No. 10 Downing Street hiring data scientists, physicists, weirdos | Hacker News Reader

No. 10 Downing Street hiring data scientists, physicists, weirdos

dominiccummings.com

84 pointsoverlords34 comments

Dominic Cummings is the Chief-of-staff of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He managed the Vote Leave campaign in 2016, the primary campaign during the UK referendum on European Union membership (campaigning successfully to leave the EU).

His success in Vote Leave is down to a targeted digital campaign on Facebook using the services of Cambridge Analytica / AggregateIQ. These are the root actions that sparked Facebooks turmoil around election advertisements that may again affect the 2020 US Presidential campaign.

Cummings is an anarchist and has said he wants to tear down the UK Civil Service, getting rid of mandarins and long-term civil servants, and replace it with something else. This blog post is part of that change.

It's government by data science, perhaps technocratic. With a governing majority of 80 seats, by December 2019 election, he thinks he -- the government -- has space to do controversial or unpopular things, and tearing down the civil service is something he believes is necessary.

Slight clarification: he's an anarchist in the sense of wanting to subvert the existing established order and ignoring rules and conventions along the way, not in the sense of rejecting hierarchies and advocating self-governed societies. Unless I'm completely mistaken.

Is there some context or information missing here? He's a disciple because he quotes Graham once in a blog post in a fairly pedestrian way? Surely no reasonable person would describe that relationship as being a 'disciple' unless there is something more?

Searching the wider internet for "Dominic Cummings" "Paul Graham" doesn't seem to reveal any meaningful connections.

And who is the person who has editorialised this title quoting when they say 'heads' in quotes?

He's the brexit architect. I very much doubt he has any credible connection to pg

My read: he's realized that England's government gave up with hint of a clue it had after the rise of the EU, Brexit is about to reveal that fact, and it's time to grasp at straws in hopes that some kind of half assed imitation of ARPA will save it?

Come now. Let's just accept England's natural fate as a US protectorate alongside Guam if it leaves the EU.

The US is looking for allies not protectorates.

Giving the benefit of doubt, I'm assuming that they meant the UK being a protector of the US interest[s]; however, I could be wrong.

Considering they specifically mentioned "alongside Guam," I have to assume they meant becoming a territory of the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_Stat...

Does this sound like Downing Street is gearing-up for mass surveillance, post-Brexit, or is it just me?

It does seem to me too.

I think this is about improving decision-making and effectiveness of government. I'm not an expert but I imagine a surveillance play would be handled via MI5 (domestic security) and not Downing Street. Moreover, Johnson is vaguely libertarian.

Cummings has been good at tearing things down, we’ve yet to see him build something. His one attempt at business was a complete failure.

He seems to have drunk the AI koolaid but I’m not convinced he really understands it.

This could all go spectacularly wrong.

Dominic Cummings, Steve Bannon, Olavo de Carvalho, Amit Shah, endless number of similar clones in EU...just amazing to watch what kind of people are getting propped up by the attention economy.

Cummings shares some qualities with the rest of that list, but he’s not a nationalist if you believe his extensive blogging.

Although he is comfortable using the language of nationalism, which perhaps amounts to the same thing practically.

I’m also not sure how right wing he really is. He seems fairly liberal in his own views on immigration, race and so on. Although again, he panders to those with different views.

I don’t agree with Cummings on many things, but I don’t think it’s fair to put him in a list with those other names.

I stand to be corrected. It’s possible I misunderstand him. He’s hard to misunderstand.

Starts by quoting Eliezer Yudkowsky, winds up advertising for "weirdos from William Gibson novels". I would have to eat so much cheese to dream something as weird as this.

A lot of odd and downright false assertions ITT. Anti-Brexit people are too often mistakenly conflating Cummings/Johnson and Farage as if everyone in favour of Brexit has precisely the same views. In reality they ran two different campaigns in very different styles and in fact one of Vote Leave's main aims was to keep Farage off the TV as much as possible because he was (and is) a turn off to the majority and presumably most swing voters.

I voted Remain at the time, but stumbling across Cummings' blogs and subsequently reading about Tetlock [0] + David Deutsch's arguments [1] has left me in favour of Leave (although I don't have strongly nailed down views on this).

This project is a great idea to improve the effectiveness of government by creating tools that will help ministers and officials make better decisions in the face of complex systems. Will it work? I'm optimistic but there will surely be unknown unknowns that could derail progress in addition to plain old politics.

