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throwitaway222today at 4:30 PM2 repliesview on HN

What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).

If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" we can drop all jobs - and only the surgeon has some authority over the machine. When we have a surgery robot, then they can go to. And at some point we'll be recommending and forcing surgery for athletes foot because some kind of best practice or viral post going out of control and a bunch of openclaw bots randomly decide to make tons of recommendations online for amputation for athletes foot and GPT 8.6 agrees this is the way to go.

OR we can somehow decide there is a boundary, there is some room for human memory and decisions.


Replies

avgDevtoday at 4:42 PM

I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible. Let me explain.

All podiatrists are not the same. All physicians in their specialties are often specializing in their own niche and are up-to-date on that niche.

I've had lisfranc ligament injury. My podiatrist wanted to perform a surgery quickly, which in 90% of cases is advised. I decided to seek a 2nd opinion because I realized she did the X-rays wrong, as she did them non-weight bearing, which is useless if there are no fractures.

The specialist was excited to see me, and up to date on all the lisfranc research. I've had a really bad sprain and he said conservative treatment should be sufficient. It took months but I healed up.

I've had quite a few injuries from playing sports and often found doctors to be "wrong" simply because their knowledge was out of date.

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rfgplktoday at 5:01 PM

> What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).

Ironically I had a friend who went to med school and in his own words roughly 90% or more of the students there are heavily relying on GPT. They even had a few instances where people were using it to cheat during exams. And supposedly during the clinical years of uni if they don't know something they literally just go to a separate room and start asking GPT for answers. Make of that what you will.