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Comment by pinkmuffinere | Hacker News Reader

The difficult edge case presented in the opening is that the standard protocol prohibits a decision that sensibly should be made. I feel the obvious fix is to amend the protocol. The time at which an operation occurs should factor into the protocol, we do prefer complex operations to occur when experts are most available. Rather than abandoning the protocol, it should be updated to reflect this. Of course there will still be cases with the protocol doesn’t handle well, but eventually those will be amended as well.

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I think that is what this article is addressing.

You can never have a thorough protocol that always works.

Doctors need to be trained in the limits of protocol.

This is why the humanities are important. Doctors should not just be unthinking executors of protocols. Trained human intuition, expertise, experience still matters. Knowledge of the human factors still matters.

Crucially, I don’t think the humanities are the solution here. I’d rather have a doctor that follows best practices than one who follows the supposed benefits of a humanities education — in particular I object to the idea that a doctor would follow their intuition when there is always an established best practice. The humanities are valuable, but don’t think it solves the problem statement laid out in the article.

Bioethics fall under the humanities!

A lot of it is just "being human", and you don't need separate college education for that.

Trouble is, too many doctors have internalized the ideal of being efficient robots instead.

There are lots and lots of different ways of "being human" - an infinity of ways, really, but most fall into broadly recognizeable patterns. The Humanities, properly understood, are the study of "being human" - which involves both the way you experience this (which, yeah, for most people is a learned behavior: it's hard to get outside your own perspective and evaluate your own experience), and also the way others' perspectives influence them.

There's no "just" about it. (It's like saying "Facebook is just a CRUD app, right?" - which from one point of view might be literally true, but's hardly relevant to any of the problems Meta has to solve.) Much like tech, humanities are a path of life-long learning, for which a college course of study can be (though isn't strictly necessary as) a helpful starting point, but is hardly adequate.

Efficient robots, though: yes. Many who work in tech have also internalized that mind-set.

Factoring everything into the protocol would be to convert it into an exercise in discretion, which was what the protocol was designed to counteract.

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