by Get ready for the revenge of the Oxford PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) graduates. The generals who have been running the British state for decades can heave a sigh of relief. Peter Thiel, the multi-billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, says the era of the math wizard is over.
Thiel imagines a brutal job apocalypse where AI kills more math experts than it will “word humans”. He calls this the “overdue rebalancing of our society”.
But hold your horses.
Thiel must be referring to an AI that hasn’t been invented yet, because one of the smartest we have today is advising us to eat a rock a day to improve our health and assuring us that there were cats on the moon . This came from improving Google’s AI Overviews, an experiment it scaled back on Friday.
If anything, today’s generation of AI is even worse at solving mathematical challenges than it is at delivering wisdom. On a five-digit multiplication, OpenAI’s GPT4 gets it right less than 7pc of the time. Don’t delete that calculator app just yet.
Now let’s examine Thiel’s proposition in more detail. Are we really living through the Tyranny of the Numerate, from which we must be free? He cites Silicon Valley as an example of a culture dominated by mathematics, but it has never been true of the British state.
Our administrative class prefers to run the Civil Service, and that’s what it gets: “general” is by far the most popular track on the recently revived Civil Service Fast Stream programme. The generals also go a long way in politics: Wilson, Heath and Cameron are the prime ministers with a PPE degree from Oxford, and Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband, both PPE, will soon lead the important numbers.
According to research carried out by the Institute for Government, less than a quarter of newly recruited civil servants (23pc) have a Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) degree, while 44pc of students have completed a Stem degree.
And you might wonder where those 23 computers are working.
“There is a real shortage of maths skills in the Treasury,” one civil servant told me. “We need to know numbers and question numbers, but it’s a horror show”.
Maths skills were certainly not evident when Laura Trott, chief secretary to the Treasury, appeared on the Today program recently and argued for debt reduction. It was predicted to increase, Evan Davies said.
Gas graduates are notorious for asking odd and annoying questions, like “how exactly is this going to keep the lights on?” This disturbs the smooth consensus which Whitehall enjoys in a room, and which he seems to value above all else.
Dominic Cummings recognized this as a structural weakness of Whitehall and tried to shake things up. He famously called for “misfits and weirdos” to be enforced. It didn’t last long.
Stem graduates can make more money in the private sector, so they are entitled to ask why they should help save the state from one of its suicidal disasters.
Recent recruiting changes have made matters worse, and seemed designed to keep them out. A new situational judgment test (CSJT) has been introduced, an exercise that invites the candidate to act out hypothetical workplace dramas. You can try it yourself online.
One Cambridge masters graduate I know did exactly that, and found himself in the lowest 5pc score. “I took it again and again, with an excellent psychologist, and we still came in the bottom 15pc.”
“These tests value soft skills over hard skills, including numerical ones,” says Jordan Urban of the Government Institute. “It’s clearly a barrier to math and engineering types,” says another Westminster researcher.
The MoD has lost cases of discrimination brought by civil servants who have remained unsolved and have been blocked by such tests, but Whitehall persists.
Unsurprisingly then, first-choice applications on the Science and Engineering Stream tracks between 2020 and 2023 fell by 78 pc – twice the drop seen in humanities applications.
The head of the Civil Service, Simon Case, said last year that half of all fast-track recruits were Stem graduates. But insiders say they could only claim that by moving the goalposts.
“They’ve achieved it by expanding the definition of Gas to include economics, and some other kind of humanities or social science degree with quantitative aspects,” one source tells me.
This exposure should only be a minor scandal.
Another trick favored by Whitehall is the inclusion of more intangible skills such as “digital”, rather than engineering, computer science and maths, all of which require intensive and in-depth knowledge.
“They’ve done one-day courses in AI, or Big Data,” says one Whitehall source, “so of course they’re all experts now.”
The rise and fall of the Government Digital Service shows the danger of taking self-styled digital guides at face value. For a few years he ran a track in Whitehall, but in the end he over-promised and under-delivered, and had to hire hundreds of contractors to do the hard work.
The labels “builder” and “maker” are starting to work the same way: self-certifications that sound great, but mean little.
And for all his success in Silicon Valley, it must be noted that Thiel himself has a law degree. No wonder technical types, scientists and mathematicians suspect a conspiracy to keep them out.
