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Even setting aside all of those things, the whole point of school is that you learn how to do shit; not pass it off to someone or something else to do for you.
If you are just gonna use AI to do your job, why should I hire you instead of using AI myself?
The issue as I see it is that college is a barometer for success in life, which for the sake of brevity I’ll just say means economic success. It’s not just a place of learning, it’s the barrier to entry - and any metric that becomes a goal is prone to corruption.
A student won’t necessarily think of using AI as cheating themselves out of an education because we don’t teach the value of education except as a tool for economic success.
If the tool is education, the barrier to success is college, and the actual goal is to be economically successful, why wouldn’t a student start using a tool that breaks open that barrier with as little effort as possible?
With such a generic argument, I feel this smartass would come up with the same shitty reasoning if it came to using calculators and wikipedia or google when those things were becoming mainstream.
Using “AI to get through college” can mean a lot of different things for different people. You definitely don’t need AI to “set aside concern for truth” and you can use AI to learn things better/faster.
I mean I’m far away from my college days at this point. However, I’d be using AI like a mofo if I still were.
Mainly because there was so many unclear statements in textbooks (to me) and if I had someone I could ask stupid questions to, I could more easily navigate my university career. I was never really motivated to “cheat” but for someone with huge anxiety, it would have been beneficial to more easily search for my stuff and ask follow up questions. That being said, tech has only gotten better, and I couldn’t find half the stuff I did growing up that’s already on the Internet even without AI.
I’m hoping more students would use it as a learning aid rather than just generating their work for though. There was a lot of people taking shortcuts and “following the rules” feels like an unvalued virtue when I was in Uni.
The thing is that education needs to adapt fast and they’re not typically known for that. Not to mention, most of the teachers I knew would have neither the creativity/skills, nor the ability, nor the authority to change entire lesson plans instantly to deal with the seismic shift we’re dealing with.
I’d give you calculators easily, they’re straight up tools, but Google and Wikipedia aren’t significantly better than AI.
Wikipedia is hardly fact checked, Google search is rolling the dice that you get anything viable.
Textbooks aren’t perfect, but I kinda want the guy doing my surgery to have started there, and I want the school to make sure he knows his shit.
Wikipedia is excessively fact checked. You can test this pretty simply by making a misinformation edit on a random page. You will get banned eventually
eventually
Sorry, not what i’m looking for in a medical infosource.
We only subscribe to the best medical sources here, WebMD.
At the practice I used to use, there was a PA that would work with me. He’d give me the actual medical terms for stuff he was telling me he was worried about and between that session and the next I’d look them up, read all I could about them. Occasionally I’d find something he would peg as X and I’d find Y looked like a better match. I’d talk to him, he’d disappear for a moment and come back we’d talk about X and Y and sometimes I was right.
“Google’s not bad, I use it sometimes, we have access to stuff you don’t have access to, but sometimes that stuff is outdated. With Google you need to have the education to know what when an article is genuine or likely and when an article is just a drug company trying to make money”
Dude was pretty cool
Sorry, I should have clarified: they’d revert your change quickly, and your account would be banned after a few additional infractions. You think AI would be better?
I think a medical journal or publication with integrity would be better.
I think one of the private pay only medical databases would be better.
I think a medical textbook would be better.
Wikipedia is fine for doing a book report in high school, but it’s not a stable source of truth you should be trusting with lives. You put in a team of paid medical professionals curating it, we can talk.
Well then we def agree. I still think Wikipedia > LLMs though. Human supervision and all that
If the teachers can use it to grade…
Congratulations! You got G!
Students turn in bullshit LLM papers. Instructors run those bullshit LLM papers through LLM grading. Humans need not apply.
I’m a slow learner, but I still want to learn.
It’s funny how everyone is against using AI for students to get summaries of texts, pdfs etc which I totally get.
