Quarkmaster
Community Member
- MBTI
- INTP
I haven't been able to figure out what this guy is. I know he's a PhD psychologist, but that far from makes him godlike in capabilities. There are many PhDs in the world. Last statistic I saw said that 0.8% of the people who live in my community have PhDs. Less than 1%, but the population of my town is around 100,000, so that says about 800 live just around here.
The real scary thing is exactly this: how much power we give to that credential. I also have a PhD (technically, two bachelors, a minor in Math, a masters and a doctorate), but the other guys (and girls) at the gym don't respect it one bit. Of course, I don't share that with everyone either.
When a PhD nutritionist at Harvard started running around the country and eventually around the world, telling everyone that, "eating fat is bad for you", people saw two things, "Harvard" and "PhD", and suddenly this became the "new blue", even though, at that very moment, there were a dozen other papers (by real scientists) telling us that fat is actually good for us. This guy was probably just the Harvard Cafeteria Nutritionist.
But the damage he caused can't be undone. To this day, health-conscious people are still terrified of fat in their diet. Then there have been a number of poorly-done studies, funded by the sugar industry, to confirm his ideology.
Almost no one who attends college doesn't intend to do this. Indeed, if the majority of college students were merely going for "the fun of it", no government money would be supplied to support it. When was the last time you heard of a student loan for going to Disney World?
About half of the people in college are iNtuitives (according to... well, wait, now I don't remember where I read that), which makes them a much larger group than out "in the world". But it's a place where the iNtuitive faction of our world feel much more at home, as did I.
The last I heard, maybe ten years ago, PhD Electrical Engineers started out in the industry around $130k. Doctors and lawyers are probably not far off from that.
However, I knew one INFJ girl at the gym (whom I thought was very cute and I wanted to try and "get next" to her) had her degree in psychology, but wasn't going to pursue a master's in psychology because "the jobs in psychology don't pay well enough for the work" and instead, was going to go after an MD. I commented to her that I thought that psychology was an ideal field for her personality type, which of course, she took offense to and eventually ran away from me, advising that she had already spoken to her therapists and that this was after all a wise decision. That was silly, of course, because, what else would her therapists advise her to do? They would all be supportive, whereas, somebody like me would advise her of the practicality of this decision. Or the impracticality of it.
Of course, I didn't word it that way; I simply mentioned that, even with a bachelor's in psychology, they would still want to see her take courses in physics, calculus, biology, chemistry and probably a few other of the sciences that she may have skipped for her psych degree, like microbiology and organic chemistry before admitting her to a medical program. I had already tutored many premed students in physics who wanted a good grade in order to qualify to get into medical school.
She didn't like that. Not one bit. And that's about when she ran away, I think maybe crying. Oh well. I never saw her again.
