dominic cummings reading list

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. Mindstorms, Seymour Papert. While some characters from the ancient world, such as Themistocles or Alexander the Great, would be as interesting to study in minute detail we dont have the sources. It was a direct inspiration for my terrorist demand to Boris, July 2019: we must create an ARPA. Why it's in AOC's interests to challenge Old Joe. Plato. is considered a classic but Ive not read. Linked, Barabasi. Much (mis)quoted, rarely read. Expert Political Judgment, and Superforecasters, Tetlock. , Morris Kline. On connections between quantum physics, computation and information theory. The best book on politics. I searched for explanations. A classic non-specialist introduction to reasoning. The best biography in English (probably any language) is, . I started like everyone young assuming those at the top of politics must be smart, interested in policy and great at organising things. You often read versions of those really at the edge of this research do not predict fast timetables. Dyson, Hawking) is wrong. This is the Newton biography and its brilliantly done with intense love and care for its extraordinary subject. some Kay emails, Sydney Brenner interview on the hideous science funding system. His point about the fundamental importance of error-correction in political institutions was the fundamental reason I think Brexit is the right idea and the EU is doomed to fail in important ways. Yudkowskys Sequences, the core document of the rationalist movement. Those who think very fast timetables are plausible do not talk about it publicly because (partly) they worry about the effects of their comments. 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!). Im reading this summer. Much (mis)quoted, rarely read. On May 22, 2020, The Guardian and Daily Mirror newspapers in the UK published details of how Dominic Cummings, senior aide to the British prime minister, had broken lockdown rules by travelling 420 km to a family estate with his wife (who had suspected COVID-19) and child. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. , 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. Insider account of how the legendary Skunk Works worked by a guy who ran it. (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. This is not true of blogs like Marginal Revolution. Los Alamos was crucial but it was part of a much vaster infrastructure of engineering projects, intelligence, planning and so on. , Carville & Matalin. Almost anything good you read on strategy and conflict is based on ideas you see here. He was a mathematician who got interested in how markets work. Alls Fair, Carville & Matalin. 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. 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. Almost no MPs or senior officials study him or are even midly interested. 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. Governments find it very, very hard to fund such ventures. Like LKY, crucial if you really are interested in practical planning for high performance government. the failure of alignment and/or the inherent drive of high intelligence to escape constraints/control/alignment with others goals? Producers didnt want to make a Renoir picture even if it was a success. 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. 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. 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. (Politicians also constantly make this mistake in hiring journalists to do communication, almost always a bad idea.). There is a great Commentary by Gomme and Andrewes, two of the great 20th C classical scholars. Charlie Munger has written and spoken extensively about mental checklists/models he uses, not just for investing. 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 best book on politics. I should have read this, havent, will. (Also note that the oversight for Groves was a group of just four who met with no secretariat and no formal records.) 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. In Pursuit of the Travelling Salesman, Cook. April 22, 2023 156 Comments. I wish there was something similar on the history of the LMB at Cambridge, one of our crown jewels which Whitehall (and the VC office) has gradually buried with stupid regulation. Functions and Graphs, Gelfand and Glagoleva. , 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. A short companion book to his famous lecture series. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's Rasputin, is happy to watch the country blow up if he gets what he wants. Many ideas you see from others (e.g Taleb) derive from Mandelbrot. It is, therefore, practically unknown in SW1. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. Review of the disintegration of the Tories in the context of Brexit, SW1 vs Vote Leave perspectives on risks of Brexit/Remain, and why some of the VL team decided to go to No10 in 2019 and save the trolley to Get Brexit Done despite our reservations. 