He understood politics and government in a way I think almost nobody in 20th Century politics did and influenced it more than almost any elected leader. It was a direct inspiration for my terrorist demand to Boris, July 2019: we must create an ARPA. 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. Notes on Colin Grays Strategy and Defence Planning, following on from military innovation, The Kill Chain, nuclear (sorry for slow progress on Payne). What is moral behaviour is not the same question as what are the principles of high performance in politics! The media laughed and many said its so boring. One of the most critical lessons? is extraordinary, e.g his secret search for the truth about Leibniz. The Deputy Prime Minister resigned yesterday because a lawyer found against him on two of the eight allegations made. The best book on politics. Richard Feynman was a giant of theoretical physics who famously defined science as "the belief in the ignorance of experts". You often read versions of those really at the edge of this research do not predict fast timetables. , and let non-player characters stumble into a set of critical decisions in November? I applied his basic ideas in the euro campaign, in the 2004 North East referendum, in thinking through education reform and trying to get the Department for Education to do what I wanted, in the Brexit referendum, in solving the 2019 impasse, in No10, and to removing this PM since spring 2021. The vaccine taskforce a) created huge value for the UK and the world, b) would no way have happened without [typo original!] I enjoyed/learned from Isaacsons biography of Steve Jobs. How to predict news? Like LKY, crucial if you really are interested in practical planning for high performance government. As the craziness of 2024 approaches his ideas will be much more influential in some circles than you will realise from the media. E.g his few pages on, which few economists seem to know about! Reading List Dominic Cummings Jun 26, 2022 80 This thread is only visible to paid subscribers of Dominic Cummings substack Subscribe to view Keep reading with a 7-day free trial Subscribe to Dominic Cummings substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. It is by far the best insider book Ive read on modern UK politics and the only one that realistically and honestly faces a) the failures of MPs as managers and systems thinkers, and b) the failures of the civil service. Many academics predicted OpenAIs approach would not work but have been proved repeatedly wrong.). E.g Around 1848 nationalism was an elite opinion held by educated liberals who thought of liberalism and nationalism as naturally, and morally, connected, while uneducated peasants were, nationalistic. Youll see its very similar to Grovess principles (above). Non-fiction books on politics fail to give you this crucial sense. Mr Cummings is Boris Johnson's chief adviser. ), here are some books and a few papers I recommend. Welles dismissed the French auteur theory as not relevant to the old Hollywood where the producers called the shots, not the directors. The politicians soon are on the next current thing too. The cynicism/realism remains shocking. Plato. Rationality, Vernon Smith. On connections between quantum physics, computation and information theory. Useful introduction to some fundamentals, from Pythagoras to Newton to e and complex numbers. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. The vaccine taskforce a) created huge value for the UK and the world, b) would, have happened without [typo original!] Those who think very fast timetables are plausible, because (partly) they worry about the effects of their comments. (Dostoyevsky was Nietzsches favourite novellist!). 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. , which was unpublished for many years and seems to be generally unknown, is super-useful. Start trial Already a paid subscriber? I blogged a series on this great book starting. Yudkowskys Sequences, the core document of the rationalist movement. I started like everyone young assuming those at the top of politics must be smart, interested in policy and great at organising things. khloe kardashian hidden hills house address. In the search I came across Boyd. Governments find it very, very hard to fund such ventures. de Tocqueville. A good biography of Einstein by Isaacson. Steve Jobs advised Obama to do the same but it didnt happen. If you read his blogs and trusted him on covid over the entire CDC/FDA/WHO bureaucracies, youd have come out far ahead. Its often found in terrorist safe houses when raided. . *Chaplin City Lights, The Gold Rush, Modern Times, Great Dictator. On typical problems dealing with statistics, Bayes Theory, and how to improve understanding of probability. A classic non-specialist introduction to reasoning. Although Nietzsche despised nothing more than the radical left, he became extremely influential on it, perhaps because nobody else so thoroughly demolishes the foundations of liberal democracy, although, in a further twist, few of the left realise the extent to which they are influenced by him. Dominic Cummings's Odyssean reading list might make you smarter. I wrote this blog which has a further reading list. I think hes right that most academics assume models for how this works that are clearly not how people really think under pressure. 