acatnamedjoe

The author doesn't seem to have considered that this might just be a matter of taste.

I personally find this kind of overly verbose blog post enjoyable to read (even when, as in the case of Scott Alexander and the internet rationalists, I disagree with a lot of the substance).

Same reason I like A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry, Admiral Cloudberg, Perun (Youtube), and various other long form content blogs and channels. These could all get to the point much faster, but that's not what they're trying to do.

For me - the nerdy deep dive + relatively low information density + analytical style makes for a pleasurable reading / watching experience.

I have a personal current account, a shared current account with my wife, and several savings accounts. It is frequently necessary to move money between these accounts.

Also, here in the UK we don't really use Venmo or anything like that, so normally transferring cash to and from friends and family happens by bank transfer as well.

In Britain we have quite strong employment laws and a bit less of a ruthless corporate culture, so in many sectors it's fairly uncommon for people to be terminated for poor performance, so I suspect "misconduct" is a higher percentage of overall firings here.

"Firing" is becoming a bit more common in Britain, but still sounds like an Americanism to my British ears.

I would use "sacking" for performance related termination, and "losing ones job" in all other cases. I suspect BBC would use the same.

Unlocking trolleys with a coin is normal in Britain too. I'd never considered that this might be unusual.

Is this not a thing in other countries? How do they get people to return their trolleys to the bays?

Can't America fine them? Surely this is illegal there too?

I think the argument is less that inequality has increased overall, and more that the country is increasingly stratified by geography - with greater concentrations of wealth in the South East relative to the rest of the country.

This is especially true in formerly undesirable areas of London (e.g. Hackney, #10 on the 2003 list) and towns within commuting distance of London (e.g. Hythe, #3).

Presumably this is due to the gradual shift to a London-centric services economy as well as the increasingly ludicrous price of houses in Central London.

> quite possibly the most spirit-crushingly tedious town in Kent.

This is an extremely high bar to hit in a county that also contains Ashford.

I was curious - what was the angle on Hythe in the book?

These days Hythe seems like a posh seaside town with a Waitrose, a nice canalside park, a cute steam railway, lots of boutiquey shops and cafes, etc.

I know a lot of places in the area (e.g. Folkestone, Margate, Whitstable) have all been heavily "gentrified" in the last few years, but I sort of assumed Hythe was always this way? Is that not the case?

And even allowing for a bit of gentrification, it seems wild in 2025 to select it for a "crap towns" award ahead of somewhere like Dover or New Romney.

They have something to give away because they have power, which is the only thing that matters in the final analysis.

It doesn't matter who created the value - it's who controls it.

It seems like this is more about the semantics of what we mean by athleticism then?

It sounds like for you, being a top athlete simply means being very good at a sport.

I've always generally understood athleticism to be about raw physical traits, like speed, strength and agility (and is therefore only part of the range of attributes that makes up the overall profile of a sportsperson).

Out of interest would you consider people performing at an elite level in high-skill, relatively low-physicality sports like golf to be top athletes?

That's only because a capitalist economy uses the circulation of currency and goods as a way to multiply wealth, while motivating the people who generate the wealth.

Sufficiently advanced AI offers the potential for exponential wealth generation for our (former) capitalist overlords, without you or I needing to produce or consume anything.

Focusing on the state misses the point. The state is a relatively modern abstraction for society. Society, state-based or not, has always been dominated by class of elites and governed primarily in their interests.

However, for all of human history those elites have needed workers, and in complex societies, they need LOADS of them. The elites have always needed to ensure that the working people are sufficiently fit, healthy, motivated and skilled to do the work required.

For the last 500 years or so the elites have also found it convenient to maintain a mass of relatively affluent people with a reasonable amount of leisure time, who will purchase the products that make them rich.

Thus the typical person in the world today finds themself able to exchange their labour for basic necessities and increasingly, consumer goods. Most people receive some form of protection from bodily violence and for their property - whether from the state or from some other arrangement with the elite class. Most people also have access to some form of education and healthcare (although of course the level of provision varies massively). Most people have some amount of leisure time, some level of autonomy over what they do with that time, and an increasing range of options for leisure activities.

All of this happens because it is convenient for elites - it gets them what they want.

AI presents us with a possible future where a small group of elites could generate infinite wealth, and would have absolutely no need of the working and middle classes. The benefits we currently enjoy (however meagre) would dry up.

At best, we'd be ignored and left to scratch a subsistence living out of whatever is left of our natural environment by that point.

