People who voted for Brexit ‘more likely to be less intelligent’, study claims | Hacker News Reader

People who voted for Brexit ‘more likely to be less intelligent’, study claims

independent.co.uk

25 pointsBerislavLopac47 comments

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Actual study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Please don’t Reddit my HN

This is some seriously brazen propaganda. I'll give them points for courage.

It's important to distinguish between Brexit and voting for Brexit.

The question on the referendum was:

> Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

and the options were:

> Remain a member of the European Union

and

> Leave the European Union

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the UK could in fact do better outside the EU.

Let's also assume that most economists, trade experts, business groups, politicians, etc from all across the political spectrum agreed with this.

Let's even assume that the consensus among all those experts was so strong that you'd pretty much have to be an idiot to think the the UK should remain in the EU.

It would still be dumb to vote "leave" on that particular referendum because it doesn't say anything about how Brexit is to be implemented.

For things like this whose implementation is very complicated and there are many ways to get it wrong and negate many or even most of the benefits you were hoping to get from it there needs to be at least two separate referendums.

The first referendum directs the government to work out how it will be implemented--writing all necessary legislation, negotiating all necessary treaties and trade agreements, and so on.

The second referendum would be on whether or not to accept that implementation.

Imagine a democracy in which you vote your IQ from an official test. If your IQ was measured at 114 your vote counts 114 times, etc. This seems obviously unfair. But would it improve the results? My intuition fails me here, I can't predict.

I wonder if that rule would have swung Brexit the other way? That would give an idea of the magnitude of the difference.

The people with high IQ may vote to further the interests of people with high IQ, effectively oppressing the people with low IQ.

> the interests of people with high IQ

What would that be? More library funding? NASA? NSF?

Smart people are equally greedy and corruptable.

And have greater ability to leverage that in to oppression of others.

This entire idea if IQ or "smart" as somehow better has tried and failed repeatedly in history. There is no benevolent ruler, as they will get displaced in short order.

Let's say for the sake of argument that people with high IQ are more likely to have white-collar jobs which rely on intellectual ability, and people with low IQ are more likely to have jobs consisting mostly of manual labor. I would expect jobs to be distributed this way even in a theoretical society where IQ was a perfect measure of true intelligence, and where manual labor was respected and not necessarily lower-paid.

It stands to reason that the white-collar, high IQ voters would be less concerned with policies which affect manual laborers. These could include workplace safety protections, certification requirements, etc.

Even with one-person-one-vote voting systems people often vote to further their own interests, sometimes to the detriment of minorities.

Too lazy/tired to work it out in detail but afair IQ is normally distributed so I don't think this linear weighting would bring high IQ much if any advantage vs the average person when weighted by sample count (because there's so many more average people). But the low IQ population would be seriously at a disadvantage vs the average and high IQ populations.

We're saying the same thing, it just depends on where you put the groupings. The top 50% of the bell curve would have outsized voting power compared to the bottom 50% (which is what I meant by "high" vs "low").

Brexit should have gone the other way anyway, a constitutional change like that should require a 70% majority. But the EU was coming after the tax safe havens like the british virgin islands and the rich do so like their money…

How large a majority was required to join the EU? The threshold to create a law or join a treaty should be at least as high as to revoke or leave.

Heck, even a simple majority would probably have fine if the vote wasn’t claimed to be non-binding. People vote differently when they are told their votes don’t matter.

Though not a measure of IQ, the USA used to require landownership as the litmus test for voting. It might be a similar enough metric.

Not a valid comparison.

Imagine, if you will, a world with no income tax, no sales tax, because those things were very difficult (if not impossible) to reliably know. Instead what you could know is real estate ownership, because that was tracked by the government. Then you also had a new country that was frustrated with taxation without representation. So you form those who represent the country as those who pay taxes.

The availability of land in those days it was easy enough for anyone who wanted to get it. It was also a way to turn a citizen in to a tax payer. Equating this to IQ is similar in the same way that ice cubes and electrical arcs are the same.

Several forms of "census suffrage" exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Householder_Franchise (Check the other languages because they are more complete and better document the various forms).

On Wikipedia I frequently check other languges for comparison but I've never seen it recommended before.

Are there others who do it too?

Whilst I appreciate your point- what happens if the higher the IQ, the more likely to be a sociopath (for example)?

And secondly- just because someone has a lower IQ, doesn’t mean their vote and view is any less valid.

The issue here, imho, is more that the fraudulent claims by the leave were not shut down so lower intelligence people were less able to understand and realise what was happening. They put their trust into the liars who were in it for their own gain rather than the good of the nation. This is, for me, the real story.

This gives me the vibe of “Chinese most dishonest because of not sending email after finding wallet”.

