Vive la Difference

Just because it’s fun to have a different view on things here’s something that isn’t directly to do with our EQSQ personality tests. Via Craig Newmark’s blog, a piece in the New York Observer on how people choose which medical specialty they go into.

The oncologists are the baseball card collectors apparently: not too strange when you think that there are hundreds of possible different treatments and they have to remember the details of them all. Internal medicine as a whole seems to attract the crossword puzzlers and scrabble players: those who like to solve puzzles (hey, this is sounding like our systemizers!).

General surgery attracts those who really like working 90 hours a week: either that or they hate their familes, it can be difficult to tell as one informant points out.

Dermatology seems to be populated by those who themselves have perfect skin although opinions are mixed: those with the right resume but not the most intellectual, a bit like investment banking.

Neurosurgery seems, entirely bizarrely, to attract the frat boy set with brains.

Anasthesiology is rather like flying: take off and landing are interesting, the bit in thje middle less so. But you do, as they say, have to love the five minutes of fear.

Pediatrics is low paid and really only for those with a mission to care for kids (do we detect a whiff of our empathizing tendency here?).

Of course, this is more or less just for fun but I do find it interesting how at least some of the specialties map across what we might expect from our EQSQ personality test results. Even within such a highly intelligent and driven group as trainee doctors, there’s still parts of the psyche that draw people to one activity or another and that part of the mindset seems to be consistent: the puzzle solvers want to solve puzzles for a living, not just for fun, and so on.

Now this is a career that many think of but believe me, it’s horribly difficult to get into. The idea of the crusading journalist out to put the world to rights attracts many but most unfortunately, few are chosen. The profession is also a poster child for the way in which certification has become ever more important in employment. The time was that the training of a journalist happened on the job: Terry Pratchett tells of his first day as an 18 year old on the local paper: four hours later he saw his first dead body. Progression in a career happened by starting on a small paper in a small role and as more was learned (and talent shone through) moving on to larger roles in larger outlets.

Nowadays the absolute minimum to get anywhere in the industry is a college degree. It can be in journalism itself although there are many places that prefer a college degree in what will become the specialist subject: politics, business or economics for example. It is also becoming more common for employers to want a further college degree: perhaps a Master’s in journalism.

Unfotunately, what hasn’t happened at the same time is that those small jobs went away. Even with a college degree, it is still extremely unlikely to be hired on a large paper or by a national network: careers still progress by starting with small jobs and then moving up: it’s just you need that college degree before you start now.

Reporters and journalists need to have two skill sets: they need to be able to read people, empathise with them, in order to get the information and stories they want. They also need to have the systemizing skills to put it all into order, to explain it with reference to the rest of the world. So by our EQSQ personality tests standards, we’re looking for balanced brain types here.

Now this is actually the job that we all wanted, wasn’t it? Whether it was the big hair and spandex in a heavy metal band or playing that exquisite concerto in front of the nation’s finest symphony orchestra I’m convinced (OK, maybe I’m projecting here) that everyone has at some time wanted to be the musician or singer up there on the stage.

Most of us realize early on that we don’t have the systemizing skills necessary: it takes a minimum of 3,000 hours of playing to become an accomplished musician. That is, for those keeping score, a year and a half of full time work. So would we look at musicians and singers and say that this is, therefore, for those with the male brain type by our EQSQ personality tests?

Well, on that evidence alone we might but from personal experience I can tell you that it isn’t actually that simple. Having done those 3,000 hours myself I was working occasionally as a semi-pro (one or two gigs a week for beer and gas money, nothing more) and I was good at my chosen instrument, the trumpet. It was mostly jazz I played but there was orchestral stuff in there as well, bits and pieces of being a horn section for local pop bands, that sort of stuff.

Then I hit a brick wall in developing my playing. I didn’t actually have what it takes to go further than being simply a proficient technican. The most important thing to get to a fully professional position is empathy. You have to naturally understand what the other musicians are thinking, where the piece is going, (yes, even if it’s all written out for you, you have to ‘get’ the dynamics).

Much to my annoyance and frustration I found that to be a professional musician you really need to have the balanced brain type from our EQSQ personality tests. You need to be systemizing to get the physical skills but you need on top of that the empathic ones to make good use of them.
I do wish I’d known that 30 years ago, I will admit.

