I never said you hated medics. No need to rebuke a point I didn't make.
Look I'm just saying I think you've made a great many weak points.
1. The only differentiating academic factor between students at undergraduate level (just before they've started their degree) - is what their A-level, IB or highers grades are. Many very high achievers will go into science, medicine, law, economics, history, philosophy, but also art and so on.
1.1 I would therefore propose to you, that there are many history students for example at good universities who are very, very intelligent indeed. I would even say some of them may be more intelligent (with whatever metric you may use to measure intelligence) than a science student (how
inconceivable!).
2. An intelligent historian say, wouldn't necessarily have to solve "hardcore" problems (however it is you're even defining "hardcore"
throughout their degree
per se (something I actually doubt you're doing yourself tbh), but that doesn't mean they wouldn't have the capacity to be an excellent problem solver in general.
2.1 There is a fairly well described theory of general intelligence, which suggests its divided into two factors: "crystallised" (what you know, ability to use skill) and "fluid" (your problem solving capability, reasoning).
2.2 A very intelligent student, with straight A*s at school may well have excellent reasoning - there would be no clear reason why they couldn't become a physicist, lawyer,
incredible synthetic chemist solving hardcore problems or biologist. Indeed, they could apply to most courses and get accepted. But maybe they chose history. You can't then say they would find chemistry hard-going, but with this weird implicit assumption like they somehow
couldn't possibly attain the problem solving and interpretive skills necessary. Like you're somehow, "on average", more intelligent. You simply cannot know that.
3. Neither your personal perceived problem solving ability or the perceived difficulty of your own course are accurate indicators of the general intellect of other chemists, let alone scientists. That's before you could even get to comparing one whole community to another (chemists versus plumbers, for example).
3.1 Describing lots of things chemistry students might do with jargon doesn't change point 3.
3.2 Your overarching point seems to follow from point 3 above and is odd to me anyway, which is that you think the study of medicine is "hyped" - but the reason you think that is literally because you think synthetic chemists are smarter, on average of course. You know this because, in your own words:
..?
In conclusion, I think the only
reasonable way to assess intelligence is by assessing each person individually. The only time group assessments can be made is when using hierarchy: "On average, a PhD student studying artificial neural networks will be more intelligent than a maths undergrad with an interest in machine learning" might just be about fair enough. And even then might not be correct.
I think you're bias, and I think your point comes across as being arrogant.