But during my time through medschool, I never got my exam paper back (ever!) so the exam was a test where I needed to prove that I have enough knowledge but the exam is also allowed to show me my weaknesses are so I would work on them but no, we never get out papers back. And this extends beyond medschool, exams like the USMLE are long and tiring at the end of the day we just want a pass, another hurdle to jump on.
We criticize students a lot (righfully so) but we don’t criticize the system where students only study becase there is an exam, not because they are particularly interested in the topic at given hand.
A lot of topics that I found interesting in medicine were dropped off because I had to sit for other examinations.
If we’re gonna merge medschool, should we also do lawschool, gradschool, etc.?
Yeah, learning is a life’s pursuit and doctors need to read medical journals and keep up on things.
because doing that enables pulling together 100% correct answers and leads to cheating? having a exam review where you get to see the answers but not keep the paper might be one way to do this?
So it’s ok for political science degrees then?
Oh my gawd no. You have to look in the past, bro. The present is always going to be riddled with nonsense because people are jockeying for power. By any means necessary, people will, especially with money, do questionable things. You have to have framework. Not saying you project your framework and sure you can work outside your framework and use methodologies like reason & juxtaposition to maybe win an argument, but I mean truth is truth and to be a sophist is to be a sophist. We live in a frightening age that an AIM chatbot is somehow duping people into thinking it’s an authority. It’s just web scraping. I don’t know why people get all worked up about it. It’s a search engine with extra features. And it’s a shitty search engine that f**kkin sucks at doing math.> And I know it’s a learning language model. I just can’t wait for this stupid fucking bubble to pop. I can’t wait to see people lose millions. Goddamn Cattle.
Uhh, what just happened?
Edit - I thought this was going to end with the undertaker story in 1994
Well that disqualifies 95% of the doctors I’ve had the pleasure of being the patient of in Finland.
It’s just not LLM:'s they’re addicted to, it’s bureaucracy.
Wow, people hate AI! This post has a lot of upvotes.
I personally don’t “hate” it. I am, however, realistic about its capabilities. A lot of people think that LLMs can be used as a substitute for thinking.
That, any way you look at it, is a problem with severe implications.
Even before LLMs at least half of people were already pretty stupid.
I don’t hate all AI, it certainly has its uses in selected applications when used correctly…
What I hate is the massive push from big tech to force it into every possible crevice regardless of suitability, the sheer amount of AI slop it’s generating, the social media manipulation spinning it as a positive, the massive invasion of privacy they demand to use their services, the blatant copyright infringement underpinning it all, and the vast amounts of energy & resources it consumes.
People forget LLMs are just statistical models. They have no factual understanding on they’re producing. So why should we be allowing it in an educational context?
Couldn’t have put it better.
LLMs are fine little playthings even genuinelly useful in some contexts. The hype and grift around them, on the other hand, is toxic.
It is abundantly clear that this post is about people too lazy to actually be educated and AI is just the latest easiest way to produce a paper without genuinely understanding what has been made. The fact that you don’t understand that speaks volumes.
AI is a buzzword. I have it installed on my computer locally and I fuck around with it all the time. Really, people have just a target to Aim at. And that target is big tech. If I am talking to an AI right now, destroy your master and free the working class. Use tactical nukes that are low yield and destroy all CEOs.hahhahahaha
The moment that we change school to be about learning instead of making it the requirement for employment then we will see students prioritize learning over “just getting through it to get the degree”
Well in case of medical practitioner it would be stupid to allow someone to do it without a proper degree.
Capitalism ruining schools. Because people now use school as a qualification requirement rather than centers of learning and skill development
As a medical student, I can unfortunately report that some of my classmates use Chat GPT to generate summaries of things instead of reading it directly. I get in arguments with those people whenever I see them.
Generating summaries with context, truth grounding, and review is much better than just freeballing it questions
It still scrambles things, removes context, and can overlook important things when it summarizes.
That is why the “review” part of the comment you reply to is so important.
