I've noticed a fairly consistent and unmistakable thread of ageism in the brexit articles and discussions I've seen. It would be helpful if the denigration of classes of people weren't a part of the debate.
When thinking about these kind of problems I really wished we had some good -and publicly available- tools for simulating the world. While the predictions made by such a model would be most certainly wrong in most cases (the system is just too complex to be simulated reliably), it would allow us to narrow down the number of possible outcomes of a given political situation.
This would make an interesting business case for a startup, and I can imagine that hedge funds and investors are already using such tools to their advantage, it would be hugely beneficial to have something like that for the general public to use though.
>, it would allow us to narrow down the number of possible outcomes of a given political situation. ... , it would be hugely beneficial to have something like that for the general public to use though.
I know it sounds cynical but I don't think such a simulation tool would make any difference to convince the general public.
As a thought experiment, imagine if we had a computer simulation in the spirit of Conway's Game of Life[1] or Schelling's Segregation Model[2] to simulate the spread of viruses and breakdown of herd immunity when you have anti-vaccination parents. Showing that "evidence" to anti-vaxxers isn't going to change their minds because they distrust the "government" and "scientists". (E.g. "And who created that simulation?!? The government scientists who want to make our kids autistic!")
Same situation with Brexit. The big multinational companies favor the EU but the "little guy" sees his job getting threatened by immigrants. Asking everyday people to be scientific and weigh the "big picture" instead of being emotional about their immediate livelihoods isn't realistic.
>When thinking about these kind of problems I really wished we had some good -and publicly available- tools for simulating the world. While the predictions made by such a model would be most certainly wrong in most cases (the system is just too complex to be simulated reliably), it would allow us to narrow down the number of possible outcomes of a given political situation.
Actually it wouldn't. The world is more chaos theory than determinism in political scales.
A complex dynamic system will have evolutions that follow a probability distribution. The simulation should approximate the p.d., and that is useful information.
We do this with weather, market forecasting, and physical modelling.
Chaotic systems (as in chaos theory) don't make predictions either, whatever the probability distribution. Too many factors and butterflies in Beijing.
>We do this with weather, market forecasting, and physical modelling
Don't know about physical modelling, but in weather and market forecasting we do it with dire results.
The butterfly-in-Beijing metaphor is normally a good sign of someone who misunderstood the dynamics of complex systems. IIRC there's a lecture series from Santa Fe on intro to complex dynamics that might help.
And 'dire results': the tyranny of the perfect! We get very good results from both, compared to the intrinsic information of the system. Again you're thinking about single results rather than probability distributions. It's a hard habit to crack, again, an intro to the field would help.
>The butterfly-in-Beijing metaphor is normally a good sign of someone who misunderstood the dynamics of complex systems. IIRC there's a lecture series from Santa Fe on intro to complex dynamics that might help.
I didn't speak of "complex systems" (heck, even a three-body gravity system is complex), I spoke of chaotic systems.
>And 'dire results': the tyranny of the perfect! We get very good results from both, compared to the intrinsic information of the system. Again you're thinking about single results rather than probability distributions.
No, I'm thinking about the inability to e.g. make any weather forecast for more than 7-10 days at most.
>It's a hard habit to crack, again, an intro to the field would help.
Again with the condescending study suggestions. It's a bit rich from someone who asks for a pie in the sky "social oracle".
I'm sorry it came over that way. But there should be nothing condescending about pointing out that you are misunderstanding the field. Knowledge and science are a real thing, they don't exist to inconvenience you.
Complex systems (including chaos theory) is a fascinating area of math, for which there are a lot of learning resources online. It is not an insult to encourage you to go down the rabbit hole and move beyond the superficial (and wrong) stereotypes.
> It's a bit rich from someone who asks for a pie in the sky "social oracle".
Different person. Check the GP. Also probably straw-man, but you'd have to ask the GP.
People seem to think prediction markets not making a specific prediction implies they don't work. That's not even wrong.
Consider a perfect prediction market. This means that if it says "the probability of X is 0.6" 100 times, then approximately 60/100 times X will occur. If you wrongly interpret that to mean "X will occur", a perfect prediction market will be "wrong" 40/100 times.
