summarising responses to this. I'll answer some over the next 48 hours, on Friday I'll focus on live questions/discussion, then tidy up after. The Power Broker, Robert Caro. northwood dominic cummings SW1 suffers such extremely powerful wilful blindness even an event as big as covid doesnt puncture consciousness in many important ways. I know some of them. A history of ARPA-IPTO and Xerox PARC: how the internet and PC revolution was created. This will also show you why high performance is so hard it is totally hostile to normal bureaucracies dominated by large numbers of middle managers. Almost anything good you read on strategy and conflict is based on ideas you see here. 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. Almost no MPs or senior officials study him or are even midly interested. 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. Useful introduction to some fundamentals, from Pythagoras to Newton to e and complex numbers. Am told that the Loebs translated by Shackleton Bailey is the best translation. If you read Boyd youll see how lessons recur across Alexander, Nelson, Groves et al. While some characters from the ancient world, such as Themistocles or Alexander the Great, would be as interesting to study in minute detail we dont have the sources. by Gomme and Andrewes, two of the great 20th C classical scholars. Pflouffe ran the Obama 08 campaign and 2012 re-election. the failure of alignment and/or the inherent drive of high intelligence to escape constraints/control/alignment with others goals? Ciceros letters. All ideas welcome. Someone should run a prize for the best 10,000 word essay summarising the fundamental lessons of this book (which I havent read in full, just skimmed, because of time not a judgement). (Politicians also constantly make this mistake in hiring journalists to do communication, almost always a bad idea.). This by Fields Medallist Terry Tao, maybe the greatest mathematician alive, is brilliant and incredibly useful for someone like me explaining a lot of fundamental concepts in non-technical language. Steve Jobs advised Obama to do the same but it didnt happen. The truth is that they recognized themselves my enemies had nothing to do with its failure. Also see Nietzsche on the pre-Socratics. Zvi reviews Tyler Cowens new book, Talent. Also you cant understand our world unless you have a sense of Nietzsches profound influence on 20th Century artists, thinkers, and politics. , Seymour Papert. (NB. Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison and others have been trying to push some of the principles of how to do hard things into economics and government, in similar ways to some of my arguments over the years. (Also note that the oversight for Groves was a group of just four who met with no secretariat and no formal records.) ): how much was the. Dominic Cummings Dec 8, 2021 93 726 Subscriber-only AMA, Friday 12-2 UK time. (Politicians also constantly make this mistake in hiring journalists to do communication, almost always a bad idea.). The Man from the Future, Bhattacharya. Much (mis)quoted, rarely read. His boss and predecessor was Kelly Johnson who wrote. 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. This is not true of blogs like Marginal Revolution. 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. Welles dismissed the French auteur theory as not relevant to the old Hollywood where the producers called the shots, not the directors. For this unprecedented project in world history Groves had no huge central staff, he worked with a brilliant woman and a tiny staff with truly extreme decentralisation. Hard question (relevant to AGI safety debates! . The basic arguments remain critical today. Yes its striking that looking at my internet favourites for politics there are no UK-based political blogs/writers I regularly read. The insider account of the Manhattan Project by its legendary leader. Vast amounts of what you read on this is rubbish. I know some of them. Interesting on the psychology of selling and marketing. (general reader). Partly accessible to a non-specialist with some maths already, though very challenging for most including me. 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. If you read his blogs and trusted him on covid over the entire CDC/FDA/WHO bureaucracies, youd have come out far ahead. Mathematics: A short introduction, Gowers. A classic non-specialist introduction to reasoning. Pentagon Wars, Burton. A history of ARPA-IPTO and Xerox PARC: how the internet and PC revolution was created. If one could observe a discussion between Bismarck and one politician from the 20th Century, he might be the most interesting choice. If you want to follow the cutting edge of this research follow, , which you should anyway. Then I realised the truth. Orson Welles thought Renoir the greatest director. Alexander the Great, Robin Lane Fox. Very very telling that in a recent interview with Tyler Cowen, the recent head of the CIA was clearly unaware of this work, which includes results showing that his own agency is routinely bested by people like unemployed grandmothers in a hut in Central America. Re George Mueller, the man who managed the Apollo program. Then I realised the truth. He opted out of the traditional science funding system early. . My blog with other books HERE. Her recent book, The Scout Mindset, was excellent. I applied his basic ideas in the euro campaign, in the 2004 North East referendum, in thinking through education reform and trying to get the Department for Education to do what I wanted, in the Brexit referendum, in solving the 2019 impasse, in No10, and to removing this PM since spring 2021. , Gowers. khloe kardashian hidden hills house address. Groves (fired), Bob Taylor (fired), George Mueller (not funded to push on to Mars after the moon), Renoir The list goes on and on. Also. In War and Peace, 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. 