Hacker News Reader

Comment by cslarson | Hacker News Reader

At least regarding the UK and brexit I'd disagree with this. I'm a us/uk dual living in London and watched a bbc show called questiontime avidly pre-brexit vote. The show moves around the country each week with a different audience and generally skews left. But in the brexit issue week after week it was clear to see which side the audience was for. They just did not find the remain arguments compelling.

I think the UK is civically engaged and that the brexit outcome actually reflected this despite the sour grapes in London... and at the Guardian.

View on HN

There are many problems with drawing inferences about overall public opinion from programmes like BBC Question Time. The main one is sample bias. Sampling occurs in three stages:

1) Audience members are self-selecting.

2) Audience members are then selected from the group that self-selected to represent a cross-section of the population.

3) Not all audience members get to ask their question, they are selected by the host.

The problem with the second stage is that there is a person, called an "audience producer", who selects people. When that person reposts the social media output of Britain First, an extremely far right political organisation, it questions whether they may have a political bias that may affect the sampling [0].

Watching Question Time could quite easily convince you that you are in a majority or a minority and you could be wrong. Treating Question Time as any kind of meaningful measure of public opinion is a form of self delusion, albeit one that's hard to shake off even if you know it. The only thing a person speaking on Question Time could tell you is that there exists a person with those views, and even that might not be true. Same goes for any other audience panel.

[0] https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourbeeb/tim-holmes/is-question...

Oh god, I hate Question Time.

It doesn't "skew left" in any meaningful sense. There's almost always a UKIP member on the panel, regardless of how badly they do in the elections. There's always people banging on about how immigrants have ruined the country. Participants shout over one another, especially over women.

And it's not "sour grapes", it's people who wonder if they or their family members are going to be deported, or whether their business is going to continue to exist. Many people in the scientific community have already had their work disrupted due to uncertainty over funding and pan-European collaboration.

Fair observation, but it's worth noting that the person in charge of selecting the audience for Question Time was caught out as being extremely far right on the political spectrum. It's unlikely that the audiences you saw in the leadup to the vote were particularly balanced.

http://www.thecanary.co/2016/12/05/fresh-scandal-erupts-bbc-...

I don't see where the disagreement is. I agree that the population is civically engaged, and it's not a surprise that a show that moves around the country with a remit amongst the audience planners to include everyone has 'Leave' voters (Leave voters being as they are predominantly concentrated outside London and large cities).

My argument is that we are potentially no longer able to determine the arguments that are being used to influence people, which is significant when there has been a marked turn away from the EU in public opinion over the last five years.

Is it necessary to postulate a shadowy cabal of influencers at play here? Perhaps there's nothing there to identify, and the risk is instead of falling into the conspiracy theorist's trap of being so desperate to force legibility upon an illegible world that outright florid psychosis, a true break from reality, becomes preferable to simply accepting that too many things go on too often among too many people to ever be cohesively understood save in retrospect, and rarely enough even then.

Regarding your notion of "there's nothing there to identify" which I assume means there's nothing to the work of Cambridge Analytica.

If that was true then Cambridge Analytica would not make any money. The fact that Cambridge, and facebook, make money, and a ton of it, can make you relatively certain that they can influence people.

No, I'm referring to the idea that the Brexit vote wouldn't have come out as it did absent, essentially, a conspiracy.

That said, plenty of firms make money despite not actually doing as they purport to do. Perhaps Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and the like simply have yet to be exposed as charlatans.

> No, I'm referring to the idea that the Brexit vote wouldn't have come out as it did absent, essentially, a conspiracy.

Nobody upthread has disagreed with you on that. So why are you arguing?

In that case, it doesn't matter what Cambridge Analytica did or didn't do. So why are you?

Even if Cambridge Analytica was not necessary for the vote to come out as it did, what they are trying to do still does matter. Because they or someone else is definitely working on improving their techniques, and they will be used in any number of elections to come.

Facebook makes money through simple commercial advertising - nothing sinister there.

Cambridge Analytica might just make money by convincing fools that they have some secret insight or power, when they actually don't. Psychics and mediums have in the past made a ton of money, as did quack doctors. Coca-Cola started out as a quack cure-all and it still makes a ton of money today.

The basic narrative you're pursuing here is one that has cropped up a lot in the past 18 months: voters are, by and large, easily manipulated putty who don't have real reasons or analysis behind their decisions. Instead they simply do whatever shadowy Russian conspirators make them do through subtle manipulation of Facebook, the press, or whatever.

Simple, obvious explanations for what's happening in politics are staring us all straight in the face. Occam's Razor guys ... there is no need to go full chemtrails and pin responsibility on some invisible evidence-free conspiracy of random firms, people and countries. Just assume voters are on average, of average intelligence, and thus probably have reasonably straightforward reasons for doing what they do.

Again, my post made clear that I don't necessarily buy the thesis that Cambridge Analytica swung the election. So I don't see where the florid break from reality comes into it either.

My preference is strongly however to attempt to understand (and have visibility over) the factors that are influencing people rather than retreat behind a veil of 'we can't possibly understand it' ignorance.

I note that your profile says you are a strategist & speaker on "digital, UX and branding".

