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A decent-ish response: <http://www.oneill.io/2020/...
# in-london
j
d
That post makes a good point - it’s not just a question of what can be predicted from the data. We used to have an institute (ACMD) that would inform government policy with scientific facts related to drugs/narcotics. We soon saw what happened when advisers started to say alcohol was causing more harm than some illegal drugs… It could be argued that the truth didn’t suit the impression that politicians wanted to create. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt
I remember attending a panel discussion where civil servant heading the new “Universal Credit” benefit was answering questions about the UK civil service use of agile software development. The guy was extremely tall, super-photogenic and very well spoken - but extremely clueless about technology. “the Senior Civil Service is a monoculture and reacts very badly to those outside that culture” That’s the impression I got - whatever that guy does - it happens in a bubble, far, far away from technology. The impression I got was the “technology side” of things is some cheap, dirty process that we export to the lowest bidder in some other part of the world. An Alan Kay/ Bret Victor vision of “computational thinking” hasn’t been conceived of by dinosaurs of that kind…
j
@daf definitely the elephant in the room is that no one in UK gov listens to evidence!
Unfortunately if you read the blog post that Cummings links out to, he has a very long post about his trip to Dynamicland and conversations with Michael Nielsen, etc.
The irony being that Cummings lacks the self-awareness to realise he has zero chance of realising or facilitating any of the visionary possibilities he froths over
d
@jarm Is that why you wrote “unfortunately”?
j
In my opinion, by spreading his version of what Victor et al are saying, he is setting the field back potentially 5-10 years
Most of the people who will encounter that material through him for the first time are doomed to never understand it, while being in a position to badly implement it
d
I was worried it would suffer from “the Xerox Parc effect” i.e. get excited over a compelling demo, but only understand and re-implement some more superficial part of it… ?
j
Yes exactly that's what I can see happening
d
So do you have to be a chief government henchperson to visit dynamicland or can any member of the great unwashed public go there?
j
I have no idea if they're taking visitors right now. If you're in Oakland soon it's worth asking around I would imagine.
d
A few years ago, I worked on a very big government project and got into an elevator with the boss of my boss. He’s a big, pompous guy that didn’t know me although I was a lead dev - and it was fascinating to hear him describe loudly how my project was going. He went on to describe the polar opposite of the daily reality my team were facing…. I imagine that must happen a lot in the civil service…
j
I'm guessing you kept rather quiet 🙂
d
It was very depressing because he was boasting about how he managed to retain the “talent” that was fucking up our project. So worse than screwing our project - disaster guy was moving to a new project to seed new fucked-upness… and the pompous guy up in the stratosphere that never had a thought to actually talk to the guys doing the work was proud of this. Even if I wanted to take the risk of putting him straight, where would I start? Pompous guy showed no sign of wanting to talk to minions - not even a lead minion like me!
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