maniclucky

Why bother? Not like he hears anything with his head somehow up both Putin and Musk's asses. Or would care if he did.

Fallacy of relative privation.

Arguable. Your argument appears to assume that bad doctors (for lack of a faster term) are the dominant problem and my assertion is a reminder that there are many other, more likely candidates. Apologies if I put an assumption in your mouth.

The current medical framework gives incentive to providing an easy, quick, cheap fix to what is often a complex problem.

I feel like the sins of capitalism are tainting the idea of a standard doctor visit. I would hazard that most doctors just want to help their patients, but that's rather philosophical and more or less unanswerable.

I think RFKs solution is neither clear nor doable. I don’t think it even addresses the main cause of the problem.

Fair enough, I misunderstood your stance. I personally think RFK doesn't deserve any substantial defense, hence me getting argumentative. He's an unqualified rich asshole in a position he shouldn't be near and I was apparently in a "shout them down" kind of mood.

You're right in that the goal is problem solving, you're wrong that inability to code isn't a problem.

AI can make a for loop and do common tasks but the moment you have something halfway novel to do, it has a habit of shitting itself and pretending that the feces is good code. And if you can't read code, you can't tell the shit from the stuff you want.

It may be able to do it in the future but it can't yet

Source: data engineer who has fought his AI a time or two.

We have microplastics in our brains, pfas in our water, the lingering effects of lead gasoline working its way out, increased ability and willingness to diagnose mental disorders (contrast with the old "stick em in attic" approach), economic badnesses of assorted kind every few years and a cohort of society shaming individuals for needing help. Even if bad doctors were a significant cause, they at minimum aren't alone.

There's no shortage of internal and external, mental and physical potential causes that are worth addressing before a conspiracy/incompetence of medical professionals is getting to my radar. It's way easier to blame individuals than realize the problem is way bigger than that. It's a comforting lie because it lets you pretend that the solution is clear and doable, when reality is that it's ambiguous on a good day and may not be possible to fix in our lifetimes.

Or ye olde "useful idiot". Honestly more rhetorical to draw attention to the absurdity of relying on RFK Jr for health advice.

Why is RFK Jr a reliable source for any of this? He's hardly a reliable medical source. Dude promotes vaccine lies. He's a lawyer by trade. He has no special medical knowledge or training. Why is he in charge of any of this in the first place?

Data guy here. You're kinda running into the same rationale used by fascists, I mean republicans, to cut welfare. That being: there exists some number of people that game the system, so lets put rules in place to fight them. Sounds good right?

The problem is this: what's the actual added value of these new rules? For this example, what's the ratio of badly prescribed medicines to correctly prescribed ones? How many people that need the medication have to be denied it to validate catching one bad actor? Is it better to have a few bad actors to make sure everyone gets help, or is it more important to be punitive and make sure that only the right people get the resource?

Well, there's a rational way to answer that. How scarce is the resource? If a solid gold bar was what was required to treat a condition, than yeah you're gonna need to make sure no one is wasting it. But if the treatment is common as dirt, why are we getting in the way?

What's the cost of the system as-is? People take medications they don't need and may experience side effects of this medicine. Given that wellbutrin is hardly a party drug, it's not as if people are seeking this out recreationally. They want to feel better. And if it isn't doing anything, or is making them feel worse, than the discussion with one's doctor should end up with "let's try something else" (YMMV, doctors are sometimes bad, patients are sometimes bad, I'm talking how a typical case should go in a quasi-sensible world).

And you know what's worse? Anyone that isn't the patient and the doctor being involved in that conversation.

Just finally made the jump this week. Keeping the dual boot to finish my masters in a known stable environment with all the only-necessary-for-school-programs and then gleefully deleting it as part of my graduation celebration.

An elegant way to make someone feel ashamed for using many smart words, ha-ha.

Unintentional I assure you.

I think it’s some social mechanism making them choose a brute force solution first.

I feel like it's simpler than that. Ye olde "when all you have is a hammer, everything's a nail". Or in this case, when you've built the most complex hammer in history, you want everything to be a nail.

So I’d say commercially they already are successful.

Definitely. I'll never write another cover letter. In their use-case, they're solid.

but I haven’t even finished my BS yet

Currently working on my masters after being in industry for a decade. The paper is nice, but actually applying the knowledge is poorly taught (IMHO, YMMV) and being willing to learn independently has served me better than by BS in EE.

I’m not against attempts at global artificial intelligence, just against one approach to it. Also no matter how we want to pretend it’s something general, we in fact want something thinking like a human.

Agreed. The techbros pretending that the stochastic parrots they've created are general AI annoys me to no end.

While not as academically cogent as your response (totally not feeling inferior at the moment), it has struck me that LLMs would make a fantastic input/output to a greater system analogous to the Wernicke/Broca areas of the brain. It seems like they're trying to get a parrot to swim by having it do literally everything. I suppose the thing that sticks in my craw is the giveaway that they've promised that this one technique (more or less, I know it's more complicated than that) can do literally everything a human can, which should be an entire parade of red flags to anyone with a drop of knowledge of data science or fraud. I know that it's supposed to be a universal function appropriator hypothetically, but I think the gap between hypothesis and practice is very large and we're dumping a lot of resources into filling in the canyon (chucking more data at the problem) when we could be building a bridge (creating specialized models that work together).

Now that I've used a whole lot of cheap metaphor on someone who causally dropped 'syllogism' into a conversation, I'm feeling like a freshmen in a grad level class. I'll admit I'm nowhere near up to date on specific models and bleeding edge techniques.

Ooooooh. Ok that makes sense.

With that said, you might look at researchers using AI to come up with new useful ways to fold proteins and biology in general. The roadblock, to my understanding (data science guy not biologist), is the time it takes to discover these things/how long it would take evolution to get there. Admittedly that's still somewhat quantitative.

For qualitative examples we always have hallucinations and that's a poorly understood mechanism that may well be able to create actual creativity. But it's the nature of AI to remain within (or close to within) the corpus of knowledge they were trained on. Though now it leads to "nothing new under the sun" so I'll stop rambling now.

That response doesn't make sense. Please clarify.