What are the intellectually MOST rigorous jobs?

[elect_eng]

Outside of academia there are almost no jobs that requires more knowledge than the average high school student can master in half a year.

Surely you said this just to be provocative.

Would you let a high school student with a half year of training perform brain surgery on your child, or parent, or sister, or on yourself? Could such a person be a useful dentist?

Would one be suited to be an ambassador to a hostile nation?

Would you let one design, or even manage a nuclear power plant? Or, design an airplane, or a bridge, or skyscraper?

Would one be capable of conducting a symphony orchestra successfully? What about even read the score, and know the history, performance practice of the era, or the intent of the composer.

Could one take the place of your pharmacist and properly advise you about drug interactions?

Would you feel comfortable flying in a plane flown by such a pilot? Would one be qualified to captain an ocean liner?

Such a statement could only be said (sincerely) by someone so immersed in academia, as to have no conception of the intricacies of performing in real life, where there is no "tenure".

 

[j93]

Would one be capable of conducting a symphony orchestra successfully? What about even read the score, and know the history, performance practice of the era, or the intent of the composer.

Could one take the place of your pharmacist and properly advise you about drug interactions?

Would you feel comfortable flying in a plane flown by such a pilot? Would one be qualified to captain an ocean liner?

All of these are possible to train in half a year to be passable especially the second one since a person with a database could do a better job than anyone person's memory.

 

[elect_eng]

All of these are possible to train in half a year to be passable especially the second one since a person with a database could do a better job than anyone person's memory.

You obviously know nothing about music.

A database in the hands of a high-school student can not replace a pharmacist, but even if it could, can the database or the HS student perform research and develop new drugs?

On the last point, you can definitely train someone, but how comfortable would you feel with your life in their hands. Is passable enough for you? If so, what about your family?

 

[j93]

You obviously know nothing about music.

I took years of Music Theory, a year of Jazz Composition, and a course on music history.

Would one be capable of conducting a symphony orchestra successfully? What about even read the score, and know the history, performance practice of the era, or the intent of the composer.

a) nobody knows the absolute intent of every composition in most cases I doubt even the composer knows so this is a vague notion then how can one judge how long the conductor spent researching this. Until you can clearly discern if a conductor spent a week or a month on knowing the history, performance practice of the era, or the intent of the composer, I do not believe a hs student can't be made passable.
b) I am not sure if you can or how long it took you to learn how to read musical notation well enough to read a score but I hope it was not six months.

A database in the hands of a high-school student can not replace a pharmacist, but even if it could, can the database or the HS student perform research and develop new drugs?

Wow I never realized the average pharmacist at CVS was conducting cancer research in the back. I will try and be more quiet next time I have to buy tylenol.

On the last point, you can definitely train someone, but how comfortable would you feel with your life in their hands. Is passable enough for you? If so, what about your family?

As a side note http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot. I doubt I could discern as a passenger the difference between an autopilot landing and a person performing the landing.

 

[Werg22]

Waste management. You take a lot of sh*t from everyone.

But in reality you'd be a fat italian mafia boss living New Jersey, right?

 

[Choppy]

All of these are possible to train in half a year to be passable especially the second one since a person with a database could do a better job than anyone person's memory.

And we all know that a database system is never wrong.

 

[elect_eng]

I took years of Music Theory, a year of Jazz Composition, and a course on music history.

.

Then, you have just proved the notion that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

 

[j93]

And we all know that a database system is never wrong.

Is there a person that is never wrong?

 

[j93]

Then, you have just proved the notion that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

What makes you an expert? Am I communicating with Beethoven?

 

[elect_eng]

What makes you an expert? Am I communicating with Beethoven?

I make no claims to be an expert at any of those professions I mentioned. One does not need to be an expert to appreciate that that a great many professions require talent and hard work to achieve a reasonable level of proficiency. The notion that an average high school student can train for six months and be a passable conductor for an orchestra is really hard to justify. I'm quite sure you know that, just as I'm sure that Count Iblis is not being literal in his assertion.

I could present a wide array of arguments, but why should I do that for such a "no brainer". I only began commenting because I thought the idea presented is very insulting to professionals outside of academia. It's a pompous and stupid thing to say. There are ways to make the point that people in academia are exceptional people without belittling the rest of the world.

