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I have the Irish equivalent of an MD; "Medical Bachelor, Bachelor of Surgery, Bachelor of the Art of Obstetrics". This unwieldy degree puts me in fairly decent company on Less Wrong.
I may be generalizing from a sample of one, but my impression is that medicine selects out rationalists for the following reasons:
(1) The human body is an incompletely understood highly complex system; the consequences of manipulating any of the components can generally not be predicted from an understanding of the overall system. Medicine therefore necessarily has to rely heavily on memorization (at least until we get algorithms that take care of the memorization)
(2) A large component of successful practice of medicine is the ability to play the socially expected part of a doctor.
(3) From a financial perspective, medical school is a junk investment after you consider the opportunity costs. Consider the years in training, the number of hours worked, the high stakes and high pressure, the possibility of being sued etc. For mainstream society, this idea sounds almost contrarian, so rationalists may be more likely to recognize it.
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My story may be relevant here: I was a middling medical student; I did well in those of the pre-clinical courses that did not rely too heavily on memorization, but barely scraped by in many of the clinical rotations. I never had any real passion for medicine, and this was certainly reflected in my performance.
When I worked as an intern physician, I realized that my map of the human body was insufficiently detailed to confidently make clinical decisions; I still wonder whether my classmates were better at absorbing knowledge that I had missed out on, or if they are just better at exuding confidence under uncertainty.
I now work in a very subspecialized area of medical research that is better aligned with rational thinking; I essentially try to apply modern ideas about causal inference to comparative effectiveness research and medical decision making. I was genuinely surprised to find that I could perform at the top level at Harvard, substantially outperforming people who were in a different league from me in terms of their performance in medical school. I am not sure whether this says something about the importance of being genuinely motivated, or if it is a matter of different cognitive personalities.
In retrospect, I am happy with where this path has taken me, but I can't help but wonder if there was a shorter path to get here. If I could talk to my 18-year old self, I certainly would have told him to stay far away from medicine.
Huh. My experience is somewhat similar to yours in the sense that I never was a big fan of memorization, and I'm glad that I could outsource some parts of the process to Anki. I also seem to outperform my peers in complex situations where ready made decision algorithms are not available, and outperformed them in the few courses in medschool that were not heavy on memorization. The complex situations obviously don't benefit from bayes too much, but they benefit from understanding the relevant cognitive biases.
The medical degree is a financial jackpot here in Finland, since I was actually paid for studying, and landed in one of the top 3 best paying professions in the country straight out of medschool. Money attracts every type, and the selection process doesn't especially favor rationalists, who happen to be rare. It just baffles me how the need for rationality doesn't become self evident for med students in the process of becoming a doctor, not to mention after that.
Is it just a matter of terminology? I would guess that all med students will agree that they should be able to make a correct diagnosis (where correct = corresponding to the underlying reality) and then prescribe appropriate treatment (where appropriate = effective in achieving goals set for this patient).
Whatever the terminology, they should make the connection between the process of decision making and the science of decision making, which they don't seem to do. Medicine is like this isolated bubble where every insight must come from the medical community itself.
I found overcoming bias and became a rationalist during med school. Finding the blog was purely accidental, although I recognized the need for understanding my thinking, so I'm not sure what form this need would have taken given a slightly different circumstance.