Boaty McBoatface might be a "terrible embarrassement" to some, but to me it's really good since it shows that you don't take yourself all too seriously.
If all nations took themselves 100% seriously we would all end up like Russia and probably be instantly catapulted into WW3.
Well then, let us ask thousands of people: Had the electorate answer to the Brexit question been a No instead of a Yes, would the voters still - in the view of this very same Aran Rees - have been an unfortunately unqualified gaggle, unsuitable for asking about anything beyond the number of airports in a given country?
I think in the case of brexit, not only were the general public the wrong audience for the question, their opinion was also informed primarily by the UK press; therefore the answer to the question was actually the opinion of the majority of the press - which is just formulated to sell papers.
"Lesson two: don’t ask people to make decisions they are not qualified to make."
He's implying that certain questions (such as whether or not the UK should be a member of the EU) should be left to the political and economic experts.
What if the political and economic experts disagree with the majority, not just because of their political and economic knowledge, but because they are a very limited demographic and don't even consider many of the things that are important to the people who are not experts in those fields?
Considering what he wrote, I would say we need more referendums, not less. So that people can become familiar with their votes having an observable impact on their lives. At the moment, people feel powerless, so when they're given a vote, they're more likely to use it in anger. Give them more decision making power, not less.
We probably don't need more referendums, but a constitutional change like Scottish independence or leaving the European Union does warrant a referendum.
In the 2016 US election 43% of you failed to vote.
For Brexit 28% of people failed to vote. And the younger the demographic, the fewer people who voted.
In Australia where voting is compulsory, we have close to 6% informal votes. Donkey votes are believed to be close to 2%. I shudder to think of the people who vote for Labour or Libs because "their votes doesn't really count anyway".
And you don't have to vote that often! You had one job!
The thing is, when all you can do is vote once every 4 years, you don't have a lot of influence. If I were tasked with steering a cruise ship but my only tool was to splash my arms in the sea to make waves, I would give up pretty quickly.
So the point about having more referendums, not less, is I think completely spot on to try to fix this issue.
The only solution I can think of is to enact a set of laws that require and enforce science and evidence based legislation. However, this is such an affront to all the lobbying groups that even the suggestion of such laws will be aggressively attacked from every direction possible.
That link doesn't actually argue either way. It just presents some ideas with lots of "could be" and "under certain circumstances" and "proponents often counter" and so on. No sources.
It does provide one example. But the example has nothing to do with referendums, it's about people being asked to vote on the same sort of question repeatedly in a short period of time.
I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to that of an election, so the behaviour may be completely different.
There is research into the phenomenon, but since I don't want to even try to link to [cough sb], I can provide a couple of pointers for further research.
> I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to that of an election
I think you are being somewhat dishonest here, and I would suspect you actually know that. From an individual voter's point of view there is very little practical difference: you are supposed to set time aside to go to the polling station at a given date, and cast your vote on an issue where it is HIGHLY unlikely that you have enough data to make an educated decision.
Referendums attempt to distill a complex issue (or a set of issues) into a binary decision. (I find it relevant that binary option trading is a common source of scams: http://scambroker.com/binary-options-trading-scam/); elections attempt to distill a complex set of competing and mutually exclusive issues into a personality contest.
Either way the only repeatibly reliable result is that no matter whose side wins, all the voters will eventually feel they have been shafted.
I don't know why you felt the need to call me dishonest.
An election is for choosing who you want to defer decision making power to. Often you only agree with some of the things that person intends to do. The headline actions. And even then, you realise that they may not do some of the things they said they would, and will probably do many other things you never even hear about.
A referendum is about answering a specific question. One you have probably never been asked in your life time. And hopefully one where the result will be an actual thing that takes place, e.g Brexit.
I find it hard to believe that concepts such as voter fatigue would apply equally to those two considerably different things.
My apologies for that unclear statement. I meant that in this particular issue, I believe you are not being honest with yourself.
There are several problems with voting fatigue, but chief among them is that the actual effects of the result are divorced from the outcome. It usually takes months, if not years, for a practical change to propagate from election campaigns to reality. (In the off-chance that an election campaign promise is actually adhered to.)
So for most practical purposes a vote taking place has little resemblance to its practical results. We take the expectation of tight feedback loops as a given in UI design. If usability and results from user actions are not coupled, the user will get confused, irritated and eventually will just give up. Why would we expect voting to be any different?
It's not just the vote itself that is causing fatigue, it's also the insane mental overload of having to deal with and the need to make sense of the constant (mis)information deluge. For months on end, as a voter you are supposed to digest a barrage of incoming information. It is tiring.
And all this still boils down to the need to eventually set time aside go to a polling station to drop a piece of paper into a box, only to see that nothing really changes. Do this often enough and only the activists will be left. The silent majority can not be bothered to care enough.
> What if the political and economic experts disagree with the majority, not just because of their political and economic knowledge, but because they are a very limited demographic and don't even consider many of the things that are important to the people who are not experts in those fields?
So my understanding of your idea is, the perspective of experts and general populous is different. If we give people more chances to vote, they will have more opportunity to vote in a way that will address issues important to them.
But we already have the opportunity to vote "from our perspective". But a lot of people don't care to. So why would having more opportunities to vote improve the this?
Because voting in a general election is different to voting in a referendum.
A lot of people see voting in general elections as futile, because as far as they can see, all they get from any party is more of the same.
Regardless of whether or not that viewpoint is correct, it doesn't apply to referendums. A referendum is about voting for a specific thing and getting it, or not.
I think that if we have more referendums, people will start to realise the difference, and take part more.
The scary thing is how easily people are swayed by blatant lies. Britain has been let down twice recently. Both times it was the quality of the debate around the referendums.
