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by antisthenes
3001 days ago
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That's a bit disingenuous to say. A lot of policies are complex and a 10-second google search is unlikely to bring you anywhere near competence from willful ignorance. Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere. How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with. |
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I'm not talking about competence. I'm talking about people not leaving or even attempting to leave the state of willful ignorance.
> How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with.
It's obvious that my comment wasn't a plea for universal omniscience. None of this is relevant to my complaint about people deprioritizing the effects of a policy, as if it's not close to the _only_ thing that's important.
> Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere.
This is a perfect example, thank you. Do you know what I would say if asked what I thought the effect of min wage changes are? _I would say I have no idea_, and anyone who tells you they do for sure is lying to you. Accepting that doesn't mean throwing up your hands in hopelessness, but it does suggest a different understanding of the effects of each policy than simply what feeling you get from hearing the one-line description.
Policy, and the world in general, generally isn't as simple as people would like it to be. In democracies, one's insistence on pretending that things work the oversimplified way you want them to has concrete costs to those affected by those policies and is more than a little despicable.