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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that there are any winners in Brexit. It corrupted the British politics and EU lost UK, besides the economical impact.

Barriers on trade and travel were raised without purpose other than having barriers.

Even the brexiteers lost their mojo as their purpose of existence disappeared and a particularly incompetent and toxic breed of politicians dominated the political discussions. Those too lost by getting exposed for what they are, destroying the support for legitimate position which those were pretending to stand for.

Absolutely no winners. Any perceived winners are temporary simply because you don't have anything to win by destroying your tight and fruitful relationship with your closest neighbours and you can't move somewhere else.

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It’s small beer by comparison, but I’m similar fashion, British Columbians booted out an efficient and wonderful value added tax called the HST because an aging provincial politician engaged his base of mostly conservative low-information voters against it, claiming baselessly that it killed jobs.

Democracies for some reason seem to shoot themselves in the foot periodically when a popular idea takes hold despite rational arguments against it. If you can come up with a good sounding idea that is devoid of facts, dumb citizens will gleefully support it.

Democracy is a bad form of government, especially for more complex questions as you presented. Unfortunately, that's still the best form of government we've discovered that far (besides theoretical naive ones like communism or libertarianism).

So Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that.

— EM Forster

> that's still the best form of government we've discovered that far (besides theoretical naive ones like communism or libertarianism).

Libertarianism and communism may be naive, but as I understand it, they aren't forms of government, as in "providing a framework for governance".

Democracy, authoritarianism, fascism, monarchy, oligarchy, anarchy - those are all forms of government.

> conservative low-information voters

this is a terrific turn of phrase. thanks.

there are liberal low-info voters, and high-info voters of both sides.

plus don't conflate low info to == low intelligence. low info is as much about attention and willingness to delve into policies as it is about sharpness. your Stanford STEM grad working 60 hours a week doesn't have time to dig deep into anything outside of some casual reddit or wired or HN browsing, and efforts to convey expectations via simple things like screenshoting someone else's tweets work very well.

I did not make the assumptions you’re concerned about but I appreciate the spirit of your comment.

I would however argue that low info often correlates with low access to info. Or perhaps more correctly, you don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t know to look.

If theres anything I’ve learned as I’ve become older it’s how little I know about anything.

>If you can come up with a good sounding idea that is devoid of facts, dumb citizens will gleefully support it.

You can also apply the same thinking to "rational", fact-based ideas held by intellectuals.

Sometimes they backfire in horrific ways and you need the truck drivers of the world to keep you in line.

What sort of ideas do you have in mind?

Communism

When communist movements take hold, it’s because the truck driver types have gotten on board.

"The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

— Winston Churchill (probably not, actually, but it's usually attributed to him)

Or just read any poli-sci research concerning voters. It's basically all horrifying and/or depressing.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." — H. L. Mencken, A Little Book in C major (1916)

This is absolutely one of my favorite quotes, because it’s both true, and points to what we need, which is better systems. I’m currently writing out a design for a better system! At the moment I’ve published some work toward it, including commentaries on some of the major problems a new design needs to resolve. Some of the key ones include the dilution of representation, which means that emotional appeals have a much easier time driving voter behavior, bundled governance, which means we get far less expertise among our policymakers, and lack of justifiable governance - we don’t have to prove that our rules do what we intended them to do.

I’d love to invite more folks to give feedback and think about some of these ideas. It is possible to design a better system, but somewhere along the way we sort of gave up on doing more than incremental reform. I'm currently still laying foundations, but hope to be laying out a worked out proposal within the next few months.

https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/a-beginning https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/table-of-contents

> This is absolutely one of my favorite quotes, because it’s both true, and points to what we need, which is better systems.

To which one would reply...

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

People often use this to imply that we can't make better things. That's a really sad belief. I will agree that it's tremendously hard, and requires enormous care, but the Founders of the US weren't gods. They didn't have perfect knowledge of all possible ways of organizing things. With science we say we stand on the shoulders of giants, and I think it's possible to do so in this realm too.

is there such a thing as “liberal low-information voters” and if so, what bad policies were enacted as a result of such voters? Or is this just a high-brow way of saying “the people who disagree with us are stupid”?

Perhaps those who lean liberal but dislike nuclear energy?

Nah, that's people like me. We say "nuclear has high and increasing costs, requires state-subsidised liability insurance and isn't even getting closer to solving its waste problem" and think that learning to live with cheap fickle solar is a smaller problem. Even if you disagree, I don't think you'll call it a a low-information attitude.

You proved yourself to be low information on at least one point (the waste problem).