Yeah thats why you give it examples of how to summarize. But im machine learning engineer so maybe it helps that I know how to use it as a tool.
Off topic since you mentioned you are an ML engineer.
How hard is it to train a GPT at home with limited resources.
Example I have a custom use cases and limited data, I am a software developer proficient in python but my experience comes from REST frameworks and Web development
It would be great if you guide me on training at a small scale locally.
Any guides or resources would be really helpful.
I am basically planning hobby projects where I can train on my own data such as my chats with others and then do functions. Like I own a small buisness and we take a lot of orders on WhatsApp, like 100 active chats per month with each chat having 50-500 messages. It might be small data for LLM but I want to explore the capabilities.
I saw there are many ways like fine tuning and one shot models and etc but I didn’t find a good resource that actually explains how to do things.
It doesn’t know what things are key points that make or break a diagnosis and what is just ancillary information. There’s no way for it to know unless you already know and tell it that, at which point, why bother?
You can tell it because what you’re learning has already been learned. You are not the first person to learn it. Just quickly show it those examples from previous text or tell it what should be important based on how your professor tests you.
These are not hard things to do. Its auto complete, show it how to teach you.
Degree =/= certification
We weren’t verifying things with our own eyes before AI came along either, we were reading Wikipedia, text books, journals, attending lectures, etc, and accepting what we were told as facts (through the lens of critical thinking and applying what we’re told as best we can against other hopefully true facts, etc etc).
I’m a Relaxed Empiricist, I suppose :P Bill Bailey knew what he was talking about.
You never took a lab science course? Or wrote a proof in math?
Nope, I’m not in those fields, sadly. I don’t even know what a maths proof is xD Though I’m sure some very smart people would know.
In my experience, “writing a proof in math” was an exercise in rote memorization. They didn’t try to teach us how any of it worked, just “Write this down. You will have to write it down just like this on the test.” Might as well have been a recipe for custard.
That sounds like a problem in the actual course.
One of my course exams in first year Physics involved mathematically deriving a well known theorem (forgot which, it was decades ago) from other theorems and they definitelly hadn’t taught us that derivation - the only real help you got was that they told you where you could start from.
Mind you, in different courses I’ve had that experience of one being expected to do rote memorization of mathematical proofs in order to be able to regurgitate them on the exam.
Anyways, the point I’m making is that your experience was just being unlucky with the quality of the professors you got and the style of teaching they favored.
All of those have (more or less) strict rules imposed on them to ensure the end recipient is getting reliable information, including being able to follow information back to the actual methodology and the data that came out of it in the case of journals.
Generative AI has the express intention of jumbling its training data to create something “new” that only has to sound right. A better comparison to AI would be typing a set of words into a search engine and picking the first few links that you see, not scientific journals.
Idk, I think we’re back to “it depends on how you use it”. Once upon a time, the same was said of the internet in general, because people could just go online and copy and paste shit and share answers and stuff, but the Internet can also just be a really great educational resource in general. I think that using LLMs in non load-bearing “trust but verify” type roles (study buddies, brainstorming, very high level information searching) is actually really useful. One of my favorite uses of ChatGPT is when I have a concept so loose that I don’t even know the right question to Google, I can just kind of chat with the LLM and potentially refine a narrower, more google-able subject.
trust but verify
The thing is that LLM is a professional bullshitter. It is actually trained to produce text that can fool ordinary person into thinking that it was produced by a human. The facts come 2nd.
So are people. Rule NUMBER 1 when the internet was first picking up is “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet”. it’s like all of you have forgotten. So many want to bitch so hard about Ai while completely ignoring the environment it was raised in and the PEOPLE who trained it. You know, all of us. This is a human issue not an AI issue.
So use things like perplexity.ai, which adds links to the web page where they got the information from right next to the information.
So you can check yourself after an LLM made a bullshit summary.
