The Value, and the Burden, of a Professional Degree

Not everyone goes to graduate school to get a professional degree.  Not everyone goes to college.  Not everyone finishes high school.  Not everyone has to.  There are plenty of creditable and valuable things people can do without those levels of education.

But lots of people do finish high school, and go to college, and earn post-graduate degrees.  It's a lot of time, money, and work.  And plenty of people take a different, and shorter, route, and attend trade schools.  Then, they apprentice.

In a less formal, and more general, way, it is often said that to develop expertise, someone has to spend 10K hours doing something.

If you take the longest possible route, and finish high school, finish college, and complete a post-graduate program in something, you have a very clear sense of what you knew at the end that you didn't know at the beginning.  And it's clear to you how you got to know what you finally know.  As I said, it's a lot of time and work, and even once you get to the part where you start making money, instead of spending it on your education, most professionals call what they do "practice."  You're always learning.  And the people who depend on your professional ability count on you to know a lot, and to continue to learn more.

All of that is the value of a professional education, and a professional degree.  There are two burdens of a professional education.  One is that since you never stop learning, you always have to learn more.  Real professional learning is not made easy.  You're living your life, carrying out your profession, and trying to figure out which "learning" offerings are legitimate, and which are not.  Lots of them are not.  It's part of your job to figure out which are the scams, and what's just vogue, but not really true.  It never gets easy.

The other burden of a professional education is that as you have realized (it's not hard to realize) how much you know at the end, even of the formal academic part, that you didn't know at the beginning, you also realize how limited you are with respect to the professional educational opportunities you didn't pursue.  It's humbling to know, and appreciate, how much other professionals know that you don't know.  You chose profession A, and they chose profession B.  Or, in my case, specialty A versus specialty B.  Each of you chose to know a lot about this or that, and little or nothing about that or this.

But people who don't have professional educations and degrees don't necessarily understand what it takes, and what it means, to have a professional education.  If they don't assume that a professional knows more about the area in question than they do, then they're out to sea without a paddle.

The common daily example I deal with of that, in this computer age, where everything and anything seems so accessible, is people who either self-diagnose or develop a preference for a certain approach to treatment, because they've been online.  I am very straightforward with people who do this (there are loads of people who do this).  I tell them that I will beg them, on my knees if necessary, not to look stuff up online.  They have no idea from where it comes, who put it there, how truly qualified the sources are, what's their motivation, and frankly, if what they find is even remotely true.  I tell them that's what they have me for.  And if they're afraid to trust me, then either they have trust issues, or they should find someone they feel they can trust better.  I spend way too much of my time disabusing patients of wrong "information" they've gotten for themselves online, and to which they become attached.

Less personal to me as a professional is the group of people who form completely unsupported, and flagrantly wrong, conclusions about things like the coronavirus, or vaccines against it, or Tony Fauci.  We're talking about people who are not epidemiologists, or medical doctors at all, or have had professional training of any kind.

What's curious is someone like Ron DeSantis.  DeSantis does have a professional degree.  He's a lawyer.  It should be clear to him (or Ted Cruz, or Josh Hawley, or others) how little they knew about the law before they got their professional educations, and how much they know about it now, after they got educated.  They should understand how complicated and difficult is a professional education, and they should be capable of recognizing how little they know about professions in which they were not educated.  Yes, of course I realize -- I've said it a million times -- that no one can adhere to the Rep/con agenda without being a hypocrite, dishonest, or both, but you would think that at the very least, people like them would recognize the value of their own educations, and be able to make the same assumptions about the value of other people's educations.  I don't think it's a good enough excuse to say they only went to law school for three years, while a doctor goes to medical school for four years, then internship for a year, then residency for anywhere from three to six years, and maybe a fellowship to follow, and they just didn't realize.  They should have humility enough to realize how much they learned in their three years, and to assume, even if they thought doctors only learn formally for three years, that a doctor must know vastly more about medicine than they do.  They don't mind the value of their training and degrees, and they should gracefully accept the burden, or limitation, of them.

