, Plouffe. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith. I thought this was outstanding and every young person aspiring to be influential in politics should read it. A billionaire should provide copies to all elected politicians. On expert decisions under pressure, like firemen. Like all the best political advice you dont need to be clever to understand it. A modern version of Polya for children, by aFields Medalist. A big problem for UK political discussion is people focus obsessively on the immediate interest of the London media rather than trying to think about whats really important. A short companion book to his famous lecture series, Tips on Physics: a problem-solving supplement, which was unpublished for many years and seems to be generally unknown, is super-useful. A classic book on mathematical problem solving. His point about. Physics for Future Presidents, and Energy for Future Presidents, Richard Muller. A scholarly history of maths, not for a general reader. Vast amounts of what you read on this is rubbish. Interesting how some fields (e.g airlines, surgery) have significantly improved performance while others have not, and the barriers to improvement. I started like everyone young assuming those at the top of politics must be smart, interested in policy and great at organising things. (Also note that the oversight for Groves was a group of just four who met with no secretariat and no formal records.) Like with ARPA-PARC its fascinating to see how funders ignore such successful examples. The more I study the more clear it is that luck plays a crucial part in almost all famous successes. Elite opinion in London today is dominated by very similar people with very similar education and very similar views that inevitably include assumptions that will prove false like the British navy rules the waves (true and a useful heuristic for many decades then suddenly and drastically not true) and values that will seem evil/comical. Popular intro to network theory. , Adam Smith. Also Democracy in America. Functions and Graphs, Gelfand and Glagoleva. Partly accessible to a non-specialist with some maths already, though very challenging for most including me. He understood politics and government in a way I think almost nobody in 20th Century politics did and influenced it more than almost any elected leader. Almost no MPs, journalists or academics have any idea about just how costly such bureaucracy truly is or how these bureaucracies truly work and the criminality and near-insanity theyre capable of. How to Solve It, Polya. Like Hoskyns (below) genuine rare insight and almost totally ignored. Like all the best political advice you dont need to be clever to understand it. Posted January 13, 2014 Source: Pexels There's a lot of hope today that playing mindless brain training games will make you. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's Rasputin, is happy to watch the country blow up if he gets what he wants. (This series was written for the Russian correspondence school a way of giving talented maths pupils a useful curriculum in such a vast country. In 2018 I asked some academics to consider this and we built a crude tool. Kahneman bravely admitted hed ignored some of his own lessons in believing studies he shouldnt have believed. Although Nietzsche despised nothing more than the radical left, he became extremely influential on it, perhaps because nobody else so thoroughly demolishes the foundations of liberal democracy, although, in a further twist, few of the left realise the extent to which they are influenced by him. Linked, Barabasi. A good introduction to P=NP?. , Spivak (2008 edition). , Robin Lane Fox. Two adjacent questions: 1) what signals of memes/news predict that X is likely to emerge from the noise and become one of the few stories/memes thats significant e.g the process of the Wall falling has started with small events which are detectable but almost nobody notices or realises what a big deal they will be in a few weeks, how soon can we, X is Y% likely to be a big story, with what confidence? If one could observe a discussion between Bismarck and one politician from the 20th Century, he might be the most interesting choice. I blogged on it here. E.g rapidly speeding up construction/housing/infrastructure, how to accelerate scientific discovery and technological development. Much (mis)quoted, rarely read. Classic on teaching children programming, recommended by Alan Kay and Bret Victor. Most economists cant synthesise worth a damn. , Gershenfeld (MIT). The real reason is most people in politics dont want to face the big questions about what government is for and how to do it better (and especially dont want to face the quality of people). Groves (fired), Bob Taylor (fired), George Mueller (not funded to push on to Mars after the moon), Renoir The list goes on and on. If you want to understand modern