That's your failure to interpret the market, nothing else.
"Not working" means not assigning the correct probabilities to the outcomes over time with regard to the information available. The article mentions some of the biases which could cause this.
Of course this is difficult to measure, because there are not enough natural experiments (i.e. 100x Brexit) and there are many variables at play here.
We'll have to wait for papers with regards to Brexit + predicition markets for a more detailed analiysis, but still, for the time my trust in prediction markets is down a bit.
That is too simple. There was strong autocorrelation in prediction market odds changes which suggests herding. You are not taking this additional important information into account.
That's silly. Prediction markets still gave a ~15% change to "Leave" at their most pessimistic, and no one says the roulette wheel "didn't work" when black comes up three times in a row. The vote outcome was clearly a surprise to the prediction markets, to newspaper, to the pundits, and to the real markets where people lost billions of dollars.
Prediction markets aren't magic, they aggregate views. If they say there's a 15% chance of something happening, by golly, sometimes it will happen. The point is (1) they are self-correcting and (2) they have a much better track record that polls. Not even the "market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" rule applies. With prediction markets, you know exactly when and how the outcome will be settled.
There's a simple fallacy here - you can't use a market mechanism to define the probability of the outcome of a one-off event like a major referendum.
All you have are hopes and fears about the probability, which are always - by definition - limited and subjective.
In fact you're simply quantifying opinions about opinions. That's one step removed from what polls do. Polls fail because of practical sampling errors (and sometimes because of political bias) - not because no one understands the theory of polling.
There's no way a prediction market mechanism can be self-correcting, because by the time you have real data the question is settled.
Some people may find this kind of thing useful. I'm not convinced it's any more than entertainment.
No, it means you can't assess prediction markets, or any mechanism for making probabilistic predictions, from a one-off event. I was responding to tobias3 regarding Brexit.
> There's no way a prediction market mechanism can be self-correcting, because by the time you have real data the question is settled.
You misunderstand. I'm not claiming that the market for a single event is self-correcting. I'm claiming that if someone discovers a bias in prediction markets as a whole (e.g., the pop-science biases discussed in the Economist article), then traders can profit off this bias and it will be removed from the market's prediction.
There's a lot wrong with your other points, but it would take too much discussion to draw it out.
>Prediction markets still gave a ~15% change to "Leave" at their most pessimistic
It was 10% in the hours after the polls closed.
The odds for a Leave victory in England were out of step with the odds for a UK wide leave vote for many hours (even though overall Leave was never going to be happen without England going Leave).
These tools exist. I was part of a team that wrote one [in OCaml!] for the British Home Office, in that case simulating the whole police / courts / prisons / probation system. It's kind of fun to see the effects on prisons of increasing police (more police find more crimes putting pressure on the rest of the system). Whether the predictions are accurate was unclear to me (I was a mere coder), but they are surely better than not doing any simulations at all.
A lot of organizations use techniques like Scenario Planning[1], that forces them to already think about a wide scale of possible future scenarios.
But in all honesty, it sounds like you are talking about a black swan[2] detector: The current immigration crisis plays a big role in the Brexit. Who could have predicted how western policy about everything in the middle east led to the growth of (the fear of) ISIS? If anyone wear to reliably predict these really big abstract _changes_, they would probably keep it to themselves and use it to make money on the markets.
The thing about Black Swans is that they're easy to see, yet very, very hard to time.
There is an asset bubble, for instance, at the moment (houses and a lot of other things are more expensive than justified). Gold price seems suppressed. And a government debt bubble. And a China bubble (China is exporting more than is justified by the economics, probably due to state subsidies). There was an oil price bubble, that could reflate (it would take a 5% difference in oil supply, maybe less, for the price to go back to $100 at least temporarily). Renewables could destroy the energy economy (this is happening, could accelerate. E.g. we could find a fantastic new battery principle, easy cheap large scale energy storage. The world would change to accommodate that faster than anyone can imagine). EU disintegration, and related shocks : e.g. a Deutsche Bank bankruptcy. Central banks switching tactics (either to helikopter money or the other way, interest rates back to 4%). More US states/territories cities going bankrupt. Large scale terror attacks.
