Although some other officials and senior figures had also broken the lockdown rules, this transgression was the first to . Non-fiction books on politics fail to give you this crucial sense. For us its often seen as high level political philosophy but it was bashed out by Hamilton et al as part of a brutal political struggle including many dirty tricks on both sides. Please just ask one question as precisely as you can, it will increase the chance I answer. His point about. The main biography of Buffett, , is also interesting. I wrote, which has a further reading list. This will also show you why high performance is so hard it is totally hostile to normal bureaucracies dominated by large numbers of middle managers. Just like despite ARPA-PARCs success, almost no science funding is done like that in the world (hence why I made the creation of ARIA one of my terrorist demands when Boris asked me to go to No10, 21 July 2019). An inspiration for changes to maths teaching I pushed in 2011-14, including trying to get a maths for Presidents course going. You often read versions of those really at the edge of this research do not predict fast timetables. Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche. , Plouffe. The politicians soon are on the next current thing too. 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. The real reason is most people in politics dont want to face the big questions about what government is for and how to do it better (and especially dont want to face the quality of people). 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. The Power Broker, Robert Caro. Some of the unpublished stuff in Gdels Collected Works is extraordinary, e.g his secret search for the truth about Leibniz. Twitter Web App Retweets This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Wycombe Abbey Suicide: Caitlyn Scott-Lee Found Dead , Carville & Matalin. A great textbook by the worlds leading scholar on the subject. . , Marcus du Sautoy. Also cf. ! ), , Waldrop. Alexander the Great, Robin Lane Fox. Dominic Cummings's Odyssean reading list might make you smarter. The best biography in English (probably any language) is Otto Pflanzes three volumes. 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. Just like despite ARPA-PARCs success, almost no science funding is done like that in the world (hence why I made the creation of. His book 'Causality' is the leading textbook in the field. 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. Also Democracy in America. In the search I came across Boyd. The Federalist Papers. Cowen & Collison handed out fast grants to researchers during covid and at my request advised UKRI on how to speed up in spring 2020. If you really are interested in policy and how someone tries to bring principles of high performance to government, this is essential. While some lessons are specific to time/place (e.g how the Senate works in 1950) the most important lessons from all such books are quite abstract and common and I assume this will be true of these classics. Lines and Curves, Vassiliev and Gutenmacher. Professor Sides Dominic Cummings Nov 22, 2022 59 134 Ask Me Anything Monday 28 November, 1900-2100 Dominic Cummings Nov 21, 2022 57 310 Reckoning With Risk, Gigerenzer. It amazes me how many scientists and economists know nothing or almost nothing about it. was the fundamental reason I think Brexit is the right idea and the EU is doomed to fail in important ways. Cited by many professional mathematicians as an inspiration. Hard question (relevant to AGI safety debates! Ive only read a few excerpts of these but reading them all is a project for later this year. SW1 suffers such extremely powerful wilful blindness even an event as big as covid doesnt puncture consciousness in many important ways. If interested in how a government could take seriously accelerating progress, follow these debates. dominiccummings.substack.com. Colonel John Boyds briefings are great. How to predict news? I like reading stuff about people where incentives and feedback work, from used car salesmen to fortune tellers. Like Hoskyns (below) genuine rare insight and almost totally ignored. Before the current lockdown scandal, he was best known for. Many academics predicted OpenAIs approach would not work but have been. How Roger Ailes packaged Nixon with actual campaign memos reproduced at the back. Its often found in terrorist safe houses when raided. Genres Politics The uncomfortable truth about Dominic Cummings's campaign playbook I know I should like Dickens, the Russians loved Dickens, but I just couldnt enjoy it, probably a school effect, and I should retry. People dont realise that nobody in movies is interested in money Theyre really interested in its all an ego trip, status, You can replace Hollywood with Westminster, picture/movie with political strategy, producers with MPs, and money with the public. The Cummings effect: politics, trust, and behaviours during the COVID Oppenheimer is better known but Groves was his boss. The title comes from Revelations 6 (7-8): And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. This is false. 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. I enjoyed/learned from Isaacsons biography of Steve Jobs. NB. It is, therefore, practically unknown in SW1. A mathematicians apology, Hardy. Functions and Graphs, Gelfand and Glagoleva. One of the most critical lessons? 