Just scanned through the post. FYI, I broadly disagree with this and a few other takes I read from Dominic Cummings when it comes to enforcing ambitious political changes based on strategies he presents as the rational choice viz a viz predicted scenarios. But don’t want to get into detail here.
Highlighting this point from Dominic’s summary:
The Valley is the natural place to build the best model of the electorate and some weird subculture there is more likely than DC to look at the problem with the fresh eyes it needs. It’s also the natural place to think about how to have startups replace parts of the US government and the sort of policies to pursue if you can control the government.
In response, this excerpt encapsulates a more open/less insular approach to collaborating on innovation across society that I’m more excited about:
The best we can do—as technologists, financiers, policymakers, and above all citizens—is to find ways to pursue innovation in an experimental and flexible manner, with a conscious focus on improving society as a whole. Without a spirit of collaboration, we may be limited by ideologies like technocapitalism, which promises inevitable progress and epistemic certainty while concentrating economic power, debasing public discourse, and failing to live up to its grand ideals.
Those were the last sentences from The Case Against Naive Technocapitalist Optimism. That article seems rather moderately and reasonably argued, and somewhat interesting (though doesn’t dig much specifically into how technocapitalism debases public discourse or fails to live up to its grand ideals; rather points to lack of fundamental research and selectively motivated applied research delivered by the industry, and sticks to well-travelled economic ideas and issues like income disparity).
I don’t think Cummings believes what the article calls technocapitalism. It defines as a fundamental aspect:
Furthermore, they believe that technological innovation is necessarily created by private enterprise, and in particular through the institution of the startup, funded by private venture capital funds.
If you read Cummings recruiting call for wierdo’s he calls for creating significant technical innovation within government with new technologies like seeing rooms which don’t seem to be developed by private for-profit enterprise.
The general idea is that the government used to be able to do technological innovation and that a government that controls the government could again get the government to do technological innovation that’s currently not done.
When Cummings speaks about “startups replacing parts of the US government” he’s not talking about privately funded and owned companies replacing parts of the US government but about creating new governmental organizations.
We also need institutional change to allow a re-organisation of expert attention on important problems. Academia and markets are not aiming the most able people at our biggest problems.
Ah, I was vaguely under the impression indeed that Dominic’s article suggested for-profit tech start-ups would replace government departments. So thanks for correcting that impression.
To be clear though, that’s not core to what I’m disagreeing about here. My disagreement here is not about for-profit entities coming in and running operations more efficiently, it’s about insular monopolistic actors privileging their technical expertise for deciding how to built the systems that will hold sway over the rest of society, while attempting little real dialogue with the diverse persons whose lives they will impact.
IMO Taiwan’s g0v collaborative is an impressive example of technical innovation for amongst others resolving disinformation and tensions between the polar sides of technocratic/technocapatalistic top-down enforcement and populist bottom-up destabilisation (tricky not to get stuck in political idealogy when discussing those issues).
Just read these articles on g0v and vTaiwan. They’re kinda idealistically promotional, but still highly recommend them:
Cumming’s conception of a seeing room, which from a casual glance seems to be about providing key government decision-makers with a more accurate and more processable overview for making a big decision.
with the way vTaiwan activists compile digestable information from responses to ‘rolling surveys’ amongst stakeholders and relevant experts, before inviting them to deliberate and build a rough consensus on stances online.
To be clear though, that’s not core to what I’m disagreeing about here. My disagreement here is not about for-profit entities coming in and running operations more efficiently, it’s about insular monopolistic actors privileging their technical expertise for deciding how to built the systems that will hold sway over the rest of society, while attempting little real dialogue with the diverse persons whose lives they will impact.
Cummings describes how their focus group’s found that people in them were talking about wanting an immigration system like Australia and then they added that wish into their platform.
Focus groups usually don’t give you very detailed policies but part of the plan with them is to do create a platform that actually includes all those things that 70-80% of the population want and that currently gets ignored.
IMO Taiwan’s g0v collaborative is an impressive example of technical innovation for amongst others resolving disinformation and tensions between the polar sides of technocratic/technocapatalistic top-down enforcement and populist bottom-up destabilisation (tricky not to get stuck in political idealogy when discussing those issues).
Audrey Tang was a hacker from Silicon Valley who wanted to do innovation in politics. That’s not possible in the US or UK right now but is in Taiwan, so they went back to Taiwan to do it there where they created what would be a startup in Cummings sense of the word. Audrey Tang is completely the kind of person Cummings wanted to hire in his call for weirdo’s.
