Choice Writings of Dominic Cummings

Mostly agreed, but one lesson I took from the pandemic was that far more of public communication seemed to be outright explicit manipulation than I could've previously imagined. Examples include the initial policy on masks, as well as the endless asymmetric claims that "there is no evidence for <thing we don't like>".

So insofar as politics appears to me to be inherently manipulative, it does not make much sense to me to single out a specific person for using misleading rhetoric in a political campaign. And conversely I can't quite envision a successful political campaign that no-one would accuse of misleading rhetoric.

For instance, we just had the German federal elections, and our election posters are full of slogans I'd describe as both empty and misleading. <10-word slogans are just too short for nuance. A similar problem applies to Twitter discourse, too.

I haven't followed the Brexit campaign myself, but here are the quotes from the essay.

On lies and on the NHS:

Many of those who blame defeat on ‘lies’, including Cameron, Osborne, and Clegg themselves told flat-out lies. One example will do. Cameron and Osborne claimed repeatedly on TV, almost always unchallenged, that their new deal meant ‘after six months if you haven’t got a job you have to leave’. This is not an argument over the fairness of using a gross/net figure, like ‘£350 million’, or even a properly bogus figure like the Treasury’s £4,000 per household figure. It is a different category of claim – a flat out 100% lie. (For more details see HERE.) How much time did Today, Newsnight, and the Guardian spend explaining to people that the PM and Chancellor were lying through their teeth? Approximately none. Why? Because very few of those complaining about lies really are cross about ‘lies’ – they are cross they lost and they are not so interested in discussing a lie that undermines the pro-EU campaign’s attempt to neutralise fear of immigration.

Further, many of the same people spent the entire campaign saying ‘Vote Leave has admitted a Leave vote means leaving the Single Market, this is what will happen make no mistake…’ and now say ‘the Single Market was not an issue, Vote Leave never had a policy on it and there is no mandate for leaving it’. Cameron, Osborne, Mandelson, Campbell and Clegg spent much of the last 20 years lying through their teeth to further their own interests and prestige. Now they whine about ‘lies’. They deserved worse than they got – and reasonable Remain-ers deserved better leadership.

And elsewhere:

Some people now claim this [claim about the NHS] was cynical and we never intended to spend more on the NHS. Wrong. Boris and Gove were agreed and determined to do exactly this. On the morning of 24 June they both came into HQ. In the tiny ‘operations room’ amid beer cans, champagne bottles, and general bedlam I said to Boris – on day one of being PM you should immediately announce the extra £100 million per week for the NHS [the specific pledge we’d made] is starting today and more will be coming – you should start off by being unusual, a political who actually delivers what they promise. ‘Absolutely. ABSOLUTELY. We MUST do this, no question, we’ll park our tanks EVERYWHERE’ he said. Gove strongly agreed. If they had not blown up this would have happened. The opposite impression was created because many Tories who did not like us talking about the NHS reverted to type within seconds of victory and immediately distanced themselves from it and the winning campaign. Unlike Gove and Boris they did not learn from the campaign, they did not listen to the public. Until people trust that the NHS is a financial priority for Tories, they will have no moral authority to discuss management issues. This obvious fact is psychologically hard to absorb because of the strength of gang feelings in politics.

A tangential quote on data:

IN started with legal access to vast amounts of electoral data from at least three political parties, unofficial / illegal access to vast amounts of data from things like CCHQ data and the Crosby/Messina models built during the campaign, and vast amounts of commercial data. (CCHQ laughably claimed that there were ‘Chinese walls’ that prevented any abuse of Party data.) VL had none of these things. We could not even afford to buy standard commercial datasets (though the physicists found ingenious ways around this). We had no way even to acquire the electoral roll until the official process allowed us in early 2016, after which we had to wait a couple of months for LAs to fulfil their legal obligations to provide us with the data (which they did patchily and often late).

Finally, if you want to see his overall views of the IN campaign, it's the section "Rough balance of forces" of the essay. He mentions having to go up against numerous enormous structural disadvantages (which isn't surprising, since the government was pro-IN). For example:

IN set the legal rules. VL [Vote Leave] faced a huge imbalance in how these worked. For example, Cameron even during the official campaign could do huge events at places like the British Museum and the IN campaign did not have to account for such events as part of their £7 million. Meanwhile VL was told by the Electoral Commission that if people we did not even know put up huge signs that appeared on TV we might get billed for them.

There's no quote on Turkey.

I think it's somewhere between very early and unreasonable to ask about "post-COVID" impacts when we're probably a year away from returning to any semblance of normal globally.

I was actually thinking that this is mostly normality -- by "post-COVID" I meant "the world after COVID first shows up" rather than "the world after COVID goes away". :)

seems to contrast with them going alone on pushing for herd immunity, in what was both in retrospect bad, and predictably so according to economists and epidemiologists who were shouting about it at the time.

