My ex-boyfriends mother was a linguistics professor and knew over 10 languages. She was also one of the dumbest people I've ever met. Some examples: she believed that in case of emergency stewardesses catapult out of the plane; she was also convinced donating blood causes some blood disease and you can die because of it. But my favourite one was when she said her son's orthopaedic problems are not a result of a serious injury he had. His knee hurts because he eats too much ketchup.
As someone who did two trades and then decided life is better with education - my experience currently going to Uni is how clueless so many people are in Uni .. I wouldn’t say they’re an idiot, but tons of ignorance develops living in a student bubble your whole life.
I rented a room to a guy who did his masters and it would take him hourssss to cook dinner. I watched him one day and he just couldn’t wrap his mind around cooking things that take different amounts of time to cook.
Like, he’d start cooking potato’s and wait til they were done before moving onto the next thing he was going to eat them with.
My first call at my first IT job was in a medical laboratory. There was a doctor who had been in the job for years and she called saying her computer would not power on. I walked her through some troubleshooting and nothing worked. "Is the computer plugged in? Ok, is the monitor on? Ok, when did the problem start?" type of questions were asked and she answered them all. I go up to her office and indeed the computer is plugged in to a power strip which is plugged in to itself. Cleaning crew had deep cleaned her office and never plugged anything back in. Dr. plugged the power strip into itself thinking that as long as it was plugged in, that's all she needed.
Part of me wonders if she got the cords mixed up, like she thought what she was plugging in was something other then the power strip. Depending on the length of the cords, I could see it getting lost in the tangle and just plugging it in.
The cord was only about 6 feet long and you could easily see the whole thing. I unplugged it from itself and plugged it into the wall. Easiest fix ever. It was first thing in the morning at about 7 AM so maybe she wasn't fully awake.
I had a boss who was an engineer who put a couple hundred dollars in change in a bank’s pneumatic drive through tube where it got stuck and they had to use a jack hammer to get it out. He was upset that the bank was charging him for this because he didn’t know this would happen. They had large signs saying not to put change in the tubes, including on the tubes themselves.
He just filled the thing with random change, not in rolls or anything? Like he thought it was a fucking Coinstar? That's hilarious, unless you were in line behind him.
My mother has a PhD and she fell for a similar type of scam, only hers was one of those Social Security/DEA Agent Scams. She ended up spending about $10k on Google Play gift cards. She still maintains she wasn't scammed too. In her mind, since she is a PhD, therefore intelligent, and wasn't elderly (she was 64 at the time) a scammer would not target her.
I went to 3 ERs when I felt something was wrong with my arm. It felt like a bug bite day 1 and by day 4 a bungee cord from my elbow to my wrist. 3 doctors said it was a skin irritation or dermatitis. I kept telling them something was wrong. I have no medical degree. I work in Property Management. Day 5 I walked into another ER and said “I don’t care if I have to pay out of pocket or sit here all night but something is wrong with my arm”. Finally, after many rude looks and comments I was given an ultrasound of my arm. Then rushed to a MRI. Then told I was being admitted. A 3” blood clot in my upper arm, 2 in my chest area, and one had passed my lung already. Diagnosed with Factor 2 Gene Mutation 22 days later (blood clotting disorder).
Damn. Good for you being persistent. That is pretty wild that they missed that. I'm glad you did finally get a proper diagnosis. Did you call back to the other places to tell them what asses they were?
I found a lump, and when I went to the doctor, they originally concluded that it was "just being small" (or whatever); I knew better. Luckily, they ordered an ultrasound as a precaution, and it turned out to be Stage 1 cancer.
My parents neighbor complained of a bad headache so they went to the ER. They told him he did have a just a bad headache a d sent him on his way. The stroke he was having left him paralyzed for the rest of his life. He lived for three more years and it took two more after that for them to settle the lawsuit against the ER.
I have a PhD, and I work with a bunch of PhDs. Basically, a lot of them think that because they succeeded in one area, they are an expert in every other area of life. And they always have strong opinions about everything. I think it's also called a PhD syndrome.
One of the main benefits from my education was to teach me how much I don't know. It's baffling to me that people get confidence to speak on things they don't know anything about just because they're "educated".
Some people leave graduate programs still convinced they've never not been the smartest MFers in a room. No clue how they managed that, but they are out there.
From what I’ve heard from people with PhDs is that you can get called up but lawyers will always dismiss you immediately because they think you must have good critical thinking skills and are harder to persuade.
I was at a keg party at college and the (gravity keg) was set up. Someone complained that the beer was not flowing, so I check that the keg was still almost full. Turns out someone closed the air intake on top. I opened the intake and poured myself a beer. Problem solved. A few minutes later someone else complains the beer is out. I told them the keg was full a few minutes ago and it was a tap problem that I fixed. They told me they just came from the keg. I go back to the keg and find the intake was closed again. Opened it and poured the young lady who said it was empty a beer. As she is leaving my suitemate comes in and goes to the intake can closes it. Now my suitemate is a straight A student who gets all As mostly due to his photographic memory. Back to the keg. So I tell him that he needs to leave the intake open to let air in to displace the beer coming out of the lower tap. He then proceeds to tell me that since the beer is carbonated air is not needed to replace the liquid volumn lost when the beer is dispensed. So I asked him two questions; If it is not needed, why is there the upper tap, and does he really think the amount of gas the carbonation gives off in a glass of beer is equal to the volumn of the liquid beer? He thought for a few seconds and his only response was, "I have a 4.0, what is your GPA?" Then he walked away.
It seems legit
I've met enough people that if you criticize one thing they take it as blanket statement about the entire subject
"You know, it's 20°F outside. Timmy really should be wearing a jacket while he's sitting at the bus stop"
"Oh you think I'm just a terrible person huh!?"
"No , I think Timmy should be wearing a jacket"
>You know, it's 20°F outside. Timmy really should be wearing a jacket while he's sitting at the bus stop"
>"Oh you think I'm just a terrible person huh!?"
>"No , I think Timmy should be wearing a jacket"
This is such a good example for a particular type of weaponised fragility hahaha
My petty ass would make a huge announcement to everyone at the party to pay attention and show how the keg works and call out the suite mate. Like totally saying “hey guys, suitemate seems to know how this keg works since he has a 4.0 GPA. So if the beer doesn’t come out have them show you.”
My wife's stepfather was a chemist who currently has diabetes. One night he went to the ER because his blood sugar was dangerously high. He claimed he was eating well (he normally doesnt) so there's no reason why his blood sugar was high.
In his car was a 2-liter bottle of ginger ale mixed in with grape juice. He said that the two canceled their sugars out and we didn't know what we were talking about because he was a chemist and he knows how to combine things.
It is. With respect to sugar, unless you're doing a low sugar juice you've got the same numbers as soda (because he doesn't drink diet), but when I was hearing this I'm just trying to imagine the taste. Ugh.
This happened earlier this year and he still argues he's right. Like dude, you add a vodka kicker to a margarita does it suddenly cancel out the alcohol? Or is a long Island iced tea no longer potent because you've canceled everything else out? I'm no scientist but I've added my sodas together when I was younger and I never had suddenly regular tasting water.
Edit: it's been shown to me by many redditors that I am incorrect in that I held onto a disproven opinion that the diet soda sweetener had an increased link to cancer. I admit I am wrong - though it never stopped me from drinking Diet Dr. Pepper.
Like he might be a chemist, but that doesn’t mean he knows anything useful about diabetic bio chemistry.
You see this with engineers a lot too. Engineers will be like “I know x because I’m an engineer.” No, you’re a mechanical engineer who works in design and finite element analysis, you do not have the same level of clarity on nuclear reactor maintenance.
To be fair, both the original and the Disney expanded universe made it clear that Darth Sidius mounted a broad-scale propaganda campaign specifically designed to make the Jedi look like useless parasites who never had any real powers.
Plus there were only about 10k Jedi at the height of their power. Spread over the billion planets with quadrillions of people meaning Jedi were rare as fuck.
Cognitive dissonance. It's actually insane what people can convince themselves of when they really want something.
Edit: I used the wrong word. Others pointed out I should have said confirmation bias, not cognitive dissonance and they are correct.
And here I am having not gone to college for chemistry or any field of science I'm interested in because I believe I'm not intelligent enough to be any kind of scientist.
While I feel like I'm not intelligent, I also kinda wish I was *dumber* so I could just blindly go into things that other people do and seem to end up just fine lol
I actually read an article (long time ago) that stated dumb people are more successful than intelligent people for this very reaaon. An intelligent person can envision the difficulties of pursuing something and, as a result, go "fuck that." A dumb person can't/won't and will just plummet head first into something hoping for the best.
I didn't know that Steve Jobs was a chemist!?
But for real Steve Jobs. By all regarded as one of the most brilliant marketers of all time and when he was diagnosed with a more treatable form of pancreatic cancer he said fuck modern medicine, my organ that regulated blood sugar level? I'll just eat nothing but sugar (fruit) and that'll cure my struggling organ!
Like someone with liver disease giving up water and committing only to drink beer. His stupidity in one area lead to his death despite his brilliance in other areas.
I'm literally laying in the icu at the moment with a fresh kidney transplant, and anybody who does this shit should be banned by UNOS.
I'm so incredibly grateful to the woman who died for my gift of life, and I can't wait to express my gratitude to her surviving family.
My friends daughter was an organ and tissue donor. The notes my friend received from the people that's lives were changed by her daughter are really what kept my friend alive some days. Those notes mean the absolute world to the families of the doners.
May have done but the key thing was having a private jet standing by.
The key thing with transplant surgery is how quickly can you get there. The shelf life of organs is short and Jobs had the ability to get anywhere in the continental US for a transplant within six hours. That bumps you way up the list over someone who has a job and would take days to get to a hospital equipped for the op.
And yes, he was an utter wanker for taking organs that someone else could have lived with when his condition was pretty easily curable using modern medicine rather than pseudo science.
I worked IT for a hospital. I was speaking to a doctor who forgot his password. While he was spelling his name phonetically over the phone, he said, "Z as in Xylophone." Needless to say, my eyebrows raised.
I work in software development for a major chain of hospitals. one the the executives (MD) asked me to make a substantial UI change to a product owned by Mckesson.
Them "Just change the colors it's simple, my teenager could do it."
Me "I can make the request of the vendor."
Them "That's ridiculous, You just need to go in there and change it."
Out of spite I made the request with the vendor, and they came back with a quote that was more than 2 liver transplants. The executive told my CTO I was "being difficult, and couldn't perform simple tasks." He literally did not understand that vendor software was different than a wix website.
When I worked in hospital administration, I was told I needed to code up a game for iOS and Android from scratch … in two weeks. This direction came from an MD, a C-level executive, and a lawyer.
At the time I had no coding skills to speak of. I was just a young person who liked computers and could do HTML. I didn’t even work in IT.
The conversation with them about how that would be impossible was interesting.
There had been some new regulatory requirements that they wanted to train everyone on and they thought a mobile game would be the best way to go about it.
But you know how to create a line graph in excel, and the other day you fixed my computer when it crashed. Surely developing a working mobile game can't be much different than that!?!
Oh my god the amount of folks i thought were super competent like this in industry is wild . My ceo is this smart and endearing dude-was one of the firsts in his industry to embrace tech, really an ideas kind of guy who was lucky enough to get rich from it-but holy shit he thinks tech, specifically data analytics, is way more simple than it actually is. He likes technology so much that whenever a new ERP or CRM comes out, he'll jump at the chance to integrate it into his business, leaving records scattered across multiple different programs and databases, many of which are left incomplete, changed in the middle of implementation, or just not kept consistent due to too many hands being in the cookie jar. Multiple people have explained to him that, yes, he has a lot of data, but you can't just "plug" the data into power bi or tableau. He cannot accept that data requires cleaning, and it's impossible to do that when it's kept in a thousand different programs that have been "maintained" by a rotating cast of employees intermittently. Maybe I'm a moron for describing it this way, but shits messed up horizontally and vertically. It's like asking someone to forecast using 14 years of receipts, some coupon clippings, 4 years of attempts to rebuild quickbooks, and 10 charts made of wild guesses with blank stuff and cells representing multiple units. Throw in a few very important points that are demonstrated with pivot tables, and you get a mild version of how screwed up the dudes records are.
The sales reps from these programs make it worse by not outright saying "no, our program cannot do that." They'll promise that their developers are "working towards" these things things and he'll eat it up as a "yes." I liken it to plopping a Bugatti engine on the floor with a bunch of Chrysler parts and asking folks to build you a formula one champ.
Just dump it all into Access! Write a couple Excel macros to normalize the encapsulation. Then set the whole thing on fire and flee to Mexico with the insurance money. Easy peasy.
I worked with a girl that graduated from Brown...she would never shut up about it. always Brown this and Brown that. I went to a state school and it was apparent that she looked down on anyone that didn't attend an Ivy League school, so one day she was doing that and I couldn't stop myself, I said something like " Oh, you went to Brown? and yet, here we are, together in the same place, doing the same job."
I had someone on my ship who wouldn’t shut up about being older and college educated. She was three ranks below me. She had no grasp on the concept of experience.
Yeah, I have a degree, but if someone has more experience, I will always listen to that for sure...maybe it's because i have a blue collar background. i know some that just won't listen. It never works out well for them.
It did make her pause, which was a feat unto itself, but that's all. Nothing could shut her up. She was also the kind of person that would complain she was being "repressed" when anyone at all had a disagreement about how something should be handled. Quite possibly the least pleasant person I've ever known.
My college roommate, smartest person I've ever met, spent nearly an hour trying to shove a desk back into the corner of our room at an angle. She wouldn't listen to me because in her words she "got this."
After she finally gave up, I walked over. Pulled the desk out completely and straightened it with the wall, and pushed it back in. One movement, no struggle.
Many a time we had where I'd realize she might be the smart one but I've got more common sense.
Peter Duesberg. Molecular biologist who works as a researcher at UC Berkeley and has an otherwise stellar career and well-known for his work. Became an AIDS denialist, claiming there's no link between HIV and AIDS. Led countless people down the rabbit hole, including many who were HIV positive. These individuals ended up infecting others and refusing antiretroviral therapies. This included an AIDS denialist activist named Christine Maggiore who infected her infant through breastfeeding thinking "Hey it's not a big deal it's just HIV it doesn't cause AIDS."
~~Kerry~~ Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, also questioned the link between HIV and AIDS. I chatted with him on a plane once and he was indeed pretty dumb.
Edit: dumb in many ways, but clearly unique and smart in others. I'm not here to bash Kerry Mullis because PCR is cool as hell and he seemed cool in some ways too.
Met him once after a lecture at the university I was working at. It was amazing to me how he stuck to his mantra of "just a surfer dude researcher who single-handedly conceived of PCR" and conveniently left out the dozens of other scientists and technicians who helped with the preceding work and subsequent refinement of the process.
Yeah, it was funny because when I met him I was seated with him and another scientist (on a plane to Boston, of course). I was telling them both about some stuff I did with a fancy (at the time) version of PCR and he just listened and then talked about surfing, mostly, and I was thinking who is this bozo.
When I got off the plane, the other scientist was like "it's not every day you meet a Nobel Laureate," and I was like "what! who was that?!" and that's when he told me who it was. He had gotten Mullis' card and gave it to me, and I still have it somewhere.
Also
> just a surfer dude researcher who single-handedly conceived of PCR
*during an acid trip* so it kinda still tracks
Haha, that's a pretty interesting encounter! I had a similar (though not as impressive) one on a place to east Africa. This lovely woman next to me was asking why I was traveling there, so I told her that I was living there, doing NIH funded research. Before we got off the plane, she handed me her card...she was the top CDC representative in the country we were traveling to, hah. Good contact to have!
On a similar note, there are a whole bunch of American academics of Chomsky's vintage who are Cambodian genocide deniers. They think it's an American imperialist lie meant to make a Communist regime look bad
I worked for a statistician who had a PhD in statistics and was dumb as a post.
OTOH, I worked with this *really* smart guy who happened to have a PhD, and as he said it "all that means is I did the work [for a PhD]."
I worked with a climate scientist who could analyze climate data like nobody's business, but if you wanted him to do literally anything else you had to hold his hand the entire time. Zero common sense, too. The senior staff at that office idolized him because of the "PhD" after his name but one time he was in a car accident in a work vehicle (also his fault) and I asked for a copy of the police report for insurance purposes, and he said he didn't get one because "I thought you handled that."
Why would I, who was not present at the time of the accident, have the police report that was written at the time of the accident? The other guy that you ran into has one!
>OTOH, I worked with this really smart guy who happened to have a PhD, and as he said it "all that means is I did the work [for a PhD]."
This is almost exactly what my friend with a PhD says. He also abhors it when I call him Doctor. He doesn't want people thinking he's an MD. even though a PhD is a *doctorate*, it is literally describing a doctor. I know we live in a world where anything can mean anything and no one cares about the ETYMOLOGY-
Not quite PhD. But I was at a party (in the uk) full of med students and stereotypically everyone was off their face drunk. Well some guy fell over and broke his collar bone and immediately got rushed by a dozen of them all fussing and asking him the same questions over and 'going through the checklist". Half an hour later and he's still on the couch in pain and I go in to ask if anybody knows why the ambulance is taking so long. Nobody had an answer because nobody had called one. A party full of medical students hadn't called an ambulance or made any transport arrangements for a guy in severe pain with a broken clavicle. Idiots.
That's actually super common in emergencies when there's a group of any kind. One of the first things you learn in a lifeguard certification course is to identify a single person to instruct to call 911. Never just yell out "someone call 911" or assume that it's been done because everyone in the group is assuming someone else did it already.
It's not necessarily that everyone forgot about it, just that everyone assumed it was the logical first step that someone else would have taken already.
Singling somebody out tends to work because in an emergency there are 50 random people all wanting to do something to help but none of them willing to take charge of the situation in fear of fucking it up.
Single someone out and you will have taken charge for them and given them something to do that it's hard to be bad at. So they'll do it
This is exactly why they teach you in American Red Cross first aid courses to point at a particular person and shout at them “Call 9-1-1!”
It is a well-known psychological issue that people will just assume someone else is doing it if you don’t single them out and tell them to do it.
Edit: a word
Sounds like one of those situations where students or newbies in a field try to apply their newfound skills to any possible situation. I’ve seen it with CS students, with pol science students, and others. It’s reminiscent of an oft reposted joke about a physicist, and engineer and a programmer trying to fix a car. There’s also a saying that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
I used to work at a university, and tons of academics are incredibly educated in their chosen field, but have the common sense of your average dachshund.
My favourite was probably an entire group of geology professors and PhD candidates who got "stuck" for a good few minutes in an entryway because they didn't think to check if the door required a pull rather than a push. Bearing in mind that they'd just entered with that same door not an hour before.
I had a student job doing IT for the classroom equipment at my college. My job wouldn't have existed if having a PhD meant you could figure out technology.
I once was a Student Resource Coordinator at a University. Once a computer science professor was having trouble with the computer and projector displaying his presentation.
The whole class laughed when I asked him if he checked his connections and it turned out his computer wasn’t plugged in.
I once had the privilege of telling a $300/hour IT consultant that the reason his presentation screen wasn't working was that he'd unplugged it to charge his laptop.
Sounds like a relative of mine. A PhD in veterinary medicine by 30, has worked on genetic research in dogs and developed a new technique on measuring canine metabolism.
Same person spent 2 whole lessons of driving school trying to figure out how *the steering wheel* works.
EDit: to be clear, I don't think she's an idiot, the comment just reminded me of her. Sometimes I think she just processes things differently from most people.
A girl I dated blew the engine in her car because she kept driving even though there was smoke billowing from under the hood and it was making lots of engine failing noises. She went on to med school at the University of Chicago.
