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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.
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.
Processed foods are a meme. Washing and cutting up counts as processing for the FDA. It’s a ridiculous standard.
Well shit, then I guess learned helplessness is the only possible answer. Not using the eyes in your skull to perceive that the veggie tray is categorically different from the canned "Hearty Vegetable Stew" with 30 added grams of sugar, along with more unrecognizable ingredients than not. It's all processed! Nothing to be done about it.
That’s not the point. The point is that ‘processed’ is a bullshit designation that doesn’t mean anything and has no information about the health impact of a foodstuff.
Pop tarts aren’t unhealthy because they’re “processed food”. One could likely have an entirely healthy diet consisting of processed food. The term is irrelevant.
There was a bit I read once, possibly even on Slate Star Codex, that went a bit like this:
Person A: I don't want to eat (food item), it has too many chemicals in it.
Person B: I don't understand what you mean. Everything we eat is composed of chemicals - even water is a chemical!
Commentary from blogger: But, of course, B is being deliberately pedantic, and knows perfectly well that A is objecting to ingredients with complicated names that nobody uses in home cooking and most people don't even know what they are, e.g. sodium benzoate.
It seems like you're being Person B here? Yes, "chemicals" and "processed" are technically overbroad, but they work pretty well for normies to communicate concepts like, "this category of food tends to be low in fiber, high in added sugar and salt, and has good odds of being designed by food scientists to be as tasty and un-satiating as possible so you'll eat more of it per sitting and thus spend more money buying more of it".
B knows what A is gesturing at, but doesn't know what A means because A doesn't either, and that's the point of the objection.
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Scott's covered two hypotheses for what the issue with "processed food" is:
Yes, many definitions exist which do not correspond one-to-one with a reasonable hypothesis such as these, and to the extent they do not they will be less effective than they could be, but the basic idea of categorising things this way is not insane.
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I’d hazard a guess that regardless of definition, processed food will have a strong correlation with unhealthyness.
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Listening to the FDA here won't work well. But somehow I doubt that "I look at the food and decide whether it counts as processed" will work well either.
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