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dominic cummings reading list

    dominic cummings reading list

    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. Many ideas you see from others (e.g Taleb) derive from Mandelbrot. I'll answer some over the next 48 hours, on Friday I'll focus on live questions/discussion, then tidy up after. 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. Essential companion (and very much ignored by most Americans) to The Federalist Papers - the so-called Anti-Federalist Papers (AFP): http://resources.utulsa.edu/law/classes/rice/Constitutional/AntiFederalist/antifed.htm, https://history.nycourts.gov/about_period/antifederalist-papers/, Re Monnet ~ https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2020/the-eu-godfathers-wall-street-roots/ and Draghi ~ https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-2021/the-sphinx-who-reshaped-europe/, This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. NB. Classic on teaching children programming, recommended by Alan Kay and Bret Victor. ), Modern works on war / strategy (NB. People dont realise that nobody in movies is interested in money Theyre really interested in its all an ego trip, status. Almost the only good business book I have read on strategy. (If anyone knows if his remarkable secretary, Mrs. OLeary, left any records or an oral history please leave links below.). Vernon Smith, economics Nobel-winner, argues that TOMS provides a better basis for economic models and prediction than modern neoclassical economics. A remarkable 19th Century book about propaganda and politics that influenced Lenin, Hitler and PR pioneers like Bernays. Non-fiction books on politics fail to give you this crucial sense. There are fields like professional mathematics and equity investing where institutions mean the best people are recognised over time. Los Alamos was crucial but it was part of a much vaster infrastructure of engineering projects, intelligence, planning and so on. The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver. A classic book on calculus / analysis designed for undergraduates. The Man from the Future, Bhattacharya. Ive written a few things about his work. 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. , Bhattacharya. Keynes essay on Newton is great: He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than10,000years ago Why do I call him a magician? 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. Reading List - Dominic Cummings substack Reading List Dominic Cummings Jun 26, 2022 79 127 As long promised (sorry! As Strauss said, Nietzsche despised anti-semites and the sort of characters who controlled the Nazi party but it also cannot be ignored that in attacking ideas and clearing the ground for new values, he also prepared the ground for communism and fascism: Nietzsche did not mean it in the way people like Hitler and Mussolini meant it, but through his negations, he prepares it. Dyson, Hawking) is wrong. 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. Welles dismissed the French auteur theory as not relevant to the old Hollywood where the producers called the shots, not the directors. I searched for explanations. ), here are some books and a few papers I recommend. 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 . 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. Cowen & Collison handed out fast grants to researchers during covid and at my request advised UKRI on how to speed up in spring 2020. Number, Dantzig (1930, updated 1953; new edition 2007). Will. This excellent short book introduces quantum mechanics using A Level maths. 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? Popular intro to network theory. The replication disaster means you have to be careful about what you believe but its still a good book. 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 politicians soon are on the next current thing too. Dyson, Hawking) is wrong. 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. A widely praised new biography of John von Neumann, the man Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Pauli et al thought was the smartest person they knew. So, let's conclude this list with two of his scientific heroes. I was not. Pearl led a revolution in thinking about causation from inside the then tiny field of AI. Looks at the bigshots of modern military thinking. , Klein. Yes its striking that looking at my internet favourites for politics there are no UK-based political blogs/writers I regularly read. On connections between quantum physics, computation and information theory. Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos (1988). 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. The Ascent of Man, Bronowksi. Governments find it very, very hard to fund such ventures. The best biography in English (probably any language) is, . Ditto for the Johnson volumes (Ive not read) when Caro publishes the last. An inspiration for changes to maths teaching I pushed in 2011-14, including trying to get a maths for Presidents course going. He replied to Yudkowskys AGI ruin, . The story of Turing, von Neumann and the computer. I think hes right that most academics assume models for how this works that are clearly not how people really think under pressure. , and let non-player characters stumble into a set of critical decisions in November? 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. (I knew Mark, a professor at Cambridge, who spent a huge amount of time over the past decade helping state school pupils get hold of great physics material via Isaac Physics. 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. Los Alamos was crucial but it was part of a much vaster infrastructure of engineering projects, intelligence, planning and so on. If interested in how a government could take seriously accelerating progress, follow these debates. About Robert Mosess grip on NYC. Its fascinating both for getting hard things done and how to reform science funding. Just like despite ARPA-PARCs success, almost no science funding is done like that in the world (hence why I made the creation of. A classic book on mathematical problem solving. , Gigerenzer. For the beginner, by a Fields Medallist. Like LKY, crucial if you really are interested in practical planning for high performance government. 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. de Tocqueville. , Carville & Matalin. Dominic Cummings I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. 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/. 