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”?
Your other points may be “true” but in a rather hollow way. We’re all subsidizing the impact of fossil fuel waste for example, it just isn’t correctly accounted for.
> and think that learning to live with cheap fickle solar is a smaller problem
Even if we accept this to be true now, we will have been burning fossil fuels for over a century by the time we actually learn to live with solar at a scale relevant to climate change. I place blame for that squarely on low information liberals.
The waste problem isn't solved. It's entirely a political problem rather than a technical problem, but it's still a problem.
> we will have been burning fossil fuels for over a century by the time we actually learn to live with solar at a scale relevant to climate change.
In 2015, wind&solar was 5.7% of US electricity generation. In 2021 it was 13%. In 2022 it was 16.5%. How can you extrapolate from that and come up with a century?
You may argue that the x, y, a and b are wrong, and therefore the conclusions is wrong. Well, fine, as you please. What I'm saying is that learning about x, y, a and b, then forming conclusions, is a high-information mode.
It isn't necessarily the case that low-information voters are distributed equally across the political spectrum.
> what bad policies were enacted as a result of such voters
It's not a legal policy, but consider usage of the word "latinx" which most Americans of Latin American heritage strongly dislike.
Last I saw, the majority don’t care: https://news.gallup.com/poll/353000/no-preferred-racial-term...
The average person has an IQ of 100. Given that average IQ is defined as being one standard deviation of average, the vast majority of voters are between low intelligence and average intelligence. About 84% of voters thus have low-to-average intelligence (68% fits in one standard deviation of average; 68/2 + 50 = 84%).
Regardless of your political leaning, I think it’s worthwhile accepting that most governments are elected by people who aren’t as smart as the typical HN contributor.
Either way, even if it's true that some significant percentage of voters have below-average IQ, how strong is the evidence that they'll make a "worse" collective choice of government than those with above-average IQs? That's basically assuming that the properties of candidates that will ensure they can act as part of an effective government are somehow "too hard" to accurately judge unless you have above average IQ. It seems just as possible the opposite is true - i.e. those with above average IQ aren't good at judging the sorts of properties candidates need to be govern effectively - at least partly because that implies being able to govern in way that works well for those in the below-average-IQ group (i.e. those in the above-average-IQ group will probably do reasonably well for themselves regardless of the quality of government).
Google provides many hits of people using average to mean within one standard deviation, or 85-115, but in a few minutes of searching I couldn't figure out a proper authority for that.
- 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.
Combine this with the decimation of the middle class and democracy has a big problem.