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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4055 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The only book of his I've read is Blink. It's a thoroughly entertaining and absorbing book to read, but it's a bit sad reading it years after it came out, after probably an absolute majority of the psychological studies it cites have been hit by the replication crisis. The book's thesis is also a bit confused: he says it's about the value of relying on your intuition and snap judgement over cold dispassionate analysis, but there's a whole chapter on what happens when your snap judgement goes wrong (the shooting of Amadou Diallo). There's a big chunk of the book where he talks about how the single biggest factor determining whether a doctor faces a malpractice suit is how nice the doctor is to the patient, which he takes as a point in favour of his thesis when to me it sounds like an indictment of it: a competent doctor who did everything in his power to help his patient but got sued anyway because of his substandard bedside manner (while his charming Chad of a colleague, who wouldn't know a foley catheter from his elbow and is on regular rotation in M&M conferences, gets away scot-free) sounds like whatever the equivalent of blackpilling is for medics.

I remember reading an article critical of his whole approach to writing; I think it was this one but I'm not sure.

Never read Blink, but it sounds pretty typical.

It seems like the conventional understanding these days is that being a "charming Chad" is a central part of most jobs, medicine particularly, rather than an optional extra distinguishable from "competence". (As famously expressed by Zunger, and frequently discussed in relation to House previously.) Don't feel like arguing it myself, though.

Thanks for the article link; I read it and passed it on. I had this one in the draft of my reply to non_radical_centrist:

Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell? - Knight Science Journalism @MIT (archive)

It's conceivable that I meant to suggest it to you as either being or having a link to the one that you were remembering.

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