For the voting system a lie was spread about how it isn't fair one person gets to vote once while another can vote 6 or 7 times.. this was the description of the AV system.
You then have Brexit which was a shit show. It worries me how few people ask to see evidence. This is why I do not feel people should have a say in complex decisions via referendum. If the should then Britain has demonstrated how not to do it.
You could equally say that stupid people shouldn't be allowed to vote because they make bad decisions.
Democracy isn't always about getting the right answer. It's about distributing decision making power and making sure everyone gets an input. Even when they're wrong.
And it seems like a good example of why more referendums wouldn't do much good in the current UK political system.
Who's going to be setting the questions? Presumably the government? Which means realistically the Conservative party or Labour (generously assuming they can recover to a position of electability at some point). Why would they then ever pose referendum questions where they wouldn't like one of the answers (especially in light of the last referendum)? How does anyone really get more of a democratic voice when you'd just be choosing from options selected by the 2 big parties so that their preferred option is all but guaranteed to win?
"Should we: A) waste £90 million on a complicated new voting system, or B) keep our traditional voting system and spend the money on the NHS?"
The majority of the Tories wanted to stay in the EU. They didn't want the referendum. They provided the referendum because the public demanded one by giving a single issue party (UKIP) 12% of the vote at the previous general election.
The Tories wanted to remain in the EU, yet when the electoral commission recommended they change the wording of the question because it favoured staying in the EU, they obliged.
Personally, I still think the question was biased towards the status quo and should have been:
"Should the UK be a member of the European Union"
Rather than what it actually was:
"Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?"
I wonder if the remain vote would have been even lower with a less bias question?
Referendum wording is generally heavily scrutinised. I'm sure if we had more regular referendums a process would be created to make sure it remained that way.
> The majority of the Tories wanted to stay in the EU. They didn't want the referendum. They provided the referendum because the public demanded one by giving a single issue party (UKIP) 12% of the vote at the previous general election.
No, they provided the referendum because their leadership thought that the split within the party on the issue (while the majority was against leaving, there was a substantial minority for it) would result in loss of vote share if the party was unambiguously for staying, so they promised a referendum to keep their internal coalition intact.
About 20% of the Tory MPs wanted to leave the EU. So yes, that did play a part in the decision I'm sure. But I doubt that we would have been given a referendum without the increase in public support for UKIP. The Tory party was under threat because of the gains UKIP was making.
> About 20% of the Tory MPs wanted to leave the EU
Sure, but the split I was talking about is in the party-in-the-electorate, not the party-in-government. It wasn't a technique to maintain party unity in the Parliament, but to avoid losing party of the electoral base for the 2015 general election.
> But I doubt that we would have been given a referendum without the increase in public support for UKIP.
Sure, but that wasn't the public demanding an isolated referendum on the issue; the referendum was just a Tory tactic for minimizing the controversy over EU policy as a general election issue for the set of voters that, their view on that issue aside, were generally aligned with the Tories.
What if 99% of the people has no idea about the implications of their vote? I'm genuinely curious here. What if the experts are right and the majority of people are against them?
Then we make the inferior decision. Equally the experts can be wrong. Or they can be right about the particular things they are experts in, but wrong about everything else.
Democracy doesn't mean always making the right decision. But it does mean we take collective responsibility when we make the wrong one.
Yes, we all know that democracy cannot possibly be wrong.
Give people more power.
It will be impossible for example to elect Adolf Hitler when the people have the ultimate power... or maybe he was legitimately elected by the majority of German people at the time?
It's kind of scary that people keep repeating their errors and have a blind faith in democracy or whatever form of government is popular.
As I said in another comment: "Democracy doesn't mean always making the right decision. But it does mean we take collective responsibility when we make the wrong one."
I never stated that the majority would always make the right decision as you're implying that I did. Nor will the correct decisions always be made by ignoring the majority.
I would argue that the people who voted to remain in the EU have more blind faith in government. Willy nilly disregarding concepts such as sovereignty, and representation, and democracy as concepts from the past that don't need to be considered any more, because we've not had a war to fight to keep them for a generation or two.
I don't want to tell my grand children that we allowed democracy to be eroded because some people were afraid how the value of the pound would be affected.
> On the other hand, asking a large number of people to make a YES/NO decision on something they scarcely comprehend is like having a hundred school children who have just finished dissecting a frog collectively decide the best way to handle a triple bypass operation. That is to say, when the question requires expertise to answer, widening the circle reduces the collective wisdom of the group. This is one element of what I call the Stupidity of Crowds.
If you want to change people's opinions, a good start would be to stop calling people who disagree with you stupid.
If you go and look at which areas of the United Kingdom voted "leave" the most strongly, it's the coastal fishing ports. I'd assume that the fishermen know very much more than the average remainer does about what effect the European Union has had on their industry, and yet in page after page of post-referendum discussions by remainers I have yet to see a single remainer even acknowledge these people's existence, let alone suggest why remaining in the EU would be better for the fishermen than leaving it.
> a good start would be to stop calling people who disagree with you stupid.
Or for that matter calling people 'remoaners' who don't think that because at one instant people voted for Brexit by a thin margin this means an irrevocable mandate for politicians to do as they please.
The absolutist, partisan nature of current British politics not only is very unproductive but also divisive.
Then let's not forget, had the result turned out the other way round Brexit supporters would have been moaning, too. Even more so, the most fervent of them wouldn't have stopped clamouring for another referendum (and another ...) until they would have had it their way.
Exchanging one remote, self-serving political elite for another doesn't automatically make things better though. For what it's worth, Westminster is just as far away from most of the UK as Brussels.
The average distance of any point in the UK from Westminster or Brussels is then just going to be the root of the square of the average distance to that centre point plus the square of the distance to Westminster or Brussels.