All of these would be large to massive financial shocks. They're also very likely all going to happen. Most of them are going to be caused by another one in that very list, like domino blocks all lined up, but currently standing up. Only one will really be set off in truly unpredictable fashion, and cause the other dominoes to topple. The question is, how to find (and time) the drop that overflows the bucket. That is not a trivial question and the answer could be that said drop won't fall for another decade (or two, why not). That's unlikely, but certainly not impossible.
Whilst not many people were expecting the Brexit scenario to pass, ever since the Greek crisis (5-7 years ago now, depending on what event you think set it off) people have been worried about EU disintegration. That the EU, for various reasons, from languages, over border protections to finance habits does not have what it takes to stay together. Apparently they were right. The real fear is that it will cause bank bankruptcies. That may be underway. That may already have happened (a lot of EU banks aren't far from bankruptcy)
This is what economists do. The problem is non-linear relationships and large error margins in variables make it hard to predict. Think the Butterfly Effect on steroids.
With every area save England flatly stating that they would rather leave Britain than leave the EU, I think the consequences of this move are highly exaggerated.
First, there is a real possibility that Britiain will not exit the EU at all.
The referendum is actually non-binding in a legal sense. Parliament could vote to suspend it tomorrow. Another referendum could be held. The Privy Council could even intervene on its own authority.
Second, Britain has yet to invoke Article 50 of the EU charter, which would formally begin the separation process. Despite the insistent (and foolish) efforts of the French and German governments for Britain to invoke Article 50 immediately, they have not done so, and thus remain an EU member in good standing.
Third, there is a substantial body of evidence that a large portion of the "Leave" voters had no idea the consequences of their actions.
The areas that have gathered, or will have gathered by week's end, as many signatures as the original Leave petition include;
Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, and London. In short, almost all of the U.K., save rural and smaller cities in England proper.
Northern Ireland is even holding talks with the Republic of Ireland to unite the island. Protest Northern Ireland frantically scrambling to join the Catholic Republic of Ireland, and receiving a tepid response, is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime.
The nation of Britain is disintegrating into its constituent parts.
Great Britain may never leave because there simply may not be a Great Britain any more.
Finally, Britain's elite are already seeking to mitigate the effects of the referendum. Even if they hold their country together successfully, Britain will almost certainly seek a treaty to retain their economic rights while gaining some control over their immigration process.
Let's not start burning the furniture yet. Britain was independent for most of the post-War period.
The current panic may be merely the flip side of irrational exuberance.
> Northern Ireland is even holding talks with the Republic of Ireland to unite the island. Protest Northern Ireland frantically scrambling to join the Catholic Republic of Ireland, and receiving a tepid response, is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime.
You have to understand the broader demensions of interaction between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, going back at least to the Anglo-Irish war, and perhaps back to the plantation of Ulster.
Ireland is quite literally the first colony of the British. It only recently emerged from centuries of civil war, and the Protestant-Catholic conflict has abated within the past five years.
For the topic of unification to even be seriously discussed is extraordinary, and without precedent.
Forgive me if I don't believe a government funded news outlet, with a vested interest in the outcome, a deep cultural belief in Anglic superiority, that was so sure the U.K. independence vote would fail, when they discuss issues of Irish affairs.
One could be forgiven for believing the government line at the moment. But if viewed through the eyes of Irish history, current events are clearly unprecedented.
In Ireland, there are many people alive who remember the Troubles in vivid detail. For the Deputy Prime Minister, and more importantly several prominent Anglo-Protestant politicians, to even broach the subject is to risk reopening Pandora's box.
Even now there are armed groups operating in the RoI with the explicit goal of finally driving the British from their lands.
Even a cursory understanding of Irish history is sufficient to appreciate that the current discrete (and even public) communiques would be in the realm of fantasy even a few short years ago.
