If you are doing are thinking about taking any non-standard interventions that are far away from the normal practice of medicine, why would you assume that the average doctor can tell you about the merit of the intervention?
Their “job”, if you will, is to (a) talk down people have absolutely zero clue and have bought into total idiotic quackery, and (b) talk down people (and this includes plenty of people on Less Wrong) who overestimate their own cleverness or expertise, think wishfully, and overinterpret inconclusive or downright meaningless research. There is of course a continuum between these. And it turns out that the “talking down” doesn’t always require having read the stuff.
The reasons you’re “supposed” to talk to them are that (a) telling you to do that covers the teller’s ass, and (b) it’s a reasonable prior for the teller to expect you to screw up. Random nonspecialists who don’t make serious mistakes aren’t as rare as Authority Figures think they are, but they’re also not at all close to the most common case, and they have to optimize for the common case. And for that matter clueless or nutty doctors aren’t as uncommon as Authority Figures would like to pretend… it’s just that a random doctor is a far better bet than a random “contrarian”.
Speaking of appropriate caution, if you continue the same chat context over multiple days, especially if you’re not really careful and disciplined about letting yourself be led into selectively “becoming aware of more symptoms”, you’re inviting a hallucinatory rathole and/or “AI psychosis”. I mean, not to say they can’t be useful, but it’s pretty tricky to keep them useful if you use them that way.
Their “job”, if you will, is to (a) talk down people have absolutely zero clue and have bought into total idiotic quackery, and (b) talk down people (and this includes plenty of people on Less Wrong) who overestimate their own cleverness or expertise, think wishfully, and overinterpret inconclusive or downright meaningless research. There is of course a continuum between these. And it turns out that the “talking down” doesn’t always require having read the stuff.
The reasons you’re “supposed” to talk to them are that (a) telling you to do that covers the teller’s ass, and (b) it’s a reasonable prior for the teller to expect you to screw up. Random nonspecialists who don’t make serious mistakes aren’t as rare as Authority Figures think they are, but they’re also not at all close to the most common case, and they have to optimize for the common case. And for that matter clueless or nutty doctors aren’t as uncommon as Authority Figures would like to pretend… it’s just that a random doctor is a far better bet than a random “contrarian”.
Speaking of appropriate caution, if you continue the same chat context over multiple days, especially if you’re not really careful and disciplined about letting yourself be led into selectively “becoming aware of more symptoms”, you’re inviting a hallucinatory rathole and/or “AI psychosis”. I mean, not to say they can’t be useful, but it’s pretty tricky to keep them useful if you use them that way.