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Comment by throwitaway222 | Hacker News Reader

What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).

If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" we can drop all jobs - and only the surgeon has some authority over the machine. When we have a surgery robot, then they can go to. And at some point we'll be recommending and forcing surgery for athletes foot because some kind of best practice or viral post going out of control and a bunch of openclaw bots randomly decide to make tons of recommendations online for amputation for athletes foot and GPT 8.6 agrees this is the way to go.

OR we can somehow decide there is a boundary, there is some room for human memory and decisions.

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I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible. Let me explain.

All podiatrists are not the same. All physicians in their specialties are often specializing in their own niche and are up-to-date on that niche.

I've had lisfranc ligament injury. My podiatrist wanted to perform a surgery quickly, which in 90% of cases is advised. I decided to seek a 2nd opinion because I realized she did the X-rays wrong, as she did them non-weight bearing, which is useless if there are no fractures.

The specialist was excited to see me, and up to date on all the lisfranc research. I've had a really bad sprain and he said conservative treatment should be sufficient. It took months but I healed up.

I've had quite a few injuries from playing sports and often found doctors to be "wrong" simply because their knowledge was out of date.

I am confused as to how this is an argument for a single source of truth. It seems like you've presented an argument for the opposite. If there were a single source of truth, there would be no point in seeking a second opinion - it would be the same as the first. If the first opinion was correct, excellent. But if the first opinion was incorrect (and no AI model is correct 100% of the time), then you're straight out of luck.

The problem is that the first source is incorrect because she doesn't deal with lisfranc injuries frequently enough and her knowledge is not good enough. I've had to go do my own research to find a guy who specializes in lisfranc. Most patients would not.

However, if you went to an AI agent which has access to medical research, you would get the most up to date research.

Why would I seek a 2nd opinion if the initial doctor knew what to do?

> I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible.

We should establish a single practice of care, MedicineGPT. It may be a rough start but over time the gene pool will adapt and the human race will live harmoniously with the machines (sorry, with the GPUs). Plus our insurance premiums should finally go down.

It would be better than most physicians now. It can quickly crunch many pages of medical history and medical research, this something a physician cannot do. They have intuition but sometimes are not equipped to deal with complex problems.

While I am not 100% opposed to this idea, it should come with liability to the provider AND its error rate be better than best human doctors.

> What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).

Ironically I had a friend who went to med school and in his own words roughly 90% or more of the students there are heavily relying on GPT. They even had a few instances where people were using it to cheat during exams. And supposedly during the clinical years of uni if they don't know something they literally just go to a separate room and start asking GPT for answers. Make of that what you will.

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