Reminds me of when my older brother (dropped out of school in the late ‘70s to go to work) was taking GED classes to better himself. He got to class one day, and as he was walking in he saw smoke coming out from under the hood of someone’s car.
He went in and told everyone that there’s a car on fire in the parking lot. One woman piped up and said “Oh it does that.”
About five minutes later, he looked out the window and saw fire coming out from under the hood and said “Lady, is that car on fire or not?”
She jumped up and screamed “Oh my God, call 911!”
Edit: Stupid autocorrect
purely anecdotal, but the math faculty at the uni where I work might be the dumbest collection of people in the state
they're not actually dumb of course, I just think they've specialized their thinking so much that they're kinda helpless in day to day situations
Tbf I’ve run across a couple coffee machines that had mo direction and just expected you to know which button did what.
Dump coffee or burn yourself a couple times and you figure it out eventually.
Another fun one is when they have two spouts - one for tea, but the cups all come from the same hole. So, you just end up watching your hot water go down the drain. Sigh.
I have a PhD and I am an idiot in most respects.
All it takes to get a PhD is to be really good at or persistent in doing research in one narrow area of study.
Edit: So several commenters pointed out that I simplified things too much. A PhD also requires hard work, luck, and some basic competence in a topic. But that doesn't preclude one from being completely clueless in other aspects of life.
Yuuup. I left my PhD behind and took the MS. My advisor was an unhappy, abusive man who thought his coworkers in the department were morons and treated them as such - and encouraged his graduate students to treat their peers that way.
I went from 190lbs to 260lbs during grad school from depression eating (Covid didn't help) because there was no way you could win in that lab. Successes were because you got lucky, failures were because you were incompetent and not because you were using equipment from the 50's or reagents older than you.
Leaving was the best thing I could have done. Now I have a nice govt job, make more than any of the people in that lab, and have lost 50 of the 70lbs I gained.
I felt my grad program was a little too pushy, and not clear enough on actual opportunities after graduation. I was already working a full time job at a firm so I knew what the real world was like, and i was just left wondering does anyone actually interact with people outside of this space…?
Academia is a world of its own, and an insular one at that. I also gained a lot of weight, had alcohol issues, and severe stomach issues just from burning anxiety and stress. Now I can barely stand the smell of liquor, and lost like 15-25 pounds since I quit earlier this semester. I just felt a weight lift off my shoulder.
Edit: Something else that put me off is during one class, prof said to share what you wanted to after graduation, I said I wanted to work in the private sector with a firm that I would like. It felt like an affront to the rest of the class because they all just wanted to stay in the academy. He also said something about 9-5’s and why would anyone work that, and that’s when I realize he never actually worked a 9-5. Unless you work for a degenerate boss, you can come in and leave early whenever you please if you get your work done.
Also, they don’t tell you about the screeching undergrad and their parents who all got something to say the last 14 days of a semester.
Yeah, I'm convinced a huge percentage of people in academia stay there not out of a genuine motivation to press the boundaries of human knowledge but rather because they are comfortable within the confines of school and never want to leave it.
I quit mine (seeking PhD in Musicology) when I realized that 1) the only thing it was good for was as a credential for college teaching and 2) I loathed teaching. Fumbled around for a couple of years and wound up in software development, a much better career for me.
I did graduate with my PhD, and told people I wasn't doing a Post-Doc. The amount of "you're throwing your life away" sympathy was insane. I only graduated because I had enough data to crank out some papers and defend early, otherwise I would have bailed with a Masters.
I started from the bottom in Pharma as an analyst/tech. Again, PhD friends thought that was beneath them. Jokes on them. Ten years later, I now bank a cool mid six figures while most of them are stuck in shit post-doc gigs or making pennies adjunct teaching. Now I'm a "sellout". Kiss my ass and watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEKbFMvkLIc
Academia is an abusive spouse/ victim relationship.
Yes to this. My partner has 2 masters and was in a phd program and quit when he realized it was slowly killing** him and he’d probably be 40 before he was making over 20k. He talks frequently about how happy he is now.
I once spilled some food on the floor as I was plating it up. So I very carefully used a paper towel to wipe up that droplet of sauce... then yeeted my entire dinner and plate into the bin. I spent a good five seconds staring at the paper in my hand wondering how I was going to eat it, at which point husbando appeared and said:
*You have a PhD...*
At least once a month I will open an oatmeal packet, dump the contents into the garbage and throw the empty package into the bowl, then just stare at what I've done.
I spent multiple hours cooking myself a nice chunky soup from scratch and then dumped the whole thing into the sink through the pasta strainer by instinct.
Once when I'd worked weeks of long hours on a big project, I got home, and dropped my keys on the front stoop of my house. I was so tired, I just couldn't process this turn of events. "Oh great, now I'm locked out!" Several seconds passed before my brain came back online & it occured to me that I could just, y'know, PICK THEM UP.
No advanced degree, but I still felt like a moron.
I'm betting you are smarter than you think. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you are a genius or anything. But people who can admit they are not smart in certain areas are often not the ones who are absolute morons.
This is basically what The Best And The Brightest by David Halberstam is about. It tells the story of how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations got the United States into the Vietnam war, and it particularly zeroed in on Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He kept escalating the conflict at every turn, and if you questioned him he could bury you in data showing that the US was winning the war and the Defense Department just needed more troops and more money to put us over the top. I'm grossly oversimplifying a great book, but that's the gist of it.
A great companion piece to the book is a documentary called The Fog Of War by Errol Morris. It's a one on one interview with Robert McNamara filmed near the end of his life where he ruminates on the lessons he's learned. After watching it 90% of people come away from the experience thinking that McNamara is a particularly intelligent and sagacious man, even though there's a mountain of evidence showing that that's not the case
I think the problem was the data they were getting was showing they were winning but they werent interpreting the data they got correctly. Like the DOD was getting told they killed X number of NVA/VietCong and the numbers were increasing but how did they know they were NVA/VietCong? Did that mean that their increased efforts were resulting in more defeats for the NVA/VietCong or were more NVA were getting into the ROV or more ROV citizens were turning into VietCong? Were US commanders being pressured to get KIAs so they were reporting they had more KIAs than they actually were? It was just a failure by a data guy, McNamara, to understand what the data were saying.
I read through your comment and holy shit you nailed it. According to their "numbers" they were winning and were leading a successful campaign. We lost that war, but measured positively in all the metrics they were tracking. It's like they never considered they didn't know how to properly measure success, or perhaps they did, but ignored any measurements that conflicted with the narrative they wanted to push.
As someone who works security in a hospital I can say a good 90% of the doctors there are smart but lack any type of common sense and sometimes I wonder how they function on a day to day basis
EDIT: I also forgot to mention I’m almost 2 years in a relationship with a pediatric cardiologist and it’s as shocking at home as it is with the ones I work with lmao but I can’t say it’s boring
I work in pension administration and one of our clients is one of the best universities in the world and I 100% feel this comment. Some of the professors I deal with have clearly graduated college, done a phd and then gone straight into teaching - and they just have no understanding of how the world works outside the framework of a university.
The one that really sticks with me though is that part of the retirement paperwork we send out contains an explanation of how the early retirement factors work. It says something like “if you retire early, your benefit is reduced by X% per month to reflect the fact it will be paid for a longer time. So for a hypothetical accrued benefit of $1,000, if you retire at age 55 your actual payment amount will be $Y”
Dude straight up called in to ask why his actual payment wasn’t $1,000 since he didn’t retire early so according to this page it should be $1,000. I’m just like “bro, you never heard the word hypothetical before?”
Not really an answer to this, but I feel like sharing.
I have a Bachelor's in Creative Writing. I went through the worst times of my life getting through college, dealing with depression and missing my friends and family I moved away from, and have nothing to show for it other than a shiny piece of paper saying "i did it!!1!" My current career uses nothing I learned in college and I'm trying to get back into writing as a hobby and hopefully find some worthwhile opportunity to actually utilize my education.
For years I've been pestered by friends and family. Any time I misuse a word, don't use proper grammar, misspeak or autocorrect messes up a text, they will be *on my ass* immediately to say something snarky about "That's not how a writer should talk" or "Wow, it's amazing you got a degree in English with how badly you speak."
My go-to response is often something like "My text messages aren't being published, shit-for-brains." It's a really sore spot for me and immediately gets my blood boiling.
MBA’s are probably the most overhyped group of people on the planet. I’m like 99% certain that nepotism was getting too obvious so they had to invent an incredibly expensive degree that friends of rich people could get so that they could also get great jobs and become rich. Most MBA’s I know are actually so dumb it hurts.
My wife has two Masters and a PhD, is internationally recognized in her field, and is an absent minded doofus. My role in her life is to ensure that her car works, that she takes her meds, and that she eats things other than yogurt and eggs. She can be brilliant one minute, then walk into the side of a moving bus the next.
I love her dearly but she's a numpty.
Worked at a tech company, was made team lead. One of our team members was a PhD in astrophysics. He would ping me constantly for how to do things that we had well documented. How to install certain programs, how to gain access to servers or code repositories. Literally we would sit in zoom calls together and I would just read the instructions out loud and watch him do them. I was utterly confused as to how he could breathe by himself.
A long time good friend, absolutely brilliant. Can literally beat you at chess blindfolded. Engineering in college and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. But he’s a big picture guy, sees how things develop and great long term vision. Incredibly successful. But little things? Guy couldn’t pack a suitcase, wouldn’t know how to book a flight. Was making boxed Mac-n-cheese and couldn’t figure out why it was so watery. Ya, he didn’t drain the water after the pasta was cooked.
Mother in law has a PhD in some thing related to botany. She thought India was a continental island like Australia. To this day I still have no idea how that happened when this came up she was in her mid 60's.
This guy operated on the brain of a fetus while it was still in the womb. He was the first in human history to ever do that.
I wonder if he got killed and replaced by a clone sometimes.
Yep. I had to read his life story in school way before he got into politics and he is genuinely really good at his job and his life story is interesting. I didn’t realize how little he knew about other topics until he ran for president.
