The entire application process is designed in such a way to largely encourage pre-meds to think poorly.
If you want someone to be honest, you have to take away their incentive to lie. That might sound oversimplified, but it's really not much more complicated than that. But pre-meds have a huge incentive to lie when a school says (for example) they want students who are "interested in pursuing a career in primary care and rural medicine." What's a student expected to do in this case? Be honest and say they've never really been particularly drawn to either primary care or rural medicine and hurt their chances of admission? Or say to themselves "Screw it, I'm going to lie and paint a false portrait of myself to maximize my chance of getting an acceptance." Most students will think lying is wrong, so instead you see them try to actually convince themselves they're interested in primary care or rural medicine when of course in reality if they're given the choice in the future most will take the high paying specialties in the more desirable locations.
Keep in mind, people can get themselves to believe a lot of really crazy stuff when it benefits them. So getting yourself to believe you would actually take a less desirable job in a less desirable location or make your life (largely) a sacrifice is a pretty easy mental feat to perform. And once it stops benefiting someone to believe these things, they'll just stop believing it and go on living their lives.
On a similar note, the same way most pre-meds often won't admit many of the reasons why they're actually drawn to medicine (since it will hurt them), medical schools won't admit what they're doing either with the application process (since it will hurt them). Everything is so confusing and secretive for a reason. For example, you won't see a school just come out and say "Diversity for the most part just means racial diversity, and we really want more blacks and Hispanics and fewer Asians " Instead you'll see schools say "We do not discriminate based on sexual orientation, religion, or race" while still clearly giving some racial groups a preference over others. They do this because it benefits them and being honest and saying "While there's no definite rule, an Asian should expect to score around X more points on the MCAT than a URM to be admitted, all else being equal" probably wouldn't exactly go over too well despite that being a much more honest statement than "we do not discriminate based on race." So just like pre-meds, you see schools say one thing then do something else. Because it benefits them.
And when both pre-meds and med schools are saying whatever benefits them, despite how silly it might be, it's easy to see how people get lost of confused in this whole process.
oh and it's "waste" and not waist.
