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.
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.
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.
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.