Branching Histories

It is a very long post. It is also about politics, in a country different from mine, and about a referendum where I didn’t have a side. Still, I learned a lot from reading it so I’d like to share Dominic Cummings’s behind the scenes into what goes behind a public influence campaign: Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’.

Reality has branching histories, not a big why. The branching histories are forgotten and the actual branch taken, often because of some relatively trivial event, seems overwhemingly probable. We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories - stories that often obscure the branching history of reality, stories that become the primary way history is told.

Such stories oversimplify and limit thinking about the much richer reality of branching histories.

The result was an emergent property of many individual actions playing out amid a combination of three big forces. If just about 1% of voters had decided differently, IN would’ve won. Anybody who says ‘I always knew X would win’ is fooling themselves. What actually happened was one of many branching histories and in many other branches of this network — branches that almost happened and still seem almost real to me — we lost.

He talks about various things, like the importance of a clear marketing imperative (“Vote Leave”) instead of inconcreteness (“Go Global”); about how adverts are more effective the closer to the decision moment they hit the brain; and how:

In general big mistakes cause defeat more often than excellent moves cause victory. An analysis of chess … reveals how

1. The best computers make moves that preserve the widest possible choices in the future (Bismark’s ‘keep two irons in the fire’)
2. Even great humans are distinguishable from great computers by their propensity to make clear tactical errors occasionally amid the fog of war.

He ends his post by attributing a part of success to effective operations:

I am not clever, I have hopeless memory, and have almost no proper circle of competence. I made a lot of mistakes in the campaign. I have had success in building and managing teams. This success has not relied on a single original insight of any kind. It comes from applying what Charlie Munger calls unrecognized simplicities of effective action.

Effective because they work reliably, simple enough that even I could implement them, and unrecognized because they are hiding in plain sight but are rarely stolen and used. I found 10-15 highly motivated people who knew what they were doing and largely left tme to get on with it while stopping people who did not know what they were doing interfering with them, we worked out a psychologically compelling simple story, and applied simple management principles.