 

[j93]

The notion that an average high school student can train for six months and be a passable conductor for an orchestra is really hard to justify.

Its not hard to justify because you only need to learn one score to be passable and one can learn how to do this one score in six months spending 10 hours a day to practice. Its also possible to passable as an good pianist and learn how to play the third movement of the moonlight sonata by spending 10 hours a day on it. Under scrutiny that player probably could not play easier pieces and unravel but yes it sure is possible to train one to be passable in 6 months.

I don't disagree with the general premise but 3 of those examples were just not true.

 

[Tibarn]

I'd like to see a high school student with 6 months of training safely land a plane in the Hudson River.

 

[elect_eng]

Its also possible to passable as an good pianist and learn how to play the third movement of the moonlight sonata by spending 10 hours a day on it.

Clearly we are each operating with different definitions of the word passable. So, perhaps we don't disagree very much.

Even if you are correct about the above statement, this is not passable in my book. What you are describing is not a passable professional pianist, but someone who could fool the average layman for a few minutes. There is a big difference, and any musically trained person would hear and see that the player was an amateur.

However, I would be impressed if an average high school student did this. Although, after witnessing it, I would then conclude that this is not an average student at all, but someone born with a real gift. I mean, come on now, the first two movements are child's play, but the third movement at full tempo, played convincingly, with no background? That's an indication of talent. Even if it is an intermediate piece, the tempo would be more than the average person could muster in 6 months, starting from ground zero.

But, the above is your example, not mine. I really don't need to deny your claim. However, a professional conductor would need to be much beyond the "trained monkey" you are describing.

Tibarn, also clearly states the point I was alluding to before with my question, "how comfortable would you feel?". Training a pilot in 6 months with all the modern day systems is certainly possible, but you would know in your heart that if any emergency came up, your odds of survival would be significantly compromised. Training and preparation are the only things that stave off panic when the adrenaline starts flowing. Of course, there are always those few fearless people, but again, now we are no longer talking about the average person.

 

[Astronuc]

Jobs, which require a good set of intelligence and hard work?

Many jobs require intelligence and hard work, especially if one wishes to be productive. Certainly many jobs in scicence, engineering and technology require intelligence and hardwork. For example, application of systems of partial differential equations, particularly non-linear partial differential equations (NL Navier-Stokes), require intelligence, skill and hardwork.

Many projects in which I'm involved are well beyond the average high school student, and in fact, well beyond the average university student.

Any PhD who is doing a job that could be accomplished by a high school or university undergraduate student is 'underemployed'. It's one thing to plug numbers into a formula, but it's quite another matter to develop the formula based upon one's understanding of the physics of what one is modeling/simulating. That's where the intelligence, skill, experience and hardwork come in.

 

[Blenton]

Does the second poster seriously think that electrical engineering is the second hardest intellectually rigorous job out there?

 

[Count Iblis]

I'd like to see a high school student with 6 months of training safely land a plane in the Hudson River.

That pilot I think was a former fighter pilot. It doesn't take a long time for a high school graduate to learn to land a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier at bad conditions in the middle of the night.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

That pilot I think was a former fighter pilot. It doesn't take a long time for a high school graduate to learn to land a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier at bad conditions in the middle of the night.

I sincerely hope you are joking. Pilots go through rather rigorous training. You might be able to learn to fly a single engine prop plane in a few months but a jet fighter? You realize that enlisted (military straight out of high school) don't become pilots right?

 

[Count Iblis]

I sincerely hope you are joking. Pilots go through rather rigorous training. You might be able to learn to fly a single engine prop plane in a few months but a jet fighter? You realize that enlisted (military straight out of high school) don't become pilots right?

I'm not saying that it can be learned in a few months. But it isn't many years either. So, I think the point I made earlier that most jobs can be learned by high schoolers in a year still stands. Because even if we look at highly specialized jobs, many of these can still be learned in a period of a year or so. And most jobs do not require highly specialized training at all.

 

[Cyrus]

That pilot I think was a former fighter pilot. It doesn't take a long time for a high school graduate to learn to land a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier at bad conditions in the middle of the night.

Says the person who has never flown an airplane in his life - hilarious.

 

[gravenewworld]

Outside of academia there are almost no jobs that requires more knowledge than the average high school student can master in half a year.

