The work of mathematicians on 'pure' problems has often yielded ideas that have waited to be rediscovered by physicists. The work of Euclid, Apollonius and Archimedes on ellipses would be used centuries later by Kepler for his theory of planetary motion.

MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings.

Economics is clearly a vital area of prediction for people in politics.

While our ancestor chiefs at least had some intuitive feel for important variables like agriculture and cavalry our contemporary chiefs (and those in the media responsible for scrutiny of decisions) generally do not understand their equivalents, and are often less experienced in managing complex organisations than their predecessors.

If we want leaders to make good decisions amid huge complexity, and learn how to build great teams, then we should send them to learn from people who've proved they can do it. Instead of long summer holidays, embed aspirant leaders with Larry Page or James Dyson so they can experience successful leadership.

I've learned over the years that 'rational discussion' accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average.

We need organisations like Vote Leave to operate permanently to give a voice to those who otherwise won't be heard.

Most educated people are not set up to listen or change their minds about politics, however sensible they are in other fields.

Politics is profoundly nonlinear.

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

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.

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.

CRISPR editing will allow us to enhance ourselves.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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).

Complex systems are hard to understand, predict and control.

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.

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

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

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.

It is hard to change people's minds.

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

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

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

Regardless of political affiliation most of the policy/media world, as a subset of 'the educated classes' in general, tended to hold a broadly 'blank slate' view of the world mostly uninformed by decades of scientific progress.

If you go back to the Euro campaign in 1999, how many chief executives and chairmen of FTSE 100 companies were speaking out on this? I think two. Two out of 200 people. Did that represent the reality of what businesses in Britain thought about the Euro? Of course it didn't. Did it represent what CBI members thought? Of course it didn't.

Politics does the equivalent of constantly trying to reinvent children's arithmetic and botching it. It does not build reliable foundations of knowledge.

The panic over Sputnik brought many good things such as a huge increase in science funding.

Unprecedented in modern British history and outside all normal civil service rules, a bunch of MPs, some of them working with foreign governments, wrote primary legislation - 'the Surrender Act' also known as the Benn Act - without any of the scrutiny of who influenced and who funded it that is normal for legislation.

Decentralised collaborations are inherently threatening to Whitehall's core principles.

Britain could contribute huge value to the world by leveraging existing assets, including scientific talent and how the NHS is structured, to push the frontiers of a rapidly evolving scientific field - genomic prediction - that is revolutionising healthcare in ways that give Britain some natural advantages over Europe and America.

Usually in politics everything is done on hunches.

Do some companies have great power? Yes but only in limited ways.

Facebook, like great politicians, surfs waves that it very rarely (if ever) creates.

People are always selling the idea that they have a magic bullet of persuasion. You won't get poor by shorting such promises.

One of the problems with the civil service is the way in which people are shuffled such that they either do not acquire expertise or they are moved out of areas they really know to do something else.

People think, and by the way I think most people are right: 'The Tory party is run by people who basically don't care about people like me.' That is what most people in the country have thought about the Tory party for decades. I know a lot of Tory MPs and I am sad to say the public is basically correct.

Victoria Woodcock ran Vote Leave - she was a truly awesome project manager and without her Cameron would certainly have won.

In many aspects of government, as in the tech world and investing, brains and temperament smash experience and seniority out of the park.

Those of us from the Vote Leave team would never have gone to No10 to help if Boris hadn't told us that he is determined to change the Conservative Party - change its priorities and change its focus so it really serves the whole country. Most of us were not 'party people.' For us, parties are a means to an end - a means to improve lives.

Westminster has let the whole country down for many years.