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A well-credentialed doctor in a prestigious institution has once prescribed me a massive, costly and crippling operation in response to some worrying symptoms. I thought for a bit, reasoned that hypochondria and credulity are shameful, and just ignored the problem, which subsequently… mostly went away.
(I visited the Church for the first time in years after that).
N=1 is not much, but I do not contact medical professionals all that often in the first place.
The point is I do not fundamentally care if my clinician is a transformer or a meat bag: it would be quite unwise of me to uncritically assume that either has a modicum of responsibility or common sense. It'd be nice to know in advance that outright hallucinations are unlikely, of course.
Not true, it's a deterministic black box, and not even that black, we can fact-edit LLMs. Of course we can also curate the dataset.
Why do you think holistic application of medical knowledge can be implemented with a database search, but English prose is something we need LLMs for? Grammar, too, has regularities.
LLMs are just our best way to date of approximating arbitrary regularities of text.
There truly is a massive problem with the amount of authority and trust we place in doctors in the modern Western world. They've taken over the mantle that has been passed from shamans to pagan druids to Eastern sages to Catholic priests. Doctors function as our way to stem the anxieties and problems in society, not just medically but now spiritually as well.
After Christianity suffered its fall, the medical system was bootstrapped into a sort of Frankenstein monster, where instead of curing illnesses we now expect doctors to make us happy, less anxious, help us understand our brethren and self-actualize into better people.
Clearly this was a mistake.
You've got the order wrong, I think. The bootstrapping came first, and this bootstrapping is in fact part of how Christianity got pushed out of its position of social dominance. The invention of Psychology as a purported "science" was another big part of it. One of the core Enlightenment claims was that human reason and knowledge should replace "superstition", that materialist science should replace faith; the process you're pointing to was the explicit plan from the foundation of the ideology.
Interesting, I haven’t heard this claim before but it’s certainly plausible. Know of any further reading on the subject?
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