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. Why? Pearl led a revolution in thinking about causation from inside the then tiny field of AI. (A great highlight of Oxford for me was four-hour tutorials with RLF on Athenian democracy, Thucydides, Alexander etc.). Next week I'll write something for subscribers only on 'Some basics of how to do regime change'. 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. Why it's in AOC's interests to challenge Old Joe. I thought this was outstanding and every young person aspiring to be influential in politics should read it. Richard Muller. I think hes right that most academics assume models for how this works that are clearly not how people really think under pressure. This is true even of those who frequently complain about this phenomenon. The Book of Why (general reader). The media laughed and many said its so boring. 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. ; 2) how to map the spread of memes and identify critical nodes in the network that, if influenced somehow, can amplify or dampen signals? Ill do a separate list on science funding. , Spivak (2008 edition). The Nazis did indeed think they were creating a new world beyond good and evil, so did Stalin. NB. You often read versions of those really at the edge of this research do not predict fast timetables. Classic text, university level. Rohls multivolume biography on Wilhelm II is brilliant and, like Pflanze, a whole political education in itself. Like LKY, crucial if you really are interested in practical planning for high performance government. The river was also burning. If youre in Georgia, visit her house in Milledgeville. British political writing depends hugely on assuming that much of the newspaper coverage is roughly true, so given much is actually invented it means the books repeat a lot of fake news and miss the point. Cummings has also instructed the advisers to read High Output Management by Andrew Grove, the former chief executive of computer-chip manufacturer Intel, who "warns that success breeds. If one could observe a discussion between Bismarck and one politician from the 20th Century, he might be the most interesting choice. Main allegations as Dominic Cummings gives evidence to MPs on the government's early handling of the COVID outbreak in the UK. If you read Boyd youll see how lessons recur across Alexander, Nelson, Groves et al. He was a businessman who understood systems thinking and was the first head of the Policy Unit in No10 for Thatcher. Want to Get Smarter? Read Something on This List 121. 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. Number, Dantzig (1930, updated 1953; new edition 2007). . Dominic Cummings: What is the scandal about? - BBC News The insider account of the Manhattan Project by its legendary leader. On connections between quantum physics, computation and information theory. E.g Introduction to Strategic History, Modern Strategy, Strategy and Defence Planning (reading now). 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. Ill do a separate list on science funding. Considered by many in Silicon Valley to be the best book on the details of management. And notice that despite their vast success Buffett & Munger have had almost zero success in persuading anybody to run their companies the way they run Berkshire! I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. Posted January 13, 2014 Source: Pexels There's a lot of hope today that playing mindless brain training games will make you. The Story of Mathematics, Marcus du Sautoy. His boss and predecessor was Kelly Johnson who wrote this short list of principles. by Lee Kuan Yew. Almost the only good business book I have read on strategy. , Robert Caro. , Professor Mark Warner. E.g his few pages on, which few economists seem to know about! The smartest person Einstein said he knew wrote one of the first things on existential risk. Sept. 7, 2019 Dominic Cummings, special adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson of . Ditto for the Johnson volumes (Ive not read) when Caro publishes the last. Mr Cummings is Boris Johnson's chief adviser. , George Dyson (son of Freeman). By Reagans pollster. 19 Apr 2023 07:47:58 High Output Management, Andy Grove, ex-founder/CEO of Intel. He opted out of the traditional science funding system early. Brexit and VL in No10 (original official advice was to go with the useless bureaucratic EU scheme. , Nietzsche. A general introduction to number theory, topology, calculus and other subjects. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's Rasputin, is happy to watch the country blow up if he gets what he wants. Doing the Impossible, Slotkin. , Murray Gell Mann. (NB. A Boyd ally wrote about his time in the Pentagon dealing with the extreme nightmare of procurement. Re Clintons 1992 campaign which influenced the Blair 1997 campaign. In all of these struggles I tried to follow Boyds advice such as, connect yourself to sources of power, disconnect your opponent 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!). Newton biography and its brilliantly done with intense love and care for its extraordinary subject. , Klein. , Courant. Dominic Cummings Quotes - BrainyQuote Like all the best political advice you dont need to be clever to understand it. Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos (1988). But this also means theres always billion dollar bills on the pavement sometimes even trillion dollar bills, like do vaccines much faster and smarter than usual in spring 2020, and like now with 2024 approaching People, ideas, machines in that order! Robert Coram wrote a biography. Six months later tens of thousands died for the lack of such skills. Welles dismissed the French auteur theory as not relevant to the old Hollywood where the producers called the shots, not the directors. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty. Book accompanying an OU course. A classic on the 1972 campaign. Almost anything good you read on strategy and conflict is based on ideas you see here. 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. Someone should run a prize for the best 10,000 word essay summarising the fundamental lessons of this book (which I havent read in full, just skimmed, because of time not a judgement). The cynicism/realism remains shocking. No doubt about that Nietzsche produced the climate in which Fascism and Hitlerism could emerge. , 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. (3 volumes), Morris Kline. AT&T could only support it when a monopoly. Will. Dominic Cummings substack | Substack Michael Nielsen on quantum mechanics and computers: textbook on QCs, one of the top ten cited physics books ever written. But the storyteller makes this picture incredibly beautiful. Influence, Cialdini. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72, Hunter S Thompson. Causality, Judea Pearl (advanced). Thinking, fast and slow, Kahneman. Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Sipser (2005 edition). (Dostoyevsky was Nietzsches favourite novellist! Im reading this summer. , which was unpublished for many years and seems to be generally unknown, is super-useful. This excellent short book introduces quantum mechanics using A Level maths. , Sipser (2005 edition). Our impression was there is valuable low hanging fruit for governments, hedge funds, campaigns. I know some of them. Youll see its very similar to Grovess principles (above). The smartest person Einstein said he knew wrote one of the first things on existential risk. , Burton. Dominic Cummings on Twitter There is a great. The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides. He was a mathematician who got interested in how markets work. In Pursuit of the Travelling Salesman, Cook. , Gelfand and Glagoleva. (If anyone knows if his remarkable secretary, Mrs. OLeary, left any records or an oral history please leave links below. A good biography of Dirac. On the 50th anniversary Munger reflected on why his partnership with Buffett had been so successful and Buffetts personality. I put * next to 7 which is a guess at what people 100 years hence will find most interesting on this list. , Kahneman. Classic on teaching children programming, recommended by Alan Kay and Bret Victor. The classic Cummings campaign is in the Star Wars rebel-alliance mould. Ive only read a few excerpts of these but reading them all is a project for later this year. True of Bismarck (only appointed because of meltdown in royal circles), true of the likes of SpaceX (an explosion away from bankruptcy) and Steve Jobs (tried to sell early and was turned down), true of Brexit We just dont see all the stories of very able people trying really hard who get taken out by bad luck early in the story. (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. Then I realised the truth. 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. Dominic Cummings on Twitter: "@drjennings Try reading before tweeting 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. 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. Hes a very unusual thinker and much more right much more often than just about anybody, partly because of how he thinks. Brilliant physics books for the interested non-specialist written by a top physicist, widely praised by Nobel Prize winners, used in his Berkeley course voted best course on campus. He did not however go quietly or in apologetic mode. de Tocqueville. Vast amounts of what you read on this is rubbish. People who climb to the top of the science system tend to defend the system rather than support change, even when they realise how bad it is. Dominic Cummings told Parliament that his ex-boss, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was "unfit for the job" and that government incompetence lead to thousands of excess Covid-19 deaths. What is moral behaviour is not the same question as what are the principles of high performance in politics! The Quark and the Jaguar, Murray Gell Mann. Orson Welles thought Renoir the greatest director. Vernon Smith, economics Nobel-winner, argues that TOMS provides a better basis for economic models and prediction than modern neoclassical economics. I wrote some essays on the history of maths and computing which have further reading lists. , in contrast to most professional economists who influence media debate on regulation who have no idea of how government really works and how destructive it is to make simple things take years, how it drives people away, rewards the worst people and companies etc. I started reading him around 1999 when I first got involved in politics. Elite opinion in London today is dominated by very similar people with very similar education and very similar views that inevitably include. I searched for explanations. As long promised (sorry! A remarkable 19th Century book about propaganda and politics that influenced Lenin, Hitler and PR pioneers like Bernays. The cynicism/realism remains shocking. But this also means theres always billion dollar bills on the pavement sometimes even trillion dollar bills, like do vaccines much faster and smarter than usual in spring 2020, and like now with 2024 approaching. I blogged on it