most people get rebuffed by the sheer number of words and posts he’s written
I think most people are far more put off by his close association with Vote Leave, and the damage it caused. He's clearly brilliant and insightful, but I'm very wary about promoting rationality "dark arts" like how to manipulate the public, especially when coming from someone whose primary claim to fame is that they hurt their own country, further destabilized the European Union, and worsened the world economy.
What's the empirical basis for this attitude, though? Why did you associate him with "dark arts"? What makes you think he made the world economy worse, and how would one even quantify long-term effects of something like that?
In any case, he would not agree with any of those propositions. Among other things, in his ridiculously long Brexit essay he claims:
...I will go into the problems of the EU another time. I will just make one importa
Thanks for the response. First, economists and experts seem pretty unified in thinking that Brexit will be bad for the UK, and somewhat less bad but still negative for the EU. That's not proof, but it's fairly convincing data, and I haven't seen plausible claims to the contrary.
Regarding the rest, I think you've just admitted that there were places where lies were used in service of a supposed greater truth, and that the claims used to promote Brexit were willfully inconsistent - but that's exactly what we mean by dark arts, and no additional empirical data is needed to support the claim. Of course I agree that neither side was honest - but a policy of getting involved in (epistemic) mud fights isn't about relative muddiness, it's about actually staying clean. If we care about our epistemic health, there are lots of things we might want to avoid, and dishonesty in service of our prior (debatably effective / correct) ideas seems like a great candidate.
Mostly agreed, but one lesson I took from the pandemic was that far more of public communication seemed to be outright explicit manipulation than I could've previously imagined. Examples include the initial policy on masks, as well as the endless asymmetric claims that "there is no evidence for <thing we don't like>".
So insofar as politics appears to me to be inherently manipulative, it does not make much sense to me to single out a specific person for using misleading rhetoric in a political campaign. And conversely I can't quite envision a successful political campaign that no-one would accuse of misleading rhetoric.
For instance, we just had the German federal elections, and our election posters are full of slogans I'd describe as both empty and misleading. <10-word slogans are just too short for nuance. A similar problem applies to Twitter discourse, too.
Is there a good cost-benefit analysis of Brexit in the post-COVID era? The last conversation I saw about this was in February 4 2021:
Rob Wiblin:
The UK vaccination program has been so good — from planning to strategy to implementation.
Mad respect for these folks.
Jai Dhyani:
The UK's vaccination campaign has been so good and the EU 's so bad that I'm seriously reconsidering my position on Brexit. I don't know how things went in the universe where Brexit didn't happen, but the contrast is so stark it's hard to imagine that getting the EU out of the way didn't help a lot.
Chris Watkins:
This is one of the few things they've done well, though.
Jai Dhyani:
It's a really big thing though! Ending a pandemic faster, and consequently saving hundreds of thousands of QALYs *and* spinning up the economy months earlier than they counterfactually could have probably outweighs even a pretty long list of Brexit downsides.
Robert Rand:
Also, probably slowed the spread of the UK variant.
But yeah, looking at the EU beaurocracy trying to deal with the desperate need for vaccines had left me flabbergasted and way more pro-brexit. (Though equally anti the brexiteers.)
Jeffrey Eldred:
...My understanding is that EU n
I think it's somewhere between very early and unreasonable to ask about "post-COVID" impacts when we're probably a year away from returning to any semblance of normal globally. At the same time, while I don't think there is a clear answer, the consensus of economists seems to be that overall Brexit was clearly bad, as of January this year, i.e. mid-pandemic.
Next, the UK going alone on vaccination, which probably would have been possible even without Brexit, seems to contrast with them going alone on pushing for herd immunity, in what was both in retrospect bad, and predictably so according to economists and epidemiologists who were shouting about it at the time.
Second, my understanding is that the stated reasoning for why to do Brexit had little or nothing to do with this type of policy freedom. But even if it was mentioned, I think it's strange to defend the impacts of Brexit on the basis of a difficult to explore counterfactual understanding of how the UK would have behaved differently during this tail event, ignoring the consensus that the impact on the economic situation was very negative.
I think it's somewhere between very early and unreasonable to ask about "post-COVID" impacts when we're probably a year away from returning to any semblance of normal globally.
I was actually thinking that this is mostly normality -- by "post-COVID" I meant "the world after COVID first shows up" rather than "the world after COVID goes away". :)
seems to contrast with them going alone on pushing for herd immunity, in what was both in retrospect bad, and predictably so according to economists and epidemiologists who were shouting about it at the time.
Would this have gone any differently if they'd been in the EU? I'm mostly asking whether Brexit itself was a good idea, not whether the UK's overall policies are good. (Though I guess a bunch of that other stuff is also relevant to evaluating Cummings' track record! I guess I'd just want to note the change in scope.)
