It could also be one person who is having both a heart attack and an asthma attack.
Oho, but the cunning mathematician never specified the units. They could easily have meant two medical incidents, not two people!
Its a math degree, not group theory
Is there a doctor around? There’s someone who has 30 minutes to respond to a funding call and needs help ASAP.
as if math graduates could do that sort of addition in their head
My brother has a PhD in pure mathematics. Sometimes I get in trouble (yes, hyperbole) with him because, while I’m pretty decent at arithmetic and I like numbers, he knows so much more about either than I do. For example, I recently said that 57 was a boring number (I tried to connect it to 17, which I like, but was thinking of 19, which is fine) and learned quite a lot from both him and some lemmings.
Another time I told him that I thought there was debate about whether 2 was prime and I subsequently got quite a lecture on the nature of primality.
Point I’m trying to make is, give at least some math graduates at least some credit.
Gotta add context for readers.
Of all the numbers to call boring you picked the Grothendieck prime.
2 is unambiguously prime. The best motivation for the definition of primality I know is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: every integer greater than 1 can be uniquely decomposed into a product of primes. That’s what primes are, and the uniqueness constraint is why 1 is not prime.
Are you my brother?
Is the amount of credit I should give them less than, equal to, or greater than the amount of credit I should give English majors?
I suppose it depends on what you value. Language is more of a creative venture while math is more of a technical one. “Credit” is also somewhat of a nebulous term.
I don’t know, once math becomes Greek letters and mathematician names it sort of seems to circle back around.
That’s a really excellent point.
Didn’t they just talk about circling back, not back into itself?
Don’t you drop a dimension from this deep conversation!
majors? you mean bachelors? PhDs get PhD respect. Bachelors get Bachelor respect. It’s not the subclassification of study, it’s the level. if you only have a bachelors, you get less respect than a masters and so on.
It’s weird how we use the word for a teacher as a name for physicians.
I actually don’t think we should require physicians to be doctors. Medicine doesn’t really have a lot to do with teaching. We do need some PhDs in medicine, but I don’t think physicians need to be qualified to teach.
Physicians don’t require PhDs, they require MDs.
A PhD is a Doctor of Philosophy while a MD is a Doctor of Medicine. So I guess in that way the title “Doctor” radically changes based on the field kinda like the title “Engineer”.
Yeah I’m saying physicians shouldn’t have MDs. They should have some other non-teaching physician qualification, or a PhD in medicine.
You shouldn’t be able to get an MD at a Bachelor or Master level. And patients should not expect to see a doctor when they walk into a clinic or hospital.
you mean like Nurse Practitioners?
I think you have things backwards. PhDs are just proof of becoming an expert researcher in a field, and MDs are just proof of becoming a practitioner of medicine.
Some who get PhDs or MDs become teachers because of their proficiency, but the purpose of PhDs and MDs isn’t to become teachers.
If the purpose of an MD isn’t to be a teacher, why do they use the word doctor? Doctor means teacher. Pick a different word!
I’m staring to think MDs aren’t actually doctors!
If we’re putting effort into fixing how society uses words, can we work on flammable versus inflammable first? Then I vote for fixing the odd one out in the terrible, terrific, horrible, horrific quad. Then the split between awful and awe. Then…
can we work on flammable versus inflammable first?
no. also you missed horrid
You’re making a semantic argument, which is kinda useless because what you’re suggesting wouldn’t change anything substantially, just the language we use to describe it. People would still go to the same programs to get the same qualifications, they would just be called something different.
But language has inertia, and you’re never going to get people to stop calling them doctors, no matter how much you insist that they’re called “health engineers” or “A&P technicians” or whatever you come up with.
Why not focus on something else like the much-needed systemic reforms in healthcare; getting business interests out of the medical system; socializing and universalizing healthcare if you live in a backwater country like the US; making sure mental, vision, hearing, and dental are included in that; training enough medical professionals and opening enough clinics to reduce waitlists and ensure everyone has timely access to the care they need; updating standard practices to be consistent with cutting edge research (this is especially important in mental healthcare!); actually funding research to find effective treatments even if that means entrenched healthcare companies offering subpar options have to adapt or become obsolete; et cetera.
So many things to be concerned with that are more important than what we call the people with a medical degree…
Reforming the medical system is a pointless waste of time. We need to ban fossil fuels and animal agriculture. Animals are being slaughtered by the millions by factory farms. We shouldn’t waste time improving the way we care for humans, when humans are already doing so much better than other creatures like cows and corals. It’s a waste of effort to secure such marginal improvements for humans, when we can do so much more for animals.
Actually, never mind. Dismissing problems by comparing them to bigger problems, AKA whataboutism, doesn’t actually make the world a better place. It doesn’t increase effort spent on the big problems, it just reduces effort on the smaller ones and makes the world a worse place. I retract the above paragraph; medical care reform is important too, even if it’s less impactful. And physicians calling themselves doctors, though relatively inconsequential, still annoys the crap out of Me.
For what it’s worth, patient education is a necessary component of any medical interaction. Most medical doctors need to be able to teach. Unless you’re a pathologist I guess, and never speak directly to the patients.
If you divided them horizontally, they would stop
Most people stop if you divide them horizontally.
Only a flesh wound
Only most?
only most
Lieutenant Dan!
Some are worms
Did they have the poisson for the in-flight meal.
Why did this jerk speak up in an emergency? To confuse people? Sheesh (yes I know it’s part of the joke blah blah but let me take a moral high ground on an argument in my head for a second)
Because he’s a doctor and doesn’t know what kind of doctor they are looking for.
OK I get that - but in this fake scenario how many math PhDs would seriously be like “oh I’m a doctor that might be useful on an airplane right here right now”
c’mon that makes no sense
I get it’s a joke and all but if a PhD is that full of themself then they need to take a break lol
Non-ambiguous use of language is important in our training.
Those are not good odds.
