Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the operating knife at least once; in that case, the operation was successful, healed me of the condition, and never caused any negative side-effects to this day.
Maybe there's a difference in regulation. A lot of the "entrepreneurial" landscape seems unregulated and a kind of Wild West, and I suppose that allows for certain kinds of personalities to succeed by suspect means. The medical field, by contrast, is quite regulated and there are very real risks to malpractice. Thus, I think it attracts better people and allows them to succeed.
Maybe it's similar to how dictators often take over in poor or struggling countries, whereas they find it harder to get a foothold in developed, prosperous countries with strong institutions.
Being non-virtuous doesn't all of a sudden turn them into some kind of evil monster. It's just a job for most of them, one that pays well. Being professional and giving treatment like they should (basically following orders) is the easiest way to avoid problems for doctors.
This all changes when they get more difficult patients. As someone who's been told bogus by doctors, even lightly pushing back many will completely change demeanor, you're no longer some easy money but a risk/annoyance. So your good experiences basically just show doctors in their 'perfect state'.
This isn't the same in every country as you say it's a regulated field and the regulations differ wildly from country to country and so does the view and behaviour of doctors.
But it's good that being virtuous is the "easy path" for them. That's how I want it to be. Why would I want to make it difficult or put impediments in the way of my doctors doing their job well?
My point is that, when the institution supports and encourages virtuous behaviour, the actors within the institution are more likely to practice virtue.
I think this is also largely the point of Plato's Republic.
You're absolutely, completely, 100% correct that the nature of good institutions is to make the virtuous path the easy one, and also that medical norms and practices do a (generally) good job achieving this.
You're also missing your interlocutor's point.
> Why would I want to make it difficult or put impediments in the way of my doctors doing their job well?
Doctors very often don't do a good job with complex cases - like rare conditions, complicated histories, or multiple interacting factors - and some will treat the patient as "difficult" or "an impediment" when they (the doctor) haven't grokked the situation. Very few patients are trying to be an impediment - 99% are trying to help achieve a good outcome, though sometimes their definition of that is misguided or impossible - but it is frustrating to be treated that way by someone who genuinely knows less about your situation than you do. ("Doc, I've taken that test before, and I've tried that medication before - I know it's not in your EMR, but here is a printout - what are you looking for this time that you expect to be different than before?" That conversation doesn't always go well - and even when it does, you're likely to be told "I can't [read: hospital / insurance policy won't permit] try something else until we've done those again" - so you'll end up going back to step A with each new provider.)
In fairness to doctors, many of them work within horrible constraints: it's impossible to get a handle on a complex situation in one twenty minute appointment every six months, and there's little point trying when it's likely the patient will be reassigned to a new provider by next year, anyway. The tension between medical ethics and practice and hospital (let alone, in the US, insurance) ethics and practice is enormous, and (for the individual doctors and patients caught up in it) intractable.
> I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
You are extremely lucky, then.
As a man, I've been gaslit by my doctors about my depression. My PC in my early 20s told me I was just lazy and needed to get a "real" job.
For women, by all accounts, it's much worse. I have not met a woman yet who has not had a story about some doctor treating her like a child, minimizing her pain, etc.
Well I've had more mixed experiences with other kinds of professions. Real estate agents have fibbed to me about the condition of the property, recruitment agents have misrepresented the role, financial advisors have given me sub-optimal advice. There didn't seem to be much in the structure to prevent this. Doctors, nurses and surgeons on the other hand were very careful and thorough, and that included telling me things I didn't want to hear. This makes sense. Medicine is much more serious - people's long-term health and lives are at risk.
I don't deny there's privilege involved in my case. Again, this seems an institutional problem. The medical field as a whole needs more inclusive frameworks to deal with women's health, racial justice, LGBTIQ, ageism and much more. These are issues need to be addressed at an institution and even whole-of-society level. You can't expect each individual to independently solve for them all. At the very least, they need education.
FWIW, I've been using AI, but instead of "max # of lines/commits", I'm optimising for "min # of pr comments/iterations/bugs". My goal is to end up with less/simpler code and more/bigger impact. The real goal is business value, and ultimately human value. Optimise for that, using AI where it fits.
Along those lines, some techniques I've been dabbling in:
1. Getting multiple agents to implement a requirement from scratch, them combining the best ideas from all of them with my own informed approach.
2. Gathering documentation (requirements, background info, glossaries, etc), targeting an Agent at it, and asking carefully selected questions for which the answers are likely useful.
3. Getting agents to review my code, abstracting review comments I agree with to a re-usable checklist of general guidelines, then using those guidelines to inform the agents in subsequent code reviews. Over time I hope this will make the code reviews increasingly well fitted to the code base and nature of the problems I work on.
The Goodhart's law effect there seems obvious - rather than code getting better, you might just become less rigorous in your reviews and stop commenting as much. You may not even realize your standards are dropping.
Can you provide a link to this app?
Or alternately, share a few of the prompts by which you built it?
I only ask because, if it's really that easy/simple, I'd like to do the same thing!
Regarding prompts:
a) In general I clean up the work space on a regular base, so I do not store prompts
b) Overall, Id say so far above 200 - 300 initial prompts for the code developed with the LLM (and then 2 - 50[?] follow up prompts to change & update things)
c) The initial prompts are always long and very elaborative, like 60-70% of screensize
d) The model is always aware of the source files used for a given prompts (in Claude you can create project workspaces and put your stuff in)
e) I always tell the model the current state, where want to go and which steps are necessary according to my opinion and I specify the result as detailled as possible
f) I give contraints in the prompts, telling what not to do etc.
TL;DR: To lose unwanted fat in a healthy, sustainable, frugal and environmentally-friendly way, follow a whole-food plant-based diet and maintain a calorie deficit over a long period of time by exercising vigorously on a daily basis and sticking to a healthy and enjoyable eating routine.
If you're looking to maximise employability / pay scale, maybe you can do some small side projects, just enough to showcase curiosity/open-mindedness.
Examples:
- Build a useful bash script using ChatGPT prompts and blog about it
- Build a text summariser component for your personal blog using Xenova / Transformers.js
- Build an email reply bot generator that uses ChatGPT prompt with sentiment analysis (doesn't have to actually send email, it could just do an API call to ChatGPT and print the message to the screen).
Just a few small examples and maybe a course or two (e.g. Prompt Engineering for Developers) should look great.
However I question how many companies really care about it right now. Most interviews I've done lately didn't bring it up even once.
But that said, maybe in a few months or year or so it will become more essential for most engineers.
Do you really think a useful bash script using ChatGPT prompts is worth blogging about? I'm genuinely asking. I've been wanting to start my blog back up I was always primarily a sysadmin, although I've had to move more into DevOps to keep with the times and instead of being more an SRE/sysadmin like I used to be I'm now DevOps meets sysadmin where I'm not helping write our companies application but I do everything else from CI/CD, monitoring, log dashboards, to creation of infrastructure using terraform, ansible etc.
So I don't want you to think my question was being sarcastic... I'm genuinely curious if you think this sort of thing would be a useful or interesting thing to blog about or only in the cases of a resume building thing?
I think this skill could save time in a very rushed business environment.
A while back I wrote a prompt to build a script that runs git-reflog to get a the list of distinct authors. After a few small tweaks I got it roughly working. This took about 1 hour. Writing it myself would have definitely taken multiple hours, especially having to learn the details of git-reflog.
But that said I think it's mainly resume-building. ChatGPT isn't going to overall transform our productivity.
