Doctors are always running into strange and urgent situations, having to come up with some tentative diagnosis and fix that’s more determined by what’s available than by taught best practice.
I think this covered in the point that Eliezer was making—why do we insist that the person who does our surgery has to be a Doctor (and thus capable of dealing with strange and urgent situations, tentative diagnoses, and so forth)? Why can’t we train this one person to be a surgeon, and isolate them from the source of all these strange situations—perhaps by putting some sort of specially-trained Strange and Urgent Situation Handler professional in between?
You mean have someone check before surgery that patients probably won’t have anything unusual happen, (not standing in the operating room going “let’s not do the surgery, there was a misdiagnosis”, which would cost even more)? That’s bad for patients who do look unexpected inside, and cases where the surgeon messes up in a way that didn’t come up during training. The cost may well still be lower than that of doctor training that rarely gets used.
There are specialized phlebotomists who do their job perfectly, and that’s probably feasible (maybe actually implemented?) for much minor surgery.
I think this covered in the point that Eliezer was making—why do we insist that the person who does our surgery has to be a Doctor (and thus capable of dealing with strange and urgent situations, tentative diagnoses, and so forth)? Why can’t we train this one person to be a surgeon, and isolate them from the source of all these strange situations—perhaps by putting some sort of specially-trained Strange and Urgent Situation Handler professional in between?
You mean have someone check before surgery that patients probably won’t have anything unusual happen, (not standing in the operating room going “let’s not do the surgery, there was a misdiagnosis”, which would cost even more)? That’s bad for patients who do look unexpected inside, and cases where the surgeon messes up in a way that didn’t come up during training. The cost may well still be lower than that of doctor training that rarely gets used.
There are specialized phlebotomists who do their job perfectly, and that’s probably feasible (maybe actually implemented?) for much minor surgery.