9 ms·

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

by ttul 4y ago

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.

deepsun 4y ago
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).
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  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
- danans 4y ago
  > 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.
doctor_eval 4y ago
> conservative low-information voters this is a terrific turn of phrase. thanks.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  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.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    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.
AussieWog93 4y ago
>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.
- beachy 4y ago
  What sort of ideas do you have in mind?
  - srackey 4y ago
    Communism
    - bandyaboot 4y ago
      When communist movements take hold, it’s because the truck driver types have gotten on board.
yamtaddle 4y ago
"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.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  "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)
- belos 4y ago
  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/a-beginning https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/table-of-contents https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/table-of-contents
  - shagie 4y ago
    > 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-of-government/ https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
ghufran_syed 4y ago
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”?
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Perhaps those who lean liberal but dislike nuclear energy?
  - Arnt 4y ago
    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.
    - creato 4y ago
      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.
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        > (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?
beachy 4y ago
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-war-ukraine-advancing-lgbtq-rights-00085841 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- themaninthedark 4y ago
  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.
robear 4y ago
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.
bluefirebrand 4y ago
> 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.
Tiktaalik 4y ago
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.
- Gud 4y ago
  I disagree completely with this point of view. Look to Switzerland for a functioning direct democracy.
  - Tiktaalik 4y ago
    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.
    - Gud 4y ago
      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.

by ttul 4y ago

deepsun 4y ago

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).

yamtaddle 4y ago
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
danans 4y ago
> 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.

doctor_eval 4y ago

> conservative low-information voters this is a terrific turn of phrase. thanks.

red-iron-pine 4y ago
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.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  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.

AussieWog93 4y ago

>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.

beachy 4y ago
What sort of ideas do you have in mind?
- srackey 4y ago
  Communism
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    When communist movements take hold, it’s because the truck driver types have gotten on board.

yamtaddle 4y ago

"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.

throw0101c 4y ago
"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)
belos 4y ago
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/a-beginning https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/table-of-contents https://bestofagreatlot.substack.com/p/table-of-contents
- shagie 4y ago
  > 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-of-government/ https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

ghufran_syed 4y ago

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”?

satvikpendem 4y ago
Perhaps those who lean liberal but dislike nuclear energy?
- Arnt 4y ago
  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.
  - creato 4y ago
    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.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      > (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?

beachy 4y ago

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-war-ukraine-advancing-lgbtq-rights-00085841 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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
themaninthedark 4y ago
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.

robear 4y ago

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.

bluefirebrand 4y ago

> 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.

Tiktaalik 4y ago

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.

Gud 4y ago
I disagree completely with this point of view. Look to Switzerland for a functioning direct democracy.
- Tiktaalik 4y ago
  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.
  - Gud 4y ago
    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.