I think your comments on medical doctors go some what too far. Doctors who approach medicine with an engineering perspective of “how can I fix this” are stupid—the effects of most interventions are subtle or counter-intuitive and thus can only be reliably determined by quality clinical trials.
Much of being a doctor comes down to pattern recognition—what you have consciously decided to memorise is only part of the story and lays only the foundations for future learning. For instance, even with the textbook in front of you I doubt most could competently perform a clinical examination—it is often difficult to tell the difference between normal variation and a pathological sign.
Performing a procedure is also not a simple as being a gigantic look up table, also you neglect that many medical doctors will be involved with research at some point in their careers as research plays a huge part of this profession.
Medical doctors must also apply their EQ to treat well, which is not not wrote learned. I do agree however that having a large knowledge base is a key part of the profession, more so than for engineers and such.
Regarding thinking outside of the box I do not think it would be anti-correlated with memory at all, in fact the opposite. True thinking out of the box doesn’t happen by magic, it involves thinking about a problem and getting to know it totally intimately from there you can start to see new solutions. Additionally I think I have read that memory correlates strongly with problem solving and other forms of intelligence, and it may be that memory and cognition are really applications of the same fundamental thing—I’ve not completed by studies of cognitive science yet but it seems that information storage and computation aren’t truely separate in neural networks.
A doctor faces a patient whose problem has resisted decision-tree diagnosis—decision trees augmented by intangibles of experience and judgement, sure. The patient wants some creative debugging, which might at least fail differently. Will they get their wish? Not likely: what’s in it for the doctor? The patient has some power of exit, not much help against a cartel. To this patient, to first order, Phil Goetz is right, and your points partly elaborate why he’s right and partly list higher-order corrections.
(I did my best to put it dispassionately, but I’m rather angry about this.)
Um… what so you’d rather have diagnoses that are not based upon data? Or a diagnosis which is made up versus no diagnosis? I don’t quite understand what you mean. Illnesses in the human body cannot be solved in the same way as an engineering problem, particularly at the margins. Most of the medical knowledge that could be derived without careful and large clinical trials is already known—I’m not sure what you expect a single doctor to do.
Furthermore, note that most patients will not die undiagnosed—bar situations, such as in geriatric patients, where many things are so suboptimal that you just can’t sort out what is killing them and what is just background noise. It is very rare that “creative debugging” would be of any use at all.
Secondly, many patients in a terminal situation often what more medicine. They feel that not treating with aggressive chemotherapy or some such treatment is giving up. This is not always the case, it is often in terminal illnesses that palliative care is the best option and avoiding aggressive treatment will in fact lead to a longer life. No amount of debugging will change that.
Let me stress once again that it is not often a patient will die where a diagnosis has not been achieved where the correct diagnosis would have materially changed the outcome.
I think your comments on medical doctors go some what too far. Doctors who approach medicine with an engineering perspective of “how can I fix this” are stupid—the effects of most interventions are subtle or counter-intuitive and thus can only be reliably determined by quality clinical trials.
Much of being a doctor comes down to pattern recognition—what you have consciously decided to memorise is only part of the story and lays only the foundations for future learning. For instance, even with the textbook in front of you I doubt most could competently perform a clinical examination—it is often difficult to tell the difference between normal variation and a pathological sign.
Performing a procedure is also not a simple as being a gigantic look up table, also you neglect that many medical doctors will be involved with research at some point in their careers as research plays a huge part of this profession.
Medical doctors must also apply their EQ to treat well, which is not not wrote learned. I do agree however that having a large knowledge base is a key part of the profession, more so than for engineers and such.
Regarding thinking outside of the box I do not think it would be anti-correlated with memory at all, in fact the opposite. True thinking out of the box doesn’t happen by magic, it involves thinking about a problem and getting to know it totally intimately from there you can start to see new solutions. Additionally I think I have read that memory correlates strongly with problem solving and other forms of intelligence, and it may be that memory and cognition are really applications of the same fundamental thing—I’ve not completed by studies of cognitive science yet but it seems that information storage and computation aren’t truely separate in neural networks.
A doctor faces a patient whose problem has resisted decision-tree diagnosis—decision trees augmented by intangibles of experience and judgement, sure. The patient wants some creative debugging, which might at least fail differently. Will they get their wish? Not likely: what’s in it for the doctor? The patient has some power of exit, not much help against a cartel. To this patient, to first order, Phil Goetz is right, and your points partly elaborate why he’s right and partly list higher-order corrections.
(I did my best to put it dispassionately, but I’m rather angry about this.)
Um… what so you’d rather have diagnoses that are not based upon data? Or a diagnosis which is made up versus no diagnosis? I don’t quite understand what you mean. Illnesses in the human body cannot be solved in the same way as an engineering problem, particularly at the margins. Most of the medical knowledge that could be derived without careful and large clinical trials is already known—I’m not sure what you expect a single doctor to do.
Furthermore, note that most patients will not die undiagnosed—bar situations, such as in geriatric patients, where many things are so suboptimal that you just can’t sort out what is killing them and what is just background noise. It is very rare that “creative debugging” would be of any use at all.
Secondly, many patients in a terminal situation often what more medicine. They feel that not treating with aggressive chemotherapy or some such treatment is giving up. This is not always the case, it is often in terminal illnesses that palliative care is the best option and avoiding aggressive treatment will in fact lead to a longer life. No amount of debugging will change that.
Let me stress once again that it is not often a patient will die where a diagnosis has not been achieved where the correct diagnosis would have materially changed the outcome.