DeSantis has lurched like a pinball about what he spouts about management of the coronavirus, about which he knows nothing, and should realize he knows nothing.  He'll say vaccination (he's one of the ones who refuses to reveal if he and his family were vaccinated) is very effective, and at the same time, he'll say all this worry about the coronavirus, and wearing masks, is childish nonsense.  And he thinks his big accomplishment is that he found some crackpot doctor in California who claims to agree with him.  (The rest of us don't.)  But if DeSantis was an honorable and honest, and appropriately aware and humble, professional, he would realize and appreciate that he knows much more about the law than does someone who never went to law school, and that any epidemiologist, or doctor of any specialty, that he can pluck from his own state, knows much more about medicine than he does.  He just wants the value, but he doesn't want to have to deal with the burden, of a professional education and degree.

I wonder if politics, especially being a Rep/con, is like extreme intoxication, and it totally prevents clear thinking.  Or maybe Reps/cons are -- I don't know -- hypocrites, dishonest, or both.

The Interesting Question About George Santos

In case this is not known to you, George Santos is a 34 year old man who was elected to the federal House of Representatives from some district in NY.

It turns out that more or less nothing Santos said about himself when he was running was true.  He did not graduate from any college (nor attend them, and he claimed degrees from two), he was not an employee of either company he named, he did not have employees who were killed in the Pulse nightclub as he alleged, he did not own several residences (he lived with his sister), he is not Jewish (nor were his close ancestors) -- he tried to clean that up by some other collection of lies about his close ancestors, and say he meant "Jew-ish" -- and the "truth" of him is frankly entirely unknown.  He had some sort of business of some kind, but it did not pay him remotely what he claimed to have made.  (He seems to have loaned himself money from his campaign accounts, and claimed it as income.)  Those were the lies of commission.  The lies of omission were the multiple evictions and debt defaults in NY, and the criminal fraud conviction in Brazil.  It's hard to know how to categorize the claim of having been divorced from a woman, and being homosexual and married to a man, when no marriage to a man has been found on record.  The New York Times investigated him for some reason, and turned up this astonishing list of frank lies Santos told.  Santos had refused to talk to Times reporters and investigative staff, but he lashed out at them after they published their column about him, essentially accusing them of picking on him.  But he also admitted to every one of the lies, claiming, as a junior high school or high school student, caught with his pants down, might, that lots of people "embellish" their resumes.  He portrayed it as a sort of essentially harmless white lie.  The only problem with this dodge is that he used these lies to appeal to voters when he was running (he won!) for Congress.  And he's to be sworn in next week, despite calls for his resignation first.

There's a video in this story -- Another one of George Santos's claims has unraveled in less than 24 hours (msn.com) -- and one of the presenters poses a question at the end of the clip: "did he have to lie?"

Santos was running for office.  He told an astonishing list of lies about himself, to make himself more appealing (somehow better qualified; more deserving of sympathy) than he really was.  One way to interpret the presenter's question -- did he need to lie? -- is would he have been less likely to get elected if he had not lied.  No one can know that.  Even if anyone could go back to every citizen who cast a vote, and ask them if they would vote for him now, or even if they would still have voted for him then, if he had not lied, they now know two things about him they didn't know before.  One is his real resume, and the other is that he is an inveterate liar.  It might be hard for them accurately to reconsider whether or not they would have voted for him if they known his resume was in fact very thin, now that they also know how shockingly dishonest he is.  It might be hard for them to factor out what they now know about his ethical sense, or lack of one.

But perhaps the more important answer to the "did he have to lie" question is that he apparently thought he had to lie.  Lying was his choice.  He had less confidence in his chances if he didn't lie.

So, maybe that's the answer: yes, he had to lie.  He thought he did, he lied, and he got elected.  He calculated that he needed the lies in order to get votes.  (He ran in '20, and didn't get elected, and ran in '22, and did get elected.  I have not seen any reports as to whether he told the same lies in '20 that he did in '22.  I don't know if telling these lies was a new strategy, and it worked, or if the approach to the voters was the same both times, but for some reason, the outcome was different this time.)  But, he doesn't deserve the votes, and he should step down.  He's a kid, but he's not a child, and it's unlikely he'll have learned a lesson from this.  That needs to be his problem.