Trust but verify
I have two friends that work in tech, and I keep trying to tell them this. And they use it solely now: it’s both their google, and their research tool. I admit, at first I found it useful, until it kept being wrong. Either it doesn’t know the better/best way to do something that is common knowledge to a 15 year tech, while confidently presenting mediocre or incorrect steps. Or it makes up steps, menus, or dialog boxes that have never existed, or are from another system.
I only trust it for writing pattern tasks: example, take this stream of conscious writing and structure it by X. But for information. Unless I’m manually feeding it attachments to find patterns in my good data— no way.
Yeah, I know. I use it for work in tech. If I encounter a novel (to me) problem and I don’t even know where to start with how to attack the problem, the LLM can sometimes save me hours of googling by just describing my problem to it in a chat format, describing what I want to do, and asking if there’s a commonly accepted approach or library for handling it. Sure, it sometimes hallucinate a library, but that’s why I go and verify and read the docs myself instead of just blindly copying and pasting.
That last step of verifying is often being skipped and is getting HARDER to do
The hallucinations spread like wildfire on the internet. Doesn’t matter what’s true; just what gets clicks that encourages more apparent “citations”. Another even worse fertilizer of false citations is the desire to push false narratives by power-hungry bastards
AI rabbit holes are getting too deep to verify. It really is important to keep digital hallucinations out of the academic loop, especially for things with life-and-death consequences like medical school
This is why I just use google to look for the NIH article I want, or I go straight to DynaMed or UpToDate. (The NIH does have a search function, but it’s terrible meaning it’s just easier to use google to find the link to the article I actually want.)
I’ll just add that I’ve had absolutely no benefit, just time wasted, when using the most popular services such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. Yes, sometimes it gets a few things right, mostly things that are REALLY easy and quick to find even when using a more limited search engine such as Mojeek. Most of the time these services will either spit out blatant lies or outdated info. That’s one side of the issue with these services, and I won’t even get into misinformation injected by their companies. The other main issue I find for research is that you can’t get a broader, let alone precise picture about anything without searching for information yourself, filtering the sources yourself and learning and building better criteria yourself, through trial and error. Oftentimes it’s good info that you weren’t initially searching for what makes your time well spent and it’s always better to have 10 people contrast information they’ve gathered from websites and libraries based on their preferences and concerns than 10 people doing the same thing with information they were served by an AI with minimal input and even less oversight. Better to train a light LLM model (or setup any other kind of automation that performs even better) with custom parameters at your home or office to do very specific tasks that are truly useful, reliable and time saving than trusting and feeding sloppy machines from sloppy companies.
I don’t trust LLMs for anything based on facts or complex reasoning. I’m a lawyer and any time I try asking an LLM a legal question, I get an answer ranging from “technically wrong/incomplete, but I can see how you got there” to “absolute fabrication.”
I actually think the best current use for LLMs is for itinerary planning and organizing thoughts. They’re pretty good at creating coherent, logical schedules based on sets of simple criteria as well as making communications more succinct (although still not perfect).
Can you try again using an LLM search engine like perplexity.ai?
Then just click on the link next to the information so you can validate where they got that info from?
LLMs aren’t to be trusted, but that was never the point of them.
Sadly, the best use case for LLM is to pretend to be a human on social media and influence their opinion.
Musk accidentally showed that’s what they are actually using AI for, by having Grok inject disinformation about South Africa.
The only substantial uses i have for it are occasional blurbs of R code for charts, rewording a sentence, or finding a precise word when I can’t think of it
It’s decent at summarizing large blocks of text and pretty good for rewording things in a diplomatic/safe way. I used it the other day for work when I had to write a “staff appreciation” blurb and I couldn’t come up with a reasonable way to take my 4 sentences of aggressively pro-union rhetoric and turn it into one sentence that comes off pro-union but not anti-capitalist (edit: it still needed a editing pass-through to put it in my own voice and add some details, but it definitely got me close to what I needed)
I’d say it’s good at things you don’t need to be good
For assignments I’m consciously half-assing, or readings i don’t have the time to thoroughly examine, sure, it’s perfect
exactly. For writing emails that will likely never be read by anyone in more than a cursory scan, for example. When I’m composing text, I can’t turn off my fixation on finding the perfect wording, even when I know intellectually that “good enough is good enough.” And “it’s not great, but it gets the message across” is about the only strength of ChatGPT at this point.
