In real life, you can—to an exent—choose your community and who you hang out with. Online with social media, that’s much, much harder. This is a good video (“Something Strange Happens When You Trace How Connected We Are”) from Veritasium, and if you’re busy, that link takes you to the section on how the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma works when you add in network effects. Game theory tells us not to feed the trolls.
From “The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A,” published last month in The Atlantic:
When everyone gets an A, an A starts to mean very little. The kind of student that gets admitted to Harvard (or any elite college) wants to compete. They’ve spent their lives clawing upward. Khurana, the former dean, observed that Harvard students want success to feel meaningful. Getting all A’s is necessary, but insufficient.
This has created what Claybaugh called a “shadow system of distinction.” Students now use extracurriculars to differentiate themselves from their peers.
I also cared more about extracurriculars than classes when I was in college, and I graduated back in 2008. Part of it was that the classes were often not all that great and the other stuff was fun, but—
The parallels to pass/fail Step 1 and pass/fail medical schools are obvious. I don’t work with enough students to know if the proposed psychological benefits entirely failed to materialize—certainly the world is complicated and students are wrestling with broader societal trends, the Covid aftermath, social media despair, etc—but the impact on CV buffing is undeniable.
Medical school hasn’t changed all that much over the past century, but it seems like the recent drift in the status quo also isn’t really working?
But even at Harvard, change won’t be easy:
Now that they know that making college easier doesn’t reduce stress, Harvard administrators are attempting to rediscover a morsel of lost wisdom from the ancient past: School should be about academics. In March, the faculty amended the student handbook to emphasize the highly novel point that students should prioritize their schoolwork.
“For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it.” – LA Paul
I’m running low on my stash of Cometeer coffee. If you’re interested, you can get $20 off your first order + free shipping and help subsidize my terrible caffeine addiction. (Full review here. Not an ad, but I’ve been ordering for the past three years and I really do like cheaper coffee.)
Morgan Housel, “Little Ways the World Works”:
Chamath Palihapitiya once noted that however fast your business grows, that’s the half-life for how quickly it can be destroyed. So many companies, flush with cheap money from previous years, are learning this right now. Every business and every industry has a natural growth rate – push beyond it and short-term growth comes at the cost of long-term quality, and eventually survival.
From Face it: you’re a crazy person, about the importance of “unpacking” a job to understand your relationship to a potential career:
High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack because the upsides are obvious and appealing, while the downsides are often deliberately hidden and tolerable only to a tiny minority.
[…]
Making matters worse, people are happy to talk about themselves and their jobs, but they do it at this unhelpful, abstract level where they say things like, “oh, I’m the liaison between development and sales”. So when you’re unpacking someone’s job, you really gotta push: what did you do this morning? What will you do after talking to me? Is that what you usually do? If you’re sitting at your computer all day, what’s on your computer? What programs are you using? Wow, that sounds really boring, do you like doing that, or do you endure it?
How important and yet almost impossible does that sound?There are wide chasms between expectation, perception, and reality. I’m not sure most people are truly psychologically willing to confront unpacking themselves, let alone comprehensively do it for others.
Dictation is such a powerful skill.
I strongly believe that writing is incredibly valuable, and in many ways, I feel that writing is how you really learn how you think. But speaking out loud has its own benefits—for figuring out what you want to say and practicing the skill of taking nebulous ideas and turning them into crisp prose.
With experience, it’s also simply faster than typing with your hands and more accurate with spelling than your clumsy fingers.
The Value of Verbalizing in Radiology
The return of the radiology oral boards is, I think, largely a reflection and acknowledgment of the reality that taking cases is a valuable skill—not just because of the performance art component or the ability to assess critical thinking, but because the ability to verbalize and think out loud is intrinsically valuable, even if it’s hard to quantify.
The more you say things, the clearer you can become in how you express yourself. It’s also no secret that we create mental shortcuts and cognitive macros in our ability to rapidly describe things, just like riding a bicycle. If you hear an older attending free-dictate every single word of the report like a well-paid auctioneer as though we’re still living in the 1990s, you would see how powerful that automaticity can be.
I don’t know if it’s the same basal ganglia circuitry, but it’s also undeniably something that you can see every first-year resident develop a library of as they practice. Dictating reports is part of the learning process, even if it doesn’t feel like learning specifically.
The more you verbalize complex cases, the more you reduce the cognitive load of those interpretations. I think the ability for people to gain speed and confidence in reading cases is not just a matter of how many cases you’ve looked at, but likely also a reflection of how many cases you’ve dictated.
Dictation as a Personal Superpower
I also think—taking a step back from radiology—that dictation is a super valuable skill. I’d always been drawn to the idea of dictating but wasn’t really able to put enough reps in to become comfortable with it until I became a radiology resident. I even bought a copy of Dragon back in high school after NY Times columnist David Pogue started dictating all of his columns but had terrible results at the time. This was a symptom of my desire to be a writer but inability to put in the actual work to be less terrible at writing, and the incorrect belief (that I still fall prey to) that if I had just the right tool, I would magically get things done.
Even outside of accuracy problems with earlier software (especially my admittedly not very clear speech), the fact was that I had the same writer’s block with a blank page whether I was trying to type or to speak.
But since starting residency and thanks to the built-in voice transcription of modern cell phones, I’ve been able to capture ideas that would have been lost in the ether or only partially captured through written shorthand (less well-formed and often frustratingly unintelligible to my future self).
As I’ve written before, I even dictated the majority of the first draft of my book about student loans while walking on a bridge between the reading room and our noon conference.
Dictating while walking is an especially incredible gift, because the act of pacing around is distracting enough to help you silence your internal editor and allow the free flow of ideas without being demanding enough that the actual thinking itself is impaired.
While the dictation is never the final draft, it provides incredible, unfiltered raw material for revision. Editing and expansion are where, for me, the real craft of writing takes place, but there’s so much less friction when you’ve built some momentum through dictation.
If you think you might want to start writing but can’t seem to build the habit, try speaking first.
After 40 years, Spaceballs is set to return. Mel Brooks, a national treasure, will, incredibly, be over 100 if it comes out in 2027 as planned. My son is overdue to see the original.
From Obsolescence Rents: Teamsters, Truckers, and Impending Innovations, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research:
We consider large, permanent shocks to individual occupations whose arrival date is uncertain. We are motivated by the advent of self-driving trucks, which will dramatically reduce demand for truck drivers. Using a bare-bones overlapping generations model, we examine an occupation facing obsolescence. We show that workers must be compensated to enter the occupation – receiving what we dub obsolescence rents – with fewer and older workers remaining in the occupation. We investigate the market for teamsters at the dawn of the automotive truck as an á propos parallel to truckers themselves, as self-driving trucks crest the horizon. As widespread adoption of trucks drew nearer, the number of teamsters fell, the occupation became ‘grayer’, and teamster wages rose, as predicted by the model.
“Obsolence rents” is a neat phrase. I remember a friend growing up whose aging father made a great living maintaining legacy systems in the nearly defunct computer language COBOL.