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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

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.

bostik 10y ago
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.

bostik 10y ago

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.