I agree that it's not great style for just conveying information clearly and plainly (e.g I'd hate to read documentation written like this) but I'd argue that here, the medium is part of the message.
It's supposed to sound dry and depressing and somewhat sterile.
> It's hostile to the reader with the side of flaunting author's superiority.
I think if someone deliberately obfuscates meaning to sound fancier when the point is to communicate information directly, sure, I'd agree. But writing is often art, and I think demanding effort from the reader is fair in that case. I wouldn't make a blanket generalization like that.
I agree in that I don't know in what context Orwell wrote the quote above. Maybe it made more sense the way it fitted in that context.
Whenever this kind of discussion happens, I recall Andrey Platonov (a Russian writer, who was so weird in his rejection of the "decadent" parts of speech and sentence clauses that he'd never use passive voice or adverbs, would never put two adjectives side by side etc. that even Soviet censorship decided to ban him.) His works were added to the mandatory high-school reading list back around the collapse of the Soviet Union. I studied book publishing in college right around that time and had taken an elective in editing (the process of preparing a manuscript for publication, especially for the more technical fields, like encyclopedias or handbooks). My professor was a huge fan of Platonov, and, probably, forever spoiled for me whatever people enjoy when they read flamboyant or contorted prose like the one quoted above.
One thing that would send my professor into a fit of rage about that quote is that the real subject is people: it's talking about how people incorrectly rationalize the connection between effort and outcome. But, it's written in a way that, formally, the subject is... "the consideration", making it necessary for the reader to work back from the formal towards intended before they can figure out what the author was really trying to say.
I disagree. There is plenty of writing that operates at the same level of abstraction (philosophy, mathematics) without being needlessly convoluted.
Orwell is a master precisely because he understood language deeply enough to be able to produce a monstrosity on both the level of content (undue abstraction) and structure (winding, breathless syntax).
Both versions are great: the former is poetic and grand and would fit right in in a fantasy text; the latter is dry and informative and requires much less mental effort to translate and extract meaning from (though still more than "normal" text.
I could imagine a third version that's clearer than the second and still nearly as poetic as the first.
Is there no measurable quantity in the current state of a magnetized ball that would predict its behavior in a magnetic field then?
I'd be surprised if that were the case: seems like it'd violate some sort of "locality", where the future should depend entirely on the present state.
Is it just that there's unidentified present state that's perhaps more easily characterized by knowing the history? Or is it somehow unidentifiable in principle?
Yeah, the current magnetization of the sphere carries all the history of the magnetic fields it's been in in its value.
The hysteresis in the material only means that if you apply 1T to it to magnetise (supposing the ball starts with zero magnetisation) it and then apply 0T to demagnetise it, the remanent field in the ball would be like 0.4T due to hystetesis, you need to apply something like -0.4T to leave it as it started.
Do you think (or care) about the ethics of this sort of behavior? Do you consider it unethical and if you do, under what conditions would you decide to do it anyway?
https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues
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