David MacKay: Energy and Information Lecture

David at DECC: Impact and legacy.

Moira Wallace, Ravi Gurumurthy (NESTA)

"Do people have the expertise to do the job?"

• Numbers not adjectives
• No vagueness
• Transparent models & working, not opaque
• Right policy direction, right implementation direction

Nesta is furiously buildng calculators.

I hope they're having impact; PASCAL reported by Ravi as impactful.

We have targets but do we have plans that add up?

Generalists are valued over specialists in civil service, that's not good, they both need to be valued given the each circumstance.

We need strong links between gov and academics

Yes but we also need to connect to people. Allow themselves to see themselves in the data, the model of the world. And to see others and be able to empathise with them too. And please don't call them "normal people" we're all different, just slightly different forms of life.

Ability to synthesis a huge amount of knowledge in one place: incredibly valuable for policy makers.

Trying to communicate with and get information from a large range of people who were not in whitehall:

• Aim high
• Reach out
• Pull together
• (Know your shit)

Synthesising informantion across fields is so needed by policy & media

They can see part of the problem but not the whole thing.

Totally agree with this: [Higher dimensional thinking]([object Object])

The debate has become polarised and the knowledge and understand is fractured.

We're crying out for a shared fact base. Something we can play with

Yes!