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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32458 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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I have a general concern about people who "literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors" doing work that requires understanding complex medical literature and prescribing minute quantities of similarly named drugs where there's no check on their work (other than the dispensing pharmacist perhaps noticing something looks weird). I feel for your sister's difficulty in school and I'm glad she's been successful, but it makes me wonder if it is wise for us to provide these accommodations for academic testing when the job is going to require those skills to function at a certain level, and the only thing anyone has to go by for hiring is the credential.

(This generalizes to a lot of other problems with credentialing and affirmative action and so forth, but the subject of your post brought it into sharp relief for me.)

His sister is a psychiatrist not pharmacist

Whoops, I guess this is what happens when I post when sleep deprived

TBF those two words are very similar and easily confused if your brain happens to like... swap some letters around.

To whom would you rather trust your well-being:

  • The medical professional who has spent their entire life developing strategies to meticulously check over their work to ensure consistency and accuracy
  • The average medical professional (they're confident they just don't make that kind of mistake)

I think you are significantly overestimating the scope of the problem - her failure mode was losing points for questions she did not have time to answer, as opposed to answering questions wrongly, on a timed test with pencil and paper. This is demonstrably not a representative model of the real world, in which computers, colleagues, and the spoken word exist, variables may be named at one's pleasure, operators correspond to explicit and distinct positions on the keyboard, and you get at least half a decade of extra practice before they let you loose on the unsuspecting populace. Today, her learning disabilities are effectively non-issues; in fact, her meticulousness means she tends to catch mistakes made by others as well (which has made for some colorful stories).

It is precisely this kind of tractable problem, which only really exists in a pedagogical spherical-cow setting, that requires accommodations, as opposed to nebulous claims of racial or mental victimhood from the lazy, the conniving, or the otherwise unqualified comprising the median. The challenge, as it has always been, is telling them apart. Again, there's an argument to be made that it's not worth it to try, and it may even be a good one. But it's not open-and-shut.

I'm genuinely very curious, being also a medical professional, how a person who "literally can't read [text] without making symbol transposition/translation errors" could read medical histories and patient documentation, or keep up with new literature. I could not do my job if I was dyslexic to that level, or at least I would be performing much more inefficiently.

If there's some sort of intervention that "cures" the dyslexia so much so that word and sentence recognition and parsing becomes "native" or at the very least second nature, that would make sense -- but I am to understand that dyslexia isn't really "curable". Or if psychiatrists to read very little medical documentation, which...seems incorrect to me in experience.

Open to be wrong, I don't have any experience with this personally.

One of my coworkers is a PhD in computer science with dyslexia. When he reads academic papers he puts them on a screen using a plugin which colors every word a different color. His output is pretty good, so it must work for him. But he also is in the top 5% of extroversion for software engineers, presumably making up for some of that tough paper reading with social connections.

There are lots of ways to read and write text other than the default font by unaided eye. There are laptops and stuff. If you have access to windows, check out the Ease of Access Center for the freebies.i

Hm. I was thinking more paper charts, but I suppose if there are fonts in a digital system that works.

I was also under the impression that dyslexic fonts don’t have a great track record, but if it works for someone…

Now I wonder if there is a difference in difficulty reading for dyslexics when they have to read from an alphabet or syllabary vs when they read from a logographic script.

Weighted fonts are one method by which things can be made easier on dyslexics. Notably, Comic Sans is surprisingly useful as one in a pinch, though still beaten out by purpose-built fonts.

Yes, the whole theoretical point of academic tests is to be an objective measure of the capacity of students. Because when you go out and get a real job, you have to actually be able to do that job. If these remedial courses aren't necessary for being a psychiatrist, then there should be a path to becoming a practicing psychiatrist that doesn't require them. If they ARE necessary, then lightening the requirements because, gosh, you can't satisfy the requirements but really want to graduate ends up causing harm later on in life.

I mean, these classes are far from the only example of things you don’t need. We make doctors get bachelors degrees that require literature and history classes for essentially class reasons.

I do always think of the local-ish story of the Native American law student forced to take math classes at ASU. Now, sure, depending on the specific field of law, math may actually prove to be a useful skill to have, but I could probably imagine some areas of law where it's not really necessary.

Hard to properly and believably inflate your billable hours when you can't do math.

We make doctors get bachelors degrees that require literature and history classes for essentially class reasons.

Other peer countries (culturally and economically) don’t, though, it’s solely a peculiarity of the American college system.

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