Dominic Cummings

“While our ancestor chiefs at least had some intuitive feel for important variables like agriculture and cavalry our contemporary chiefs (and those in the media responsible for scrutiny of decisions) generally do not understand their equivalents, and are often less experienced in managing complex organisations than their predecessors.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Do some companies have great power? Yes but only in limited ways.”

“In January 2014 I left the Department for Education and spent the next 18 months away from politics.”

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

“Westminster has let the whole country down for many years.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“If you want to avoid the usual fate in politics of failure, you need to understand some basic principles about why people make mistakes and how some people, institutions, and systems cope with mistakes and thereby perform much better than most.”

“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.”

“One of the problems with the civil service is the way in which people are shuffled such that they either do not acquire expertise or they are moved out of areas they really know to do something else.”

“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.”

“After 23 June 2016, the U.K. has to reorient national policy on many dimensions.”

“Economics is clearly a vital area of prediction for people in politics.”

“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.”

“I want people to understand the barriers to serious government in order that more people take action.”

“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.”