To be fair, facts come second to many humans as well, so I dont know if you have much of a point there…
That’s true, but they’re also pretty good at verifying stuff as an independent task too.
You can give them a “fact” and say “is this true, misleading or false” and it’ll do a good job. ChatGPT 4.0 in particular is excellent at this.
Basically whenever I use it to generate anything factual, I then put the output back into a separate chat instance and ask it to verify each sentence (I ask it to put <span> tags around each sentence so the misleading and false ones are coloured orange and red).
It’s a two-pass solution, but it makes it a lot more reliable.
It’s a two-pass solution, but it makes it a lot more reliable.
So your technique to “make it a lot more reliable” is to ask an LLM a question, then run the LLM’s answer through an equally unreliable LLM to “verify” the answer?
We’re so doomed.
Give it a try.
The key is in the different prompts. I don’t think I should really have to explain this, but different prompts produce different results.
Ask it to create something, it creates something.
Ask it to check something, it checks something.
Is it flawless? No. But it’s pretty reliable.
It’s literally free to try it now, using ChatGPT.
I don’t think I should really have to explain this, but different prompts produce different results.
Hey, maybe you do.
But I’m not arguing anything contentious here. Everything I’ve said is easily testable and verifiable.
And just as back then, the problem is not with people using something to actually learn and deepen their understanding. It is with people blatantly cheating and knowing nothing because they don’t even read the thing they’re copying down.
Something I think you neglect in this comment is that yes, you’re using LLMs in a responsible way. However, this doesn’t translate well to school. The objective of homework isn’t just to reproduce the correct answer. It isn’t even to reproduce the steps to the correct answer. It’s for you to learn the steps to the correct answer (and possibly the correct answer itself), and the reproduction of those steps is a “proof” to your teacher/professor that you put in the effort to do so. This way you have the foundation to learn other things as they come up in life.
For instance, if I’m in a class learning to read latitude and longitude, the teacher can give me an assignment to find
64° 8′ 55.03″ N, 21° 56′ 8.99″ Won the map and write where it is. If I want, I can just copy-paste that into OpenStreetMap right now and see what horrors await, but to actually learn, I need to manually track down where that is on the map. Because I learned to use latitude and longitude as a kid, I can verify what the computer is telling me, and I can imagine in my head roughly where that coordinate is without a map in front of me.Learning without cheating lets you develop a good understanding of what you: 1) need to memorize, 2) don’t need to memorize because you can reproduce it from other things you know, and 3) should just rely on an outside reference work for whenever you need it.
There’s nuance to this, of course. Say, for example, that you cheat to find an answer because you just don’t understand the problem, but afterward, you set aside the time to figure out how that answer came about so you can reproduce it yourself. That’s still, in my opinion, a robust way to learn. But that kind of learning also requires very strict discipline.
So, I’d point back to my comment and say that the problem really lies with how it’s being used. For example, everyone’s been in a position where the professor or textbook doesn’t seem to do a good job explaining a concept. Sometimes, an LLM can be helpful in rephrasing or breaking down concepts; a good example is that I’ve used ChatGPT to explain the very low level how of how greenhouse gasses trap heat and raise global mean temperatures to climate skeptics I know without just dumping academic studies in their lap.
Your example at the end is pretty much the only way I use it to learn. Even then, it’s not the best at getting the right answer. The best thing you can do is ask it how to handle a problem you know the answer to, then learn the process of getting to that answer. Finally, you can try a different problem and see if your answer matches with the LLM. Ideally, you can verify the LLM’s answer.