[0] - Superforecasting is a great book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdtssXITXuE

Also, Timothy Gowers (Fields Medallist) has an interesting piece in favour Remain [2], although he overlooks the fact that differences in institutional design of UK vs EU mean that sovereignty has significant implications beyond just sovereignty for sovereignty's sake.

[2] - https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/6172/

Edit: Would love to hear counterarguments from downvoters btw. I don't mean that in a hostile way, I've changed my mind on this topic many times in the past 3 years and I'd be more than happy to be exposed to more good arguments against Brexit and Cummings' ideas.

(disclaimer: I wasn't one of the downvoters)

My take was that Cummings saw Farage as a useful way to draw in the anti-immigrant crowd whilst being able to wash Vote Leave's hands of hints/accusations of racism?

Interesting to see the video with Deutsch there; I wasn't aware he had publicised opinions on this. Seems like you could summarise his argument as saying that adversarial political systems are more democratic and more effective than consensus-based political systems. It seems quite odd to me in the same way that some of his work in physics is. He's taken a principle of Popper's ("Democracy is measured by how easy it is to remove a policy or government") as a seemingly absolute axiom and spread it quite thinly to the extent that FPTP is seen as more democratic simply because policies get added and removed more frequently. I can see how this attitude links in with Cummings' obsession with effectiveness.

Although FPTP probably does make it easier for some policies to be repealed, I think it makes it a lot harder for some policies to be introduced. It results in a kind of "package-deal" politics in which you can often only effectively vote for a certain policy when it's bundled up with a load of other policies which you may or may not like. Take for example cannabis decriminalisation, which over half of the UK support and most of the rest don't have any strong opinion over. The two main parties havenever paid it any attention as they see it risky, therefore it's never seriously discussed.

My previous reading about institutional differences between the UK and the EU had left me with the impression that the EU is significantly more "democratic" in the sense that the broad spread of people's attitudes and opinions is being represented and percolated up to the legislative processes. For example, although the EU Commission isn't directly elected, it is at least selected by heads of state and approved by Parliament members, is renewed every 5 years and can be scuppered in a vote of no confidence. Parliament members are by and large voted in in a proportional way, which I see as generally a positive thing. By contrast the HoL - although it does not propose legislation - wields a certain amount of influence over how legislation is passed, is effectively unelected, and many members are there for life.

There's also the fact that the EU as a political body appears to be more of a self-modifying organism than the UK's political body. For example, recent years/decades have seen significantly more power being vested in the EU Parliament. This may be to do with how young the EU is - it's still working on its method of government.

With Brexit looking quite inevitable now, it will be interesting to compare the ongoing performance of the UK and set it against that of the EU.

Apologies, I've only just seen this, thanks for replying.

I don't agree that Cummings was happy to let Farage bring in the anti-immigrant votes. They maintain that Farage/Banks cost them votes overall because they turned off a lot of swing voters whereas people who were very concerned about immigration were going to vote Leave anyway.

You make a good point about marginal policies like cannabis decriminalisation (something I support too) not making progress under FPTP, I think the UK system certainly has its downsides too.

Re democracy, you may be right that the EU is more democratic in terms of how the cross section of concerns are mushed together. The fundamental issue is error correction though, the EU is unresponsive in the face of problems when it might require them to row back on the idea of deeper and deeper integration across Europe. They keep on pushing the same path, even when it appears to be causing damage (e.g. Greece). The empirical evidence on political forecasting suggests that everyone, including those at the top of institutions, is frequently wrong in the medium/long term and I think the EU will keep compounding errors. Of course, this is itself a forecast and it's possible that the EU will seriously reform and we would have been better off inside after all, I assign low probability to this though.

Yes I agree the HoL is very flawed too.

That seems surprisingly coherent actually. Freakishly so

Everything else the brexit crowd has produced is a steaming PoS of low quality lies.

Maybe they're better at playing the fool than I gave them credit for

His reading list is excellent.

I enjoy many of the same thinkers he does, and it pains me that Cummings associates himself with the rationalists. Alan Kay and Paul Graham will be unaffected by being name-dropped I’m sure. Lesswrong and slate star I fear might not, which would be a shame.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/alanwh...

https://unherd.com/2019/08/dominic-cummings-is-no-chicken/

I wonder whether Cummings’ main flaw is that he admires scientists and rationalists too much, to the extent that his plans rely on them to solve problems he is deliberately creating, confident they can be overcome.