Second, my understanding is that the stated reasoning for why to do Brexit had little or nothing to do with this type of policy freedom.
What was Cummings' stated reasoning? Googling around, the first source I could find explaining this was in this Economist interview:
...BAGEHOT: Turning to the case for Brexit, what is it about the
As a way to contextualize this, he describes the Vote Leave campaign as a pretty straightforward case of Working With Monsters.
It seesm to me that the only way to make that judgement is to actually read Cummings describe his cause.
What grounds do we have for taking that description at face value? I don't think that even his supporters believe his qualities include scrupulous honesty.
Four, he has uniquely powerful ideas about how to do project management well...
I am interested in this. Any suggestions for posts that focus on project management specifically?
but actually swing voters tend to side with Libs strongly on some things like health care, white collar crime, and higher taxes on the rich and Tories strongly on some things like violent crime, anti-terrorism, and immigration
Having just read the (ridiculously long) post, his position even seemed to be that these voters are (often?) to the left of the left parties (or their leadership) on some issues, and to the right of the right parties (or their leadership) on the others.
I haven't read a ton of Dominic Cummings, but the writing of his that I have read had a pretty large influence on me. It is very rare to get any insider story about how politics works internally from someone who speaks in a mechanistic language about the world, and I pretty majorly updated my models of how to achieve political outcomes, and also majorly updated upwards on my ability to achieve things in politics without going completely crazy (I don't think politics had no effect on Cumming's sanity, but he seems to have weathered it in a healthier way than the vast majority of other people I've seen go into it).
"Extremely committed to truth-seeking". Hmm. https://fullfact.org/health/cummings-blog-coronavirus/ and https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dominic-cummings-blog-pandemic would suggest that he has a penchant for telling fibs.
Many people have brought this up to me and I think it's extremely misleading. Basically, he wrote this blog post about the dangers of possible pandemics that governments weren't taking seriously, and heavily rested on giant block quotes from a good source, as he often does. In the block quote he included sections on like 4/8 of the pathogens they warned about, separated by ellipses. After the pandemic he went back and added to his block quote the section on coronaviruses specifically, to show that bio-risk people were already warning about this BEFORE it happened and the government was completely failing to act on it.
This seems like an extremely reasonable action to me—he probably should have used ETA or something, which is the only "dishonesty" I fault him for, but even that phrase is a little weird in a block quote. I can see how some people would be like "you changed it!" but absent political anger, I don't really imagine getting mad at a friend or acquaintance for this. If I myself had a block quote that cut some things for length but was warning of essentially the exact thing that happened, I probably wouldn't just add the section without an ETA, but I expect I would just say in an interview "I specifically warned about coronaviruses amongst other things".
In a press conference, he claims. "Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning," I am failing to find mention of coronavirus in that original. I also note https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/26/dominic-cummings-says-he-did-not-tell-whole-truth-about-journeys-to-durham-barnard-castle.
I remain unconvinced that he is "extremely committed to truth-seeking".
First, I already agreed this was true. But if you write about the urgent need for planning for biosecurity a year before a pandemic, quote a biosecurity report that mentions 8ish diseases, you cut a few from your block quote for concision, and then one of the 8 that you didn't specific use in your block quote (but which you were definitely writing about!) occurs in a global pandemic... I just think it's pretty reasonable to say "I wrote about this". I might not do it per se, but if a friend of mine did it, I wouldn't bat an eyelid. If a random acquaintance did it, I would stop for a second, think about it, decide it seemed fine. If you write a fair amount about a report warning of some things, and then one of those things happens, you get to say "you wrote about that".
Second, I think there's a very important distinction between truth-seeking and truth-telling, as comes up regarding Cummings. I understand this is a pretty apologist stance but I think it's super important here. Normally people have neither, and sometimes people have both. But I think it's pretty consistent to have a model of him where he is truth-seeking but not always truth-telling.
For example, he talks about ...
It's important to distinguish seeking the truth from speaking the truth. The truth-seeking credential here is that the Vote Leave campaign applied basic epistemics, at his direction: review the literature to determine what methods actually work; gather as much data as possible; update methods according to feedback; aggressively ignore recommendations from high-status-but-wrong people who are nominally on the same side.
Cummings' accomplishments are kinda pathetic, actually? He was associated with the successful Brexit effort. OK. So were lots of other people. Cameron was lukewarm on remain and Labour was basically pro-brexit but couldn't talk about it. In retrospect it's not that shocking Remain lost when neither major party was fully campaigning for it. Also this is literally his only meaningful accomplishment.
Then he later gets into government as Johnson's fixer, which given that Johnson is averse to actual work means he can basically do whatever he wants. He then fail...
