[dijksterhuis]

> Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow?

politicians sometimes lie…?

the £350 million a day bus springs to mind as one example. the amazing trade deals which will unleash our new economy were another.

like, those things sound great. people wanted those promises to become real and believed the people who were saying those things could implement them.

turns out implementation is sometimes a lot harder than waving your hands and making a bunch of promises.

edit —

especially when the advertised numbers are factually wrong, and people know they are wrong — i.e. they lied.

> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus

[robertlagrant]

> politicians sometimes lie…?

That isn't a big enough reason to assume everyone's been fooled. Or at least, the people who disagree with you have been fooled. That's possible, but it's also possible you've been fooled. So bringing it up one-sided is a bit grating.

[dijksterhuis]

i’m going to post the quote above again, with more context from another quote, because you’ve avoided quoting the bit which actually demonstrates that this is a big enough reason to assume that enough people were fooled.

> On 27 May, the UK Statistics Authority chair Andrew Dilnot made a stronger statement against Vote Leave, stating that the continued use of the figure was "misleading and undermine[d] trust in official statistics".

misleading is politics speak for “lying with statistics”.

> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.

two years later, after the claim was repeatedly denounced as being misleading and false multiple times, 42% of people surveyed still thought it was true.

that’s a significant representative proportion of the population, given 52% of people voted to leave.

it’s no wonder that 7 years later “brexit remorse” among leave voters is sitting pretty at around 60% or so (cba to source this, i think it was a yougov poll reported in the independent).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus

> bringing it up one-sided is a bit grating.

i find people who lie, and people who defend liars, grating.

we don’t get to pick our reality. we just have to live in it.

[robertlagrant]

> i find people who lie, and people who defend liars, grating.

Who here is defending liars?

[EndShell]

> politicians sometimes lie…?

Most people are quite aware that politicians lie. It is a common trope in movies, tv and media generally. Politicians are quite disliked in the UK generally. So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.

> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.

So? People frequently cherry pick information to justify their decisions after they have already made them. I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.

People seem to forget that a good portion of the Media and Parliament (including the Prime Minister at the time who won with a majority) were in favour of Remain. What is often ignored is that if you look at UKIP voter percentage before the referendum. It had risen from 3.1% to 12.6%. That was rising well before the bus campaign was a thing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results

The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine. I also don't believe Dominic Cummings on how effective it was btw.

But in any event this will probably be my last comment on anything political on here because you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.

[dijksterhuis]

i find your comment weird. hopefully my reply clarifies why i find it weird. probably not. i’ve drunk too much coffee today.

> I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.

64% Con/65% Lab leave supporters versus 32% Con/20% Lab remain supporters. so, 65%-ish (hand wavy representative stat) of leave supporters believed the claim, which was misleading / false.

65% x 52% = 34% of all leave voters (very back of a napkin maths here). that’s a sizeable chunk of people who believed the lie. enough people to possibly swing the vote, given there was only 2% in it. that’s enough to swing it if there was no bus claim.

> The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine.

i completely agree.

but the bus is a great example of how people get lied to by politicians, who then potentially get their 34% of people convinced. which was the point i was trying to make. politicians lying has a significant impact on the outcome. it’s not solely responsible, but it has an impact. they bear some responsibility for the shit show we currently have now.

interestingly, the ipsos mori / KCL study confirms this somewhat

> you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.

1) commenting about the voting on comments is something we try to avoid doing here. have a read of the site guidelines to understand why (you’re a new user so i don’t know if you’ve seen them before or not)

2) people on HN generally speaking tend to be pedantic nerds like me who are probably somewhat on the spectrum somewhere and when they see a claim will call people out on it when it is wrong.

> Leave voters are least likely to answer correctly (16%) and most likely to wrongly think that European immigrants contribute less than they take out (42%).

> Leave voters are most likely to hold these incorrect beliefs: European immigration has increased crime; decreased quality of healthcare services; increases unemployment among low-skilled workers.

^ ipsos mori/KCL study

there’s your problem. you’re aligned politically with people who are, to put it plainly, more wrong about this subject than they are right. so when you try and defend your position on here, you are going to get significant pushback on claims because, frankly, a lot of the claims made by other people who voted the way you did are either wrong or misleading when they make their claims.

3) i wasn’t on the site in 2016 (did HN exist then? who knows). imagine what it would have been like back then!

4) i hope you stick around. compared to some commentators, you’re doing a bang up job with actually reading studies (which meant i’ve gone and read the study and learned something now! thanks!).

> So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.

bonus round. most people don’t believe politicians. they do, however, vote based on who the sun newspaper tells them to vote for (well, until recently).