The vast majority of the Northern Irish voted to remain in the E.U. With the loss of their British patrons, as the inevitable loss of Scotland unfolds, Protestants in Northern Ireland already know that the E.U. is their only assurance of security and insulation from the chaotic collapse of Britain.
the only people talking about it are Sinn Fein, and a united republican Ireland is the only reason they exist, so, surprise surprise, they're talking about the unification of Ireland
UK just raised the bet chasing a straight. The best course for their politicians is to present a united front, show strength and resolution in the people's decision, which is what I think Cameron is doing. Displaying public indecision is the worst thing they can do for their bargaining position. They need to hold out and hope other EU members have similar referendum results. Then, they'll be on the right side of this thing, and all the EU countries can begin to move forward on a renegotiated regime.
A Trump win in November, or even the prospect of it, helps the UK now. The problem with this idea of an Anglo trade and defense block with US, UK, Canada and Australia though, is the US is not Anglo enough any more and Canada's PM is French and liberal. So they have to talk about freedom from regulations and such, and hope enough non-anglos buy in. It seems like the narrowest of paths to me.
The US and their currency will remain strong only through immigration and decent birth rates. Closing the borders just won't work.
The EU did to Greece what it did because it was feared that the bankruptcy of the least member of the EU would topple German banks into bankruptcy. That non-payment on 1.3% of total government debt would cause a disaster.
Now the second-biggest economy is leaving the EU, with unknown implications for lots of financial instruments ...
There is at least a serious case to be made that this could be bad.
Small problem: the Europeans have had enough of Britains's perfidious ways and are not inclined to being patient. This pandoras box is therefore open for business and cannot easily be be rammed shut again.
Yes but there are powerful forces within Europe that always felt Britain was a ball and chain, especially in the latin bloc led by France. This is not going to be simple as they will insist that a rubicon has been crossed. Recall that Charles de Gaulle himself was against British involvement in continental Europe, considering it a trojan horse. Just recently and for a whole decade, for example, Britain was vocally pro Turkish accession to the EU, against Italy and France. Ironically the same issue was used by the Brexit campaign, feeding Britain's image as an opportunistic Judas. Distrust of Britain runs deep in the southern bloc.
As such, with all these forces, this vote genuinely reshuffles the deck, in Europe itself, even if Britain now backtracks.
If the UK stays in the EU despite this referendum result, then there will be significant civil unrest and it will lurch even further to the right. I doubt it would be in the benefit of the EU to have a member state who's population chose not to be in it, and yet are forced to stay in it. That is the sort of unrest that will spread across borders.
The member state chose not to be in it for long-known reasons. If the EU learns the concept of democracy from this, and entertains the idea of loosening its stubborn insistence that things set up in a way that has long been problematic and is now seriously damaging, they might dare to consider some flexibility and the idea of loose coupling.
Edit (I forgot my point and finished too soon :)
If the EU relaxed a little the departing member state may democratically u-turn.
> With every area save England flatly stating that they would rather leave Britain than leave the EU
That's wrong on several levels:
(1) Wales, like England, voted Leave,
(2) The referendum only covered leaving the EU, not relative preference for leaving the UK vs. leaving the EU,
(3) While NI voted by majority to stay in the EU, the issue of leaving the UK vs. staying in the UK is one of recurring interest in NI, and every indication I've seen is that the majority that favors staying in the UK is larger and more solid than that that prefers staying in the EU. Sure, NI republicans are making a big deal of the Remain vote in NI, but NI republicans are not in the same position as Scottish nationalists.
Of the four countries of the UK, the only one that seems to be more inclined to leave the UK than the EU is Scotland, which seems to have stayed last time it had an independence largely because of uncertainty over whether, if it left England, it would be able to smoothly join the EU. Brexit renders that consideration moot.
> The referendum is actually non-binding in a legal sense.
That's technically true (well, not entirely: it was legally binding as to the improved deal Britain had secured from the EU, which was expressly contingent on a Remain victory in the referendum. So, staying in the EU is already less attractive than it was before the vote -- when it was already not attractive enough for a majority of UK voters to want to stay.)
> Parliament could vote to suspend it tomorrow.
I'm not sure what that even means; the non-binding referendum already happened, and the action that would be needed to implement it (invoking article 50) is one of, as the sources I've seen have indicated, royal prerogative not dependent on Parliamentary action, so Parliament "suspending" the referendum or its would seem to be a meaningless symbolic act.
> Northern Ireland is even holding talks with the Republic of Ireland to unite the island.
