Quotes from Dominic Cummings

Science advances by turning new ideas into standard ideas so each generation builds on the last.

I know from my nightclub days that when local cops need to show a fall in crime for political reasons there are all sorts of ways in which they can easily cheat numbers.

Regardless of political affiliation most of the policy/media world, as a subset of 'the educated classes' in general, tended to hold a broadly 'blank slate' view of the world mostly uninformed by decades of scientific progress.

In the commercial world, big companies mostly die within a few decades because they cannot maintain an internal system to keep them aligned to reality plus startups pop up.

Unprecedented in modern British history and outside all normal civil service rules, a bunch of MPs, some of them working with foreign governments, wrote primary legislation - 'the Surrender Act' also known as the Benn Act - without any of the scrutiny of who influenced and who funded it that is normal for legislation.

Technology enables people to improve communication with unprecedented speed, scale and iterative testing. It also allows people to wreak chaos with high leverage.

We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful.

Discussion of politics and government almost totally ignores the concept of training people to update their opinions in response to new evidence - i.e adapt to feedback.

The stock market is an exploitable market where being right means you get rich and you help the overall system error-correct which makes it harder to be right (the mechanism pushes prices close to random, they're not quite random but few can exploit the non-randomness).

Most political operations - and government - don't try to be rigorous about decision-making or force themselves to think about what they know with what confidence. They are dominated by seniority, not evidence.

TV news dominates politics and is extremely low-bandwidth: it contains a few hundred words and rarely uses graphics properly.

If you want to avoid the usual fate in politics of failure, you need to understand some basic principles about why people make mistakes and how some people, institutions, and systems cope with mistakes and thereby perform much better than most.

Britain could contribute huge value to the world by leveraging existing assets, including scientific talent and how the NHS is structured, to push the frontiers of a rapidly evolving scientific field - genomic prediction - that is revolutionising healthcare in ways that give Britain some natural advantages over Europe and America.

Every failing organisation has the same stories, people find it very hard to learn from the most successful organisations and people.

While our ancestor chiefs at least had some intuitive feel for important variables like agriculture and cavalry our contemporary chiefs (and those in the media responsible for scrutiny of decisions) generally do not understand their equivalents, and are often less experienced in managing complex organisations than their predecessors.

I make judgments about people and ideas individually - for me, parties are just a vehicle of convenience.

If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is - hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies and never believe what advertising companies tell you about 'data' unless you can independently verify it.

MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings.

Victoria Woodcock ran Vote Leave - she was a truly awesome project manager and without her Cameron would certainly have won.

CRISPR editing will allow us to enhance ourselves.

In physics we have developed models that are extremely accurate across vastly different scales from the sub-atomic to the visible universe. In politics we have bumbled along making the same sort of errors repeatedly.