Dominic Again

I am liking Dominic Cummings's substack

The NYT, Guardian et al had no interest in the facts — particularly given the NYT’s coverage of Hillary’s emails was orders of magnitude more important than ‘Twitter-bots’. An interesting aspect of how the post-graduate classes themselves were conned en masse by misinformation about misinformation on Putin/Trump/Brexit is visible all around us today. Part of why the Left, in the form of AOC and Bernie Sanders, argue as they do on Ukraine is because they see the war against Putin as part of the war against Trump. It’s tragi-comic that such a large fraction of our post-graduate elite Idiocracy that tells itself over dinner parties that ‘we have a big problem with non-college whites falling for misinformation’ are themselves the biggest suckers for misinformation! But as I’ve remarked many times, this has usually been the case historically. It wasn’t the deplorables who fell for Stalin’s propaganda over the Ukraine famine and the Great Terror in the 1930s, it was the NYT and graduate-elites. Thucydides wrote about the same thing in the context of civil wars in Greece, in one of his most striking and immortal passages (Bk 3).  

The above is similar to what I have noted, even recently, that it was the intellectuals, not the thugs and stupid bigots, who drove the National Socialist movement.  He has noted elsewhere and repeats it in this essay that the primary difficulty in the UK during Covid was the failure to update understandings as new data became available. Anyone can misunderstand a situation that takes them by surprise. It's what you do after that that matters. Little matters more than being willing to scoff at the ideas you had last week about a subject.

I'm betting his political predictions are going to be as good on the next round as on this round. He keeps insisting that it has nothing to do with Game Theory or Cambridge Analytics or AI, but just the very simple ideas of polling and looking honestly at what is in front of you and adjusting accordingly. Seems plausible.  But we are like those politicians we abhor, not caring about the good of the party and certainly not of the country, but of our own status in our own village.  It applies to us as well. I care far more what all of you think than what my supposed demographic allies think.  That works out because you are smart and at least attempt objectivity.  But we're the best there is, statistically, and we do the same village-thing as the folks we deplore. 

Ilya Somin will tell you that voting with your village is entirely rational for your own happiness and try to give you a pass, but he doesn't take his own advice and he does care what the right answer is.