Democracies for some reason seem to shoot themselves in the foot periodically when a popular idea takes hold despite rational arguments against it. If you can come up with a good sounding idea that is devoid of facts, dumb citizens will gleefully support it.
— EM Forster
Libertarianism and communism may be naive, but as I understand it, they aren't forms of government, as in "providing a framework for governance".
Democracy, authoritarianism, fascism, monarchy, oligarchy, anarchy - those are all forms of government.
this is a terrific turn of phrase. thanks.
plus don't conflate low info to == low intelligence. low info is as much about attention and willingness to delve into policies as it is about sharpness. your Stanford STEM grad working 60 hours a week doesn't have time to dig deep into anything outside of some casual reddit or wired or HN browsing, and efforts to convey expectations via simple things like screenshoting someone else's tweets work very well.
I would however argue that low info often correlates with low access to info. Or perhaps more correctly, you don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t know to look.
If theres anything I’ve learned as I’ve become older it’s how little I know about anything.
You can also apply the same thinking to "rational", fact-based ideas held by intellectuals.
Sometimes they backfire in horrific ways and you need the truck drivers of the world to keep you in line.
— Winston Churchill (probably not, actually, but it's usually attributed to him)
Or just read any poli-sci research concerning voters. It's basically all horrifying and/or depressing.
I’d love to invite more folks to give feedback and think about some of these ideas. It is possible to design a better system, but somewhere along the way we sort of gave up on doing more than incremental reform. I'm currently still laying foundations, but hope to be laying out a worked out proposal within the next few months.
https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/a-beginning https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/table-of-contents
To which one would reply...
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…
https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
The average person has an IQ of 100. Given that average IQ is defined as being one standard deviation of average, the vast majority of voters are between low intelligence and average intelligence. About 84% of voters thus have low-to-average intelligence (68% fits in one standard deviation of average; 68/2 + 50 = 84%).
Regardless of your political leaning, I think it’s worthwhile accepting that most governments are elected by people who aren’t as smart as the typical HN contributor.
Either way, even if it's true that some significant percentage of voters have below-average IQ, how strong is the evidence that they'll make a "worse" collective choice of government than those with above-average IQs? That's basically assuming that the properties of candidates that will ensure they can act as part of an effective government are somehow "too hard" to accurately judge unless you have above average IQ. It seems just as possible the opposite is true - i.e. those with above average IQ aren't good at judging the sorts of properties candidates need to be govern effectively - at least partly because that implies being able to govern in way that works well for those in the below-average-IQ group (i.e. those in the above-average-IQ group will probably do reasonably well for themselves regardless of the quality of government).
Google provides many hits of people using average to mean within one standard deviation, or 85-115, but in a few minutes of searching I couldn't figure out a proper authority for that.
Your other points may be “true” but in a rather hollow way. We’re all subsidizing the impact of fossil fuel waste for example, it just isn’t correctly accounted for.
> and think that learning to live with cheap fickle solar is a smaller problem
Even if we accept this to be true now, we will have been burning fossil fuels for over a century by the time we actually learn to live with solar at a scale relevant to climate change. I place blame for that squarely on low information liberals.
The waste problem isn't solved. It's entirely a political problem rather than a technical problem, but it's still a problem.
> we will have been burning fossil fuels for over a century by the time we actually learn to live with solar at a scale relevant to climate change.
In 2015, wind&solar was 5.7% of US electricity generation. In 2021 it was 13%. In 2022 it was 16.5%. How can you extrapolate from that and come up with a century?
You may argue that the x, y, a and b are wrong, and therefore the conclusions is wrong. Well, fine, as you please. What I'm saying is that learning about x, y, a and b, then forming conclusions, is a high-information mode.
Combine this with the decimation of the middle class and democracy has a big problem.
- Antivaccine politics (before covid) was mostly liberal.
