Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Politics is profoundly nonlinear.
CRISPR editing will allow us to enhance ourselves.
Westminster has let the whole country down for many years.
Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.
Do some companies have great power? Yes but only in limited ways.
Most claims you read about psychological manipulation are rubbish.
There are many brilliant people in the civil service and politics.
Economics is clearly a vital area of prediction for people in politics.
After 23 June 2016, the U.K. has to reorient national policy on many dimensions.
MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings.
Facebook, like great politicians, surfs waves that it very rarely (if ever) creates.
Almost all analysis of politics and government considers relatively surface phenomena.
Decentralised collaborations are inherently threatening to Whitehall's core principles.
The panic over Sputnik brought many good things such as a huge increase in science funding.
Action requires focus and priorities and these inherently require compromises and pragmatism.
Science advances by turning new ideas into standard ideas so each generation builds on the last.
The audience for facts, evidence and research about microtargeting, Facebook and Brexit is tiny.
Speed and adaptability are crucial to success in conflict and can be helped by new technologies.
In history books, luck is always underplayed and the talent of individuals is usually overplayed.
If you look back at history, most important PR and propaganda was invented by the Communist Party.
In January 2014 I left the Department for Education and spent the next 18 months away from politics.
Most security failings happen because of human actions that are not envisaged when designing systems.
I want people to understand the barriers to serious government in order that more people take action.
Music is similar to sport. There is very fast feedback, learning, and a clear hierarchy of expertise.
I make judgments about people and ideas individually - for me, parties are just a vehicle of convenience.
The British political system is broken in many ways and needs big changes - the E.U. is not our only problem.
For many decades, Whitehall has deceived itself and deceived the public about the true nature of the E.U. project.
Billionaires who want to influence politics could get better 'returns on investment' than from early stage Amazon.
We need organisations like Vote Leave to operate permanently to give a voice to those who otherwise won't be heard.
We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful.
We should stop selecting leaders from a subset of Oxbridge egomaniacs with a humanities degree and a spell as spin doctor.
Brexit cannot be done with the traditional Westminster/Whitehall system as Vote Leave warned repeatedly before 23 June 2016.
Victoria Woodcock ran Vote Leave - she was a truly awesome project manager and without her Cameron would certainly have won.
TV news dominates politics and is extremely low-bandwidth: it contains a few hundred words and rarely uses graphics properly.
People are always selling the idea that they have a magic bullet of persuasion. You won't get poor by shorting such promises.
Most educated people are not set up to listen or change their minds about politics, however sensible they are in other fields.
Political analysis is full of chess metaphors, reflecting an old tradition of seeing games as models of physical and social reality.
Changing the world in a profound and beneficial way is not enough to put a dint in bureaucracies which operate on their own dynamics.
Every failing organisation has the same stories, people find it very hard to learn from the most successful organisations and people.
I think the right way to deal with terrorism is to carry on with normal life, like Britain used to when it was a more serious country.
Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don't care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.
In many aspects of government, as in the tech world and investing, brains and temperament smash experience and seniority out of the park.
Abstracting human wisdom into models often works better than relying on human experts as models are often more consistent and less noisy.
A basic problem for people in politics is that approximately none have the hard skills necessary to distinguish great people from charlatans.
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.
Judea Pearl is one of the most important scholars in the field of causal reasoning. His book 'Causality' is the leading textbook in the field.
I've learned over the years that 'rational discussion' accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average.
Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children's arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge.
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.
Technology enables people to improve communication with unprecedented speed, scale and iterative testing. It also allows people to wreak chaos with high leverage.