Quotes from Dominic Cummings

In many aspects of government, as in the tech world and investing, brains and temperament smash experience and seniority out of the park.

Changing the world in a profound and beneficial way is not enough to put a dint in bureaucracies which operate on their own dynamics.

Politics is profoundly nonlinear.

People are always selling the idea that they have a magic bullet of persuasion. You won't get poor by shorting such promises.

If you look back at history, most important PR and propaganda was invented by the Communist Party.

If we want leaders to make good decisions amid huge complexity, and learn how to build great teams, then we should send them to learn from people who've proved they can do it. Instead of long summer holidays, embed aspirant leaders with Larry Page or James Dyson so they can experience successful leadership.

Most educated people are not set up to listen or change their minds about politics, however sensible they are in other fields.

Markets and science show that some fields of human endeavour work much better than political decision-making. I think we could do much much better if we will face our problems honestly.

In healthcare like in government generally, people are incentivised to engage in wasteful/dangerous signalling to a terrifying degree - not rigorous thinking and not solving problems.

I think the right way to deal with terrorism is to carry on with normal life, like Britain used to when it was a more serious country.

One of the things I wanted to do in the Department for Education was open up the policy making process and run things like wikis in open formats in order to a: start off with better ideas and then b: adapt to errors much faster than is possible with normal Whitehall systems.

As I've said many times, Vote Leave could only win because the Establishment's OODA loops are broken - as the Brexit negotiations painfully demonstrate daily - and they are systematically bad at decisions, and this created just enough space for us to win.

Judea Pearl is one of the most important scholars in the field of causal reasoning. His book 'Causality' is the leading textbook in the field.

All the best companies quickly go downhill after the departure of people like Bill Gates - even when such very able people have tried very very hard to avoid exactly this problem.

Fields make huge progress when they move from stories (e.g Icarus) and authority (e.g 'witch doctor') to evidence/experiment (e.g physics, wind tunnels) and quantitative models (e.g design of modern aircraft).

I've learned over the years that 'rational discussion' accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average.

Most claims you read about psychological manipulation are rubbish.

Decentralised collaborations are inherently threatening to Whitehall's core principles.

Music is similar to sport. There is very fast feedback, learning, and a clear hierarchy of expertise.

MPs are so cowed by the institutions and the scale of official failure that they generally just muddle along tinkering and hope to stay a step ahead of the media.

Political analysis is full of chess metaphors, reflecting an old tradition of seeing games as models of physical and social reality.

I know from my days working on education reform in government that it's almost impossible to exaggerate how little those who work on education policy think about 'how to improve learning.'

In history books, luck is always underplayed and the talent of individuals is usually overplayed.

The E.U. has narrowed our horizons. It has narrowed everyone's horizons in Whitehall so they're not thinking about the big things in the world. They're not thinking about the forces changing it or what Britain can really do to contribute to them.