Would this have gone any differently if they'd been in the EU? I'm mostly asking whether Brexit itself was a good idea, not whether the UK's overall policies are good. (Though I guess a bunch of that other stuff is also relevant to evaluating Cummings' track record! I guess I'd just want to note the change in scope.)

Second, my understanding is that the stated reasoning for why to do Brexit had little or nothing to do with this type of policy freedom.

What was Cummings' stated reasoning? Googling around, the first source I could find explaining this was in this Economist interview:

BAGEHOT: Turning to the case for Brexit, what is it about the EU that you think makes it an inadequate form of governance and international co-operation in 2016, 2030, 2050?

DOMINIC CUMMINGS: In no order of priority… there is an obvious problem with democratic legitimacy (which the pro-EU people accept) if you have democratic accountability working at a national level, but a large and very important set of rules being set at a supranational level. People may accept that if they think that this new system is obviously much more effective and beneficial. But it isn’t. There are huge problems with how the EU system works. It is extraordinarily opaque, extraordinarily slow, extraordinarily bureaucratic, extraordinarily wasteful. And the advantages are very hard to quantify. I’ll give a specific example. Everyone holds up the Single Market as a wonderful thing without usually realising what it is. A rule brought in under the Single Market a decade or so ago was the Clinical Trials Directive. This regulates how the testing of drugs, including cancer drugs, operates in this country. There is no rationale whatsoever why, from the point of view of international trade, how a country organises the testing of cancer drugs should be an issue for supranational regulation.

BAGEHOT: It makes it easier to sell those drugs to a wider market of consumers.

DOMINIC CUMMINGS: No, it does not. In fact, what it has done is, as Nobel scientists and all sorts of people have said, massively slow down the process of testing and people have died unnecessarily as a result. The problem here is two-fold. It’s not just that the rule is stupid and in a rational world you wouldn’t have it. It’s that the process of changing it is almost impossible—and we still haven’t managed to do so. It’s been there now for over ten years. It is still causing trouble. The amended version comes into effect shortly. It still has all sorts of stupidities in it. Britain, left to its own devices, certainly would not do that. There’s a whole set of other examples. If two people sitting on a Shetland island want to sell olive oil to each other, the EU says they can’t sell it in containers of more than five litres. What on earth is the point of that? It’s totally pointless and saying “if we minus ourselves from rules like that, that’s somehow going to destroy jobs” is a non-sequitur. It does not follow on any sane view of economics.

This relates to a broader argument. If you look back on the long sweep of history, one of the big arguments about post-renaissance China and post-renaissance Europe concerns regulatory harmonisation. Post-renaissance China essentially harmonised the entire empire. Everyone had to do the same thing. In Europe we had a completely different system. We had regulatory competition so when, for example, the central Chinese government said “we’re not going to have any explorers, we’re going to get rid of our fleet”, that’s what happened. In Europe when explorers were told “we’re not going to fund you to go out and do that”, they went to another country and got funding from someone else.

This makes it sound to me like the vaccination case is a central example of the kind of thing Cummings wanted to change via Brexit.

I think it's somewhere between very early and unreasonable to ask about "post-COVID" impacts when we're probably a year away from returning to any semblance of normal globally. 

To the extend that this is unreasonable it's very unreasonable to say that you know the post-Brexit effects yourself. 

Second, my understanding is that the stated reasoning for why to do Brexit had little or nothing to do with this type of policy freedom.

What do you think "take back control" means when it's not about policy freedom and escaping bureaucracy from Brussels?

Which country do you think has sane clean air policies? To me it feels like one of the most annoying features of German policy making regarding COVID that clean air isn't given much weight.

Moving to the actual point, there are policies where EU rules interfer and there are policies where EU rules don't have much of an effect. The way drugs get licensed is one where EU rules matter a lot and thus it relates to the Brexit.

On the other hand I'm not seeing how Brexit has an effect on masks or clean air. 

Sorry, I deliberated for a while on whether to include it, but for a number of reasons decided I wanted to just ignore the politics-as-mindkiller and focus on everything else. Ideally I would have mentioned something about this, I just felt like addressing it in any respect would immediately lead to discussion about politics-as-mindkiller and not help. Also I didn't think this post would get much publicity. Still don't really regret it.

I will say though, here, I think >90% of the value I got from his writings was orthogonal to ideology-level politics. I think operational-level politics is super interesting and with some effort we should be able to talk about it orthogonally to ideology-level politics, even if we are not yet at the level of being able to talk about ideology-level politics without being mind-killed.

It seesm to me that the only way to make that judgement is to actually read Cummings describe his cause.

What grounds do we have for taking that description at face value? I don't think that even his supporters believe his qualities include scrupulous honesty.

Generally, it's hard to judge whether someone does things for causes you agree with or don't agree with when you don't know what the causes are. 

