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.

Dominic Cummings

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.

Dominic Cummings

Car Tory Toned

A basic problem for people in politics is that approximately none have the hard skills necessary to distinguish great people from charlatans.

Dominic Cummings

Politics Great Tin

We should stop selecting leaders from a subset of Oxbridge egomaniacs with a humanities degree and a spell as spin doctor.

Dominic Cummings

Wit Top Tin

Until the 20th century, medicine was more like politics than physics. Its forecasts were often bogus and its record grim. In the 1920s, statisticians invaded medicine and devised randomised controlled trials. Doctors, hating the challenge to their prestige, resisted but lost. Evidence-based medicine became routine and saved millions of lives.

Dominic Cummings

Politics Were Us

Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people.

Dominic Cummings

Which Very Them

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).

Dominic Cummings

Men Design Car

In history books, luck is always underplayed and the talent of individuals is usually overplayed.

Dominic Cummings

History Ways Way

Most claims you read about psychological manipulation are rubbish.

Dominic Cummings

You T Rubbish

Usually in politics everything is done on hunches.

Dominic Cummings

Politics Very Usual

CRISPR-enabled 'gene drives' enable us to make changes to the germ-line of organisms permanent such that changes spread through the entire wild population, including making species extinct on demand. Unlike nuclear weapons such technologies are not complex, expensive, and able to be kept secret for a long time.

Dominic Cummings

Time Change Wild

I've learned over the years that 'rational discussion' accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average.

Dominic Cummings

Politics Art Age

If we want leaders to make good decisions amid huge complexity, and learn how to build great teams, then we should send them to learn from people who've proved they can do it. Instead of long summer holidays, embed aspirant leaders with Larry Page or James Dyson so they can experience successful leadership.

Dominic Cummings

Success Leadership Great

I know from my nightclub days that when local cops need to show a fall in crime for political reasons there are all sorts of ways in which they can easily cheat numbers.

Dominic Cummings

Which Ways Way

MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings.

Dominic Cummings

Knowledge Via UN

We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful.

Dominic Cummings

Power World Wit

There are many brilliant people in the civil service and politics.

Dominic Cummings

Politics Vice T

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.

Dominic Cummings

Men Good Whether

We need organisations like Vote Leave to operate permanently to give a voice to those who otherwise won't be heard.

Dominic Cummings

Won Wise Who

Almost all analysis of politics and government considers relatively surface phenomena.

Dominic Cummings

Politics Men Government

Most security failings happen because of human actions that are not envisaged when designing systems.

Dominic Cummings

Design Age Visa

Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children's arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge.

Dominic Cummings

Vote Leave argued during the referendum that a Leave victory should deliver the huge changes that the public wanted and the U.K. should make science and technology the focus of a profound process of national renewal.

Dominic Cummings

If you look back at history, most important PR and propaganda was invented by the Communist Party.

Dominic Cummings

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.

Dominic Cummings

MPs are so cowed by the institutions and the scale of official failure that they generally just muddle along tinkering and hope to stay a step ahead of the media.

Dominic Cummings

Facebook, like great politicians, surfs waves that it very rarely (if ever) creates.

Dominic Cummings

Technology enables people to improve communication with unprecedented speed, scale and iterative testing. It also allows people to wreak chaos with high leverage.

Dominic Cummings

People in politics tend to spend far too much time on higher profile issues affecting few people and too little time on such basic processes that affect thousands or millions and which we know how to do much better.

Dominic Cummings

The British political system is broken in many ways and needs big changes - the E.U. is not our only problem.

Dominic Cummings

Music is similar to sport. There is very fast feedback, learning, and a clear hierarchy of expertise.

Dominic Cummings

The E.U. has narrowed our horizons. It has narrowed everyone's horizons in Whitehall so they're not thinking about the big things in the world. They're not thinking about the forces changing it or what Britain can really do to contribute to them.

Dominic Cummings

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.

Dominic Cummings

Action requires focus and priorities and these inherently require compromises and pragmatism.

Dominic Cummings

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.

Dominic Cummings

The panic over Sputnik brought many good things such as a huge increase in science funding.

Dominic Cummings

Politics is profoundly nonlinear.

Dominic Cummings

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.

Dominic Cummings

Brexit cannot be done with the traditional Westminster/Whitehall system as Vote Leave warned repeatedly before 23 June 2016.

Dominic Cummings

I think the right way to deal with terrorism is to carry on with normal life, like Britain used to when it was a more serious country.

Dominic Cummings

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.

Dominic Cummings

If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is - hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies and never believe what advertising companies tell you about 'data' unless you can independently verify it.

Dominic Cummings

Those of us from the Vote Leave team would never have gone to No10 to help if Boris hadn't told us that he is determined to change the Conservative Party - change its priorities and change its focus so it really serves the whole country. Most of us were not 'party people.' For us, parties are a means to an end - a means to improve lives.

Dominic Cummings

Britain could contribute huge value to the world by leveraging existing assets, including scientific talent and how the NHS is structured, to push the frontiers of a rapidly evolving scientific field - genomic prediction - that is revolutionising healthcare in ways that give Britain some natural advantages over Europe and America.

Dominic Cummings

Westminster has let the whole country down for many years.

Dominic Cummings

I know from my days working on education reform in government that it's almost impossible to exaggerate how little those who work on education policy think about 'how to improve learning.'

Dominic Cummings

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.

Dominic Cummings

Science advances by turning new ideas into standard ideas so each generation builds on the last.

Dominic Cummings

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.

Dominic Cummings

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).

Dominic Cummings

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.

Dominic Cummings