This document HERE is the fourth blog in this series on complexity and prediction – The birth of computational thinking.
This page has an Index of various blogs on this and other themes. The previous blog in this series was on von Neumann, economics, maths, and prediction.
Unable to do some formatting things on WordPress, I’ve done it as a PDF.
Please leave corrections and comments below.
Dominic Cummings's Blog 
This is all very interesting but it’s ultimately quite depressing.
Your exploration of these fields and their application to politics seems (please correct me if I am wrong) to be oriented towards prediction and, to a lesser degree, control.
I read it as confirmation that modern politics is about power and careers rather than representation of the will of the people. After all, if you need to enlist scientific mehods to predict how to anticipate and represent popular opinions, then surely be definition you do not hold those opinions yourself – or at least you consider holding those opinions to be secondary to appearing to represent them.
It’s all a bit too “professional politician” for my tastes. It seems that the first principal is to obtain power and the rest is just how to acheive that goal. This is what Nigel Farage is always on about.
Personally, I blame Blair.
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All sound thought-provoking stuff. I particularly enjoyed the Freudian slip about Clytemnestra waiting for news of “the fall of TORY”. Aren’t we all? No serious contributions from me just yet.
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“Leibniz built a computer” ← please reserve “computer”, if you mean a machine, for [devices that can implement a finite approximation to] a Turing machine.
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