- Progressive regulation of housing construction/affordable housing policies in liberal cities are (probably) well intentioned but economically naive
- Some environmental policies (banning plastic straws, grocery bags, some water conservation efforts) are again well intentioned but a complete waste of breath for either side.
It isn't necessarily the case that low-information voters are distributed equally across the political spectrum.
> what bad policies were enacted as a result of such voters
It's not a legal policy, but consider usage of the word "latinx" which most Americans of Latin American heritage strongly dislike.
Last I saw, the majority don’t care: https://news.gallup.com/poll/353000/no-preferred-racial-term...
Most people living in democracies don't really understand - or just don't think about - how good they have it. At the same time, the human brain is wired to react strongly to outrage. Living the sweet life in a democracy, and with less valid things to outrage about, the brain is vulnerable to outrage exploitation about manufactured controversies, like who must bake a cake for who, or whether this statue or that should be allowed to stand in the park. Social media hostility and polarisation flourish.
But when the chips are down and democracy itself is at stake, people wake up and start thinking more rationally about the things that really matter.
Case in point from a news article this morning - Ukraine is normalising LGBTQ attitudes rapidly because suddenly their democracy is at risk. And suddenly it seems more sensible to have your LGBTQ neighbour alongside you in the trenches rather than hating on them because of your weird religious hangups or whatever (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/07/russias-wa...).
So perhaps democracy does indeed shoot itself in the foot, but perhaps also the system can be self-balancing when things finally go off the rails or a threat from outside arrives.
My bet is that this is just signaling to their western allies(us) but hopefully I am wrong.
Absolutely not.
It was because the HST added an extra 7% tax onto a whole ton of things that were exempt from the 7% PST previously. The HST was costing people a lot money on everyday items.
Yeah when most things start cost an extra 7% in tax, you're going to mobilize people against you.
There's a reason our democracies are representative democracies. It allows things to slow down and our representatives to have cooler heads and make informed decisions.
In contrast a referendum is easily instantly hijacked and there's never any guarantee that the way people are voting in the referendum has anything actually to do with the referendum issue.
In BC's case with the HST the vote on the tax quickly became a way to poke the unpopular Premier Gordon Campbell in the eye, and many people voted against the HST to make a point against a government that they were mad at for other reasons.
Referendums are bad bad bad.
Referendums were effectively used to limit their rights for decades upon decades longer than other democracies.
In that sense, EU kind of prevailed. But yes, not really better off.
Russia, of course.
Their investments in Murdoch media and other hyperpartisan media and disinformation-warfare techniques have paid massive dividends - the US is the most hyper-polarized it's been since the civil war, the UK has been pulled out of the EU fold are both massive successes. Australia and Canada and several other countries are dealing with similar polarization - although of course not Murdoch media in Canada, but it's not a coincidence that the other three are all Murdoch strongholds.
Not a coincidence the NRA got busted for funnelling russian money into US politics and working hand-in-glove with russian intelligence operators, and I don't think they're the only one, not even close. Just as the republican majority leader noted in 2017 - there's probably even a few specific congresspeople and other powerful politicians on the Russian payroll. Throw in a few shells for plausible deniability and it's all for sale.
The performative theatrics around ukraine have certainly been interesting and I don't think it's all just ritual opposition to whatever the party in power is doing either. The politicians McCarthy identified have been particularly outspoken too.
As they say: "Lock it up, no leaks, that's how we know we're family here."
(and as far as Brexit goes they undoubtedly funnelled a lot of money to certain campaigns, but Mail/Murdoch coverage of the EU in the UK was just as hysterical in the 1990s when Russia was a non factor)
What does a regular russian citizen gain from increased corruption in EU - that used to be Russia's biggest trading partner? Or from a potential civil war in US, that is the source of most progress and new technology in the world?
Once the Russian people can do that, the rest of us can too.
What is the difference between the people and the regime? The GOP lost elections; they voted in Obama, and later Biden. Control of the House and Senate changes, or is often perilously close.
