Comment by TitaRusell
11 hours ago
Virtuous people become doctors, social workers or kindergarten teachers.
People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.
11 hours ago
Virtuous people become doctors, social workers or kindergarten teachers.
People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.
As someone who's been in both engineering school and medical school, I would say you're very wrong. Most doctors aren't in any way virtuous, most are in it for status or money and plenty don't care one bit about humans (some just like the thrill of being in charge of someone their life). There's only a small minority that's extremely virtuous.
This might've been different 50 years ago but it's the number one striver job there is.
Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the operating knife at least once; in that case, the operation was successful, healed me of the condition, and never caused any negative side-effects to this day.
Maybe there's a difference in regulation. A lot of the "entrepreneurial" landscape seems unregulated and a kind of Wild West, and I suppose that allows for certain kinds of personalities to succeed by suspect means. The medical field, by contrast, is quite regulated and there are very real risks to malpractice. Thus, I think it attracts better people and allows them to succeed.
Maybe it's similar to how dictators often take over in poor or struggling countries, whereas they find it harder to get a foothold in developed, prosperous countries with strong institutions.
Being non-virtuous doesn't all of a sudden turn them into some kind of evil monster. It's just a job for most of them, one that pays well. Being professional and giving treatment like they should (basically following orders) is the easiest way to avoid problems for doctors.
This all changes when they get more difficult patients. As someone who's been told bogus by doctors, even lightly pushing back many will completely change demeanor, you're no longer some easy money but a risk/annoyance. So your good experiences basically just show doctors in their 'perfect state'.
This isn't the same in every country as you say it's a regulated field and the regulations differ wildly from country to country and so does the view and behaviour of doctors.
They obviously won't say it to your face so I'm not sure that your anecdote says anything.
> I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.
You are extremely lucky, then.
As a man, I've been gaslit by my doctors about my depression. My PC in my early 20s told me I was just lazy and needed to get a "real" job.
For women, by all accounts, it's much worse. I have not met a woman yet who has not had a story about some doctor treating her like a child, minimizing her pain, etc.
It's hard to claim that the initial generation of Free Software developers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't virtue-minded people. The issue isn't spending one's entire life in front of a computer, it's being outcompeted by people who do the same but with mercenery aims.
Seeing unscrupulous people make it while the principled pay the price can break even the most virtuous person. It causes disappointment, resentment and a sense of injustice that can very easily radicalize into actual sociopathy. Society needs to realign itself if it wants to prevent this. Good people should win and be rewarded.
You say this like it's a recent development.
Creating a society where the unscrupulous are not unduly rewarded has been a long, painstaking slog over millennia that still hasn't been solved. And whatever progress has been made is always fragile as the lessons are so very easy to forget.
I don't believe doctors and kindergarten teacher needed to be virtuous at all
I have a friend who worked in kindergarten taking care of the children. From what they told me, I can tell you, it's no easy lunch for virtuous people with ideals, who want to help and educate the children there. The amount of playing hierarchy games and bickering and bullying and whatnot, that happens when someone wants to improve things for the children... It basically crushed that friend and often made them cry, until they got out of those shit holes named kindergarten.
Doctors with big egos are a huge problem because they don’t listen to patients. I deal with some medical issues and, if a self-absorbed doctor walks into the room, I know my problem isn’t being solved today.
Not necessarily no - but sustainably doing good work while shoulder-to-shoulder with human frailty and confounding diversity does raise the chances.
People succumbing to parental pressure become doctors.
A lot of folk go into teaching because there's high demand for workers & the academic path is relatively accessible.
You're probably mostly right about social workers, but it's a vague term & there's at least some categories of social worker that fill the same appeal as teaching.
Virtuosity is so hard to define, I'd say there's some virtue in almost every career direction but less in some than others. Certainly in my experience tech entrepreneurship has some of the lowest levels I've encountered.
There are Black Mirror episodes for people in all sorts of careers who find themselves with too much power, poorly handled; the show's narratives depend on the fact that the technology is the axe but not the executioner.
as a former teacher, a former receiver of social services, and someone who makes great money helping teams move bits efficiently, I can say most assuredly that most teachers or social workers are regular, non-expert people. My former teaching colleague thought the screen of his monitor was watching him. And my last social worker had "personal struggles balancing his faith's view on evolution and what the science says." The classic computer nerd who "can't human," but my job is aligning hundreds of people to work on the same software. Education and social work is divorced from the "real world" in many ways, not unlike how those stuck on a screen are divorced from the "real world."
> Virtuous people become doctors
I remember when I was in high school knowing a bunch of people who wanted to be doctors (and had good grades). It was strange to me so many people wanted to be doctors so I asked why. The answer was one word: Money. In my adult life I have also heard of multiple people who demand to be called “doctor” in social situations.
“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though.
>“Virtuous” is not a word I’d associate at all with wanting to become a doctor. Veterinarians are a different matter, though.
For those that don't know, veterinarian education is just as rigorous, time consuming, and expensive as human medical education, yet the median annual wage for practicing veterinarians is $125,510.
That's a lot of money out in rural country, which is where veterinarians tend to be especially useful.
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And the work can be considerably harder. Human doctors tend to specialise on a certain area of a single species, and they can communicate with their patients. Veterinaries are expected to know every part of a huge range of species (though there are specialties as well) and have to be able to diagnose patients who not only can’t explain themselves in our language, they are usually terrified by being in a strange environment with a strange person and thus alter or hide their behaviour. Not to mention having to deal with the owners and regular euthanasias.
It’s an incredibly stressful job with a huge rate of suicide.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20231010-the-acute-suic...
For virtuous people, look at jobs where the average person in the field could get a much better job doing something else. That’s not the case for your average teacher, who tend to be on the low end of the scale of college educated workers. Public defenders are a good example of the opposite. These are generally lawyers who have the credentials to make a lot more money in private practice.
> Virtuous people become doctors
And by the time medical school and residency are done with them, many if not most will be sociopaths to rival all the top CEOs.
Talk about peak arrogance. Who the hell are you to think you get to be the one to decide who should have the key to society?
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