Your other points may be “true” but in a rather hollow way. We’re all subsidizing the impact of fossil fuel waste for example, it just isn’t correctly accounted for.

> and think that learning to live with cheap fickle solar is a smaller problem

Even if we accept this to be true now, we will have been burning fossil fuels for over a century by the time we actually learn to live with solar at a scale relevant to climate change. I place blame for that squarely on low information liberals.

> (the waste problem).

The waste problem isn't solved. It's entirely a political problem rather than a technical problem, but it's still a problem.

> we will have been burning fossil fuels for over a century by the time we actually learn to live with solar at a scale relevant to climate change.

In 2015, wind&solar was 5.7% of US electricity generation. In 2021 it was 13%. In 2022 it was 16.5%. How can you extrapolate from that and come up with a century?

Nuclear has been stalled in favor of fossil fuels for at least 50 years already.

I think you overlook the central point: The assessment that x>y is based on learned information about x and y, and the assessment that a is a smaller problem than b ditto.

You may argue that the x, y, a and b are wrong, and therefore the conclusions is wrong. Well, fine, as you please. What I'm saying is that learning about x, y, a and b, then forming conclusions, is a high-information mode.

> is there such a thing as “liberal low-information voters”

It isn't necessarily the case that low-information voters are distributed equally across the political spectrum.

> what bad policies were enacted as a result of such voters

It's not a legal policy, but consider usage of the word "latinx" which most Americans of Latin American heritage strongly dislike.

> but consider usage of the word "latinx" which most Americans of Latin American heritage strongly dislike.

Last I saw, the majority don’t care: https://news.gallup.com/poll/353000/no-preferred-racial-term...

"Although it is not true that all Conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are Conservative." - John Stewart Mill

I don't want to throw mud, but something I've thought of is that there has never been a viable liberal talk radio show that came anywhere close to competing with Rush Limbaugh, and there is no liberal analogue to Fox News with anywhere near the success.

Perhaps this is a result of the center-left stance held by most national media corporations and their affiliated commentators. Fox has a monopoly on “conservative msm news” at a national level so they don’t have to share the pie like “liberal msm news”.

It’s not “low information”, if anything we all have way too much information. It’s the overwhelming quantity of “low quality information” that’s breaking us.

Combine this with the decimation of the middle class and democracy has a big problem.

There certainly are. I grew up in a very liberal area and have met lots of people that fit the description. Picture a guy who was raised by ex-hippies and doesn't read the news or care about politics.

Not reading the “news” and not partaking in flavor of the week national political topics are both positive indicators of intelligence in my opinion. It at least takes some meaningful wisdom to not impulsively form a binary conclusion on every topic mentioned by news reporters.

Sure, there definitely are liberal low-information voters. Consider the mask-opposed anti-vax crusader who nonetheless eats vegan and votes Democrat, for instance.

The average person has an IQ of 100. Given that average IQ is defined as being one standard deviation of average, the vast majority of voters are between low intelligence and average intelligence. About 84% of voters thus have low-to-average intelligence (68% fits in one standard deviation of average; 68/2 + 50 = 84%).

Regardless of your political leaning, I think it’s worthwhile accepting that most governments are elected by people who aren’t as smart as the typical HN contributor.

Fairly sure your maths is off there...IQ is supposed to have normal distribution, hence ~50% have below-average intelligence, 50% above-average: how can 84% possibly have low-to-average?

Either way, even if it's true that some significant percentage of voters have below-average IQ, how strong is the evidence that they'll make a "worse" collective choice of government than those with above-average IQs? That's basically assuming that the properties of candidates that will ensure they can act as part of an effective government are somehow "too hard" to accurately judge unless you have above average IQ. It seems just as possible the opposite is true - i.e. those with above average IQ aren't good at judging the sorts of properties candidates need to be govern effectively - at least partly because that implies being able to govern in way that works well for those in the below-average-IQ group (i.e. those in the above-average-IQ group will probably do reasonably well for themselves regardless of the quality of government).

The comment uses a definition of average as scores within one standard deviation of the mean. (The comment also uses average as the mean score, 100, which makes it confusing--two meanings of average. NB: Mean is also median in normal distributions.)

I suppose it's the redefinition of average to include IQs up to "115" that I'd say was the issue then...

TIL that apparently both Stanford-Binet and Wechsler have classification systems which both define "average" as 90-109. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford%E2%80%93Binet_Intelli... (the latter includes the latest scale for Standford-Binet)

Google provides many hits of people using average to mean within one standard deviation, or 85-115, but in a few minutes of searching I couldn't figure out a proper authority for that.

