Fields make huge progress when they move from stories (e.g Icarus) and authority (e.g 'witch doctor') to evidence/experiment (e.g physics, wind tunnels) and quantitative models (e.g design of modern aircraft).
Tory MPs largely do not care about these poorer people. They don't care about the NHS. And the public has kind of cottoned on to that.
If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is - hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies and never believe what advertising companies tell you about 'data' unless you can independently verify it.
Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people.
Usually in politics everything is done on hunches.
Most claims you read about psychological manipulation are rubbish.
A basic problem for people in politics is that approximately none have the hard skills necessary to distinguish great people from charlatans.
Until the 20th century, medicine was more like politics than physics. Its forecasts were often bogus and its record grim. In the 1920s, statisticians invaded medicine and devised randomised controlled trials. Doctors, hating the challenge to their prestige, resisted but lost. Evidence-based medicine became routine and saved millions of lives.
Fundamental to real expertise is 1: whether the informational structure of the environment is sufficiently regular that it's possible to make good predictions and 2: does it allow high quality feedback and therefore error-correction.
Science advances by turning new ideas into standard ideas so each generation builds on the last.
MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings.
Technology enables people to improve communication with unprecedented speed, scale and iterative testing. It also allows people to wreak chaos with high leverage.
If we want leaders to make good decisions amid huge complexity, and learn how to build great teams, then we should send them to learn from people who've proved they can do it. Instead of long summer holidays, embed aspirant leaders with Larry Page or James Dyson so they can experience successful leadership.
I think the right way to deal with terrorism is to carry on with normal life, like Britain used to when it was a more serious country.
The E.U. has narrowed our horizons. It has narrowed everyone's horizons in Whitehall so they're not thinking about the big things in the world. They're not thinking about the forces changing it or what Britain can really do to contribute to them.
Music is similar to sport. There is very fast feedback, learning, and a clear hierarchy of expertise.
Almost all analysis of politics and government considers relatively surface phenomena.
Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children's arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge.
I've learned over the years that 'rational discussion' accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average.
We should stop selecting leaders from a subset of Oxbridge egomaniacs with a humanities degree and a spell as spin doctor.
