ESRogs

Dominic Cummings (discussed previously on LW, most recently here) is a Senior Advisor to the new UK PM, Boris Johnson. He also seems to be essentially a rationalist (at least in terms of what ideas he's paying attention to). He has posted today that his team is hiring "data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos". Perhaps some LW readers should apply. Extensive quotes below: ‘This is possibly the single largest design flaw contributing to the bad Nash equilibrium in which … many governments are stuck. Every individual high-functioning competent person knows they can’t make much difference by being one more face in that crowd.’ Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI expert, LessWrong etc. [...] Now there is a confluence of: a) Brexit requires many large changes in policy and in the structure of decision-making, b) some people in government are prepared to take risks to change things a lot, and c) a new government with a significant majority and little need to worry about short-term unpopularity while trying to make rapid progress with long-term problems. There is a huge amount of low hanging fruit — trillion dollar bills lying on the street — in the intersection of: * the selection, education and training of people for high performance * the frontiers of the science of prediction * data science, AI and cognitive technologies (e.g Seeing Rooms, ‘authoring tools designed for arguing from evidence’, Tetlock/IARPA prediction tournaments that could easily be extended to consider ‘clusters’ of issues around themes like Brexit to improve policy and project management) * communication (e.g Cialdini) * decision-making institutions at the apex of government. We want to hire an unusual set of people with different skills and backgrounds to work in Downing Street with the best officials, some as spads and perhaps some as officials. If you are already an official and you read this blog and think you fit one of these ca