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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1056 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 5, 2026

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"Tech bro" and "finance bro" are well-known archetypes. That we don't have equivalents for other high-profile, high-status, high-paying fields like "law bro" or "med bro" probably says something, but what exactly?

Third example: "lit bro", a stereotype of a man who's very interested in fiction but whose reading is limited to the oeuvres of uber-masculine powerhouses like Ernest Hemingway and, um, David Foster Wallace. Freddie deBoer is convinced it's a category with no members, a literal empty set.

The difference is that lawyers and doctors are relatively evenly spread geographically.

Where NYC is crawling in finance bros, and the bay area is full of tech bros. There's a vast horde of guys all working in the same field at the same companies who went to the same colleges dominating the social and romantic market in these places.

You never have the same phenomenon of seemingly EVERYONE working in medicine or law, outside of colleges for those progressions.

It's interesting that certain professions are seen as intrinsically high-status. Doctors are presumptively taken to be morally upstanding individuals, to the point that "he's a doctor, but he treats everyone like shit" is seen as such a surprising twist it can power an entire TV series for eight seasons. More darkly, I wonder if this presupposition might be the root of the Lucy Letby truther movement: perhaps these people just cannot believe that a trained nurse could be this spectacularly vicious. I was once speaking to a former veterinarian who complained that, whenever she reads a novel in which a character is a veterinarian, it's always used a shorthand for that character being of good moral character: "aww, look at him, he cares about teh animals!!" But in her experience, most vets are dickheads.

I feel like law and medicine do have some of those stereotypes but they are usually only within subfields. Like surgeons are supposedly the jocks of the medical profession. The show Scrubs describes some of the stereotypes.

Lawyers also have their stereotypes with corporate lawyers being the boring ones. Rich defense lawyers being morally bankrupt. Prosecutors being aggressive career climbers. Etc.

I think the main unfairness to tech and finance is that a small subset of them that deserve the label is being use to describe the whole industry. Silicon valley was great for splitting up and labelling the various tech archetypes.

Rich defense lawyers being morally bankrupt.

So ethics is the thing keeping me from getting rich? I knew it!

Strange isn’t it? If you want to be ethical and rich, law is one discipline you’re better off avoiding relative to other career paths.

like surgeons are supposedly the jocks of the medical profession. The show Scrubs describes some of the stereotypes.

Yes just so.

Ortho, Pathology, and Internal Medicine are probably further apart in temperament and day to day work than a Lawyer, Tech-bro, and Finance-bro.

This makes us much harder to stereotype although there are definitely some (like being bad at finances).

What is the pathology stereotype, out of curiosity? One of my academic mentors had a side gig as a professor of pathology, wondering if he would fit.

Outside of specific subfields pathology is a pretty anti-social specialty with a lot of time working on their own/outside the hospital milieu and near zero patient interaction. Communication skills are therefore weaker. The work is also quite a bit more basic science oriented. When Glaucomflecken makes fun of pathologists they are unhealthily attached to their microscopes.

The other major anti-social specialty is Radiology, but Rads is up in everyone else's business and is required to know an incredible variety of shit. Sometimes get called the physician's physician because they know a lot and heavily guide decisions. Communication skills are a lot better because Rads gets called more often and reports are more nuanced and need clinical correlation and therefore shit like theory of mind. When Glaucomflecken makes fun of Radiologists it's about wearing sunglasses indoors (because they live in dark rooms with fancy computers).

When I went to the Path lab as a medical student they'd be happy to see me, apologize for things still being pending, offer to show me slides, and get me tea. When I went to find the imaging room I'd have to walk through a secret door in the back of a nursing locker room in the third sub-basement wherein I would get bitched at for exactly 30 seconds which was followed by exactly 30 seconds of clearly explaining the context behind the read. I would then flee.

The above is an exaggeration. ...And also not.

In my experience Pathologists make excellent pre-clinical teachers and mentors when inclined because they know and are interested in the more science stuff, and the ones who are involved have the patience and communication skills to be good teachers (otherwise they wouldn't do it). Radiologists make better clinical teachers and mentors because they have to be efficient/excellent at time management, and deal with a lot of risk and uncertainty.

Lastly, my friends in Radiology can still be trusted to know and remember basic clinical medicine shit. The pathologists...no.

Interesting. I would say that kind of tracks, someone who only socializes on his own terms. He was a great fellow and an excellent teacher in my field (when not working at the med school/research lab, he taught modernist/postmodern literature, with some divinity school courses on Aquinas, as well as adult education teaching God knows what). I saw his Google Calendar once and there must have been maybe ten events for the week in it, one of which was our meeting.