I'm Just Sayin'.

Now I Know: The Town in Alabama That Has Huge, Random Sculptures - fredjonasmd@gmail.com - Gmail (google.com)

There are things municipalities do to distinguish themselves, and to enhance the lives of the people who live there.  What these municipalities do is different depending on the styles, resources, and other factors of the municipalities.  Not one of these things is the "right" thing to do.  They're just possibilities, depending, as I say.

Our glaring, blindingly conspicuous possibility, which many other municipalities couldn't do (because they don't have them), is improve our medians.  For who knows what reasons, we have persistently chosen not to do that.  We keep them looking terrible, and make them available for people to park on and drive over.

We have, however, begun to create a program of public art in the Village.  We have acquired three sculptures and one mural.  The sculptures were paid for by a limited number of our neighbors, and donated to the Village, and the mural was paid for out of Village funds.  We could do more.  A suggestion was made, and not adopted, to charge each household as little as $6-$10 (that's $7200-$12K) per year to create a public art fund.  That minuscule amount of money would allow the Village to buy one nice sculpture every year or so, or less expensive displays more often.  Or, we could save up for a few years or so at a time, and get something really impressive.

The linked article above talks about an Alabama town that established a program like that, and it was fully funded by one resident of the town.  There are other municipalities in various places (two in the upper midwest, one in NY, San Francisco, and San Diego, that I know about), that have used public money to buy public art.  Kansas City, Missouri, also has a well-developed collection of public sculptures, paid for mostly by the Blochs of H and R Block.

We could do this, and it would be cheap, on a per house basis.  As various people and organizations like to say, we could do it for the price of two cups of Starbucks coffee per year.

Our problem has consistently been a lack of ambition, enthusiasm, vision, creativity, and motivation to improve our lives.  And, as I say, for next to nothing.

I never read the book, but have you ever seen the movie of "The Time Machine?"  Do you remember the essentially mindless Eloi, who would march to their deaths when the Morlocks blasted a tone over speakers, or who would sit inert while one of their own was caught in a river flow, and likely to drown?  That's sort of how we are about improving our lives here.

After many decades, we finally erected a Public Works building, then we acquired our three sculptures, then our mural.  But other than that, we can't do a thing to help ourselves.  We don't even do the most minimal thing any more, which is enforcing our own Codes.  The current fanfare is about establishing some new Codes, but if we don't enforce any of them, then what's the point?  I'm told we're working on enforcing Codes, or that it's one of the allegedly many things on the manager's desk.  But I don't think the check is in the mail, either.

PS: The source of the linked story -- NowIKnow.com -- is free.  They publish posts five days a week.  I have found almost all of them interesting.  If we're still as inert as the Eloi, at least we can amuse ourselves reading interesting posts five days a week.

I Hope I Won't Hate Myself For This.

I'm old enough.  And I have known, without any doubt, for my whole life, that there's no such thing as "god."  But tonight, I started to have uneasy thoughts.

I saw a show put on by Dance Now! Miami (DNM), and two of the four pieces were choreographed and danced by their Italian visiting company, Compagnia Opus Ballet (COB).  A third piece was choreographed by a revered local choreographer, Daniel Lewis, and the last piece was choreographed by DNM's founders and artistic directors, Diego Salterini (OK, he's Italian, too) and Hannah Baumgarten.

The two pieces created and danced by COB were way off the charts.  They were the cause of my uneasy thoughts.  The Lewis piece was wonderful.  The music for all three was delightful.  The range included The Beatles, Mancini, Gershwin, Pachelbel, Berlioz, Monteverdi, Pergolesi, and others.  It was a pretty wide range of music.  My companion tonight, who's 83 and Cuban, was singing the Beatles song along with me.  Totally captivating.

And I know what you'll say to me.  You'll say to me what I'd say to you: "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it, too?"  (That was Douglas Adams' question, and I agree.)  But how good can something be before you start wondering if there are, in fact, fairies at the bottom of it?  Or "god?"  This was that good.

