Cat Hicks

nothing wrong with benefitting from explanatory modes. They seem to provide a lot of useful foundation. Just saying passively reading is rarely a complete step, needs translation into active learning and production

- those modes are readily available (like explanatory mode) no need for some extra 'skill' but
- we absorb a lot less from that than we think we do!

It's fascinating to get a couple drive-by comments from tech guys telling me that better learning would happen from having AI passively summarize "insights" from the work it just completed; EXACTLY the learning misconception my Skill was designed to challenge 😂

How much does it pay to publish an open access academic book? Read this thread for my story and 💲💰 amounts. 🧵

www.routledge.com/9781032908724

Haha ah works both ways! :)

I've followed that reporting! Thanks for the share

use those together with the natural way they would describe a symptom, basically trying to get the best of both worlds for them. Just way more often than I would like, docs of do not do ANY of the "triage" or w/e they're supposed to be doing on pt descriptions

Additionally, there is a lot of "I'm experiencing THIS, how should I describe it to my doctor," chat as a translator for these vital conversations. Particularly for the older folks who feel very depleted in those fifteen min sessions. I have given a number of ppl scripts to ask for medical terms AND

yeah, the people I talk to are super aware of this and often including a lot of information against it in their prompts which greatly changes their experience I would say

As a social scientist here, I cannot express how profound my disappointment is in the academic communities that purport to care about patients. The elitism, salami-slicing publishing of MDs, the horrific state of medical research on any condition seen as "women's health," the dripping condescension

Wanting desperately to access and then to use information about oneself to make oneself healthier and more comfortable is not "stupid." Falling into harmful misconceptions happens to highly educated doctors. Don't fritter away the energy you could use to help people on rage at the wrong shit.

I end a lot of these kind of chats just feeling profoundly sad. I see the subtle ways that people get misled by their doctors and (especially women, who are mostly who I talk to) gaslit, and the ways that the skills of evidence and arguing about evidence are exhaustively withheld

--concerned about the possibilities of false signals. Which is a great instinct and we've been having a long chat about all the ways I learned to think about this in data science. It is just gross to me to not recognize how profoundly people have been cut off from benefitting from their own data.

Instead I've been spending time in 1:1 conversations. I had a long chat with a very thoughtful person because I shared that I've been experimenting with building some self-tracking for complex symptoms and she is someone who wanted to know if she could use predictive statistics but was also --

At any rate, I don't know if I'll ever finish that piece and I honestly don't know if I want to absorb the shit that would come from setting out something that is intentionally very compassionate about these users. It all hurts a lot and I don't particularly want to become a symbol of the problem

It's really exhausting and unpredictable so it's small work with long-term relationships. However, I think I have come to see a lot of important themes here and set against the context of our existing information ecosystem I think a lot less about AI and a lot more about that ecosystem

I've already spent the past 18 months helping do things like gently correct misconceptions about scientific papers, giving people my take on various "youtube doctors" (some of which provide excellent information, some of which are just doing marketing for their Very Expensive Private Clinics)

People are using AI for their health crises, and no amount of screaming about it is stopping that. I started slowly drafting a piece about my experiences having long, slow conversations about AI practices in the patient communities I'm in, where I primarily stay just to provide scientific support

Lots has changed in the last ten years and only some of it visible to many of us

Catharsis is.......about to open a new community-based developer science research call 😱

Taking a bit to set up the infrastructure but *jumanji drums in the distance*

We're so back

Totally different "competition" context when it's task to task competition

evaluating *everything* in terms of "does this individual thing scale --> can it outcompete" is so last era.

Thanks I'll check it out!

I think the exception to this that makes sense to me is when there's a very big split between clinical and research paths, like psych science is primarily just to distinguish from all the applied social and clinical paths!

The way this ABSOLUTELY tracks with how people treat you in tech when you come up from this background 😩

Plan mode is so so helpful to me too

That makes this even cooler and more meaningful...maybe you just haven't had environments around you suited to the ways YOU learn

I do love that for them/feel jealous a lot of the time about it

Like I don't need convincing!! I'm here!! Please get your philosophy degree on your own time lord

I'm reading through a number of "community tech" pieces and there's a lot of nice stuff about the power of humanity but extremely little actual help for me, a person who wants to build some research tools to help my community