Every failing organisation has the same stories, people find it very hard to learn from the most successful organisations and people.

The British political system is broken in many ways and needs big changes - the E.U. is not our only problem.

Priorities are fundamental to politics because of inevitable information bottlenecks: these bottlenecks can be transformed by rare good organisation but they cannot be eradicated.

It is hard to change people's minds.

Inevitably, the world of 'communications' / PR / advertising / marketing is full of charlatans flogging snake oil. It is therefore very easy to do things and spend money just because it's conventional.

Technology enables people to improve communication with unprecedented speed, scale and iterative testing. It also allows people to wreak chaos with high leverage.

Abstracting human wisdom into models often works better than relying on human experts as models are often more consistent and less noisy.

Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind's journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can sling objects across the solar system with extreme precision.

Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.

In a large bureaucracy, it is vital to keep eyes on the grassroots as they almost always will give you warning of problems faster than official signals (which says a lot about official signals).

For many decades, Whitehall has deceived itself and deceived the public about the true nature of the E.U. project.

The Single Market is no-where defined in the E.U. treaties. If you suddenly ask people to define the Single Market, the number who can do that, who are specialists in the area, is pretty small.

There are many brilliant people in the civil service and politics.

Eitan Hersh wrote a book in 2015 called 'Hacking the Electorate.' It's pretty much the best book I've seen on the use of data science in U.S. elections and what good evidence shows works and does not work.

Most political operations - and government - don't try to be rigorous about decision-making or force themselves to think about what they know with what confidence. They are dominated by seniority, not evidence.

In the commercial world, big companies mostly die within a few decades because they cannot maintain an internal system to keep them aligned to reality plus startups pop up.

I know from my nightclub days that when local cops need to show a fall in crime for political reasons there are all sorts of ways in which they can easily cheat numbers.

If you think of politics as 'serious people focusing seriously on the most important questions,' which is the default mode of most educated people and the media (but not the less-educated public which has better instincts), then your model of reality is badly wrong.

People are always asking 'how could the politicians let X happen with Y?' where Y is something important. People find it hard to believe that Y is not the focus of serious attention and therefore things like X are bound to happen all the time.

Changing the world in a profound and beneficial way is not enough to put a dint in bureaucracies which operate on their own dynamics.

CRISPR editing will allow us to enhance ourselves.

Project management is not hard in the same way that theoretical physics is hard - there are tried and trusted methods that a lot of people without exceptional talents can use - yet we can't embed it in government.

The E.U. has narrowed our horizons. It has narrowed everyone's horizons in Whitehall so they're not thinking about the big things in the world. They're not thinking about the forces changing it or what Britain can really do to contribute to them.

A basic problem for people in politics is that approximately none have the hard skills necessary to distinguish great people from charlatans.