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People insist on treating Dominic Cummings as a second Napoleon in part because he bought the AI hype
Similarly, he thinks the civil service doesn't have enough scientists and too many classicists. This is a cliché going back to the 1930s at least and possibly Lloyd George
Harold Wilson was perhaps its biggest exponent - wanted the service to be "production oriented"
@DEHEdgerton would remind us all that this tradition completely ignored the midcentury's huge and influential corps of scientific civil servants.
@DEHEdgerton But is anyone arguing for bringing back the research establishments? Well, me, but I am the wrong kind of verbose extremist blogger. Ha, no
@DEHEdgerton Also, he wants to recruit more senior CS from the private sector. Literally every prime minister in my lifetime has had this as a policy aim. There are good reasons why this has been a multi-decadal fiasco
@DEHEdgerton The point I am driving at here is that Cummings' new, exciting, and radical ideas are old, boring, and conformist clichés
@DEHEdgerton Political people are hugely impressed because he engages with ideas and substance at all, this usually being effectively banned
@DEHEdgerton He is too close to the powerful to be dismissed as unrespectable for reading books (the usual strategy). The horrible result is that in the kingdom of the pig-ignorant, the half-baked is king
@DEHEdgerton Finally, that recruiting more civil service scientists is a Dangerous Idea from the Intellectual Dark Web is a testament to the history of Tory extremism. In 1978, or France or Ireland, nobody would think it anything other than normal
