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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2699 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 26, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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ThomasdelVasto asked the question yesterday, and I had been wondering it myself, so I'll ask it here: how many lawyers are on this site?

Faceh, anti_dan, RovScam, and myself are the ones I can think of right away. I believe naraburns has a JD but isn't practicing law. Any others?

The more important question is: Which ones are cooler—lawyers, doctors, programmers, or engineers?

I'm an engineer (civil), but I vote for lawyers. Engineers merely apply the simple guidelines that have been laid out for them by the researchers of AASHTO, ASCE, et cetera. But the guidelines laid out for lawyers in documents like the Restatements (to say nothing of the tens of thousands of judicial opinions) need real brainpower to understand and apply.

Perhaps compared to civil engineers, lawyers are cooler, but only by that incredibly generous comparison.

Neither. The majority of those professions are trapped in somewhat soulcrushing positions where they are not allowed to show the spark of genius that gives the high of being engineer/doctor etc.

I don't know, absolutely killing a trial or oral argument certainly provides an opportunity for "the spark of genius that gives the high," especially since it is public and social and surrounded by the prestigious trappings of power in a way being a doctor or engineer isn't. And the doctors and engineers I know seem to be stuck in soulcrushing, cog-turning positions at roughly the same rate as the lawyers.

Yeah, you don't often see those professions act like the equivalent of House or a John Grisham protagonist in real life. Who would you say the Engineer version is? MacGyver?

I'm a programmer, and in my opinion lawyers, doctors and programmers are all intolerable hacks who can't be trusted. Leaving only the engineers, who actually build useful things now and then.

I feel like you really can't put a Pathologist, a Hospitalist, and a Trauma Surgeon in the same category.

I don't think many jobs in the world are cooler than a trauma surgeon, transplant surgeon, or literal brain surgeon....but being an endocrinologist or nephrologist is rather maximally lame.

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