The problem with AI and poorly educated professionals is not the ability to diagnose and treat based on evidence-based medicine. The problem is that you have to know enough about medicine, and enough about real human people to know what kinds of questions to ask in the first place. If nothing else, there is a massive amount of information gained from a patient’s body language, mannerisms, behavior, and the physical exam itself that would be extremely hard to quantify in a meaningful way for someone without the background education and experience to come to any useful conclusions.

Were I in any other field, I might agree with you, but given that I am in the medical field, stupidity and incompetence cost real human lives and I cannot tolerate that if it can be at all avoided.

It’s not quite a catchphrase yet, but when discussing cases or whatever, I frequently use the sentence: “I’m not sure, lemme go look that up.”

I worked professionally in medicine for a few years before starting medical school, and thus far my approach has been to entirely disregard anything they said on the subject and continue as normal unless the nonsense they’re spouting has the potential to cause serious harm. Our patient care professor is training us to listen attentively, then dismantle the nonsense as politely as possible while guiding the patient’s viewpoint back to something approaching reality.

There’s some things you look for that are difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t seen it before. That’s part of why experience is so valuable in Emergency Medicine, and it’s not uncommon to put your best nurses out in triage. People will do this kinda twitchy/wilting/loss of focus/change in pallor/change in posture right before they go down. I don’t have a good way to describe it, and it might be easier to draw even, because it really is a body language thing and the general appearance of the patient that can inform your decision making.

I have thought about trying to plan out a learning algorithm that could spit out suggestions for triage level and preliminary tests based on input data like vital signs, symptoms, and complaints… but I would never implement something like that as anything beyond a tool for the nurses at triage to use. There would have to always be an option to override the algorithm because there’s some aspects of patient presentation that are not easily quantifiable. I’d never be able to explain it in a way that one could input it into a computer, but even with my limited experience, I can tell which patients are going to crump on me.

NPs working under a physician with actual oversight is fine. The ones I have problems with are the ones that have a physician sign the hundreds of notes a month while maybe reviewing a handful, and worse, the ones pushing for independent practice without even that sham of oversight involved.

At least I can rest assured of the fact that AI will be next to useless in my intended field. Emergency medicine is an environment where you get a random constellation of symptoms and complaints with very little direction on which are related to the current illness, and which ones are not currently relevant. Also, in the time it would take to get all the info into the AI for a trauma/cardiac/code situation, the patient might be dead or rapidly heading in that direction.

I try to remind myself that I’ve only gotten as far as I have because of hard work. I don’t have any special talent, I’m not some kind of genius, I just know how to work hard for the things that matter.

As a medical student, I have a negative amount of trust in and/or respect for anyone in the healthcare sector that has a business degree.

For me, it just looks like he has a certain coldness in his eyes. It’s not a dead or vacant look, it’s just the way a smile, or any other facial expression for that matter, just doesn’t seem to make it to his eyes. There’s obviously life and intelligence there, but it’s not a friendly intelligence. I pulled up the most lizard-man pictures of Zuckerberg for comparison, and even at his most robotic, his eyes still look human. Like there’s some capacity for empathy in there somewhere. With Musk? His eyes just don’t quite read as human to me in an uncanny valley sort of way.

Makeship is having a sale on their new Glow in the Dark plushies. It’s not a huge discount, but the proceeds go towards supporting independent artists which is always a good thing.

https://www.makeship.com/shop/gitd-2023

From Lord of the Rings: “Not all who wander are lost.”

From the Old Kingdom Series: “Does the walker choose the path, or does the path choose the walker?”

Pro tip: if there’s an Aldi near you, get the Benton’s sandwich creme cookies. They’re so much better than Oreos and way cheaper.

Other people have given me a hard time for using that as the metric for when they’re done. It’s not my fault they interpret it as me drowning the cookie.

An interesting thing about Benadryl (diphenhydramine): if you look at “PM” meds or things that are supposed to help with sleep, diphenhydramine is usually the active ingredient. Benadryl is a sleep medication that happens to also work as an antihistamine which I find a bit amusing.

I won’t be buying one for quite a while. I’m driving my 2021 Crosstrek with a manual transmission until it dies and I can’t reasonably repair it anymore. It’s the first new car I’ve ever had, it’s my first manual transmission car, and I’m not giving it up for anything besides another of the same in a newer model. (and unfortunately, it looks like manuals are getting phased out throughout the market)

(Edit to add: I would be sorely tempted by a BRZ though.)

Just based on build quality and reputation, I’d take a Subaru Solterra over even the highest-end Tesla any day. I live in Minnesota, and my bigger concern about Teslas is the lack of ground clearance. If I can get out of the snow bank in the ditch, I don’t need my car’s heating system to last 12 hours.

It is a profoundly complex issue, and that’s what makes much of this comment section so frustrating. Many of the arguments here are very reductionist and fail to account for detail or nuance. In this particular case, I have a hard time excusing the behavior of the accused interlopers given that this is a women’s conference that has been a recurring event for quite some time and has always been a women’s conference.

Lack of education or not, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask professionals to act professionally and refrain from attending events not intended for them. I think there’s a significant amount of leeway being given to the men/foreign workers who showed up at the women’s conference as if they cannot be expected to regulate their behavior in a professional context. It’s the same kind of hand-waving and excuses that perpetuate the good ol’ boys’ club that the tech industry already is. It is irksome that people here aren’t realizing that the arguments they are making about exclusivity or discrimination are the same arguments frequently used to excuse the misogyny and sexual harassment that is so ubiquitous in the tech industry to begin with.

Admittedly, my sympathies for some of the foreign workers is a bit more limited. One of the worst jobs I had was working as a contracted project manager at Google for an India-based contracting company. The team in India that I was supervising was extremely difficult to work with and my boss and coworkers that were all either H1B visa employees or over-staying expired student visas actively contributed to the problems I was having. There were a few times that my project failed to meet adequate performance metrics because the team in India refused to complete tasks that I had created for them and my supervisor did very little to back me up in that situation.

The other side of the coin for the foreign worker situation is that the mega-conglomerates like Google, Apple, etc. specifically hire foreign workers and H1B visa employees because they will work for less pay and minimal to no benefits unlike American college graduates that have student loans to pay off and nowhere else to go. I have a couple of friends still in the tech industry, and they are frequently undercut and out-competed by foreign workers that can accept lower pay and worse benefits as it is a temporary situation for them. I have much more sympathy for those that are actively immigrating and assimilating, but the ones who work on H1B visas or other similar contracts are part of the problem that drive down wages and benefits for everyone else. If they were working in genuine solidarity with American workers, I would feel very differently about it, but as it stands, the vast majority of foreign tech workers I have interacted with have been people abusing the visa systems and dragging down the market for everyone else. In some ways, they are victims, but they also help to perpetuate many of the worst problems in the industry.

California recently passed legislation that now protects social caste against discrimination because the massive Indian population in the tech industry has been horribly discriminatory and brutal to Indians from lower castes. It’s also worth pointing out that many of the H1B visas and more temporary workers are from the upper castes and they intend on moving back to India after making enough money and the ones who are truly immigrating are usually from the lower castes and are working under green cards. The workers from the lower castes are also much less likely to be tech workers in the first place because they did not have access to education in India. All of this to say: there are injustices that foreign workers face, but for foreign workers in the tech industry, I’m more inclined to believe that they are among those that are part of the problem.

(Not to mention the fact that some of the worst sexism I have dealt with was from Indian workers from upper castes.)