Chaos Program

Should doctors be more than medical technicians?

I’ve thought of this question several times in the last few years, most recently in connection with two emergency room visits for my mother. She complained of (among other things) a very bad headache. Early on, one doctor ordered a ct scan of her head to see if there was maybe a tumor or something to explain the headache. The ct scan showed nothing out of the ordinary.

Here’s the bit that made me start wondering about doctor education, or intelligence or something: When the ct scan came back clean, the doctors then proceeded to completely ignore the headache. It was as if, when the test showed nothing, the problem simply ceased to exist.

This is the way not-very-skilled technicians operate. People who, in the IT field (my field) would be level 1 help desk and who would probably never progress beyond that level. Example (a real one):

Me: “I have a problem with my internet connection.”
Tech support: “I’ll test the line.” (pause) “The line is fine.”
Me: “Okay but I keep losing my connection.”
Tech support: “Restart your modem and check that it’s plugged in correctly.”
Me: “I did that. The modem is fine. There’s something wrong with the connection.”
Tech support: “I’m sorry sir but the line is clean. You need to check your modem.”
Me: “Aaaaaaaaauuuugggggghhhh!”

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One of the things that makes being a fan of science fiction a little difficult is the traditional absence of creativity in Hollywood products. That is, even on the rare occasions when Hollywood tries to do science fiction, they don’t generally try very hard to make it good or interesting. An even worse problem is the traditional ignorance of science in Hollywood and journalism. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is that staple of TV science fiction: The Genius.

Notice that the word is capitalized. Not mere genius but more like Super Genius. The person with an intellect so enormous that he (usually, though sometimes a she, as characters Amanda Tapping played very well in Stargate: SG1 and much less convincingly in the deeply inferior Sanctuary) is a master of every science and all technology. Often these people are so brilliant they not only understand everything, they go far beyond what the rest of the world knows, inventing whole new sciences and extending existing ones to unimagined new heights.

In stories, these people have two functions. Those are to explain what is going on to the audience (and incidentally to the folks around them) and to come up with the one great idea that can save the day, or save the world, or at least save the story from a depressing ending.

The third, often unintended function, is to annoy the living hell out of the audience, especially those of us who know that that’s just not the way things work.
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At my job we encourage people to use Test Driven Development (TDD). The short explanation of that is that before you write a line of program code, write a test for what it is supposed to do. I confess I don’t always adhere to this. For me the rule would be more like, test early and test often. Testing is a skill and it can be hard. Testing first is also a skill. Like any skill it takes time to learn (and I’m getting better at it all the time!).

For years now, though, I’ve found that even my sloppy and less-than-perfectly skilled approach to testing seems to be too much effort for some people. At a previous job I routinely heard other people complaining that some system/server/software was broken when, in fact, their own code (or configuration or approach or whatever) was really broken. My colleagues and I would say something like, “Did you try it from a different computer?” And, as often as not, when tried on a different computer it worked fine. Reboot and try again. Don’t place blame before you’ve gathered the relevant information. Thank you kindly, call again soon.

See? It’s not just programming. Programming is just an environment where testing is measurable and has well developed tools.

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Maybe it’s some kind of law of nature that immediately after I write a blog post about a subject, the next day there will be new stories related to the same subject. Last week I wrote something about critical thinking and, shortly thereafter, there was an interesting story in Science Daily claiming that tests show that college freshman majoring in science have terrible reasoning skills whether they were educated in the U.S. or in China.

My first reaction was, “Duh!” Young people in general have terrible reasoning skills. That’s why those of us who are older call them idiots. At this point it would be polite of me to explain that I’m just kidding but, in fact, I’m not much. Face it, how many people look back on their younger selves and think, “Wow! I was sure smart then! I wish I was that smart now!”? I have my glasses on and I still can’t see any raised hands. But, believe it or not, this is not intended to trash the thinking capacity of young people. I was trashing a study about them, actually.

The article about the study mentioned that Chinese students knew many more facts than American students (but please don’t get me started on the state of science education in America!) but performed just as poorly on tests of scientific reasoning. That is, even the ones who knew many scientific facts were unable to solve many of the problems they were given.

From this, the researchers (Or maybe it was the reporters. It’s so hard to tell sometimes. But don’t get me started on the state of science journalism in America either!) concluded “that educators must go beyond teaching science facts if they hope to boost students’ reasoning ability.” I found this to be a very poorly reasoned conclusion based, as it was, on the strange assumption that it’s even possible to teach reasoning or that it’s possible to teach it to children. Talk about a triumph of optimism over experience! read more »

An odd coincidence of things I saw in the news lead me to think about critical thinking. A recent study claimed that the rise of electronic has improved certain visual skills but has also reduced the prevalence of critical thinking, especially among the young. [See Is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis?]. It’s hard to argue with that. People don’t read very much these days (if they ever did). Watching TV is passive and not very critical. I seem to recall that there was proof of this twice when TV writers went on strike and people just kept watching the repeats that were aired in place of new shows.

It’s hard to be much less critical than re-watching the same stuff that bored us on the idiot box (as my father has been known to call it) the first time. But does watching TV (or playing video games, or chatting via SMS or IM) really engage the brain that much less than other traditional human activities like gathering nuts and berries, or walking behind a plow? I’m not so sure. I’m also unsure that reading, alone, has much to do with critical thinking. It depends on both the quality of material being read and the quality of thinking the reader does about it. Experience shows that cramming for a test does not foster serious thought. Mostly, it just gives me a headache. (I hope that’s not just me!) read more »