The fourth piece provided a little bit of cold water, which was a relief.  I can't stand Christmas and Christmas music, and the fourth piece had an extensive array of music which most assuredly included Christmas music.  And some Tchaikovsky.  And it was too long, and not as coherent as the other pieces.  "'Clara' [that was the name of this piece, which was a world premiere] charts the journey of a young woman, on Christmas eve, who is puzzled by the contradictions in her seemingly ordinary life.  She begins seeking new truths, embarking on a journey where she experiences the exotic, the unknown, the frightening and the forbidden, ultimately finding love, identity and self-determination for herself and her community."  I guess that's what Salterini and Baumgarten intended to try to illustrate, but I lost a meaningful sense of the story.  The dancing sure was top shelf, though.

So, I won't have any trouble reassuring myself that there's no such thing as "god," or fairies at the bottoms of beautiful gardens, and I won't think I've overlooked anything all my life.  I won't hate myself for that.

But I might hate myself for harping.  Miami is overflowing with great art and culture.  It really, really is.  Just today, I bought all the tickets I wanted for shows of interest at South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center.  It was a lot of shows, as it is every year.  And SMDCAC is not close to here.  It's at SW 211th St and 109th Ave.  That's about 28 miles from here, as the crow flies (I-95, then US 1).  Sometimes, I'll be there days in a row.  Scheduling was unclear for one show, and it's possible I'll see two shows in the same day on one day.  And that's just SMDCAC.  One of the shows I chose will be presented on a day I already have something else.  But I can move the something else at GableStage.  There are some things I can't move.  Then, I just have a choice to make.

The DNM show was presented at the Miami Theater Center on NE 2nd Ave at about 98th St.  If you felt like it, you could walk there.  Do you want to know if anything like that will happen again?  Saturday, March 4.  They have a show on Miami Beach on Sunday, April 9, and one in Coral Gables on Saturday, April 22.  You can check them out at dancenowmiami.org.

And they're not the only spectacular modern dance/ballet organization in town.  There's Dimensions Dance Theater of Miami, too, and I try never to miss their shows, either.  Not to mention Miami City Ballet, if you like pure ballet.  And tons of other presentations of many kinds.  If you like flamenco, you can keep yourself busy attending those shows, too.  And orchestral music (Orchestra Miami and Miami Symphony Orchestra), and jazz, and an endless range of culture.

But I'm not going to hate myself for pointing out what's around, and urging you to patronize.  I'm going to hate myself, maybe, for reminding you that bizarrely enough, these magnificent, often top flight, performers, and the organizations that present these shows, not uncommonly do it on a shoestring.  Or less.  And nobody -- nobody in the world (except groups like the Rolling Stones or someone) -- can keep up with their expenses by selling tickets to performances.  So...if you like them, you have to patronize them, subscribe to series, and... donate.  We just talked about this regarding Give Miami Day, but it's true all the time.

I promise you you'll like these presentations, and they'll enrich your life, and they're worth a little extra ($) effort from you.  And you don't have to wait until DNM's 3/4/23 show to find out if you agree with me.  There's stuff really all the time, and in a lot of places.  If you're willing to drive to SMDCAC, the next show for which I just today bought tickets is 1/14/23.  It's someone's rendition of Pink Floyd songs.  I'll be back there the next day for the L'viv Philharmonic Orchestra from the Ukraine.  That one, for who knows what insane reason, is free.  I was going to go back on 1/18/23 for someone's rendition of Seger, but I thought it was Pete Seeger.  It's Bob Seger, who's of less interest (mercifully).  So I won't have to go back down there until 1/20/23.  That's how it gets.  And the great news about SMDCAC, and Sandrell Rivers Theater at NW 62nd St and 7th Ave, is that they're the county, they're super easy to negotiate, ticket prices are very low for most things, parking is free, and you couldn't donate if you wanted to.

So I hope these words to the wise will be sufficient.  As best I know, we all have only one life.  We might as well get the most we can out of it.

You're Underestimating.

