients have blood clots in their lungs and a history of lupus, like the article described? That's not on the same level as a common cold at all.

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