I would hope that a branding specialist would have no trouble understanding the Brexit result. It doesn't require deep analysis. Remain mounted a campaign that was defeatist and based on fear: "ok, our attempt to negotiate resulted in nothing at all, but we must still remain and obey Brussels because if we don't our friends and allies will destroy our economy."

As a logical consequence, they were effectively arguing that there was no future for British democracy, because the trend over time has always been for the EU to take more powers out of the hands of democratic local government and take it for itself.

That's a terrible brand. Leave campaigned on a better future with "take back control" as their byline.

You don't need conspiracy theories about corporations with mind-control machines to explain what happened next.

Yes the remain campaign was very negative. However it is also true to say that a lot of people voted leave on the promise of £350 million a week extra for the NHS (as painted on the Brexit Bus). Many people feel this is a straight-forward lie because a) The number is wrong (the governments own figure is £199m). The number of 350m is something like the gross contribution and could only be acheived with widespread cuts to services currently funded by the EU. b) The money was never going to get govern to the NHS.

I think this alone serves to demonstrate 1) your assertion about what caused the Brexit vote is a gross oversimplification 2) Why many people still won't accept the result.

it is also true to say that a lot of people voted leave on the promise of £350 million a week extra for the NHS

No it's not. Can you show that with any sort of data at all? Or do you define "a lot" as simply "more than a few"?

The Remain obsession with a single bus is really sad. There's no evidence that this was a major factor in the vote. Immigration and sovereignty were the top two issues as shown by repeated polls, vox pops, the views of campaigners themselves, etc.

It's an especially weak point to bring up because it appears to have been wrong in the wrong direction: nobody campaigning for the EU mentioned an £80 billion exit fee, and if that had been known about or incorporated, the true cost of membership would have been much higher, perhaps more like £500 million a week.

Additionally there were lots of lies told by the Remain campaign that were far more impactful and serious. For example, Cameron saying he'd stay on to negotiate with the EU in the case of an out vote (despite having failed to achieve anything before), which turned out to be a colossal lie. And a very important one because it made Osborne's threat of a "punishment budget" credible. Yet he resigned immediately, clearly he didn't decide that on the spot, he knew he wouldn't continue if he lost the vote.

You don't need to postulate a shadowy cabal because it's not shadowy.

Does it not bother you that David Cameron's first press officer was Murdoch-stooge Andy Coulson, who had already resigned as Editor as News of the World, and who was subsequently imprisoned for his role in phone hacking?

We're talking about someone who would attempt to hack the phone of anyone with a public profile - including politicians - and who was then employed to run the official government press office.

Meanwhile Rupert Murdoch's attitude to Europe is public knowledge:

https://www.indy100.com/article/this-terrifying-rupert-murdo...

So. It's not shadowy at all. It's not mysterious. No joining of dots is needed.

It's completely overt and out in the open. And it should never have been allowed this level of influence over British politics without being challenged.

David Cameron led the campaign to remain, as did the government. Coulson, the press officer whom Cameron picked, and who you're trying to finger as part of some "overt" and "out in the open" conspiracy, also campaigned for Remain and frequently attacked people campaigning to Leave:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-camerons-ex-staff...

How does this conspiracy theory even work? That Cameron's staff were secretly trying to lose whilst they were out campaigning to win? Because of an ex-employer?

That's not just illogical, it's completely incoherent. Think about what you're trying to argue there for a moment.

Yeah, influential Tories are likely to get jobs when a Tory government is in power. Much like how Seamus Milne will become the Corbyn's press officer come a labour win in June.

And that quote has always just been a standard issue made up internet quote. Murdoch was literally in the Guardian letter pages denying he ever said such a thing. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/19/rupert-murdoch...

And why would he say it? "When I go into Downing Street they do as I say" would be a bizarre utterance from a newspaper editor.

"I think the UK is civically engaged"

I tend to believe the opposite (purely anecdotally). Most people are apathetic when it comes to politics. We've just had local elections in the UK (seats for local councils and regional mayors). The turnout (i.e. the proportion of the population who turned up to vote) ranged from 21% to around the 30% mark for most regions in England. Turnout was higher in Scotland.

In the UK we have a lot of political discussion on TV, radio and in our highly partisan national press, but that doesn't mean the public are well-informed or particularly interested in politics. It doesn't help that many of our national newspapers deliberately seek to mislead or sway readers either. For example, when Theresa May announced a snap election, the headline in the Daily Mail wasn't 'May announces snap election', it was 'Crush the saboteurs' (opponents of Brexit).

I certainly did not get the sense a year ago that the average person in Britain really wanted there to be a referrendum at all. I just don't think your average person wanted to discuss it. In the end the referendum forced people to make a decision on a subject they didn't really care about. It is a bit like posing the question to a random passer-by. Do you want less bureaucracy? Well of course I do!

You could detect the 4% bias in question time?

Quite feasibly when you look at the geographical split. It's not like it was 52-48 across the country, there were very real regional divides.

While in London it may be more equal (including the famous Remain voter who asked who was going to make all the sandwiches in Pret), in somewhere like Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Lincoln, absolutely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com