Brexit: Boris' Big Belgian Bangers - The Bear and Badger

Funkstain

Eh, you're right. Find it tough not to get emotional about this colossal fuck up of a govt

davyK

It's all smarts and no wisdom.

AI, ML et al are fine for decision support. But nothing else.

Once a decision is supported by a process that the decision maker does not understand we move into problem areas - not dis-similar to the financial crisis in which too many people made decisions about products that they did not understand at a fundamental level.

Just as overly complex financial products were created, so could predictive models - and to jump on that horse and go all in is complete and total folly.

I genuinely believe these clowns are unwittingly playing with fire and they will do real lasting harm. I am of a conservative nature when it comes to defence. I know I'm probably out of synch with a lot of people here in that regard. But it underpins our existence and this clown Cummings is starting to tinker with that.

The world is not a safe place for us - partly because of our foreign policy and our shackles to the US.

What really worries me about Cummings is that he seems to be a spreadsheet fanboy. The world doesn't run off Excel but he seems to think he can and throwing enough big brains at it will make it work.

I haven't read the article - something about trying to build up a technological capability again (we did throw it all away in the 80s you know - GEC, ICI, ICL et al).

That is fine.

I'd like us to be able to build our own power stations.

Some folk get rich off government contracts and may be chums of those in power. That is fine too - up to a point.

We have to accept that has always happened and is going to happen - what does worry me is the hollowing out of competency in the upper ranks - the competency of those that this government will give the contracts to. We are playing with grown ups now in a global economic world - and chinless wonders just don't cut it any more.

Our Prime Minister still thinks he is playing at debate in the Oxford Union. He is in the real world now.

This government seems hell bent on it. So be it.

Roujin

Dom Cumming's blog is hilarious, I recommend not reading it because he is a fucking buffoon, he feels like he has big dunning-kruger energy to me.

This is his about statement from the blog:

Someone who thinks they are the smartest guy in the room wrote:

About
I read Ancient & Modern History at Oxford University (graduated 1994).

I worked in Russia 1994-7 on various projects.

I was Director of Research then Campaign Director of Business for Sterling and the ‘no’ campaign (to stop Britain joining the euro) 1999-2002.

I worked on various projects 2003-7, including trying to stop the EU Constitution being enacted (2004-5) and helping to run the referendum campaign against the North East Regional Assembly (2004) which won 80-20.

I was Michael Gove’s main adviser September 2007 – January 2014, with a break May 2010-December 2010. (NB. BBC people in particular: I said in September 2013 I was leaving and I left voluntarily in January 2014, do not put me in your lists of ‘people who were fired’ as you are prone to.)

I have never been a member of a political party.

This page is for an essay I wrote over a few years, ‘Some thoughts on education and political priorities‘, that (in draft form) was published by the Guardian on 11 October 2013.

This page gives an Index of various things I’ve written.

In 2015/16 I ran the official leave campaign in the EU referendum, Vote Leave.

I run a company, North Wood, that tries to solve problems (management, political, communication).

Email me on: [email protected]

Note how he gives details of exactly what he was doing in every other job he chooses to list, apart from his three years in Russia. That's very interesting Dom, why can't you tell us about the russia stuff? I'm sure it's not important, afterall, it's not like after returning from your stint in russia, your next list of career moves involves helping out with anti-EU campaigns and a brief stint inserting yourself into westminster by helping fuck up the schools with Gove.

Also the bit of his blog about education reform is password protected lmao.

His essay or at least the excerpt on Odyssean Education is just him waffling on about how the government is all shit, and how everything needs to be modernised and we need to improve decision making and reduce waste and how everything should be some data driven fuckfest, except it's all wishy washy and he never gives any sources or uses any tangible examples to illustrate his points. He comes across like someone who thinks they are really clever, before they get reality checked hard by an actual galaxy brain. Luckily someone in his comments section for that piece does a bang up job taking him to task for writing such a shit "essay"

tl:dr Dom Cum is a wasteman and he's giving you his email address so feel free to email him and ask him what he actually thinks he's going to do, other than line his own pockets and those of his colleagues in the data industry.

