Core Curriculum
If I were America’s education czar, I would want every kid to attend Robin Hanson’s lecture on the medical profession, which Seth Roberts describes in this post.
I have heard hundreds of professors lecture. I had never heard anything like this. It wasn’t the usual stuff. It wasn’t the usual stuff made entertaining with cartoons or demonstrations or jokes or war stories. Instead, it was a straightforward look at how the medical profession operates, and a lot of it was about how it operates to empower doctors, reduce the power of patients, and reduce health care innovation.
And I also wish doctors would receive rigorous training in statistics. Reduce their workloads, make residencies less of a manic hothouse — just make sure all practicing physicians understand statistics. We will save many lives in the process.
I wish they’d come and live with families who have kids with serious disabilities for a short time. Especially the pediatricians who have no idea how to help me with my autistic son—oh, and the neurologist/psychiatrist who helpfully told me that my son was like an “unchained elephant” and “that’ll be $1800, please.”
— Joules · Mar 25, 02:37 AM · #
Certainly — but not just doctors.
Even though I loathe the French system of preparatory classes, the more I think about it I think the ideal college educatino is something close to the “Khâgne B/L”, where equal weight in the curriculum is given to mathematics and philosophy, economics and literature.
— PEG · Mar 25, 06:28 AM · #
Yeah, good luck with that. You can’t even get most scientists to know much statistics.
— Sanjay · Mar 25, 01:54 PM · #
“There’s lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Good old Mark Twain (I hope, since I’m too lazy to look it up). I know it isn’t “good, old Garrison Keillor.”
— Joules · Mar 25, 04:30 PM · #