"Representation" isn't just about numbers though. 90% of your MEPs don't even have English as their first language. I don't know what proportion of them have even been to the UK. You don't get representation from these people. They're too busy representing their home countries. Which of course, is how these things work. The larger the state, the more diluted your representation becomes at the center. Which is why you need to make sure to not centralise too much power.
Isn't that the problem? If the fishermen only look at Brexit through the lens of the fishing industry they cannot be expected to understand the effects of Brexit on all of society. This can be expanded to any group, even your classy ad hominem "remoaners". Brexit has such wide consequences that it shouldn't have been a decision based on opinions.
> If the fishermen only look at Brexit through the lens of the fishing industry they cannot be expected to understand the effects of Brexit on all of society. This can be expanded to any group, even your classy ad hominem "remoaners".
Not to be sarcastic or rude, but the comment you're responding to actually does say exactly what you said there. The remainers did not seem to care very much about the fishing industry, and they've shown no ability to understand the effects of the EU or leaving the EU on other groups of people, such as the fishermen.
All of society is always all of me, maybe some friends, ocassionally family, but definatly me - im all of society. But i dont want to soundt egocentric. The massesmolasses are definatly with me, i can feel the avalanch of opinion, everytime i go online, like a huge fluid-physics simulation, going towards the drain, that is my viewpoint.
The strange thing is, this even occurs, if i had a radical change of opinion. The people dont just have the same opinion as me, they follow me- im the chosen one, as prophezized by the facebook.
Alternate hypothesis: the remainers noted that whilst the effects of the EU on the fishing industry may have been bad there are only around 10,000 fishermen in the whole of the UK[1] whose livelihoods aren't guaranteed to be improved by leaving, and there was no reason not to prioritise the far greater number of jobs and revenues in other industries that are threatened by leaving.
Or more likely, most of them didn't because few people understand the intricacies of the Common Fisheries Policy or financial passporting and their respective impacts on the job market and most people actually tended to make their decision out of a vague sense of whether right-wing politicians shouting about taking back control of their borders resonated with or appalled them.
[1]and fishing jobs were lost at a much faster rate last century before the UK joined the EU than afterwards. Needless to say, the proportion of the 17 million people who voted Leave who were affected by the Common Fisheries Policy is vanishingly small.
Who can "be expected to understand the effects of Brexit on all of society" ?
I'm pretty sure the majority of economics and finance experts only looked at this through the lens of how it would affect the economy. And even then only at a macro level.
I'm pretty sure the majority of politicians were mostly concerned with how it would affect the macro economy too, and also how it would affect the UKs ability to project power and influence.
The media? Selling to their demographic of choice.
I was told to frame the question in terms of "How will it effect how rich and powerful the UK is? And are you a racist?". Instead, I framed it in terms of "How do I want my descendants to be governed". I don't believe my political representatives would have framed the question that way, so I feel more qualified than them to make that decision. Even though it was based on opinion.
By a government of people who grew up in the same culture, speaking the same language. I believe they will get better representation that way. I want a Europe full of states which collaborate and trade and compete with each other, but where ultimate political and legal power is at the state level. I don't think that the economies of scale gained by handing over political control to a central European government are worth the loss of sovereignty and representation in the long term.
I want further devolution of powers. Not further centralisation. I think this is a necessity if you want a government that works for the people instead of against them.
I'd much prefer a Europe where the countries work together to compete against the US and China, rather than compete among themselves and get pushed around by the more powerful players.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see, but I expect the post-Brexit UK to get less and less relevant, especially after Scotland leaves.
It's a balancing act. You don't want your country to be a pushover because it can affect the l
ives of your citizens negatively, but at the same time, you don't want to ditch any semblance
of national self determination in exchange for an increase in external power/influence.
I feel that citizens of rich countries put too much emphasis on the importance of their country projecting power externally.
It's cool that you want European countries to be able to stand up to the US and China, but recognise the cost.
> If you want to change people's opinions, a good start would be to stop calling people who disagree with you stupid.
> I have yet to see a single remoaner even acknowledge these people's existence
Then clearly it's just a matter of which particular epithet you choose. Just as people had well-founded reasons for wanting to leave the EU, others (48% of the country in fact), had well founded reasons for wanting to stay in. There are many different kinds of Brexit we can have even once you accept - as almost everyone does - that we are leaving. I don't see how childish name calling like this possibly moves debate or understanding forward.
And as pertains your point on fishermen - there's good evidence that leaving the EU will leave the fishermen no better off than they were before as we will still be bound by commitments we've made to the UN. Perhaps yet another example where a group have been told that leaving the EU would be a land of milk and honey only for the promises to be quietly withdrawn at a later date.
I think that whoever believes in things like: "brexit will give 350M£ more per week to NHS" and "brexit will make uk great again (while Scotland and north Ireland probably will leave)" doesn't fit completely my definition of intelligent...
If you add that a lot of people that voted for leave are living in depressed areas that are getting BILLIONS from EU, even if I don't agree with the exact choice of words I don't think that is too far from reality.
I would have had the same harsh judgement for anyone that would cut his penis to spite her wife, but in that case I believe that a lot more people would have agreed with me.
So you've described a person who believed that the NHS would get £350M extra a week, and also wanted to "make UK great again", and you've called them stupid.
I will now describe a person who was scared to leave the EU because of how it might affect their spending power, and didn't care less about the implications to democracy of staying in the EU, and will call them stupid, selfish and short sighted.
So where does that leave us? Have we gained something from this?
I lost about 7-8k£ until now thanks to the brexit and the pound value that collapsed (just counting pure expenses, not considering any asset that I own).
So you had all the rights to call me stupid, idiot and whatever you wanted if I had voted for leave.
But it's not the case because I don't believe at whatever false propaganda is on air at a certain moment.
I believe only to facts and I look at my interests.
