First, yes, I’ve read a fair amount of his writing, albeit only up to a couple years ago. And no, he’s not “uniquely bad”—quite the opposite. But I wouldn’t advise people interested in rationality to read about political strategy generally. Even though Cummings is significantly better than most—which I think he is, to clarify—that doesn’t mean it’s worth reading his material.
For those familiar with LW, I thought the distaste for politics was obvious. And yes, I think it’s rare for political strategists not to almost exclusively play level 3 and 4 simulacra games, and engage in what has been called dark arts of rationality on this blog for years.
Thanks, that clarifies things. I agree that frontpaged politics stuff has a good chance of doing more harm than good on LW. (EDIT: I originally had a typo saying “more good than harm” despite meaning the opposite.)
That said, do you think his writing on policy, rather than political strategy, has the same problem? I’ve read <5-ish essays from him, and while the Brexit stuff mostly seemed to be about political strategy, e.g. the Hollow Men essay was mostly about stories of ludiscrously dysfunctional institutions, terrible incentives throughout government, a systematic inability to fire incompetent people, people getting promoted to organisations with budgets and responsibilities which are far out of proportion to their own expertise, and so on.
These stories were surprising to me (and yet they seem quite plausible after following Covid policy in the last year), so I was in turn surprised when you said elsewhere that there was nothing to learn from him. Was that stuff obvious to you beforehand, or do you think he’s misrepresenting things, or what?
Or put differently, suppose I want my map to not have a blind spot around policy. Who or what could I read instead?
I’m happy to make more specific recommendations on how to think about policy, depending on what you’re looking for—but I’m generally happy recommending James Q. Wilson’s “Bureaucracy” and Eugene Bardach’s “A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis”—he former largely explains why things would be so dysfunctional, and the latter is a generally great introduction to understanding what policy analysis and interventions can do.
First, yes, I’ve read a fair amount of his writing, albeit only up to a couple years ago. And no, he’s not “uniquely bad”—quite the opposite. But I wouldn’t advise people interested in rationality to read about political strategy generally. Even though Cummings is significantly better than most—which I think he is, to clarify—that doesn’t mean it’s worth reading his material.
For those familiar with LW, I thought the distaste for politics was obvious. And yes, I think it’s rare for political strategists not to almost exclusively play level 3 and 4 simulacra games, and engage in what has been called dark arts of rationality on this blog for years.
Thanks, that clarifies things. I agree that frontpaged politics stuff has a good chance of doing more harm than good on LW. (EDIT: I originally had a typo saying “more good than harm” despite meaning the opposite.)
That said, do you think his writing on policy, rather than political strategy, has the same problem? I’ve read <5-ish essays from him, and while the Brexit stuff mostly seemed to be about political strategy, e.g. the Hollow Men essay was mostly about stories of ludiscrously dysfunctional institutions, terrible incentives throughout government, a systematic inability to fire incompetent people, people getting promoted to organisations with budgets and responsibilities which are far out of proportion to their own expertise, and so on.
These stories were surprising to me (and yet they seem quite plausible after following Covid policy in the last year), so I was in turn surprised when you said elsewhere that there was nothing to learn from him. Was that stuff obvious to you beforehand, or do you think he’s misrepresenting things, or what?
Or put differently, suppose I want my map to not have a blind spot around policy. Who or what could I read instead?
I’m happy to make more specific recommendations on how to think about policy, depending on what you’re looking for—but I’m generally happy recommending James Q. Wilson’s “Bureaucracy” and Eugene Bardach’s “A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis”—he former largely explains why things would be so dysfunctional, and the latter is a generally great introduction to understanding what policy analysis and interventions can do.