Just to respond to this and all the others at once:

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.

I don't think it's a stupid answer. Maybe too extreme, but I believe it contains some elements of truth. Trust has been largely eroded by greed, corruption and incompetence, and if one counts only on trust is probably going to get the short end of the stick. As a matter of fact, when you "outsource" some activity, you need some non-zero amount of competence in the outsourced field to be able to evaluate the level of service and avoid terrible outcomes. This is sadly true even when you go to a gastroenterologist.

I think it's impolite to label the original answer stupid, he seems to have taken time to at least think about it, and we should keep a civil tone here.

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.

I don't think there's anything uncivil about calling something as stupid as "if you don't want to be a victim of the very legal foundation of the country you live in, you must:

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.

There's a lot of hostility to unpack in your response, but I'd just say this: It costs nothing to study law, you don't need a college degree to pass the bar, and it's a useful life skill the way understanding code is. If you have the ability to study something that would benefit you and don't choose to, that's a waste of intellect. If you feel the need to deride it as well, that's indicative of having a chip on your shoulder. Ultimately your unfounded class assumptions and indignation at people who try to better themselves by learning as much about the system we live in as possible are a lot of wind and water, and speak more about your insecurities and fear of learning something that seems scary. Make all the appeals to popular emotion you want - they don't change reality. The reality is that people who can read and write legal documents have an ability to execute all of the business strategies that the smartest minds on HN struggle with; for the same reason that those brilliant minds can execute algorithms in binary that the average lawyer can't conceive of. If you could know both languages, why wouldn't you? Your comment is fundamentally no different from one which derides learning math as an elitist activity, when someone else says it's a way of making sense of the natural world. Or who says that learning another language is only for the elite.

"Too extreme" is putting it mildly. Most people couldn't even afford to go to law school. A great many wouldn't have the spare time to study another specialty and a lot might not even be capable of competently understanding the material even if they did go to law school (we all have our strengths and weaknesses after all. For example I'd be a hopeless doctor, chef or teacher). And that's before you've factored in that you also need to keep on top of any new case studies and changes in legislation else risk your knowledge becoming irreverent.

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).