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. The story of Turing, von Neumann and the computer. Interesting on the psychology of selling and marketing. RT @zebulgar: Step aside Andy Grove, I believe @chughesjohnson has written the new bible for managers Took me a while to work through my reading list so I could start this, but the writing is phenomenal, let alone the content Must-read for any founder, but especially after your Series A . A good biography of Einstein by Isaacson. A general introduction to number theory, topology, calculus and other subjects. The Greatest Communicator, Worthlin. One of Britains most senior and respected civil servants, Michael Quinlan, wrote this paper after retiring, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, on nuclear strategy. *Come and See ( , Russian). . This shows the critical meta-lesson again: those in power have no interest in high performance. Book accompanying an OU course. was the fundamental reason I think Brexit is the right idea and the EU is doomed to fail in important ways. How Roger Ailes packaged Nixon with actual campaign memos reproduced at the back. Two adjacent questions: 1) what signals of memes/news predict that X is likely to emerge from the noise and become one of the few stories/memes thats significant e.g the process of the Wall falling has started with small events which are detectable but almost nobody notices or realises what a big deal they will be in a few weeks, how soon can we detect X is happening then predict X is Y% likely to be a big story, with what confidence? Ive only read a few excerpts of these but reading them all is a project for later this year. Non-fiction books on politics fail to give you this crucial sense. I wrote, which has a further reading list. In all of these struggles I tried to follow Boyds advice such as, and in all of them, as the opponents OODA crumbled I observed what Boyd said would happen: it starts to feel like your opponent is working for you, the more they try, the worse it gets (e.g when Cameron called the press conference to denounce lies about the fact that Turkey was in the process of joining the EU!). . Dyson, Hawking) is wrong. One of the most critical lessons? The Dominic Cummings guide to management Boris Johnson's adviser plans to put business leaders' strategies into practice Andrew Hill Dominic Cummings, the prime minister's senior adviser, has. (A great highlight of Oxford for me was four-hour tutorials with RLF on Athenian democracy, Thucydides, Alexander etc.). Ditto for the Johnson volumes (Ive not read) when Caro publishes the last. Re George Mueller, the man who managed the Apollo program. A remarkable 19th Century book about propaganda and politics that influenced Lenin, Hitler and PR pioneers like Bernays. Review of the disintegration of the Tories in the context of Brexit, SW1 vs, perspectives on risks of Brexit/Remain, and, and save the trolley to Get Brexit Done despite our reservations. Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it. If theres one film to show Nietzsche brought back from the dead, maybe this is it. Solving Mathematical Problems, Terence Tao. , Terence Tao. Many ideas you see from others (e.g Taleb) derive from Mandelbrot. There are fields like professional mathematics and equity investing where institutions mean the best people are recognised over time. But this also means theres always billion dollar bills on the pavement sometimes even trillion dollar bills, like do vaccines much faster and smarter than usual in spring 2020, and like now with 2024 approaching People, ideas, machines in that order! Robert Coram wrote a biography. Opinion | The 'Political Anarchist' Behind Britain's Chaos - The New ; 2) how to map the spread of memes and identify critical nodes in the network that, if influenced somehow, can amplify or dampen signals? , 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. This is true even of those who frequently complain about this phenomenon. A big problem for UK political discussion is people focus obsessively on the immediate interest of the London media rather than trying to think about, . My essay on an 'Odyssean' Education - Dominic Cummings's Blog *Chaplin City Lights, The Gold Rush, Modern Times, Great Dictator. I like reading stuff about people where incentives and feedback work, from used car salesmen to fortune tellers. Physics for Future Presidents, and Energy for Future Presidents, Richard Muller. What is moral behaviour is not the same question as what are the principles of high performance in politics! I wrote this blog which has a further reading list. The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande. His book 'Causality' is the leading textbook in the field. are great. , Frank Close (2011). Intoxicating, insidery and infuriating: everything I learned about In 2018 I asked some academics to consider this and we built a crude tool. Ill do a separate list on science funding. Yes its striking that looking at my internet favourites for politics there are no UK-based political blogs/writers I regularly read. If youre thinking of doing a startup or just curious about how to do hard things you should read Paul Grahams essays. Looks at the bigshots of modern military thinking. I blogged a series on this great book starting. , General Groves. I'm thinking re 'What should Labour do to win the next election'. Considered by many in Silicon Valley to be the best book on the details of management. Its often found in terrorist safe houses when raided. How Roger Ailes packaged Nixon with actual campaign memos reproduced at the back. What is mathematics?, Courant. (on maths, logic, P=NP, computational complexity), (in general, and if interested in extreme talent Steve blogs a lot on this), The most interesting intelligent person writing on American politics who a) really knows a lot of history, b) understands the rationalists but is not of them, and c) whose version of regime change includes ending democracy, is. , Kahneman. Twitter Web App Retweets This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Ive only read a few excerpts of these but reading them all is a project for later this year. British political writing depends hugely on assuming that much of the newspaper coverage is roughly true, so given much is actually invented it means the books repeat a lot of fake news and miss the point. steve stricker wrist lock; what channel are the st louis cardinals playing on today Ditto for the Johnson volumes (Ive not read) when Caro publishes the last. Colonel John Boyds briefings are great. ), here are some books and a few papers I recommend. The title comes from. If you really are interested in policy and how someone tries to bring principles of high performance to government, this is essential. , Plouffe. , Beinhocker. A good biography of Einstein by Isaacson.