And the slumping pound is an incontrovertible fact that even guys like you that try to negate reality cannot possibly contest.
At the end for me doesn't really change much, I still have a good job and in the worst case I have EU citizenship if everything collapses.
I'm not sure that the fishermen, the factory workers and all the others that gets billions from EU subsidies and that voted to leave are still fine in case everything collapses.
I didn't call you stupid. I created a straw man, and called him stupid. Just like you created a straw man, and called that one stupid.
1. There are people who voted based on how they thought it would affect themselves personally.
2. There are people who voted based on the long term interests of what they thought was best for the people of the UK and Europe.
I made a conscious effort to be in camp 2. It sounds like you're squarely placing yourself in camp 1.
The value of the pound has recently dropped and you find that to be relevant. I don't and I'm poorer for it too. I can see that you based your vote on the short term personal economic impact, rather the long term effect it would have on human beings living in European countries.
That's ok. You can call people stupid. As long as you're comfortable being called selfish.
Those people dont want your billions. They want dignity, they want to work and feel like they accomplished something. They want the exact same life you got. They dont want handouts, they want to reverse what has happened, they want to undo what has been accomplished. And that is the dileman, that leads to a nice little dystopia- where the democracy is abandoned from above, because those below who got trampled, could undo the foam castles floating ontop. Lets vote on it, till exaustion, shall we?
Perhaps you should investigate how good the EU has been for UK fishermen.
Fishing quotas are based on historical catches, which the UK had a very large share of due to its geographical position. UK fishermen then sold their quotas to the Spanish, French, etc. Despite this:
>The UK’s share of the overall EU fishing catch grew between 2004 and 2014. In 2004 the UK had the fourth largest catch of any EU country at 652,000 tonnes, by 2014 this had grown to 752,000 tonnes and the second largest catch of any country in the EU.
> Indeed, collectively, UK fishermen appear not to be very wise.
My post at the head of this discussion made the point that continually repeating "Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid" turned out not to be a good way to win an election.
Still doing the same thing and expecting different results?
I strongly expect that the fishing communities (is fishermen actually an OK word to use these days?) actually know their own situation much better than either you or I do, and they're very clear on how the EU affects them.
> I strongly expect that the fishing communities (is fishermen actually an OK word to use these days?) actually know their own situation much better than either you or I do, and they're very clear on how the EU affects them.
Why? The things the GP wrote are not matters of opinion, they are facts. If people ignore them and vote against their own interests they are not "better informed".
The idea that most people are intelligent, well informed and vote in their own interest is nice. It's also incredibly naive and not supported by reality.
The decline of fishing as a profession over the past 40 yrs is due to changes in technology and catchable stocks, not the UK's membership of the EU or the Common Fisheries Policy.
Plenty of people who benefit from large EU subsidies voted for Brexit (rural areas of England, Welsh Valleys, etc). Sometimes people do vote against their own interests.
* The Boaty McBoatface is /r/iamverysmart territory. It was lighthearted and brought interest from across the world - not everything has to be named after a Greek tragedy.
* As for Brexit. Well, the public in general was unaware of the benefits of being in EU to begin with. Ultimately it was the 'experts' - the people in charge of conveying information - who failed. Not democracy. Democracy is by no means perfect, the metrics for who are qualified to vote hasn't been set.
* The language barrier. For some reason I really doubt that's true. What polls are in questions? I can't find any sources in the article. 4% deviation is completely normal if the question was asked from same people a year later.
Crowdsourcing is amazing, as long as your target group is set properly. This entire article is regurgitating intro into statistics. I do agree with the consensus part. The very problem was relevant in assessing difficulty of 'stories' in software development. When devs were asked to just number the difficulty, people lost sense of responsibility and would normally vote for extremes (very easy or very hard). Hence, the people who chose lowest and highest had to explain why they chose that specific number.
Might have wrote it that way to be deliberately confusing.
Where's the source for these numbers? Did the polls have similar number of respondents? If these were online polls, was one poll shared on certain internet groups and not the other?
Also the two statements are not the same thing. 'Right to vote' and 'Allowed to vote' are different. A useful follow up poll would be to gauge the percentage of people who believed that 16 year olds have a right to vote, but should also not be allowed to vote. I believe that number may be significant. You can think of it in terms of death row criminals: there is an argument that they have a right to life, but also that the victims have a right to justice. Which right is more important is not something everyone agrees on. That type of logic applies to the questions of voting too.
I don't know why he would have written it that way on purpose to be deliberately confusing, as the non-confusing way would seem to have given more weight to his point, rather than less.
I don't know why either, but it seems almost impossible to do it by mistake? Which leaves doing it on purpose the more likely, but why he would do it on purpose is a mystery. As you say, it's bizarre.
The positive versus negative results emphasize the contrast?
"When asked if the voting age should be lowered the majority said no."
BUT
"When asked if 16 and 17-year-olds should have the right to vote, the majority said yes.
Replacing the expression "the majority" with actual percentages just adds more information.
I found it bizarre, because he could have listed two questions which were the same but worded differently. But instead, he listed two questions which were opposite and worded differently.
Compare these two equivalent questions:
Is 4 greater than 2 ? Yes
Is the number four greater than the number two ? Yes
Vs this:
Is 4 greater than 2 ? Yes
Is the number two greater than the number four ? No
The questions are equivalent as originally written in the article:
One poll asked the following question:
“Should the voting age be lowered to sixteen?”
The second poll asked:
“Should sixteen and seventeen-year-olds be allowed to vote?”
When he later repeated the questions with percentage figures, he did in fact write what I quoted, which was:
"When asked if the voting age should be lowered 57% said no"
So within the context of the article, what I said was correct. But if you just read my comment and nothing else, you would be correct.