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. Youll see its very similar to Grovess principles (above). I searched for explanations. Working Backwards, by Amazon alumni. The insider account of the Manhattan Project by its legendary leader. A billionaire should provide copies to all elected politicians. A lot of Boyd (including getting inside your enemys OODA loop) is interpreting Sun Tzu after 2,000 years of case studies proving him right plus some modern ideas. By Reagans pollster. Turings Cathedral, George Dyson (son of Freeman). Although Nietzsche despised nothing more than the radical left, he became extremely influential on it, perhaps because nobody else so thoroughly demolishes the foundations of liberal democracy, although, in a further twist, few of the left realise the extent to which they are influenced by him. Oppenheimer is better known but Groves was his boss. (If anyone knows if his remarkable secretary, Mrs. OLeary, left any records or an oral history please leave links below.). NB. His book 'Causality' is the leading textbook in the field. Newton biography and its brilliantly done with intense love and care for its extraordinary subject. Non-fiction books on politics fail to give you this crucial sense. Follow Zvi. (on maths, logic, P=NP, computational complexity), (in general, and if interested in extreme talent Steve blogs a lot on this), The most interesting intelligent person writing on American politics who a) really knows a lot of history, b) understands the rationalists but is not of them, and c) whose version of regime change includes ending democracy, is. This shows the critical meta-lesson again: those in power have no interest in high performance. Anybody who goes to Hollywood can see right away what the setup is Hollywood is Hollywood, theres nothing you can say about it that isnt true, good or bad. (I knew Mark, a professor at Cambridge, who spent a huge amount of time over the past decade helping state school pupils get hold of great physics material via Isaac Physics. Some of the unpublished stuff in Gdels Collected Works is extraordinary, e.g his secret search for the truth about Leibniz. Also you cant understand our world unless you have a sense of Nietzsches profound influence on 20th Century artists, thinkers, and politics. In particular Ill add textbooks, history and philosophy which Ive largely left out. Dominic Cummings has hit back at Boris Johnson's partygate defence, accusing him of spreading "further misinformation". A lot of Boyd (including getting inside your enemys OODA loop) is interpreting Sun Tzu after 2,000 years of case studies proving him right plus some modern ideas. About Robert Mosess grip on NYC. The Book of Why (general reader). . (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. People who havent studied it often mock Fukuyamas. Dyson, Hawking) is wrong. His boss and predecessor was Kelly Johnson who wrote. One of Britains most senior and respected civil servants, Michael Quinlan, wrote this paper after retiring. I was amazed and desperate. Classic text, university level. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. Click repeat). Posted January 13, 2014 . In 2018 I asked some academics to consider this and we built a crude tool. Sept. 7, 2019 Dominic Cummings, special adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson of . His Memoirs are fascinating and so is this biography by Duchne. which egg to use for IVF. , Flannery OConnor my wife gave me these, theyre little known and absolutely brilliant, the closest to Dostoyevsky of anything in the 20th Century Ive read. ), , Waldrop. Psychologie des foules, Gustave le Bon. David wrote some of the breakthrough papers on quantum computers. Lines and Curves, Vassiliev and Gutenmacher. ), The foundational crisis of mathematics, set theory, Hilbert, Godel, and Turing. Like LKY, crucial if you really are interested in practical planning for high performance government. , Carville & Matalin. Aug 25, 2022. If you havent read it dont read another modern book until you have. He replied to Yudkowskys AGI ruin, . , maybe the greatest mathematician alive, is brilliant and incredibly useful for someone like me explaining a lot of fundamental concepts in non-technical language. Nobel-winner, Feynman sparring partner, co-founder of Santa Fe Institute, wrote a book on complex systems for the general reader. Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos (1988). (Planning to see some classics Ive missed: Intolerance; Tokyo Story; Bicycle Thieves.). In the meantime Ill post another tomorrow. Blurb endorsement by Einstein. Also cf. Genres Politics ; 2) how to map the spread of memes and identify critical nodes in the network that, if influenced somehow, can amplify or dampen signals? Below is a summary of the main ideas. Pflouffe ran the Obama 08 campaign and 2012 re-election. . AT&T could only support it when a monopoly. I found his Nobel lecture fascinating and I suspect it would be one of the most useful things to force politicians and senior officials to read. Anyone interested in terrorism and counter-terrorism should watch Pontecorvos movie The Battle of Algiers, one of the best movies ever made. If one could observe a discussion between Bismarck and one politician from the 20th Century, he might be the most interesting choice. So a philosopher simultaneously prepared the ground for Hitler, deeply influenced todays Left, and personally hated Bismarck and anti-semites. , John Allen Paulos (1988). Now, perhaps, they have some idea of what that. *Come and See ( , Russian). The main biography of Buffett, , is also interesting. Many ideas you see from others (e.g Taleb) derive from Mandelbrot. There's a big bad enemy out there, possibly with superior weaponry but. By Reagans pollster. On expert decisions under pressure, like firemen. I know some of them. We look back on history and abstract over decades or centuries, judging the ideas that held sway for a few decades and sneering at how formerly all the world was mad as Nietzsche put it. I like reading stuff about people where incentives and feedback work, from used car salesmen to fortune tellers. 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. (3 volumes), Morris Kline. Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (3 volumes), Morris Kline. If you get into it you have no right to be bitter, youre the one who sat down and joined the game People who dont succeed, people whove had long bad times like Renoir Renoir was the best director ever are people who didnt want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. 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. (A great highlight of Oxford for me was four-hour tutorials with RLF on Athenian democracy, Thucydides, Alexander etc.). Use a small number of good people (10% to 25% compared to the so-called normal systems). For the beginner, by a Fields Medallist. E.g rapidly speeding up construction/housing/infrastructure, how to accelerate scientific discovery and technological development. I will publish soon a chronology of 1862-67 following the twists and turns of Schleswig-Holstein, the escalating conflict with Austria, the domestic conflict running through the period. A history of the amazing Bell Labs which famously won more Nobels than most EU countries. A good biography of Dirac, The Strangest Man, Farmelo. Professor Sides Dominic Cummings Nov 22, 2022 59 134 Ask Me Anything Monday 28 November, 1900-2100 Dominic Cummings Nov 21, 2022 57 310 Youll understand more of how SW1 really works than from all PM memoirs of the last 30 years combined (PMs never face why they dont control much of Whitehall even after theyve gone). Autocracy has wide variance in performance one minute you have Bismarck in charge, the next you have Wilhelm II firing him and trying to govern himself in an appalling disaster that took the best educated country in the world towards Nazism. Classic on teaching children programming, recommended by Alan Kay and Bret Victor. A classic book on calculus / analysis designed for undergraduates. Ive written a few things about his work. ), Modern works on war / strategy (NB. Buy the book, support Zvi. The Idea Factory, Gertner. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72, Hunter S Thompson. Cummings was his most senior adviser his de facto chief of staff and the architect of the Tories' 2019 landslide victory in the general election. Please use comments below for reading suggestions, not general Q&A. 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. Almost no MPs or senior officials study him or are even midly interested. A Cavendish Quantum Mechanics Primer, Professor Mark Warner. I should have read this, havent, will. Interesting on the psychology of selling and marketing. Mathematics: A short introduction, Gowers. In War and Peace, you see a world historical genius skip between vast scales of time and space, connecting tiny things happening this moment to the biggest things affecting decades or centuries to come. , Gustave le Bon. Considered by many in Silicon Valley to be the best book on the details of management. Elite opinion in London today is dominated by very similar people with very similar education and very similar views that inevitably include. (Planning to see some classics Ive missed: theory as not relevant to the old Hollywood where the producers called the shots, not the directors. The basic arguments remain critical today. The Greatest Communicator, Worthlin. Apr 18. 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. He was a mathematician who got interested in how markets work. The most interesting intelligent person writing on American politics who a) really knows a lot of history, b) understands the rationalists but is not of them, and c) whose version of regime change includes ending democracy, is Curtis Yarvin. I wrote some essays on the history of maths and computing which have further reading lists. A mathematicians apology, Hardy. One must not be squeamish about admitting this (Strauss). A scholarly history of maths, not for a general reader. Also cf. , Scott Aaronson (2013) is a brilliant introduction to many ideas about computation, physics and quantum information. LAncien Rgime et la Rvolution, de Tocqueville. If we could predict events like the fall of the Berlin Wall better it would have huge value. Also. One of Britains most senior and respected civil servants, Michael Quinlan, wrote this paper after retiring, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, on nuclear strategy. The United Kingdom parliamentary second jobs controversy of 2021 began with Owen Paterson and his lobbying and breach of Commons advocacy rules, which led to his resignation on 5 November, and this was followed by extensive press coverage and debate about the second jobs of other MPs, particularly Geoffrey Cox.Cox, a former Attorney General, registered a total income of 970,000 in 2020, for . Very very telling that in a recent interview with Tyler Cowen, the recent head of the CIA was clearly unaware of this work, which includes results showing that his own agency is routinely bested by people like unemployed grandmothers in a hut in Central America. Like Hoskyns (below) genuine rare insight and almost totally ignored. I thought this was outstanding and every young person aspiring to be influential in politics should read it. I'll answer some over the next 48 hours, on Friday I'll focus on live questions/discussion, then tidy up after. Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Sipser (2005 edition). E.g Around 1848 nationalism was an elite opinion held by educated liberals who thought of liberalism and nationalism as naturally, and morally, connected, while uneducated peasants were less nationalistic. Book accompanying an OU course. I started reading him around 1999 when I first got involved in politics. E.g rapidly speeding up construction/housing/infrastructure, how to accelerate scientific discovery and technological development. How to Solve It, Polya. Based on a course Susskind taught in San Francisco to give people a basic physics education. Dominic Cummings Dec 13, 2022 40 94 #4 Regime Change, America 2024 Trump's disastrous error. Never At Rest, Westfall. I know some of them. Why? 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. one of my terrorist demands when Boris asked me to go to No10, 21 July 2019). , Adam Smith. Perhaps America has elections every four years, power supply is ~100% reliable in the First World, Europe wont see millions killed in wars again, nobody lives happily/normally to 200, robots cant escape control and kill vast numbers of humans, children should study curricula controlled by the state, I support policies that undermine traditional ideas about the family will seem as quaint in 2052 as Bertrand Russell being taught by a grandfather whod met Napoleon that British naval dominance is a fact of life. The Dream Machine, Waldrop. ), genetics, expert judgement, finance and many other topics with the focus on how education policy has to cope in order to train problem solvers for the coming challenges. As the craziness of 2024 approaches his ideas will be much more influential in some circles than you will realise from the media. Fab: From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, Gershenfeld (MIT). Vernon Smith, economics Nobel-winner, argues that TOMS provides a better basis for economic models and prediction than modern neoclassical economics. What does it say about the West that their newspaper propaganda was much higher class than most elite philosophy now? A great textbook by the worlds leading scholar on the subject. (NB. The critical meta-lesson is the same for all the below: Grovess last personnel report concluded that his effectiveness is unfortunately lessened somewhat by the fact that he often irritates his associates, but he has extraordinary capacity to get things done. Then he