No, based on my data points of super rich people seeking care. They just get a lot more of the 5-star luxury side care. They can access expensive and bleeding edge therapies including illegal ones, but they don’t work well enough to be called Illuminati med
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My biggest frustration is the amount of time it can take to get a proper diagnosis for something. Can be weeks of getting routed between different doctors before you can even begin treating something.
Have dealt with this for various sports injuries, infections, etc.
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Ah yes, there’s no Illuminati doctors but there are Illuminati Skip the Line passes
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Not good enough for illuminati. I want a smarter, more efficient, more incentivized doctor who is going to fix my shit fast.
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The top 1% of every field can typically charge more for better performance. But seemingly not true for doctors. I want, e.g., the Federer of dermatologists to get me right ASAP. And if I were a billionaire, I’d be ready to pay up.
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I don’t know that such outlier performance can exist in medicine. It’s not a field of prodigies and genuises. The House show painted a convincing portrait of a type of savant doctor who doesn’t exist.
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find this incredibly hard to believe - medicine has a lot of art to it, and the more "art" the larger variance in individual performance?
I'd expect a genius doctor to be 1000x better than a good one.
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I don’t agree. “Art” as such is a negative indicator. Outlier performance happens when there is a talent factor within highly legible objective performance criteria that can statistically learned. Like music or sports. Even fine art arguably has no prodigies, only “greats.”
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fair - but you'd argue then that medicine has not enough feedback loops for outlier performance to develop?
maybe that's where we see things differently :)
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I think it’s just too messy and open a domain, with vast social context too. Same reason you don’t have prodigies in social science generally. Where tight feedback loops for “10,000 hour effect” to kick in exist, it’s too narrow a range of conditions.
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Doctors with amazing cure stats are often gaming their record by never taking cases they know they can’t save
yeah, gotcha. my overly optimistic view still stands that what you're describing is a property of the system (= not making prodigies visible/legible as easily), more than the underlying reality of prodigies not existing at all
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we can debate what prodigies mean, but I find it hard to believe that there's no outlier performance at all in any field of human knowledge/practice that is complex enough
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