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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   29575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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I really don't think that is true. People in medicine are there because they are willing to suffer to help people. They are getting it wrong because of propaganda efforts by the university administrations and journalist classes.

They are just as fooled as everyone else, even the bad actors in this case think they are helping and doing the right thing because "these things are true, if the data doesn't match we must have done something wrong!" after years of being brainwashed.

They are just as fooled as everyone else, even the bad actors in this case think they are helping and doing the right thing because "these things are true, if the data doesn't match we must have done something wrong!" after years of being brainwashed.

So I don't know if this is the point that Listening is getting at, my take on this is that anyone in academia - which medicine counts as close enough and people who do medical research certainly fit - who is brainwashed is entirely responsible for their being brainwashed. One of the core themes of academia is to be skeptical, especially of oneself. This requires checking things against objective reality and listening to people who disagree with oneself, especially when it comes to narratives that sound convincing. If they bought into the propaganda efforts by the university administrations and journalist classes, then they ignored these basic, fundamental "warnings" that are core to any form of higher education.

On a practical level I think that sort of thinking is gone from almost all modern education - we don't really focus on critical thinking any more and much of the university experience in America is essentially just a fancy trade school.

In medicine in particular you have to get phenomenally good at box checking and thinking too much is going to get you in serious trouble and unable to advance. This is magnified by downstream pressures - people who are republican or unable to hide being republican don't get admitted to medical school, people who aren't willing to engage in games about social signaling don't end up at good programs for residency, teachers who don't engage with wokeness either get fired or pushed into non-teaching roles and so on.

Outside of medicine most disciplines in school don't really select for or allow much in terms flexibility on this front.

Some people do still have those chops but you have to be very good at turning them off and not saying shit to succeed.

Basically blame the framework for brain washing people, not the people who got brainwashed.

If your job requires you to not notice - at every level, for years, with tremendous pressure to do so....it's hard to keep noticing.

And while the impacts of not noticing from medicine are higher, I'm not sure we should be held to a higher standard than anyone else - all the other disciplines are having this problem and medical professionals are already held to a higher standard in so many different ways that put much of the community on the knife's edge of burnout, suicide, substance abuse, and exit. Don't add more.

On a practical level I think that sort of thinking is gone from almost all modern education

This seems more like an argument for the dissolution of the monasteries than a defense.

And while the impacts of not noticing from medicine are higher, I'm not sure we should be held to a higher standard than anyone else

Of course not—the sea pouring in certainly won't be confined to just medicine.

Basically blame the framework for brain washing people, not the people who got brainwashed.

I blame both. The framework didn't fall from the Heavens on a tablet that we must follow lest we be barred from Paradise forever, it was formed by individuals making individual decisions. The framework of brainwashing is maintained in a large part by people who were - and continue to be - brainwashed in the past, and it is only maintained because people are willing to be brainwashed. Refusing to blame the brainwashed because of the framework just reinforces the framework.

Perhaps critical thinking in higher education is truly almost all gone - I'm skeptical that "almost all gone" is an accurate description, but it's not an absurd proposition - but it's not all all gone, and it's also something individuals can develop on their own. Anyone who's intelligent enough to become a doctor - or any other sort of high level professional in such an academic field - has the full capability to develop in their own. They can notice the framework and play the game while not being subsumed by it, so as to improve the framework in the long run. Yes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, as Upton Sinclair said - this is a fairly well known quote, and educated people ought to be expected to at least understand the concept and to counter it in themselves. After all, it's difficult, not impossible, and one of the entire points of being a professional in an academic-related field is that they're capable of doing things that are intellectually difficult.

I think this is easy to say in principle but if you look at how successful identity politics were at taking over such a large part of the public discourse and intellectual framework...well we don't need to speculate what happens in practice, which is that some people figure it out (cough cough looks around) but most don't and it isn't enough.

Moral panics and crowd hysteria and Hersey have always been part of human culture. Expecting that to not be the case is foolhardy, even if we can feel comfortable tossing out labels about lack of ethics or whatever.

We can expect things like moral panics, jaywalking, stealing, genocide, rape, and crowd hysteria to be with us for as long as human civilization remains human. I don't expect that not to be the case. I still hold the individuals who perform these things accountable and blame them for partaking in them. In practice, on a forum like this, all I can do is to explain whom I blame, for I lack the capability to do anything to make that blame translate to actual negative consequences for the blameworthy.

I really don't think that is true.

You really don't think it's true that people were warned? That's really not a question of mental state.

I'm not sure what you mean.

"The mental state of people in medicine isn't related to whether they were warned about what they were normalizing."

I'm sorry you still aren't being clear.

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