I see someone here has downvoted Thomas. I sincerely hope it was because that person knew penicillin is not effective against M. tb. If so, high five, downvoter! (Thomas: streptomycin.)
ITakeBets
Karma: 354
I’m teaching some classes for a test prep company in a town 2 hours away. They’re paying me fairly for my expenses and travel time, but it still feels like kind of a waste—it’s like 20 hours a week! Of course most productive things cannot safely be done while driving, but listening is a notable exception.
Can anyone recommend some good educational podcasts, or other free downloadable audio that will make me better in some way? I’m working on learning Spanish, so that seems like a good place to start.
On Wednesday they awarded me a scholarship covering full in-state tuition, making them probably my least expensive option (since it’s easy to establish residency for tuition purposes in Ohio after a year or two). It’s an excellent program, but moving would be hard and Columbus is cold and far from both our families.
I participate and was invited the first season to be a super-forecaster in the second. It is kind of a lot of work and I have been very busy, so I really quit doing anything about it at all pretty early on, but mysteriously have been invited to participate again in the third season.
Thanks, your advice more or less coincides with what I was planning up until Ohio State confused me again. I certainly have not ruled out international medicine and nonprofit work as some part of my career, but I don’t see that any of the schools that has accepted me has a clear advantage on that front.
I plan on a career in patient care. I will almost certainly do research in medical school, but based on past experience I don’t expect to find it extremely compelling or to be extraordinarily good at it. Money concerns me if only for philanthropic purposes. The field that interests me most now (infectious disease) does not pay especially well, but I have decided that I really should seriously consider more lucrative paths that might let me donate enough to save twice as many lives in the developing world.
Both schools seem to have pretty solid clinical training and early patient exposure, to hear the students tell it (though they have little basis for comparison). I don’t have a strong preference between their curricula, except my worries about driving around between hospitals in Miami.
Thank you!
I had just about settled on UF when I was suddenly struck with SERIOUS FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS as Ohio State, the highest-ranked school that accepted me, offered me a scholarship covering full in-state tuition. Ohio is quite easy to establish residency in, so I’d probably only be out of pocket the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition for the first year, but of course I’d have to move, and we’d be far from both our families.
I put together a spreadsheet taking into account the cost of moving, transportation costs, estimated change in rent, tuition and fees, and potential lost wages—and it looks like OSU could actually be the least expensive of the three, depending on whether I manage to establish residency in time to get in-state tuition my second year (I’m told this is the norm). My estimate for the difference between UF and FIU increased slightly to $40k-$70k. I am not sure what to do about estimated career earnings—lots of variance there, and I’m having a hard time weighing it against the costs, which I can be much more confident about.
Fair question. It seems that compensation is determined largely by what Medicare/insurance companies are willing to pay for procedures etc. I believe unfilled fellowship spots aren’t really a problem in any field, but the highest-paying subspecialties attract the most applicants. For example, cardiologists are very well-compensated, and cardiology fellowships are among the most competitive.
Ok, I agree that’s probably good advice in general. I’ve tried to avoid premature closure throughout the process of making this career change, but I’ll explicitly list some third options when I journal tonight. The bulk of my probability mass is in these two schools, though, so I am especially interested in advice that would help me choose between them.
Do you have one in mind? Or are you just advising against medical school, and if so, why?
Request for advice:
I need to decide in the next two weeks which medical school to attend. My two top candidates are both state universities. The relevant factors to consider are cost (medical school is appallingly expensive), program quality (reputation and resources), and location/convenience.
Florida International University Cost: I have been offered a full tuition scholarship (worth about $125,000 over four years), but this does not cover $8,500/yr in “fees” and the cost of living in Miami is high. The FIU College of Medicine’s estimated yearly cost of attendance (including all living expenses) is nearly $69,000; if I multiply that by four years and subtract the value of my scholarship I get about $145,000. However, my husband will continue working during all four years, defraying some of my expenses, so I hope to keep my actual indebtedness at graduation under $100,000 if I attend FIU. Program Quality: This is difficult to gauge, because the program is very new, having only graduated its first class of MDs this year. Their reputation is necessarily unestablished. All of their graduates successfully matched into residencies this year (a few in prestigious hospitals and competitive specialties), but this is reassuring rather than impressive. They only graduated 33 students although they matriculated 40 in their first year; not sure if that represents a worrying rate of attrition or what became of the other students (though I plan to ask). Another consideration is that although FIU is affiliated with many well-known hospitals in South Florida, they do not have a dedicated teaching hospital. Location/convenience: Already mentioned the higher cost of living. Miami is also farther from where we are currently living and working (over 3 hours away vs under 2 for Gainesville). My husband could probably find work in Miami, but it might be less desirable or pay less than his current job, and we would probably need to live apart during the week until he does. Also, the widely-scattered hospitals through which FIU students rotate, as well as South Florida traffic, make me worry about my quality of life during my third year.
The University of Florida Cost: I have been offered $7500 per year in aid. The rest of the $50k/year cost of attendance (including living expenses) would be loans. Again, my husband would continue to work and pay some of my expenses. In all I estimate a $30k-$60k difference in indebtedness at graduation between the two programs (in FIU’s favor). Program Quality: UF is Florida’s oldest and best-respected medical school, which is to say good but not elite. UF also has a reputable teaching hospital on campus, and a larger research budget, which would help build my resume if I decide to try for a very competitive specialty. They graduate 95% of their students within 4 years (98% in 5 years), and their residency match list looks a bit nicer than FIU’s on average. For what it’s worth (probably not much), I have a better feeling about this program’s “culture” based on the events I’ve attended. Location/Convenience: Gainesville is closer. It might be feasible for my husband to stay at his current workplace for all four years if we find a good place to live around midway between.