The beginning of that sentence is: If you think you know how bad racism in this country is... you're underestimating.

Around two years ago, I got shingles.  I didn't know it was shingles.  It started with a weird pain in one of my teeth.  I've never had a cavity, but I imagined that maybe I had one then.  So I went to a dentist.  By the time I got there, which was maybe a day or so after the tooth pain started, I also had a small rash on one side of my face.  The dentist took a look, couldn't find a cavity, or any other dental problem, noted the rash, and told me he thought I had trigeminal neuralgia.  It could have been that (although less likely with the rash), and he said I should see an oral surgeon he knew.  I didn't know what the oral surgeon was supposed to do, but the tooth pain, and the rash, were getting worse, and I got a quick appointment with the oral surgeon.  The surgeon walked into the exam room, took one look at me with my mask off, and told me immediately that 1) I had shingles, and 2) he didn't treat shingles.  The oral surgeon's office happened to be on the extended grounds of Aventura Hospital, and I know a neurologist there, so I called that office.  It would be a couple of weeks before I could get an appointment, and I felt as if I couldn't wait.  So I called an internist I know.  I told him someone else had diagnosed shingles, and asked him what to do.  He told me over the phone what antiviral I needed, what the dose was, how long to take it, and when to expect results.  So I got myself a prescription for the antiviral, took it as directed by my internist friend, and got precisely the desired result, right on time.  End of shingles in less than two weeks.

When my then wife, and our two very young children, moved to Miami Beach in 1983, we hired a woman, I think from Trinidad (you know -- black), to take care of the kids and do errands, so we could work.  I've very loosely kept up with her over the years, and even saw her once a few years ago.  She's elderly and generally not doing well, but she calls me every once in a very long while.  The last time was yesterday.  She's doing worse than before, but the most prominent problem is great pain and a rash from one of her hips extending down the lower extremity on that side.  She saw some doctor in Broward, possibly even at Memorial Medical Center, which generally has a good reputation, and they diagnosed shingles, and told her to... do nothing.  Just wait for it to get better, (if it was going to).  Which it hasn't at all.

Well, I've been there myself, and I even have some pills left over.  It was possible that the woman's adult daughter, who I think lives with her, might come to my house, and take the pills I'll never use, but it turned out easier just for me to call in a prescription, which I did.  And I told her she needed a better doctor, and recommended my friend who told me about the treatment for shingles.  I sort of apologized for the extent of racism in this country, but she told me it's world-wide.  I know she's right.

There are loads of stories like this.  Loads.  Some are very dramatic, like civilians and even police who assassinate black people for being black, and some are less dramatic, like Americans making the lives of black people more difficult than there's any reason they should be.  (These are people who were kidnapped from Africa, forced to come here, sold into miserable slavery, and persistently mistreated even after we outlawed slavery.  And we still want to make their lives difficult.  If you wonder when we'll have had enough of this, I have no idea.)

There are even medical manifestations of mistreating black people.  There's the woman I've known for 40 years, and the tendency to undertreat pain in black people (documented).  One study was of matched black women and Caucasian women who gave birth.  Even among the black women who were professionals, various kinds of outcomes were worse in the black women.  The stress of racism takes a subtle and pervasive toll.

Studies have shown that patterns of psychiatric diagnosing are different depending on the race of the patient.

Every facet of life, certainly in this country, is corrupted by racism.  We seem unable to stop ourselves.  Examinations of laws passed and penalties applied show evidence that where behavior is considered more common in black populations, laws and the penalties for breaking them are harsher than for the same behavior in populations that are more likely Caucasian.  One then famous example from 20-30 years ago was the application of harsher sentencing for use of "crack" cocaine than for use of powdered cocaine, because it was thought blacks more commonly used "crack" cocaine.

But I was more surprised by my old employee and friend, and her experience with shingles.  When I had shingles, I got prompt and effective attention.  When she developed shingles, even the people supposedly treating her didn't care.  Couldn't be bothered.  Were content to let her suffer, even though there is very effective treatment available.  I heard from her and her daughter today, and she's taken her first pill.  I hope I get a happy report by the end of next week.