The answer to a problem cannot be, "Become a subject matter expert in that field."
You don't understand the problem with your small intestine? Become a gastroenterologist. No thanks. Society has to be built on trust to function. Yes, we've allowed for an enormous amount of trust to be eroded in the Western world, but that's over now. We either make the hard choices to rebuild these institutions or we see the long slow miserable collapse of our society.
The reason my family optimizes for law school as a default is that it's not a specialization, it's a baseline way of thinking about and dealing with any business or life situation you find yourself in. Just as "programming" in the general sense is not a speciality and is something I think everyone should be versed in as a logical form to call upon when needed, their view is that thinking as a lawyer is crucial. Whether you ever practice law or not. This is far different from delving into the specifics of some field of law or, in your example, medicine. It's as general a type of logic as you might get from a degree in philosophy; it just happens to be a lot more useful when you need to get things done in the here and now.
My father's command was: Be whatever you want but do it after you're a lawyer. I didn't do that, but then again, I'm the least successful of my brothers.
All I meant by my original comment was that there's a rationale to it: This is not one aspect of medicine. It's applicable to every endeavor in life. Taking the time to become intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the law is roughly the same as learning the CLI for the operating system that your society runs on. Most people are only familiar with the GUI.
And for the person who said no one can afford to go to law school: Many of the best I know went to night school or even studied completely on their own, and passed the bar while they were working other jobs full-time. Just like many of the best coders.
However, I agree with the guy who called it stupid. Not in calling it stupid, but in that it's an answer that creates more questions than it answers.
You could nuance it and take the steelman version, which is that everyone should be generally educated and know a bit about everything, but we all know it's unrealistic. You can't do part of an actuarial degree so that you understand insurance. But you have to buy insurance. You can't flip through a psychology intro so that you can be prepared when you see a therapist. Or read DS&A so that you can hire a programmer. Or read about structures for when you buy a house, or learn to play the piano so you can enjoy music.
You just can't do all these things to a degree where you are covered everywhere.
Now the problem with certain fields is they reach into everyone's lives to a significant degree. Law is one of those, medicine is another, and finance is yet another.
So you can't even narrow it down to "do these things only", because you can't become an expert in multiple broad fields like that. The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.
a) be smart enough to get into a very competitive professional school (most people don't have a college degree, which is required, and even objectively bad law schools are somewhat hard to get into),
b) be wealthy enough to pay for it (it costs on average $150k plus opportunity costs),
c) be interested enough in it to actually consider it, and
d) be... stupid enough to actually do it (there are too many lawyers, and less than 1/4 of them say their education was worth it)"
stupid.
> The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.
And this is exactly why "just go to law school" is a stupid answer in this context.
In short, if it were that easy then more people would do it since the kind of jobs it unlocks generally pays pretty well (easily above the national average).
Be it small things like robocalls, or bigger things like a broken healthcare system, gun violence, lobbying in politics or things like the housing/opiod crisis — a big part of the US people I talk to have basically given up on any collective way of fixing these issues and just try to shield themselves individually from the consequences and risks. The summed up individual time, nerve and energy spent on this must easily outweigh the time, nerve and energy it would cost to fix these issues collectively.
Sometimes I even have the feeling that some people like hurdles like these because they believe it gives them some kind of "edge" in the competition with others — a bit like in the 30-year-war where at some point people had adapted to the war so much, they didn't want it to end, because they were a little less worse off than their peers — they had forgotten how much better off they could be if there was peace.
Let's take the example that the public prosecutor's office is bound by the instructions of the Ministry of Justice. Let us now assume that someone files charges against two politicians on the (justified) suspicion of supporting tax evasion by banks, and let us assume that these politicians now hold very prominent positions in the country. How would the public prosecutor's office react?
Exactly. The initial suspicion necessary for an investigation is denied. Despite demonstrable false statements made by the politicians in question before parliamentary investigative committees.
