This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Revealed preferences in the real world: black doctors.
I wonder if anyone has studied this? What is going to happen to all the black doctors who are being admitted to med school with inferior credentials and who will likely be socially promoted through residency/licensing as well.
I'm sure a large degree of affirmative action has already affected the supply of doctors, but the post-Great Awokening world seems to have taken that to a new level. Apparently rates of test-failing have increased by nearly 10x in some subjects at UCLA's medical school post 2020.
https://x.com/aaronsibarium/status/1793657774767022569
This is obviously forbidden information. I wonder how many schools will simply cover it up and graduate people as normal despite failures.
I hate to say it, but if I or a loved one was seriously ill, I would try my best to get a non-black doctor. If I wanted the best, I'd probably follow Peter Griffin's advice. I imagine others have similar revealed preferences that we would never admit in public. In the future, will black doctors magically have tons of open appointments while the cue to see Dr. Rosenblatt grows ever longer? I think probably.
The profession has a deliberately bottlenecked profession that makes it unnecessarily selective. Even if the average black doctor has lower MCATs than other doctors, they're still going to be plenty good to do basic medical procedures. I suppose part of the reason that I think this is that I generally think big chunks of medicine are significantly overrated, with only a few classes of medicine being consistently effective, and those not generally be all that hard to do. Antibiotics and vaccines work great, but they don't really take a genius to prescribe. Trauma surgery is very effective, but you're probably not going to have much time to pick who you want to fix your shattered body when you're brought in from a car accident. Without considering race, I just generally don't think I'm going to get much out of a physician with a higher MCAT.
There are a couple areas where I would want to get the absolute best. If I had cancer, I would want top-notch pathologists and oncologists working on the problem and would seek out an elite hospital. I probably wouldn't care about race in that context because the bar for being specialists working on bone marrow transplants at MD Anderson is pretty damned high. On the opposite end, if I had something that required sports medicine, I would be insistent on people that are actually knowledgeable int he field, but on this one, the intellect level shouldn't be much of a barrier.
Relatedly, I can't believe how many people that have nothing wrong with them just go to the doctor all the time for checkups, as though a physical is going to provide you any useful information about yourself. What a silly, shamanistic ritual. I'm especially amazed that people who pretty obviously don't care much about their health go through the debasement of being told annually that yep, you're still fat and should lose weight.
I don't think this is really valid. Maybe the median black doctor is fine and knows your arm from your arse. But the people on the tails... Truly bad doctors don't just mess up, they can ruin lives and leave corpses. If that's even 5% of the total, it would be a catastrophe.
Even decent doctors doing 'normal' stuff can have surprising gaps, if they're struggling with combinatorics or recall -- outside of test reqs, it's one of the big arguments against the residency-as-hazing, because being that tired makes you stupid. This seems like a joke, but it's also a joke that I know three people in meatspace with similar stories specific to Crohn's. I've personally been given a combination of prescriptions that, about six months earlier, had received a black-box label about risk of horrible wasting cancers in my demographics.
((That said, I'm skeptical on both the naive HBD take, and also on the data here being completely causative, though I expect the base problem of 'prioritizing everything over ability' is bad enough even in a perfectly blank slate world.))
The naive HBD take seems to be a complete distraction. They had a standard. They're massively lowering the standard. We can be fairly confident that this is going to go very badly, because we have prior examples of it going badly when standards were lowered at smaller scales.
This, in a situation that can already be fairly described as a shitshow. I've got a close acquaintance who had a tough pregnancy a couple years ago, and has since been having dizziness, shortness of breath, and other scary symptoms. For years, plural, since the delivery, she's been asking her doctor, only to be told that it was asthma, or leftover pregnancy hormones, or just her imagination. long story short, the pregnancy caused a degenerative heart condition, which her doctors had been studiously ignoring since her delivery. She's currently waiting to find out if the crash course of meds they've put her on can turn things around, or if she's going to need a prompt heart transplant. She isn't poor, both she and her husband have upper-middle-class jobs with excellent health coverage. Her doctor was just a waste of air. Most stories I hear from people about interactions with the medical system run along similar lines. The expense is absurd, and the results are depressing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link