Yes, I went with the phrase for effect, which is a poor choice of words, and I agree it's inaccurate. There's nothing that makes a pharmaceutical intervention advocate more angry than if a person questions their unassailable right to intervene. Too rarely will there be calm reasoning or attempt to explain, and when there is, it will be accompanied with a weariness built from many such conversations.
The alternative is that they are wrong, and the medical system selects for personalities that don't apologize. The ones I resent are accustomed to a labcoat earned throne, and wear "You shouldn't question me" everywhere. And yet a better translation is: 'You shouldn't defend your child, use logic, seek evidence for life changing decisions, or respect the scientific method." I have far more respect for the local street drug dealer, who would help me understand what he's selling.
IQ is not a full measure of the truly desirable aptitudes anyway, it leans too much toward a measurement of workforce skills for foolish systems. The point I should have made, about the pharmaceutical program engineers, is that those who are capable of knowingly selling poisons for profit do so with the rationalization that anyone dumb enough to take their poisons deserve it. It is hard for good people to believe that bad people are as bad as they are, or that a society-wide system could be so insidious and self-driving.
I am thinking that 'test of disagreeableness' is not a good description. Certainly that dimension of personality can help one make the right choice, or disagree with the doctor in a social setting, but I happen to score very low on disagreeableness. Moreso in prose on the internet though :D
You hit on something central to the issue with autonomous vs herd thinking, and I would agree that university can foster bad thinking. There are graduates who see through the bullshit, but they seem to be more rare. Part of the problem is that it is kids at the top of their classes to start, and then the ones that finish are the ones that survive in a) a social system b) a system that rewards compliance. Then the result is that they have a set of knowledge they have to believe is worth the debt and time they paid for it. To invalidate their own institution is to invalidate all that, and their parents who sent them there, and the professors who taught them, to say nothing of the mascot they root for. For those who never attended, it is not so far uphill.