culture, the 19th Century smashup of the traditional world with the capitalist, liberal and increasingly atheist world, and what deep forces lie behind the ideas we see all around us, its the best book. Michael Nielsen on quantum mechanics and computers: Why the world needs quantum mechanics Quantum Computing for Everyone Quantum Computing for the Determined. Psychologie des foules, Gustave le Bon. He understood politics and government in a way I think almost nobody in 20th Century politics did and influenced it more than almost any elected leader. The Federalist Papers. A scholarly history of maths, not for a general reader. Start trial Already a paid subscriber? I really liked this classic but a lot was beyond me. My wild Westminster Dubbed 'The Gazelle' by the press, she was a trusted aide who babysat Boris, chauffeured Dominic Cummings and chaperoned Carrie Johnson when the PM was ill. As a new television drama depicts Downing Street during the pandemic, Cleo Watson describes her whirlwind year at No 10 Dress to thrill Feeling gilty? Fab: From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, Gershenfeld (MIT). Ive flicked through books on post-Thatcher UK general elections but never found them interesting enough to read in full. There are fields like professional mathematics and equity investing where institutions mean the best people are recognised over time. by Rumelt. Someone should run a prize for the best 10,000 word essay summarising the fundamental lessons of this book (which I havent read in full, just skimmed, because of time not a judgement). Pflouffe ran the Obama 08 campaign and 2012 re-election. RT @zebulgar: Step aside Andy Grove, I believe @chughesjohnson has written the new bible for managers Took me a while to work through my reading list so I could start this, but the writing is phenomenal, let alone the content Must-read for any founder, but especially after your Series A . For us its often seen as high level political philosophy but it was bashed out by Hamilton et al as part of a brutal political struggle including many dirty tricks on both sides. Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it. If theres one film to show Nietzsche brought back from the dead, maybe this is it. I will publish soon a chronology of 1862-67 following the twists and turns of Schleswig-Holstein, the escalating conflict with Austria, the domestic conflict running through the period. Thoughts on past and future of the Buffett system, Charlie Munger. The critical meta-lesson is the same for all the below: practically nobody has any interest in extreme performance and all governments in the west will try to stop you applying these lessons. It also corrects a lot of modern books that have reverted to the World War I was a terrible accident / railway timetables idea in fact crucial nodes in the Prussian deep state network were trying to force war in summer 1914 and to manipulate Wilhelm II into going along with their plans. This is false. Pearl led a revolution in thinking about causation from inside the then tiny field of AI. He also wrote a book on neural networks. , Morris Kline. Solving Mathematical Problems, Terence Tao. The Nazis did indeed think they were creating a new world beyond good and evil, so did Stalin. (Ive recently read some of the media commentary about 2019 that I ignored at the time and its amazing how many hacks thought I was trying to use vNs game theory. This is not true of blogs like Marginal Revolution. Also. Working Backwards, by Amazon alumni. LAncien Rgime et la Rvolution, de Tocqueville. (Also note that the oversight for Groves was a group of just four who met with no secretariat and no formal records.) With Bismarck you can follow the twists and turns of a true (and monstrous) genius in great detail and learn an extraordinary amount about how politics, government, war and diplomacy truly work. If we could predict events like the fall of the Berlin Wall better it would have huge value. Review of the disintegration of the Tories in the context of Brexit, SW1 vs, perspectives on risks of Brexit/Remain, and, and save the trolley to Get Brexit Done despite our reservations. Many who used them went on to the famous Kolmogorov schools.). Very very telling that in a recent interview with Tyler Cowen, the recent head of the CIA was clearly unaware of this work, which includes results showing that his own agency is routinely bested by people like unemployed grandmothers in a hut in Central America. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. People dont realise that nobody in movies is interested in money Theyre really interested in its all an ego trip, status. If you want to stop Trump in 2024 you should figure out what you could offer Plouffes wife to let him do it. de Tocqueville. There's a big bad enemy out there, possibly with superior weaponry but. NB. E.g Introduction to Strategic History, Modern Strategy, Strategy and Defence Planning (reading now). Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison and others have been trying to push some of the principles of how to do hard things into economics and government, in similar ways to some of my arguments over the years. Grovess last personnel report concluded that his effectiveness is unfortunately lessened somewhat by the fact that he often irritates his associates, but he has extraordinary capacity to get things done. Then he was effectively fired. A history of the amazing Bell Labs which famously won more Nobels than most EU countries. , Hunter S Thompson. I wish there was something similar on the history of the LMB at Cambridge, one of our crown jewels which Whitehall (and the VC office) has gradually buried with stupid regulation. We can now test fertilised eggs for common risk factors such as mental disorders and heart attacks and. I should have read this, havent, will. British political writing depends hugely on assuming that much of the newspaper coverage is roughly true, so given much is actually invented it means the books repeat a lot of fake news and miss the point. Its crucial to remember both aspects of this genius-monster without whom probably no World War I, Lenin, Hitler etc summed up by Salisburys two comments: One misses the extraordinary penetration of the old man and he will do things of which it would be absurd to suspect any other statesman in Europe. The philosophising Tolstoy fought against the picture of an infinitely complex system in which most thoughts and actions fade to zero significance quickly but a few connect to others with highly non-linear effects. Many ideas you see from others (e.g Taleb) derive from Mandelbrot. And notice that despite their vast success Buffett & Munger have had almost zero success in persuading anybody to run their companies the way they run Berkshire! Cummings described a "completely insane situation" in March 2020 when a bizarre cocktail of events came together on one day. In particular read. People dont realise that nobody in movies is interested in money Theyre really interested in its all an ego trip, status, You can replace Hollywood with Westminster, picture/movie with political strategy, producers with MPs, and money with the public. ; 2) how to map the spread of memes and identify critical nodes in the network that, if influenced somehow, can amplify or dampen signals? For this unprecedented project in world history Groves had no huge central staff, he worked with a brilliant woman and a tiny staff with truly extreme decentralisation. Considered by many in Silicon Valley to be the best book on the details of management. The replication disaster means you have to be careful about what you believe but its still a good book. Many interesting developments and the launch of the 2024 campaign may be only a few weeks away, if Trump announces on 4 July as is being discussed in Mar-a-Lago. He replied to Yudkowskys AGI ruin, . , Gelfand and Glagoleva. Dominic Cummings Partly accessible to a non-specialist with some maths already, though very challenging for most including me. It was a direct inspiration for my terrorist demand to Boris, July 2019: we must create an ARPA. He was a mathematician who got interested in how markets work. The difficulty comes from the fact its psychologically very hard to stick to and almost all bureaucracies operate with incentives and culture that push in opposite directions. A great textbook by the worlds leading scholar on the subject. Then I realised the truth. Anybody who goes to Hollywood can see right away what the setup is Hollywood is Hollywood, theres nothing you can say about it that isnt true, good or bad. but most do not realise the last chapter is about Nietzsche and the Last Man, and this chapter is the most relevant today. Governments find it very, very hard to fund such ventures. I'll answer some over the next 48 hours, on Friday I'll focus on live questions/discussion, then tidy up after. Cummings' understanding of modern genetics, IQ, evolutionary psychology, child development and neuroscience, as evidenced by his blog and advice to Michael Gove when education minister, is a. We can now test fertilised eggs for common risk factors such as mental disorders and heart attacks and choose which egg to use for IVF. Book accompanying an OU course. If you read his blogs and trusted him on covid over the entire CDC/FDA/WHO bureaucracies, youd have come out far ahead. Sign in The real reason is most people in politics dont want to face the big questions about what government is for and how to do it better (and especially dont want to face the quality of people). Oppenheimer is better known but Groves was his boss. ), The foundational crisis of mathematics, set theory, Hilbert, Godel, and Turing. Dyson, Hawking) is wrong. Hard question (relevant to AGI safety debates! Perhaps America