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Comment by hnthrowaway0328 | Hacker News Reader

From my personal experience (thus does not have statistical significance), it's not the amount of knowledge, but the position. Teachers/professors are a group of people that I interact frequently with (both my parents and parents of my friends are university professors/lecturers), and it just happens that the ones that I know the most are all overconfidence.

Basically they think they know everything, to the point of educating the doctors about medicines when they are in the hospital (as patients). I don't know what got them into this but I found the arrogance distasteful.

Maybe it's in the culture though. Back in the day teachers were respected and the relationship between teachers and students are somewhat closer to father-children than customer-merchant. Now time changes but old habits stay hard.

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What do you mean by educating the doctors about medicines? I've seen people without degrees advocate for themselves as patients and be more knowledgeable about certain medications and treatments than doctors or nurses were.

Like "you don't know as much as I do, I Googled a page and it says..." type. No they definitely know very little about the stuffs. And I personally heard and saw they tried to persuade OTHER patients, of different symptoms to listen to their "theories".

ALL patients with access to Internet are like that.

now with chatGPT there will be more people like that

For every 5 “type” People you mention there’s 1 common person who really does spend the time doing their research and likely knows more about the drug than the doctor in some ways (typically they just lack the context of interactions and side effects). A good doctor will listen to what the patient says and then discuss with them what they think with an open mind. Good doctors are rare. Especially nowadays with all this arrogance that they know everything as you say.

This is something that always kind of gets me, because when I have something wrong with me I will do a deep dive on it and read whatever studies, publications, and fellow patient accounts I can find.

This often puts me in a position where I feel pretty confident that I have more fresh knowledge about it than the doctor before me. Someone who in all likely hood has a mild familiarity with it, and is filling in the blanks with rote medical intuition.

What I really wish is that I could get doctors to drop the veil, and just openly admit what there depth of knowledge on the illness is. I would love it if they googled stuff right in front of me. I absolutely do not expect them to have a full medical encyclopedia in their head, and I am smart enough to be able to not be put off by "I don't know/I'm not sure".

The flip side is imagine a project manager did this to a programmer or architect. The programmer would constantly need to explain why the blog post they read dated 2013 about how hadoop makes everything faster is wrong, or how that AI paper is bullshit and designed to get someone grant money. Or how someone else’s experience with Azure was great because they just shifted all their Windows stuff to it. So that could kind of stuff get frustrating for the expert.

It's interesting to imagine doctors understanding humans and their pathologies nearly as well as programmers understand the systems they work on. My guess is that'd amount to an incredible upgrade.

(Yes that level of understanding is often quite poor in absolute terms.)

But that's part of the issue, I'm not reading a blog post from 2013, I'm reading recent studies in top shelf medical journals with clear conclusions.

I may not understand the minutia of the study, but if the conclusions are "60% of people with X showed the underlying cause Y", and my doctor is saying "I have never heard of any possible association with Y, and Y has no possible connection anyway" then I feel pretty confident that the doctor is out of touch.

Rather the doctors take should be "Please send me the studies and I will review them with my actual medical knowledge" or really "I need to review the literature on this patients illness so I can be up to date while treating them for it"

That’s the promise of AI in medical care, that it can synthesize all known data relevant to observed symptoms and, on average, make a more accurate diagnosis than human doctors.

https://towardsdatascience.com/ai-diagnoses-disease-better-t...

The old joke: "The difference between doctors and programmers is that programmers actually admit to finding all their answers on the internet!'

Indeed, given the PE-driven profit motive of most (US) hospitals these days, people are increasingly less trusting of their diagnoses and prognoses, and more likely to take an active role in their own care and treatment.

I think with teachers and professors it can be a case of "habit".

They're used to being the smartest person in the room and telling the people around them what's what. This can sometimes rub off on interactions outside work. Same kind of thing can happen with other professions, of course.

Do you disagree with the OP, that it's the people with intermediate knowledge that are most overconfident?

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