Words matter. These are the best Dominic Cummings Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In history books, luck is always underplayed and the talent of individuals is usually overplayed.
As I’ve said many times, Vote Leave could only win because the Establishment’s OODA loops are broken – as the Brexit negotiations painfully demonstrate daily – and they are systematically bad at decisions, and this created just enough space for us to win.
Action requires focus and priorities and these inherently require compromises and pragmatism.
Abstracting human wisdom into models often works better than relying on human experts as models are often more consistent and less noisy.
The panic over Sputnik brought many good things such as a huge increase in science funding.
Judea Pearl is one of the most important scholars in the field of causal reasoning. His book ‘Causality’ is the leading textbook in the field.
If you think of politics as ‘serious people focusing seriously on the most important questions,’ which is the default mode of most educated people and the media (but not the less-educated public which has better instincts), then your model of reality is badly wrong.
Billionaires who want to influence politics could get better ‘returns on investment’ than from early stage Amazon.
MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings.
Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don’t care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.
In the political world, big established failing systems control the rules, suck in more and more resources rather than go bust, make it almost impossible for startups to contribute and so on.
There are many brilliant people in the civil service and politics.
The biggest problem for governments with new technologies is that the limiting factor on applying new technologies is not the technology but management and operational ideas which are extremely hard to change fast.
Eitan Hersh wrote a book in 2015 called ‘Hacking the Electorate.’ It’s pretty much the best book I’ve seen on the use of data science in U.S. elections and what good evidence shows works and does not work.
Inevitably, the world of ‘communications’ / PR / advertising / marketing is full of charlatans flogging snake oil. It is therefore very easy to do things and spend money just because it’s conventional.
Fundamental to real expertise is 1: whether the informational structure of the environment is sufficiently regular that it’s possible to make good predictions and 2: does it allow high quality feedback and therefore error-correction.
Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind’s journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can sling objects across the solar system with extreme precision.
People think, and by the way I think most people are right: ‘The Tory party is run by people who basically don’t care about people like me.’ That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct.
Music is similar to sport. There is very fast feedback, learning, and a clear hierarchy of expertise.
Politics is profoundly nonlinear.
It is very very hard for humans to lift our eyes from today and to go out into the future and think about what could be done to bring the future back to the present. Like ants crawling around on the leaf, we political people only know our leaf.
The stock market is an exploitable market where being right means you get rich and you help the overall system error-correct which makes it harder to be right (the mechanism pushes prices close to random, they’re not quite random but few can exploit the non-randomness).
Discussion of politics and government almost totally ignores the concept of training people to update their opinions in response to new evidence – i.e adapt to feedback.
All the best companies quickly go downhill after the departure of people like Bill Gates – even when such very able people have tried very very hard to avoid exactly this problem.
Speed and adaptability are crucial to success in conflict and can be helped by new technologies.
People are always asking ‘how could the politicians let X happen with Y?’ where Y is something important. People find it hard to believe that Y is not the focus of serious attention and therefore things like X are bound to happen all the time.
Despite the centrality of communication to politics it is remarkable how little attention Insiders pay to what works – never mind the question ‘what could work much better?’
Science advances by turning new ideas into standard ideas so each generation builds on the last.
Regardless of political affiliation most of the policy/media world, as a subset of ‘the educated classes’ in general, tended to hold a broadly ‘blank slate’ view of the world mostly uninformed by decades of scientific progress.
In the commercial world, big companies mostly die within a few decades because they cannot maintain an internal system to keep them aligned to reality plus startups pop up.
In physics we have developed models that are extremely accurate across vastly different scales from the sub-atomic to the visible universe. In politics we have bumbled along making the same sort of errors repeatedly.
I’ve learned over the years that ‘rational discussion’ accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average.
We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful.
A basic problem for people in politics is that approximately none have the hard skills necessary to distinguish great people from charlatans.
For many decades, Whitehall has deceived itself and deceived the public about the true nature of the E.U. project.
Westminster has let the whole country down for many years.
We need organisations like Vote Leave to operate permanently to give a voice to those who otherwise won’t be heard.
Most security failings happen because of human actions that are not envisaged when designing systems.
Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children’s arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge.
Victoria Woodcock ran Vote Leave – she was a truly awesome project manager and without her Cameron would certainly have won.
Decentralised collaborations are inherently threatening to Whitehall’s core principles.
I want people to understand the barriers to serious government in order that more people take action.
TV news dominates politics and is extremely low-bandwidth: it contains a few hundred words and rarely uses graphics properly.
People are always selling the idea that they have a magic bullet of persuasion. You won’t get poor by shorting such promises.
The audience for facts, evidence and research about microtargeting, Facebook and Brexit is tiny.
Fields make huge progress when they move from stories (e.g Icarus) and authority (e.g ‘witch doctor’) to evidence/experiment (e.g physics, wind tunnels) and quantitative models (e.g design of modern aircraft).
In many areas, the E.U. regulates to help the worst sort of giant corporate looters defending their position against entrepreneurs. Post-Brexit Britain will be outside this jurisdiction and able to make faster and better decisions about regulating technology like genomics, AI and robotics.
Priorities are fundamental to politics because of inevitable information bottlenecks: these bottlenecks can be transformed by rare good organisation but they cannot be eradicated.
The fundamental problem the Conservative Party has had since 1997 at least is that it is seen as ‘the party of the rich, they don’t care about public services.’ This is supported by all serious market research. Another problem that all parties have is that their promises are not believed.
I make judgments about people and ideas individually – for me, parties are just a vehicle of convenience.
It is hard to change people’s minds.
Project management is not hard in the same way that theoretical physics is hard – there are tried and trusted methods that a lot of people without exceptional talents can use – yet we can’t embed it in government.
The reason why Whitehall is full of people failing in predictable ways on an hourly basis is because, first, there is general system-wide failure and, second, everybody keeps their heads down focused on the particular and they ignore the system.
One of the things I wanted to do in the Department for Education was open up the policy making process and run things like wikis in open formats in order to a: start off with better ideas and then b: adapt to errors much faster than is possible with normal Whitehall systems.
Most educated people are not set up to listen or change their minds about politics, however sensible they are in other fields.
