Please don't post ideological battle comments here. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, usually by evoking worse from others.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Both sides promise to fix everything all the time. That's essentially the whole game.

I don't even know how long ago people stopped believing they had the agency to improve things in their own lives themselves, but it seems.to have coincided with the 24-hour worldwide news cycle.

It used to be that most of the bad things you found out about in the world were things you might be able to do something about. Your neighbor's car breaks down and she needs a ride to work. A family has a fire and needs furniture or clothes.

These days it's hard even to find those kinds of local mews stories. Instead you're reading about gigantic crises all over the world you can't possibly touch and need to be solved at a scale far, far removed from your influence.

I'm not saying having "low information voters" because people are illiterate or innumerate isn't a problem. I just don't think it's the primary one influencing the kinds of candidates that run or the kinds of promises that get them elected.

Stupid people are the majority in most common groups of people and so this argument can basically be used against anyone, espeically politically. Also, there are countries besides the US. Americans sometimes forget that.

The bottom 18% of adults have, by definition, an IQ of 86.2 or less.

While there's ongoing argument about the extent to which that's a selection bias and there's other skills that aren't captured in this metric (and already were well before LLMs demonstrated that it's definitely possible to train for those tests), IQ scores do correlate with the ability to perform across those kinds of skills.

While we can — and, I would argue, should — help raise people up as far as possible, it's not really surprising that the least capable are the least capable.

> It's really no wonder far-right candidates promising to fix everything are doing well lately.

Many OECD countries would have had a large chunk of the population now +50 yrs old who where born in a time where they physically didn't have access to education and where child labour was normalized.

Secondly, I hear a shockingly high number of University educated Europeans (in historically social-democrat countries) quite simply repeating TT talking points that Trump is a better choice for the 'economy'.

What we are lacking is proper education on human biases, and on identifying and understand how propaganda operates.

From https://www.statista.com/statistics/1535279/presidential-ele... while, yes, less educated voters voted Republican in larger numbers, 45% of voters with bachelor's degrees and even 38% of people with post-graduate education voted for the Republicans. Shame on them but that still deflates the "low information voter" meme being circulated. The public, even the educated, just wasn't into the message the Democratic Party was selling.

> far-right candidates promising to fix everything are doing well lately

It has always been like this—just the end of a cycle, accelerated by the invention of social networks, which broke the monopoly of information gatekeeping and broadcasting, once controlled by a few TV/radio stations and newspapers. Adding to this is the outsourcing of most low-wage industries (so where most of these 18% of voters worked) to Asia. What you call a "low information voter" has always existed and will continue to exist.