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Or the judge who sued his condominium demanding its employees call him "doutor" (Your Honor)...

As a Brazilian raised to not care about this stuff, I would say even rebelled a bit, it was weird to basically be required to do so once I reached adulthood. I remember getting in front of a sheriff and having to address him as "doutor". I remember talking to an intern in law firms and he corrected me when I addressed him by name saying, "No, it's DOUTOR Adriano".

Gee, let's not even mention the medical field... veterinarians and nutritionists want to be called "doutor"...

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I moved from Brazil to Sweden and it is hard talking to medical doctors, it is so indoctrinated into us.

me: Hi Doctor... I have X problem, Doctor. Could you give me some treatment, Doctor?

Doctor: You can just call me Ana

me: Yes Doctor Ana

Even for professionals that don't have titles if they have authority over you, you need to use the title. VERY evident when talking to police officers always say "Senhor" (sir), police have the power to really screw with you without any reason so better to show respect. You never know when you run into a police officer who enjoys screwing people over.

The Germans are also pretty ridiculous around titles, in that not only can you have multiple titles, and each are mentioned, but you can also have several copies of each. So someone can be Herr Doktor Doktor Professor.

But "Doctor" means you have an actual PhD, a doctorate. That's a worthy title, IMHO

My country has a fairly high % of PhD holders, but nowhere near enough jobs for them, so they end up getting regular jobs (e.g. I have a friend who got a PhD in laser physics, who now plays with AI models for license plate recognition).

These people usually leave the PhD off their CV, as some employers frown upon it, as they think the person will have higher expectations and be hard to work with.

> These people usually leave the PhD off their CV, as some employers frown upon it, as they think the person will have higher expectations and be hard to work with.

Most of them are hard to work with. As is with any people that climb on titles. They consider themselves special. That's why it is difficult for them to integrate in a team.

Not my personal experience. Many of whom I have worked with are quite friendly and open.

PhDs are not take just for social climbing. Many were genuinely interested in the subject until they got disillusioned..

Are PhDs ever taken for social climbing? It's absolutely wild to me that somebody would go through that for status. Doesn't generally give you much of it and costs you a ton in opportunity cost and stress (at least based on the cases I know lol).

Your example seems kinda funny.

Most people would think working on AI models for computer vision problems is a perfectly reasonable outcome for a STEM PhD, even if it's not a direct continuation of the thesis research.

Turning a physics PhD into any sort of modeling, statistical analysis or engineering work is pretty normal in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more physics PhDs working in finance than academia and government research labs.

The senior title comes first -- Prof. Dr. Dr. Honorary doctorates are "honoris causa", abbreviated h.c. If you get multiple of these, you write Dr. h.c. mult. So you occasionally find Prof Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. X (would have been the correct way to address Umberto Eco, for instance). After introductions, people generally name only the most senior title, if any.

That’s really interesting. Re medical field — by contrast surgeons in the UK are called “Mr” (Mister) or “Ms”, for historical reasons.

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