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.”

“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).”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I make judgments about people and ideas individually - for me, parties are just a vehicle of convenience.”

“Every failing organisation has the same stories, people find it very hard to learn from the most successful organisations and people.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Speed and adaptability are crucial to success in conflict and can be helped by new technologies.”

“People are always selling the idea that they have a magic bullet of persuasion. You won't get poor by shorting such promises.”

“When comparing many things in life the difference between average and best is say 30% but some people are 50 times more effective than others.”

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

“In healthcare like in government generally, people are incentivised to engage in wasteful/dangerous signalling to a terrifying degree - not rigorous thinking and not solving problems.”

“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.”

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

“In a large bureaucracy, it is vital to keep eyes on the grassroots as they almost always will give you warning of problems faster than official signals (which says a lot about official signals).”

“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.”

“Decentralised collaborations are inherently threatening to Whitehall's core principles.”