There have been lots of comments on yesterday's Doctors vs. Geeks essay. One reader pointed out that "safe drinking water probably saves more lives than any single technology or medical advance." So, I guess geeks and doctors both owe civil engineers and hydrologists a debt or two, to say the least.
Also, Carlos Santos wrote:
The difference you hint at in your article is the top-down vs bottom-up approach. You've hit upon exactly the problem that most of us engineers met when we went through pre-med programs.
It is the type of thinking, and not the individual (e.g. it is not the medical profession, it is rather the TYPE of individual that is selected to become a physician that leads to the self-perpetuating expert-system approach).
The way I see it, medical schools select via pre-requisite classes and insistence on 4.0 GPA's the people that can brute-force memorize facts and do well in 'arbitrary' classes like organic chemistry vs the more typical engineer that is not great at memorizing encyclopedic volumes of unrelated facts but rather makes a logical model of the system and applies it at will to various types of problem.
They select people well-suited for the demands of the profession as it is currently; It's not that doctors don't think, it's just that most doctors are people who are selected *precisely because their way of thinking is adequate*. They were born with that approach at knowledge, you weren't.
What he said!
4:12:19 PM 
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