Armitage_Shankburn

I think the Russia stuff is blanked because it was a commercial failure. I think it's included nonetheless because a certain subset of readers will then assume he is some kind of ex-spy

Roujin

I guess it would spoil his "I'm very smart, I know all about data" if he had to disclose that despite his immense knowledge and foresight into the needs for things to be more data driven, for people to have a greater understanding of statistics in addition to whatever else they may also wish to study, so they can be better decision makers, he lacked the decision making ability to predict that his business ventures would be a failure based on the data he must surely have consulted prior to setting them up.

SpaceGazelle

What's most alarming is how Cummings seems to see scientists in an entirely political way. Quoting Michael Nielson in a political blog is all kinds of scary.

SpaceGazelle

Actually it's not scary, it's just stupid.

Armitage_Shankburn

I am fascinated by his blogs, have read many. I don't think the guy is dumb, at all. I don't know if her is angry or blinkered. My best take on his blogs is: they're like Adam Curtis documentaries. Amazing to experience, but when you try to explain the argument to a mate, it usually resembles this sunny bit at the end.

https://youtu.be/0smTejZF42c

LarryDavid

No doubt in years to come Curtis will make a doc about him, explaining what Cummings thought he was up to & how it threw up a whole host of unforeseen consequences.

"But then something Dominic Cummings hadn't anticipated happened..."

*Burial plays on soundtrack*

EDIT: actually he'd probably get off on that, so I hope it doesn't happen and he merely gets shitcanned when Boris next looks for someone to take the blame.

Armitage_Shankburn

I can hear the soundtrack

https://youtu.be/i5UU2TxOcZs

mistercrayon

Johnson will sack every other person first before he sacks the person who got him the prime minister job.

SpaceGazelle

Cummings is not dumb but I don't think most of his ideas are going to translate well into a Tory government. Pre-pandemic, the govt spent a shitload on data science hiring and I mean a lot.

The tendency to wield a machine learning hammer and think every problem is a nail is strong and my bet is he's going all in with this in every conceivable area of politics and the civil service. For a start this is only going to confuse most MPs and Tory MPs are going to protest the most.

There's no doubt ML is going to change things in a way most people won't believe but trying to force that by throwing money at it is not the way. It's like the early days of the internet when everyone was saying how world changing it was going to be and then nothing really happened much but slowly and quietly it changed things perhaps more than the initial hype.

davyK

He is smart but I doubt his wisdom.

monkey

No one’s smart enough to do what he’s attempting to do. Which seems to be restructuring the entire country’s economy and governance in 18 months during a plague. All by himself. Using ministers and civil servants as meat shields when each new thing goes tits up.

poprock

He’s just seeing the current chaos as an opportunity to rush through his agenda.

davyK

That my main issue. His agenda. When did his fucking name ever appear on a ballot paper?

SpaceGazelle

Nor did Allistair Campbell's but that's the b way it is.

RedDave2

davyK wrote:

That my main issue. His agenda. When did his fucking name ever appear on a ballot paper?

Well, as an odd defence - it's very strange why he has been pushed to the fore on this. I'm pretty certain many Ministers in governments through out history and in various countries will have advisors who the minister is using to both guide and suggest the best course of action. So having an unelected person do the guiding isnt that strange. In theory, we vote the person in who decides which people to listen to. After all, we dont vote ministers into their roles in cabinet. Stands to reason that they would rely on advisors. What is strange is that He has been front and centre for a while. I dont know if its his ego that demands it or is it a Boris thing so that he has someone to hang if it all goes tits up.

Your description of him as someone who lives in Excel spreadsheets does come across when you check out his blog stuff. Given how Facebook, Google etc. have come to dominate our world, maybe he isnt wrong to look at that stuff and even focus on it but it does feel too detached for something you will base a system of running a government / country on.

davyK

There is solace in knowing his name I suppose.