The examples I can think of are going to be arguable, but:

- Antivaccine politics (before covid) was mostly liberal.

- Progressive regulation of housing construction/affordable housing policies in liberal cities are (probably) well intentioned but economically naive

- Some environmental policies (banning plastic straws, grocery bags, some water conservation efforts) are again well intentioned but a complete waste of breath for either side.

Democracies are weird. Many of the most primal problems of mankind are solved. The rule of law is (in theory) impartial, citizens have property rights, etc. etc. There is free press.

Most people living in democracies don't really understand - or just don't think about - how good they have it. At the same time, the human brain is wired to react strongly to outrage. Living the sweet life in a democracy, and with less valid things to outrage about, the brain is vulnerable to outrage exploitation about manufactured controversies, like who must bake a cake for who, or whether this statue or that should be allowed to stand in the park. Social media hostility and polarisation flourish.

But when the chips are down and democracy itself is at stake, people wake up and start thinking more rationally about the things that really matter.

Case in point from a news article this morning - Ukraine is normalising LGBTQ attitudes rapidly because suddenly their democracy is at risk. And suddenly it seems more sensible to have your LGBTQ neighbour alongside you in the trenches rather than hating on them because of your weird religious hangups or whatever (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/07/russias-wa...).

So perhaps democracy does indeed shoot itself in the foot, but perhaps also the system can be self-balancing when things finally go off the rails or a threat from outside arrives.

That is a very optimistic view, I doubt that the % of LGBTQ that would contribute in the trenches would make a big difference.

My bet is that this is just signaling to their western allies(us) but hopefully I am wrong.

In my circles it was mainly left leaning people against the HST. Part of it was a dislike of Gordon Campbell and part of it was that the HST changes were seen as pro-business.

> British Columbians booted out an efficient and wonderful value added tax called the HST because an aging provincial politician engaged his base of mostly conservative low-information voters against it, claiming baselessly that it killed jobs.

Absolutely not.

It was because the HST added an extra 7% tax onto a whole ton of things that were exempt from the 7% PST previously. The HST was costing people a lot money on everyday items.

Yeah when most things start cost an extra 7% in tax, you're going to mobilize people against you.

With the HST issue, it wasn't necessarily the democracy that was the fault but the mechanism of direct democracy referendum. Also the culprit with Brexit.

There's a reason our democracies are representative democracies. It allows things to slow down and our representatives to have cooler heads and make informed decisions.

In contrast a referendum is easily instantly hijacked and there's never any guarantee that the way people are voting in the referendum has anything actually to do with the referendum issue.

In BC's case with the HST the vote on the tax quickly became a way to poke the unpopular Premier Gordon Campbell in the eye, and many people voted against the HST to make a point against a government that they were mad at for other reasons.

Referendums are bad bad bad.

I disagree completely with this point of view. Look to Switzerland for a functioning direct democracy.

Women only got the vote in Switzerland in 1971.

Referendums were effectively used to limit their rights for decades upon decades longer than other democracies.

Things move slower in Switzerland. Eventually they adapt good ideas. That is why they're so stable but not always progressive. Switzerland is a very diverse country politically and culturally.

I don't think that's right. Everythign in the EU is moving much faster now the UK is out. Losing the 2nd/3rd (depending on year & measurement approach) largest EU economy seems like an obvious loss. But with money comes power, and the UK always used its power to try to stop anything happening. It's a shame the UK was dominated by its most intransigently sclerotic constituent nation. Scotland and Wales could both have been effective and useful EU members (and, who knows, may yet become so). England was never going to be, and the EU is undoubtedly better off without it.

When UK was a member of EU it stopped any further development of it. It was against all proposals for tighter military, political and economic integration of the member states. Now that UK is out it gives EU a chance to get closer to a real state and to better compete with US and China.

In 10 or 20 years when most of the leave voters die out and a new generation of politicians grows up it's completely possible for UK to re-join the EU.

In 10 or 20 years when most of the leave voters die out and a new generation of politicians grows up

It will be interesting to see if that new generation stick to their current political beliefs in 10 or 20 years.

The older generation who were most heavily in favour of Brexit were the same younger generation who voted for the EU's predecessor at the previous referendum a few decades earlier. A person's political views can change over time. And of course so can both the UK and the EU.

On the other hand the traditional patterns of individual political evolution and voting behaviour in British politics haven't really held recently and no-one seems to know why yet. So we shouldn't assume that younger voters who skew pro-EU at present will turn into older voters who skew the other way in a decade or two.

