Thoughts on our circumstances...: We Don't Need Any More of These Private School Kid Graduate Morons

Thursday, January 28, 2021

We Don't Need Any More of These Private School Kid Graduate Morons

Editor's note: The UK's Dominic Cummings despite a few recent flaws (£800 million controversial Covid tests) that might have been intentional, wrote an interesting blog piece last year called "Two hands are a lot — we're hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos…" that we partially republished below. What's Cummings basically saying? Cummings is saying "they have jobs at 10 Downing Street" but they don't want Yale graduates, Oxford graduates, they don't want Cambridge graduates. They want people who have been beaten, and bashed, and raped, and traumatized; people who have had the shit kicked out of them on the streets, they want people who have been drug dealers, they want people who have traveled the world, they want people who have lived a f*cking life and not another one of these university private school kid graduate dumbass morons. 10 Downing Street needs more people with "genuine cognitive diversity." Bloody cheers, Dominic Cummings.

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Source: Dominic Cummings Blog

'Two hands are a lot' — we're hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos…

JANUARY 2, 2020 | BY DOMINICCUMMINGS

'This is possibly the single largest design flaw contributing to the bad Nash equilibrium in which … many governments are stuck. Every individual high-functioning competent person knows they can't make much difference by being one more face in that crowd.' Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI expert, LessWrong etc.

'[M]uch of our intellectual elite who think they have "the solutions" have actually cut themselves off from understanding the basis for much of the most important human progress.’ Michael Nielsen, physicist and one of the handful of most interesting people I’ve ever talked to.

'People, ideas, machines — in that order.' Colonel Boyd.

'There isn't one novel thought in all of how Berkshire [Hathaway] is run. It’s all about … exploiting unrecognized simplicities.' Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner.

'Two hands, it isn't much considering how the world is infinite. Yet, all the same, two hands, they are a lot.’ Alexander Grothendieck, one of the great mathematicians.

There are many brilliant people in the civil service and politics. Over the past five months the No10 political team has been lucky to work with some fantastic officials. But there are also some profound problems at the core of how the British state makes decisions. This was seen by pundit-world as a very eccentric view in 2014. It is no longer seen as eccentric. Dealing with these deep problems is supported by many great officials, particularly younger ones, though of course there will naturally be many fears — some reasonable, most unreasonable.

Now there is a confluence of: a) Brexit requires many large changes in policy and in the structure of decision-making, b) some people in government are prepared to take risks to change things a lot, and c) a new government with a significant majority and little need to worry about short-term unpopularity while trying to make rapid progress with long-term problems.

There is a huge amount of low hanging fruit — trillion dollar bills lying on the street — in the intersection of:

• the selection, education and training of people for high performance
• the frontiers of the science of prediction
• data science, AI and cognitive technologies (e.g Seeing Rooms, 'authoring tools designed for
• arguing from evidence', Tetlock/IARPA prediction tournaments that could easily be extended to
• consider 'clusters' of issues around themes like Brexit to improve policy and project management)
• communication (e.g Cialdini)
• decision-making institutions at the apex of government.

We want to hire an unusual set of people with different skills and backgrounds to work in Downing Street with the best officials, some as spads and perhaps some as officials. If you are already an official and you read this blog and think you fit one of these categories, get in touch.

The categories are roughly:

• Data scientists and software developers
• Economists
• Policy experts
• Project managers
• Communication experts
• Junior researchers one of whom will also be my personal assistant
• Weirdos and misfits with odd skills

We want to improve performance and make me much less important — and within a year largely redundant. At the moment I have to make decisions well outside what Charlie Munger calls my 'circle of competence' and we do not have the sort of expertise supporting the PM and ministers that is needed. This must change fast so we can properly serve the public.

A. Unusual mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, data scientists

You must have exceptional academic qualifications from one of the world's best universities or have done something that demonstrates equivalent (or greater) talents and skills. You do not need a PhD — as Alan Kay said, we are also interested in graduate students as 'world-class researchers who don't have PhDs yet'.

You should have the following:

• PhD or MSc in maths or physics.
• Outstanding mathematical skills are essential.
• Experience of using analytical languages: e.g. Python, SQL, R.
• Familiarity with data tools and technologies such as Postgres, Scikit Learn, NEO4J.

Please go to Dominic Cummings blog to read the entire post.

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Here is one of those graduates from one of UK's private universities who apparently from what we have been able to ascertain, doesn't have "genuine cognitive diversity."