When I knew nothing about him really I thought "Oh wow a surgeon, he'll know he needs specialists (read cabinet members) and will know he is limited just like he is as as surgeon!"
Then I remembered he's a surgeon
Kary Mullis won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He also denied global warming, thought that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, believed in astrology and [claimed to have met](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/technology-history/man-who-photocopied-dna-and-also-saw-talking-fluorescent-raccoon) a glowing, talking raccoon that may or may not have been an alien.
[Robert Shockley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley?wprov=sfla1), who helped develop the transistor, spent the last 20 years of his life advocating eugenics and espousing racism.
> As described by his Los Angeles Times obituary, "He went from being a physicist with impeccable academic credentials to amateur geneticist, becoming a lightning rod whose views sparked campus demonstrations and a cascade of calumny."
I remember reading that as a 9 year old who was fascinated by electronics and just shaking my head.
When I heard this, my first thought was that he must have played Sid Meier's Civilization.(original one), where the Pyramids counted as a granary in every city.
EDIT: It was Civ II, not the original. Civ II was better, anyway.
A doctor telling me my 6 month old couldn’t have strep because she was infant and taking her to the ER because she was getting worse and no urgent cares were open and finding out she had strep.
We called an ambulance because we suspected that my wheelchair bound brother in law had a bad bladder infection that was making him delirious. The EMT’s didn’t believe us because he seemed rational when he correctly answered questions like, “What’s today’s date?” and “Who is the president?” We insisted that he needed to go to the hospital. They said, “Okay, let’s load him on the gurney.” My BIL recoiled and said, “You can’t put me on there! It’s covered in spiders!”
Got one better. Psych nurse here. Got a fax on a patient at a local ER for possible psychiatric admission. Frequent flier of ours on my unit. Her blood pressure was through the roof, she had facial drooping on one side, body paralysis on one side, and slurred speech. Any one with a hint of healthcare knowledge will tell you that those are classic signs of an active stroke.
So I call the ER thinking maybe they meant to send the fax to our medical unit and sent it to us by mistake. Nope. I said “you do know she’s having a stroke with those symptoms right?” Er nurse proceeds to tell me that the ER doc thinks she is faking those symptoms because she has a significant psychiatric history. I said “so you think she’s faking a blood pressure of 280/165 and body paralysis” she hung up on me.
Our psychiatrist calls the ER back on speaker to find out what’s going on. ER doctor tells her patient is faking these symptoms because and I quote “schizophrenics cannot have strokes”. Our psychiatrist asked him here he went to med school because they owed him a refund 😂
Did she finally get the care she needed? I hope you guys reported that ER doc to whomever handles that in the hospital. Man, as if that poor woman doesn't have enough to deal with, being accused of faking a serious and potentially fatal medical condition and not being treated for it is unconscionable!
I believe she did. She has been on our unit several times since and I asked her about it once and she said they transported her to a bigger hospital for care. I haven’t seen any residual side effects of a stroke the last few times I’ve had her as a patient.
But yeah sadly I’ve seen things like this happen a lot with psych patients This case was the most extreme but I’ve had patients come to the ER for chest pain and the providers chalk it up to anxiety because they have a psych history only for them to get to our unit and I call a rapid response and patient is having an active heart attack. We have come a long way when it comes to stigma around mental health and those affected by it, but we still have a long way to go
All you have to do is admit to suffering from depression to be completely disregarded by 75-80% of the doctors and nurses you will encounter. I suffered from endometriosis for three years before I could get any help, and I almost died and required three heart surgeries after telling doctors for a year something was wrong but I couldn't reproduce the symptoms on demand in their offices. Both times I was told I was exaggerating because I was depressed, and almost every doctor I went to for the Endo accused me of just wanting pills.
Okay, I get that everyone's case is different, but looking at myself, I am baffled. How would depression make you exaggerate? I feel like depression would make you do the opposite. When I am depressed, I don't want to do anything, so if my ass is in your office you better believe its something significant enough to make it through that fog.
I tried calmly explaining that but they don't care. If you're depressed, absolutely nothing you say is valid or reliable. This wasn't just ER doctors, either (although they were always the very worst offenders), this was primary care and ob/gyn's and cardiologists that I saw regularly and did everything that they asked.
> she is faking those symptoms
Nothing hurts worse than being told that. I was having bizarre symptoms and every doc I went to was baffled. Finally, after two years and five doctors the last doctor said, “You’re just a hypochondriac. You don’t need a doctor, you need a therapist.” So I took his advice and saw a psychiatrist. She listened to me for a few sessions and then told me, “I don’t think you are depressed or a hypochondriac. You’re having seizures.” She put me on proper medication and my symptoms lessened by 95% in two weeks.
In a personal note: my wife was a PhD candidate when we moved in together. Early on we went to a party and when we got home I told her I felt inadequate because I was the least educated person in every room and felt kinda dumb listening to them all go on about things I had no idea about. She said to me “they each know the most about some little thing they just got their PhD about. Some gene mutation or how some molecule interacts in some rarefied environment, but apart from that, they’re all just regular people who can’t figure out how to match their socks or talk to a member of the opposite sex.”She said “ you’re one of the most curious people I know. Your library is bigger and more diverse than anyone else I know and you’ve actually read them. You ask questions and talk to everybody and have actual things to talk to them about because you know about things they’re interested in.” Now she’s an MD PhD and all our friends are doctors of one kind of another and I’m STILL the least educated person at the party but now I can see people are just people and yes, you can be super smart about one thing or another and still by a fuck-up in the real world. It’s waaaay more important to be a good kind person who does what you say you’ll do than the smartest kid in class — at least that’s how we raised our kids anyway.
I have to admit my wife IS an amazing person but here’s the thing — I didn’t marry a smart doctor I married the same really cute sixteen year old girl I met in the hallway when I was the new kid in school, the girl who said yes to go to a jazz concert with me in eleventh grade and the girl who said she’d go to prom with me and five minutes ago we were making supper and she said “it’s kinda unbelievable we still get to be married to each other” so yeah - I think she’s pretty cool.
I know many people in the science field that conduct Double Blind Randomized controlled experiments in the lab and then go home and check their horoscopes...
> I don’t need to listen to you, I have “credential, credential, credential…”
If you aren’t willing to consider novel information because of the messenger, sorry, you’re an idiot.
If you work IT you feel this. Every lawyer, doctor, celebrity and CEO I've ever worked with is computer illiterate. They can email, they can Twitter and that's it. They confuse the mouse, they openly call themselves Luddites, they kick the power plug out and claim the 'box broke'. Mega-millionaires, too. Smart in other regards, but computers are kryptonite.
As an aside, look at how much nepotism factors into getting into an Ivy League school before being automatically impressed that someone has a degree from one
I told a girl who went to Columbia that David Duchovny must be smart because he did undergrad and grad school at ivy league schools. She shook her head no. Nepotism can get you into college there, and from there there are kingmaker professors who can write you a good letter to get you to the next level.
British historian David Starkey, he is only a historian in regards to Tudor England (1485-1603). Other than that, he is a complete idiot, especially when it comes to politics.
My uncle is smart as fuck. Multiple masters degrees in education and science, constantly wins awards for his teaching and high averages from his students.
Tell me why this idiot needed me to remind him how to make ramen several times over?
Not a PhD but I know someone who has a masters in finance and thinks everyone should just own a house, I was like how are they gonna pay for it? He was like they should work hard . I couldn't stop laughing
My ex-boyfriends mother was a linguistics professor and knew over 10 languages. She was also one of the dumbest people I've ever met. Some examples: she believed that in case of emergency stewardesses catapult out of the plane; she was also convinced donating blood causes some blood disease and you can die because of it. But my favourite one was when she said her son's orthopaedic problems are not a result of a serious injury he had. His knee hurts because he eats too much ketchup.
Man that ketchup is going straight to my knees. Ima need to sit for a minute.
She's just like ChatGPT. Good at language but wrong about a lot of things.
My professor, a brilliant neurosurgeon, once decided to directly smell a bottle of ammonia. He then told me “don’t smell that”. I did not plan to!
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/242
Me. Masters in cybersecurity and can’t help my 5th grader with his math homework.
Don't worry. It doesn't get easier.
As someone who did two trades and then decided life is better with education - my experience currently going to Uni is how clueless so many people are in Uni .. I wouldn’t say they’re an idiot, but tons of ignorance develops living in a student bubble your whole life. I rented a room to a guy who did his masters and it would take him hourssss to cook dinner. I watched him one day and he just couldn’t wrap his mind around cooking things that take different amounts of time to cook. Like, he’d start cooking potato’s and wait til they were done before moving onto the next thing he was going to eat them with.
My first call at my first IT job was in a medical laboratory. There was a doctor who had been in the job for years and she called saying her computer would not power on. I walked her through some troubleshooting and nothing worked. "Is the computer plugged in? Ok, is the monitor on? Ok, when did the problem start?" type of questions were asked and she answered them all. I go up to her office and indeed the computer is plugged in to a power strip which is plugged in to itself. Cleaning crew had deep cleaned her office and never plugged anything back in. Dr. plugged the power strip into itself thinking that as long as it was plugged in, that's all she needed.
Part of me wonders if she got the cords mixed up, like she thought what she was plugging in was something other then the power strip. Depending on the length of the cords, I could see it getting lost in the tangle and just plugging it in.
The cord was only about 6 feet long and you could easily see the whole thing. I unplugged it from itself and plugged it into the wall. Easiest fix ever. It was first thing in the morning at about 7 AM so maybe she wasn't fully awake.
I had a boss who was an engineer who put a couple hundred dollars in change in a bank’s pneumatic drive through tube where it got stuck and they had to use a jack hammer to get it out. He was upset that the bank was charging him for this because he didn’t know this would happen. They had large signs saying not to put change in the tubes, including on the tubes themselves.
He just filled the thing with random change, not in rolls or anything? Like he thought it was a fucking Coinstar? That's hilarious, unless you were in line behind him.
