Dominic Cummings: belief

Transcript context

…Given that most attempts at finding NIMBY and red tape and over regulation have failed. Even the one you attempted to fix planning, aka Zoning in the UK, when you were chief advisor. What is the correct strategy to fighting NIMBY? Because it just seems like really hard to fight it head on. I think a lot of people look for a magic bullet of communication whereby we come up with some equivalent of take back control, but for planning, and then we persuade everyone and the public will shift and start cheering house building. I don’t think that’s realistic and I don’t think that’s the answer. In fact, in 2020, we did actually make some changes to the planning laws, but I think it’s instructive how we did it. We didn’t talk about it at all. I actually basically had a communications blackout on the whole thing and that’s because talking about it is extremely hard to do, even if you’re very good at communications. So it was completely pointless trying to do it with that Number 10 and that Prime Minister and that Conservative party. So my approach to it then was just do it, don’t talk about it, and talk about other things. And so we did actually manage to get various things done then, but without most people even noticing. I think overall, though, if you’re really trying to do at a big scale, the actual answer is that you just do it. You focus public communications largely on other things. When people actually see the effects of it with growth and houses they can afford and businesses starting and growing and thriving local areas and whatnot, then you can point to that. But you’re not doing it in a theoretical way. It’s not politicians promising things. It’s being able to point to real change in their areas and say, “Look at what’s happened. Now, do you want to go back? Do you want the people who don’t like this to take over?” You see what I mean? I think the idea of coming up with some kind of agenda on it and then trying to persuade the public about mass deregulation and mass housing is a fool’s errand. Let’s talk about education for a bit. You mentioned earlier that that’s one of the things you’re working on now. But also you have a big history here. You were at the Ministry of Education, and while there you wrote a very interesting report on an Odyssean education and this was one of the quotes from that that I thought was pretty compelling. “We need leaders with an understanding of Thucydides and statistical modelling, who have read The Brothers Karamazov and The Quark and the Jaguar, who can feel Kipling’s Kim and succeed in Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project. An Odyssean education would focus on humans’ biggest and most important problems and explain connections between them to train synthesisers.” This is a very interesting idea. Do you want to explain a bit about what the idea behind the Odysseyan education was?…

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