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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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?<p>Searching the wider internet for <i>"Dominic Cummings" "Paul Graham"</i> doesn't seem to reveal any meaningful connections.<p>And who is the person who has editorialised this title quoting when they say 'heads' in quotes?
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?<p>Come now. Let's just accept England's natural fate as a US protectorate alongside Guam if it leaves the EU.
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.<p>He seems to have drunk the AI koolaid but I’m not convinced he really understands it.<p>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.
Starts by quoting Eliezer Yudkowsky, winds up advertising for "weirdos from William Gibson novels". I would have to eat <i>so much</i> 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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>[0] - Superforecasting is a great book: <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-Philip-Tetlock/dp/1511358491" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.co.uk/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction...</a><p>[1] - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdtssXITXuE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdtssXITXuE</a><p>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.<p>[2] - <a href="https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/6172/" rel="nofollow">https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/6172/</a><p>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.
That seems surprisingly coherent actually. Freakishly so<p>Everything else the brexit crowd has produced is a steaming PoS of low quality lies.<p>Maybe they're better at playing the fool than I gave them credit for
Interestingly, some of the issues Cummings is concerned with are similar to those raised in the 1968 Fulton Report <a href="https://civilservant.org.uk/csr-fulton_report.html" rel="nofollow">https://civilservant.org.uk/csr-fulton_report.html</a>
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.<p>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.<p>How are this kind of people allowed into power...