Most of you in the UK will have this, but one of PM Boris Johnson’s most senior advisors, Dominic Cummings, has put a call out on his blog for “weirdos with skills”. It has caused more criticism than praise on twitter and the media from what I can tell. But, I suspect - like quiet Torys and quiet Trump voters - this will have gone down well with a lot of people; and if you are a weirdo with skills it’s likely you will have found ait nd maybe you are applying… FWIW, I was contemplating prediction markets this very week and it’s one of Cummings’ focus.
I have no idea about this at the top of government. Some thoughtful people I know have been pretty critical (along the lines of this is not what a SPAD should be doing and this disruptor approach won’t work for the civil service). Other critiques include: Tony Yates here in New Statesman in a commentary/defence there’s Henry Oliver in his blog and on being a State Capacity Libertarian H/T Tyler Cowen.
Cummings blog is here. He writes:
“…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….”
