Dominic Cummings

Back when he was still considered quotable, Dominic Cummings often mused about the UK's future post-Brexit. I seem to remember his blog mentioning data science and drug research as possible areas where UK could build a global advantage. I can't be bothered to wade through it all but if you're interested his (old) stuff is here: https://dominiccummings.com

Ah, that would do it. I've just been reading some of his posts and watched his podcast with Chris Williamson[1], and he seems like a rather smart, earnest guy trying to do his best to help out the country. He did mention the whole bureaucracy is rather dysfunctional and the general feel of this post[2] was that a catastrophe was another Tuesday at 11am, so maybe he just didn't know there was a fire to put out? [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-HhIfpBdoQ [2]: https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflecti…

The author seems to confuse "Brexit can be viewed through the prism of" with "Brexit is". He provides evidence for the weaker claim, but then treats the issue as if he has proven the stronger claim. I highly recommend reading Dominic Cummings directly to see the level of thinking exhibited by one of the Brexit architects. For example, https://dominiccummings.com/2019/02/21/on-the-referendum-29-genetics-g…

The blog post on which the article is based - which is very long! (I'm still reading through it) - can be found at the top of Dominic Cummins's blog (On the Referendum #33, 26 June 2019) - https://dominiccummings.com/ Given that DC has now been appointed as one of Boris Johnson's key advisors, with a desk (I assume) in 10 Downing Street, it will be interesting to see how far - and how quickly - he can put his ideas into action. If only for the potential car crashes it may cause. Whatever my views on Brexit (hard against leaving the EU) or the new PM and his Government (definitely not a fan), I do agree (in principle) with Dominic Cummings about the need for major reform of the UK Civil Service and the decision-making processes used there. Whether the tools and processes that he advocates in his blog post are the right ones? I don't know.

I'm committing the sin of commenting w/o having read the article yet, so this might be duplicative or orthogonal, but: Without feedback, there is no real expertise. Most experts are in domains w/o feedback, so they are mostly full of shit. Good blog posts exploring this topic a bit: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/05/dominic-cummings-on-fighting-phy… (above is a summary/intro to following:) https://dominiccummings.com/2018/05/22/effective-action-4a-expertise-f…

If anyone from California YIMBY is reading this thread, I really hope you get a chance to read the following: - https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-… - "Win Bigly" by Scott Adams

The article says this is led by Dominic Cummings, whose blog is https://dominiccummings.com/ if you want to know more about him. He advocates for a tech/quantitative approach to policy, e.g. https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring… on who he wants to hire. https://dominiccummings.com/2019/06/26/on-the-referendum-33-high-perfo… on tech to assist decision making in government. https://dominiccummings.com/2014/08/19/standin-by-the-window-where-the… on his trip to SciFoo, and being a policy person amongst tech people. He's not very popular in the UK, which is tangential to the article, so this thread is at risk of becoming a smear comment section.

Most of the top comments in this thread are badly missing the point. This is probably partly due to the title -- the point here is not whether connections and reputation are important. The point is that at the very highest levels of US government, when they have brought in an academic advisors from elite universities, they have ended up presenting absurdly wrong child-like nonsense as their best attempt at analyzing Covid-19 data. Rather few people in this thread have managed to get beyond the title and the slightly opaque columbia.edu blog post to see this. An exception is ahdeanz. It is an extremely depressing and valid point. Yes, human connections will always be important, but we MUST as sensible democracies, ensure that when science needs to be done, it is not left to the those who have been so involved in the world of human politics and dinner-party-approved conversational topics that they can't even vaguely think about something technical. I expect he has many flaws, but Dominic Cummings in the UK Conservative party is on the right side of history here, in wishing for a new era in which politics is not dominated by those with law and humanities degrees. https://dominiccummings.com/the-odyssean-project-2/

I get it, but I am wary of this brewing corporate FETISHISATION of 'neurodivergence'. The UK government held a similar recruitment scheme a year ago[1] - headed by Dominic Cummings - which is no surprise since he is very much in touch with this culture. Of course, he uses SFW synonyms of mental ailments: weirdos, oddballs, wild-cards, etc. It's almost as if these people recently watched Rain Man (1988). [1] https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring…

Some disagree about that: > Generally the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions and political hysteria than the worse educated far from power. Why? In the field of political opinion they are more driven by fashion, a gang mentality, and the desire to pose about moral and political questions all of which exacerbate cognitive biases, encourage groupthink, and reduce accuracy. Those on average incomes are less likely to express political views to send signals; political views are much less important for signalling to one’s immediate in-group when you are on 20k a year. https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-…

The claim that Turkey was soon going to join the EU (which isn't going to happen) and flood the country with Turkish immigrants was a major component of vote leave messaging: "Turkey/NHS/£350 million". Edit: FYI Dominic Cummings actually blogged about the important of Turkey to their success: https://dominiccummings.com/2017/01/09/on-the-referendum-21-branching-…

You’ve probably seen this, but posting in case you haven’t: https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring…

Dominic Cummings https://dominiccummings.com/an-index-of-blogs-articles-papers/

>chief advisor to PM stating that UK civil service should be entirely abolished Citation? The original article advocates reform, and possibly abolishing permanent secretaries, but nothing like entirely abolishing the civil service https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflecti…

>I wonder if the Apollo project would have worked today, instead of in the 1960s. George Mueller (who was head of NASA during the Apollo program) said that it would be impossible to repeat Apollo today without it being a classified program as Congress has passed so many laws and regulations in the meantime. Source: https://dominiccummings.com/2017/06/12/the-unrecognised-simplicities-o…

How do you lose citizenship of the place you're born without explicitly giving it up? If you can support yourself off savings you don't need an income, which is why retirees can go to Spain. But you do need to be able to support yourself financially and without much time to do so. I wouldn't be that amazed, given I've been to Berlin many times. Sure, you can go to big cities and then compete with locals for unskilled work without speaking the local language. You might be able to find temporary jobs where it's not strictly required. Most people don't want to do that. > though 48% voting for anything it isn't what I'd call a "small" But we're talking about moving abroad here. Of that 48%, 15% were primarily motivated by the false claims made about economic armageddon. https://dominiccummings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/screenshot-2016… Only about 30% of the population actually supported the EU for any reason (we don't know which ones). If you could go back in time and tell people 10 years ago that leaving would have no impact on GDP, no impact on trade, and no impact on jobs, the vote would have gone to Leave by maybe 65-70% (rough guess, can't be bothered to recompute the numbers with the 9% of don't knows excluded). > If Texas seceded from the US, their citizens would (probably) lose the rights of US citizenship This is ultimately a not very interesting debate about the precise semantics of the word "right". In the past I've attended…

Is this as big a gotcha as people think it is? The article which he quoted in length in 2019 [0] hasn't been modified and did mention both SARS and Coronavirus. He's just amending the quote he took from it. Obviously the first time he quoted it, he didn't think it was relevant to show the example, so contracted it by hand to "[An example]" [1]. In 2020, he realises that specifically mentioning SARS and Coronavirus in a blog post about the dangers of biolabs causing a global pandemic will either seem relevant or look prescient so he adds it back into the quote [2]. This implies that in 2019, he had read the article and was aware of threats like coronavirus/SARS, but didn't think it was the important aspect of what he was discussing. So his crime here is a bit like rewriting your CV for a new job -- not lying about what you know or have done, but using different words that emphasize new aspects to the new audience. [0] https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-biocontainment-lab… [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190331190550/https://dominiccummings.com… [2]…