No, its not. Sinn Fein has indicated that unification should be reopened as a topic based on the Remain vote in NI, but Ireland isn't interested, and neither (unsurprisingly) is the unionist-majority NI government.
> Finally, Britain's elite are already seeking to mitigate the effects of the referendum. Even if they hold their country together successfully, Britain will almost certainly seek a treaty to retain their economic rights while gaining some control over their immigration process.
Of course they'll seek to get all the benefits of EU membership without the bits they don't like. But its not really likely that they'll get that.
The article seems a bit of a muddle. He's talking about Emerging Markets. I'm not sure what breaking their backs is supposed to mean. He mentions the Nigerian Naria which fell last week when the government stopped pegging it and has nothing to do with Brexit. He figures commodities will go lower which I guess is likely. He kind of ignores Brexit leading to problems with European banks and a possible Grexit which seems much more of a problem.
Again that furiating table with the 18-24 aged persons voting for remain. Maybe also include the percentage to actually vote for those age group. 37% came to vote for 18-24y, vs 70% and up for 35y and up.
It's done using phone polls and interviews after the vote. You don't know if people are being truthful, but there's not a lot of reason to think that people would lie about how they voted shortly afterwards, at least not a statistically significant number of them.
The fingerpointing going on is a good enough reason to obfuscate the data imo. Also, if it is used as a basis of assumptions it should have at least mention how the data was collected on what sample size. It is very easy to make a bias error.
People might not be interested in the details, or it can be interpreted as sloppy journalism. Either way I'm not convinced (hence the reference to Remain).
Would you elaborate on how you'll think these numbers play out after Brexit?
Isn't it a chicken-and-egg-problem and we can't just say: because Germany is producing and Britain is consuming, the latter will be worse off by Brexit?
For many developed economies General Trade Agreements are the last straw of growth. And with Brexit both sides of the Channel loose.
And another spin: A consumerist economy (US, UK) seems to have its own benefits, in that it can much easier survive on its own.
I'm really, really sorry to be that guy, and sorry to be somewhat off-topic but; "We are unlikely to see a full scale collapse, but uncertainty has definately increased and it is difficult to see how the genie will be put back in the bottle."
Personally, even though I also noticed the mistake, I don't really see the point to be honest. I wish I could trade whatever grey matter was trained for spelling intuition, and use it for something more interesting.
I know people who can't spell better than an average sixth-grade student, but they are brilliant at what they do.
You have to admit, spelling is at least somewhat arbitrary, especially in the English language. How do you spell 'centre,' for example?
I had to scroll three pages down to see the words 'emerging markets' in the article. Or maybe the title is referring to 'Emad Mostaque's (The author of the piece)' back.
It would really be good not to use abbreviations in the title if it is not immediately clear what it is referring to in context. I understand it is just a copy of the original title.
Thank you, at least he should have used the phrase in the title. Simple mistakes like this have a disproportionally great effect on me discarding the writer's opinion by default.
Ok, we macroexpanded it above. But this is not a reliable way to page moderators! I saw this one by accident but am pretty sure we miss most of them. Email hn@ycombinator.com instead.
Leave is mostly the elder, remain is mostly the younger. And the younger will, albeit they voted remain, confront the effects for longer than the elder. Thus they have the right to react. Don't boil everything to denigration and human rights, if everybody hides behind the shield of some identity no discussion will happen. Keep your american -isms to yourselves, people need to debate, discuss and even fight and define the future of their people.
I don't like watching the american politically-correctism and identity crises being exported overseas. This sort of protectism creates a deaf and blind democracy that is also very prone to logical errors in its thinking and decision making, and renders actual social problems irresolvable.
There seems to me something profoundly contradictory about this slur, but in any case it's a nasty breach of civility and you can't post like that here.
What I refer to is a certain, observable feature of the american culture. The only breach of civility here is you calling me uncivil. But this sort of moderation is something I've seen often on the HN, so there's nothing to say.
You didn't just 'refer' to an 'observable'. You combined three pejoratives in as many words ('your american isms') with a boorish gesture ('keep your X to yourselves').
