Like Hoskyns (below) genuine rare insight and almost totally ignored. Dominic Cummings is a man known to be fond of reading lists (Oliver Wright writes).But while the prime minister's chief adviser exhorts others to read books on subjects such as . Dominic Cummings . Sign in On the 50th anniversary Munger reflected on why his partnership with Buffett had been so successful and Buffetts personality. Kahneman bravely admitted hed ignored some of his own lessons in believing studies he shouldnt have believed. Cummings' understanding of modern genetics, IQ, evolutionary psychology, child development and neuroscience, as evidenced by his blog and advice to Michael Gove when education minister, is a. The Story of Mathematics, Marcus du Sautoy. How to predict news? The resignation of Dominic Raab. He opted out of the traditional science funding system early. Our impression was there is valuable low hanging fruit for governments, hedge funds, campaigns, Thucydides. , Slotkin. Dominic Cummings Judea Pearl is one of the most important scholars in the field of causal reasoning. This shows the critical meta-lesson again: those in power have no interest in high performance. Please leave errors and suggestions below, Ill tweak and add over time and notify of updates. , and let non-player characters stumble into a set of critical decisions in November? 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 don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. Never At Rest, Westfall. Mr Cummings is Boris Johnson's chief adviser. A remarkable 19th Century book about propaganda and politics that influenced Lenin, Hitler and PR pioneers like Bernays. (This series was written for the Russian correspondence school a way of giving talented maths pupils a useful curriculum in such a vast country. why some of the VL team decided to go to No10 in 2019, Thoughts on past and future of the Buffett system, , Scott Aaronson (Scientific American, 2008), Orson Welles thought Renoir the greatest director, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2020/the-eu-godfathers-wall-street-roots/, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-2021/the-sphinx-who-reshaped-europe/. , Morris Kline. 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. NB. Before the current lockdown scandal, he was best known for. Almost the only good business book I have read on strategy. LKY, Boyd, Groves all say the same). We can now test fertilised eggs for common risk factors such as mental disorders and heart attacks and. 59. One must not be squeamish about admitting this (Strauss). Classic text, university level. , George Dyson (son of Freeman). (This series was written for the Russian correspondence school a way of giving talented maths pupils a useful curriculum in such a vast country. I wrote this blog which has a further reading list. I wrote, which has a further reading list. If you want to follow the cutting edge of this research follow, , which you should anyway. The director was evacuated from the horror of Stalingrad as a child: The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky. A modern version of Polya for children, by aFields Medalist. If youre thinking of doing a startup or just curious about how to do hard things you should read Paul Grahams essays. This is false. At every session I attended I could feel the unanimous disapproval of the audience.), Risky Business (Sometimes you just gotta say, what the fuck, make your move, what the fuck brings freedom, freedom brings opportunity, opportunity makes your future), War and Peace (the 1960s Russian TV series is really an epic movie), Whos Afraid of Virginia Wolf (Burton & Taylor). I think hes right that most academics assume models for how this works that are clearly not how people really think under pressure. Also though, everybody has bad luck and those who survive long enough to get good luck are very perseverant. 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). 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. (NB. Quotes. Also the club of those who write about UK politics a) are rarely interested in how power really works, b) are almost, 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. 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. 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). Looks at the bigshots of modern military thinking. 406. A history of the amazing Bell Labs which famously won more Nobels than most EU countries. Book accompanying an OU course. 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. 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. NB. If you want to follow the cutting edge of this research follow Steve Hsus blog, which you should anyway. Aug 25, 2022. He also wrote a book on neural networks. Steve Jobs advised Obama to do the same but it didnt happen. Nelson, biography by John Sugden. Oppenheimer is better known but Groves was his boss. What does it say about the West that their newspaper propaganda was much higher class than most elite philosophy now? The critical meta-lesson is the same for all the below: practically nobody has any interest in extreme performance and all governments in the west will try to stop you applying these lessons. , Leonard Susskind (2013). Why? 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. He was a mathematician who got interested in how markets work. Richard Feynman was a giant of theoretical physics who famously defined science as "the belief in the ignorance of experts". If you read his blogs and trusted him on covid over the entire CDC/FDA/WHO bureaucracies, youd have come out far ahead. Dominic Cummings' answer is to make Britain "the leading country for education and science". (A counterfactual: if Thatcher had taken his advice in the early 1980s and rejected the emerging Single Market plan and embarked on civil service reform?). Short stories, 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. Classic on teaching children programming, recommended by Alan Kay and Bret Victor. , von Neumann, 1955. , Ben Rich. You can learn from him about how to get very hard things done without admiring his character. 