It's the ones we don't hear about we should be more concerned about perhaps.

monkey

SpaceGazelle wrote:

Nor did Allistair Campbell's but that's the b way it is.

Alistair Campbell carried out Tony Blair's agenda. I doubt Johnson could tell you half of what Cummings is up to.

davyK

And data is good. But it isn't everything.

Not enough emphasis is placed on the data's shortcomings. Any dataset will have limitations be it accuracy, completeness etc Whether any sample is representative etc. Surely the whole poll performance tells data heads that...

Context, experience, insight, even empathy. The world is not clockwork. Even Newton got that wrong.

LivDiv

Yeah but Newton never got his dick wet.

SpaceGazelle

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data is a thing and if you have a large enough dataset it will find complex patterns that are currently thought to be random. This is MLs power and it is sort of mindblowing but it absolutely needs gigantic datasets.

It's so size dependent that the learning algo is actually secondary in consideration and people realised from about 2001 that if the dataset was big enough the simplest algo could learn the same patterns as a complex one. From more or less that time on the goal was to spend money on gathering good data and spend less on the actual learning machine. This is why big data is so valuable. The FB database must be one of the hottest intellectual properties on Earth.

It's not fully known what ML can't do but the set size of that is shrinking all the time.

Diluted Dante

RedDave2 wrote:

davyK wrote:

That my main issue. His agenda. When did his fucking name ever appear on a ballot paper?

Well, as an odd defence - it's very strange why he has been pushed to the fore on this. I'm pretty certain many Ministers in governments through out history and in various countries will have advisors who the minister is using to both guide and suggest the best course of action.

How many times in history has the Chancellor had his advisors appointed by another advisor?

SpaceGazelle

monkey wrote:

SpaceGazelle wrote:

Nor did Allistair Campbell's but that's the b way it is.

Alistair Campbell carried out Tony Blair's agenda. I doubt Johnson could tell you half of what Cummings is up to.

Well there is that, yes.

davyK

Diluted Dante wrote:

That my main issue. His agenda. When did his fucking name ever appear on a ballot paper?

Well, as an odd defence - it's very strange why he has been pushed to the fore on this. I'm pretty certain many Ministers in governments through out history and in various countries will have advisors who the minister is using to both guide and suggest the best course of action.

How many times in history has the Chancellor had his advisors appointed by another advisor?

I am sure there are Sir Humphreys everywhere too. Special advisors et al.

The difference is this guy appears to be setting the agenda.

Now maybe that's what the media wants us to think.

I don't have him down as evil or anything silly like that - just he appears to have an overly large influence. And there do not appear to be any checks and balances. I do like to think that Johnson knows his mind and that's the backstop - but Johnson isn't a detail man - at least when it comes to modelling et al. At least I don't see him that way.

Of course he will be ejected at some point. It's a transient thing (unlike the Sir Humphreys) They all are bounced when things go wrong. Just what damage will be done before that.

davyK

His driveabout sticks in my craw too. And the inhuman fuckwits we have heard about that have had to be fired that he appears to want around.

Arrogant fucker with no mandate.

I hate to think I'm falling for hype and hate campaign though. He's neither the first nor last. But he is getting noticed and he shouldn't be.

monkey

He seems to be the only one that has some sort of idea of what a post-Brexit Britain might look like. The rest of them are there either from being intellect-free, nationalistic, small-minded flag-wavers or there to exploit that first group for their own self-advancement - political or monetary.

It’s why Cummings avoided the boot. The only one there with a hint of a plan.

SpaceGazelle

Let's face it he's probably more competent than Boris, who's not daft himself, but at some point the Tory backbench is going to have a shitfit at this new and weird direction and they'll both be gone.

davyK

I don't have the energy to stay annoyed about it if I'm honest.....

They probably complement one another in their strengths which is why is was selected. I just don't trust them or anyone else for that matter.

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