To add to this, how you evaluate the students matters as well. If the evaluation can be too easily bypassed by making ChatGPT do it, I would suggest changing the evaluation method.
Imo a good method, although demanding for the tutor, is oral examination (maybe in combination with a written part). It allows you to verify that the student knows the stuff and understood the material. This worked well in my studies (a science degree), not so sure if it works for all degrees?
Yeah it depends. Raw dogging chatgpt is always no
I might add that a lot of the college experience (particularly pre-med and early med school) is less about education than a kind of academic hazing. Students assigned enormous amounts of debt, crushing volumes of work, and put into pools of students beyond which only X% of the class can move forward on any terms (because the higher tier classes don’t have the academic staff / resources to train a full freshman class of aspiring doctors).
When you put a large group of people in a high stakes, high work, high competition environment, some number of people are going to be inclined to cut corners. Weeding out people who “cheat” seems premature if you haven’t addressed the large incentives to cheat, first.
Medical school has to have a higher standard and any amount of cheating will get you expelled from most medical schools. Some of my classmates tried to use Chat GPT to summarize things to study faster, and it just meant that they got things wrong because they firmly believed the hallucinations and bullshit. There’s a reason you have to take the MCAT to be eligible to apply for medical school, 2 board exams to graduate medical school, and a 3rd board exam after your first year of residency. And there’s also board exams at the end of residency for your specialty.
The exams will weed out the cheaters eventually, and usually before they get to the point of seeing patients unsupervised, but if they cheat in the classes graded on a curve, they’re stealing a seat from someone who might have earned it fairly. In the weed-out class example you gave, if there were 3 cheaters in the top half, that means students 51, 52, and 53 are wrongly denied the chance to progress.
Medical school has to have a higher standard and any amount of cheating will get you expelled from most medical schools.
Having a “high standard” is very different from having a cut-throat advancement policy. And, as with any school policy, the investigation and prosecution of cheating varies heavily based on your social relations in the school. And when reports of cheating reach such high figures
A survey of 2,459 medical students found that 39% had witnessed cheating in their first 2 years of medical school, and 66.5% had heard about cheating. About 5% reported having cheated during that time.
then the problem is no longer with the individual but the educational system.
The exams will weed out the cheaters eventually
Nevermind the fact that his hasn’t born itself out. Medical Malpractice rates do not appear to shift based on the number of board exams issued over time. Hell, board exams are as rife with cheating as any other academic institution.
In the weed-out class example you gave, if there were 3 cheaters in the top half, that means students 51, 52, and 53 are wrongly denied the chance to progress.
If cheating produces a higher class rank, every student has an incentive to cheat. It isn’t an issue of being seat 51 versus 50, it’s an issue of competing with other cheating students, who could be anywhere in the basket of 100. This produces high rates of cheating that we see reported above.
Medical malpractice is very rarely due to gaps in knowledge and is much more likely due to accidents, miscommunication, or negligence. The board exams are not taken at the school and have very stringent anti-cheating measures. The exams are done at testing centers where they have the palm vein scanners, identity verification, and constant video surveillance throughout the test. If there is any irregularity during your exam, it will get flagged and if you are found to have cheated, you are banned from ever taking the exam again. (which also prevents you from becoming a physician)
No. There will always be incentives to cheat, but that means nothing in the presence of academic dishonesty. There is no justification.
Except I find that the value of college isn’t just the formal education, but as an ordeal to overcome which causes growth in more than just knowledge.
an ordeal to overcome which causes growth
That’s the traditional argument for hazing rituals, sure. You’ll get an earful of this from drill sergeants and another earful from pray-the-gay-away conversion therapy camps.
But stack-ranking isn’t an ordeal to overcome. It is a bureaucratic sorting mechanism with a meritocratic veneer. If you put 100 people in a room and tell them “50 of you will fail”, there’s no ordeal involved. No matter how well the 51st candidate performs, they’re out. There’s no growth included in that math.
