Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

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Something else that isn't really factored into most of these conversations is the level of gatekeeping around professions and schools where a much larger group of people can succeed or even flourish, yet never get the opportunity due to limited class sizes.

Around the healthcare debate specifically, there were a lot of people who talked about the restrictive policies that artificially limit the supply of doctors as well as the policies that prevent the creation of more hospitals.

When my dad was growing up, his father was a mechanic and he really just wanted to go be a mechanic to work with his dad...who told him that it wouldn't support 2 families. So instead...my dad became a dentist. Don't get me wrong, he's very smart (particularly with math) but how many people could be doctors? How many people could handle the curriculum at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, etc?

My guess is that it's a whole lot more than are actually admitted. Further, is the curriculum at these schools that much better than everywhere else or is it more a factor of surrounding yourself with highly motivated peers that makes it better?

What's that saying? Something like: "It's not that Einstein was so brilliant, it's that so many more Einsteins spend their whole lives in the farm fields" and in between is there is a whole spectrum of talent vs opportunity and recognition going from brilliant and unknown to famous and undeserving.

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." ― Stephen Jay Gould

> Further, is the curriculum at these schools that much better than everywhere else or is it more a factor of surrounding yourself with highly motivated peers that makes it better?

I've watched the full set of lectures for a few classes at top universities (Yale, MIT, that kind of thing) for a topic area in which I took a lot of classes at a very-cheap low-tier ex-normal-school state university that's completely unknown outside a ~150 mile radius, and only somewhat recognized within it.

From what I could tell, the content, pace, and amount & sort of assigned work were all pretty similar.

What differed? Two main things:

1) The guest lecturers—cheap state school, none, or unremarkable ones; the fancy schools, both more common to have them, and universally very impressive credentials, possibly someone you've heard of even if you don't really follow the topic, basically, their guests were "celebrities", at least within a field.

2) How engaged the students seemed to be—not at all, at the cheap state school; very, at the fancy schools.

This is for undergrad. The ways they differ may not be the same in grad school.

Really?

Maybe my (large, relatively well respected state school) lectures were uniquely bad. But I found MIT lectures to be leagues ahead of what we got. They covered more content, went deeper and were faster paced. The lecturers were more talented and engaging, and the problem sets were harder and more efficient. It really was night and day.

Yeah if Physicians didn't have a monopoly on medicine, OP probably would have lived in a middle-class school district and not had every advantage of a 1-5%er.

While AA is an issue, OP most benefited from the Physician cartel/AMA who lobbies/bribes their way to wealth for their members at the expense of the 99% of the population.

The supply of physicians is artificially limited by Medicare funding for residency programs at teaching hospitals. This shortage will only get worse as the population ages.

https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate...

The corporations running America's hospitals and health systems are fully aware of this problem and have lobbied state governments to give physician's assistants, nurse practitioners, and in some cases even pharmacists the same powers as doctors. Depending on your state, you'll find an NP or PA where you might have expected a doctor 10 years ago -- places like urgent care clinics and standalone ERs.

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