“My own heuristics for working in politics are: focus, ‘know yourself’ (don’t fool yourself), think operationally, work extremely hard, ... and ask yourself ‘to be or to do?’” - DC
Dominic Cummings is fascinating for four reasons. One, he is extremely committed to truth-seeking but from a different perspective than most of LW. Two, he has a shocking amount of real-world “success”, especially for a truth-seeker. Three, he fills the missing niche of trying to describe what government is actually like, to great effect. Four, he has uniquely powerful ideas about how to do project management well and how to fix government.
At the very least, he is extremely thought-provoking, and provides tons of value to >30% of people around me who try reading or listening to him.
However, most people get rebuffed by the sheer number of words and posts he’s written (or included as block quotes...). This post is to help people get a foothold in reading him, triage his work, and understand the basics of his perspective.
(Pitch: If you end up liking what he has written or even just my summary, consider subscribing to his Substack, even if only for a month and $10. It’s long been hard to capture much of the value from public goods like good opinions/models/writing, leaving them under-incentivized. Now that Substack allows us a convenient way to reward and incentivize good online writers, I want us to do an about-face on our expectations, and not confuse the previous fully-free status quo “is” with the “ought” of a real remuneration scheme. If you really like his writing but are short on cash, reach out to me and I may gift you a subscription.)
The Brexit Story (20k words = ~1.5 hrs, anecdotally 2.5):
This piece is most him. It touches on many of the themes that come up throughout his writing but in a concrete story. (Warning: you might have to do a bit of research into UK politics to understand what’s going on, or just skip the hard parts. You don’t need to understand everything.)
Highlights:
The Hollow Men II: Some reflections on Westminster and Whitehall dysfunction
Four great stories about working in government: at one point they couldn’t fix their own elevator. At all points it was an extraordinary mess. Extremely long, you can ctrl+f “Part II” for the stories and don’t need to finish.
Unrecognised simplicities of effective action #1: expertise and a quadrillion dollar business
“Plenty of room at the top”—there’s no cap on effectiveness and good management and startup skills, so we might be able to do vastly more impressive things with the right skills and teams. Most concrete points about how to do this are later in the series, but this starts the series that feels to me like it could kick-start a paradigm change.
A bunch of advice on what he actually means by there being room to be better at systems management, for example matrix management, focusing on people first, Black Saturdays and focus on error-correction, having clear goals set by the top of the org but extreme decentralization of decisions made for how to achieve that, etc. This was better than I had gotten from reading the top management books.
Effective action #4a: ‘Expertise’ from fighting and physics to economics, politics and government
“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 2) does it allow high quality feedback and therefore error-correction. Physics and fighting: Yes. Predicting recessions, forex trading and politics: not so much.”
Somewhat old-hat but I still found it surprisingly clarifying.
Effective action #4b: ‘Expertise’, prediction and noise, from the NHS killing people to Brexit
When do fields exhibit true expertise? Why doesn’t government? And some thoughts on the failure to learn from the simplest and biggest successes (e.g. ARPA/PARC).
Some thoughts on education and political priorities
The big essay. The first 5 pages of this are a great summary of his worldview: focused on how scitech is making things move faster and bigger; no one has the knowledge for how to stop or control this; we do have some examples of teams who were effective enough they could plausibly keep up; to get those teams we need a better system of governance and that will require better education for people to meet the requirements; specifically understanding the big pieces from many fields. Skip after page 5 unless you want a deep-dive into tech predictions from 2013 or a re-hash of the scientific worldview.
A cool off-brand essay about the importance of being able to see the important information while you’re working. Gave me some ideas about how to better set-up my own office.
Afghanistan SNAFU (situation normal all fucked up): 'normal' politics,'normal' results
Finally gets further on-message! Explains how “The government does not control the government”, some laws of bureaucracies, and why most things should just be dismantled and rebuilt rather than reformed.
Further explains how the goal is “a government that controls the government” and calls for a bold project of ~10 people to make substantial progress here.
Startup government: notes on Lee Kuan Yew #3
Really good look at a very different type of government. Goes pretty in-depth on the ramifications of different ideas like {the press should not actually be totally "free", because ideas/memes spread based not on truth but on how they strike emotional chords within us, and an unfettered press will use this to gradually accumulate power of an odd sort}, or {a serious government should strongly empower standing anti-corruption investigations into itself}, etc. The other LKY notes (1,2,4) are also similarly good.
You can find his index of blog posts here, broken into topic. In general the three areas he blogs about that I find most interesting are:
I don’t get as much out of:
I haven't read the Education section but it looks interesting as more boots-on-the-ground experience-fodder.
Regarding my biases: the cutting-edge science is well-understood by those around me, so it’s just old-hat. The Complexity series also feels a bit old-hat and just doesn’t capture me that well. So know that those are my biases here, and I’m foisting them onto you because I expect you’re similar to me.