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 . , Slotkin. No question, it's Dominic Cummings. Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Sipser (2005 edition). , you see a world historical genius skip between vast scales of time and space, connecting tiny things happening this moment to the biggest things affecting decades or centuries to come. , Robin Lane Fox. Also cf. His. . 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. Main allegations as Dominic Cummings gives evidence to MPs on the government's early handling of the COVID outbreak in the UK. 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. (I knew Mark, a professor at Cambridge, who spent a huge amount of time over the past decade helping state school pupils get hold of great physics material via Isaac Physics. 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. , Gelfand and Glagoleva. 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. On digital fabrication. 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. This is the Newton biography and its brilliantly done with intense love and care for its extraordinary subject. SW1 suffers such extremely powerful wilful blindness even an event as big as covid doesnt puncture consciousness in many important ways. E.g Around 1848 nationalism was an elite opinion held by educated liberals who thought of liberalism and nationalism as naturally, and morally, connected, while uneducated peasants were less nationalistic. And a very recent post, AGI Ruin, summarising the arguments on why artificial general intelligence is so dangerous and why controlling these dangers is so very hard. , Professor Mark Warner. The classic Cummings campaign is in the Star Wars rebel-alliance mould. ): how much was the. You often read versions of those really at the edge of this research do not predict fast timetables. , Sipser (2005 edition). A lot of Boyd (including getting inside your enemys OODA loop) is interpreting Sun Tzu after 2,000 years of case studies proving him right plus some modern ideas. Click repeat). I'm thinking re 'What should Labour do to win the next election'. A reader with no more than GCSE Maths can read this introduction to maths from Greece through the birth of calculus. The river was also burning. A history of ARPA-IPTO and Xerox PARC: how the internet and PC revolution was created. A short companion book to his famous lecture series. , Franzen. It is, therefore, practically unknown in SW1. Retweets. , 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. 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. Also Democracy in America. On digital fabrication. Influence, Cialdini. Mr Cummings is Boris Johnson's chief adviser. On dynamic tools, interface design, Seeing Rooms, new ideas about programming, tools for thought, and so on, read Bret Victor, a rare genius. Elite polarisation, Cicero & fishponds. There's a big bad enemy out there, possibly with superior weaponry but. Brexit and VL in No10 (original official advice was to go with the useless bureaucratic EU scheme. In the search I came across Boyd. Pflouffe ran the Obama 08 campaign and 2012 re-election. Interesting how some fields (e.g airlines, surgery) have significantly improved performance while others have not, and the barriers to improvement. What does it say about the West that their newspaper propaganda was much higher class than most elite philosophy now? He did not however go quietly or in apologetic mode. 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. Their favourite argument is the laughable its a small island, about as sensible as a general saying Alexander the Great was using cavalry so its out of date. The best modern subject for those interested in how political decisions are taken and effective action in politics/government is, . Theres no question about this. His. , Terence Tao. A striking thing: notice how they take regulation and speed extremely seriously because they have direct experience of it, 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. Am told that the Loebs translated by Shackleton Bailey is the best translation. 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. The replication disaster means you have to be careful about what you believe but its still a good book. Insider account of how the legendary Skunk Works worked by a guy who ran it. Something on how ideas change over different time scales. Reckoning With Risk, Gigerenzer. , Scott Aaronson (2013) is a brilliant introduction to many ideas about computation, physics and quantum information. You can download that version (2.0) here. , Courant. I like reading stuff about people where incentives and feedback work, from used car salesmen to fortune tellers. While No 10 was trying to get a grip on the pandemic, news came in . . Considered by many in Silicon Valley to be the best book on the details of management. 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. , Nietzsche. (Dostoyevsky was Nietzsches favourite novellist! What is moral behaviour is not the same question as what are the principles of high performance in politics! About Robert Mosess grip on NYC. I advised spads and officials to read this in 2019 and ignore the media. What does it say about the West that their newspaper propaganda was much higher class than most elite philosophy now? (A great highlight of Oxford for me was four-hour tutorials with RLF on Athenian democracy, Thucydides, Alexander etc.). 19 Apr 2023 07:47:58 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. 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. Hard question (relevant to AGI safety debates! Complexity Economics, Beinhocker. Warning, its an accurate portrayal of atrocities on the Eastern Front therefore truly horrific. Likes. Click repeat), , Hamming. Theoretical Minimum, Leonard Susskind (2013). 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. SW1 suffers such extremely powerful wilful blindness even an event as big as covid doesnt puncture consciousness in many important ways. Hes a very unusual thinker and much more right much more often than just about anybody, partly because of how he thinks. This is true even of those who frequently complain about this phenomenon. 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. How Roger Ailes packaged Nixon with actual campaign memos reproduced at the back. If you read his blogs and trusted him on covid over the entire CDC/FDA/WHO bureaucracies, youd have come out far ahead. Although some other officials and senior figures had also broken the lockdown rules, this transgression was the first to .

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