To me, it's rather strange that he calls on "unusual economists" but apparently one of the requirements for being unusual is simply knowledge of mainstream theories. Surely the unusual economists are the post-Keynesians, Sraffians, Marxians and Austrians. In fact, even a Nobel Prize winner like Sen would be more unusual than anyone he's summoning with that list. From the topics he lists as what might be discussed, it seems he's much more interested in economics grads with an interest in AI than in economics grads with, say, an interest in Veneziani and Yoshihara's work on mathematical proofs of FMT or Roemer's game-theoretical approach to capitalist markets.

For all the talk of being "rational", the "rationalsphere" and unfortunately now a UK government minister have neglected learning about social science, political philosophy, and the critiques of utilitarianism in favour of... what, I'm not sure. One starts to see this repeatedly; Scott Alexander's only encounter with Marxian sociology, for instance, comes from a "Very Short Introduction" book by Peter Singer of all people. Even subject areas one would expect would appeal to them, such as game-theoretic Rational Choice Marxian economics have completely missed their radar.

Perhaps it would be better if Cummings were to educate himself on the wealth of heterodox economics (and I say this just because he wants "weirdos"), political philosophy and sociology - because at the moment it looks like he wouldn't hire a Nozick, Friedman or Roemer, and he definitely wouldn't hire a Rawls, Sen or Marx.

"Unusual" for this man means "rationalist", technocratic, LessWrong reader, and capitalist free market evangelist.

> Everything else the brexit crowd has produced is a steaming PoS of low quality lies

...which worked. If we accept what you are saying as true then it merely demonstrates the utter incompetence of the Remain crowd at effective communication (that they weren't even able to refute 'low quality lies'), which is kind of an important thing in a political debate.

Agreed.

But if we’ve learned anything from the last 4 years it’s that “low quality lies” (which I’ll read as “obvious untruths”) presenting a simple message are fiendishly, fiendishly difficult to defend against when the truth is complex and unpalatable.

It’s an important job to be able to cope with lies, certainly (ideally without lying in turn). But it’s not easy.

Indeed; "as soon as you have to explain yourself, you've lost the argument".

Interestingly, some of the issues Cummings is concerned with are similar to those raised in the 1968 Fulton Report https://civilservant.org.uk/csr-fulton_report.html

Dominic Cummings is a problem in UK politics.

He worked with the YC co-founder?

If this was Corbyns advisor and Corbyn was in power how would people feel about a data driven approach to disrupting politics?

For left leaning folk don't like cummings new style, does that mean they are thinking conservatively about government?

I think this is an interesting thought experiment?

Hey, a left-leaning folk here (in that I broadly approve of Labour’s manifesto, if not its execution or current leadership).

The things Cummings gets right are already well-discussed, among the lefties in my social group at least. And he gets a fair bit of not-entirely-negative analysis in the Guardian.

I like almost everything Cummings says about data-driven government. That’s all fine. But that’s also not what people are generally taking exception to.

On the other hand, I think Seumas Milne is terrifying. Perhaps more so than Cummings, were Milne to have actual power.

You use the expression “left-leaning”. Cummings himself demonstrates the limits of simple left/right, liberal/conservative labels. He’s a little bit of all of those things. He’s not a Conservative party member, for example. Immigration doesn’t bother him personally.

Or a necessary counterbalance to Seumas Milne. It all depends on your point of view.

Care to elaborate?

tl;dr: "help us build the eye of Sauron"

This is A+ language to hide that he simply wants to hire people with the same worldview/mindset as himself irrespective of qualifications and civil service rules.

Telling also that this is posted on his private blog, not an official government site. He will rip the country apart, make a huge profit for himself and his friends (like Farage) and leave a bloody mess. Damage for decades as we see already now with Britain's conflicted population (huge rift in particular between pro/against Brexit people and on a lot of other lines) but at an institutional scale and reach.

How are this kind of people allowed into power...

> his friends (like Farage)

Err...

'The Daily Telegraph reported on Cummings's past rivalry with Nigel Farage from the 2016 referendum campaign, and quoted Farage as saying that: "He has never liked me. He can't stand the ERG. I can't see him coming to any accommodation with anyone. He has huge personal enmity with the true believers in Brexit"'

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