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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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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.

If this isn't your wake up call to get healthy now, nothing is. Best way to never have to see a fake doctor is to never get sick. Eat right, exercise, hope you don't have any genetic predispositions towards chronic conditions. Do it now, because it's way harder to unfuck your health than it is to maintain it in the first place. Once you see your GP and they are axing you about your medical history before you ask about this pain in your gut that hasn't gone away for three weeks, it's over for you.

Eat right

Easier said than done, given how everyone and his brother has an opinion on The One True Right Way To Eat, and all these opinions contradict each other.

It's easier than you think. Avoid processed foods and refined sugar and you are 75% of the way there. Yeah, it involves picking up lots of meats, vegetables and grains and cooking them yourself. Sometimes even those are still adulterated, but it's still gonna be better than boxed slop.

Sure, everyone swears by a one true right way to eat that is better than all other ways. But that doesn't mean give up, especially when there are so many pretty obvious, and pretty universally agreed upon things you could do to move the needle in the right direction.

There are dozens of "this is the real diet that works that Big Food doesn't want you to know about" diets which have worked for large numbers of people including smart people. The only thing they seem to have in common is severely restricting refined sugar.

I don't see how you can live well as a normie in a country where the bread is sweetened by default.

Mostly the one weird trick stuff works on two pillars. One, it requires you to pay attention to what you eat. If you’re doing Paleo, you can’t just go buy something that sounds good, you need to read the label and evaluate the ingredients. That alone is a huge help. Second, because the market hasn’t yet caught onto the trend, there aren’t boxed versions of that diet’s foods available. If you were doing Paleo or Keto or Gluten Free when it first became a thing, you had to get the foods and cook them yourself. That eliminates most processed foods from your diet. In early Keto, before the food manufacturers started making hungry man keto foods, you had to get real fresh chicken or steak, real vegetables from the grocery store, and cook them yourself. So you’d end up making marginally better choices even if the new fad diet was based on unicorn farts.

even if the new fad diet was based on unicorn farts

Oh, fasting, I've done that. :-)