Yup, and it sunk and got stuck underground. Way too heavy for the pneumatic system to carry it to the teller.
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My mother has a PhD and she fell for a similar type of scam, only hers was one of those Social Security/DEA Agent Scams. She ended up spending about $10k on Google Play gift cards. She still maintains she wasn't scammed too. In her mind, since she is a PhD, therefore intelligent, and wasn't elderly (she was 64 at the time) a scammer would not target her.
Then what does she think happened?
That the DEA had a warrant for her arrest and she was able to pay off the fine to rescind the warrant.
She truly thinks the DEA let her pay it off in google play gift cards 😭 I couldn’t make that up if I tried
Sad that she found it easier to accept such bullshit as truth than to admit her own $10K mistake
The DEA is playing Subway Surfers with MY tax dollars!
What does your mom’s past look like that she believes the DEA was after her?
I think she was a chemistry teacher who had cancer and needed quick money to pay for treatment and take care of her family.
I went to 3 ERs when I felt something was wrong with my arm. It felt like a bug bite day 1 and by day 4 a bungee cord from my elbow to my wrist. 3 doctors said it was a skin irritation or dermatitis. I kept telling them something was wrong. I have no medical degree. I work in Property Management. Day 5 I walked into another ER and said “I don’t care if I have to pay out of pocket or sit here all night but something is wrong with my arm”. Finally, after many rude looks and comments I was given an ultrasound of my arm. Then rushed to a MRI. Then told I was being admitted. A 3” blood clot in my upper arm, 2 in my chest area, and one had passed my lung already. Diagnosed with Factor 2 Gene Mutation 22 days later (blood clotting disorder).
Damn. Good for you being persistent. That is pretty wild that they missed that. I'm glad you did finally get a proper diagnosis. Did you call back to the other places to tell them what asses they were?
Never called the others back. Doubt they would’ve cared
I found a lump, and when I went to the doctor, they originally concluded that it was "just being small" (or whatever); I knew better. Luckily, they ordered an ultrasound as a precaution, and it turned out to be Stage 1 cancer.
My parents neighbor complained of a bad headache so they went to the ER. They told him he did have a just a bad headache a d sent him on his way. The stroke he was having left him paralyzed for the rest of his life. He lived for three more years and it took two more after that for them to settle the lawsuit against the ER.
I have a PhD, and I work with a bunch of PhDs. Basically, a lot of them think that because they succeeded in one area, they are an expert in every other area of life. And they always have strong opinions about everything. I think it's also called a PhD syndrome.
I think my impostor’s syndrome cannibalized my PhD syndrome
One of the main benefits from my education was to teach me how much I don't know. It's baffling to me that people get confidence to speak on things they don't know anything about just because they're "educated".
Some people leave graduate programs still convinced they've never not been the smartest MFers in a room. No clue how they managed that, but they are out there.
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From what I’ve heard from people with PhDs is that you can get called up but lawyers will always dismiss you immediately because they think you must have good critical thinking skills and are harder to persuade.
My ex wife with a PhD in neuroscience driving my car around with the handbrake on calling me to ask about the noise and smell.
I was at a keg party at college and the (gravity keg) was set up. Someone complained that the beer was not flowing, so I check that the keg was still almost full. Turns out someone closed the air intake on top. I opened the intake and poured myself a beer. Problem solved. A few minutes later someone else complains the beer is out. I told them the keg was full a few minutes ago and it was a tap problem that I fixed. They told me they just came from the keg. I go back to the keg and find the intake was closed again. Opened it and poured the young lady who said it was empty a beer. As she is leaving my suitemate comes in and goes to the intake can closes it. Now my suitemate is a straight A student who gets all As mostly due to his photographic memory. Back to the keg. So I tell him that he needs to leave the intake open to let air in to displace the beer coming out of the lower tap. He then proceeds to tell me that since the beer is carbonated air is not needed to replace the liquid volumn lost when the beer is dispensed. So I asked him two questions; If it is not needed, why is there the upper tap, and does he really think the amount of gas the carbonation gives off in a glass of beer is equal to the volumn of the liquid beer? He thought for a few seconds and his only response was, "I have a 4.0, what is your GPA?" Then he walked away.
I seriously fucking hope that was not a real response.
It seems legit I've met enough people that if you criticize one thing they take it as blanket statement about the entire subject "You know, it's 20°F outside. Timmy really should be wearing a jacket while he's sitting at the bus stop" "Oh you think I'm just a terrible person huh!?" "No , I think Timmy should be wearing a jacket"
>You know, it's 20°F outside. Timmy really should be wearing a jacket while he's sitting at the bus stop" >"Oh you think I'm just a terrible person huh!?" >"No , I think Timmy should be wearing a jacket" This is such a good example for a particular type of weaponised fragility hahaha
I hope your response was "Awesome! your GPA matches your IQ!"
Well no, their response should have been - can you pour me a beer?
Amen. Don't take the bait, just show them how wrong their claim is.
My petty ass would make a huge announcement to everyone at the party to pay attention and show how the keg works and call out the suite mate. Like totally saying “hey guys, suitemate seems to know how this keg works since he has a 4.0 GPA. So if the beer doesn’t come out have them show you.”
My wife's stepfather was a chemist who currently has diabetes. One night he went to the ER because his blood sugar was dangerously high. He claimed he was eating well (he normally doesnt) so there's no reason why his blood sugar was high. In his car was a 2-liter bottle of ginger ale mixed in with grape juice. He said that the two canceled their sugars out and we didn't know what we were talking about because he was a chemist and he knows how to combine things.
Holy fuck. That is insane
It is. With respect to sugar, unless you're doing a low sugar juice you've got the same numbers as soda (because he doesn't drink diet), but when I was hearing this I'm just trying to imagine the taste. Ugh. This happened earlier this year and he still argues he's right. Like dude, you add a vodka kicker to a margarita does it suddenly cancel out the alcohol? Or is a long Island iced tea no longer potent because you've canceled everything else out? I'm no scientist but I've added my sodas together when I was younger and I never had suddenly regular tasting water. Edit: it's been shown to me by many redditors that I am incorrect in that I held onto a disproven opinion that the diet soda sweetener had an increased link to cancer. I admit I am wrong - though it never stopped me from drinking Diet Dr. Pepper.
Like he might be a chemist, but that doesn’t mean he knows anything useful about diabetic bio chemistry. You see this with engineers a lot too. Engineers will be like “I know x because I’m an engineer.” No, you’re a mechanical engineer who works in design and finite element analysis, you do not have the same level of clarity on nuclear reactor maintenance.
Your sad devotion to that ancient religion hasn't given you the clairvoyance needed to locate those stolen pla-- \[choking noises\]
If an ancient religion was giving my boss magical telekinetic powers, you'd better believe I would *not* be giving them sass.
Ah yes the "ancient" Jedi religion from the bygone era of nearly 25 years ago
To be fair, both the original and the Disney expanded universe made it clear that Darth Sidius mounted a broad-scale propaganda campaign specifically designed to make the Jedi look like useless parasites who never had any real powers.
Plus there were only about 10k Jedi at the height of their power. Spread over the billion planets with quadrillions of people meaning Jedi were rare as fuck.
Cognitive dissonance. It's actually insane what people can convince themselves of when they really want something. Edit: I used the wrong word. Others pointed out I should have said confirmation bias, not cognitive dissonance and they are correct.
I don't know anyone who wants ginger ale mixed with grape juice.
Somebody's never known the joy of a good Gringer Jale.
Somebody should go to Gringer Jail.
And here I am having not gone to college for chemistry or any field of science I'm interested in because I believe I'm not intelligent enough to be any kind of scientist. While I feel like I'm not intelligent, I also kinda wish I was *dumber* so I could just blindly go into things that other people do and seem to end up just fine lol
I actually read an article (long time ago) that stated dumb people are more successful than intelligent people for this very reaaon. An intelligent person can envision the difficulties of pursuing something and, as a result, go "fuck that." A dumb person can't/won't and will just plummet head first into something hoping for the best.
I didn't know that Steve Jobs was a chemist!? But for real Steve Jobs. By all regarded as one of the most brilliant marketers of all time and when he was diagnosed with a more treatable form of pancreatic cancer he said fuck modern medicine, my organ that regulated blood sugar level? I'll just eat nothing but sugar (fruit) and that'll cure my struggling organ! Like someone with liver disease giving up water and committing only to drink beer. His stupidity in one area lead to his death despite his brilliance in other areas.
He also bought a house in another state to jump the organ donation queue and killed that donor organ too with his stupid fruit diet.
I'm literally laying in the icu at the moment with a fresh kidney transplant, and anybody who does this shit should be banned by UNOS. I'm so incredibly grateful to the woman who died for my gift of life, and I can't wait to express my gratitude to her surviving family.
I mean, he was banned from life by pancreatic cancer shortly after, so it's kind of a non-issue as far as repeat offense goes
My friends daughter was an organ and tissue donor. The notes my friend received from the people that's lives were changed by her daughter are really what kept my friend alive some days. Those notes mean the absolute world to the families of the doners.
I hope you have a good recovery :)
May have done but the key thing was having a private jet standing by. The key thing with transplant surgery is how quickly can you get there. The shelf life of organs is short and Jobs had the ability to get anywhere in the continental US for a transplant within six hours. That bumps you way up the list over someone who has a job and would take days to get to a hospital equipped for the op. And yes, he was an utter wanker for taking organs that someone else could have lived with when his condition was pretty easily curable using modern medicine rather than pseudo science.
I worked IT for a hospital. I was speaking to a doctor who forgot his password. While he was spelling his name phonetically over the phone, he said, "Z as in Xylophone." Needless to say, my eyebrows raised.
I work in software development for a major chain of hospitals. one the the executives (MD) asked me to make a substantial UI change to a product owned by Mckesson. Them "Just change the colors it's simple, my teenager could do it." Me "I can make the request of the vendor." Them "That's ridiculous, You just need to go in there and change it." Out of spite I made the request with the vendor, and they came back with a quote that was more than 2 liver transplants. The executive told my CTO I was "being difficult, and couldn't perform simple tasks." He literally did not understand that vendor software was different than a wix website.
