Boris Johnson has backed his top aide Dominic Cummings, saying he "acted responsibly, legally and with integrity" when he drove 260 miles to County Durham to isolate with his family. A history of ARPA-IPTO and Xerox PARC: how the internet and PC revolution was created. Also see Nietzsche on the pre-Socratics. The difficulty comes from the fact its psychologically very hard to stick to and almost all bureaucracies operate with incentives and culture that push in opposite directions. The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides. While some characters from the ancient world, such as Themistocles or Alexander the Great, would be as interesting to study in minute detail we dont have the sources. With Bismarck you can follow the twists and turns of a true (and monstrous) genius in great detail and learn an extraordinary amount about how politics, government, war and diplomacy truly work. ), Modern works on war / strategy (NB. We can now test fertilised eggs for common risk factors such as mental disorders and heart attacks and. is extraordinary, e.g his secret search for the truth about Leibniz. A billionaire should provide copies to all elected politicians. This is the Newton biography and its brilliantly done with intense love and care for its extraordinary subject. (Also note that the oversight for Groves was a group of just four who met with no secretariat and no formal records.) For example: , Andy Grove, ex-founder/CEO of Intel. You can learn from him about how to get very hard things done without admiring his character. The philosophising Tolstoy fought against the picture of an infinitely complex system in which most thoughts and actions fade to zero significance quickly but a few connect to others with highly non-linear effects. . I blogged a series on this great book starting. (Steinbergs recent book has interesting stuff but has many errors of fact/date and interpretation.) Some supported this approach but as youd expect the worst hated it. Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison and others have been trying to push some of the principles of how to do hard things into economics and government, in similar ways to some of my arguments over the years. Remember that approxmitately no MPs and few in Congress are aware of these facts or ideas yet they speculate confidently about Putins thinking on nuclear weapons. An inspiration for changes to maths teaching I pushed in 2011-14, including trying to get a maths for Presidents course going. In 2018 I asked some academics to consider this and we built a crude tool. Most educated people remain unaware of how little home environment affects IQ/education nor that modern analysis of DNA has confirmed the data from decades of twin/adoption studies. , Kahneman. Fascinating. Non-fiction books on politics fail to give you this crucial sense. Youll see its very similar to Grovess principles (above). Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it. If theres one film to show Nietzsche brought back from the dead, maybe this is it. Yudkowskys Sequences, the core document of the rationalist movement. Remember that approxmitately no MPs and few in Congress are aware of these facts or ideas yet they speculate confidently about Putins thinking on nuclear weapons. No doubt about that Nietzsche produced the climate in which Fascism and Hitlerism could emerge. Again the meta-lesson: the media often obsesses with specific horrific stories which for a few days absorb SW1 attention, but there is no interest in actually solving the institutional problems and the institutions will successfully resist change during a media panic then go back to business as usual. SW1 suffers such extremely powerful wilful blindness even an event as big as covid doesnt puncture consciousness in many important ways. Steve has a startup that is a leading player in this emerging field. I'm working on a Reading List as requested by many, coming in the next 2-3 weeks If you read Boyd youll see how lessons recur across Alexander, Nelson, Groves et al. The river was also burning. A scholarly history of maths, not for a general reader. NB. The Substack blog he started in June last year is not cheap - 10 a month for an erratic and irregular output via email - but it's worth it. People who havent studied it often mock Fukuyamas The End of History but most do not realise the last chapter is about Nietzsche and the Last Man, and this chapter is the most relevant today. You can download that version (2.0) here. are great. Mathematics: Its content, methods and meaning, Kolmogorov et al. Governments find it very, very hard to fund such ventures. Pearl led a revolution in thinking about causation from inside the then tiny field of AI. Based on a course Susskind taught in San Francisco to give people a basic physics education. , Gershenfeld (MIT). Reagans White House was better at communication than any other in the modern era partly because they did not rely on normal political staff but brought people in from Hollywood. Mindstorms, Seymour Papert. The smartest person Einstein said he knew wrote one of the first things on existential risk. I started like everyone young assuming those at the top of politics must be smart, interested in policy and great at organising things. One of Britains most senior and respected civil servants, Michael Quinlan, wrote this paper after retiring. Re Clintons 1992 campaign which influenced the Blair 1997 campaign. , Dantzig (1930, updated 1953; new edition 2007). Thoughts on past and future of the Buffett system, Charlie Munger. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. He replied to Yudkowskys AGI ruin here as did Paul Christiano here. Dominic Cummings on Twitter: "RT @zebulgar: Step aside Andy Grove, I As the craziness of 2024 approaches his ideas will be much more influential in some circles than you will realise from the media. No question, it's Dominic Cummings. , Scott Aaronson (2013) is a brilliant introduction to many ideas about computation, physics and quantum information. (This series was written for the Russian correspondence school a way of giving talented maths pupils a useful curriculum in such a vast country. Then nationalism became generally despised by educated liberals, and so on We cant know how our own ideas will appear in the future but its fascinating how little we try to imagine how foolish our own views will inevitably appear to those looking back on us. Behavioral Genetics, Plomin. Makers of Modern Strategy, Paret et al. Their favourite argument is the laughable its a small island, about as sensible as a general saying Alexander the Great was using cavalry so its out of date. Skunk Works, Ben Rich. . Viz the famous lists, Yes to Renoir, Welles, Chaplin, Keaton, No