One way to do this is to trust the people when they claim to tell you what their motives are. But Cummings spends his time talking about how politicians need to lie about that, and talking about how to do that type of manipulation well. And ceteris paribus, I will trust someone less if they say they study how to lie effectively. I'm not saying I don't trust Cummings - I think he's relatively honest, and extremely / unfortunately so for a political figure - I'm saying that I don't think encouraging people to learn the skills he wants to teach is a good thing for enhancing trust more generally.

First, I already agreed this was true. But if you write about the urgent need for planning for biosecurity a year before a pandemic, quote a biosecurity report that mentions 8ish diseases, you cut a few from your block quote for concision, and then one of the 8 that you didn't specific use in your block quote (but which you were definitely writing about!) occurs in a global pandemic... I just think it's pretty reasonable to say "I wrote about this". I might not do it per se, but if a friend of mine did it, I wouldn't bat an eyelid. If a random acquaintance did it, I would stop for a second, think about it, decide it seemed fine. If you write a fair amount about a report warning of some things, and then one of those things happens, you get to say "you wrote about that". 

Second, I think there's a very important distinction between truth-seeking and truth-telling, as comes up regarding Cummings. I understand this is a pretty apologist stance but I think it's super important here. Normally people have neither, and sometimes people have both. But I think it's pretty consistent to have a model of him where he is truth-seeking but not always truth-telling.

For example, he talks about reading a lot of history in a truth-seeking way and how he's literally trying to piece together what actually happened around Bismarck because everything is so untrustworthy, and he waxes extensively on how one should interact in government in a way that continuously excises the oft-repeated political narratives and seeks truth instead. BUT he also runs campaigns that make public slogans that are slightly misleading in an unimportant way (350M), or publicly says he warned of X when instead he wrote a warning about everything in a report that included X.

These statements are a little fishy, I agree, and you should flag him as someone who you might not want to directly believe all public statements from. It also seems fine if you go more extreme, and say he's the type of person who you can't trust, though others might personally still trust him and different people should have different takes on this.

BUT I still think we should describe him as truth-seeking, especially if I flag it as "from a different perspective". I imagine you won't want to read much of his writing, but I think probably if you read a few posts of it you would see that he's making a weird distinction between {how you yourself think, and how you talk to your friends and colleagues while hugging the truth} and {communicating publicly, where everybody is constantly lying, in part because you can only get across a snippet of information to people}. I don't really know how to reconcile these personally, because I don't know much about public communication. And I personally am not happy that he does it—in fact, it's super annoying, because it makes it so much harder for his allies to claim moral high ground, and in fact causes a bunch of people to distrust him. But I still think pretty strongly that we should describe him as truth-seeking, because A) it's true, and B) hardly any people in politics are truth-seeking and I think we can learn a ton from him.

ETA: ryan_b makes the same point below more concisely, and provides a better example: that "the VoteLeave campaign applied basic epistemics, at his direction". I think this is a great example, and there are other similar anecdotes, like their success in the referendum on the Northwest Regional Assembly. 

And more:
Kuenssberg challenged him on Vote Leave’s central promise – a £350m Brexit dividend for the NHS. “You knew very well then, and you know very well now, that that figure didn’t include the so-called rebate, the money that the UK got to keep,” she said. “Yes,” Cummings replied.

He explained that he used the figure to focus the debate on the “balance sheet” of Britain’s EU membership, and to “drive the Remain campaign and the people running it crazy”.

“So it was a deliberate trap for the other side?” asked Kuenssberg. 

“Yeah,” Cummings replied. 

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/07/dominic-cummings-has-admitted-leave-campaign-won-lying-we-should-never-forgive-him  

Looks to me like your average political animal, focussed mainly on winning rather than truth.

I looked a bit into the actual policy. It's not a question about whether or not there are farming subsidies but for what subsidies are paid. As the forward for the 2021 document says:

This is an exciting time for English farming. We will be phasing out 
Direct Payments and introducing a new system that rewards farmers 
and land managers while delivering additional public goods that improve 
the environment.

Changes of this significance can be intimidating, and it is natural that many 
farmers are worried about the phasing out of Direct Payments. We will move 
to the new system gradually, and make changes where needed if the new policies do not work as intended. It is vital that farmers have time to adapt.

We have committed to maintaining the current annual budget in every year of this Parliament. This means funds from Direct Payments will be redirected straight back into Countryside Stewardship and our new schemes. The same amount will be available to the sector, though the way it is distributed will change

The way the money was distributed with the EU rules was having stupid affects on making unheathly food cheaper compared to healthy food. Insteadly, thinking about how farming can happen in a way that produces public goods and organizing subsidy payments to further public goods is much smarter then existing policy.

This likely means that some farmers who don't want to change their practices will lose money relatively to what they had before while other farmers gain money.