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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   38688 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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Any system that doesn't just unleash total replacement of the native population (see Canada) will inevitably the majority of well-meaning fine people who want in

Letting in all Indians at or above self_made_human's intelligence / merit would not lead to total replacement of the native population, though? They aren't all doctors or FAANG engineers

Google lied to me and said there were 10 million+ doctors in India but actually there are 10 lakh+ doctors in India.

Nevertheless if you had a system that made it easy for Indian doctors to get a visa, you would find that thousands of diploma mills would spring up overnight churning out millions and millions of degrees. And somehow all of them will have the full Indian government licensing, accreditation, and whatnot to seem as legit as anything can be without actually existing.

We already have the flood of fraudulent paperwork with Indian companies filing dozens and dozens of H1-B applications per person, just to abuse the lottery, and trying to catch even a fraction of them is a losing battle.

As far as I can tell, there's no way an Indian doctor can practise in the States without clearing the USMLE.

That is a protracted process, and there is identity verification involved. If a licensing exam can't rule out fraudulent or unqualified candidates, it's not worth the name.

Just being a doctor is of little value, they want you to prove equivalency.

The fact that doctors and lawyers aren't allowed to sit for their exam without taking years of schooling and training suggests otherwise. Of course the training requirements are likely more of a cartel thing, but at least ostensibly the exam only tests a fraction of what's necessary to practice.

@Throwaway05 has been scaring me with claims of how difficult the USMLE is. He's better positioned to answer this than I am, but I'm personally quite confident that almost nobody who did not actually have the skills and knowledge of an American doctor could make it through the gauntlet. The only way to get those, at present, is med school.

The USMLE is necessary but not sufficient, other stuff is required to be a competent doctor (and NPs/PAs certainly become doctors without passing the USMLE, and while not actually good enough certainly make some people comfortable).

Preparation side of things gets weird, these days most applicants use uniformly the same few "best in class" test prep resources like Sketchy and First Aid, hypothetically someone could pass the USMLE without the structure and context of course work but it would be nearly impossible because of the sheer amount of crap you need to know.

As you know but the other poster likely doesn't, a lot of what is involved in being a good doctor involves practical experience doing shit in the hospital (sometimes physical skills and the like) with training wheels for awhile before you do it on your own.

You don't want your first time doing X to be doing it by yourself with no supervision, it's a terrifying thought.

Incidentally some states in the U.S. do allow lawyers to became barred without law school but I don't know the details of that.

Can't really do that in the same way for medicine.

Lastly it's entirely possible to pass USMLE and be ass as a physician for a variety of reasons including skills atrophying and laziness.

I believe you. It's not like the PLAB doesn't occasionally let absolute lemons through, and I wish I could say that every doctor with the same nominal degree I have was someone I'd entrust my medical care to.

God knows that I've sometimes felt scared and befuddled by how much autonomy the UK saw fit to grant me, back in India it was far too easy to hide behind a consultant's skirt, but that's not really a possibility when the senior psychiatrist hasn't had to interpret a CXR longer than I've been alive. I personally think it's nigh miraculous how doctors once managed without ready access to the internet.

They used to have less shit they could do so it was easy to have everything memorized aka we used to do jack shit, especially overnight (and reference textbooks are a thing!).

Also like 50 medications total lol.

Reminder that the treatment for a heart attack used to be ETOH and that was the better option than the alternative (bedrest).

Hmm.. It seems to me that you're describing late 1960s and early 70s medicine, whereas what I had in mind was closer to early 90s, before computers and internet access were truly ubiquitous.

I think by then, most of medicine had solidified, or at least we wouldn't be too outraged at the state of knowledge.

My grandpa finished med school back when penicillin was the hot new thing, DNA hadn't been discovered. Hell, when he entered med school, the notion of surgeons specializing was rather novel. I think they were at General Surgeons, OBGYNs and orthopods when he finished med school, if not by the time he finished postgraduate training in gyne.

I presume that the understanding of anatomy was most of the way there. You're not going to discover a brand new organ past the 1950s (and recent claims of new organs are rather tenuous at best, is the discovery of a new part of the lymphatic system or some kind of fascia that important?). And surgery would definitely be a practical field above all else.

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Nevertheless if you had a system that made it easy for Indian doctors to get a visa, you would find that thousands of diploma mills would spring up overnight churning out millions and millions of degrees

Yeah, and if you have a competent right-wing administration overseeing the immigration process, and also immigrating costs $1M USD, then this won't be an issue

In a democracy you absolutely should never make laws that only work well as long as you're in power but become a giant thorn in the side once you aren't anymore. In fact, while Musk & Trump are certainly trying to change that, the current government staff is still massively left-leaning. So such a law would be a thorn pretty much instantly.

I mean it's going to be hard to have any immigration laws work well if half the time the executive is held by people who want unlimited immigration. A lot of the policies people here would prefer aren't currently politically practical but they'd still be better if they were

The obvious next step seems to me to be removing those laws again before the next election.

There's a lot of them.

... a few million? self_made is evidently smarter than most american whites, and HBD should tell us the indian average is lower, so

... a few million? self_made is evidently smarter than most american whites, and HBD should tell us the indian average is lower, so

Why should HBD tell you that? India's been pretty civilised for ages, and Indians have the same basic subspecies makeup as whites AIUI (and there was plenty of geneflow even after OoA2; Persia wasn't a hard barrier, which is why Indians look more like whites than they do Chinese). I would expect the average Indian IQ to have been lower in the 20th century due to the Flynn effect, but I don't see a reason to suspect a large genetic difference. If you have something I'm not aware of, I'm all ears.

Indian students score so poorly on the PISA exams that their government pulled out in embarassment. Most lines of evidence suggest that there is extreme IQ stratification in India, with only certain high-caste subgroups performing at or above European or East Asian levels.

So, a substantial part of the Indian population has the Y-DNA haplogroup R, which is a European lineage almost certainly introduced to India by the Aryan steppe invasion which conquered the existing Dravidian culture in the north of the subcontinent and introduced Indo-Aryan language and culture.

However, there is a gradient of R ancestry which is stronger in the north and much more rare in the south of the continent, where more South Asian Y-haplogroups such as L and H are far more prevalent. And of course once you look at mitochondrial ancestry, which comes from female ancestors, you see far more Asia- and India-specific lineage, such as the M haplogroup. This is consistent with the story of male conquerors intermingling with local women of Dravidian ancestry in the north and spreading their DNA in areas where they had political and cultural control. Over time their ancestry has been diluted substantially by intermarriage with people of ancient pre-Aryan Indian ancestry — people related to the Austronesian peoples of Southeastern Asia.

The big question mark over the Austronesians from my POV is the substantial Denisovan admixture, which fits the pattern of (lack of) civilisation suspiciously well. According to WP the Denisovan admixture in Indians is of a smaller level, similar to that in Orientals.

That's a ton of people. We should not be inviting millions of people into the country. That's too much by an order of magnitude, and we're only talking about one country that is not compatible with our values and culture.

The US currently has 40M people who were born in foreign countries? I can see the argument that that's too much, but a few million doesn't seem like that many to our current 350M.

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