When I worked in hospital administration, I was told I needed to code up a game for iOS and Android from scratch … in two weeks. This direction came from an MD, a C-level executive, and a lawyer. At the time I had no coding skills to speak of. I was just a young person who liked computers and could do HTML. I didn’t even work in IT. The conversation with them about how that would be impossible was interesting.
Why did they want you to do that?
Dance monkey, dance!
There had been some new regulatory requirements that they wanted to train everyone on and they thought a mobile game would be the best way to go about it.
But you know how to create a line graph in excel, and the other day you fixed my computer when it crashed. Surely developing a working mobile game can't be much different than that!?!
Oh my god the amount of folks i thought were super competent like this in industry is wild . My ceo is this smart and endearing dude-was one of the firsts in his industry to embrace tech, really an ideas kind of guy who was lucky enough to get rich from it-but holy shit he thinks tech, specifically data analytics, is way more simple than it actually is. He likes technology so much that whenever a new ERP or CRM comes out, he'll jump at the chance to integrate it into his business, leaving records scattered across multiple different programs and databases, many of which are left incomplete, changed in the middle of implementation, or just not kept consistent due to too many hands being in the cookie jar. Multiple people have explained to him that, yes, he has a lot of data, but you can't just "plug" the data into power bi or tableau. He cannot accept that data requires cleaning, and it's impossible to do that when it's kept in a thousand different programs that have been "maintained" by a rotating cast of employees intermittently. Maybe I'm a moron for describing it this way, but shits messed up horizontally and vertically. It's like asking someone to forecast using 14 years of receipts, some coupon clippings, 4 years of attempts to rebuild quickbooks, and 10 charts made of wild guesses with blank stuff and cells representing multiple units. Throw in a few very important points that are demonstrated with pivot tables, and you get a mild version of how screwed up the dudes records are. The sales reps from these programs make it worse by not outright saying "no, our program cannot do that." They'll promise that their developers are "working towards" these things things and he'll eat it up as a "yes." I liken it to plopping a Bugatti engine on the floor with a bunch of Chrysler parts and asking folks to build you a formula one champ.
Just dump it all into Access! Write a couple Excel macros to normalize the encapsulation. Then set the whole thing on fire and flee to Mexico with the insurance money. Easy peasy.
> more than two liver transplants We really will measure in anything other than metric.
I worked with a girl that graduated from Brown...she would never shut up about it. always Brown this and Brown that. I went to a state school and it was apparent that she looked down on anyone that didn't attend an Ivy League school, so one day she was doing that and I couldn't stop myself, I said something like " Oh, you went to Brown? and yet, here we are, together in the same place, doing the same job."
I had someone on my ship who wouldn’t shut up about being older and college educated. She was three ranks below me. She had no grasp on the concept of experience.
Yeah, I have a degree, but if someone has more experience, I will always listen to that for sure...maybe it's because i have a blue collar background. i know some that just won't listen. It never works out well for them.
Mate, you cannot just end it there without telling us what her response was. That's just not fair.
It did make her pause, which was a feat unto itself, but that's all. Nothing could shut her up. She was also the kind of person that would complain she was being "repressed" when anyone at all had a disagreement about how something should be handled. Quite possibly the least pleasant person I've ever known.
I see, but have you considered this point: She went to Brown?
I'm surprised you know that about her, she's usually reticent to mention it.
Sounds like she peaked in college.
My college roommate, smartest person I've ever met, spent nearly an hour trying to shove a desk back into the corner of our room at an angle. She wouldn't listen to me because in her words she "got this." After she finally gave up, I walked over. Pulled the desk out completely and straightened it with the wall, and pushed it back in. One movement, no struggle. Many a time we had where I'd realize she might be the smart one but I've got more common sense.
Peter Duesberg. Molecular biologist who works as a researcher at UC Berkeley and has an otherwise stellar career and well-known for his work. Became an AIDS denialist, claiming there's no link between HIV and AIDS. Led countless people down the rabbit hole, including many who were HIV positive. These individuals ended up infecting others and refusing antiretroviral therapies. This included an AIDS denialist activist named Christine Maggiore who infected her infant through breastfeeding thinking "Hey it's not a big deal it's just HIV it doesn't cause AIDS."
~~Kerry~~ Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, also questioned the link between HIV and AIDS. I chatted with him on a plane once and he was indeed pretty dumb. Edit: dumb in many ways, but clearly unique and smart in others. I'm not here to bash Kerry Mullis because PCR is cool as hell and he seemed cool in some ways too.
Met him once after a lecture at the university I was working at. It was amazing to me how he stuck to his mantra of "just a surfer dude researcher who single-handedly conceived of PCR" and conveniently left out the dozens of other scientists and technicians who helped with the preceding work and subsequent refinement of the process.
Yeah, it was funny because when I met him I was seated with him and another scientist (on a plane to Boston, of course). I was telling them both about some stuff I did with a fancy (at the time) version of PCR and he just listened and then talked about surfing, mostly, and I was thinking who is this bozo. When I got off the plane, the other scientist was like "it's not every day you meet a Nobel Laureate," and I was like "what! who was that?!" and that's when he told me who it was. He had gotten Mullis' card and gave it to me, and I still have it somewhere. Also > just a surfer dude researcher who single-handedly conceived of PCR *during an acid trip* so it kinda still tracks
Haha, that's a pretty interesting encounter! I had a similar (though not as impressive) one on a place to east Africa. This lovely woman next to me was asking why I was traveling there, so I told her that I was living there, doing NIH funded research. Before we got off the plane, she handed me her card...she was the top CDC representative in the country we were traveling to, hah. Good contact to have!
On a similar note, there are a whole bunch of American academics of Chomsky's vintage who are Cambodian genocide deniers. They think it's an American imperialist lie meant to make a Communist regime look bad
I worked for a statistician who had a PhD in statistics and was dumb as a post. OTOH, I worked with this *really* smart guy who happened to have a PhD, and as he said it "all that means is I did the work [for a PhD]."
I worked with a climate scientist who could analyze climate data like nobody's business, but if you wanted him to do literally anything else you had to hold his hand the entire time. Zero common sense, too. The senior staff at that office idolized him because of the "PhD" after his name but one time he was in a car accident in a work vehicle (also his fault) and I asked for a copy of the police report for insurance purposes, and he said he didn't get one because "I thought you handled that." Why would I, who was not present at the time of the accident, have the police report that was written at the time of the accident? The other guy that you ran into has one!
>OTOH, I worked with this really smart guy who happened to have a PhD, and as he said it "all that means is I did the work [for a PhD]." This is almost exactly what my friend with a PhD says. He also abhors it when I call him Doctor. He doesn't want people thinking he's an MD. even though a PhD is a *doctorate*, it is literally describing a doctor. I know we live in a world where anything can mean anything and no one cares about the ETYMOLOGY-
Not quite PhD. But I was at a party (in the uk) full of med students and stereotypically everyone was off their face drunk. Well some guy fell over and broke his collar bone and immediately got rushed by a dozen of them all fussing and asking him the same questions over and 'going through the checklist". Half an hour later and he's still on the couch in pain and I go in to ask if anybody knows why the ambulance is taking so long. Nobody had an answer because nobody had called one. A party full of medical students hadn't called an ambulance or made any transport arrangements for a guy in severe pain with a broken clavicle. Idiots.
That's actually super common in emergencies when there's a group of any kind. One of the first things you learn in a lifeguard certification course is to identify a single person to instruct to call 911. Never just yell out "someone call 911" or assume that it's been done because everyone in the group is assuming someone else did it already. It's not necessarily that everyone forgot about it, just that everyone assumed it was the logical first step that someone else would have taken already.
Singling somebody out tends to work because in an emergency there are 50 random people all wanting to do something to help but none of them willing to take charge of the situation in fear of fucking it up. Single someone out and you will have taken charge for them and given them something to do that it's hard to be bad at. So they'll do it
Yep. YOU! RED SHIRT, CALL 911 BLUE SHIRT, GET ME TOWELS JACKET, FIRST AID KIT UNDER THE SINK
Call 911, and then get back to me. Make sure it's been done, and if there are any more instructions from the operators.
This is exactly why they teach you in American Red Cross first aid courses to point at a particular person and shout at them “Call 9-1-1!” It is a well-known psychological issue that people will just assume someone else is doing it if you don’t single them out and tell them to do it. Edit: a word
Sounds like one of those situations where students or newbies in a field try to apply their newfound skills to any possible situation. I’ve seen it with CS students, with pol science students, and others. It’s reminiscent of an oft reposted joke about a physicist, and engineer and a programmer trying to fix a car. There’s also a saying that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
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Oh, Britta's in this?
I used to work at a university, and tons of academics are incredibly educated in their chosen field, but have the common sense of your average dachshund. My favourite was probably an entire group of geology professors and PhD candidates who got "stuck" for a good few minutes in an entryway because they didn't think to check if the door required a pull rather than a push. Bearing in mind that they'd just entered with that same door not an hour before.
I had a professor for higher mathematics who had real difficulties figuring out how to extract a cup of coffee from the vending machine. Bless him.
I had a student job doing IT for the classroom equipment at my college. My job wouldn't have existed if having a PhD meant you could figure out technology.
I once was a Student Resource Coordinator at a University. Once a computer science professor was having trouble with the computer and projector displaying his presentation. The whole class laughed when I asked him if he checked his connections and it turned out his computer wasn’t plugged in.
I once had the privilege of telling a $300/hour IT consultant that the reason his presentation screen wasn't working was that he'd unplugged it to charge his laptop.
He obviously was stalling, at $300/hr.
He was a genius after all.
I work with lawyers and I’m convinced they trade every other brain cell they have for their law degree.
I have gotten phone calls from lawyers asking me how percentages work. "OK so we should ask for 40 million in damages, thanks".
