The Oil Drum

69 comments on The Future of Medicine in a Time of Resource Deprivation?

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Gail the Actuary on January 12, 2007 - 1:29pm

It is especially important that we work on educating those working at high enough levels to be making policy decisions regarding the coming changes associated with climate chage and peak oil and gas.

Each of us needs to work on educating people in our own field. If we have contacts at the university level or public policy areas, we need to work on them also. One avenue is writing articles in business magazines. Another is one-on-one contact with targeted individuals.

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Don Sailorman on January 12, 2007 - 2:15pm

I think one-on-one contact is, on an hourly basis, roughly one hundred times more effective than writing books and articles.

As a teacher I had an impact on some 9,000 students over the decades--possibly a significant impact in a fair number of cases. As the author of an economics textbook that emphasized the importance of secondary effects, I had perhaps 100,000 readers--but with much less net impact. Several students have told me that what they learned in my classes was a life-transforming experience, and though I've gotten positive feedback on my book, nobody has ever told me that it was life-transforming.

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Noisette on January 13, 2007 - 10:15am

Don wrote: I think one-on-one contact is, on an hourly basis, roughly one hundred times more effective than writing books and articles.

I was pleased to read this because locally in my little fish pond it is my impression.

Good teachers are incredibly influential, and their input holds and endures. Books - particularly set or expert texts of the academic style - even when excellent, tend to be washed away by the next text, publishers hype, etc. and to be forgotten. (Again, this is commercial biz. Ask Elsevier.)

Here (switz), if one asks students what books they hold dear or changed their lives or that they will keep as ‘sacred texts’ they always quote novels, biographies, philosophy, general discussion (those crappy books that eg. marry system analysis with personal relations - hydraulics and love - ! -) or, sometimes, religious texts, which are, at heart, nothing but dusty ethics and etiquette, or violent tales (respectively, the Koran and the Bible), symbols of adherence to a ‘community’. (I’m an atheist, apologies for the superficiality.)

Still, it depends on the book. Maybe a new genre needs to be invented.

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Don Sailorman on January 13, 2007 - 11:40am

Books have transformed my life; to a large extent I am what I read. However, I think for most people their lives are transformed almost entirely by their relationships with others--not by books or films or what they read on the Internet.

Every great teacher I have known was fully aware of the life-transforming possibilities in the classroom; their influence goes on in a positive way for generations after they die. Much of what I try to model for or teach to my grandchildren comes from the outstanding teachers I was fortunate to have from the fifth grade all the way through graduate school.

If you truly want to improve the world--and if you have the passion and the guts for it--go into teaching.