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. . If hed run the Hillary campaign in 2016, no Trump as President. , Gowers. Just in Time, John Hoskyns. Los Alamos was crucial but it was part of a much vaster infrastructure of engineering projects, intelligence, planning and so on. Number, Dantzig (1930, updated 1953; new edition 2007). A Boyd ally wrote about his time in the Pentagon dealing with the extreme nightmare of procurement. ), here are some books and a few papers I recommend. Ive read at least some of (almost) all of them and (almost) all of most titles I refer to (not all the textbooks). 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. There are fields like professional mathematics and equity investing where institutions mean the best people are recognised over time. The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande. I blogged a series on this great book starting. 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. Re George Mueller, the man who managed the Apollo program. It is, therefore, practically unknown in SW1. Jean Monnet created the ECSC and EEC/EU. Like Hoskyns (below) genuine rare insight and almost totally ignored. 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. Brexit and VL in No10 (original official advice was to go with the useless bureaucratic EU scheme. How Roger Ailes packaged Nixon with actual campaign memos reproduced at the back. (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. David Deutschs books. David wrote some of the breakthrough papers on quantum computers. Orson Welles thought Renoir the greatest director. A billionaire should provide copies to all elected politicians. 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. His boss and predecessor was Kelly Johnson who wrote this short list of principles. Dominic Cummings has hit back at Boris Johnson's partygate defence, accusing him of spreading "further misinformation". Interesting how some fields (e.g airlines, surgery) have significantly improved performance while others have not, and the barriers to improvement. His boss and predecessor was Kelly Johnson who wrote. Dominic Cummings's Odyssean reading list might make you smarter. and I suspect it would be one of the most useful things to force politicians and senior officials to read. 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. Mindstorms, Seymour Papert. What is moral behaviour is not the same question as what are the principles of high performance in politics! For example: , Andy Grove, ex-founder/CEO of Intel. 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!). I thought this was outstanding and every young person aspiring to be influential in politics should read it. Also, Defense In Atomic War. judge timothy kenny political affiliation. 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. NB. About Robert Mosess grip on NYC. Theoretical Minimum, Leonard Susskind (2013). The best modern subject for those interested in how political decisions are taken and effective action in politics/government is Bismarck. , Gertner. His Memoirs are fascinating and so is this biography by Duchne. Many academics predicted OpenAIs approach would not work but have been proved repeatedly wrong.). 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. Next week I'll write something for subscribers only on 'Some basics of how to do regime change'. Twitter Web App Retweets This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. one of my terrorist demands when Boris asked me to go to No10, 21 July 2019). Blurb endorsement by Einstein. I put * next to 7 which is a guess at what people 100 years hence will find most interesting on this list. A good introduction to P=NP?. 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. If one could observe a discussion between Bismarck and one politician from the 20th Century, he might be the most interesting choice. ), Dostoyevsky. Pearl led a revolution in thinking about causation from inside the then tiny field of AI. , Terence Tao. 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. , Marcus du Sautoy. Almost anything good you read on strategy and conflict is based on ideas you see here. You can download that version (2.0) here. Re Clintons 1992 campaign which influenced the Blair 1997 campaign. (Politicians also constantly make this mistake in hiring journalists to do communication, almost always a bad idea.). 19 Apr 2023 07:47:58 On Renoir and Hollywood: It would be ridiculous to be bitter about Hollywood. Yes its striking that looking at my internet favourites for politics there are no UK-based political blogs/writers I regularly read. 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! There is a great. ), The foundational crisis of mathematics, set theory, Hilbert, Godel, and Turing. , 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. 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. (Dostoyevsky was Nietzsches favourite novellist!). , Charlie Munger. dominiccummings.substack.com. Will live players use the next five months to build build build or waste the most important element in conflict, time, and let non-player characters stumble into a set of critical decisions in November? 