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maybe but honestly probably not, im not interested in talking re politics much, hence why i avoid interviews!

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I'd study quant reasoning & study successful projects & also try to work in a company like Stripe or Amazon, something with world class management, so you actually experience it - which almost nobody in politics has

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will blog reading list next week

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Thank you!

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Sorry to jump on here - would your answer be basically the same for someone who recently finished a PhD in AI? I have pretty much no idea what jobs to apply for.

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Apply to FacultyAI!

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If youre interested in management look at the bibliog at the end of my paper on Apollo/ICBMs

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Dominic, what are your thoughts of an education policy similar to the Thiel Fellowship where a cohort of bright young people in the UK are given £100,000 to build something? To me this feels relatively inexpensive for the country while also offering an alternative to university for some of the brightest young minds in our country.

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Am in favour of such diverse experiments on funding. Tyler Cowen et al have had great success with their Fast Grants program...

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Maybe you should start one. Call it 'Bismarck Grants' or something?

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UK has great scope for seasteading, particularly now we're taking back control of our territorial waters

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Boris' removal of the longstanding Tory pledge to repeal the hunting act seemed to be a watershed moment in terms of Tory attitudes to individual/minority/cancelled freedoms. To what extent was this driven by Carrie/PETA?

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I dont think talking about foxes shd be a priority, everyone who wants to can hunt now anyway with the dumb laws we got

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Really great post Dominic.However it is not an idiocracy more a malignocracy.

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Below excerpts on Obama's rational thoughts about Ukraine from his 2016 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg:

Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.

“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” he said.

I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.

“It’s realistic,” he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.” He then offered up a critique he had heard directed against him, in order to knock it down. “I think that the best argument you can make on the side of those who are critics of my foreign policy is that the president doesn’t exploit ambiguity enough. He doesn’t maybe react in ways that might cause people to think, Wow, this guy might be a little crazy.”

“The ‘crazy Nixon’ approach,” I said: Confuse and frighten your enemies by making them think you’re capable of committing irrational acts.

“But let’s examine the Nixon theory,” he said. “So we dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II, and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell. When I go to visit those countries, I’m going to be trying to figure out how we can, today, help them remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids. In what way did that strategy promote our interests?”

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Do you think there are more wheels or doors in the world?

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most important question here. would love to see an answer to this

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founding

It’s Sunday, it’s the beginning of Summertime, are you hopeful about anything ?

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you seen the movie Tenet?

people go forward in time and back in time.

im hopeful when i see much of the science and technology community and some other parts of scholarship, all sorts of startups and tools...

but not when you look at the big bureaucracies we rely on for health/education etc, not when you look at welfare, not when you look at our political leaders/parties!

the people you see in the former world cd fix much of the problems of the latter world but politics is constructed to make this extremely hard - so the people of the former world increasingly stick to their domains and try to islate themselves...

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founding

To flag a typo: "Now the burble comes faster and faster thanks to Twitter-addiction. But when it comes to *muclear* weapons, it is necessary to face uncomfortable truths or else our idiocracy will destroy much more than Ukraine."

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fixed thx

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Mar 27, 2022·edited Mar 28, 2022

What are your thoughts on Effective Altruism? Are you an EA?

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Think a lot of them do good work but also many are naive about politics and don't realise those in charge are mostly NOT trying to solve serious problems. To be fair to them tho this missconception is widespread beyond EA & extends to the billionaire class who shd know better - tho I also think this class has wised up a lot over last 5 yrs

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Cf Wales's new 'commissioner for future generations' immediately getting major improvements to the M4 cancelled and all road building paused

