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.
Conversation
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.
2
1
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.”
2
4
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 :)
1
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.
1
Doctors with amazing cure stats are often gaming their record by never taking cases they know they can’t save
1
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
1
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
1
That’s where we disagree. I think the field needs to be *simple* enough. Complexity kills prodigality. In fact signs of it are a red flag in complex fields. If you hear of a “prodigy” economist, run.
1
2
yeah, there's nuance here though.
you get a lot more into prodigy economist territory on areas like nutrition, but an NFL doctor might get reps to become a 1000x better doc for knee injuries
What trips me up is an absolutism in "for sure no prodigy doctors" haha
1
Still going with that. I think “prodigies everywhere” is the absolutism 🤣
Mostly OCD nerdery gets mistaken for prodigality