Frame this north American style. The poorest voted for it because it was in their interests

They voted for it because they were propagandized into believing it was in their interests.

High immigration into the UK has been depressing wages at the lower end of the scale (edit: and perhaps not only but I'm thinking that people who earn a good living don't think too much about whether all those foreign professionals dampen salary increases)

The "working class" voted to control immigration but were taken for a ride because those in charge actually want more immigration.

The Brexiteers were naive. Anyone with half a brain wouldve known the elites would switch immigration from EU to third world which is exactly what they did post Brexit.

Ahh yes, the old “the poor are too stupid…” argument.

Nowhere did I say stupid… everyone is susceptible to propaganda, and to deny its influence in this particular circumstance seems naive.

You don’t have to use a specific word to pull out an old political trope.

Massively unhelpful study which nevertheless raises an important point about the democratic system of governance - intelligence not being a factor in making critically important decisions - which would appear to be an un-smart way of doing things

Is a study unhelpful if it leads to helpful questions?

fair point!

There's no evidence that people with a higher IQ do better at choosing where to vote on the ballot. Germany, for example, was a highly educated society in the 1930s, one of the most educated in the world. They voted for Hitler.

This is very subjective. France may officially disagree but I think most reasonable people will at least partially agree that the Treaty of Versailles was a disaster and was the actual cause of what happened next.

> Prominent economists such as John Maynard Keynes declared the treaty too harsh, styling it as a "Carthaginian peace", and saying the reparations were excessive and counterproductive. On the other hand, prominent Allied figures such as French Marshal Ferdinand Foch criticized the treaty for treating Germany too leniently. This is still the subject of ongoing debate by historians and economists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles

yes true. Maybe the issue is not intelligence but the voting

And what about the people who initiated Brexit?

And “more likely to be manipulated” too?

That’s actually a large part of it. People with lower intelligence are also worse at critical thinking. They often defer that to someone else despite what they may say or even believe.

This is such bull crap. The way a person votes should not be an indicator of their intelligence. To try to put that label on someone is demeaning both to the person, and to the right to vote in a free democracy.

It should not be, which is why it’s notable when it is.

I think you’re mixing up the causal link here. Voting for Brexit is not being used as proof of lower intelligence. But there is a clear divide. If one has lower intelligence, that person is more likely to have voted for Brexit.

That's impossible to know. It's making an assumption based on a predetermined belief that lower intelligence votes for things others more "righteous" disagree with. There is no causal relationship between voting and intelligence, and it's elitist to believe so.

Many highly intelligent people voted for Brexit, but they are deemed "lower intelligence" by those who voted against it. It's like saying only low intelligent people vote liberal. It's impossible to measure, purely assumed. Just because someone disagrees does not mean they are lower intelligence.

I think the whole study is ballocks.

> It's making an assumption based on a predetermined belief that lower intelligence votes for things others more "righteous" disagree with.

In this case, it's not an assumption. The majority of Brexit voters were less intelligent. That's just how it is. It doesn't necessarily mean they were wrong however.

> Many highly intelligent people voted for Brexit, but they are deemed "lower intelligence" by those who voted against it.

One does not necessarily follow the other. It really feels like you're trying to defend a Brexit vote more than anything else here.

And I get it, everything bad about it that was claimed came to fruition while none of the good happened. And people were explicitly told that what the problems would be and that the other side was at best wishful thinking. People can point to receipts and say "Look, we literally told you so". But, the voters listened to people they listened to their entire lives. They trusted those people. And they disregarded people they saw as contrarian. Because that's where politics was going at the time, high polarization where conformity to one's "side" being the most important factor. Often at the expense of actual policy.

It's now so bad that if one side has a completely reasonable, middle of the road, easy to implement take, the other side has to reject simply because it came from "the wrong side". But things like Brexit were indicators of this polarization taking hold.

These things are always brought up when supposedly right wing voting happens(=against the interests of the ruling class).

I wonder who knows best what’s best for the common man, himself or University of Baths “school of management“?

I’ve only even here for a few months for work, but I’ve never been in a more classist country than the UK. It’s shocking.

I am happy for the British public. They might be stupider than their overlords, but at least they brought the power back slightly closer to themselves.

> I’ve never been in a more classist country than the UK. It’s shocking.

Genuinely curious... How does this manifest itself in practice there?

The monarchy for one. Class is kinda part of national identity.

When people meet you they try and group you by asking where you studied etc similarly to where you worked.

While there was a split with more educated voting remain and working class voting leave, I don't think it was down to "cognitive ability in processing and discounting misinformation."

More things like well off graduates benefiting from hiring cheap Polish plumbers, while British plumbers etc suffered from that.

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