Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

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It's interesting - as Tocqueville (Democracy in America) and Mill (On Liberty) argued precisely that it was civil society and discourse that help us protect against a tyranny of the majority.

And that generally what separates 'democratizing' nations from 'democracies' is that one simply has democratic institutions such as voting, and the other has a culture of democratic decision making, civil discourse etc etc to go with it. Iraq may have elections and be able to kick out its leaders but it sure isn't a democracy in the same way Britain and the United States are.

Now its not a 'the people are stupid' argument that I'm making - there have been people throughout history who have contended that we take a too simplistic view of affairs. Fine, blah, I'm sure they do, and I'm happy to accept there are people who don't reason critically on both sides and there's no reason to think one side has a monopoly on those.

What I'm saying is that we can't fairly determine the information that is being seeded to all parties. It's the equivalent of someone turning up to lots of Tocqueville's town hall meetings and distributing pamphlets biased to one side to people who look like they're from a certain socioeconomic background as they walk in.

There is something that happened in Britain in the last five years that merits explanation. A population which according to Eurobarometer 2010 data, only five years ago was 45% Pro-EU and 33% anti voted 52% to 48% to Leave when the government of the day, international instutitions, and all major political parties were arguing that we should stay. This, in Britain, a country not generally known for upending its whole political system on a whim.

Now you can pin the explanation for that on whatever you want (and I happen to think your austerity theory has something in it), but it's reasonable to think in a democracy that we should be able to have a discussion (or at least know about) the factors that swayed people.

> 45% Pro-EU and 33% anti

Looking at the Eurobarometer autumn 2010 report at http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/archives/e... on page 47 (of the report, not the PDF) we have the UK listed polling 39% "negative or very negative", 38% neutral, and 19% "positive or very positive" in terms of their general perception of the EU.

And on page 36 of the same report, it's claimed that the UK was polling at 27% "we benefit from the EU", 60% "we don't benefit from the EU" and 13% "don't know".

Page 39 lists the UK (without specific numbers) in the list of countries where a majority believes that their "national interests are not properly taken into account".

So at first glance it seems to me that in autum 2010 the population of the UK wasn't all that sweet on the EU as a concept at all. I'd love to know what question the "45% Pro-EU and 33% anti" was a response to; I haven't found it in that PDF so far. The only mention of "45%" in reference to the UK I see is on page 49, where 45% of UK respondents think the EU is "democratic" (the only EU country with less than 50%!).

The problem is the direct voter communication bandwidth is at best a few bits per election. People need to condense thousands of very important choices into one overall choice per election. Which often boils down to are you doing a terrible job or not.

Granted elected officials often listen to side channels, but they care about what will influence the election not what most people actually want aka 'the will of the people'.

> Which often boils down to are you doing a terrible job or not.

Or even "you are doing a terrible job, but that other person would be worse".

> we can't fairly determine the information that is being seeded to all parties

Why do you think anyone should be in the position of "determining" the information that is being seeded? Fight disagreeable speech with agreeable speech, amirite, but don't yearn for a boss to tell which is which.

> Why do you think anyone should be in the position of "determining" the information that is being seeded? Fight disagreeable speech with agreeable speech, amirite, but don't yearn for a boss to tell which is which.

Maybe the more exact word for what I mean is "discern" rather than determine, though determine works fine too ("Officials are working to determine the cause of a bus crash").

Anyhoo, I don't yearn for such an arbiter.

>don't yearn for a boss to tell which is which.

This is not what is being said - I will quote the parent commenter:

"Here it seems that an influence / behaviour change campaign could be waged relatively cheaply against a relatively small number of people, exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity, and the majority of the population would have no idea about it."

This is talking about being "bubbled", and how different collections of people are seeing completely different things, and because both sides don't know what the other is looking at, they become alienated from each other.

Furthermore, there is another problem - while a singular lie can be countered, a thousand different lies told to a thousand different communities is much harder to defend against.

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