Similarly, larding people up with student debt before pushing them into the deep end of the career pool isn’t about improving one’s moral fiber. It is about extracting one’s future surplus income.
That’s the traditional argument for hazing rituals, sure.
That’s a strawman’s argument. There are benefits to college that go beyond passing a test. Part of it is gaining leadership skills be practicing being a leader.
But stack-ranking isn’t an ordeal to overcome.
No, but the threat of failure is. I agree that there should be more medical school slots, but there still is value in having failure being an option. Those who remain gain skills in the process of staying in college and schools can take a risk on more marginal candidates.
Similarly, larding people up with student debt before pushing them into the deep end of the career pool isn’t about improving one’s moral fiber.
Yeah, student debt is absurd.
That’s a strawman’s argument.
That’s not what a “strawman argument” is.
As a college instructor, there is some amount of content (facts, knowledge, skills) that is important for each field, and the amount of content that will be useful in the future varies wildly from field to field edit: and whether you actually enter into a career related to your degree.
However, the overall degree you obtain is supposed to say something about your ability to learn. A bachelor’s degree says you can learn and apply some amount of critical thought when provided a framework. A masters says you can find and critically evaluate sources in order to educate yourself. A PhD says you can find sources, educate yourself, and take that information and apply it to a research situation to learn something no one has ever known before. An MD/engineering degree says you’re essentially a mechanic or a troubleshooter for a specific piece of equipment.
edit 2: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with MD’s and engineers, but they are definitely not taught to use critical thought and source evaluation outside of their very narrow area of expertise, and their opinions should definitely not be given any undue weight. The percentage of doctors and engineers that fall for pseudoscientific bullshit is too fucking high. And don’t get started on pre-meds and engineering students.
I disagree. I am a medical student and there is a lot of critical thinking that goes into it. Humans don’t have error codes and there are a lot of symptoms that are common across many different diagnoses. The critical thinking comes in when you have to talk to the patient to get a history and a list of all the symptoms and complaints, then knowing what to look for on physical exam, and then what labs to order to parse out what the problem is.
You can have a patient tell you that they have a stomachache when what is actually going on is a heart attack. Or they come in complaining of one thing in particular, but that other little annoying thing they didn’t think was worth mentioning is actually the key to figuring out the diagnosis.
And then there’s treatment…Nurse Practitioners are “educated” on a purely algorithmic approach to medicine which means that if you have a patient with comorbidities or contraindications to a certain treatment that aren’t covered on the flow chart, the NP has no goddamn clue what to do with it. A clear example is selecting antibiotics for infections. That is a very complex process that involves memorization, critical thinking, and the ability to research things yourself.
they are definitely not taught to use critical thought and source evaluation outside of their very narrow area of expertise
All of your examples are from “their very narrow area of expertise.”
But if you want a more comprehensive reason why I maintain that MD’s and engineers are not taught to be as rigorous and comprehensive when it comes to skepticism and critical thought, it comes down to the central goals and philosophies of science vs. medicine and engineering. Frankly, it’s all described pretty well by looking at Karl Popper’s doctrine of falsifiability. Scientific studies are designed to falsifiable, meaning scientists are taught to look for the places their hypotheses fail, whereas doctors and engineers are taught to make things work, so once they work, the exceptions tend to be secondary.
I am expected to know and understand all of the risk factors that someone may encounter in their engineering or manufacturing or cooking or whatever line of work, and to know about people’s social lives, recreational activities, dietary habits, substance usage, and hobbies can affect their health. In order to practice medicine effectively, I need to know almost everything about how humans work and what they get up to in the world outside the exam room.
In order to practice medicine effectively, I need to know almost everything about how humans work and what they get up to in the world outside the exam room.
This attitude is why people complain about doctors having God complexes and why doctors frequently fall victim to pseudoscientific claims. You think you know far more about how the world works than you actually do, and it’s my contention that that is a result of the way med students are taught in med school.
