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.
2rafa
9hr 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
9hr 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.
Probably none, but most people here have still driven at some point, and it’s not like they lack knowledge of what a car is.
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