I had a Cockney father-in-law, once upon a time, so a few phrases crept into my lexicon. I still use "don't chicken about it" = "chicken curry" = "worry", and a couple more.

You don't always leave out a word. Some of the more famous ones, that most English people have heard, are "trouble and strife" = "wife", and "apples and pears" = "stairs" - though I never heard anyone use those particular examples in regular speech, they're often given as examples / stereotypes / satires of the style.

Yeah, "God did it" is the first of those answer layers at which some people stop interrogating the world around them, just like "that's just the way I am" is where some people stop developing their self-understanding. Neither of those answers advance civilization / ourselves any further than the status quo. They're terrible answers! Everyone should be digging deeper.

However, I would not use the word "understanding" in opposition to "intuition". Someone who can generate a ballistics chart understands trajectories, but so does someone who can reliably put a basketball through a hoop or a bullet on target. I would set "analysis" against "intuition" (or "instinct", if you prefer), but they're not in opposition: instead, they reinforce each other. We're all familiar with the scientists and mathematicians who ride a hunch to a ground-breaking discovery, which is then validated by exhaustive analysis. From the other direction, athletes and musicians analyze their technique in minute detail, and practice incessantly, in order to ingrain analytical insights into instinct. (Or, if you prefer a less physical example, programmers study algorithms so that they can intuit which to apply to a particular problem.)

My point - badly expressed in my earlier comment - is that as humans we exist moment-by-moment, and as such react, in each moment, by intuition. As important as analysis is, we cannot live in analytical mode: it lags too much! Furthermore, approximately none of us will ever make a groundbreaking discovery in any field, far less in all of the areas to which we can (and should!) direct our analytical energy. At some point we have to stop (even if we are a groundbreaking genius in one area, we'll have to in all of the others), and accept the answer that satisfys our purpose or exhausts our motivation.

If you'd marked enough undergrad papers you would have. :-)

> Most people are incapable of understanding and describing a complex series of steps, including their side effects and tradeoffs regardless of the language used to describe them.

That's true!

But... The AI promise is that users won't have to do all of that part. They'll describe an end-state, and the machine will work out the steps needed to get there, asking clarifying questions along the way. If that's true, then skills like writing and interface design and "taste" and all the other "non-engineering" parts of making things rise in importance relative to the engineering skills that have been handed over to the machines.

That's a big "if", of course, and the machines aren't there yet, but that's what's promised. If it comes to pass, then I like my prediction (for, at least, the 50th percentile of both groups). If not, not.

That's the crux of it, and right now it appears to me that the ability to write unambiguous natural language prompts - in a variety of contexts, not specifically heavy-duty dev work - is going to be increasingly valuable. The 50th percentile english / philosophy grad is better at that than the 50th percentile CS major - while, at the same time, the bottom rungs of the developer ladder appear to have been kicked out.

I'm trying very hard not to make this into a "who's smarter?" question. That's a well-trodden and pointless argument, particularly if money is going to be the measuring stick. Besides, if that's where we're going, the finance bros and C-suite win, and do either of us think they're the geniuses in the room?

But, we'll see. We're living in Interesting Times.

Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do?

[0] In fact, in case you didn't know, rigorous humanities programs and research involve an awful lot of statistics and coding, even though the dinosaurs that run the MLA and most English departments aren't able to handle it.

Pursued far enough, any line of thought will reach something non-deterministic - or, simply, That's The Way It Is - however unsatisfying that is to those of us who crave straightforward answers. Like it or not, our ground truth as human beings ultimately rests on intuition. (Feel free to say, "No, it's physics", or "No, it's maths", but I'll ask you if you're doing those calculations in your head as you run!)

Mind you, I don't think the process of improvement in those dimensions is fundamentally different, just much less direct and not easily (or perhaps even at all) articulable.

That's not axiomatically true, like, at all.

The odds of being hired vary according to the supply of qualified applicants vs available positions. Tech companies with large profit margins will be able to offer higher wages than businesses with lower margins - and do so because they're competing with other tech companies, and (for the most part) not companies in other sectors - so assuming pay is a differentiator across domains can't be assumed. Over the long term, pay differential within a sector will motivate more people to become qualified for jobs within it, but at any particular moment cross-sector compensation isn't really relevant to the question.

This isn't to say the original assertion is true, as they don't offer any evidence, but it wouldn't be shocking to find out that a publishing company has more qualified applicants per job posting than any particular tech company.

My current hypothesis is that as AI forces software development down less and less deterministic pathways, I suspect that the value of a basic CS degree will diminish relative to humanities training. Comfort with ambiguity, an ability to construct a workable "theory of mind", and to construct unambiguous natural-language prompts will become more relevant than grokking standard algorithms.

And... I preferred WordPerfect's separate "reveal codes" pane, which reduced the opportunity for ambiguity. WP 5.1 has never been equalled as a general-purpose word processor.

Several Northern European countries (like the Netherlands, which GP finds congenial) pursue this, though pragmaticism (unlike ideology) never reaches an end-state, and remains a work in progress. The USA, from ~1933 until sometime in the 1970s, operated on this model. It's probably only possible to sustain in high-trust societies.

I agree. But that conversation can't happen where appointments are restricted to 20-minute segments, and trust cannot be established within a system where patients are forcibly changed to different doctors / medical systems based on the business requirements of insurance companies.

The doctors I know (all ~10 I can think of off the top of my head) have left, or are trying to leave, direct patient care. They haven't been allowed to practice medicine, as so defined, for years.

(This is in the USA, by the way. If you live in a country with a different model, count your blessings and fight like hell to keep it.)

[Edit: Actually, two of my acquaintances included in the number above have switched (or thought about it - it's been a couple of years since I saw one of them, and I don't know if he pulled the trigger) to concierge care. Look it up, if you don't know what that means. It may be the last remaining rump of traditional medical practice, but it's not sustainable / scalable, and is arguably a prisoner's dilemma defection which hurts the system as a whole.]

Is there an engineering-based reason, or is it that the AI knows React, so it's easier to vibe, and damn the user experience?

Why (especially if the answer above is 'yes' / 'most') do we collectively think Anthropic built such a heavy interface?

But... Yeah. I'm in much more agreement with your point of view, and he's still Wrong On The Internet, so here we are. :-)

You are correct about where I (over) interpreted your view of the court system. Apologies for that, and thanks for the clarification. However, I still don't think I understand the distinction you draw between "retaliatory (proper) vs initiatory (improper)". Would you then say that there shouldn't be a permitting / approval system (because that's anticipatory), so enforcement should be limited to taking pollution readings and acting (in retaliation, natch) after a facility is built? Even if you can sustain that position in principle, I think it would be impractical, across a number of dimensions, in reality. But, it's possible that I misunderstood that point, so please explain further.

I also note a segment from one of your earlier comments, where you advocated for "total separation of state and economics". In my view this is utterly impossible. Regulating pollutants is an intervention that (properly, we agree!) works to the economic disadvantage of pollutors. Even more fundamentally, a (functional, large scale) market economy depends entirely on the state's ability to adjudicate and enforce (at least) contractual terms. I don't think your view can be sustained.