All the people at my company who are behind the medicines that you take would beg to differ. In fact, I guarantee you some of the people at my company are smarter than most people in academia. The people who come up with the ideas behind medications and where to start from are absolutely f*cking brilliant. The human body is an absolute mine field littered with traps and pitfalls that can kill an experimental drug at any point. The fact that we even have medicines that are entirely synthetic that can get around all the hoops is absolutely incredible if you actually had an idea of how complex creating a new medicine from the ground up really is.

Sorry but they don't teach pharmacology, pharmacodynamics/kinetics, medicinal chemistry, and drug metabolism to people who haven't mastered even the basics of college level chemistry, biology, anatomy, and physiology.

 

[j93]

I'd like to see a high school student with 6 months of training safely land a plane in the Hudson River.

You realize that landing a plane in the hudson river is not a task that every commercial pilot can do and at that it is not a task that even the top percentile can do successfully 100 percent of the time. There are tons of examples of pilots trying that maneuver only to crash and burn.

 

[j93]

In fact, I guarantee you some of the people at my company are smarter than most people in academia. .

You know that this is not true especially at the level where your guaranteeing. Are you saying you can guarantee that they are smarter than their academia counterpart or your average theoretical math academic or the same for physics or ...

 

[gravenewworld]

You know that this is not true especially at the level where your guaranteeing. Are you saying you can guarantee that they are smarter than their academia counterpart or your average theoretical math academic or the same for physics or ...

You can't compare what pharmacologist does or a chemist does to a physicist or mathematician. But yes, the chemists and pharmacologist who work where I work are probably smarter than most chemists and pharmacologists who work in the same fields in academia. I have no problem saying this at all. We do tons of R&D just like academia does and write articles in the same journals that academia does.

 

[turbo]

There are very smart people working in universities, but it's a whole new world out there for chemists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, etc, when they get out into the job market and try to function at a high level in their field. Then they find out not only how to solve problems, but to analyze them and model them so that they can be solved. As a process chemist, I spent about a year and a half documenting the heat and mass balances of all the non-potable water systems in a very large pulp mill. We had to come up with algorithms that would allow us to model systems, subsystems, and individual components in order to optimize the efficiency of that plant. One REALLY big help was a newly-minted ChemE who was a whiz at Fortran and who pitched into turn our models into code that would run under the company's SAS package and deliver intelligible results. When you're in heavy industry with high costs associated with raw materials, energy, and labor, and you can tweak out an extra few percentage points of efficiency here and there, the savings can pay your salary for years. Pulp mills are exceedingly complex systems, and they don't come pre-built with instruction manuals - if you are a chemist or an engineer, you essentially have to find out how to discover the rules, and then determine if you can safely bend or break them in order to optimize production and quality and minimize production costs. Later, you might be able to codify what you have found so that somebody else can plug in some values and make changes necessary to preserve the gains, but that's way down the road, after the model is developed, tested, tweaked, and found to be repeatable and reliable. Until then, you're forging new territory.

New challenges come up almost daily, and you have to rely not only on your training, but on your imagination, intellect, and work-ethic to address them. Note that this does not describe a person's field, but jobs in which you use the skills in your field(s). There are some really demanding jobs out there. Certainly Astronuc's position couldn't be held by a HS graduate (or even a PhD) with only 6 months' training/experience in the field. BTW, when I was consulting with pulp mills and training the operators of their black liquor recovery boilers, I was required to carry a million dollars worth of liability insurance. How many HS students (even with the requisite 6 months of training) could come up with industry references that would prompt an insurer to issue such a policy? I could operate without such liability coverage when consulting for paper mills, but chemical recovery boilers are extremely dangerous beasts if not operated to strict guidelines (including solids % of black liquor, firing rates, bed temperature, etc) and given the fact that most of them operate at above 600psi tube-pressure, smelt-water steam explosions or a failed rapid-drain in upset conditions could result in much death and destruction.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

I'm not saying that it can be learned in a few months. But it isn't many years either. So, I think the point I made earlier that most jobs can be learned by high schoolers in a year still stands. Because even if we look at highly specialized jobs, many of these can still be learned in a period of a year or so. And most jobs do not require highly specialized training at all.

