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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I'm sure you know about the LLM phenomenon of what's been dubbed hallucination, so how can you trust the model with something as impactful as medicine?

It doesn't have to be perfect - just better than doctors.

Imagine a doctor gets it right 90% of the time, and the other 10% of the time he says "I'm not really sure what's going on" and either consults with another doctor, suggests you get a second opinion, or even just sends you home with no treatment.

Now imagine a LLM gets it right 95% of the time, and the other 5% of the time it gets it confidently wrong and prescribes you an incorrect course of treatment.

In this hypothetical scenario, even though the LLM is "better," I'd rather have the human doctor, because getting treated for the wrong thing is often much worse than not getting treated at all.

humans are confidently wrong all the time

I think it'd be fun to play a game where people are shown pictures of doctors and decide whether to trust them or GPT based on physiognomy.

I endorse this plan.

This is not what doctors do. The other 10% of the time they get it confidently wrong and prescribe you an incorrect course of treatment.

IME actual doctors are confidently wrong with some regularity too.

GPT makes sense today as a way for the doctor to second check his or her diagnosis. The doctor is quality control for GPT if it spits out something crazy, and GPT is quality control for the doctor.

Sitting here in a climate controlled room, I can say that I would much rather die behind the wheel instead of as a passenger of an automobile.

Because of how inscrutable LLMs (and AI in general) are I have an innate fear that the conclusions they reach are not based on the same reasoning you or I might make. Like it could be a completely alien way of thinking that arrives at the same solution. Without knowing (specifically) how AI achieves it outcomes, I am weary about accepting their solutions blindly.

You are not 'behind the wheel' either way. The actual process by which medical decisions are made and applied is, in Western countries, so labyrinthine and complex and insane that no human understands it. The addition of LLMs seems to hardly make any difference at all.

What prompts you to make such a claim?

Quite a large chunk of medicine has been algorithmized, with the role of clinicians largely reduced to interpreting said guidelines, choosing the appropriate ones and administering treatment. An example of something utterly streamlined would be the treatment of Acute Coronary Syndrome.

Then, there are situations that aren't nearly as cut or dry, or multiple conflicting requirements in a highly comorbid patient, at which point you do really need a doctor to think things through.

Frankly speaking, while some medical decisions might be made for less than noble reasons such as liability minimization, the majority of them are made with relatively clear underpinnings, making me think such a claim is highly unwarranted.

I am weary about accepting their solutions blindly.

You mean "wary". "Weary" means tired, and comes from "wear" in the sense of "worn out" or "weariness". "Wary" means cautious or concerned, and is related to "beware" and "aware".

I'm late because I don't sign in often, but thanks for the correction.

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