Peter Woit, Dominic Cummings and How To Hire Whizz-Kids

Dominic Cummings has a widely-cited blog post about the people he wants to hire and it has attracted a lot of attention. Even from Peter Woit, who says this...

The remarkable things to me about this long document are what it doesn’t contain. In particular I see nothing at all about any specific policy goals. Usually a new government would recruit people by appealing to their desire to make the world a better place in some specific way, but there’s nothing about that here. The goal is to control the government and what the British population believes, but to what end?

In addition, a more conventional hiring process would be asking for candidates of high ethical values, with some devotion to telling the truth. Cummings seems to be asking for exactly the opposite: best if your background is “from a crime family hired by the KGB.”

This is one of those times I’m glad I never stayed in Academia, but went into the private sector. Because I know exactly what Cummings is trying to do with this blog post / advertisement. He is trying to attract people who would never otherwise in a million years go anywhere near politics and the public sector.

Here’s why you don’t advertise "high ethical values and some devotion to telling the truth" when what you want are people with off-the-charts technical skills and ideas. Because it signals that attitude is more important than skill, and that demonstrating that attitude is an important part of the job - rather than an important part of one’s character. Which means the job involves some posing and virtue signalling. So the skilled people won’t apply, no more than they would to an advertisement that said something about “must be able to function well in a big-company environment”, which they would read as “a lot of your time is going to be wasted on bureaucratic BS”.

For similar reasons you don’t go on about how you want people "to make the world a better place in some specific way.” Quite apart from all the talent you will turn away because they think that what you want to do will actually make the world a worse place. An appeal to people who want to change the world is code for “we’re not paying the market rate for the skills we say we want” and which will be read as “we don’t really want those skills because we don’t know how to use them”.

British politics is full of the “confident public school bluffers”. It’s full of networkers and people who can sense changes of policy and mood and pick up the latest buzz phrases and ideas, but who can’t actually do anything. When they go outside for advice and insight, they go to people who will listen carefully and then tell them what they want to hear.

This is exactly what Cummings does not want. He wants "people who are much brighter than me who can work in an extreme environment. If you play office politics, you will be discovered and immediately binned."

“People much brighter than me” is code for “I am not intimidated by the fact you can do things I can’t and understand things I never will. I don’t need to prove myself in competition with you.” Which is very attractive to people who have spent a couple of years dialling it down so as not to upset their less competent managers.

Cummings goes on to make a point near to my heart. "People in SW1 talk a lot about ‘diversity’ but they rarely mean ‘true cognitive diversity’. They are usually babbling about ‘gender identity diversity blah blah’. What SW1 needs is not more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates but more genuine cognitive diversity."

Amen. The last thing anyone needs to solve real problems is a room full of multi-cultural people who all have MBAs from Harvard, London or INSEAD. Or a room full of vibrant Oxbridge humanities graduates. That is not diversity. That’s a mono-culture. Or the editorial staff of The Economist.

There’s another reason why you don’t advertise for people with "high ethical values and some devotion to telling the truth” who also want to make the world a better place in some specific way. It’s really easy to lie about those things and impossible to test for them, since most people can make good contextual guesses at what constitutes the interviewers’ understanding of “high ethical values”.

That’s why Cummings wrote his ad that way.

Peter Woit’s first complaint is that Cummings did not follow the assumed model of how politicians recruit, and the kind of people they should recruit: that politicians should recruit Good People Who Care About Issues And Can Work Within Existing Frameworks To Address Those Issues.

But those Existing Frameworks are not policy-neutral. Over two years of non-stop opposition by the British Civil Service to Brexit, culminating in the shenanigans of the House of Commons through the summer and autumn of 2019, the use of the legal system, and especially the Supreme Court, to pursue politics by other means… all this has shown that the Establishment is not a fiction but a bunch of real people with deep contempt for the very public whose taxes pay their wages. Some of those people will have been bought and paid for by the EU, but a lot simply have contempt for the voter. Cummings understands, as do many British people, that the bureaucrats, judges and others Establishment types who allowed their personal beliefs and feelings to get in the way of their job... those people have to step aside or be pushed aside.

That’s what I think is Peter Woit’s second complaint. He wants to believe in the Integrity and Rightness of "the institutions", and Cummings clearly does not. Peter Woit wants to believe that “the institutions" can somehow neutralise the personal interests of those working in them.

The latest generation of populist politicians are saying that if that ever was true, it is not now, and that "the institutions" are simply force multipliers for Establishment cronies to impose their ideas on, and express their contempt for, the people.

That’s a hard thing for a lot of people to take. If you don’t believe in "the institutions", what do you believe in? (Answer: that the job of a politician is not to make the people over in some image of a Good Person, but to manage the provision of Common Goods and to regulate and oversee the private sector and the provision of whatever are the key services and products in the current mode of really-existing Capitalism at the time. It’s not exactly inspiring, but I don’t want people who need to be inspired to run the State, I want people who will do it when they have a hangover.)

Disclaimer: Peter Woit is much better at his job than I am at mine. He probably has a longer track record of being a decent person as well, which since I’m a recovering alcoholic is pretty much a gimme. His book Not Even Wrong is a must-read even after all these years, and I continue to learn much from his blog. Everyone can’t be a good judge of everything, and the fact that a smart guy like him misses the point of a recruitment advertisement tells us how hard this stuff is to understand.