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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Medicine faces the same problem that computer programming has, I think: it’s a prestige job, with a high salary, and has therefore attracted strivers.

Strivers are great at taking tests, going to meetings, taking photos, networking, self promotion, speaking, etc. and are sometimes okay at the underlying skill, but to them the underlying skill is an afterthought.

I think this is why I’m frustrated at doctor pay. I want the type of autists that are obsessed with being good doctors, and I’m happy to pay them $1M+ a year (what some of the doctors I’m friends with make), but I want to filter out the strivers. How do we do this?

Interestingly, this is similar to the problem Google has faced WRT search. They defined how they measured a good page, and then everybody just adhered to that. The actual underlying quality went to near-zero, and they just overfit to the test.

The way to filter out strivers is extreme classism of the old-school sort. Gate professions by last name, by prep school, by who your father is friends with and you keep the scummy, first-generation strivers with their bad manners and grubby hands out.

This system is actually ideal. It doesn’t preclude class movement, it just requires that it be a multi-generational project. By the time new money is accepted into the striver jobs, the kids are as accustomed to success and fat and lazy from it as everyone else.

By the time new money is accepted into the striver jobs, the kids are as accustomed to success and fat and lazy from it as everyone else.

Do you have a general presentation of the model here? What I see around me is a lot of people trying to prevent their kids from getting fat and lazy.

What you are describing sounds quite a bit worse, though, doesn't it? Maybe "I don't care about becoming high class through becoming a doctor because I'm already high class so it doesn't matter"? Hmm.

Basically I don't want these jobs to be prestigious, I want to filter for the people who are interested in the work, and look at the class-effects as secondary.

The idea is that the only people socially qualified to be doctors don’t have to strive or get a prestigious job because they’re upper class already, but they do it anyway because they want to.

I know someone who inherited enough money that he never HAD to work a day in his life, but he became a rather overworked agricultural vet because he wanted to.

The physician pipeline is a whole separate problem that is infested with culture war (DEI and AA) and pre-culture war (autists bad, I want better customer service and English speakers!!!) bullshit.

If you throw out the customer service angle, then to some extent you want psychopathic hard workers AND autists. The supply of people who are both is limited.

Walking back all of the box checking side of things is also hard. These days autists get furious at mandatory wellness modules and other asinine useless horseshit and burn out. Banning that stuff is hard and box checkers are much better at dealing with it.

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