> I could certainly train someone on how to do a specialized programming task such as cleaning CSV files in python in a matter of months. They wouldn't be able to do much else, but they would be able to do that fairly well.

After a few months? Average user might still be copy-pasting the # symbol, and need help every time they tried to edit and run a script because they mixed tabs and spaces.

> Very often patients of rare diseases (including cancer types) know much more about their specific type of disease, known treatment methods, etc. than a general practitioner. How is this possible? The scope of their study is very narrow, so they can quickly go much deeper than a general practitioner on that one topic.

You also get people like my mother, who took Bach flower remedies to boost memory (she died of Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother of the same); or my dad, who insisted he was drinking enough water even though at that exact moment he had a drip in one arm to rehydrate him and another drip in the other arm for kidney medicine because his kidneys had almost failed due to dehydration; or people that think they can cure cancer with quack medicine like Steve Jobs did; or breatharians; or people who violently assault healthcare workers and vaccination teams during a global pandemic as in some American hospitals; or countless other examples.

Don’t get me wrong: I value free speech as a way to reduce groupthink, and that can affect experts too, but the experts are still, on average, much less wrong than non-experts. (Also applies to experts being plain wrong without groupthink, as they are humans not angels: still less wrong in their domains than the rest of us).

If medical science is anything like physics — easy to misunderstand, lots of Dunning-Kruger effect — the only people who genuinely become experts in their own diseases are unusually gifted, or already doctors (MD or PhD) or have enough other knowledge to separate real science from half-baked stuff that fails (or never entered) peer review. The rest are lucky they found real science and got close enough to understanding it too make a difference, and lotteries are not sound investment strategies for national growth.

If it’s like computer science, how many battles does the tech sector have to have with the government about cryptography? Or, heck, I’ve had clients and bosses who wanted things which aren’t even coherent, like a view remaining the same size on different sized and different aspect-ratio screens without adding borders, moving widgets, or resizing anything.

If it’s like politics, how many people want tax cuts without cutting government services, completely convinced it’s just a question of improving efficiency?

Or denigrate Media Studies as a “Mickey mouse degree”?

Or think they can beat olympian athletes?

Those are most of the personalities that go to GPs saying they know better. Only a tiny fraction are correct.

> Think of it this way: you basically just train people to learn flow charts. The flow charts cover 90%+ of what typically happens to an ICU patient with covid. If they encounter something not in flow chart, they stop and escalate to a real nurse or doctor. You're saying such a scheme wouldn't be effective at all? I think it would free up tons of medical personnel.

What makes you confident they don’t already do that? Because I think they already do that, with a separate flow chart for every condition.

Thing is, almost everything in medicine has a side effect. I just went onto Google to construct an example with commonly used painkillers, and to my mild surprise, guess what? WHO says no paracetamol for the side effects of the COVID vaccines. I was looking for which ones can’t be taken with alcohol. Untrained people, even smart and eager ones, are likely to not even know how to recognise the right moment to call in outside help.

But even if they could — let’s say an AI tricorder-esq app that can run on their phones — which sector would you deprive of much-needed workers to supply these temps?

And then you need to manufacture a few tens of thousands of sets of specific intense care equipment…