All the best companies quickly go downhill after the departure of people like Bill Gates - even when such very able people have tried very very hard to avoid exactly this problem.

After 23 June 2016, the U.K. has to reorient national policy on many dimensions.

TV news dominates politics and is extremely low-bandwidth: it contains a few hundred words and rarely uses graphics properly.

Science advances by turning new ideas into standard ideas so each generation builds on the last.

One of the things I wanted to do in the Department for Education was open up the policy making process and run things like wikis in open formats in order to a: start off with better ideas and then b: adapt to errors much faster than is possible with normal Whitehall systems.

Political analysis is full of chess metaphors, reflecting an old tradition of seeing games as models of physical and social reality.

The fundamental problem the Conservative Party has had since 1997 at least is that it is seen as 'the party of the rich, they don't care about public services.' This is supported by all serious market research. Another problem that all parties have is that their promises are not believed.

I want people to understand the barriers to serious government in order that more people take action.

Markets and science show that some fields of human endeavour work much better than political decision-making. I think we could do much much better if we will face our problems honestly.

I make judgments about people and ideas individually - for me, parties are just a vehicle of convenience.

Until the 20th century, medicine was more like politics than physics. Its forecasts were often bogus and its record grim. In the 1920s, statisticians invaded medicine and devised randomised controlled trials. Doctors, hating the challenge to their prestige, resisted but lost. Evidence-based medicine became routine and saved millions of lives.

In physics we have developed models that are extremely accurate across vastly different scales from the sub-atomic to the visible universe. In politics we have bumbled along making the same sort of errors repeatedly.

In January 2014 I left the Department for Education and spent the next 18 months away from politics.

Judea Pearl is one of the most important scholars in the field of causal reasoning. His book 'Causality' is the leading textbook in the field.

Almost all analysis of politics and government considers relatively surface phenomena.

Discussion of politics and government almost totally ignores the concept of training people to update their opinions in response to new evidence - i.e adapt to feedback.

Music is similar to sport. There is very fast feedback, learning, and a clear hierarchy of expertise.

Fundamental to real expertise is 1: whether the informational structure of the environment is sufficiently regular that it's possible to make good predictions and 2: does it allow high quality feedback and therefore error-correction.

Brexit cannot be done with the traditional Westminster/Whitehall system as Vote Leave warned repeatedly before 23 June 2016.

In healthcare like in government generally, people are incentivised to engage in wasteful/dangerous signalling to a terrifying degree - not rigorous thinking and not solving problems.

In the political world, big established failing systems control the rules, suck in more and more resources rather than go bust, make it almost impossible for startups to contribute and so on.

In history books, luck is always underplayed and the talent of individuals is usually overplayed.

People in politics tend to spend far too much time on higher profile issues affecting few people and too little time on such basic processes that affect thousands or millions and which we know how to do much better.

I think the right way to deal with terrorism is to carry on with normal life, like Britain used to when it was a more serious country.