There was a dream that was sports blogging for impact, and it wasn’t built in a day

Mikel Arteta was appointed Arsenal manager in 2019. Before Covid. Before Biden was too old. Before I’d heard of effective altruism, or thought about the tradeoff between a Bayesian approach to impact-maximizing career choices and the organizational stability required to take our best shot at solving the world's most pressing problems.

A disciple of Pep Guardiola, the preeminent soccerball visionary of our era, Arteta arrived with a short CV and Big Ideas. His first season, Arsenal finished 8th in the Premier League, and despite the reservoir of goodwill earned in his former incarnation as player and captain, some fans already wanted him out. Second season, 8th again, he and his patrons mocked as frauds. The owners continued to trust The Process - it would take time to replace a squad ageing ungracefully with younger players more suited to Mikel's methods, time to coach them into the cohesive unit he believed they could be, more time still to iterate his methods in response to real-world feedback - but third season and it's progress only so far as [...]

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Outline:

(00:15) Not everything should be a rocketship

(03:58) Real ones would never

(07:48) Afterward

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.