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. , Klein. Dominic Cummings's Odyssean reading list might make you smarter. I was not. Something on how ideas change over different time scales. The resignation of Dominic Raab. A history of the amazing Bell Labs which famously won more Nobels than most EU countries. If you want to understand the modern intellectual classes media, academia and politics this plugs you straight into their psychology. (Steinbergs recent book has interesting stuff but has many errors of fact/date and interpretation.) Working Backwards, by Amazon alumni. I blogged a series on this great book starting. . . The smartest person Einstein said he knew wrote one of the first things on existential risk. Please just ask one question as precisely as you can, it will increase the chance I answer. The insider account of the Manhattan Project by its legendary leader. ; 2) how to map the spread of memes and identify critical nodes in the network that, if influenced somehow, can amplify or dampen signals? 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 like reading stuff about people where incentives and feedback work, from used car salesmen to fortune tellers. 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. 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. Click repeat), , Hamming. (This series was written for the Russian correspondence school a way of giving talented maths pupils a useful curriculum in such a vast country. LKY, Boyd, Groves all say the same). NB. Retweets. The basic arguments remain critical today. If youre in Georgia, visit her house in Milledgeville. A reader with no more than GCSE Maths can read this introduction to maths from Greece through the birth of calculus. An inspiration for changes to maths teaching I pushed in 2011-14, including trying to get a maths for Presidents course going. Then nationalism became generally despised by educated liberals, and so on We cant, how our own ideas will appear in the future but its fascinating how little we, to imagine how foolish our own views will inevitably appear to those looking back on us. Yes its striking that looking at my internet favourites for politics there are no UK-based political blogs/writers I regularly read. 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. dominiccummings.substack.com. A good biography of Dirac. I like reading stuff about people where incentives and feedback work, from used car salesmen to fortune tellers. 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). ), Dostoyevsky. Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Sipser (2005 edition). 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 . A classic book on calculus / analysis designed for undergraduates. (Planning to see some classics Ive missed: theory as not relevant to the old Hollywood where the producers called the shots, not the directors. Jean Monnet created the ECSC and EEC/EU. The cynicism/realism remains shocking. A classic non-specialist introduction to reasoning. Mathematics: A short introduction, Gowers. Some of the unpublished stuff in Gdels Collected Works is extraordinary, e.g his secret search for the truth about Leibniz. 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. Dominic Cummings Dec 13, 2022 40 94 #4 Regime Change, America 2024 Trump's disastrous error. Vernon Smith, economics Nobel-winner, argues that TOMS provides a better basis for economic models and prediction than modern neoclassical economics. ), here are some books and a few papers I recommend. Sources of Power, Klein. , biography by John Sugden. Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos (1988). Almost anything good you read on strategy and conflict is based on ideas you see here. Follow Zvi. W hen Dominic Cummings arrived in Downing Street, some of his new colleagues were puzzled by one of his mantras: "Get Brexit done, then Arpa". His. On Renoir and Hollywood: It would be ridiculous to be bitter about Hollywood. Main allegations as Dominic Cummings gives evidence to MPs on the government's early handling of the COVID outbreak in the UK. Ciceros letters. This by Fields Medallist Terry Tao, maybe the greatest mathematician alive, is brilliant and incredibly useful for someone like me explaining a lot of fundamental concepts in non-technical language. If you want to follow the cutting edge of this research follow, , which you should anyway. Hard question (relevant to AGI safety debates! (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. one of my terrorist demands when Boris asked me to go to No10, 21 July 2019). Cited by many professional mathematicians as an inspiration. This is false. Causality, Judea Pearl (advanced). Collison has a webpage summarising responses to this. NB. 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. Non-fiction books on politics fail to give you this crucial sense. The politicians soon are on the next current thing too. Again the meta-lesson: while everybody wants to know what are they investing in? almost nobody pays any attention to how do they organise Berkshire, why is it so different, how does this relate to extreme performance?. A good biography of Einstein by Isaacson. Caitlyn Scott-Lee is said to have been found in a forested area next to a playing field at the 44,000-per-year Wycombe Abbey School on Friday night. (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. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty. Some supported this approach but as youd expect the worst hated it. the word strategy is a) used differently in military books, b) used differently over time, c) constantly misused in politics.). Popular intro to network theory. 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. 