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An interesting piece of commentary on Ukraine - albeit from a different angle it echoes my cynical view that Biden /West would prefer a long drawn out war. However given that your basic thesis is that we have a bunch of morons in charge then your hope for a negotiated peace stands no better chance of success than the other alternatives, This requires statesmanship and that appears singularly absent in the current situation. What does a negotiated settlement look like ? Ït probably requires the establishment of a new state called Donbas or East Ukraine - a pledge not to join NATO - a jointly funded programme to rebuild Ukraine ( Russia/West) a security guarantee via UN over which there is no veto option. The ability of both Russia and Ukraine to join an expanded free trade area.. The weakness in my solution is that you have rewarded the aggressor as is the case with your solution - perhaps it is just the price that has to be paid for realpolitik and part of that is the recognition by Putin himself that he knows he is a dead man walking,

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I dont think negotiated peace requires 'statesmanship'. Also media bordom + EUR populations thinking about their bills will push politicians...

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You are contradictory in your approach - if you think the idiocracy can achieve this then you are giving them more credit than your column inches imply. Your approach is at best naive.

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Mar 27, 2022Liked by Dominic Cummings

I would highly recommend Sue Prideaux's book on Nietzche, 'I am dynamite!' - really excellent. A complicated but brilliant mind.

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thx

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Mar 27, 2022Liked by Dominic Cummings

Common traits of the best military leaders you've studied/worked with?

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Would love to see an answer to this

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ferocious will power.

moral courage not just physical courage

lead by example, crucial for morale e.g alexander

can build phenomenal teams - know how to listen & when to decide

weirdly good judgement about when to push on / when to adapt

SPEED SPEED SPEED - 'with forty men you can change the world' - if fast. this is massively massively underrated generally as an indicator of great/normal/crap orgs.

at the highest level they also have to be politicians cos war is a political act (or else simply slaughter) . this means some of them were also genius at communication. e.g alexander, telling people he wanted to bring different peoples together, wedding ceremonies with his troops etc... caesar ditto.

training probably a bit underappreciated cos we've lost accounts of this from the ancient world? e.g incredible importance of combo of radical decentralisation + training in Prussian army in mid-19th C gave it huge operational power...

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founding

Brilliant!!!!!!

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In my estimation, invading Ukraine on many fronts and going for Kiev as if pro-Russians can sort out Ukraine after this is a massive blunder on Putin's part, even more suicidal than most of the incredibly dumb moves the West have made lately. Do you agree? If no, why not? And if yes, why does it not feature more prominently in your take on Ukraine? Personally, I regarded the posturing for a full invasion as a likely Putin psyop, on the assumption that him and his team were not idiots, but playing Biden like a fiddle and threatening (actually, reassuring) Zelenskyy that paramilitarism would soon be over, one way or another (with the Russian army putting an end to it in Donbas). But I have had to seriously revise my apparently ignorant take on Putin's Russia since this thing unfolded. At this point, I'd say @kamilkazani makes more sense of it than most, even if there still seems to be an element of wishful thinking in there. What seems clear, at any rate, is that lots of his takes are structurally sound and not yet falsified, while other commentators, both pro-Putin and anti-Putin, clearly don't have coherent stories about what's going on.

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I havent studied it enough to have strong views.

I can't find military sources I can rely on - they are so extremely contradictory it's hard to get a sense, especially with the media as cheerleader.

one of my few confident views is that Moscow overestimated the chances of their agents collapsing the UKR state from the inside and have got a genuine shock re what they were told being wrong.

I suspect the talks of peace etc are wrong & instead Putin will continue operations for a while.

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Thanks. I find it an interesting case study, and even more so from the Ukrainian side of things, of which I have seen nothing intelligent in English. There are things like Ukrainian land reform, that pop up when Zelenskyy speaks to Russian journalists in the middle of a war etc, that deserve scrutiny, esp. in view of nonsense from all usual sources across the spectrum. The US sphere (including the EU) seems to be in a dangerous downward spiral, except for these guys: the former Soviets who embraced liberalism. Those in charge of their new sphere have no clue what's going on anywhere inside it, and the disillusionment among the new recruits seems to be growing, to interesting effect.

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