The stupidity of crowds
openforideas.org
openforideas.org
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.
If 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."
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.
* 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.
When asked if the voting age should be lowered 57% said no.
When asked if 16 and 17-year-olds should have the right to vote, 61% said yes.
When asked if the voting age should be lowered 43% said yes.
When asked if 16 and 17-year-olds should have the right to vote, 61% said yes.
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:
Is 4 greater than 2 ? Yes
Is the number four greater than the number two ? Yes
Is 4 greater than 2 ? Yes
Is the number two greater than the number four ? No
First question makes numbers like 12 or 13 valid. Second doesn't.
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 asked if the voting age should be lowered 57% said no"
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.
I don't know if there's data showing those popups work, but they really ruin the user experience.
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.
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.
(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/
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.