| A lot of odd and downright false assertions ITT. Anti-Brexit people are too often mistakenly conflating Cummings/Johnson and Farage as if everyone in favour of Brexit has precisely the same views. In reality they ran two different campaigns in very different styles and in fact one of Vote Leave's main aims was to keep Farage off the TV as much as possible because he was (and is) a turn off to the majority and presumably most swing voters. I voted Remain at the time, but stumbling across Cummings' blogs and subsequently reading about Tetlock [0] + David Deutsch's arguments [1] has left me in favour of Leave (although I don't have strongly nailed down views on this). This project is a great idea to improve the effectiveness of government by creating tools that will help ministers and officials make better decisions in the face of complex systems. Will it work? I'm optimistic but there will surely be unknown unknowns that could derail progress in addition to plain old politics. [0] - Superforecasting is a great book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction... [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdtssXITXuE Also, Timothy Gowers (Fields Medallist) has an interesting piece in favour Remain [2], although he overlooks the fact that differences in institutional design of UK vs EU mean that sovereignty has significant implications beyond just sovereignty for sovereignty's sake. [2] - https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/6172/ Edit: Would love to hear counterarguments from downvoters btw. I don't mean that in a hostile way, I've changed my mind on this topic many times in the past 3 years and I'd be more than happy to be exposed to more good arguments against Brexit and Cummings' ideas. |
My take was that Cummings saw Farage as a useful way to draw in the anti-immigrant crowd whilst being able to wash Vote Leave's hands of hints/accusations of racism?
Interesting to see the video with Deutsch there; I wasn't aware he had publicised opinions on this. Seems like you could summarise his argument as saying that adversarial political systems are more democratic and more effective than consensus-based political systems. It seems quite odd to me in the same way that some of his work in physics is. He's taken a principle of Popper's ("Democracy is measured by how easy it is to remove a policy or government") as a seemingly absolute axiom and spread it quite thinly to the extent that FPTP is seen as more democratic simply because policies get added and removed more frequently. I can see how this attitude links in with Cummings' obsession with effectiveness.
Although FPTP probably does make it easier for some policies to be repealed, I think it makes it a lot harder for some policies to be introduced. It results in a kind of "package-deal" politics in which you can often only effectively vote for a certain policy when it's bundled up with a load of other policies which you may or may not like. Take for example cannabis decriminalisation, which over half of the UK support and most of the rest don't have any strong opinion over. The two main parties havenever paid it any attention as they see it risky, therefore it's never seriously discussed.
My previous reading about institutional differences between the UK and the EU had left me with the impression that the EU is significantly more "democratic" in the sense that the broad spread of people's attitudes and opinions is being represented and percolated up to the legislative processes. For example, although the EU Commission isn't directly elected, it is at least selected by heads of state and approved by Parliament members, is renewed every 5 years and can be scuppered in a vote of no confidence. Parliament members are by and large voted in in a proportional way, which I see as generally a positive thing. By contrast the HoL - although it does not propose legislation - wields a certain amount of influence over how legislation is passed, is effectively unelected, and many members are there for life.
There's also the fact that the EU as a political body appears to be more of a self-modifying organism than the UK's political body. For example, recent years/decades have seen significantly more power being vested in the EU Parliament. This may be to do with how young the EU is - it's still working on its method of government.
With Brexit looking quite inevitable now, it will be interesting to compare the ongoing performance of the UK and set it against that of the EU.