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Medschool isn't difficult, neither is studying finance. Barely anyone wash out of either and testing with bringing in less talented people show that it doesn't affect graduation rates much at all.
The point of filtering is that the eduction itself isn't difficult and evaluating results later often is. How much money are we going to allow these traders to lose? How many people should the doctors kill?
There are clearly other ways to avoid a competition arms race and this seems more like a fantasy for you to not have had to expend any effort in your youth, instead of meritocracy whipping you into usefulness.
I don't think this is true at all.
With respect to pure academic difficulty Medicine may not be the most difficult, but it does have pretty much the highest volume of content. Keeping up with years of punishing pace (often while doing multiple other things) is incredibly difficult. Once clinical years roll around you are doing things like rotations that could be over 80 hours a week while studying for an academic test, working weekends, pulling 24s and all kinds of other hellacious things.
That bit aside - the selection pressure for Med School is intense. The average MCAT score in an accepted individual corresponds to an 86th percentile. That's a phenomenal amount of filtering out. Once you get to school the drop out rate is pretty low - somewhere in the 3-5 percent range. That is with the intense selection pressures however.
Additionally a dirty secret is that schools will drag you to the finish line (maybe requiring extra years) knowing that doing so will leave you unable to match. Completion without advancement isn't really that, but it is part of the stat juking and realistically residency completion is a much better reflection of "washing out" or not. Advancing through to get your MD and then independent practice is a really different number, if you start with possibly the best reflection: "intention to be a doctor" to "finishing the path" then the completion percentage is probably under 20% or something else obscene.
Things are different in different countries.
In Sweden, medschool student absolutely aren't doing 80 hour weeks. They're working a lot, but the studies that have been done on the subject show that they're in the mid/high 40s, which is the highest of any major program, but certainly not 80. For contrast, finance students on average study less than 20 hours a week.
My suspicions mostly come from how greatly increasing access to medical school spots and providing other avenues for entry doesn't seem to affect graduation rates at all (or the people taking other entry routes having no worse graduation rates), as well as what my doctor friends have told me, some of whom transferred out of my major.
I don't disagree that being a doctor is difficult nor that getting a medical degree requires a lot of work. Medschool filters for diligence but you need more than that to be a good doctor, hence we need filtering, preferably beforehand. This isn't unique for medicine, most of higher education is a poor filter for both intelligence and conscientiousness (like finance for instance).
Sure other countries are different, the US is notorious - they should still be doing 24s at least though, no?
Those are effectively illegal in the entire EU, with very few exceptions.
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Then why not simply have Raven’s Progressive Matrices administered to every 10 year old in America and base every life path on that? The meritocrat defends the worst possible version of even his own idea.
Conscientiousness is as important, or even more important than IQ. The only working test we have for conscientiousness is a long track record of diligent work.
Furthermore, childhood iq tests don't have that good predictive power for adult IQ. You might get away with them if you do them post puberty but then we run right back into the issue of conscientiousness.
To be clear though, I support a tracking kids into wide categories with wide error bars, kind of like what they're doing in Germany.
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Equality. Most people, including the proletariat, and protected categories like women and minorities, do poorly on IQ tests. They can be smuggled into nice places under a big long education system through DEI. It also creates sinecures for them, like philosophy professor, high school teacher, or university administrator. All of this is at your expense as a smart person of course.
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Raw IQ as a ten year old does not really tell much about dilligence or attention to detail, which are at least as important for a lot of jobs.
I'd much rather have a concencious 115 IQ doctor than a 130 IQ doctor who doesn't care.
Raw intelligence is necessary for a lot of high-prestige jobs, but it's not sufficient.
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