Science and Technology links (May 6 2023)

  1. Artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) can provide better answers to patients than physicians.
  2. Eating chocolate might affect your brain and cognitive functions. It may not make you smarter, but it might brighten your mood.
  3. Obesity may shorten your disease-free lifespan.
  4. A supplement called Netrin-1 appears to rejuvenate the bone marrow.
  5. Prior research indicated that high status individuals tended to be unethical. It appears that these results are not robust: they fail to replicate.
  6. Young Americans are increasingly depressed.
  7. Garlic consumption might protect against cancer by affecting the bacteria in your body.

Published by

Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

2 thoughts on “Science and Technology links (May 6 2023)”

  1. Re 1: There probably isn’t a better way to make this a fair comparison, but I don’t find the setup of this study very convincing. What doctors post on Reddit can hardly be compared to their interaction with an individual patient in a doctor’s office:

    “To obtain a large and diverse sample of healthcare questions and physician answers that did not contain identifiable personal information, the team turned to social media where millions of patients publicly post medical questions to which doctors respond: Reddit’s AskDocs.”

    Reply

  2. Re 1)
    On questions sampled from Reddit “AskDocs” (probably not the most representative task), that may we’ll be in the training data of ChatGPT, which is trained to give “empathetic” answers via RHLF. I’d be careful with interpreting this.

    Reply

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