Are You Stuck in a Radiology Bubble?

Are you good at avoiding clickbait? (If your first reaction is to wonder what clickbait is, the answer is probably no.) How long ago did you acquire this skill?

I suspect none of us are perfect at it unless we are willing to take the extreme measure of quitting all social media and news aggregators. Even when I am sure that something won’t give me any useful information or much entertainment, sometimes I will see the teaser and think, “Okay, how can they possibly follow through on this?” I proceed to find out that they can’t, and meanwhile I have rewarded them with whatever points they get for my clicking on them.

Today, for instance, I saw a radiology post implying that the remote job market is “finished” with the poster saying that he is only seeing “complete trash” available now. To me, that screamed out engagement farming, maybe even rage-bait, since I know that the market is quite strong. The poster had to be either very poorly informed or deliberately misinforming.

But did I really know? More on that in a bit.

I clicked through because I wanted to see what sort of comments resulted. Pretty much every one of them regarded a particular slice of the market, not the overall field. Yes, corporate gigs stink. No, there’s plenty of good stuff if you dig a little and are willing to work nights. You should pursue hourly rates because the per-click rate is no good. Occasionally, people would argue with one another in these subtopics.

Not engaging with any of that, I saw that everybody was talking about the bubble of the radiology world in which they dwelled and they could all have been right. The folks decrying corporate rad jobs might indeed have had experiences that anybody else would consider lousy. Nobody spoke in defense of the corporate gigs, but if they had, they might also have been entirely correct that their personal experience was a good and worthwhile one.

The “living in a bubble” phenomenon became more widely recognized as social media and overall virtual living took off, but some of us radiologists experienced a preview of it. We tend to work in small groups, if not entirely solo. Telerad amplified this.

When you interact with a smaller chunk of humanity, it reduces the spectrum of personalities, opinions, and backgrounds you encounter. There is increasingly little chance to see or hear anything that contradicts your view of the world. That can feel misleadingly cozy as you never get challenged and forced to defend or, God forbid, reconsider your positions.

A fair analogy would be a QA system that slowly stopped sending you notifications of your alleged “misses.” If nobody pointed it out, you might get an inflated opinion of your radiological accuracy. You probably wouldn’t ever conclude that you were perfect, but you might come to believe that you had gotten good enough that none of your errors were consequential.

The QA system might eventually get fixed, forcing you to rediscover and come to grips with your fallibility. Other bubbles we have learned to live with aren’t so readily popped: We can reinforce them by avoiding certain sources of news (and commentary on it). We might even “hide” or “block” people who share opinions we don’t like, especially if we can tell ourselves we are not objecting to their views which conflict with our own, but rather the ways in which they express them.

The problem with that is it only provides false comfort. While we are enjoying not having ourselves challenged by anything from outside our bubbles, the real world is still out there. By trying to hide its existence from ourselves, we become less capable of dealing with it when, inevitably, we have to do so.

In the case of the radiology job market post, I would like very much to be in no bubble whatsoever. I want to know how truly good/bad things are so I can accurately compare my current situation (or others if I am considering any) to the field at large.

I said earlier that I know the market is strong. Really, I only think I know because I follow a few radiology social media in which a bunch of other rads from all walks of life can share their opinions. If 80 percent of them seem to think things are good for us rads, can’t I rely on that?

Maybe. On the other hand, all of us might be in a bubble together. We might not be a statistically reliable cross-section of the entire radiological world. What if the sort of rad that interacts on social media is in a subset that is likely to be more optimistic about the job market, or more likely to find the best bits of that market, and falsely conclude it is better than it really is? I might just have unknowingly eased myself into a bubble community.

These bubbles can form for anything: appraisal of the job market, what is a reasonable salary or per-RVU value, how workloads can most fairly and efficiently be distributed, etc. Then there are higher-order bubbles: rads en masse versus other types of physicians, physicians vs non-docs, health-care field people vs the rest of the population, etc.

How does one avoid bubble life? Stay open to as broad a spectrum of unfiltered, good information as possible, and maintain an ability to react to it without undue bias. To a certain extent, it’s not possible.

One’s chances improve, however, by exercising a constant willingness to self-reflect. Are my understanding and reaction to situation X being confined or directed by anything unfounded? Why am I dismissing, for instance, the social media poster’s opinion that the remote job market is “finished”? Instead, I might inquire to find out if he knows something I don’t, even if it is a harsh reality that makes me uncomfortable.

Discomfort is, in fact, a good clue that you are testing the edges of your bubble. Another term for that discomfort is cognitive dissonance: Your view of the world is coming into conflict with the reality of the world. If you can lean into that discomfort rather than shying away from it, bubbles have less of a chance to confine you.