Quotes from Dominic Cummings

Most security failings happen because of human actions that are not envisaged when designing systems.

People in politics tend to spend far too much time on higher profile issues affecting few people and too little time on such basic processes that affect thousands or millions and which we know how to do much better.

Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don't care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.

People think, and by the way I think most people are right: 'The Tory party is run by people who basically don't care about people like me.' That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct.

Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children's arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge.

Abstracting human wisdom into models often works better than relying on human experts as models are often more consistent and less noisy.

Despite the centrality of communication to politics it is remarkable how little attention Insiders pay to what works - never mind the question 'what could work much better?'

People are always asking 'how could the politicians let X happen with Y?' where Y is something important. People find it hard to believe that Y is not the focus of serious attention and therefore things like X are bound to happen all the time.

Action requires focus and priorities and these inherently require compromises and pragmatism.

Priorities are fundamental to politics because of inevitable information bottlenecks: these bottlenecks can be transformed by rare good organisation but they cannot be eradicated.

A basic problem for people in politics is that approximately none have the hard skills necessary to distinguish great people from charlatans.

In January 2014 I left the Department for Education and spent the next 18 months away from politics.

Do some companies have great power? Yes but only in limited ways.

The Single Market is no-where defined in the E.U. treaties. If you suddenly ask people to define the Single Market, the number who can do that, who are specialists in the area, is pretty small.

Until the 20th century, medicine was more like politics than physics. Its forecasts were often bogus and its record grim. In the 1920s, statisticians invaded medicine and devised randomised controlled trials. Doctors, hating the challenge to their prestige, resisted but lost. Evidence-based medicine became routine and saved millions of lives.

Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind's journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can sling objects across the solar system with extreme precision.

Inevitably, the world of 'communications' / PR / advertising / marketing is full of charlatans flogging snake oil. It is therefore very easy to do things and spend money just because it's conventional.

After 23 June 2016, the U.K. has to reorient national policy on many dimensions.

In many areas, the E.U. regulates to help the worst sort of giant corporate looters defending their position against entrepreneurs. Post-Brexit Britain will be outside this jurisdiction and able to make faster and better decisions about regulating technology like genomics, AI and robotics.

For many decades, Whitehall has deceived itself and deceived the public about the true nature of the E.U. project.

Project management is not hard in the same way that theoretical physics is hard - there are tried and trusted methods that a lot of people without exceptional talents can use - yet we can't embed it in government.

If you think of politics as 'serious people focusing seriously on the most important questions,' which is the default mode of most educated people and the media (but not the less-educated public which has better instincts), then your model of reality is badly wrong.

I want people to understand the barriers to serious government in order that more people take action.

We should stop selecting leaders from a subset of Oxbridge egomaniacs with a humanities degree and a spell as spin doctor.