here. He is not a member of parliament and is not elected. Dominic Cummings Dec 13, 2022 40 94 #4 Regime Change, America 2024 Trump's disastrous error. Considered by many in Silicon Valley to be the best book on the details of management. (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. Its crucial to remember both aspects of this genius-monster without whom probably no World War I, Lenin, Hitler etc summed up by Salisburys two comments: One misses the extraordinary penetration of the old man and he will do things of which it would be absurd to suspect any other statesman in Europe. Solving Mathematical Problems, Terence Tao. Please leave errors and suggestions below, Ill tweak and add over time and notify of updates. If you read his blogs and trusted him on covid over the entire CDC/FDA/WHO bureaucracies, youd have come out far ahead. If you want to understand the modern intellectual classes media, academia and politics this plugs you straight into their psychology. Blurb endorsement by Einstein. Like Hoskyns (below) genuine rare insight and almost totally ignored. On dynamic tools, interface design, Seeing Rooms, new ideas about programming, tools for thought, and so on, David Deutschs books. Alls Fair, Carville & Matalin. (Politicians also constantly make this mistake in hiring journalists to do communication, almost always a bad idea.). Re George Mueller, the man who managed the Apollo program. On expert decisions under pressure, like firemen. Almost the only good business book I have read on strategy. If you want to understand modern culture, the 19th Century smashup of the traditional world with the capitalist, liberal and increasingly atheist world, and what deep forces lie behind the ideas we see all around us, its the best book. 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. . The Man from the Future, Bhattacharya. While No 10 was trying to get a grip on the pandemic, news came in . 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. . The Selling of the President 1968, McGinniss. , Polya. Dominic Cummings Tells of Boris Johnson's Inept Covid Policy - The New Now It Can Be Told, General Groves. You can learn from him about how to get very hard things done without admiring his character. Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. Work for Dominic Cummings at your peril, but his take on the state's Two of the most important documents on the computer revolution by two of the critical figures in ARPA/PARC. We can now test fertilised eggs for common risk factors such as mental disorders and heart attacks and choose which egg to use for IVF. A good introduction to P=NP?. Expert Political Judgment, and Superforecasters, Tetlock. Below is a summary of the main ideas. Interesting how some fields (e.g airlines, surgery) have significantly improved performance while others have not, and the barriers to improvement. Sign in 26. One must not be squeamish about admitting this (Strauss). . Governments find it very, very hard to fund such ventures. For example: The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Apr 18. are great. If you read his blogs and trusted him on covid over the entire CDC/FDA/WHO bureaucracies, youd have come out far ahead. Lines and Curves, Vassiliev and Gutenmacher. One of the most critical lessons? 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. , John Hoskyns. 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. If you really are interested in policy and how someone tries to bring principles of high performance to government, this is essential. Hes a very unusual thinker and much more right much more often than just about anybody, partly because of how he thinks. The best book about Gdels Theorem (according to the editor of Gdels Collected Works) which explains why almost everything one reads about it including by some famous scientists (e.g. The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande. A remarkable 19th Century book about propaganda and politics that influenced Lenin, Hitler and PR pioneers like Bernays. Classic text, university level. People who climb to the top of the science system tend to defend the system rather than support change, even when they realise how bad it is. ), here are some books and a few papers I recommend. He also wrote a, A great textbook by the worlds leading scholar on the subject. In particular read Alan Kays The Power of the Context and watch the two-part YCombinator talk he gave. I did pinch ideas from how Bismarck dealt with the Prussian constitutional crisis.). *Chaplin City Lights, The Gold Rush, Modern Times, Great Dictator. Pflouffe ran the Obama 08 campaign and 2012 re-election. The Limits of Quantum Computers, Scott Aaronson (Scientific American, 2008). Vernon Smith, economics Nobel-winner, argues that TOMS provides a better basis for economic models and prediction than modern neoclassical economics. Working Backwards, by Amazon alumni. Yes its striking that looking at my internet favourites for politics there are no UK-based political blogs/writers I regularly read. 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. Makers of Modern Strategy, Paret et al. Cited by many professional mathematicians as an inspiration. Please post questions below. On expert decisions under pressure, like firemen. Some Thoughts on Education and Political Priorities - Goodreads 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. In particular Ill add textbooks, history and philosophy which Ive largely left out.
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