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>My student doesn't seem to understand. Someday, she will.

...Or you could just tell her right now, instead of going off and tweeting your smug thought.

Still, this was a nice set of stories.




> ...Or you could just tell her right now, instead of going off and tweeting your smug thought.

Modernity in a nutshell right there.


- Times I’ve learned my lesson by experience: 100

- Times I’ve learned a lesson by advice: 0

- Times a lesson taught by advice turned out to be false: 400

I don’t know. There’s so many things people take for granted that it is a dangerous thing to just take someone’s word for it.


Put this way, it seems rather important to trust one's own judgement. That is a useful basis - one need to start somewhwere. If you give up both your judgement and other people's advice, you won't get anywhere at all before making that decision.

I sometimes wonder if bad advice is running more rampant today or if it was always this bad.


So did you get hit by a car before learning to look both ways when crossing the street? Or did someone tell you?


> So did you get hit by a car before learning to look both ways when crossing the street? Or did someone tell you?

Are you suggesting the first people that learned to cross a road got hit by cars before realizing they had to look both ways? There was no one to tell them how to look, so how did they learn it except by "being hit by a car"?


Not OP, but...the advent of cars over horse-drawn carriages involved a _lot_ of deaths before both pedestrians and drivers learned. There was also a lot of propaganda put out by car companies to change the popular conception of roadways from being a place where people walk and children play to being a place for cars. [1] So...it's actually pretty close to people needing to be told to look both ways.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797


I’m suggesting it’s stupid to think you’ve learned nothing but false truths from advice.

Edit: but for what it’s worth even in this stupid example. To learn from experience that you must look both ways does imply you suffered the consequence of not knowing it beforehand. Be that being hit or coming close. Pedantic w/e


The difference is that things you learn stay with you for long, and things you're told rarely do.

Not sure how or why you would teach young people about general meaninglessness of most things. It's risky and could kill talents and inventions.

Finally people do not get interesting without making mistakes.


That guy turned a bunch of old people stories into his own old person story.

I bet he tells that same story every week to a different intern.

Probably forgets he told it already so tells it two or three times to the same intern.


I think you're taking this a bit literal. It's a story. I can't imagine an individual medical student actually talking to an attending physician like this. More likely based on observations of his students and residents in general.


https://twitter.com/TheRealDoctorT/status/117231489460504576...

"Definitely not. That medical student was a composite of every student I’ve had who has rotated with me and at some point asked me why on earth I chose a specialty that has a mostly geriatric population. It’s a valid question, the illnesses can be complex with many issues."


Composite students learning from composite patients.

> the patient was actually a composite of hundreds of patients over twenty years spanning states.

https://twitter.com/TheRealDoctorT/status/117230945733996135...

What a well composed doctor.


According to the story (which may or may not be true), he did tell her, but she didn't understand.




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