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. One of Britains most senior and respected civil servants, Michael Quinlan, wrote this paper after retiring, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, on nuclear strategy. The point that Producers didnt want to make a Renoir picture even if it was a success is really important. (3 volumes), Morris Kline. 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. A Boyd ally wrote about his time in the Pentagon dealing with the extreme nightmare of procurement. Likes. The director was evacuated from the horror of Stalingrad as a child: The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky. Vast amounts of what you read on this is rubbish. Notes on Colin Grays Strategy and Defence Planning, following on from military innovation, The Kill Chain, nuclear (sorry for slow progress on Payne). Also you cant understand our world unless you have a sense of Nietzsches profound influence on 20th Century artists, thinkers, and politics. Six Easy Pieces, Feynman. Man-Computer Symbiosis, Licklider, 1960 and The Computer as a Communication Device, Bob Taylor, 1968. I wrote some essays on the history of maths and computing which have further reading lists. The vaccine taskforce a) created huge value for the UK and the world, b) would, have happened without [typo original!] Mathematics and the Physical World, Morris Kline. If youre involved in Isaac Physics and want to discuss how it could continue please get in touch.). (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?). Will. 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. Two of the most important documents on the computer revolution by two of the critical figures in ARPA/PARC. He did not try to influence todays arguments but instead tried to prepare the future, an approach of great power partly because, as Monnet said, theres almost no competition. Anyone interested in terrorism and counter-terrorism should watch Pontecorvos movie. Pflouffe ran the Obama 08 campaign and 2012 re-election. Governments find it very, very hard to fund such ventures. Warning, its an accurate portrayal of atrocities on the Eastern Front therefore truly horrific. Oppenheimer is better known but Groves was his boss. , Terence Tao. A classic based on his famous Lectures. Jean Monnet created the ECSC and EEC/EU. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements(and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. My wild Westminster Dubbed 'The Gazelle' by the press, she was a trusted aide who babysat Boris, chauffeured Dominic Cummings and chaperoned Carrie Johnson when the PM was ill. As a new television drama depicts Downing Street during the pandemic, Cleo Watson describes her whirlwind year at No 10 Dress to thrill Feeling gilty? khloe kardashian hidden hills house address. The Misbehaviour of Financial Markets, Mandelbrot. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72, Hunter S Thompson. This shows the critical meta-lesson again: those in power have no interest in high performance. The cynicism/realism remains shocking. Many ideas you see from others (e.g Taleb) derive from Mandelbrot. (Dostoyevsky was Nietzsches favourite novellist! Yes its striking that looking at my internet favourites for politics there are no UK-based political blogs/writers I regularly read. Steve has a startup that is a leading player in this emerging field. High Output Management, Andy Grove, ex-founder/CEO of Intel. Rationality, Vernon Smith. Thoughts on past and future of the Buffett system, Charlie Munger. Dominic Cummings Most claims you read about psychological manipulation are rubbish. , Burton. It was night, bombs were exploding, and mothers were covering their children with whatever bedding they had, and then they would lie on top of them. This is false. Please post questions below. Useful introduction to some fundamentals, from Pythagoras to Newton to e and complex numbers. A widely praised new biography of John von Neumann, the man Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Pauli et al thought was the smartest person they knew. 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. Psychologie des foules, Gustave le Bon. , Franzen. 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. 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. About Robert Mosess grip on NYC. Six months later tens of thousands died for the lack of such skills. The smartest person Einstein said he knew wrote one of the first things on existential risk. 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). 26. 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. 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. The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver. Although some other officials and senior figures had also broken the lockdown rules, this transgression was the first to . ): how much was the. As the craziness of 2024 approaches his ideas will be much more influential in some circles than you will realise from the media. Brexit and VL in No10 (original official advice was to go with the useless bureaucratic EU scheme. I was amazed and desperate. A 16-year-old schoolgirl, Caitlyn Scott-Lee, was found dead near Wycombe Abbey School. A classic book on calculus / analysis designed for undergraduates. His Memoirs are fascinating and so is this biography by Duchne.

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