These days an intellectual life outside of medicine has been mostly beaten out of the field, so anyone who does that sort of thing is usually exceptional in some way (often in peculiarity and surplus of intellectual horsepower.

This makes me curious where your temperament lines up with the stereotype of your subfield.

Thankfully I'm a tremendously non-central example otherwise I couldn't write here. I'm sure someone who knew me very well in person would peg me immediately, which is a risk - in terms of more general opsec and guessing my specialty... my combination of rambling detailed knowledge and pontificating bullshit doesn't really meld with the periodic grumpy cursing incisiveness.

Those are pretty firmly going in two different directions stereotype wise.

I supposed I best fit the stereotype of an old-style PCP but they are pretty much dying out at this point.

I supposed I best fit the stereotype of an old-style PCP

Fooled me; I always figured that you were a crusty old GP!

"Tech bro" is a tricky one, because it's coming from two directions at once.

On one hand, you have what is generally a younger, left wing contingent that dislikes the Alex Karps and Marc Andreeesens of the world, and that splashes out to the industry at large. Whether I like it or not, I have to admit that there's a narcissistic, sociopathic, bloviating, stimulant-addled contingent of people in silicon valley who do a fantastic job of ruining the image of the entire industry.

On the other hand, you have the executive class. They loathe the jumped-up peasants who have the raw fucking audacity to earn a decent wage without getting a degree from an Ivy League school and getting a certificate that lets them work in a highly gatekept field. At this point, I think a lot of them would gladly detonate their own companies if they thought it would hurt the tech employees more (I'm looking at you, Jassy).

Tech bros, finance bros, and Bernie bros are linguistic weapons used to punch what's understood as a lower social class and form consensus around that fact. The chattering media class decided tech was gross and its wealthy, intelligent, too libertarianish inhabitants were also gross. As a concept, these people are too white, too male, too corporate, and too far disconnected from the greater diversity impetus. Finance bros already had their makeover in the 80's, and now everyone understands finance as an unclean field filled with morally bankrupt creatures. Tech on the other hand was a new thing with new types and we needed to know how we felt about them.

The -bros stereotypes do represent some truth as well which may be necessary to generate a stereotype to punch or look down upon. Law and medicine are sufficiently diverse and understood broadly as good. We don't need to know how we feel about lawyers or doctors, because we already know. It'd be like making a -bro stereotype for teachers.

Don’t forget Joe Rogan as a “dude bro,” and “bro science” as a term. They’re terms that are meant to draw mockery to the irrationality you find in these groups.

Well, they're coined as envious attempts to insult tech guys and finance guys (I have yet to hear the term "tech bro" followed by an intelligent and measured evaluation of the problems of the tech industry). Kind of in different ways, in that the techbros have betrayed their low-status origins and become successful when they shouldn't have, and for the finance bros that they're still just dumb frat jocks who don't deserve their money. Now, the general public doesn't tend to like insulting doctors (I'm sure there are Feminism in Medicine blogs attacking "med bros"), and "lawyer" is already enough of an insult.

Math nerds are still lower status than wordcels.

Are non-quant finance bros mostly math nerds? My understanding was that outside of quants the job was more soft skills?

You’re thinking more the analyst or sales side of things. “I can generate these complex models but can’t sell anything,” is the division where one breaks from the other and the latter washes out. Not all forms of high finance are mathematical, even though many are. Warren Buffet uses fairly simple accounting mixed with his own taste and judgment. Jack Welch was another story. Then of course in hedge funds you have extremely mathematical, complicated stochastic processes. There are multiple ways to be successful in finance.

Isn't "finance bro" specifically referring to quants (and similar "upstarts") though? Or am I misunderstanding the usage?

There are higher and lower culturally acceptable usages of the term. When Martin Shkreli hiked the price of Daraprim, the media tagged him with the label of a “Pharma Bro,” and that was because of the way he carried himself. He used to do livestreams of himself sitting around on the computer, accepting calls from people and shootin’ the shit as normal human beings do. He didn’t like most drug CEO’s and they didn’t like him because he used the language and mannerisms of ordinary people.

The way I hear most people use “finance bro,” it’s a disparaging term used to refer to the idiots you saw in YouTube commercials pitching selling options courses and driving crypto scams.

I've mostly seen it in reference to client-facing roles in investment banking and private equity.

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