alt Hacker NewsPlaying the critic that alternate “50%” outcomes were:
- You didn’t have a thyroid issue and you spent thousands more on tests the doctor was right that you didn’t need.
- Your cat didn’t have that issue and you spent hundreds on unnecessary tests.
Are you essentially saying that it is better for an LLM to sell you an idea that sometimes might be right, selling a dream to anyone with and without the money for it?
So… a telephone psychic?
The thing about WebMD telling everyone they have cancer is that sometimes it will be right.
(Just for clarity, I’m really glad it was helpful for you.)
Replies
Having the LLM give you new options doesn't mean you have to pursue them. It's just something else to talk to your doctor about.
And it's not like self researching medicial issues isn't a new concept.
I'm so tired of hearing the "unnecessary tests" line.
Anyone who says this has not experienced poor quality healthcare.
Many doctors simply aren't good and don't run tests because they are doing the bare minimum to get you out of the office.
I mean, the LLM was right in both cases. And that's what tests are for: testing whether a hypothesis was correct. It's only a waste of time and money if the LLM is only marginally better than flipping a coin. It's my experience that the LLMs are far, far better than that threshold.
The difference between an LLM and WebMD is that WebMD is a page of information. Any reasoning is yours, based on a small fraction of the information available to you. An LLM is based on all the medical literature of all time. It's not even close to being the same thing.
Even if you argue that an LLM is just a prediction engine, that's kind of exactly the right tool for the job. "If you have these symptoms and not these other ones, these are likely causes" plays against the lone strength that LLMs' detractors argue they do well.
> You didn’t have a thyroid issue and you spent thousands more on tests the doctor was right that you didn’t need.
Uhhhh, even in the US, we're not talking "thousands" here.
> So… a telephone psychic?
Look, at one level, you can think of LLMs as search with a sometimes useful probability engine sitting on top of it.
As someone who had multiple doctors do their damnedest to kill me on multiple occasions, I was very grateful to have google search back in the day, and you bet your bottom dollar I use LLMs to help me with health issues today. They are often better than most doctors.
Does that put me at risk of doing something stupid? Only if I don't do further due diligence.
> an LLM to sell you an idea that sometimes might be right
An LLM is just an information resource that can be useful when used properly. It can also be useless or net harmful when used improperly. The same is true for web search, libraries and even human experts. A licensed medical doctor is a domain expert and competent domain experts are often correct, but not always.
I don't think it's possible to suggest a universally 'correct' default position on when (and how much) to accept your GP's medical opinion over any alternatives. It depends on too many variables: the context, the person, the alternative info sources, the expected value of correctness and the potential consequences of error. But decision theory suggests this is the kind of combinatorially complex problem space for which any single default position, whether "Always trust your GP" or "Never trust your GP", for every person and situation cannot be optimal.