to Fellini (tried to watch 8 1/2 at least five times and fallen asleep fast every time) and Hitchcock. Partly accessible to a non-specialist with some maths already, though very challenging for most including me. Oppenheimer is better known but Groves was his boss. The Dance of the Photons, Zeilinger. northwood dominic cummings If youre thinking of doing a startup or just curious about how to do hard things you should read Paul Grahams essays. A widely praised new biography of John von Neumann, the man Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Pauli et al thought was the smartest person they knew. Please, . , Polya. Like Hoskyns (below) genuine rare insight and almost totally ignored. (3 volumes), Morris Kline. Pentagon Wars, Burton. ), Dostoyevsky. There are fields like professional mathematics and equity investing where institutions mean the best people are recognised over time. Brexit and VL in No10 (original official advice was to go with the useless bureaucratic EU scheme even though wed left so a fortiori it would have advised the same had Brexit not happened, but credit to the Cabinet Secretary for backing Vallance and me with the PM), c) the elite world resolutely refuses to consider procurement generally or the VTF in particular in the context of Brexit good/bad, d) in 2021 the VTF was effectively closed and turned into a normal entity rather than given the money and goal of replacing current vaccines with new ideas to solve the variants problem with safer technology, e.g nasal vaccines, e) this too is a non-subject in SW1. On May 22, 2020, The Guardian and Daily Mirror newspapers in the UK published details of how Dominic Cummings, senior aide to the British prime minister, had broken lockdown rules by travelling 420 km to a family estate with his wife (who had suspected COVID-19) and child. Expert Political Judgment, and Superforecasters, Tetlock. There is a great. NB. He opted out of the traditional science funding system early. Groves (fired), Bob Taylor (fired), George Mueller (not funded to push on to Mars after the moon), Renoir The list goes on and on. Two adjacent questions: 1) what signals of memes/news predict that X is likely to emerge from the noise and become one of the few stories/memes thats significant e.g the process of the Wall falling has started with small events which are detectable but almost nobody notices or realises what a big deal they will be in a few weeks, how soon can we, X is Y% likely to be a big story, with what confidence? that will prove false like the British navy rules the waves (true and a useful heuristic for many decades then suddenly and drastically not true) and values that will seem evil/comical. 19 Apr 2023 07:47:58 A 16-year-old schoolgirl, Caitlyn Scott-Lee, was found dead near Wycombe Abbey School. Predictive text? Why Superforecasting is top of Dominic Cummings A good biography of Dirac. I was not. Mr Cummings is Boris Johnson's chief adviser. I wish there was something similar on the history of the LMB at Cambridge, one of our crown jewels which Whitehall (and the VC office) has gradually buried with stupid regulation. . Two adjacent questions: 1) what signals of memes/news predict that X is likely to emerge from the noise and become one of the few stories/memes thats significant e.g the process of the Wall falling has started with small events which are detectable but almost nobody notices or realises what a big deal they will be in a few weeks, how soon can we detect X is happening then predict X is Y% likely to be a big story, with what confidence? , Robin Lane Fox. Insider account of how the legendary Skunk Works worked by a guy who ran it. If you really are interested in policy and how someone tries to bring principles of high performance to government, this is essential. A short companion book to his famous lecture series, Tips on Physics: a problem-solving supplement, which was unpublished for many years and seems to be generally unknown, is super-useful. How Roger Ailes packaged Nixon with actual campaign memos reproduced at the back. I enjoyed/learned from Isaacsons biography of Steve Jobs. I'll answer some over the next 48 hours, on Friday I'll focus on live questions/discussion, then tidy up after. (I used this to argue for checklists and transparency over the repeated failures of social services with child abuse when in the Department for Education 2011-14. Dyson, Hawking) is wrong. On expert decisions under pressure, like firemen. His point about the fundamental importance of error-correction in political institutions was the fundamental reason I think Brexit is the right idea and the EU is doomed to fail in important ways. Almost no MPs, journalists or academics have any idea about just how costly such bureaucracy truly is or how these bureaucracies truly work and the criminality and near-insanity theyre capable of. Dominic Cummings Quotes - BrainyQuote Many ideas you see from others (e.g Taleb) derive from Mandelbrot. A Cavendish Quantum Mechanics Primer, Professor Mark Warner. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Rumelt. Like LKY, crucial if you really are interested in practical planning for high performance government. What are the books Dominic Cummings told aides to read? Interesting on the psychology of selling and marketing. Twitter Web App Retweets This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. (Dostoyevsky was Nietzsches favourite novellist!). My essay on an 'Odyssean' Education - Dominic Cummings's Blog , summarising the arguments on why artificial general intelligence is so dangerous and why controlling these dangers is so very hard. Doing the Impossible, Slotkin. Also the club of those who write about UK politics a) are rarely interested in how power really works, b) are almost never interested in management, how to get hard things done, or how organisations work, c) think theyre an expert on communication but are not a general problem for hacks who confuse understanding journalism with understanding communication. Much (mis)quoted, rarely read. The basic arguments remain critical today. , Professor Mark Warner. Why Superforecasting is top of Dominic Cummings' reading list Perhaps hoping his colleagues will be able to see into the future, the prime minister's chief adviser has advocated a book on how to. Considered by many in Silicon Valley to be the best book on the details of management. Whenever and. the word strategy is a) used differently in military books, b) used differently over time, c) constantly misused in politics.). When you read this you realise that UK parties are something like 50-60 years behind understanding TV so its no surprise theyre bad at new technology.
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