At worst, one could imagine a scenario where AI-wielding elites compete against each other, and need access to as many natural resources as possible to stay competitive. Then you'd suspect we wouldn't just be ignored, our very existence would be an opportunity cost for the elite class.

e.g. It's 2056 and Musk needs every square meter of solar panels he can get to ensure his AI army triumphs over Zuckerberg's. The plot of land where you've been quietly growing your potatoes and trying to stop your children dying of cholera doesn't get much sun, but it gets a bit - and that's more than enough for him to have you murdered (or, if he's feeling merciful, evicted to die of starvation).

> He’s the most successful player in the most competitive position in the most competitive league in one of the most competitive sports on Earth

Isn't it exactly the point of the article though that this doesn't necessarily mean elite across-the-board athleticism?

Your statement would also have described Tom Brady for most of his career, and I don't think anyone would seriously claim he was a 99%ile athlete (certainly not for sprinting, agility, etc.)

>The main character isn't complex at all. There's no depth at all to Winston.

Of course everyone has their own response to any piece of art but I find this criticism very surprising. Even the "takedown" article you posted pretty clearly shows Winston to be a complex character (especially in relation to the role he is cast in):

"From the very beginning of his supposed revolt against the Party, Winston simply assumes that he will not be victorious"

"Winston’s revolt against the situation is based in large part on his sense of physical disgust with icky surroundings, far more (I would argue) than it’s based on any coherent ideological or humanitarian critique... Winston is repelled more by the crappy cigarettes, and the fact that people use ugly English, and the malodorous sweatiness of Parsons, and the nastiness of the food, and the forgetting of nursery rhymes, than he is by the way the system he lives in is forcing people to live as slaves in terror of death and torture."

"Winston’s sexuality is really weird, mixed up as it is with his general uninterest in other people, his contempt for the Party and a general dislike of women"

"The closest Winston comes to thinking that there is any hope of positive social change is when he thinks about the proles; but he doesn’t know any proles, he doesn’t like being around them, he thinks they smell (of course), he doesn’t believe that they are capable of independent thought or action, and what ‘faith’ he has in them is shown to be completely groundless and abstract"

"As would-be rebels go, Winston is strikingly inactive and incurious. When Winston and Julia form their little two-person cell, do they talk to each other about the world they live in, and try to figure out its true nature, and what, if anything, they can do to shake the system? No. They have sex and drink black market coffee."

Seems like a pretty complex guy to me, and much more interesting as a character than the ideologically motivated revolutionary that Johnston seems to want him to be.

So many critiques of 1984 seem to boil down to "I'd really like 1984 to be a political treatise in favour of my ideology, but it isn't!"

All of the things this article says are bad about 1984 are the things that make it a good novel:

- It has a complex main character who is deeply flawed and far from an ideal revolutionary. - It isn't especially concerned with accurately modelling a plausible political system, and instead describes an emotive representation of the author's fears for the future. - Many of it's themes are aesthetic or subjective. - It doesn't try to offer a concrete alternative, giving the whole thing a sense of hopelessness.

I don't think Orwell was ever a "man of ideas" and I don't think he would have seen himself as such either.

His writing is partly journalistic, partly literary.He's never really trying to assemble a coherent ideological or philosophical argument.

He's reporting what he sees and reflecting on the world he lives in and his place in it. He can see profound problems and injustices, but is deeply skeptical that any of the ideologies of his time provide solutions. But he is also acutely aware, I think, that he doesn't really have any better ideas. There's a profound anxiety and uncertainty than runs throughout Orwell's writing.

For me, this is what makes him a good writer. Judging him on not being "properly" socialist or anti-imperialist or whatever is completely missing the point.

As an English person my first instinct is to add "sorry" to virtually any user-facing text!

I don't think it's funny because it's "strange". It's funny because it reminds people that they can have very different inner worlds to people they share their life with.

Did you also guess what the article was about based on just the title?

But in all of those cases presumably someone needed to figure out what needed doing? (In your case maybe you're savvy enough that you knew what the issue was and just needed a certified person to do the work, but most clients won't be).

My argument is that it is the 'figuring out' that drives electricians wages, not really the doing part. Because while clipping down cables and extracting switches is fiddly work, I'd argue it isn't a skill with enough barrier to entry to maintain high wages (as compared to brick laying or plastering, for example, which you simply can't do to a professional level without years of practice).

So most of the value delivered by an experienced electrician is in talking to clients and identifying the correct technical solution, and is therefore pretty much analogous to the value delivered by software developers.

Therefore if we accept the logic that software developers will no longer be required (or that their value will be greatly diminished) it's hard to see how that wouldn't apply to electricians too (in the sense of being a well-paid trade over and above your average manual job).

(Btw - I DON'T think either will happen, but I just think electrician is a weird choice of example for those that do think that)

I see the plumber/electrician thing a lot.

But talking to my friends who do these jobs it always seems like it would be even more vulnerable to AI than programming.

Experienced electricians get paid decent wages because they have had lots of training and then have seen loads of different problems. So they intuitively know things like 'This is a 1960s house so if there's a problem with the lighting the first thing I should check is the fuse box connector, it should look like xyz, etc. Etc.'. This seems like exactly the sort of thing an LLM could do for them.

I think you could easily see a world where an electrician is someone on minimum wage with very minimal training who blindly connects wires as instructed by an AI.

I reckon the safest jobs are ones with limited reliance on knowledge and a very high level of physical skill (in environments where it's hard to get machines to operate). Bricklayers, plasterers and painter/decorators will be the big earners of the 2050s!

This isn't really true. The article talks about apprenticeships. While traditionally apprenticeships in the UK were mostly for blue collar work, these days you can do apprenticeships in almost anything: software engineering, law, medicine, management, etc.

The full list is here: https://www.instituteforapprenticeships.org/apprenticeship-s...?

Top 3 on the list: Space systems engineer, accounting finance manager, robotic systems engineer

To be fair, technical skills training in the UK is currently mostly delivered through apprenticeships. The model is 80% "on the job", 20% "off the job" training. So, in theory at least, they should deliver the kind of experience and informal mentorship you're talking about, alongside classroom based training (which is supposed to cover fundamentals, theory, etc.).

In practice, how well this works depends on how effectively employer and training provider coordinate, and how committed the employer is to delivering on the mentorship part.

Do you have any evidence to support the statement that this is "the rule in the UK"? Anecdotally (in the UK) I've only ever known managers of technical teams to have risen from technical roles, and have never heard of anyone going straight into technical management from university. I'm not super experienced though so very open to my experience not being the norm, just curious if you were speaking from experience or research.

"Regarding the complaint of not moving decisions forward with a disengaged manager, if you plan to be absentee you must delegate"

I took the OPs point on this to be that, at a certain level of seniority, delegation isn't enough.

I.e. lots of decisions will require consensus with ones peers to actually implement. And when you don't have active engagement and coordination from the level above:

1) peer consensus can take a lot more time and energy to achieve.

And 2) you can often end up with a compromise solution that's the worst of all options, because nobody has the authority to say - "we're doing it this way".

In general, I get the sense that at more senior levels management becomes much more about managing conflict between subordinates rather than managing individual activities. I think the article was written from that perspective.

Well sure, if a student doesn't engage meaningfully with the essay and just writes a load of waffle to fill the word count, they won't learn as much and they'll get a bad mark.

In that case sure, the whole exercise is kind of a waste of time, but you could say that about basically any educational method surely? You can take a horse to water and all that...

A word count is also a signal to the student of what level of depth the teacher is hoping for.

For most interesting questions you could write anything between a few sentences and a full book, depending on how much you develop and defend your arguments, evaluate other possible answers, etc.

The word count is a signal on where on that spectrum you should be aiming.

Word counts in essays in my experience are maximums not minimums.

For an advanced student writing about sufficiently complex topic, the challenge is to develop an argument in less than 5000 words, rather than to reach 5000 words.

And there is a big difference between writing an outline (which is valuable and important!) and actually expressing those ideas fully. The latter forces you to clarify your ideas much more precisely - which is a really valuable experience in exploring and understanding the details of a topic.

Perhaps we should credit OP with enough intelligence to assume that their debate with the sex worker didn't happen in a context where OP was their client.

Also the fact that sex work can be linked with human trafficking doesn't necessarily mean that sex work is bad. Working on a construction site can be a meaningful and rewarding career, but could also be utterly miserable if you've been trafficked there and are working in conditions of modern slavery. But that means human trafficking is bad, not that construction work is bad.

If anything, I think the human trafficking thing is an argument for NOT demonizing / criminalizing sex work, so that it becomes part of the visible, regulated economy, which would it turn make it harder for traffickers to exploit and control people.