was effectively fired. In general Colin Grays work. I googled recently after getting no reply to an email and learned to my dismay that he died of cancer last year. by Rumelt. Our impression was there is valuable low hanging fruit for governments, hedge funds, campaigns, Thucydides. ! In all of these struggles I tried to follow Boyds advice such as, and in all of them, as the opponents OODA crumbled I observed what Boyd said would happen: it starts to feel like your opponent is working for you, the more they try, the worse it gets (e.g when Cameron called the press conference to denounce lies about the fact that Turkey was in the process of joining the EU!). , Ben Rich. I've read at least some of (almost) all of them and (almost) all of most titles I refer to (not all the textbooks). There is a great Commentary by Gomme and Andrewes, two of the great 20th C classical scholars. Number, Dantzig (1930, updated 1953; new edition 2007). The greatest deeds are thoughts (Some confusion about his ideas is a result of his sister who was a Nazi supporter and edited things he wrote to distort his actual views. A good introduction to P=NP?. The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande. This shows the critical meta-lesson again: those in power have no interest in high performance. We look back on history and abstract over decades or centuries, judging the ideas that held sway for a few decades and sneering at how formerly all the world was mad as Nietzsche put it. Almost no MPs or senior officials study him or are even midly interested. The story of Turing, von Neumann and the computer. Our impression was there is valuable low hanging fruit for governments, hedge funds, campaigns. Almost anything good you read on strategy and conflict is based on ideas you see here. For the beginner, by a Fields Medallist. The cynicism/realism remains shocking. Most economists cant synthesise worth a damn. A history of ARPA-IPTO and Xerox PARC: how the internet and PC revolution was created. Zvi reviews Tyler Cowens new book, Talent. The director was evacuated from the horror of Stalingrad as a child: The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky. The more I study the more clear it is that luck plays a crucial part in almost all famous successes. Ill do a separate list on science funding. Ive got a list of a few dozen people I follow on Twitter (I use Tweetdeck + Lists for Twitter) and will make this public shortly. He did not however go quietly or in apologetic mode. Sign in He left his Downing Street role following an internal power struggle, amid claims the PM's then-fiancee had blocked the promotion of one of his allies, Lee Cain, after months of internal warfare . Pearl led a revolution in thinking about causation from inside the then tiny field of AI. The best book on politics. Kahneman bravely admitted hed ignored some of his own lessons in believing studies he shouldnt have believed. If interested in how a government could take seriously, , follow these debates. but most do not realise the last chapter is about Nietzsche and the Last Man, and this chapter is the most relevant today. 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. A classic based on his famous Lectures. (Ive recently read some of the media commentary about 2019 that I ignored at the time and its amazing how many hacks thought I was trying to use vNs game theory. New blog: Insiders & graduates across the West swallowed nonsense on 'AI stole it for Brexit/Trump' after 2016, in 2024 it will be used, maybe by Russia & China as well as both campaigns, so we shd expect an even more chaotic election. A good biography of Dirac. And a very recent post, AGI Ruin, summarising the arguments on why artificial general intelligence is so dangerous and why controlling these dangers is so very hard. I searched for explanations. Many interesting developments and the launch of the 2024 campaign may be only a few weeks away, if Trump announces on 4 July as is being discussed in Mar-a-Lago. For this unprecedented project in world history Groves had no huge central staff, he worked with a brilliant woman and a tiny staff with truly extreme decentralisation. If you want to stop Trump in 2024 you should figure out what you could offer Plouffes wife to let him do it. The insider account of the Manhattan Project by its legendary leader. I thought this was outstanding and every young person aspiring to be influential in politics should read it. Vast amounts of what you read on this is rubbish. Vast amounts of what you read on this is rubbish. On connections between quantum physics, computation and information theory. (NB. A classic on the 1972 campaign. Man-Computer Symbiosis, Licklider, 1960 and The Computer as a Communication Device, Bob Taylor, 1968.
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