Other advice I have received: Jess Whittlestone at 80,000 Hours suggested I’d do best, impact-wise, to consider which school would maximize my earning-to-give potential. This would mostly depend on the specialty I go into—based on how I feel now, I’m most likely to try for an Internal Medicine subspecialty, which would mean doing a fellowship after residency. A good residency match would position me well for a fellowship in a competitive field. Physicians whom I have asked for advice tell me that people commonly match into even very competitive residencies from lower-ranked US MD schools, but it takes more work (better test scores, stronger evaluations). They also tend to say “OMG take the money” when I say the words “full tuition scholarship”.
You can probably tell that I lean towards UF, but I don’t want to make a bad call. What am I missing? What should I be asking the schools? Where should I go?
Anybody on here ever sold eggs (female human gametes)? Experiences? Advice on how best to do it?
If anyone else wants me to I’ll probably have time to put something together next month (I’d need to reread the books). I’m not sure there’s enough material for a whole sequence though. I don’t remember Mansfield Park as very promising, and once you’ve said “generalizing from fictional evidence” you’re probably pretty much done with Northanger Abbey.
Well, for starters, Austen was mainly concerned with making good decisions about whom to marry, which for women of her time, place and class was by far the most important thing to worry about ever—their husbands all but owned them, and divorce was punishable by shunning. If there was an 80,000 Hours for young ladies in Regency England, it would have been called “400,000 hours” or maybe “Literally the Rest of your Life or Until the Bastard Dies,” and Jane Austen would have been its founder. People who think Austen wrote romance novels are badly misreading her: in Sense and Sensibility she mercilessly punishes Marianne for following her heart when her heart was stupid, and in Persuasion she vindicates Anne’s hard choice to turn down a poor man she loved on the advice of a trusted friend. These books are about winning.
But more than identifying the right problem, Austen actually is quite a keen observer of cognitive biases. She didn’t call them that, of course, since they technically hadn’t been named yet, but Emma is basically about confirmation bias—“She had taken up the idea, she supposed, and made every thing bend to it,”—and the central conflict in Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth’s need to change her mind about Darcy at the cost of appearing inconsistent to her friends and family. Austen isn’t interested in stupid or wicked characters, but in intelligent, well-meaning people who make bad decisions for predictable, preventable reasons. There are more examples (I seem to recall a nice planning fallacy in S&S) but I don’t want to spend too much time digging up quotes right now.
fighting pride and prejudice
Jane Austen is kind of already “rationalist fiction”.
I agree, but it may be that the best way to accomplish that end, or at least the route Chekhov has taken, is actually to make wise observations. If we are capable, as a culture, of sometimes recognizing writers whose observations are indeed wise, who help us to simulate the experiences of other people, or better possible selves, with high fidelity, then good literature is probably worth a look. That has been my experience, at least. (Another reason to enjoy reading bleak stories might be an aesthetic appreciation for the beauty of the language, for example.)
A corrective has historically been the concept of good literature. See for example George Eliot, Anton Chekhov, etc.
Reading Anton Chekhov’s stories, one feels oneself in a melancholy day of late autumn, when the air is transparent and the outline of naked trees, narrow houses, greyish people, is sharp. Everything is strange, lonely, motionless, helpless. The horizon, blue and empty, melts into the pale sky, and its breath is terribly cold upon the earth, which is covered with frozen mud. The author’s mind, like autumn sun, shows up in hard outline the monotonous roads, the crooked streets, the little squalid houses in which tiny, miserable people are stifled by boredom and laziness and fill the houses with an unintelligible, drowsy bustle. … There passes before one a long file of men and women, slaves of their love, of their stupidity and idleness, of their greed for the good things of life; there walk the slaves of the dark fear of life; they straggle anxiously along, filling life with incoherent words about the future, feeling that in the present there is no place for them. … In front of that dreary, gray crowd of helpless people there passed a great, wise, and observant man: he looked at all these dreary inhabitants of his country, and, with a sad smile, with a tone of gentle but deep reproach, with anguish in his face and in his heart, in a beautiful and sincere voice, he said to them: “You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that.” — Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov (BW Huebsch, 1921)
Thanks! That’s the one.
I’m trying to find a short story about a guy who has a brain tumor as a kid, receives a high-tech immunological treatment which cures his cancer but turns out to destroy his ability to experience pleasure, and ends up being able to configure his own preferences. Written by a dude, no idea who, probably pretty recently. Help?
I am breaking my “only comment on LW if you expect some benefit” rule because I am in a somewhat unique position to comment on this, and I agree with Eliezer that “penalizing people for sounding certain or uppity or above-the-status-you-assign-them can potentially lead you to ignore people who are actually competent”. See, I made this update at an earlier time under not-dissimilar circumstances. (In short, I thought ArisKatsaris was making an overconfident prediction about HPMoR, bet against him, and lost.)
An excerpt from my journal, 3/28/2012:
So, you know, here’s a chance to learn a $30 lesson for free, people.