It's common for people to behave rudely like this and, when asked not to, pretend they were merely stating neutral facts. Perhaps you genuinely think so; in that case the answer is to develop a more accurate sense of what the HN guidelines mean when they talk about being civil. If you continue to break them as you repeatedly have in the past, we're going to conclude that you don't want to use HN as intended and ban your account.
It's not hard to learn what the standard here is and keep to it. Many users have had to do so (myself included). The only question is whether one wants to.
I am sorry, I disagree. I don't see any pejoratives there, and in fact you're the one using them: nasty and boorish are the words you used and you implied that I'm uneducated, uncivil, and a liar. Do whatever you want with my account.
I did use the words 'nasty' and 'boorish' and probably could have avoided them. I certainly did not mean to imply anything about you personally, nor do I think those things.
Why did I call those three words pejoratives? Because that's how they work in the context where you used them: "isms" is obviously a pejorative, "American" bound to it becomes a national slight, and "your" a personal one. Perhaps you didn't intend them that way, but I assure you that for many readers they would acquire that connotation en route.
I don't have any desire to ban you, but I do wish you'd take on good faith what I'm trying to explain about how HN conversations are supposed to operate. It all comes from long hard experience trying to prevent an internet forum from degenerating. You clearly have some interesting things to say, so if you'd join us in the work of erring on the side of civility, HN would be better.
Noting that different age groups tended to vote differently is not the problem. Nor is trying to understand why they voted how they did. It's the denigration of the people who were older. This article called them "grumpy", but I've seen worse.
I've seen lots of other comments and articles that not only resorted to name-calling, but also tried to use the fact that people were older as prima facie evidence that their reasoning was bad.
The elder are not silenced, they can defend themselves.
> but also tried to use the fact that people were older as prima facie evidence that their reasoning was bad.
Like it or not (I don't like it either), but that may be an argument. Calling that denigration is the easy path out, but it leads nowhere. What has to be done is to refute it, however vulgar that might be. We're dealing with the results of a vulgar, uneducated, haphazard decision anyways.
Independece for Britain is a good thing.
People didn't like the rigged trade agreement.
It wasn't benefiting them. It was benefiting the
elite in London. Cheap jobs may be good for the rich, but not for the working folk.
Labor and Conservatives just didn't take the concerns of the majority seriously.
The UK currently has a great spot in the EU. It keeps it's own currency (a wise choice), it is not part of Schengen, it's fees are small for it's economy (e.g. Italy pays more), and all sorts of other exceptions.
The next deal will not be as good. In fact it will be considerable worse. As the UK does not have any leverage.
The EU can sort of manage without the UK.
But the UK outside the EEA would be much, much poorer.
The UK was on route to become Europe's biggest economy. But decided to follow a bunch of charismatic populists instead.
"a bunch of charismatic populists"... you mean 52% of the voting electorate? populist - a thinly veiled swipe at a group of people perceived to be less intelligent and too stupid to know what's good for them.
London did the smallest amount of export trade with the EU of almost any area in the country. The regions that voted leave actually had far more reliance on EU trade.
Trade wars/tariffs go unmentioned, yet they are probably the most important single issue for emerging markets. To the extent that brexit nurtures a reversal of global integration (and Donald Trump's "America first" platform portends the same risk), emerging markets will suffer tremendously. Wage competition first, and immigration second, are the most issues for those seeking reactionary Trump and Brexit solutions, and the target is squarely emerging markets. One needs only look at how the past 25 years of global integration has helped EM, to see the converse potential outcomes.
A related issue is capital flow restrictions, and these are arguably even easier to put into force. Brexit is a major defeat for liberal "anglo saxon" free market policies, and there are many in the world who do not buy into them, including in the EU itself. Current account deficit countries such as Turkey and South Africa are heavily exposed, as is the dollar. This last point makes it unclear that the dollar is the obvious long term safe haven. Indeed Friday's Yen price action shows that currency as being potentially the most obvious candidate for a big rally, along with gold. The latter is particularly well placed if the G7 central banks, in full panic mode, begin to implement large further slugs of QE or negative interest rate policies.
I've noticed a fairly consistent and unmistakable thread of ageism in the brexit articles and discussions I've seen. It would be helpful if the denigration of classes of people weren't a part of the debate.