There is no such change in Russia. There is only the regime, and it's grasp on the country is stronger than ever.
> Or from a potential civil war in US, that is the source of most progress and new technology in the world?
the only ones who think civil war is a real possibility in the US are foreign intelligence types pushing for destabilization, or a handful of GOP politicians trying to ride the hard right for their advantage. for all of the Texas will be independent grandstanding, it's just that -- grandstanding.
On the flip side, the UK remains a global power with significant influence although Brexit was a needless shot in the foot. This is something that a lot of Europeans forget in their attempt to paint Brexit as a disaster - something it definitely is. The UK is a diminished power, but still a power.
TIL
In 10 or 20 years when most of the leave voters die out and a new generation of politicians grows up it's completely possible for UK to re-join the EU.
It will be interesting to see if that new generation stick to their current political beliefs in 10 or 20 years.
The older generation who were most heavily in favour of Brexit were the same younger generation who voted for the EU's predecessor at the previous referendum a few decades earlier. A person's political views can change over time. And of course so can both the UK and the EU.
On the other hand the traditional patterns of individual political evolution and voting behaviour in British politics haven't really held recently and no-one seems to know why yet. So we shouldn't assume that younger voters who skew pro-EU at present will turn into older voters who skew the other way in a decade or two.
As an example GDPR is great for protecting privacy, but makes data mining for businesses really hard. Great for people, but on the long term these protections can weaken the economy which makes EU more and more vulnerable to outside control.
At the same time it's not a new thing: it's happening gradually over the last few hundreds of years.
Also in US people are fat and die much sooner than Western-Europeans (health is the most important thing a country can provide in my opinion).
With AI coming tech is really taking over from oil in importance (especially long term), so I'm not that worried about it as much as the incompetency and mismanaged EU money that should just go to the venture funds instead of how its distributed.
Yah there are economic costs to brexit but surely self-determination has some value right?
EU is not some Belgian club you subscribe to, Brussels is just a location for meeting with your partners. People who make the EU laws were British, among others.
EU is useful when you want to have interoperability and resolve conflicts before they happen.
So essentially, if you like to have flying cars that can travel across all the Europe, your people posted in Brussels come to agreement with the others on the flux capacitor fuel types and pass an EU law. Then your people at home pass a domestic law that follows the EU law and you end up with standardized flux capacitor fuels.
As a result being in EU gives you the say on what suits you so the EU law be designed that way. When out of the EU, EU does it’s own thing and if you like to sell flying cars to EU, you need to comply to their flux capacitor requirements anyway(AKA Brussels effect). That’s why Brexit made trade with EU so bureaucratic.
amongst other abuses of their powers
They get to impose modern requirements when pieces of the UK want to rejoin
The UK wasnt part of the monetary union and all I guess is that some import export duties have to be reimplemented and now counted differently.
France was an original founding member of NATO but partially withdrew in 1966 for reasons not unlike the UK leaving the EU, populist nationalism. They returned 43 years later.
My guess is that Scotland will leave the UK and join the EU. Maybe in 50 years a rump England will apply to re-join.
EU citizens can still get to London, UK citizens can still go on holiday in Europe
work visas are needed for more now
It also served to provide an excellent stress-test of the EU bureaucracy, helping to increase coordination pretty much everywhere.
It looks like it will further serve to provide yet another stimulus to the subjects of the UK to modernise their systems, which is very long overdue.
Barriers on trade and travel were raised without purpose other than having barriers.
Even the brexiteers lost their mojo as their purpose of existence disappeared and a particularly incompetent and toxic breed of politicians dominated the political discussions. Those too lost by getting exposed for what they are, destroying the support for legitimate position which those were pretending to stand for.
Absolutely no winners. Any perceived winners are temporary simply because you don't have anything to win by destroying your tight and fruitful relationship with your closest neighbours and you can't move somewhere else.