Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Dominic Cummings - Page 2

Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind's journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can sling objects across the solar system with extreme precision.

MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings.

Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.

The reason why Whitehall is full of people failing in predictable ways on an hourly basis is because, first, there is general system-wide failure and, second, everybody keeps their heads down focused on the particular and they ignore the system.

The Single Market is no-where defined in the E.U. treaties. If you suddenly ask people to define the Single Market, the number who can do that, who are specialists in the area, is pretty small.

It is very very hard for humans to lift our eyes from today and to go out into the future and think about what could be done to bring the future back to the present. Like ants crawling around on the leaf, we political people only know our leaf.

We should stop selecting leaders from a subset of Oxbridge egomaniacs with a humanities degree and a spell as spin doctor.

CRISPR-enabled 'gene drives' enable us to make changes to the germ-line of organisms permanent such that changes spread through the entire wild population, including making species extinct on demand. Unlike nuclear weapons such technologies are not complex, expensive, and able to be kept secret for a long time.

Markets and science show that some fields of human endeavour work much better than political decision-making. I think we could do much much better if we will face our problems honestly.

I want people to understand the barriers to serious government in order that more people take action.

If you go back to the Euro campaign in 1999, how many chief executives and chairmen of FTSE 100 companies were speaking out on this? I think two. Two out of 200 people. Did that represent the reality of what businesses in Britain thought about the Euro? Of course it didn't. Did it represent what CBI members thought? Of course it didn't.

I make judgments about people and ideas individually - for me, parties are just a vehicle of convenience.

If you look back at history, most important PR and propaganda was invented by the Communist Party.

Project management is not hard in the same way that theoretical physics is hard - there are tried and trusted methods that a lot of people without exceptional talents can use - yet we can't embed it in government.

A basic problem for people in politics is that approximately none have the hard skills necessary to distinguish great people from charlatans.

In physics we have developed models that are extremely accurate across vastly different scales from the sub-atomic to the visible universe. In politics we have bumbled along making the same sort of errors repeatedly.

We need organisations like Vote Leave to operate permanently to give a voice to those who otherwise won't be heard.

Changing the world in a profound and beneficial way is not enough to put a dint in bureaucracies which operate on their own dynamics.

The E.U. has narrowed our horizons. It has narrowed everyone's horizons in Whitehall so they're not thinking about the big things in the world. They're not thinking about the forces changing it or what Britain can really do to contribute to them.

One of the things I wanted to do in the Department for Education was open up the policy making process and run things like wikis in open formats in order to a: start off with better ideas and then b: adapt to errors much faster than is possible with normal Whitehall systems.

I've learned over the years that 'rational discussion' accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average.

Most educated people are not set up to listen or change their minds about politics, however sensible they are in other fields.

Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children's arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge.

The work of mathematicians on 'pure' problems has often yielded ideas that have waited to be rediscovered by physicists. The work of Euclid, Apollonius and Archimedes on ellipses would be used centuries later by Kepler for his theory of planetary motion.

The British political system is broken in many ways and needs big changes - the E.U. is not our only problem.

CRISPR editing will allow us to enhance ourselves.

If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is - hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies and never believe what advertising companies tell you about 'data' unless you can independently verify it.

MPs are so cowed by the institutions and the scale of official failure that they generally just muddle along tinkering and hope to stay a step ahead of the media.

After 23 June 2016, the U.K. has to reorient national policy on many dimensions.

When comparing many things in life the difference between average and best is say 30% but some people are 50 times more effective than others.

The panic over Sputnik brought many good things such as a huge increase in science funding.

Every failing organisation has the same stories, people find it very hard to learn from the most successful organisations and people.

The fundamental problem the Conservative Party has had since 1997 at least is that it is seen as 'the party of the rich, they don't care about public services.' This is supported by all serious market research. Another problem that all parties have is that their promises are not believed.

In January 2014 I left the Department for Education and spent the next 18 months away from politics.

If you want to avoid the usual fate in politics of failure, you need to understand some basic principles about why people make mistakes and how some people, institutions, and systems cope with mistakes and thereby perform much better than most.

TV news dominates politics and is extremely low-bandwidth: it contains a few hundred words and rarely uses graphics properly.

Decentralised collaborations are inherently threatening to Whitehall's core principles.

Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people.

While our ancestor chiefs at least had some intuitive feel for important variables like agriculture and cavalry our contemporary chiefs (and those in the media responsible for scrutiny of decisions) generally do not understand their equivalents, and are often less experienced in managing complex organisations than their predecessors.

Science advances by turning new ideas into standard ideas so each generation builds on the last.