alt Hacker News> In an era of extremely accessible and competent language models, you have no excuse not to use one to verify your doctor's (or any hired professional's) work [...] the tools exist and are now ridiculously accessible
Well I certainly have an excuse: at work, code reviews provided by a particular LLM have been a net negative contribution, in my judgement. And then it's not hard to extrapolate that experience to other professions, ones that I myself am not competent in.
The old adage exists where you read the Sunday newspaper, get a nice educative experience from 14 out of the 16 pages, but then 2 pages happen to write about your own profession, and you seethe about the rampant stupidities and mischaracterizations in those 2 pages. But the other 14, about stuff you are not directly familar with, sound good. See the problem?
You got lucky because your doctor was receptive to ideas from sources other than his own brain (LLM or otherwise). Most medical professionals laugh you (or curse you) out of the room, if you attempt to make an informed decision. In fact the most selective search criterion for doctors, as a patient, is willing to talk.
Yes LLMs fail and fail often. I use a council of 3 for my health related conversations. They have recommended stuff which proved useless, I even wasted a little money in supplements which later iterations of the same LLM explained are not useful at all. I failed to explain to the LLM that some of what I was taking (baby aspirins) was not a doctor's prescription but my own initiatives, so it didn't dissuade me from continuing them until it came up much later - something my own doctor also agreed should be dropped - she had also assumed it was something I had been prescribed in the past!
Regarding Gell-Mann amnesia, I literally mention it in a separate post in this same thread :)
And I'm sorry if your experience is that most medical professionals would react like that. This isn't absolutely the case for me. I show up with things printed out, don't come across as a lunatic who googled a symptom and just wants to be agreed with, and I explain that my LLM research is so I ask fewer stupid questions in the limited time the doc has for me.