I wish you were right, but EU's share of world GDP is just shrinking every year (both before and after Brexit) because of all the great social structure that give people a peaceful life.

As an example GDPR is great for protecting privacy, but makes data mining for businesses really hard. Great for people, but on the long term these protections can weaken the economy which makes EU more and more vulnerable to outside control.

At the same time it's not a new thing: it's happening gradually over the last few hundreds of years.

Without cheap Russian oil+gas and worldwide dedollarisation with rise of BRICS, EU will turn into just another Sri Lanka worth of GDP in coming 50 years. In my 30 years kf investment portfolios, EU portions had shrink so fast. You can see their footballs revenue shrinking, persistent high unemployment, lack innovations in tech sectors, insurance especially maritime market share erodes fastest this year. Asians influx (especially Chinese and Indians) had been eclipse by middle east and Afticans. You know how industrious amd rich the Chinese and Indians. Doing business is just not worth it in EU. The cost on average is about 20-50% higher than anywhere in the world and that was before losing Russian oil+gas (now is closer to 100% and still rising).

I'm sure Europe won't be something like Sri Lanka, but I feel the anti-business sentiment (businesses are greedy) all the time (especially when I visit US where the opposite is far too much, I see how much big companies captured the country).

Also in US people are fat and die much sooner than Western-Europeans (health is the most important thing a country can provide in my opinion).

With AI coming tech is really taking over from oil in importance (especially long term), so I'm not that worried about it as much as the incompetency and mismanaged EU money that should just go to the venture funds instead of how its distributed.

> fuck people and their rights, data mining is all that matters, amiright? GOTTA GET THAT G-D-P.

Yeah, the article despite its title, doesn't really paint 'EU' as winning, except insofar as they've likely succeeded in discouraging anyone else from exiting the union.

In the UK, there was a bit of a "we're abandoning a sinking ship, now EU gonna suffer" mood.

In that sense, EU kind of prevailed. But yes, not really better off.

While Brexit is quite comprehensively idiotic there are winners: pretty much everyone now sees how dumb it is to leave the world's largest trading bloc in an bad-mannered huff and wreak yet untold havoc on your own economy just because you chose to agree with the bilious rhetoric of perfidious over-rich clowns.

It also served to provide an excellent stress-test of the EU bureaucracy, helping to increase coordination pretty much everywhere.

It looks like it will further serve to provide yet another stimulus to the subjects of the UK to modernise their systems, which is very long overdue.

You’re absolutely right. There are no winners with Brexit although there are significant losses to both sides. The EU lost the one true global city it had - london. I’m certain there will be several claims from Europeans about how Frankfurt or Paris or Amsterdam can supplant it but all that is just hopes and dreams. London is the only true global city apart from New York and there is just no competition. This is a major loss for the EU as London was an excellent gateway to European markets.

On the flip side, the UK remains a global power with significant influence although Brexit was a needless shot in the foot. This is something that a lot of Europeans forget in their attempt to paint Brexit as a disaster - something it definitely is. The UK is a diminished power, but still a power.

I wanted to nitpick your statement about 'true global cities' but I did some research and found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_World_Cities...

TIL

I mean, Paris in Alpha+ is close enough, I think.

Paris is very "french". London is global, like nyc. And even I'd wager London is a tad more global than nyc

> I don't think that there are any winners in Brexit. ... Absolutely no winners.

Russia, of course.

Their investments in Murdoch media and other hyperpartisan media and disinformation-warfare techniques have paid massive dividends - the US is the most hyper-polarized it's been since the civil war, the UK has been pulled out of the EU fold are both massive successes. Australia and Canada and several other countries are dealing with similar polarization - although of course not Murdoch media in Canada, but it's not a coincidence that the other three are all Murdoch strongholds.

Not a coincidence the NRA got busted for funnelling russian money into US politics and working hand-in-glove with russian intelligence operators, and I don't think they're the only one, not even close. Just as the republican majority leader noted in 2017 - there's probably even a few specific congresspeople and other powerful politicians on the Russian payroll. Throw in a few shells for plausible deniability and it's all for sale.

The performative theatrics around ukraine have certainly been interesting and I don't think it's all just ritual opposition to whatever the party in power is doing either. The politicians McCarthy identified have been particularly outspoken too.

As they say: "Lock it up, no leaks, that's how we know we're family here."

Russia seems to have indirectly lost out from its leader convincing himself he's a political mastermind who can get other countries to dance to his tune too...

