9/0 Nylon

The current surgical education system forces all candidates to claim that their goal is to be an academic surgeon engaged in research and teaching, when in fact they may just be interested in a quiet rural general surgical practice that greatly benefits a local community.

Better things to do than spend Saturday morning writing this, but important since there aren't enough actual journalists who can do their job. (link in reply)

1/14 I just finished 2 weeks of work in the hospital. Here’s a glimpse of what I saw. The kind of things that remind you why medicine is so good. First up: An S4 gallop you could not only hear… but see.

I remember Taleb saying somewhere in the distant past, when he was still exceptionally sane, something like "When you can do a few thing very well, you can afford a lot of mistakes". I came to appreciate this heavy-tailedness of positive payoffs only later. *Every single firm* I have worked at was dysfunctional, in the precise sense that goals that were part of their core mission were obviously, scandalously fumbled. Stuff like "let's start a business in , for which were are completely unsuited!" or "let's fix the risk department by doubling its size!" and so on. All of this, by executives who were also obviously very intelligent and well-intentioned. How can this be? Because they had a core at which they were among the top three in the world. Even when they ignored that core competency, it saved them over and over again.