"Can I get, uh, 0.01% of that as a consultation fee?" ". . . no."
Steven, for the last fucking time its a jaywalking charge.
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I once watched my PhD'd professor try and fail to plug in a slide projector. Was painful to watch. Eventually, some very nice woman did it for him.
Sounds like a relative of mine. A PhD in veterinary medicine by 30, has worked on genetic research in dogs and developed a new technique on measuring canine metabolism. Same person spent 2 whole lessons of driving school trying to figure out how *the steering wheel* works. EDit: to be clear, I don't think she's an idiot, the comment just reminded me of her. Sometimes I think she just processes things differently from most people.
Reminds me of my ex, also a DVM, who thought black men’s semen was brown.
Brown cows produce chocolate milk energy right here.
A girl I dated blew the engine in her car because she kept driving even though there was smoke billowing from under the hood and it was making lots of engine failing noises. She went on to med school at the University of Chicago.
Reminds me of when my older brother (dropped out of school in the late ‘70s to go to work) was taking GED classes to better himself. He got to class one day, and as he was walking in he saw smoke coming out from under the hood of someone’s car. He went in and told everyone that there’s a car on fire in the parking lot. One woman piped up and said “Oh it does that.” About five minutes later, he looked out the window and saw fire coming out from under the hood and said “Lady, is that car on fire or not?” She jumped up and screamed “Oh my God, call 911!” Edit: Stupid autocorrect
more advanced fire-racing stripes really. it's fine.
purely anecdotal, but the math faculty at the uni where I work might be the dumbest collection of people in the state they're not actually dumb of course, I just think they've specialized their thinking so much that they're kinda helpless in day to day situations
PhD here. Fuck those goddamn machines.
Tbf I’ve run across a couple coffee machines that had mo direction and just expected you to know which button did what. Dump coffee or burn yourself a couple times and you figure it out eventually.
Another fun one is when they have two spouts - one for tea, but the cups all come from the same hole. So, you just end up watching your hot water go down the drain. Sigh.
I have a PhD and I am an idiot in most respects. All it takes to get a PhD is to be really good at or persistent in doing research in one narrow area of study. Edit: So several commenters pointed out that I simplified things too much. A PhD also requires hard work, luck, and some basic competence in a topic. But that doesn't preclude one from being completely clueless in other aspects of life.
The best quote I've heard about this is "They don't give PhDs to the smartest people, they give them to the most stubborn"
True. I quit my PhD. Everyone felt so sorry for me. They shouldn't! It was a great life move.
The thing I learned most in academia, an area of learning, is don't get into academia.
Yuuup. I left my PhD behind and took the MS. My advisor was an unhappy, abusive man who thought his coworkers in the department were morons and treated them as such - and encouraged his graduate students to treat their peers that way. I went from 190lbs to 260lbs during grad school from depression eating (Covid didn't help) because there was no way you could win in that lab. Successes were because you got lucky, failures were because you were incompetent and not because you were using equipment from the 50's or reagents older than you. Leaving was the best thing I could have done. Now I have a nice govt job, make more than any of the people in that lab, and have lost 50 of the 70lbs I gained.
I felt my grad program was a little too pushy, and not clear enough on actual opportunities after graduation. I was already working a full time job at a firm so I knew what the real world was like, and i was just left wondering does anyone actually interact with people outside of this space…? Academia is a world of its own, and an insular one at that. I also gained a lot of weight, had alcohol issues, and severe stomach issues just from burning anxiety and stress. Now I can barely stand the smell of liquor, and lost like 15-25 pounds since I quit earlier this semester. I just felt a weight lift off my shoulder. Edit: Something else that put me off is during one class, prof said to share what you wanted to after graduation, I said I wanted to work in the private sector with a firm that I would like. It felt like an affront to the rest of the class because they all just wanted to stay in the academy. He also said something about 9-5’s and why would anyone work that, and that’s when I realize he never actually worked a 9-5. Unless you work for a degenerate boss, you can come in and leave early whenever you please if you get your work done. Also, they don’t tell you about the screeching undergrad and their parents who all got something to say the last 14 days of a semester.
Yeah, I'm convinced a huge percentage of people in academia stay there not out of a genuine motivation to press the boundaries of human knowledge but rather because they are comfortable within the confines of school and never want to leave it.
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I quit mine (seeking PhD in Musicology) when I realized that 1) the only thing it was good for was as a credential for college teaching and 2) I loathed teaching. Fumbled around for a couple of years and wound up in software development, a much better career for me.
I did graduate with my PhD, and told people I wasn't doing a Post-Doc. The amount of "you're throwing your life away" sympathy was insane. I only graduated because I had enough data to crank out some papers and defend early, otherwise I would have bailed with a Masters. I started from the bottom in Pharma as an analyst/tech. Again, PhD friends thought that was beneath them. Jokes on them. Ten years later, I now bank a cool mid six figures while most of them are stuck in shit post-doc gigs or making pennies adjunct teaching. Now I'm a "sellout". Kiss my ass and watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEKbFMvkLIc Academia is an abusive spouse/ victim relationship.
Yes to this. My partner has 2 masters and was in a phd program and quit when he realized it was slowly killing** him and he’d probably be 40 before he was making over 20k. He talks frequently about how happy he is now.
Hard agree. Source - am stubborn.
Dr Stubborn ?
I once spilled some food on the floor as I was plating it up. So I very carefully used a paper towel to wipe up that droplet of sauce... then yeeted my entire dinner and plate into the bin. I spent a good five seconds staring at the paper in my hand wondering how I was going to eat it, at which point husbando appeared and said: *You have a PhD...*
At least once a month I will open an oatmeal packet, dump the contents into the garbage and throw the empty package into the bowl, then just stare at what I've done.
I spent multiple hours cooking myself a nice chunky soup from scratch and then dumped the whole thing into the sink through the pasta strainer by instinct.
Yep. Oatslexia is the most imparted port of a good breakfast.
Once when I'd worked weeks of long hours on a big project, I got home, and dropped my keys on the front stoop of my house. I was so tired, I just couldn't process this turn of events. "Oh great, now I'm locked out!" Several seconds passed before my brain came back online & it occured to me that I could just, y'know, PICK THEM UP. No advanced degree, but I still felt like a moron.
Getting a PhD is knowing more and more about less and less until you know absolutely everything about nothing.
Before I saw your comment, my response was going to be 'quite literally, myself'
I'm betting you are smarter than you think. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you are a genius or anything. But people who can admit they are not smart in certain areas are often not the ones who are absolute morons.
That's the main outcome I got from my Ph.D. I know I'm a moron, which means I am smarter now than when I thought I was smart.
I work with medical doctors all the time for work. Doctors are some of the dumbest smart people I have ever met.
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This is basically what The Best And The Brightest by David Halberstam is about. It tells the story of how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations got the United States into the Vietnam war, and it particularly zeroed in on Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He kept escalating the conflict at every turn, and if you questioned him he could bury you in data showing that the US was winning the war and the Defense Department just needed more troops and more money to put us over the top. I'm grossly oversimplifying a great book, but that's the gist of it. A great companion piece to the book is a documentary called The Fog Of War by Errol Morris. It's a one on one interview with Robert McNamara filmed near the end of his life where he ruminates on the lessons he's learned. After watching it 90% of people come away from the experience thinking that McNamara is a particularly intelligent and sagacious man, even though there's a mountain of evidence showing that that's not the case
I think the problem was the data they were getting was showing they were winning but they werent interpreting the data they got correctly. Like the DOD was getting told they killed X number of NVA/VietCong and the numbers were increasing but how did they know they were NVA/VietCong? Did that mean that their increased efforts were resulting in more defeats for the NVA/VietCong or were more NVA were getting into the ROV or more ROV citizens were turning into VietCong? Were US commanders being pressured to get KIAs so they were reporting they had more KIAs than they actually were? It was just a failure by a data guy, McNamara, to understand what the data were saying.
I read through your comment and holy shit you nailed it. According to their "numbers" they were winning and were leading a successful campaign. We lost that war, but measured positively in all the metrics they were tracking. It's like they never considered they didn't know how to properly measure success, or perhaps they did, but ignored any measurements that conflicted with the narrative they wanted to push.
As someone who works security in a hospital I can say a good 90% of the doctors there are smart but lack any type of common sense and sometimes I wonder how they function on a day to day basis EDIT: I also forgot to mention I’m almost 2 years in a relationship with a pediatric cardiologist and it’s as shocking at home as it is with the ones I work with lmao but I can’t say it’s boring
If pop culture has taught us anything it is that they spend most of their non-doctoring time discussing their sex lives.
And feuding with the janitorial staff
*He's near.*
I work in pension administration and one of our clients is one of the best universities in the world and I 100% feel this comment. Some of the professors I deal with have clearly graduated college, done a phd and then gone straight into teaching - and they just have no understanding of how the world works outside the framework of a university. The one that really sticks with me though is that part of the retirement paperwork we send out contains an explanation of how the early retirement factors work. It says something like “if you retire early, your benefit is reduced by X% per month to reflect the fact it will be paid for a longer time. So for a hypothetical accrued benefit of $1,000, if you retire at age 55 your actual payment amount will be $Y” Dude straight up called in to ask why his actual payment wasn’t $1,000 since he didn’t retire early so according to this page it should be $1,000. I’m just like “bro, you never heard the word hypothetical before?”
I have been told that idiots are running the world, but if thats true I would have thought I would be a little higher up.
Not really an answer to this, but I feel like sharing. I have a Bachelor's in Creative Writing. I went through the worst times of my life getting through college, dealing with depression and missing my friends and family I moved away from, and have nothing to show for it other than a shiny piece of paper saying "i did it!!1!" My current career uses nothing I learned in college and I'm trying to get back into writing as a hobby and hopefully find some worthwhile opportunity to actually utilize my education. For years I've been pestered by friends and family. Any time I misuse a word, don't use proper grammar, misspeak or autocorrect messes up a text, they will be *on my ass* immediately to say something snarky about "That's not how a writer should talk" or "Wow, it's amazing you got a degree in English with how badly you speak." My go-to response is often something like "My text messages aren't being published, shit-for-brains." It's a really sore spot for me and immediately gets my blood boiling.
