I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that most people on HN have some experience of the patient family side of medical problems, some of them no doubt significant and regular.
We're not doubting the medical situation the ER doctor agrees sounds plausible, that GPT could have produced that response or that doctors finding it difficult to communicate with family members in intelligible and empathetic terms is a real problem.
But if you're the sort of person that would "melt into calm agreeability" when basically the same explanation was offered with generic corpspeak appended (i.e. they'd trust the doctor more if he was answering your question by reading from a script so non-specific and non-empathetic it finished up with "if you have any questions or concerns please contact the medical team"!), and would also be delighted to get the same script read out to you each time you asked a different staff member the same question, I think you're very much in the minority. Certainly in my limited experience, I can assure you that I was more reassured by the empathy levels of professionals completely misunderstanding my question and thinking I was threatening to make a complaint about their standard of care than I would have been if they pulled out an index card and read that they were all doing their best, the treatment is [boilerplate], please do not hesitate to contact medical team in case of any questions and we will reread index card to you.
At best, I suppose, my reaction might be to interpret the index card boilerplate repetition as a polite way of telling me to fuck off and not offer any followup questions. You could even make an argument that this is medically useful; a more specific version of "here's a leaflet" so they can get on with doing their job.
But as written where everybody loves the GPT boilerplate, the story reads like a classic of the LinkedIn/politician people miraculously came round to supporting me and everybody cheered genre.
We're not doubting the medical situation the ER doctor agrees sounds plausible, that GPT could have produced that response or that doctors finding it difficult to communicate with family members in intelligible and empathetic terms is a real problem.
But if you're the sort of person that would "melt into calm agreeability" when basically the same explanation was offered with generic corpspeak appended (i.e. they'd trust the doctor more if he was answering your question by reading from a script so non-specific and non-empathetic it finished up with "if you have any questions or concerns please contact the medical team"!), and would also be delighted to get the same script read out to you each time you asked a different staff member the same question, I think you're very much in the minority. Certainly in my limited experience, I can assure you that I was more reassured by the empathy levels of professionals completely misunderstanding my question and thinking I was threatening to make a complaint about their standard of care than I would have been if they pulled out an index card and read that they were all doing their best, the treatment is [boilerplate], please do not hesitate to contact medical team in case of any questions and we will reread index card to you.
At best, I suppose, my reaction might be to interpret the index card boilerplate repetition as a polite way of telling me to fuck off and not offer any followup questions. You could even make an argument that this is medically useful; a more specific version of "here's a leaflet" so they can get on with doing their job.
But as written where everybody loves the GPT boilerplate, the story reads like a classic of the LinkedIn/politician people miraculously came round to supporting me and everybody cheered genre.