has elections every four years, power supply is ~100% reliable in the First World, Europe wont see millions killed in wars again, nobody lives happily/normally to 200, robots cant escape control and kill vast numbers of humans, children should study curricula controlled by the state, I support policies that undermine traditional ideas about the family will seem as quaint in 2052 as Bertrand Russell being taught by a grandfather whod met Napoleon that British naval dominance is a fact of life. As long promised (sorry! Youll understand more of how SW1 really works than from all PM memoirs of the last 30 years combined (PMs never face why they dont control much of Whitehall even after theyve gone). No doubt about that Nietzsche produced the climate in which Fascism and Hitlerism could emerge. Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison and others have been trying to push some of the principles of how to do hard things into economics and government, in similar ways to some of my arguments over the years. one of my terrorist demands when Boris asked me to go to No10, 21 July 2019). Almost no MPs, journalists or academics have any idea about just how costly such bureaucracy truly is or how these bureaucracies truly work and the criminality and near-insanity theyre capable of. What does it say about the West that their newspaper propaganda was much higher class than most elite philosophy now? The Misbehaviour of Financial Markets, Mandelbrot. NB. Steve has a startup that is a leading player in this emerging field. Almost anything good you read on strategy and conflict is based on ideas you see here. A history of ARPA-IPTO and Xerox PARC: how the internet and PC revolution was created. are classics about the presentation of information by the worlds leading expert. , Dantzig (1930, updated 1953; new edition 2007). Apr 18. I was amazed and desperate. Also you cant understand our world unless you have a sense of Nietzsches profound influence on 20th Century artists, thinkers, and politics. Vast amounts of what you read on this is rubbish. How to predict news? Hes a very unusual thinker and much more right much more often than just about anybody, partly because of how he thinks. , one of the best movies ever made. SW1 suffers such extremely powerful wilful blindness even an event as big as covid doesnt puncture consciousness in many important ways. I started like everyone young assuming those at the top of politics must be smart, interested in policy and great at organising things. I will publish soon a chronology of 1862-67 following the twists and turns of Schleswig-Holstein, the escalating conflict with Austria, the domestic conflict running through the period. The point that Producers didnt want to make a Renoir picture even if it was a success is really important. But the storyteller makes this picture incredibly beautiful. . . Dominic Cummings told Parliament that his ex-boss, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was "unfit for the job" and that government incompetence lead to thousands of excess Covid-19 deaths. How to predict news? ), Dostoyevsky. Its fascinating both for getting hard things done and how to reform science funding. In general Colin Grays work. Cited by many professional mathematicians as an inspiration. , you see a world historical genius skip between vast scales of time and space, connecting tiny things happening this moment to the biggest things affecting decades or centuries to come. In particular read Alan Kays The Power of the Context and watch the two-part YCombinator talk he gave. The Greatest Communicator, Worthlin. Almost no MPs or senior officials study him or are even midly interested. While some lessons are specific to time/place (e.g how the Senate works in 1950) the most important lessons from all such books are quite abstract and common and I assume this will be true of these classics. Please, . If you havent read it dont read another modern book until you have. Who is Dominic Cummings? I thought this was outstanding and every young person aspiring to be influential in politics should read it. For example: , Andy Grove, ex-founder/CEO of Intel. Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (3 volumes), Morris Kline. Welles dismissed the French auteur theory as not relevant to the old Hollywood where the producers called the shots, not the directors. Ill do a separate list on science funding. If you havent read it dont read another modern book until you have. (Planning to see some classics Ive missed: Intolerance; Tokyo Story; Bicycle Thieves.). Like Hoskyns (below) genuine rare insight and almost totally ignored. At every session I attended I could feel the unanimous disapproval of the audience.), Risky Business (Sometimes you just gotta say, what the fuck, make your move, what the fuck brings freedom, freedom brings opportunity, opportunity makes your future), War and Peace (the 1960s Russian TV series is really an epic movie), Whos Afraid of Virginia Wolf (Burton & Taylor). , Charlie Munger. Remember that approxmitately no MPs and few in Congress are aware of these facts or ideas yet they speculate confidently about Putins thinking on nuclear weapons. Nobel-winner, Feynman sparring partner, co-founder of Santa Fe Institute, wrote a book on complex systems for the general reader. , Leonard Susskind (2013). Now, perhaps, they have some idea of what that. SW1 suffers such extremely powerful wilful blindness even an event as big as covid doesnt puncture consciousness in many important ways. Six Easy Pieces, Feynman. is extraordinary, e.g his secret search for the truth about Leibniz. While some lessons are specific to time/place (e.g how the Senate works in 1950) the most important lessons from all such books are quite abstract and common and I assume this will be true of these classics. Perhaps America has elections every four years, power supply is ~100% reliable in the First World, Europe wont see millions killed in wars again, nobody lives happily/normally to 200, robots cant escape control and kill vast numbers of humans, children should study curricula controlled by the state, I support policies that undermine traditional ideas about the family will seem as quaint in 2052 as Bertrand Russell being taught by a grandfather whod met Napoleon that British naval dominance is a fact of life. Michael Nielsen on quantum mechanics and computers: textbook on QCs, one of the top ten cited physics books ever written. (A great highlight of Oxford for me was four-hour tutorials with RLF on Athenian democracy, Thucydides, Alexander etc.). A reader with no more than GCSE Maths can read this introduction to maths from Greece through the birth of calculus. on the hideous science funding system. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Beautiful Evidence, and Seeing With Fresh Eyes, by Edward Tufte are classics about the presentation of information by the worlds leading expert. Some supported this approach but as youd expect the worst hated it. Most of the world is not like this! So, let's conclude this list with two of his scientific heroes. (I used this to argue for checklists and transparency over the repeated failures of social services with child abuse when in the Department for Education 2011-14. Im reading this summer. And a very recent post, AGI Ruin, summarising the arguments on why artificial general intelligence is so dangerous and why controlling these dangers is so very hard. , Sipser (2005 edition). Next week I'll write something for subscribers only on 'Some basics of how to do regime change'. The United Kingdom parliamentary second jobs controversy of 2021 began with Owen Paterson and his lobbying and breach of Commons advocacy rules, which led to his resignation on 5 November, and this was followed by extensive press coverage and debate about the second jobs of other MPs, particularly Geoffrey Cox.Cox, a former Attorney General, registered a total income of 970,000 in 2020, for . But this also means theres always billion dollar bills on the pavement sometimes even trillion dollar bills, like do vaccines much faster and smarter than usual in spring 2020, and like now with 2024 approaching People, ideas, machines in that order! Robert Coram wrote a biography. On typical problems dealing with statistics, Bayes Theory, and how to improve understanding of probability. The basic arguments remain critical today. David wrote some of the breakthrough papers on quantum computers. Anybody who goes to Hollywood can see right away what the setup is Hollywood is Hollywood, theres nothing you can say about it that isnt true, good or bad. Then nationalism became generally despised by educated liberals, and so on We cant know how our own ideas will appear in the future but its fascinating how little we try to imagine how foolish our own views will inevitably appear to those looking back on us. I did pinch ideas from how Bismarck dealt with the Prussian constitutional crisis.). Hes a very unusual thinker and much more right much more often than just about anybody, partly because of how he thinks. . His. Orson Welles thought Renoir the greatest director. I've read at least some of (almost) all of them and (almost) all of most titles I refer to (not all the textbooks). The peacetime bureaucracy knew what it valued. (I knew Mark, a professor at Cambridge, who spent a huge amount of time over the past decade helping state school pupils get hold of great physics material via Isaac Physics. If you get into it you have no right to be bitter, youre the one who sat down and joined the game People who dont succeed, people whove had long bad times like Renoir Renoir was the best director ever are people who didnt want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make.
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