Almost all analysis of politics and government considers relatively surface phenomena. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
The British political system is broken in many ways and needs big changes - the E.U. is not our only problem. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
I want people to understand the barriers to serious government in order that more people take action. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Billionaires who want to influence politics could get better 'returns on investment' than from early stage Amazon. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Facebook, like great politicians, surfs waves that it very rarely (if ever) creates. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Economics is clearly a vital area of prediction for people in politics. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Most educated people are not set up to listen or change their minds about politics, however sensible they are in other fields. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
In January 2014 I left the Department for Education and spent the next 18 months away from politics. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Most political operations - and government - don't try to be rigorous about decision-making or force themselves to think about what they… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
A basic problem for people in politics is that approximately none have the hard skills necessary to distinguish great people from charlatans. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
In the political world, big established failing systems control the rules, suck in more and more resources rather than go bust, make… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
People in politics tend to spend far too much time on higher profile issues affecting few people and too little time on… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
In many aspects of government, as in the tech world and investing, brains and temperament smash experience and seniority out of the… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
If you want to avoid the usual fate in politics of failure, you need to understand some basic principles about why people… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
In physics we have developed models that are extremely accurate across vastly different scales from the sub-atomic to the visible universe. In… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
People are always asking 'how could the politicians let X happen with Y?' where Y is something important. People find it hard… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Until the 20th century, medicine was more like politics than physics. Its forecasts were often bogus and its record grim. In the… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Unprecedented in modern British history and outside all normal civil service rules, a bunch of MPs, some of them working with foreign… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
If you think of politics as 'serious people focusing seriously on the most important questions,' which is the default mode of most… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
TV news dominates politics and is extremely low-bandwidth: it contains a few hundred words and rarely uses graphics properly. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
There are many brilliant people in the civil service and politics. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Discussion of politics and government almost totally ignores the concept of training people to update their opinions in response to new evidence… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Priorities are fundamental to politics because of inevitable information bottlenecks: these bottlenecks can be transformed by rare good organisation but they cannot… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Despite the centrality of communication to politics it is remarkable how little attention Insiders pay to what works - never mind the… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children's arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
I know from my days working on education reform in government that it's almost impossible to exaggerate how little those who work… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Political analysis is full of chess metaphors, reflecting an old tradition of seeing games as models of physical and social reality. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
The biggest problem for governments with new technologies is that the limiting factor on applying new technologies is not the technology but… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Project management is not hard in the same way that theoretical physics is hard - there are tried and trusted methods that… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Markets and science show that some fields of human endeavour work much better than political decision-making. I think we could do much… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
In healthcare like in government generally, people are incentivised to engage in wasteful/dangerous signalling to a terrifying degree - not rigorous thinking… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
I've learned over the years that 'rational discussion' accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Regardless of political affiliation most of the policy/media world, as a subset of 'the educated classes' in general, tended to hold a… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
The reason why Whitehall is full of people failing in predictable ways on an hourly basis is because, first, there is general system-wide failure… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
The audience for facts, evidence and research about microtargeting, Facebook and Brexit is tiny. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
In the commercial world, big companies mostly die within a few decades because they cannot maintain an internal system to keep them aligned to… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
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… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
The panic over Sputnik brought many good things such as a huge increase in science funding. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
In history books, luck is always underplayed and the talent of individuals is usually overplayed. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Changing the world in a profound and beneficial way is not enough to put a dint in bureaucracies which operate on their own dynamics. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
I make judgments about people and ideas individually - for me, parties are just a vehicle of convenience. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
Technology enables people to improve communication with unprecedented speed, scale and iterative testing. It also allows people to wreak chaos with high leverage. — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
If you want to avoid the usual fate in politics of failure, you need to understand some basic principles about why people make mistakes… — Dominic Cummings Copy Share Image
