Truth, Medicine, and AI - Raw Transcript
Ready? Um, it is truth Medicine AI and Truth Um, I think there's a feeling where Like oh, I guess I'm not sure where to start with this one. I haven't thought about it much. We'll see where it goes But it's like I guess I'll start with When I was a kid I remember Looking at pictures on the internet Uh There was a part of me that like like wanted to be part of a picture, say, right Uh sometimes you'd like zoom in on the picture and be like, Alright when am I there, right One of the realizations growing up is that Like it was a picture It wasn't it you weren't there, right? You weren't there. It was a picture and you just had to sort of come to terms with the fact that you weren't there So, I feel like that analogy sort of holds up in a couple of places, right I think it holds up in medicine Cause you know sometimes sometimes things are pretty well defined right? Like someone comes in There's a bump turns out like it's growing. It's a cancer Yikes, there's a hole. whole arm of medicine Oncology dedicated to that But more often than not, especially primary care, right come in, like there's a painful little bump um maybe you get an ultrasound, ultrasound says There's nothing there, right You're like, well, that's weird. I'll get an MRI The MRI says We don't really see much now you're like okay I felt the bump, but it's weird that it doesn't doesn't feel like right? They don't see anything Like I can sort of feel it, but maybe At this point, I guess it's maybe the patient's uncomfortable by the bump, but Like you can pretty much say it's not a cancer, right What is it? I mean, I don't know, right I feel it, they don't see it it's We don't know. I mean, how far do we take it, right Is there a truth here to what it is? I don't know. Like I guess eventually you can cut something out, I guess, and look at it That's the ultimate truth in medicine, right? Tissue But I don't really deal with tissue much in primary care. I deal with the abstract Someone else's job to deal with the tissue for me, there's like a limit Like. Maybe pain is a similar idea, right? Like Someone comes in and they say, well, I have pain in my hand, my shoulder My back And you think, all right, well let's find out if there's like what I would consider an interesting medical diagnosis there like you look in labs, there's no inflammation, you get x-rays and bones are normal you decide if you want to get MRIs but even then it's like now you're looking at like tendon and muscle structure like the likelihood of an intervention is pretty low And ultimately, like there's not really I don't know, maybe people in medicine we try interventions because that's what we do Some people might say things like, oh, you could do needling etcetera But It just doesn't You end up getting to a point where it's like you know, I don't know why it feels this pain so bad compared to other people And it's hard to know if there's a truth there Uh And sometimes, and I think listening to this podcast yesterday but I forget, like, Tyler Cowen and religion and there's sort of like I forget, I have to look back for his research, but I was like knowing if there is ultimate truth or not is sort of like two sects of Christianity I forget which sects I think in medicine it's it's not an open question. I think it's just A patient is a person as people, we want ultimate truth, right We want ultimate truth Sometimes we don't get it And it's sort of like two Ways of looking at it, like do we keep probing or at one point do we say, well, we couldn't find it right We know enough And there are two types of people. I guess people will say that's okay. People who say let's keep going. And part of my job is Sort of like lead people down the path I think is most appropriate Um because Because sometimes I don't think we're going to get it anywhere, right? We're just Even if we get the MRI, right It might just see nothing really. Or you see something. But I'll be honest, like on those cases very frequently you see something and when I have to really counsel people on it's like Just because you see it doesn't mean it's the cause So like, oh, look, I found this one thing on it That's kind of what a surgeon might say, especially one who's maybe not as adept as some of the people I work with Um but like, you don't, you're not guaranteed the that's the cause, right So, anyways, this is a This is medicine, and then just kind of work it to AI, right I think that there is sort of like a similar I guess I don't know. It's similar Phenomenon going on there Where like We used to be able to like Zoom in on the picture Wonder, hey, like where, when do I get to be there, right When do the AI, you can sort of like I guess you'd call it like mentally zoom in on a topic Try to be like, when do I get to the truth? When do I get to the answers I'll just keep on asking digging down And eventually it's kind of like the intelligence is almost like the picture We have the intelligence It gets blurred, like the picture, right You can tell by the words it's using. and it's like that it doesn't but there isn't any answer, but it's unable to say this is as far as I'm going to say, I don't know Uh just sort of like sort of the way it's programmed. So saying, I don't know, you actually know a bit like you've reached the end of this, right And I guess It's hard to know. I guess people think, hey, if we get the artificial general intelligence or whatever It'll be like Hey, just keep looking into this till you find truth And I think that I mean, I just don't know I guess some places that probably will unlock a lot of A lot of mystery But I think other places be let's find the Like just like people have done you just grind in your gears. There is no We're we're not ready for the truth, there is no truth there or just ask the wrong question So I think they're all sort of connected like that Anyway, that's that's the article. This is pretty good. I'll continue to refine it later. One of the things I also think of as I listen to it and will tie in later is the, I think it was like the Gödel incompleteness function, or incompleteness theorem. And that made a big difference to me when I was growing up in physics, because I, at one point, sort of think like if I just had enough variables, things could become deterministic. And then you learn that even with, you know, all the information you could have, sometimes you still can't get to the answer. And that's also sort of what's, like, going on here, right?