Found in 1 comment on Hacker News
Jefro118 · 2020-01-03 · Original thread
A lot of odd and downright false assertions ITT. Anti-Brexit people are too often mistakenly conflating Cummings/Johnson and Farage as if everyone in favour of Brexit has precisely the same views. In reality they ran two different campaigns in very different styles and in fact one of Vote Leave's main aims was to keep Farage off the TV as much as possible because he was (and is) a turn off to the majority and presumably most swing voters.

I voted Remain at the time, but stumbling across Cummings' blogs and subsequently reading about Tetlock [0] + David Deutsch's arguments [1] has left me in favour of Leave (although I don't have strongly nailed down views on this).

This project is a great idea to improve the effectiveness of government by creating tools that will help ministers and officials make better decisions in the face of complex systems. Will it work? I'm optimistic but there will surely be unknown unknowns that could derail progress in addition to plain old politics.

[0] - Superforecasting is a great book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdtssXITXuE

Also, Timothy Gowers (Fields Medallist) has an interesting piece in favour Remain [2], although he overlooks the fact that differences in institutional design of UK vs EU mean that sovereignty has significant implications beyond just sovereignty for sovereignty's sake.

[2] - https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/6172/

Edit: Would love to hear counterarguments from downvoters btw. I don't mean that in a hostile way, I've changed my mind on this topic many times in the past 3 years and I'd be more than happy to be exposed to more good arguments against Brexit and Cummings' ideas.

Fresh book recommendations delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday.