Are PhD’s and MD’s the Smartest Among Us?

Common-Sense Smarts vs Book Smarts

We have this obsession with PhD's and MD's, as if they're the only ones with knowledge that is valuable.

If you've gotten a terminal degree, regardless of whether you then use it, for the rest of your life, to make a living, or signal to the world how smart you are--

--you cannot possibly help but notice that some people lacking critical thinking skills completed masters degrees and PhD's.

Many people acquire credentials to use them, forever, to prove they’re smart.

(Check out my favorite commentator on the war, Ret Col MacGregor, who makes fun of his PhD. He also mocks everything the media tells you about the war, and fills you in on alternate perspectives.)

My 30-year parenting career was more instructive than grad school. My 30 years running businesses was more instructive than grad school.

My lifetime of relationships was more instructive than grad school. The hundreds of books I've read independently were, in aggregate, more instructive than grad school.

That’s four categories of information or wisdom that were far, far more valuable to me than the post-graduate education I got.

I hope you think about that next time you hand your health off to a person in a white coat. (Remember, too, that half of those people graduated in the bottom half of the class.)

Actually, allowing a person in a white coat coerce me into a certain injection made me so sick, for four years, that I finished the masters but not the PhD.

I was just too sick to be a young mother, an employee, and finish my studies.

More-more-more of those same types of products made my oldest child so ill, I thought many times we were going to lose him.

I’m sure that AI can warp-speed my learning, but I already spend almost all my waking hours learning. I’m not sure how much faster my brain can go.

Also, I don’t trust that AI will give me much, regarding health and wellness, that I actually agree with. Since companies that monetize (in health, mostly with pharma) will incorporate whatever makes them money, into the information you’re served up.

Finding sources you trust, where a human being with decades of experience studying health and wellness, to learn from, has never been more important.

The medical journal Nature just published a report showing that MedBot gives better medical diagnostics and is more empathetic than doctors do.

Many of my colleagues in grad school were avoiding the work force–they were in school because they hadn’t figured out a way to make a living yet, or because their work paid for it, and they’d get a raise if they did it.

Some were trust fund babies or living on grants.

Some of them were less smart than some of my friends who dropped out of high school or college. (Who didn’t have the money for college and had to get started working, to support themselves or a family.)

My daughter often refers to her degree in business management as "worthless."

Two of my fellow students in grad school were having an affair, married to others--while they trained to be psychotherapists to advise others with marital problems.

Here’s the ugly little secret. If you're 56 years old and have a masters degree or even a PhD–what you "learned" is 30-yo information you don't remember much of.

It's not that I learned nothing of value in grad school. I did.

I was also woke-indoctrinated before woke was a word. One professor spent one full class period having the class work on the answer to this question:

"What is a family?"

The answer the class finally landed on was this:

“A group of people who live together and love each other."

I was in my 20's and hadn't found my voice for challenging narratives, and I've spent a quarter century mad at myself for not speaking up in that class. That's not what a family is.

That's the kind of stuff your therapist is learning in school. If you’re looking for a good therapist, check out my article on that, here.

Another therapist wrote me a private email, thanking me for that piece. She said it was spot on, but also wanted to point out that you can look at a therapist’s webpage, or Yelp review, and you’ll see whether or not she’s virtue signaling about “gender affirmation” or “masks required” or “gender-neutral bathrooms,” etc.

That’s a good addition I wanted to add to the conversation. If you’re looking for a therapist who doesn’t embrace the woke values, that’s a great way to make an initial assessment.

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