This is one of those jobs I always knew was around, I recognise the word, but I never actually knew what it meant. Enlightenment at last as the BLS points out to me that it means the people who assemble, disassemble and repair industrial machinery. I don’t think we’re going to find it too tough to place this on our EQSQ personality tests now, do you? As we’ve said before, if Tim ‘The Tool Man’ Taylor would like it, it’s male brain orientated. Pounding bolts in with a sledgehammer is one tasks mentioned: but much more important for categorizing by brain types is that the work requires systemizing abilities. It isn’t just that empathy isn’t all that useful a skill when faced with 1,500 tonnes of industrial machinery, it is that when repairing it, understanding how the system works and then being able to diagnose why it currently isn’t: well, that’s systemizing, isn’t it? Yes, there is the necessity for interpersonal skills when working as part of a team but then most people, male and female brain types alike, have sufficient empathy to be able to do that.
The training, as you would expect in this sort of industrial job, isn’t so much about college degrees as apprenticeships. Typically four or five years of on the job training, working as a junior in a team. There will usually be about a week of classroom instruction each three months to add to that process. It might be a formal apprenticeship with such classroom training, or a community college program with more informal on the job training: but it’s experience that gets the training done here, much more so than book learning. Clearly a college degree can help, especially in engineering or a related subject, but it’s very rare for millwrights to have such a degree.
Pay seems to run around the $20 an hour level and the job often entails quite lot of overtime (machinery is expensive so time when it isn’t running: worth paying a lot of overtime to get it back up rather than continue to lose on the machine) so annual incomes should be in the $40,000 to $50,000 range. Pretty good these days for a job without a college degree.

Who knew that this is actually a career? Thinking about it, of course, it’s obvious that it is and one that will be growing quickly in the future. It’s just never really occured to me that people might do this full time.

But with the increasing pace of modern life, the growth of companies that do nothing but put on, for example, industry shows, I guess it’s inevitable that it will become a more structured career. At the moment there is no specific route into the job. There are no college degrees in convention planning for example. Employers do like applicants to have a college degree, usually a Bachelor’s, but that is more as a marker, a sign of a certain level of general education and intelligence, not specific training in the field. No doubt, over the coming years, college degrees specifically on this subject will arise.

The two main routes actually seem to be either starting as a general gofer or coming in from the hotel trade. The general gofer route means being a secretary or junior manager perhaps who is asked to organise local meetings and discovers a talent for it. Reputations spread and after further experience our hero finds herself organising larger and larger meetings and conventions. Coming in from the hotel trade: well, they’re the people who see the other side of the same process so experience there is obviously a plus.

I have a feeling that this is likely a job for our male brain types (and I will certainly admit that the effective ones I’ve met professionaly have all been women: but with very much male brain systemizing abilities) according to our EQSQ personality tests. While at the time of the actual meeting or copnvention there will be a need to be the smiling and welcoming face, in the months of preparation that lead up to it it’s systems and details all the way.

This is another one of those odd jobs in the medical field (like medical coding clerk) that doesn’t in fact involve any contact with the patients at all. So we don’t have our usual concerns of the need for empathic skills here. So if we were to look at this job through the lens of our EQSQ personality tests we would not, as we do with almost all other medical specialties, immediately say that those with high relative EQ scores (or the ‘female brain’ type) will do better than those without.
The job is actually taking the taped notes of the doctors and other professionals and turning them into neatly typed files for insertion in the long term medical records. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics says, this is something that is under attack from technology at the moment (I’ve actually just bought a copy of the dictation software that is in competition) but at the current level it still needs someone to check the performance of the unaided computer. There’re two further reasons to think that the trade won’t disappear: the still rapid expansion of the health care system as a whole and the fact that still the experieinced human has an advantage over the computer: we recognize anomalies in the way they don’t. Medical notes can be contradictory and a good transcriptionist picks those up and then checks back, physically, with the note taker to resolve those anomalies. More than once such checking has saved lives.

The usual training is a one or two year program at a community college or vocational school. The study is both a basic medical background and familiarity with the medical terminology plus training in the use of the actual transciption equipment itself.

Given that many work alone, even at home, and the level of detail required, I think it’s fairly obvious that this is, by our EQSQ personality tests, a job for the systemizers, those with the male type brain.

It’s also pretty well paid for a job that doesn’t require a college degree: just under $14 an hour, or almost exactly the average hourly wage of all jobs in the US.

We shouldn’t confuse medical assistants with physician’s assistants. Strangely, medical assitants don’t actually do any of the assisting with things medical, while the physician’s ones do. The medical assistants are rather the people who do all of the other non-medical stuff so that the doctors and nurses (where they exist) can get on with doing the medical stuff.
I rather like it when a word or phrase turns out to mean exactly the opposite of what you would first think!

