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Wellness Wednesday for November 22, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I would be immensely surprised if IQ didn't correlate well with performance in the profession, as it does with job performance on pretty much anything anyone ever cared to check.

I actually believe this isn't the case so much, at least for the median. The reason for this is partially what you already mentioned, extreme pre-filtering. This is then combined with very generous compensation, practically ironclad employment security, limited opportunities for career advancement and a high work load. This strongly incentivices defection on the part of doctors.

I have no doubt that almost all doctors I meet are intelligent, whether they're a good doctor or not depends on whether they're diligent and actually interested in their work, not their relative intelligence within the doctor cohort.

This isn't unique to doctors either, mind you. It happens in all professions with sufficient compensation, status and employment security. People get satisfied and check out.

People get corrupted and intelligence isn't a protection against that. You can't really tell beforehand whose going to be a hard worker either.