I'll be liberal and grant that an average high school grad after approximately one year of training just might be capable of landing a jet fighter under optimal conditions. On a carrier? I'm not so sure but let's leave that. The primary reason people receive as much education and training for such a job is that conditions are not always optimal. Pilots of jet fighters in particular are probably far more reliant on instruments than any other type of pilot. I'd imagine (I'm not a fighter pilot) that these pilots require at least some knowledge of the rudements of what their instruments do and just what these functions mean for them. If something goes wrong they need to be able to figure out what has gone wrong and what to do about it. Quick and dirty if-then rules just don't cut it when people's lives are on the line.
Air force pilots are all officers (as far as I know). To make officer one must have a college education. Mathematics, mechanics, and physics knowledge above and beyond what is necessary to graduate high school is most certainly necessary for an air force pilot. And we are just talking about someone who operates a complex piece of machinery here. We haven't even gotten into the people who design such things.

Yes, the vast majority of jobs can be done by a high school graduate. The vast majority of jobs are in fact done by high school graduates without higher education.

 

[zoobyshoe]

The human body is an absolute mine field littered with traps and pitfalls that can kill an experimental drug at any point.

This has to be one of the most unusual characterizations of the human body I've ever read. The experimental drug becomes a sort of torn-shirted, sweating Indiana Jones like hero, leaping over abysses, dashing past spiked pendulums, and skittering underneath descending walls in the nick of time. And the human body is the enemy: a guerrilla warfare jungle outfitted with explosive and other booby-traps, whose hostile intention is to kill our hero: the experimental drug.

I never realized pharmacologists see the human body in such an unusual way.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Jobs, which require a good set of intelligence and hard work?

A question about rigor begs for rigorous definitions.

I looked up the word "rigorous" in the Merriam-Websters:

1: manifesting, exercising, or favoring rigor : very strict
2 a: marked by extremes of temperature or climate b: harsh, severe
3: scrupulously accurate : precise

To be rigorous, then, means to be very strict, scrupulously accurate, or precise.

A look at the word "rigor" itself, is also instructive:

1 a (1): harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment : severity
(2): the quality of being unyielding or inflexible : strictness
(3): severity of life : austerity b: an act or instance of strictness, severity, or cruelty
2: a tremor caused by a chill
3: a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable ; especially : extremity of cold
4: strict precision : exactness <logical rigor>
5 aobsolete : rigidity, stiffness b: rigidness or torpor of organs or tissue that prevents response to stimuli c: rigor mortis

Definition 4 is the operative one here. (I find in the context of the other definitions, it takes on useful connotations of "inflexibility, severity, rigidity"; of being unyielding.)

Jobs (using that term non-rigorously) that favor intellectual rigor, would be those that require scrupulous intellectual accuracy, exactness, strict precision.

Intellectual is defined as:

1 a: of or relating to the intellect or its use b: developed or chiefly guided by the intellect rather than by emotion or experience : rational c: requiring use of the intellect <intellectual games>2 a: given to study, reflection, and speculation b: engaged in activity requiring the creative use of the intellect <intellectual playwrights>

Intellect, the noun, is defined as:

1 a: the power of knowing as distinguished from the power to feel and to will : the capacity for knowledge b: the capacity for rational or intelligent thought especially when highly developed
2: a person with great intellectual powers

b is probably the operative definition here.

 

[D H]

Outside of academia there are almost no jobs that requires more knowledge than the average high school student can master in half a year.

This has to be one of the most intellectually dishonest statements made on this forum yet.

======================
Back on topic. Practically every intellectual endeavor has some aspects that demand rigor -- and a whole lot of BS as well. The BS factor is part and parcel of any intellectually demanding job. What you do with your career is up to you. You can focus on the hard stuff or revel in the BS. There are PhD pure mathematicians who revel in the BS and college grads with only a BS who have jobs that demand lots of intellectual rigor.

This thread has a high noise-to-signal ratio in part because the original post is rather vague and invites garbage like that quoted at the start of this post. What are you really asking, avant-garde? What are your goals in life?

 

[zoobyshoe]

This has to be one of the most intellectually dishonest statements made on this forum yet.

What is "intellectual dishonesty"? It sounds like a completely artificial sub-category of dishonesty: "Marvin is intellectually dishonest, but otherwise you can trust everything about him." Or the converse: "Jane is intellectually honest, but emotionally she lies like a rug." Sounds nonsensical to me.

 

[Cyrus]

Jumbo shrimp?