There are also regular rulings by the Hamburg court (think Delaware) regarding copyright, addblockers and the like.
Here, too, the individual can do nothing. Because the system is not made to allow such influence of individuals.
The elected representatives have gone through years of party school. Polished smoothly. Streamlined. Who questions things or acts in the sense of the people will find no place on the list to be elected. Who wants to found an own party must do a lot and will fail in the vast majority of cases because you need 5% of the votes to be represented at all in parliament.
Demonstrations, petitions and the like have not changed anything for a long time.
Imho we live in a corporate democracy. Not a democracy that represents any "people".
So the rational thing to do is to stop caring and to "only" protect one's own personal life and that of one's loved ones.
And if/when a family like mine puts themselves through law school - this generation wants to slag it as if that represents privilege or assimilation?
My father was responsible for having hundreds of criminal convictions overturned in one single civil rights case before the supreme court of California. His parents didn't even speak English. I guess he shouldn't have put himself through law school taking on debt and selling shoes?
For examples, imposed barriers for law or medical school is a form of barriers of entry. The profit-seeking motive becomes rent-seeking then, because the number of competitors is artificially lower.
We can't have a functional society like this: by the time i am done getting a law degree, a software degree, a finance degree (massive dark pattern there), medical degree , etc - i will be 60 and millions in debt.
In a functional society you rely on the rest of society to get things roughly correct, and to not defraud you every step.
Adopt the dog-eats-dog view of the world, and you will get basically russia - spciety ruled by fraud and violence, with mafia boss at the helm
Of those things you mentioned, only the law degree is useful when dealing with issues that arise in all of the others.
2. You might have saved the same amount of money by taking your car to more than one mechanic to get an estimate, without having done all that research.
3. "Building wealth is not about refraining from spending money." On the contrary, that's exactly what it's about, algebraically speaking. Income minus expenses is profit, a/k/a wealth.
Now, don't get me wrong - I don't disagree that it's good to know things; I went to university and then law school to get a well-rounded education (I'm an attorney as well as an engineer). But that doesn't mean I spent my time in the most economical way possible. (Law school was very expensive, and I don't even practice law.) If I scrubbed toilets for a living, I'd be way worse off than I am today, even if I knew how to fix my own car.
Congratulations might be the wrong word, but I applaud that you chose to become an attorney and an engineer; that type of combination is the gold standard for my family. I can't believe it's something you'd ever regret.
My argument throughout this thread has been misconstrued. All I'm arguing for is that people should use every available opportunity to educate themselves, and that certain things (to me, logic, computer science, legal, mechanical, biological, historical, and literary - but your preferences may differ) are valuable tools that are worth constantly continuing to educate yourself in.
On refraining from spending money: If you buy things that are worth what you paid for them (as an expendable or an experience), or things that increase in value over time, then spending money is fine. i.e. a fairly agreed-upon trade benefits both parties. The loss of net value comes in with friction in the transaction. Generally, spending money unwisely. If you require an expert go-between for every transaction, those fractions add up to the difference between your income and expenditure. Put more bluntly: The money I save on mechanics because I read the manuals and/or do the work myself is money I save. When I do want to spend money, it's not a problem if I'm getting what I expect from it, because it's an equal trade. The only loss would be if I didn't willingly agree to pay for what I got.
I lucked out in that we had been friends before. I have answered many development and programming questions and issues for them, and they have for me too.
To others commenting, I guess it's about having trust in others and using that. We have friends and family that are in CS, accounting, law, medicine, etc. What we don't have, we pay for. Find a good resource and pay them.
I guess this goes back to the grandparent post were they talk about access and costs of different lawyers.
I'm sure it would make the lives of whoever manages their IT a lot easier if they can just expect the lawyers to go through a few more years of college. You can just blindly deploy updates, assume everybody uses the communicated backup plan and put the full blame on the lawyers if they get hacked because they use a crappy password. Sysadmin heaven!
Form your own country and become a president.