This is a linkpost for http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/dominic-cummings-brexit-referendum-won/
This was not the content of an article I expected to be written by the mind behind Brexit.
Why? Rationalists are more likely to embrace weird or counter intuitive positions supported by chains of reasoning. I don't mean this as a bad thing. I would think the probability of a rationalist being behind a weird and unconventional position is higher than baseline.
Right, and he addresses this in the article:
...This lack of motivation is connected to another important psychology – the willingness to fail conventionally. Most people in politics are, whether they know it or not, much more comfortable with failing conventionally than risking the social stigma of behaving unconventionally. They did not mind losing so much as being embarrassed, as standing out from the crowd. (The same phenomenon explains why the vast majority of active fund management destroys wealth and nobody learns from this fact repeated every year.)