Dominic Cummings

“Most claims you read about psychological manipulation are rubbish.”

“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.”

“Unprecedented in modern British history and outside all normal civil service rules, a bunch of MPs, some of them working with foreign governments, wrote primary legislation - 'the Surrender Act' also known as the Benn Act - without any of the scrutiny of who influenced and who funded it that is normal for legislation.”

“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.”

“It is hard to change people's minds.”

“Most educated people are not set up to listen or change their minds about politics, however sensible they are in other fields.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Politics is profoundly nonlinear.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The Single Market is no-where defined in the E.U. treaties. If you suddenly ask people to define the Single Market, the number who can do that, who are specialists in the area, is pretty small.”

“If you go back to the Euro campaign in 1999, how many chief executives and chairmen of FTSE 100 companies were speaking out on this? I think two. Two out of 200 people. Did that represent the reality of what businesses in Britain thought about the Euro? Of course it didn't. Did it represent what CBI members thought? Of course it didn't.”