I don’t think there’s any good basis for suggesting that Cummings wouldn’t want systems to listen to diverse experts.
When Cummings worked in the Department of Education, that department was so disfunctional as he describes that it couldn’t repair the lift in their building. There are a lot of decisions involved in making such a system more functional that are not about building some policy consensus. Making good organizations about organizing large government departments is important.
(tricky not to get stuck in political idealogy when discussing those issues).
Yes, people like you or Glen Weyl let political idealogy cloud their ability to see clearly and that leads to errors just as thinking that what Cummings means when he says startup is something private.
Cummings explicitly tells everyone that they have to watch Brad Victors videos and Dynamicland. Brad Victor setup Dynamicland in a way that’s very intentional about not building technology average early tech adopter but for a wide variety of diverse people.
The main political fight is whether you want an enviroment where radically new departments (and that includes things like the one that Audrey Tang runs) are possible or not and not about the individual choices of technology.
I would be careful here about ascribing some singular definitive personal motivation to why I’m sharing these opinions (in the vain of ‘he and that other guy he talked with are clouded by ideology and that’s why he jumped to this factually incorrect conclusion’ or ‘he didn’t announce the names of the authors of a draft so based on that one can conclude this person doesn’t prioritise transparency’). Particularly when you quickly spot something about my take to disagree with, and might only grasp a small portion of where I’m coming from. Better to first have an actual face-to-face conversation and listen, paraphrase, and check in on each other’s views along with the context needed to interpret them. I’m deliberately not characterising you here based on your comments. I try somewhat awkwardly to stay open to what I’m missing.
That having said, you’ve clearly read a lot more about Dominic Cummings’ work than I have. I appreciate the detailed remarks. They help me break up and reassemble the broad impressions I personally got from reading a few blogposts.
On getting input from focus groups from 70-80% of the population – is the focus here on soliciting and addressing commonly held or majority views that are ignored, or also on aggregating distinct minority views?
Brad Victor setup Dynamicland in a way that’s very intentional about not building technology average early tech adopter but for a wide variety of diverse people.
This sounds cool. Let me watch a video of his.
On setting up organisations that can manage themselves, I agree that this seems a major problem in the US government for instance (and also in e.g. the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the stories I’ve heard of gross misspending and budgets reallocated to political ends from insiders involved there). This EconTalk podcast suggested actually recruiting an experienced chief operating officer in the US government, or at least to oversee an effective central auditing department. I don’t have strong opinions about that one – only that the incentives and power dynamics that you’re enmeshed in within such a big bureaucracy seem really tricky to work with.
The main political fight is whether you want an enviroment where radically new departments (and that includes things like the one that Audrey Tang runs) are possible or not
Did you mean that this is what Dominic Cummings or perhaps you would see as the main political fight here? I wouldn’t define it as such. I guess part of the tension in our conversation comes from talking past each other about what you could see as two separate agendas.
Just scanned through the post. FYI, I broadly disagree with this and a few other takes I read from Dominic Cummings when it comes to enforcing ambitious political changes based on strategies he presents as the rational choice viz a viz predicted scenarios. But don’t want to get into detail here.
Highlighting this point from Dominic’s summary:
In response, this excerpt encapsulates a more open/less insular approach to collaborating on innovation across society that I’m more excited about:
Those were the last sentences from The Case Against Naive Technocapitalist Optimism. That article seems rather moderately and reasonably argued, and somewhat interesting (though doesn’t dig much specifically into how technocapitalism debases public discourse or fails to live up to its grand ideals; rather points to lack of fundamental research and selectively motivated applied research delivered by the industry, and sticks to well-travelled economic ideas and issues like income disparity).
I don’t think Cummings believes what the article calls technocapitalism. It defines as a fundamental aspect:
If you read Cummings recruiting call for wierdo’s he calls for creating significant technical innovation within government with new technologies like seeing rooms which don’t seem to be developed by private for-profit enterprise.
The general idea is that the government used to be able to do technological innovation and that a government that controls the government could again get the government to do technological innovation that’s currently not done.
When Cummings speaks about “startups replacing parts of the US government” he’s not talking about privately funded and owned companies replacing parts of the US government but about creating new governmental organizations.
Cummings says very explicitely:
Ah, I was vaguely under the impression indeed that Dominic’s article suggested for-profit tech start-ups would replace government departments. So thanks for correcting that impression.