There’s two parts to the job, the administrative duties, which is all about scheduling things, filing the paperwork and so on: all the stuff that has to be done in any busy office. There’s also the clinical duties, which might mean taking patient histories and so on. We would normally think, according to our EQSQ personality tests that the male brain types should do the administrative side and the female brain types the clinical side. In a small medical practice of course only one person is going to end up doing both, so perhaps the balanced brain type there: in larger units, people tend to specialize so we might see people separating into the respective groups quite naturally, as certain people prefer certain types of work.

The training does not require a college degree but as the BLS tells us there are two year college degrees available. In fact, there are thousands of different programs leading to certificates, diplomas and college degrees in being a medical assistant. They’re offered at vocational and technical schools, community colleges and so on right across the country.

The number of pure mathematicians is so tiny (2,500 or so) that it seems odd to put it into a career guide: the skills needed for it are also so rare that those who have them will do it and those that don’t can train all they like and they won’t be able to do it. However, such pure mathematics is a great example of the way in which our EQSQ personality tests can illuminate career aptitudes and job choices.

The essential necessary talent (or desire if you prefer) to do high level mathematics is an intense drive to systemize. Pure mathematicians often describe themselves as describing how the universe ought to be, any connection with the real wolrd merely being a happy coincidence. The original image of the absent minded professor, pondering his notebook as his office burns down around him, well, that’s a mathematician for you.

What makes the EQSQ personality tests so valuable here is that there is a huge preponderance of men in the field, as we would expect from something so reliant upon systemizing skills. But that doesn’t mean that there are no women in it, just as we know from the personality tests that it is not true to say that no women have highly systemizing (or ‘male type’) brains. Rare, yes, but not as rare as some might think.

As a personal example one of my own friends (very much a California Girl type in everything else) is, at 26, the holder of a Ph.D in maths and is on the tenure track at a very grand university, she’ll be a professor in a few years (she published her first academic paper while a sophmore!). It is also true that the creator of the world’s first computer language (all the way back in the 1850s) was a woman, Countess Ada Lovelace.
That maths (and thus the associated professions like cryptoanalysis, high level computer progrmming and so on) appear to be almost exclusively male is not down to anything innate about the subject and males, rather, to the subject and the requirement for that intensely systemizing kind of brain, something found more often but by no means exclusively in men.

You boy, stop giggling at the back there, this is about real massage therapy not massage parlors. According to the BLS this is a job sector that is likely to grow substantially from the current 100,000 people or so over the years to come. The reasons they give make great sense too. Firstly, we’re all beginning to realize the health benefits of massage itself. Not just the freedom from aches and pains but the improved blood flow and flexibility that come from regular treatment. Secondly, the increased ageing of the population means many more old people who especially benefit from massages and the third reason is that we’re all getting much more excited about alternative and holistic therapies: look at the list in Wikipedia for quite how man of those there are, just in massage.

No college degree is required to enter the profession, indeed, outside of things like sports science where it makes up a small part of the program, no college degrees in massage exist. There are, however, thousands of different programs around the country that teach massage. As most States require licencing before a masseur is let loose, on their own, on a live body, this is probably just as well that there is a training system. Community colleges, vocational schools, practioners themselves and certain colleges as a part of another program or as an elective, offer classes in massage that can lead to certification.

Where would we think a masseur would be on our EQSQ personality test spectrum? Or rather, which type of person by those personality tests might make a good masseur? As the BLS again tells us, “..strong communication skills and a friendly, empathetic personality are extremely helpful qualities…” which makes it pretty easy for us, really, doesn’t it? Empathizers, or those with the female brain type.

There’s been yet another attempt to try and find out what it is that might be causing the rise in autism. Gregg Easterbrook writes about it in Slate and I have to say that it’s really not all that great a piece of work.

The basic thought is that children’s minds need continual stimulation: OK, we agree there, but then there are thoughts that they need to get this from 3D imagery, not 2 D. Well, if that is so, why aren’t all blind people autistic then?

The researchers did indeed find a correlation (and remember, correlation is not causation) between the arrival of cable television in an area and a rise in autism. They also found one between more rainfall in an area and more autism: maybe, they think, more rain means more TV watching?

The problem with this is that from Simon Baron-Cohen’s work, (he of our EQSQ personality tests) we think that autism is actually triggered by an excess of fetal exposure to testosterone. The trigger for that we think is genetic, where two highly systemizing people (or rather the genes for that), again as measured by the EQSQ personality tests, have children. As more people of like type (as a result of women’s move into the labor force) are marrying each other, thus we see the rise in autism.

Two economists who know a great deal about the math used in the original study are sceptical: Tyler Cowen and Steven Levitt (yes, of Freakonomics). Comments 4 and 9 there are especially good.