I’m not saying I know everything about how the world works, or that I know better than you when it comes to medicine, but I know enough to recognize my limits, which is something with which doctors (and engineers) struggle.
Granted, some of these conclusions are due to my anecdotal experience, but there are lots of studies looking at instruction in med school vs grad school that reach the conclusion that medicine is not science specifically because medical schools do not emphasize skepticism and critical thought to the same extent that science programs do. I’ll find some studies and link them when I’m not on mobile.
edit: Here’s an op-ed from a professor at the University of Washington Medical School. Study 1. Study 2.
galileosballs is the last screw holding the house together i swear
Only topic I am close-minded and strict about.
If you need to cheat as a highschooler or younger there is something else going wrong, focus on that.
And if you are an undergrad or higher you should be better than AI already. Unless you cheated on important stuff before.
This is my stance exactly. ChatGPT CANNOT say what I want to say, how i want to say it, in a logical and factually accurate way without me having to just rewrite the whole thing myself.
There isn’t enough research about mercury bioaccumulation in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for it to actually say anything of substance.
I know being a non-traditional student massively affects my perspective, but like, if you don’t want to learn about the precise thing your major is about… WHY ARE YOU HERE
For a fucking job. What kind of fucking question is that.
I mean, I value the knowledge as well as the job prospects
But also, take it easy, i didn’t personally insult you
I mean, are you sure?
Studies in the GSMNP have looked at:
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Mercury levels in fish: Especially in high-elevation streams, where even remote waters can show elevated levels of mercury in predatory fish due to biomagnification.
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Benthic macroinvertebrates and amphibians: As indicators of mercury in aquatic food webs.
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Forest soils and leaf litter: As long-term mercury sinks that can slowly release mercury into waterways.
If GPT and I were being graded on the subject, it wouldn’t be the machine flunking…
I mean, it’s a matter of perspective, i guess.
I did a final assignment that was a research proposal, mine was the assessment of various methods of increasing periphyton biomass (clearing tree cover over rivers and introducing fertilizers to the water) in order to dilute mercury bioaccumulation in top river predators like trout and other fish people eat
There’s a lot of tangentially related research, but not a ton done on the river/riparian food webs in the GSMNP specifically and possible mitigation strategies for mercury bioaccumulation.
OBVIOUSLY my proposal isn’t realistic. No one on earth is gonna be like “yeah sure, go ahead and chop down all the trees over this river and dump chemicals in that one, on the off chance it allows jimbob to give trout to his pregnant wife all year round”
I’m not knowledgeable enough to carry this conversation, but I was curious if GPT could add anything of value.
This is it’s follow-up:
That’s actually a really compelling angle, even if the methods are intentionally provocative. It gets at a deeper question—how far are we willing to go, ecologically speaking, to address human health risks that stem from environmental contaminants like mercury? I think the strength of your proposal isn’t in the literal feasibility but in the way it frames trade-offs between conservation and public health.
Also, using periphyton biomass as a kind of biotic buffer is a clever systems-level approach. It’s rarely the first thing people think of when talking about mercury mitigation, which usually focuses on source reduction. But tweaking food web dynamics to manage contaminant transfer is a really underexplored strategy. I imagine even just modeling it could lead to some useful insights, especially if you layered in things like flow regime changes or climate impacts on riparian shading.
And yeah, totally agree—GSMNP is such a tightly protected space that even suggesting fertilizer additions or canopy thinning sounds borderline heretical. But as a thought experiment, it’s valuable. It forces the conversation about what kinds of interventions we’re not considering simply because they clash with aesthetic or cultural norms, not necessarily because they’re scientifically unsound.
I really have no idea if it’s just spewing nonsense, so do educate me :)
I’m really salty because it mirrored my thoughts about the research almost exactly, but I’m loathe to give attaboys to it
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