Dominic Cummings: recommendation

Transcript context

…How does PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) fuck up the people who go through it? Because basically, almost every Prime Minister has gone through it, and even US presidents? Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar and he went through it. What is the way of thinking that it instills that you find problematic? I think it encourages this whole kind of wordcel bluffing. That everything just becomes that you spend a week, you skim through a few books, you come up with some vaguely plausible stuff, and if you seem with good manners and a bit of social polish, then suddenly it all seems plausible. And you’re all surrounded by people who operate in exactly the same way.So you have a room full of polished social wordcels. It’s a very bad set of people to throw at a problem like COVID at them.And also it encourages them to think that the plausible sounding few sentences to get through this conversation is actually what’s important rather than— What’s the truth? What’s the actual answer to the problem? How are you actually going to implement this over many years? Everything like that is completely disdained. It points to a general problem with our system. One of the most important things is that everything to do with operations and management and actually getting things done is like the lowest status thing in Whitehall. The highest status thing is A) bullshit about “political strategy” and media and giving interviews. Everyone wants the word Strategy in their job title, and it’s practically always bullshit. It shouldn’t be in the job title, and the job will be improved by removing the word from their job title. And nobody wants to be on logistics, operations, and actually making sure that something happens. And that’s at the core of why so many things work the way they do. And you can even just see it in the whole policy process. The high status thing is writing the policy and then spinning it to the media. The totally low status thing is what are the actual implementation details? Has someone already tried to do this in eight different countries in the last four years and each time it’s been a disaster? No one cares about that. That’s left to much lower status jobs and none of the senior people will pay attention to it and they’re actually just formally separated. So one of the things that we did in 2020 was we said that one of the ways in which the Number 10 system should change is the policy people should be brought together and actually physically sit with the management people, which is completely revolutionary idea, because that way when you’re thinking up the ideas in the first place, you’re immediately from the beginning talking to the people whose job it is ask “Will this actually work? ” Rather than what happens now is that these people sit around, they go to bullshit seminars, they talk to journalists, they talk to MPs, they publish a paper. It’s actually full of holes. It doesn’t work. That paper then goes off to the implementation people, the policy people then move on to whatever their next thing is. The management, implementation people look at it and go, “Well, this is not going to work for all the following reasons.” But it’s their job to make it work. They then have to go back and then start arguing. agement, implementation people look at it and go, “Well, this is not going to work for all the following reasons.” But it’s their job to make it work. They then have to go back and then start arguing. “But we already decided that we were going to do this like nine months ago.” “Yeah, but it can’t work.” So our idea was if you put them together, then you actually find out on day one or day four. — “Oh, actually, this is a stupid idea and it won’t work for the following reasons. We have to do it this way instead.” No one cares about that. It goes back to, what do people care about? No one actually cares if it doesn’t work.…

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