by ambicapter 7 hours ago
> So an ultrasound report can state there are no calcifications while a plain radiograph can report the presence of calcifications without being inconsistent. Obviously very confusing to patients and people unfamiliar with medical jargon
This is being overly nice, I think. Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo. You would have to assume that every type of diagnosis instrument has infinite clarity and is always correct to be confused in this case.
Reminds me of the Babbage quote where somebody asked him, if I put the wrong question into this computing device, will it still give me the right answer? His response, paraphrased "I can not fathom the logic of the minds which would come up with such a question".
> Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo
I don’t think that’s true. Avoiding this mistake requires knowing that an ultrasound may not detect calcification. For a patient reading their own report, I don’t think that’s intuitive. I would expect most people to read “no calcifications” and assume that their joint has no calcifications.
It’s 2026 and my computer will happily give me the right answer even when i make typos. I love it.
Most people should have learned at a young age that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. My 8 year old understands this. After all, you can rarely ever prove something does not exist, only that it is unlikely to exist.
If a report states that X was not found, it does not mean X did not exist, it means it was not found.
What may be lost on the layperson is the nuance and understanding of how thorough or not a particular scan is and how much weight to give the findings and thus the odds that the report is correct.
This is - by far - the most stupid stuff I've read on the internet the past few days. They didnt find cancer either (as well as a plethora of diseases that could be related to the symptoms), and afaik its not in the report.
Yah you can argue that the tool is not ideal for that diagnostic, yadda yadda. I get it, and in the end I agree with the subtle difference you highlight, because it is something that makes sense to a certain kind of people. You know how many medics would read the report exactly like the author did? Too many.
How do I know? Im not in a wheelchair after being constantly misdiagnosed by using the wrong imagiology technique by (mostly) chance, and a good help from friends, including a surgeon. This seems to be a case where AI would be a valuable doctor tool for differential diagnosis; instead we have know-it-alls that can't bother to verify, and AI that often gets details wrong. That is the problem.
It's like when finding out about the sex of your baby via ultrasound before they're born. If you're told it's a boy, you can be pretty certain you're getting a boy. If you're told it's a girl, you shouldn't get too attached to the idea. The ultrasound tech might just have missed the evidence your baby was a boy.
> Most people should have learned at a young age that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
That might be true, but it is definitely not the world we live in.
It's a fatal flaw to think counter-intuitive == wrong.
This comment sounds like it's written by someone who doesn't interact with real people very often
> You would have to assume that every type of diagnosis instrument has infinite clarity and is always correct to be confused in this case.
There's a difference between 99.9% clarity and 50% clarity. Even if neither exactly equals 100%, it's understandable that a layperson would expect different language between them
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Off topic but I have always felt this seemed like his misunderstanding rather than theirs. It’s an odd question, but it’s a very sensible point to make if Babbage has just told you this will solve the problem of mistakes in calculations - humans being involved at the start means human error still plagues the output.
Looking into his biography, it seems that he was indeed pitching the engine not as a means of efficiency, but as a means of avoiding mistakes in mathematical tables. It would have done Babbage well to insist he couldn't possibly solve all classes of mistakes, but would have solved a great many of them! "Why yes Senator, you are quite intelligent and handsome and make a fair point, allow me to give you the finer picture..."
Would have also been a fair point if Babbage had channeled his inner techbro and insisted it would directly replace human calculators; simple machines like Babbage's will chug along blindly on obviously erroneous data, but humans for all their sloppiness can often backtrack on errors.
To quote the LLM-ism, they were making a sharp point. It doesn't matter how precise the calculations are if you're calculating the wrong thing.
I suspect their sarcasm might have escaped Babbage who seems to have been on what we now call "the spectrum."
> Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo
I disagree. A priori it's not obvious to a layperson whether or not a statement that uses unconditional phrasing is intended to be authoritative or conditional on something unspecified, like the resolution of the measuring device. This goes for any sufficiently technical field.
If you got the brakes checked on your car, and the mechanic did <something> and told you there are no issues with them, and you then took your car to a different mechanic who did <something else> and told you there is a problem, you would not be an idiot for thinking that these conclusions contradict one another.
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