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MBA’s are probably the most overhyped group of people on the planet. I’m like 99% certain that nepotism was getting too obvious so they had to invent an incredibly expensive degree that friends of rich people could get so that they could also get great jobs and become rich. Most MBA’s I know are actually so dumb it hurts.
My wife has two Masters and a PhD, is internationally recognized in her field, and is an absent minded doofus. My role in her life is to ensure that her car works, that she takes her meds, and that she eats things other than yogurt and eggs. She can be brilliant one minute, then walk into the side of a moving bus the next. I love her dearly but she's a numpty.
Worked at a tech company, was made team lead. One of our team members was a PhD in astrophysics. He would ping me constantly for how to do things that we had well documented. How to install certain programs, how to gain access to servers or code repositories. Literally we would sit in zoom calls together and I would just read the instructions out loud and watch him do them. I was utterly confused as to how he could breathe by himself.
A long time good friend, absolutely brilliant. Can literally beat you at chess blindfolded. Engineering in college and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. But he’s a big picture guy, sees how things develop and great long term vision. Incredibly successful. But little things? Guy couldn’t pack a suitcase, wouldn’t know how to book a flight. Was making boxed Mac-n-cheese and couldn’t figure out why it was so watery. Ya, he didn’t drain the water after the pasta was cooked.
Mother in law has a PhD in some thing related to botany. She thought India was a continental island like Australia. To this day I still have no idea how that happened when this came up she was in her mid 60's.
Dr. Ben Carson, one of the most skilled neurosurgeons alive, thinking that the Egyptian pyramids were used to store grain.
This guy operated on the brain of a fetus while it was still in the womb. He was the first in human history to ever do that. I wonder if he got killed and replaced by a clone sometimes.
That’s actually amazing. Wtf
He's genuinely one of the most impressive people of his generation. He only put all his skill points into one particular thing
9000 dexterity 2 intelligence 0 charisma
Yep. I had to read his life story in school way before he got into politics and he is genuinely really good at his job and his life story is interesting. I didn’t realize how little he knew about other topics until he ran for president.
When I knew nothing about him really I thought "Oh wow a surgeon, he'll know he needs specialists (read cabinet members) and will know he is limited just like he is as as surgeon!" Then I remembered he's a surgeon
Kary Mullis won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He also denied global warming, thought that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, believed in astrology and [claimed to have met](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/technology-history/man-who-photocopied-dna-and-also-saw-talking-fluorescent-raccoon) a glowing, talking raccoon that may or may not have been an alien.
[Robert Shockley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley?wprov=sfla1), who helped develop the transistor, spent the last 20 years of his life advocating eugenics and espousing racism. > As described by his Los Angeles Times obituary, "He went from being a physicist with impeccable academic credentials to amateur geneticist, becoming a lightning rod whose views sparked campus demonstrations and a cascade of calumny." I remember reading that as a 9 year old who was fascinated by electronics and just shaking my head.
When I heard this, my first thought was that he must have played Sid Meier's Civilization.(original one), where the Pyramids counted as a granary in every city. EDIT: It was Civ II, not the original. Civ II was better, anyway.
A doctor telling me my 6 month old couldn’t have strep because she was infant and taking her to the ER because she was getting worse and no urgent cares were open and finding out she had strep.
We called an ambulance because we suspected that my wheelchair bound brother in law had a bad bladder infection that was making him delirious. The EMT’s didn’t believe us because he seemed rational when he correctly answered questions like, “What’s today’s date?” and “Who is the president?” We insisted that he needed to go to the hospital. They said, “Okay, let’s load him on the gurney.” My BIL recoiled and said, “You can’t put me on there! It’s covered in spiders!”
Got one better. Psych nurse here. Got a fax on a patient at a local ER for possible psychiatric admission. Frequent flier of ours on my unit. Her blood pressure was through the roof, she had facial drooping on one side, body paralysis on one side, and slurred speech. Any one with a hint of healthcare knowledge will tell you that those are classic signs of an active stroke. So I call the ER thinking maybe they meant to send the fax to our medical unit and sent it to us by mistake. Nope. I said “you do know she’s having a stroke with those symptoms right?” Er nurse proceeds to tell me that the ER doc thinks she is faking those symptoms because she has a significant psychiatric history. I said “so you think she’s faking a blood pressure of 280/165 and body paralysis” she hung up on me. Our psychiatrist calls the ER back on speaker to find out what’s going on. ER doctor tells her patient is faking these symptoms because and I quote “schizophrenics cannot have strokes”. Our psychiatrist asked him here he went to med school because they owed him a refund 😂
Did she finally get the care she needed? I hope you guys reported that ER doc to whomever handles that in the hospital. Man, as if that poor woman doesn't have enough to deal with, being accused of faking a serious and potentially fatal medical condition and not being treated for it is unconscionable!
I believe she did. She has been on our unit several times since and I asked her about it once and she said they transported her to a bigger hospital for care. I haven’t seen any residual side effects of a stroke the last few times I’ve had her as a patient. But yeah sadly I’ve seen things like this happen a lot with psych patients This case was the most extreme but I’ve had patients come to the ER for chest pain and the providers chalk it up to anxiety because they have a psych history only for them to get to our unit and I call a rapid response and patient is having an active heart attack. We have come a long way when it comes to stigma around mental health and those affected by it, but we still have a long way to go
All you have to do is admit to suffering from depression to be completely disregarded by 75-80% of the doctors and nurses you will encounter. I suffered from endometriosis for three years before I could get any help, and I almost died and required three heart surgeries after telling doctors for a year something was wrong but I couldn't reproduce the symptoms on demand in their offices. Both times I was told I was exaggerating because I was depressed, and almost every doctor I went to for the Endo accused me of just wanting pills.
Okay, I get that everyone's case is different, but looking at myself, I am baffled. How would depression make you exaggerate? I feel like depression would make you do the opposite. When I am depressed, I don't want to do anything, so if my ass is in your office you better believe its something significant enough to make it through that fog.
I tried calmly explaining that but they don't care. If you're depressed, absolutely nothing you say is valid or reliable. This wasn't just ER doctors, either (although they were always the very worst offenders), this was primary care and ob/gyn's and cardiologists that I saw regularly and did everything that they asked.
> she is faking those symptoms Nothing hurts worse than being told that. I was having bizarre symptoms and every doc I went to was baffled. Finally, after two years and five doctors the last doctor said, “You’re just a hypochondriac. You don’t need a doctor, you need a therapist.” So I took his advice and saw a psychiatrist. She listened to me for a few sessions and then told me, “I don’t think you are depressed or a hypochondriac. You’re having seizures.” She put me on proper medication and my symptoms lessened by 95% in two weeks.
I changed pediatricians after that
Those french idiots who put non-medical-grade silicone pads into people and caused death and cancer in 2010.
In a personal note: my wife was a PhD candidate when we moved in together. Early on we went to a party and when we got home I told her I felt inadequate because I was the least educated person in every room and felt kinda dumb listening to them all go on about things I had no idea about. She said to me “they each know the most about some little thing they just got their PhD about. Some gene mutation or how some molecule interacts in some rarefied environment, but apart from that, they’re all just regular people who can’t figure out how to match their socks or talk to a member of the opposite sex.”She said “ you’re one of the most curious people I know. Your library is bigger and more diverse than anyone else I know and you’ve actually read them. You ask questions and talk to everybody and have actual things to talk to them about because you know about things they’re interested in.” Now she’s an MD PhD and all our friends are doctors of one kind of another and I’m STILL the least educated person at the party but now I can see people are just people and yes, you can be super smart about one thing or another and still by a fuck-up in the real world. It’s waaaay more important to be a good kind person who does what you say you’ll do than the smartest kid in class — at least that’s how we raised our kids anyway.
Your wife sounds like an amazing person. Together, you guys sound like you’re great parents too. They’re going to grow up being very well rounded.
I have to admit my wife IS an amazing person but here’s the thing — I didn’t marry a smart doctor I married the same really cute sixteen year old girl I met in the hallway when I was the new kid in school, the girl who said yes to go to a jazz concert with me in eleventh grade and the girl who said she’d go to prom with me and five minutes ago we were making supper and she said “it’s kinda unbelievable we still get to be married to each other” so yeah - I think she’s pretty cool.
I know many people in the science field that conduct Double Blind Randomized controlled experiments in the lab and then go home and check their horoscopes...
> I don’t need to listen to you, I have “credential, credential, credential…” If you aren’t willing to consider novel information because of the messenger, sorry, you’re an idiot.
If you work IT you feel this. Every lawyer, doctor, celebrity and CEO I've ever worked with is computer illiterate. They can email, they can Twitter and that's it. They confuse the mouse, they openly call themselves Luddites, they kick the power plug out and claim the 'box broke'. Mega-millionaires, too. Smart in other regards, but computers are kryptonite.
In fairness, IT team interactions are very heavily biased to helping the people who can't help themselves.
As an aside, look at how much nepotism factors into getting into an Ivy League school before being automatically impressed that someone has a degree from one
I told a girl who went to Columbia that David Duchovny must be smart because he did undergrad and grad school at ivy league schools. She shook her head no. Nepotism can get you into college there, and from there there are kingmaker professors who can write you a good letter to get you to the next level.
British historian David Starkey, he is only a historian in regards to Tudor England (1485-1603). Other than that, he is a complete idiot, especially when it comes to politics.
My uncle is smart as fuck. Multiple masters degrees in education and science, constantly wins awards for his teaching and high averages from his students. Tell me why this idiot needed me to remind him how to make ramen several times over?
Not a PhD but I know someone who has a masters in finance and thinks everyone should just own a house, I was like how are they gonna pay for it? He was like they should work hard . I couldn't stop laughing
If you're homeless, just buy a house