The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking. It's no different than being a victim of dark pattern software practices, which you would be if you didn't know how to code. (Ironically, part of my slot involves helping lawyers get around pitfalls in software).
This is a stupid answer. And I don't mean it's ignorant, I mean it's stupid.
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.
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).
It saddens me that such a great part of US society (as I perceive it from the outside) has basically given up on fixing any systemic problem at all.
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.
As a total outsider my first instinct was to agree. Then I thought about aspects in my country (Germany) and thought that while not so obvious and blatant we have basically the same problems. And they grow year over year.
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.
It saddens me to see a whole generation grow up losing the DIY ethos that let Americans develop into the strongest, wealthiest middle class of any country in history. It's one thing to demand a better social safety net; it's another entirely to abandon the freedom-to-DIY engine that is the reason immigrants like my family still line up for years to come to America. Those who move to Norway get the benefits but those who come to America have the opportunity for greater rewards. Along with much greater risks. It's frankly insulting to assume they don't know what they're getting into.
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.
What makes you think that these are systemic _problems_? Maybe they _are_ the system? SCNR. I am completely with you. There is a good deal of acquired helplessness involved where small deviations from that "system" are always are conceived as degressions, so the system can not be questioned in general. Wait for the "but capitalism is the best we could come up with so far" arguments to arrive. They are not completely wrong and part of the game...
> The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking
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
I'd counter that if you expect people to handle all your legal issues, your software issues, your financial issues and your medical issues, without a solid understanding of any of those fields, you're also going to spend (and likely waste) a lot of money h and be less effective than if you knew what was going on.
Of those things you mentioned, only the law degree is useful when dealing with issues that arise in all of the others.
The statistics don’t support your assertion. Most people aren’t lawyers, and the median amount of money a person spends on legal counsel is pretty low.
The question in any given area you outsource to experts isn't how much you spend, but what percentage you waste as a result of lacking domain specific knowledge. For instance, I'm not a good auto mechanic, let alone an expert. But I've read my car's factory service manual end to end, and looked up a lot of what I didn't understand. I don't usually have to ask a mechanic what's wrong, but if a mechanic tells me something I understand what they're talking about and what it should cost, and thus, I might pay $1000 for a job where someone else would pay $3000. Having as much domain specific knowledge as you can is always a good thing. That's the point. Building wealth is not about refraining from spending money. It's about getting what your money is worth without getting scammed.
1. You're improperly discounting opportunity cost, which is making your math incorrect.
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.
How do you know the second or third mechanic you take your car to isn't shining you on? My hourly time is $200, when I'm on the clock. Nothing spectacular, but not bad for a drop-out. That doesn't mean I can't do 4 hours of yeoman's labor in my free time to save myself $200 in legal or accounting or insurance or construction contractor or mechanic's fees. Plus I end up educating myself in some field I'm less familiar with. Doesn't that education more than offset the lost opportunity cost, considering it's done in my off-work hours and only at the expense of entertainment?
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.
My "hack" around this is, have a friend that's a lawyer.
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.
That's the right hack in a lot of cases. Where would we be without friends who know more than we do about these things? But those friends also educate themselves in a lot of fields - and they know what they are or aren't qualified to answer. So if I ask a friend who's a graphics guy about lighting he can help me, but he'll point me to someone better. Or if I ask family members about a specific legal thing, they'll refer me to someone more specialized in a particular form of law. Nothing wrong with that. It's more like: I need to know enough at least to tell whether I'm being bullshitted or not; I trust my friends to know enough to tell me if they can't fully answer my question. But there is nowhere in that chain where knowing more isn't valuable.
Don't forget the medical degree so you can "do your own research", and the mechanic qualifications so you can avoid being scammed when it comes to fixing your car.
At least have a degree in cryptography so you can verify your random number generator is cryptographically secure. A trivial task for the average HN reader, except the greatest impediment being that mathematics is impenetrable largely because of the obscure notation that mathematicians use when writing it.
This is like complaining that code syntax is inscrutable because someone hasn't taken the time to learn it. While it may be difficult to access without some time spent on it, mathematical symbology avoids massive verbosity.
If that's their response, then you should also expect them to get a computer science degree every time MS Word shows a vague popup and every time their OS hides or changes the way it works, or every time a major software update breaks existing functionality.
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!
Apparently it wasn't that well taken. Is the New Yorker accepting submissions from roundly rejected HN commenters these days? I've always wanted to caption one of those cartoons. "Yes, my accountant always does his business in the bushes". That sorta thing.
Dark patterns in software usually involve UI/UX, so knowing to code doesn't really help with those. On the other hand, being able to code an app might be enough to make someone go "why is it like that? I know it doesn't have to be!" in response to a dark pattern.