Is it really the crowd becoming intelligent or stupid, or just that we are agreeing or disagreeing with the crowd and conflating that with the intelligence of the crowd?
As a quick test to try and determine this: try to think of occasions where you thought of a crowd as intelligent: did you agree or disagree with the crowd? Now try to think of occasions where you thought of a crowd as stupid: did you agree or disagree with the crowd?
If these questions are highly correlated, then you may not be measuring the intelligence of the crowd as much as you think you are. That we think of crowds in these two extremes is also a hint.
Do you have a "reading mode" on your browser? It's a ~new invention for those who intend to read anything from the mobile web, despite the jounals' contempt for their audiences.
This reminds me of some research I read a while ago, I think it was here, that said that what matters most is neither expert nor crowd, but data points. You want to maximize the total data you've got to decide, but you also don't want to bias towards one data point more then another.
Their conclusion was that the benefit of crowds is that it adds a lot of data points, by combining everyone's data, but it skews some way too much, because if 70% of the people are making the same decision from the same data point, it's not weighing in other data points.
It was also arguing that most people would decide the same thing given the same data points.
And since we are presenting opinions as fact: Boaty McBoatface was the better name. It would have made the boat and its research subject more appealing to children. More people would know about it, for better or worse. It would go down in history and take its research subject with it. The only winner in the new name is Sir Attenborough himself. Not that he doesn't deserve it, but my point stands.
This is the number one reason that I thought the YC experiment with letting HN choose someone to receive a grant was a terrible idea. I predicted it would result in a nightmare and it predictably did.
The people choosing didn't have any skin in the game and they followed celebrities instead of thinking for themselves.
The article has some good points but the whole "crowd" thing was never a serious idea.
Crowds are not intelligent. Democracies are what are intelligent. Having lots of intelligent people who care deeply about something discuss it thoroughly in good faith and then vote will almost always produce optimum outcomes for all involved. This basic principle underlies everything from global capitalism to modern science to even modern military strategy (network-centric warfare).
The problem is that more often than not you don't have lots of people discussing a topic in good faith. In fact this is a might even be a rare and fragile scenario. It's very, very easy for the discussion or the voting system to be corrupted and subverted. The logical conclusion is that the "crowd" is only intelligent and able to reach good conclusions in a well-defined environment. There must be rules, institutions and ultimately reputational accountability to ensure that all actors are actually acting in good faith. Capitalism needs well-regulated markets, science needs its prestigious institutions and even the military needs civilian oversight and international conventions.
I think once people appreciate this it becomes obvious why suggestion boxes is a waste of time and why highly compressed mass referendums are almost certainly disaster.
In science pop culture [joke mine] there is "the layman test". It involves the scientist explaining his work to a layman. Failure to do so means the scientist doesn't understand what he is doing. It is usually used to cut though a forest of terminology.
(One could [say] argue that Object Oriented Programming has property foo. The layman test would have you explain what this OOP actually is. Then, foo is assumed not to be a property of OOP if you fail to explain OOP.)
Nothing is a dead-end topic. If the explanation is successful the layman can learn some more details. Eventually the layman becomes the professor.
Not everyone is good at explaining their work. One professor (his name escapes me) once argued that we assume professionals to be good at education while they never had any such training: Academia works under the assumption their field doesn't exist. Libraries full of books about teaching and learning, some dating back thousands of years. All irrelevant?
What fascinated me was the idea that we deploy amateur explanations from mega overqualified professionals onto the first year students. The ratio is all wrong.
If the people who need information cant get access to it it doesn't matter if the information exists.
The solution to collective decision making is to set up a system for information distribution. Ideally it would be a fully distributed system but since we cant have that we will have to start with a properly designed server then work towards a decentralized formula.
The people who have monopolized information distribution will fight you all the way on this. They will rally their zombie legion of Jackass, Eastenders, Neighbours, Friends, dancing with the stars and football supporters and teach you a lesson.
In stead you got Johnny Knoxville is what you got in stead.
To add a fun story:
If you look at the RSS spec you find a rating element. If you chase that rabbit down the rabbit hole you end up reading about a mythological creature called the PICS rating system[1]. It is like the ancient Greeks of internet design forged a most poetic system for content rating. Wondering why such a beautiful thing never took off you end up reading authoritative-sounding attention-monopolists ranting and raving about the mere smell of scrutiny. Eventually they successfully denounce the concept as CENSORSHIP and proceed to brand it a porn filter. Today that is the only remaining implementation.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadIf all nations took themselves 100% seriously we would all end up like Russia and probably be instantly catapulted into WW3.
Sometimes smart people are wrong too.
There's a certain irony in calling a blog "Open for ideas" and then putting up posts that say "But not like that."
He's implying that certain questions (such as whether or not the UK should be a member of the EU) should be left to the political and economic experts.
What if the political and economic experts disagree with the majority, not just because of their political and economic knowledge, but because they are a very limited demographic and don't even consider many of the things that are important to the people who are not experts in those fields?
Considering what he wrote, I would say we need more referendums, not less. So that people can become familiar with their votes having an observable impact on their lives. At the moment, people feel powerless, so when they're given a vote, they're more likely to use it in anger. Give them more decision making power, not less.
Voters often like to give a government a kicking mid-term.
I can't see this working out at all.
In the 2016 US election 43% of you failed to vote.
For Brexit 28% of people failed to vote. And the younger the demographic, the fewer people who voted.
In Australia where voting is compulsory, we have close to 6% informal votes. Donkey votes are believed to be close to 2%. I shudder to think of the people who vote for Labour or Libs because "their votes doesn't really count anyway".
And you don't have to vote that often! You had one job!
Your response was that, not many people vote. I'm not sure how that addresses what I wrote?
