Eitan Hersh wrote a book in 2015 called 'Hacking the Electorate.' It's pretty much the best book I've seen on the use of data science in U.S. elections and what good evidence shows works and does not work.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Government
Economics is clearly a vital area of prediction for people in politics.Collection: Politics
Technology enables people to improve communication with unprecedented speed, scale and iterative testing. It also allows people to wreak chaos with high leverage.Collection: Communication
Until the 20th century, medicine was more like politics than physics. Its forecasts were often bogus and its record grim. In the 1920s, statisticians invaded medicine and devised randomised controlled trials. Doctors, hating the challenge to their prestige, resisted but lost. Evidence-based medicine became routine and saved millions of lives.Collection: Politics
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.Collection: Communication
Despite the centrality of communication to politics it is remarkable how little attention Insiders pay to what works - never mind the question 'what could work much better?'Collection: Communication
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.
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.
In January 2014 I left the Department for Education and spent the next 18 months away from politics.
I've learned over the years that 'rational discussion' accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average.
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.
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.
MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings.
I make judgments about people and ideas individually - for me, parties are just a vehicle of convenience.
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.
In a large bureaucracy, it is vital to keep eyes on the grassroots as they almost always will give you warning of problems faster than official signals (which says a lot about official signals).
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.
Political analysis is full of chess metaphors, reflecting an old tradition of seeing games as models of physical and social reality.
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.
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.
Decentralised collaborations are inherently threatening to Whitehall's core principles.
CRISPR editing will allow us to enhance ourselves.
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.
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.
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.
Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.
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 panic over Sputnik brought many good things such as a huge increase in science funding.
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.
Science advances by turning new ideas into standard ideas so each generation builds on the last.
Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children's arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge.
TV news dominates politics and is extremely low-bandwidth: it contains a few hundred words and rarely uses graphics properly.
Every failing organisation has the same stories, people find it very hard to learn from the most successful organisations and people.
After 23 June 2016, the U.K. has to reorient national policy on many dimensions.
Politics is profoundly nonlinear.
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.
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.
All the best companies quickly go downhill after the departure of people like Bill Gates - even when such very able people have tried very very hard to avoid exactly this problem.
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.
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.
The British political system is broken in many ways and needs big changes - the E.U. is not our only problem.
We need organisations like Vote Leave to operate permanently to give a voice to those who otherwise won't be heard.
For many decades, Whitehall has deceived itself and deceived the public about the true nature of the E.U. project.
We should stop selecting leaders from a subset of Oxbridge egomaniacs with a humanities degree and a spell as spin doctor.
If we want leaders to make good decisions amid huge complexity, and learn how to build great teams, then we should send them to learn from people who've proved they can do it. Instead of long summer holidays, embed aspirant leaders with Larry Page or James Dyson so they can experience successful leadership.
Action requires focus and priorities and these inherently require compromises and pragmatism.
In history books, luck is always underplayed and the talent of individuals is usually overplayed.
We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful.