> Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo

I don’t think that’s true. Avoiding this mistake requires knowing that an ultrasound may not detect calcification. For a patient reading their own report, I don’t think that’s intuitive. I would expect most people to read “no calcifications” and assume that their joint has no calcifications.

Most people should have learned at a young age that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. My 8 year old understands this. After all, you can rarely ever prove something does not exist, only that it is unlikely to exist.

If a report states that X was not found, it does not mean X did not exist, it means it was not found.

What may be lost on the layperson is the nuance and understanding of how thorough or not a particular scan is and how much weight to give the findings and thus the odds that the report is correct.

This is - by far - the most stupid stuff I've read on the internet the past few days. They didnt find cancer either (as well as a plethora of diseases that could be related to the symptoms), and afaik its not in the report.

Yah you can argue that the tool is not ideal for that diagnostic, yadda yadda. I get it, and in the end I agree with the subtle difference you highlight, because it is something that makes sense to a certain kind of people. You know how many medics would read the report exactly like the author did? Too many.

How do I know? Im not in a wheelchair after being constantly misdiagnosed by using the wrong imagiology technique by (mostly) chance, and a good help from friends, including a surgeon. This seems to be a case where AI would be a valuable doctor tool for differential diagnosis; instead we have know-it-alls that can't bother to verify, and AI that often gets details wrong. That is the problem.

I think it’s the combined depth AND breadth of knowledge that can be captured by AI models that is going to make them way better than most humans at this kind of stuff.

It's like when finding out about the sex of your baby via ultrasound before they're born. If you're told it's a boy, you can be pretty certain you're getting a boy. If you're told it's a girl, you shouldn't get too attached to the idea. The ultrasound tech might just have missed the evidence your baby was a boy.

> Most people should have learned at a young age that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I’m fairly sure that there are no lions in my house. Lions are quite large and I’m capable of detecting lion sized objects with my eyes.

To demonstrate that something is not present you first define the object, then come up with a test that will reliably detect the object. If the test comes back negative then the object is not there.

In a strict philosophical sense I cannot prove that there are no lions in my house, the external world might not exist! A hypothesis that no one has thought of might be correct and that hypothesis could show that there are invisible lions in my house!

However I intend to act with the certainty that there are no lions in my house. Because I have no evidence of lions in my house.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

"Calcifications not found" is a different statement from "no calcifications".

Even then, the context that "ultrasound isn't a great way to assess for calcification" is important when reading either statement. Laypeople don't necessarily have that context.

But the problem was that the report is not saying "not found", it is saying "is not present" or "there is no X".

And I think we can easily have examples where we can reasonably trust this, and a spectrum of such.

E.g. there is a math solution and the report says "there is no errors in this solution", you would imagine that to be quite reliable, no?

> Most people should have learned at a young age that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

That might be true, but it is definitely not the world we live in.

Exactly. I was about to reply to the comment with “perfect example of not knowing what you don’t know” in terms of self-diagnosis.

My internal model is/was “if the scan wasn’t set up / can’t detect the thing, why would the statement be present at all?”.

That implicit assumption is really subtle.

It's a fatal flaw to think counter-intuitive == wrong.

It’s 2026 and my computer will happily give me the right answer even when i make typos. I love it.

Not really, it just requires to assume an ultrasound has infinite, perfect resolution when you are faced with a different imaging tech which reports things that didn't appear in the first one. That's just stupid.

> Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo

I disagree. A priori it's not obvious to a layperson whether or not a statement that uses unconditional phrasing is intended to be authoritative or conditional on something unspecified, like the resolution of the measuring device. This goes for any sufficiently technical field.

If you got the brakes checked on your car, and the mechanic did <something> and told you there are no issues with them, and you then took your car to a different mechanic who did <something else> and told you there is a problem, you would not be an idiot for thinking that these conclusions contradict one another.

> You would have to assume that every type of diagnosis instrument has infinite clarity and is always correct to be confused in this case.

There's a difference between 99.9% clarity and 50% clarity. Even if neither exactly equals 100%, it's understandable that a layperson would expect different language between them

This comment sounds like it's written by someone who doesn't interact with real people very often

I’ll bet they’ve got a debilitating case of engineer’s disease, too.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Off topic but I have always felt this seemed like his misunderstanding rather than theirs. It’s an odd question, but it’s a very sensible point to make if Babbage has just told you this will solve the problem of mistakes in calculations - humans being involved at the start means human error still plagues the output.

> I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Well, he did diagnose the situation correctly. He couldn't comprehend the confusion of ideas that provoked the question.

I'm also not entirely sure it's an odd question to ask. To this day, users are surprised when their software produces garbage output instead of failing. Perhaps the members of parliament were expecting some form of input validation or sanity checking out output.

Looking into his biography, it seems that he was indeed pitching the engine not as a means of efficiency, but as a means of avoiding mistakes in mathematical tables. It would have done Babbage well to insist he couldn't possibly solve all classes of mistakes, but would have solved a great many of them! "Why yes Senator, you are quite intelligent and handsome and make a fair point, allow me to give you the finer picture..."

Would have also been a fair point if Babbage had channeled his inner techbro and insisted it would directly replace human calculators; simple machines like Babbage's will chug along blindly on obviously erroneous data, but humans for all their sloppiness can often backtrack on errors.

To quote the LLM-ism, they were making a sharp point. It doesn't matter how precise the calculations are if you're calculating the wrong thing.

I suspect their sarcasm might have escaped Babbage who seems to have been on what we now call "the spectrum."

Actually, I would be really pleased if a member of Parliament asked that. That shows a level of deeper consideration.

Isn’t there a saying about there being no stupid questions, only stupid answers or something?

I don’t think people are idiots if they don’t understand how a normally intelligent person might not intuit that. I do think they have a seriously underdeveloped theory of mind.

> idiots

> seriously underdeveloped

What's the difference?

Between being an idiot and having an underdeveloped theory of mind?

It’s funny that the answer to this has increasingly become “yes” over the last few decades.

> Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo

Even if this is true, so what?

Idiots get sick at least as often as others, and the medical system needs to work as well as it can for that population too.