craner

Beast of Burden
Craner might know. The way he spoke about him a while back suggested he'd been following him for a while.

The first thing I read about him was the intriguing portrait in Tim Shipman's All Out War, a very mainstream source. After that I looked at his blog and website. That was about 2 years ago, when he was out of the loop, sniping from the sidelines, and things were basically quiet for him. It was all about Game Theory and physics and electoral strategy. According to Tom Chivers he has been quite recently immersed in a nexus of bloggers called 'Rationalists' (LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, Eliezer Yudkowsky): I know nothing about this, but maybe Vimothy does.
 

version

Well-known member
The media seem to be trying to turn him into another Bannon. The evil genius behind the curtain, the clawed hand at the controls.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I don't think it was ever explained. It might have had something to do with his work with Gove at Education, even though they were still pals then. He had an extreme early career: Shipman portrayed him holed up in Siberia obsessively reading Dostoevsky and Machiavelli while trying to set up a private airline in the teeth of the Russian state. He's cutthroat, iconoclastic, hates the sclerotic elites and Establishment networks, likes Creative Destruction and mathematical theory. He was responsible for Vote Leave declaring war against both UKIP and the ERG. He had that reputation and was also comfortable with being unpopular: not the chummy, complacent Cameron charade, so it is easy to see why he would dismiss him and be irritated by him. He also got Gove and Johnson on board for Brexit, which probably won it: another reason for fear and loathing.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
This is why I said earlier on that what we are about to experience is what it would be like if Vimothy was the most powerful person in the country.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
The weirdest thing in all of this is developing a growing respect for Philip Hammond's refusal to fold. Weird that the whole entryist issue widely publicised around the time of Corbyn's election, is now being portrayed as a Conservative issue, and a fight for the 'soul' of the Tory party (weird words to write).

First Bercow, now Hammond - which other terrible people will join this list...?
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Certainly, but I'm also impressed by the way he's facing down these psychopaths, under no doubt immense pressure/threats (aside from the ones that are public). I may not agree with him about anything else, but that's immaterial right now.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I actually read Tetlock after reading about it on Cummings' website so interested to see it mentioned.

He has that long standing hatred of the EU that lots of Tories have, that I don't really get - been involved in Euro-skeptic politics for a long time, was very against us joining the Euro and campaigned against it IIRC. But he wasn't in favouur of leaving without a deal, so perhaps he thinks that this is the only way to force through change, and break the logjam. When he was in Education he appeared to want to transform the country into a hothousing academy for scientists, something like Singapore. What I find bizarre is that he thinks that this is or was at all possible, given our education system, what most teachers are like etc etc.

It might be more interesting to thing about his character than his politics - What comes over from reading his writing is that he's very clever but lacks empathy - humanistic values are a closed book to him, and he values hard sciences more than anything else. That emotional short circuit that lots of men have. Doesn't come over as someone for whom humility comes naturally either. Most politicians at least pretend to have these qualities. I imagine that dealing with the slowness and customs of standard Parlimentary procedure must be totally enraging for someone like him, what he doesn't seem to get is that this processes are there precisely to hobble lunatics like him. In summary - he'd be great at putting a man on Mars, but I wouldn't let him babysit my kids.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Probably worth adding that the Brexit vote will be seen as a vindication of his strategy - he alludes to this in one of his long essays as just "a couple of quants in the backroom" but I suspect it was something a lot more complex and corrupt than that. They'll be trying to do the same thing again with a GE, thus all the Tory ads requesting information on FB from a few weeks ago.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Having this weird vision now of what it would be like if Cummings was to babysit. Compulsory dose of Piractam alongside a high protein no carb dinner, algebra cramming 'til midnight, each child only allowed to speak in different non-European language, Cummings answering in Mandarin. 0-5 random "Black Swan" events to take place during the evening so they get used to dealing with randomness i.e. Cummings turns off power at the mains, Cummings rides round on child's trike swearing through a megaphone, tells one of them they're adopted etc.
 
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