Hello I now blog HERE. If interested in why I did the referendum, read THIS. In 2019, just before going to No10, I wrote about the likely failure of UK crisis response in the next big crisis, e.g likely collapse of COBR and the 1914 Cabinet Room: #33: High performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’ If [ ]
The Prime Minister’s new Director of Communications Jack Doyle, at the PM’s request, has made a number of false accusations to the media. 1. Re Dyson. I do have some WhatsApp messages between the PM/Dyson forwarded to me by the PM. I have not found the ones that were leaked to Laura Kuenssberg on my [ ]
‘This is possibly the single largest design flaw contributing to the bad Nash equilibrium in which many governments are stuck. Every individual high-functioning competent person knows they can t make much difference by being one more face in that crowd.’ Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI expert, LessWrong etc. ‘[M]uch of our intellectual elite who think they have [ ]
Dear Vote Leave supporters LET’S HONOUR THE REFERENDUM RESULT AND GET BREXIT DONE SO THE COUNTRY CAN MOVE ON Summary: Tell your family and friends face-to-face: if Boris doesn’t get a majority, then Corbyn and Sturgeon will control the government, their official policy is to give the vote to millions of foreign citizens to cheat [ ]
People, ideas, machines in that order! Colonel Boyd. The main thing that’s needed is simply the recognition of how important seeing is, and the will to do something about it. Bret Victor. ‘[T]he transfer of an entirely new and quite different framework for thinking about, designing, and using information systems … is immensely more [ ]
Watching SW1 these days reminds me of that scene in Citizen Kane when Boss Jim Gettys confronts Orson Welles (Kane): Gettys: ‘You re making a bigger fool of yourself than I thought you would Mr Kane With anybody else I’d say what’s going to happen to you would be a lesson to you, only you’re gonna need [ ]
This blog considers two recent papers on the dynamics of scientific research: one in Nature and one by the brilliant physicist, Michael Nielsen, and the brilliant founder of Stripe, Patrick Collison, who is a very unusual CEO. These findings are very important to the question: how can we make economies more productive and what is the [ ]
I spend a lot of time these days reading papers on prediction from different fields looking for connections between methods. This is an interesting paper: On the frequency and severity of interstate wars, 2019. Lewis Fry Richardson argued that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds, from homicides to interstate wars and everything [ ]
‘Although the institutions of our culture are so amazingly good that they have been able to manage stability in the face of rapid change for hundreds of years, the knowledge of what it takes to keep civilization stable in the face of rapidly increasing knowledge is not very widespread. In fact, severe misconceptions about several [ ]
People, ideas, machines in that order! Colonel Boyd [R]ational systems exhibit universal drives towards self-protection, resource acquisition, replication and efficiency. Those drives will lead to anti-social and dangerous behaviour if not explicitly countered. The current computing infrastructure would be very vulnerable to unconstrained systems with these drives. Omohundro. For progress there is…