Psychology and sociology disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue
The only solution I can think of is to enact a set of laws that require and enforce science and evidence based legislation. However, this is such an affront to all the lobbying groups that even the suggestion of such laws will be aggressively attacked from every direction possible.
It does provide one example. But the example has nothing to do with referendums, it's about people being asked to vote on the same sort of question repeatedly in a short period of time.
I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to that of an election, so the behaviour may be completely different.
Do you have a better link?
- 10.2307/2108922
- (no idea why, but this has no DOI: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25791895)
- (no DOI either: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379401...)
> I would argue that the nature of a referendum is completely different to that of an election
I think you are being somewhat dishonest here, and I would suspect you actually know that. From an individual voter's point of view there is very little practical difference: you are supposed to set time aside to go to the polling station at a given date, and cast your vote on an issue where it is HIGHLY unlikely that you have enough data to make an educated decision.
Referendums attempt to distill a complex issue (or a set of issues) into a binary decision. (I find it relevant that binary option trading is a common source of scams: http://scambroker.com/binary-options-trading-scam/); elections attempt to distill a complex set of competing and mutually exclusive issues into a personality contest.
Either way the only repeatibly reliable result is that no matter whose side wins, all the voters will eventually feel they have been shafted.
An election is for choosing who you want to defer decision making power to. Often you only agree with some of the things that person intends to do. The headline actions. And even then, you realise that they may not do some of the things they said they would, and will probably do many other things you never even hear about.
A referendum is about answering a specific question. One you have probably never been asked in your life time. And hopefully one where the result will be an actual thing that takes place, e.g Brexit.
I find it hard to believe that concepts such as voter fatigue would apply equally to those two considerably different things.
There are several problems with voting fatigue, but chief among them is that the actual effects of the result are divorced from the outcome. It usually takes months, if not years, for a practical change to propagate from election campaigns to reality. (In the off-chance that an election campaign promise is actually adhered to.)
So for most practical purposes a vote taking place has little resemblance to its practical results. We take the expectation of tight feedback loops as a given in UI design. If usability and results from user actions are not coupled, the user will get confused, irritated and eventually will just give up. Why would we expect voting to be any different?
It's not just the vote itself that is causing fatigue, it's also the insane mental overload of having to deal with and the need to make sense of the constant (mis)information deluge. For months on end, as a voter you are supposed to digest a barrage of incoming information. It is tiring.
And all this still boils down to the need to eventually set time aside go to a polling station to drop a piece of paper into a box, only to see that nothing really changes. Do this often enough and only the activists will be left. The silent majority can not be bothered to care enough.
> What if the political and economic experts disagree with the majority, not just because of their political and economic knowledge, but because they are a very limited demographic and don't even consider many of the things that are important to the people who are not experts in those fields?
So my understanding of your idea is, the perspective of experts and general populous is different. If we give people more chances to vote, they will have more opportunity to vote in a way that will address issues important to them.
But we already have the opportunity to vote "from our perspective". But a lot of people don't care to. So why would having more opportunities to vote improve the this?
A lot of people see voting in general elections as futile, because as far as they can see, all they get from any party is more of the same.
Regardless of whether or not that viewpoint is correct, it doesn't apply to referendums. A referendum is about voting for a specific thing and getting it, or not.
I think that if we have more referendums, people will start to realise the difference, and take part more.
For the voting system a lie was spread about how it isn't fair one person gets to vote once while another can vote 6 or 7 times.. this was the description of the AV system.
You then have Brexit which was a shit show. It worries me how few people ask to see evidence. This is why I do not feel people should have a say in complex decisions via referendum. If the should then Britain has demonstrated how not to do it.
Democracy isn't always about getting the right answer. It's about distributing decision making power and making sure everyone gets an input. Even when they're wrong.
Who's going to be setting the questions? Presumably the government? Which means realistically the Conservative party or Labour (generously assuming they can recover to a position of electability at some point). Why would they then ever pose referendum questions where they wouldn't like one of the answers (especially in light of the last referendum)? How does anyone really get more of a democratic voice when you'd just be choosing from options selected by the 2 big parties so that their preferred option is all but guaranteed to win?
"Should we: A) waste £90 million on a complicated new voting system, or B) keep our traditional voting system and spend the money on the NHS?"
The Tories wanted to remain in the EU, yet when the electoral commission recommended they change the wording of the question because it favoured staying in the EU, they obliged.
Personally, I still think the question was biased towards the status quo and should have been:
"Should the UK be a member of the European Union"
Rather than what it actually was:
"Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?"
I wonder if the remain vote would have been even lower with a less bias question?
Referendum wording is generally heavily scrutinised. I'm sure if we had more regular referendums a process would be created to make sure it remained that way.
No, they provided the referendum because their leadership thought that the split within the party on the issue (while the majority was against leaving, there was a substantial minority for it) would result in loss of vote share if the party was unambiguously for staying, so they promised a referendum to keep their internal coalition intact.
Sure, but the split I was talking about is in the party-in-the-electorate, not the party-in-government. It wasn't a technique to maintain party unity in the Parliament, but to avoid losing party of the electoral base for the 2015 general election.
> But I doubt that we would have been given a referendum without the increase in public support for UKIP.
Sure, but that wasn't the public demanding an isolated referendum on the issue; the referendum was just a Tory tactic for minimizing the controversy over EU policy as a general election issue for the set of voters that, their view on that issue aside, were generally aligned with the Tories.
Democracy doesn't mean always making the right decision. But it does mean we take collective responsibility when we make the wrong one.
I never stated that the majority would always make the right decision as you're implying that I did. Nor will the correct decisions always be made by ignoring the majority.
I would argue that the people who voted to remain in the EU have more blind faith in government. Willy nilly disregarding concepts such as sovereignty, and representation, and democracy as concepts from the past that don't need to be considered any more, because we've not had a war to fight to keep them for a generation or two.
I don't want to tell my grand children that we allowed democracy to be eroded because some people were afraid how the value of the pound would be affected.
If you want to change people's opinions, a good start would be to stop calling people who disagree with you stupid.
If you go and look at which areas of the United Kingdom voted "leave" the most strongly, it's the coastal fishing ports. I'd assume that the fishermen know very much more than the average remainer does about what effect the European Union has had on their industry, and yet in page after page of post-referendum discussions by remainers I have yet to see a single remainer even acknowledge these people's existence, let alone suggest why remaining in the EU would be better for the fishermen than leaving it.
Edit: removed the word "remoaner".
Or for that matter calling people 'remoaners' who don't think that because at one instant people voted for Brexit by a thin margin this means an irrevocable mandate for politicians to do as they please.
The absolutist, partisan nature of current British politics not only is very unproductive but also divisive.
Then let's not forget, had the result turned out the other way round Brexit supporters would have been moaning, too. Even more so, the most fervent of them wouldn't have stopped clamouring for another referendum (and another ...) until they would have had it their way.
A mathematical impossibility. Wherever you define the centre of the UK to be, it's nearer to Westminster than Brussels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_points_of_the_United_Ki...
The average distance of any point in the UK from Westminster or Brussels is then just going to be the root of the square of the average distance to that centre point plus the square of the distance to Westminster or Brussels.
So mathematically local representation is better if we leave.
Not to be sarcastic or rude, but the comment you're responding to actually does say exactly what you said there. The remainers did not seem to care very much about the fishing industry, and they've shown no ability to understand the effects of the EU or leaving the EU on other groups of people, such as the fishermen.
The strange thing is, this even occurs, if i had a radical change of opinion. The people dont just have the same opinion as me, they follow me- im the chosen one, as prophezized by the facebook.
Or more likely, most of them didn't because few people understand the intricacies of the Common Fisheries Policy or financial passporting and their respective impacts on the job market and most people actually tended to make their decision out of a vague sense of whether right-wing politicians shouting about taking back control of their borders resonated with or appalled them.
[1]and fishing jobs were lost at a much faster rate last century before the UK joined the EU than afterwards. Needless to say, the proportion of the 17 million people who voted Leave who were affected by the Common Fisheries Policy is vanishingly small.
I'm pretty sure the majority of economics and finance experts only looked at this through the lens of how it would affect the economy. And even then only at a macro level.
I'm pretty sure the majority of politicians were mostly concerned with how it would affect the macro economy too, and also how it would affect the UKs ability to project power and influence.
The media? Selling to their demographic of choice.
I was told to frame the question in terms of "How will it effect how rich and powerful the UK is? And are you a racist?". Instead, I framed it in terms of "How do I want my descendants to be governed". I don't believe my political representatives would have framed the question that way, so I feel more qualified than them to make that decision. Even though it was based on opinion.
I want further devolution of powers. Not further centralisation. I think this is a necessity if you want a government that works for the people instead of against them.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see, but I expect the post-Brexit UK to get less and less relevant, especially after Scotland leaves.
I feel that citizens of rich countries put too much emphasis on the importance of their country projecting power externally.
It's cool that you want European countries to be able to stand up to the US and China, but recognise the cost.
Apparently the stupid middle "flyover country" voted him in because they're stupid.
> I have yet to see a single remoaner even acknowledge these people's existence
Then clearly it's just a matter of which particular epithet you choose. Just as people had well-founded reasons for wanting to leave the EU, others (48% of the country in fact), had well founded reasons for wanting to stay in. There are many different kinds of Brexit we can have even once you accept - as almost everyone does - that we are leaving. I don't see how childish name calling like this possibly moves debate or understanding forward.
And as pertains your point on fishermen - there's good evidence that leaving the EU will leave the fishermen no better off than they were before as we will still be bound by commitments we've made to the UN. Perhaps yet another example where a group have been told that leaving the EU would be a land of milk and honey only for the promises to be quietly withdrawn at a later date.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environme...
I will now describe a person who was scared to leave the EU because of how it might affect their spending power, and didn't care less about the implications to democracy of staying in the EU, and will call them stupid, selfish and short sighted.
So where does that leave us? Have we gained something from this?
1. There are people who voted based on how they thought it would affect themselves personally.
2. There are people who voted based on the long term interests of what they thought was best for the people of the UK and Europe.
I made a conscious effort to be in camp 2. It sounds like you're squarely placing yourself in camp 1.
The value of the pound has recently dropped and you find that to be relevant. I don't and I'm poorer for it too. I can see that you based your vote on the short term personal economic impact, rather the long term effect it would have on human beings living in European countries.
That's ok. You can call people stupid. As long as you're comfortable being called selfish.
I still don't see the value in any of this.
Fishing quotas are based on historical catches, which the UK had a very large share of due to its geographical position. UK fishermen then sold their quotas to the Spanish, French, etc. Despite this:
>The UK’s share of the overall EU fishing catch grew between 2004 and 2014. In 2004 the UK had the fourth largest catch of any EU country at 652,000 tonnes, by 2014 this had grown to 752,000 tonnes and the second largest catch of any country in the EU.
https://fullfact.org/europe/eu-pinching-our-fish/
Indeed, collectively, UK fishermen appear not to be very wise.
My post at the head of this discussion made the point that continually repeating "Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid" turned out not to be a good way to win an election.
Still doing the same thing and expecting different results?
I strongly expect that the fishing communities (is fishermen actually an OK word to use these days?) actually know their own situation much better than either you or I do, and they're very clear on how the EU affects them.
Why? The things the GP wrote are not matters of opinion, they are facts. If people ignore them and vote against their own interests they are not "better informed".
The idea that most people are intelligent, well informed and vote in their own interest is nice. It's also incredibly naive and not supported by reality.
Plenty of people who benefit from large EU subsidies voted for Brexit (rural areas of England, Welsh Valleys, etc). Sometimes people do vote against their own interests.
* As for Brexit. Well, the public in general was unaware of the benefits of being in EU to begin with. Ultimately it was the 'experts' - the people in charge of conveying information - who failed. Not democracy. Democracy is by no means perfect, the metrics for who are qualified to vote hasn't been set.
* The language barrier. For some reason I really doubt that's true. What polls are in questions? I can't find any sources in the article. 4% deviation is completely normal if the question was asked from same people a year later.
Crowdsourcing is amazing, as long as your target group is set properly. This entire article is regurgitating intro into statistics. I do agree with the consensus part. The very problem was relevant in assessing difficulty of 'stories' in software development. When devs were asked to just number the difficulty, people lost sense of responsibility and would normally vote for extremes (very easy or very hard). Hence, the people who chose lowest and highest had to explain why they chose that specific number.
Where's the source for these numbers? Did the polls have similar number of respondents? If these were online polls, was one poll shared on certain internet groups and not the other?
Also the two statements are not the same thing. 'Right to vote' and 'Allowed to vote' are different. A useful follow up poll would be to gauge the percentage of people who believed that 16 year olds have a right to vote, but should also not be allowed to vote. I believe that number may be significant. You can think of it in terms of death row criminals: there is an argument that they have a right to life, but also that the victims have a right to justice. Which right is more important is not something everyone agrees on. That type of logic applies to the questions of voting too.
The positive versus negative results emphasize the contrast?
"When asked if the voting age should be lowered the majority said no." BUT "When asked if 16 and 17-year-olds should have the right to vote, the majority said yes.
Replacing the expression "the majority" with actual percentages just adds more information.
Compare these two equivalent questions:
Vs this: He did the second, not the first.First question makes numbers like 12 or 13 valid. Second doesn't.
I don't know if there's data showing those popups work, but they really ruin the user experience.
https://archive.fo/vlMiq
As a quick test to try and determine this: try to think of occasions where you thought of a crowd as intelligent: did you agree or disagree with the crowd? Now try to think of occasions where you thought of a crowd as stupid: did you agree or disagree with the crowd?
If these questions are highly correlated, then you may not be measuring the intelligence of the crowd as much as you think you are. That we think of crowds in these two extremes is also a hint.
Their conclusion was that the benefit of crowds is that it adds a lot of data points, by combining everyone's data, but it skews some way too much, because if 70% of the people are making the same decision from the same data point, it's not weighing in other data points.
It was also arguing that most people would decide the same thing given the same data points.
And since we are presenting opinions as fact: Boaty McBoatface was the better name. It would have made the boat and its research subject more appealing to children. More people would know about it, for better or worse. It would go down in history and take its research subject with it. The only winner in the new name is Sir Attenborough himself. Not that he doesn't deserve it, but my point stands.
The people choosing didn't have any skin in the game and they followed celebrities instead of thinking for themselves.
I hope YC has learned not to offer these choices.
Crowds are not intelligent. Democracies are what are intelligent. Having lots of intelligent people who care deeply about something discuss it thoroughly in good faith and then vote will almost always produce optimum outcomes for all involved. This basic principle underlies everything from global capitalism to modern science to even modern military strategy (network-centric warfare).
The problem is that more often than not you don't have lots of people discussing a topic in good faith. In fact this is a might even be a rare and fragile scenario. It's very, very easy for the discussion or the voting system to be corrupted and subverted. The logical conclusion is that the "crowd" is only intelligent and able to reach good conclusions in a well-defined environment. There must be rules, institutions and ultimately reputational accountability to ensure that all actors are actually acting in good faith. Capitalism needs well-regulated markets, science needs its prestigious institutions and even the military needs civilian oversight and international conventions.
I think once people appreciate this it becomes obvious why suggestion boxes is a waste of time and why highly compressed mass referendums are almost certainly disaster.
(One could [say] argue that Object Oriented Programming has property foo. The layman test would have you explain what this OOP actually is. Then, foo is assumed not to be a property of OOP if you fail to explain OOP.)
Nothing is a dead-end topic. If the explanation is successful the layman can learn some more details. Eventually the layman becomes the professor.
Not everyone is good at explaining their work. One professor (his name escapes me) once argued that we assume professionals to be good at education while they never had any such training: Academia works under the assumption their field doesn't exist. Libraries full of books about teaching and learning, some dating back thousands of years. All irrelevant?
What fascinated me was the idea that we deploy amateur explanations from mega overqualified professionals onto the first year students. The ratio is all wrong.
If the people who need information cant get access to it it doesn't matter if the information exists.
The solution to collective decision making is to set up a system for information distribution. Ideally it would be a fully distributed system but since we cant have that we will have to start with a properly designed server then work towards a decentralized formula.
The people who have monopolized information distribution will fight you all the way on this. They will rally their zombie legion of Jackass, Eastenders, Neighbours, Friends, dancing with the stars and football supporters and teach you a lesson.
Imagine this was ever on TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1-5_34QgGI
In stead you got Johnny Knoxville is what you got in stead.
To add a fun story:
If you look at the RSS spec you find a rating element. If you chase that rabbit down the rabbit hole you end up reading about a mythological creature called the PICS rating system[1]. It is like the ancient Greeks of internet design forged a most poetic system for content rating. Wondering why such a beautiful thing never took off you end up reading authoritative-sounding attention-monopolists ranting and raving about the mere smell of scrutiny. Eventually they successfully denounce the concept as CENSORSHIP and proceed to brand it a porn filter. Today that is the only remaining implementation.
[1] - https://www.w3.org/PICS/