(and as far as Brexit goes they undoubtedly funnelled a lot of money to certain campaigns, but Mail/Murdoch coverage of the EU in the UK was just as hysterical in the 1990s when Russia was a non factor)

Think you need to separate between Russia and the Putin regime. Putin and his friends/oligarchs/corrupted officials/KGB agents have kept the regular russians very very poor.

What does a regular russian citizen gain from increased corruption in EU - that used to be Russia's biggest trading partner? Or from a potential civil war in US, that is the source of most progress and new technology in the world?

"Think you need to separate between Russia and the Putin regime."

Once the Russian people can do that, the rest of us can too.

> Think you need to separate between Russia and the Putin regime. Putin and his friends/oligarchs/corrupted officials/KGB agents have kept the regular russians very very poor.

What is the difference between the people and the regime? The GOP lost elections; they voted in Obama, and later Biden. Control of the House and Senate changes, or is often perilously close.

There is no such change in Russia. There is only the regime, and it's grasp on the country is stronger than ever.

> Or from a potential civil war in US, that is the source of most progress and new technology in the world?

the only ones who think civil war is a real possibility in the US are foreign intelligence types pushing for destabilization, or a handful of GOP politicians trying to ride the hard right for their advantage. for all of the Texas will be independent grandstanding, it's just that -- grandstanding.

It didn't corrupt UK politics so much as clearly demonstrate the levels to which it had sunk.

How did the EU lose anything?

They get to impose modern requirements when pieces of the UK want to rejoin

The UK wasnt part of the monetary union and all I guess is that some import export duties have to be reimplemented and now counted differently.

The EU losing the UK is like NATO losing France.

France was an original founding member of NATO but partially withdrew in 1966 for reasons not unlike the UK leaving the EU, populist nationalism. They returned 43 years later.

My guess is that Scotland will leave the UK and join the EU. Maybe in 50 years a rump England will apply to re-join.

UK is a cultural superpower with a global city where the lingua franca is the native thong. UK leaving EU is a significant loss for EU.

UK leaving the EU is like losing your USB-C port.

The analogy is lost on me and you still didn't explain what the EU lost

EU citizens can still get to London, UK citizens can still go on holiday in Europe

work visas are needed for more now

Was a cultural superpower. 100 years ago India was speaking british english, but now they're speaking american english, and watching american movies.

Does not having to run your laws past an outside, unaccountable authority not count as a win of any kind?

Yah there are economic costs to brexit but surely self-determination has some value right?

Not at all because it’s a fallacy. EU is not some 3rd party, it’s made up of its members and having your laws aligned to EU laws mean your laws are aligned to the laws laws created by you.

EU is not some Belgian club you subscribe to, Brussels is just a location for meeting with your partners. People who make the EU laws were British, among others.

EU is useful when you want to have interoperability and resolve conflicts before they happen.

So essentially, if you like to have flying cars that can travel across all the Europe, your people posted in Brussels come to agreement with the others on the flux capacitor fuel types and pass an EU law. Then your people at home pass a domestic law that follows the EU law and you end up with standardized flux capacitor fuels.

As a result being in EU gives you the say on what suits you so the EU law be designed that way. When out of the EU, EU does it’s own thing and if you like to sell flying cars to EU, you need to comply to their flux capacitor requirements anyway(AKA Brussels effect). That’s why Brexit made trade with EU so bureaucratic.

That's how it was presented to the British public though. "Oh, the EU wants us to do this, our hands are tied, we can't do anything". No system with a smidgeon of accountability to the British public would ever have kept disgraced former disgraced former MP Peter Mandelson in a position of power.

Mandelson was nominated by the Government of the United Kingdom to be EU Commissioner, as part of the first Barroso Commission. Presumably the nominating HM Government is not accountable to the British Public.

If you put enough layers of indirection in then the accountability that theoretically exists becomes so weak as to be meaningless.

yes and we get to pick other temporary dictators who want to give knighthoods to their dads!!

amongst other abuses of their powers

Can you say exactly why the EU is unnaccountable? Genuinely curious, because my understanding is that MEPs have the final say and EU citizens get to vote for them; the fact that they tended not to engage in that in the UK pre-Brexit wasn't the fault of the EU. If that's not a mistaken understanding then by the same logic national governments are equally unaccountable, no?

And the commission which is often called undemocratic. Is essentially comparable to ministers. Selected by the governing governments. Not by voters. I don't get to vote who is which minister. They are pretty much unelected in same way...

NI, possibly - only time will tell though.

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