[siberianbear]

Yeah, that surprised me, too.

At one time in my life, I considered becoming a doctor, and had even started to take some of the required undergraduate coursework required to apply to medical school (organic chemistry, biology, etc.)

I started to talk to doctors about my choice, and nearly all of them advised me not to go into medicine and often went into a long rant about dealing with insurance companies, billing issues and being told how to practice medicine by people with only a high school diploma at an insurance company.

I might be a doctor today if it wasn't for them. I think it was for the best: I found electrical engineering in Silicon Valley to be interesting and highly remunerative.

[daodedickinson]

Same here. My father is a veterinarian, and we have many family friends who are doctors, and they all drove me away from going into medical practice. It is a tragic waste, because my brain is not compatible with many jobs, but medicine as practiced from the 90s back would have been up my bailiwick, as it gave my father, who shares most of my neuroatypical quirks, tremendous upward mobility.

But we are men of ethical scruples. I've dropped out of multiple grad programs due to witnessing academic fraud committed by students and professors working in tandem to keep money flowing into administrators who believe it is their utmost responsibility to perform a Nietzschean transvaluation of all values until a hauntingly extreme vices become considered virtues.

If I picked the medical profession, it would be because it would be so motivating to me to work in a highly motivating high-stakes environment where finding the moral thing to do is not so everloving exhausting.

Then have a statist regime begin to intimidate and relentlessly attempt to suborn you into destroying the voice of your conscience and the essential goodness of the caring profession is utterly lost.

After leaving a university just a few credits shy of a degree due to learning that university administrators have knowingly destroyed the value of their degree by handing out 50% of their CS degrees to people the professors consider completely incompetent, I was not tempted in the slightest when the university attempted to bribe me with a full scholarship for their Ph.D. program and a guaranteed tenure track teaching job.

Why the hell would I want to perpetuate the scam of a completely decadent educational husk? I am terrified that misuse and/or ignorant design of the internet is threatening our social health; it is destroying the quality of people's education in return for monetary "profit". EDUCATION IS PROFIT IN ITSELF, money is merely potential energy that may help or hinder us toward enlightenment.

So this is why our "education" system is actually a "maleducation" system: universities as founded were dedicated to making the best possible people, but they are now committed to making the most possible profit.

[whatshisface]

Why not give us a list of universities and involved persons? The only reason they do it is because they don't think fraud will devalue their reputation, and if nobody finds out about it, it won't.

[seer]

I’m sorry I don’t have much to add to the discussion but just wanted to mention that this is one of the most beautiful and insightful comments I’ve read in a while, thank you.

A book I’ve read some time ago - “Reinventing organizations” gave me back a little bit of hope for humanity, and they did detail an alternative school in germany that had all the real things a school should have - above all a passion for making its students the best, most honesf and awesome people it can.

Anyway just wnated to mention that places like this still exist, so they are possible.

[sethammons]

Our doctor who delivered our second child some 13 years ago told us he had to deliver (if I recall) 3 babies a week minimum to pay for medical malpractice insurance and he had never payed out on a malpractice lawsuit. The insurance is crazy.

[evgen]

That is because for an obstetrician the consequences of medical malpractice are profound and expensive. They are basically either killing a child or crippling that child for the entirety of their life. If the child survives their malpractice then that child will have a life that is much shorter, or much more unpleasant, than it needed to be if the obstetrician did their job correctly and the insurance company will be paying out big money to support that child for the entirety of that child's life.

[noddy1]

The constant threat of million dollar lawsuits is a pretty stupid way to ensure good practice of medicine.