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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.

In my neck of the woods, black doctors, especially those who've come onto the scene recently enough for this to potentially matter, are almost invariably relative newcomers from Nigeria (and often Irish-trained). They seem as competent as anyone - in any case I've been quite happy with mine.

They're thus unlikely to be affected much by lowered standards, actual or perceived, in the North American continent. Now you have me wondering if this might also be part of the answer to your question - clinics consciously avoiding potentially less qualified candidates from nearer to home, in a way that still makes them look "diverse".

Now you have me wondering if this might also be part of the answer to your question - clinics consciously avoiding potentially less qualified candidates from nearer to home, in a way that still makes them look "diverse".

This is the Harvard method. Supposedly, Harvard is like 20% black. The bad news is these are all rich international students, children of recent immigrants, and people with heavy European admixture.

It's been speculated that there are actually no Harvard students who have 4 ADS (American descendants of slaves) grandparents.

Hey, Google actually found it. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/

Within Harvard’s GAA population today, O’Sullivan has noticed a seemingly large percentage of biracial students and students who come from socioeconomically-privileged backgrounds. “If we were to count the number of GAA students at Harvard who were descended from enslaved people, came from low income backgrounds, first generation, four grandparents descended from enslaved people, I feel like that number would be so low — like, maybe one person. It’s just so, so, so low,” she says.

Harvard is completely shutting out disadvantaged black people in America. Instead, Harvard pads its stats with people whose only connection with ADS people is the same skin color (and sometimes barely even that).

Ultimately, Harvard and the KKK share the same belief about race: That the color of your skin matters more than the content of your character.

I mean, if the steelman position for AA is that black unequal outcomes could at least to some extent be due to lack of ingroup role models (the "studying = acting white" thing) and therefore black role models should be created even if they are promoted above their station - making this generation fake it so the next can make it, so to speak - then it doesn't really matter if the Nigerians that Harvard fills its quotas with are disadvantaged, or have or want anything to do with African-Americans at all, as long as African-Americans unilaterally believe that the Nigerians are just like them and therefore are valid role models to follow. The last part at least seems plausible - X-Americans imagining that they are actually X even as real X laugh at them is a recurrent trope even for instances of X like Asian or Norwegian.

The TV show "The Wire" had two black kids in what one black parent referred to as the "pediatric neurosurgeon phase", where a young black kid, who hadn't been ground down yet, picked as a role model one of the most intelligent and successful black men in the area. Apparently this was a real thing, at least in Baltimore, and it was due to Ben Carson being the director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center (in Baltimore).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson