2rafa
25d ago
You can always go to Oxbridge for Land Economy or whatever, which is probably harder to get into than UCL for engineering or math. Modern languages is easy to get into. Greek and Latin slightly harder but filter for those wealthy enough to go to public school from the outset, so you’re not competing against the general population. Getting into Oxbridge is also much easier than getting into HYS in the US. As I understand it, if you have perfect grades in the UK, have personality and charisma at interview, and don’t go for one of the hardest courses / colleges you will probably get in. That isn’t true even at the elite American schools that have more meritocratic (not fully, which is none, but more than average) admissions.
The Civil Service Fast Stream is fully affirmative (sorry, positive) action-ified and has been since at least the early 2010s, as is pupillage for barristers, where diversification in terms of gender, race and social class (ie hugely reducing the number of posh white men who went to elite schools) has been the central priority since about the same time.
2rafa
25d ago
The main paragraph that stood out as AI, which @BurdensomeCount himself acknowledged above, was extremely obvious. I noticed it immediately because, I’m sorry to say, it read a lot like some of the things you’ve written recently in style and tone. The rest was a mix, but clearly quite a lot was written or rewritten by him.
In general, there are two issues with LLMposting. The first is the obvious quality issue. That paragraph and some other text stands out but eventually this issue is clearly going to be solved, this isn’t magic and it is presumably only a matter of time before the LLM can authentically recreate our small foibles and stylistic elements of our writing. The second is the honor system, where this community becomes pointless if we’re all reading LLM writing we could generate ourselves (either directly or prompted by a tweet-length thought).
For this reason, I think people are opposed to LLM users now because of what it bodes for the future. We can detect it (mostly, in some long posts, by regulars) for now, but we won’t be able to forever. Soon, it will be purely the honor system.
2rafa
25d ago
I asked some people in my office and a couple got it wrong, I’ve met even smart people who miss basic gotcha riddles like this
2rafa
26d ago
The carwash riddle that made the rounds recently is a way better gamble.
No, the car wash example is much worse. Rs in strawberry is something anyone who can spell can count out. The car wash riddle is something most intelligent people should catch if told to look out for it, but many of them still, let alone people of average or below average intelligence, will stumble over and fail because they skim the question or don’t actually catch the ‘trick’. It’s like a lot of classic riddles in that way.
No. Things can always get worse without resistance. Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now than many people - even those hostile to communism - imagine. The country has, since 1991, slowly gone from a moderately poor but functioning socialist country like the former Eastern Bloc or China at the time, to the poorest country in the region after Haiti. The people are starving, there’s no electricity, no medicine, no fuel. The economy has been collapsing for 35 years. There is extensive reporting that even the Chinese have strongly recommended pursuing China or Vietnam style capitalist reforms, but the regime leadership are, moreso than the Chinese or Vietnamese, die hard communists loyal to central planning as an economic theory.
This is true historically, too. There were empires that took centuries to collapse. In my opinion, the institutional inertia around immigration for the Anglo countries is too high to solve. The public don’t have the stomach for what is required. Look at Minneapolis; ICE would probably have to kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens to outweigh even a small part of the damage caused by massive third world immigration. The only thing that could save it would be some kind of sudden, deeply unexpected overthrow of democracy in a Western country, but there’s a 90% chance that only makes it worse. You only get one LKY in a century, if that.
2rafa
29d ago
Modern DNA studies strongly suggest that Ashkenazi Jews are descended patrilineally from Levantine Jews and matrilineally from Italians, likely local Roman women who were converted to Judaism by Jewish merchants and other emigrants from Palestine in the final centuries of the Western Roman Empire.
After the Empire collapsed they slowly migrated north, into Frankish lands, then the Rhineland, then slowly eastward over the following millennium, but there was relatively little intermarriage with natives through this time (or rather if and when there was, those people left the tribe and assimilated into the local gentile society). Modern ‘pure’ Ashkenazim (meaning those who don’t have recent non-Jewish ancestry due to intermarriage over the last 100 years or so, as many eg ex-Soviet Jews do) who have a Jewish mother and Jewish father tend to have little or no Slavic ancestry for this reason, even if their ancestors spent 500+ years in Slavic lands.
Increasingly I disagree. You can actually achieve the same outcome by not paying people at all.
Imagine if all the senior positions in the government, MPs, ministerial positions but also the most senior civil servants were all completely unpaid. Then implement a maximum age of 55. Keep the same exam.
The civil service would be staffed entirely by the children of the rich who are committed to public service, plus a few people sponsored by the unions (who, again, are already in politics). You would get some champagne socialists, but you get them already anyway. Most importantly, you’d cut out all the strivers. Let a man make his money and then send his son to parliament.
It wouldn’t even increase corruption, since the corrupt will be so anyway on a current civil service salary.
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