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 . I started like everyone young assuming those at the top of politics must be smart, interested in policy and great at organising things. Sun Tzu. On typical problems dealing with statistics, Bayes Theory, and how to improve understanding of probability. (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. If you havent read it dont read another modern book until you have. , Polya. 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. In general Colin Grays work. One of the most critical lessons? I really liked this classic but a lot was beyond me. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty. The director was evacuated from the horror of Stalingrad as a child: The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky. If you really are interested in policy and how someone tries to bring principles of high performance to government, this is essential. If youre involved in Isaac Physics and want to discuss how it could continue please get in touch.). 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. 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 use comments below for reading suggestions, not general Q&A. By Andy Hayes, news reporter Thursday 27 May 2021 06:28, UK Matt Hancock, Boris Johnson, Carrie Symonds and even Dilyn the dog have been the focus of numerous explosive claims from Dominic Cummings Nobel-winner, Feynman sparring partner, co-founder of Santa Fe Institute, wrote a book on complex systems for the general reader. For the beginner, by a Fields Medallist. My essay on an 'Odyssean' Education - Dominic Cummings's Blog My essay on an 'Odyssean' Education On the evening of Friday 11 October 2013, the Guardian published a draft essay of mine - ' Some thoughts on education and political priorities ' (links here and here ). The replication disaster means you have to be careful about what you believe but its still a good book. 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. About Robert Mosess grip on NYC. But the storyteller makes this picture incredibly beautiful. NB. 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. 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. 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. I blogged a series on this great book starting here; if you only read one of these blogs make it this one on the most important issue, great people (NB. A history of the amazing Bell Labs which famously won more Nobels than most EU countries. , Murray Gell Mann. 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 . I started reading him around 1999 when I first got involved in politics. The Method of Coordinates, Gelfand, Glagoleva, Kirillov. Worthlin. 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. In particular Ill add textbooks, history and philosophy which Ive largely left out. It would be ridiculous to be bitter about Hollywood. What is moral behaviour is not the same question as what are the principles of high performance in politics! . It is, therefore, practically unknown in SW1. The truth is that they recognized themselves my enemies had nothing to do with its failure. 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. Clausewitz. Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos (1988). Cited by many professional mathematicians as an inspiration. Two of the most important documents on the computer revolution by two of the critical figures in ARPA/PARC. This is not true of blogs like Marginal Revolution. 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. Functions and Graphs, Gelfand and Glagoleva. , Scott Aaronson (2013) is a brilliant introduction to many ideas about computation, physics and quantum information. 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. SW1 suffers such extremely powerful wilful blindness even an event as big as covid doesnt puncture consciousness in many important ways. The Deputy Prime Minister resigned yesterday because a lawyer found against him on two of the eight allegations made. Pearl led a revolution in thinking about causation from inside the then tiny field of AI. 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. Predictions on AGI can be Straussian. A classic on the 1972 campaign. 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. 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. Interesting on the psychology of selling and marketing. A good biography of Einstein by Isaacson. Some of the. On dynamic tools, interface design, Seeing Rooms, new ideas about programming, tools for thought, and so on, read Bret Victor, a rare genius. , Paret et al. 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. I know some of them. Many who used them went on to the famous Kolmogorov schools.). 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. (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. The story of Turing, von Neumann and the computer. No doubt about that Nietzsche produced the climate in which Fascism and Hitlerism could emerge. 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. Elite opinion in London today is dominated by very similar people with very similar education and very similar views that inevitably include. Dominic Cummings Most claims you read about psychological manipulation are rubbish. Theres no question about this. His. The story of Turing, von Neumann and the computer. 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!). Now It Can Be Told, General Groves. On the 50th anniversary Munger reflected on why his partnership with Buffett had been so successful and Buffetts personality. An inspiration for changes to maths teaching I pushed in 2011-14, including trying to get a maths for Presidents course going. 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. , Gelfand and Glagoleva. Main allegations as Dominic Cummings gives evidence to MPs on the government's early handling of the COVID outbreak in the UK.
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