Brexit as an example of failure to comprehend conditional probabilities
It's been 2 years 5 months 12 days 12 hours 25 minutes since my first post about Brexit, and I still don't really know what will happen.Almost everything is conditional probability: "If there's a hard (no-deal) Brexit, then the traffic jams from Dover, Harwich/Felixstowe, etc. will be about as long as is physically possible given the number of trucks in the UK."
Conditional probabilities suck for human-human interactions.
Any pro-Brexit person who reads that will tend, I think, to remember that prediction without the "if" clause; and if there is a deal, they will be much more likely to crow about it as "yet another Remoaner failure". (Also often missed: "much more likely" doesn't mean "will", but I keep seeing people read it that way).
This sort of prediction tends to be used by propagandists as a modern-day Cassandra: the worst case scenario is so bad that everyone strives to prevent it — in this case by not countenancing a no-deal scenario — and so it becomes just another reason to distrust experts who fought against a no-deal scenario. In turn, this increases the chances of something as bad as a no-deal scenario next time. I see the same thing with the Millennium Bug, and as a kid with global warming (no, it wasn't scientists who told you we were heading straight into an ice age, it was newspapers; any scientists actually talking about an actual ice age were talking about the end of an interglacial warm period and were even then outnumbered 6-to-1 by those concerned about things getting warmer).
I can only think of three post-Brexit-Great-Britain (yes I do mean GB, not UK, I know too little about NI) predictions that are not conditional on the final form that Brexit takes:
- The UK population will still be arguing about it
- These arguments will involve at least one large march (≥10,000 people)
- At least one building will be set on fire (or an attempt will be made: they're designed to not be on fire)
I put at least 1-in-3 odds that events 2 and 3 will be performed by both angry Leavers and angry Remainers.
Original post timestamp: Mon, 22 Oct 2018 09:05:45 +0000
Tags: Brexit, conditional probability, prediction, propaganda
Categories: Politics, Psychology