To be clear though, that’s not core to what I’m disagreeing about here. My disagreement here is not about for-profit entities coming in and running operations more efficiently, it’s about insular monopolistic actors privileging their technical expertise for deciding how to built the systems that will hold sway over the rest of society, while attempting little real dialogue with the diverse persons whose lives they will impact.
IMO Taiwan’s g0v collaborative is an impressive example of technical innovation for amongst others resolving disinformation and tensions between the polar sides of technocratic/technocapatalistic top-down enforcement and populist bottom-up destabilisation (tricky not to get stuck in political idealogy when discussing those issues).
Just read these articles on g0v and vTaiwan. They’re kinda idealistically promotional, but still highly recommend them:
https://wearenotdivided.reasonstobecheerful.world/taiwan-g0v-hackers-technology-digital-democracy/
http://www.tomatleeblog.com/archives/175327882
As a case in point, I would try comparing
Cumming’s conception of a seeing room, which from a casual glance seems to be about providing key government decision-makers with a more accurate and more processable overview for making a big decision.
with the way vTaiwan activists compile digestable information from responses to ‘rolling surveys’ amongst stakeholders and relevant experts, before inviting them to deliberate and build a rough consensus on stances online.
Cummings describes how their focus group’s found that people in them were talking about wanting an immigration system like Australia and then they added that wish into their platform.
Focus groups usually don’t give you very detailed policies but part of the plan with them is to do create a platform that actually includes all those things that 70-80% of the population want and that currently gets ignored.
Audrey Tang was a hacker from Silicon Valley who wanted to do innovation in politics. That’s not possible in the US or UK right now but is in Taiwan, so they went back to Taiwan to do it there where they created what would be a startup in Cummings sense of the word. Audrey Tang is completely the kind of person Cummings wanted to hire in his call for weirdo’s.
I don’t think there’s any good basis for suggesting that Cummings wouldn’t want systems to listen to diverse experts.
When Cummings worked in the Department of Education, that department was so disfunctional as he describes that it couldn’t repair the lift in their building. There are a lot of decisions involved in making such a system more functional that are not about building some policy consensus. Making good organizations about organizing large government departments is important.
Yes, people like you or Glen Weyl let political idealogy cloud their ability to see clearly and that leads to errors just as thinking that what Cummings means when he says startup is something private.
Cummings explicitly tells everyone that they have to watch Brad Victors videos and Dynamicland. Brad Victor setup Dynamicland in a way that’s very intentional about not building technology average early tech adopter but for a wide variety of diverse people.
The main political fight is whether you want an enviroment where radically new departments (and that includes things like the one that Audrey Tang runs) are possible or not and not about the individual choices of technology.
Started watching this talk by Bret Victor on representing code for humans. Interesting, thanks for the share
I would be careful here about ascribing some singular definitive personal motivation to why I’m sharing these opinions (in the vain of ‘he and that other guy he talked with are clouded by ideology and that’s why he jumped to this factually incorrect conclusion’ or ‘he didn’t announce the names of the authors of a draft so based on that one can conclude this person doesn’t prioritise transparency’). Particularly when you quickly spot something about my take to disagree with, and might only grasp a small portion of where I’m coming from. Better to first have an actual face-to-face conversation and listen, paraphrase, and check in on each other’s views along with the context needed to interpret them. I’m deliberately not characterising you here based on your comments. I try somewhat awkwardly to stay open to what I’m missing.
That having said, you’ve clearly read a lot more about Dominic Cummings’ work than I have. I appreciate the detailed remarks. They help me break up and reassemble the broad impressions I personally got from reading a few blogposts.
On getting input from focus groups from 70-80% of the population – is the focus here on soliciting and addressing commonly held or majority views that are ignored, or also on aggregating distinct minority views?
This sounds cool. Let me watch a video of his.
On setting up organisations that can manage themselves, I agree that this seems a major problem in the US government for instance (and also in e.g. the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the stories I’ve heard of gross misspending and budgets reallocated to political ends from insiders involved there). This EconTalk podcast suggested actually recruiting an experienced chief operating officer in the US government, or at least to oversee an effective central auditing department. I don’t have strong opinions about that one – only that the incentives and power dynamics that you’re enmeshed in within such a big bureaucracy seem really tricky to work with.
Did you mean that this is what Dominic Cummings or perhaps you would see as the main political fight here? I wouldn’t define it as such. I guess part of the tension in our conversation comes from talking past each other about what you could see as two separate agendas.