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I don't disagree, but do you think being informed makes a difference once a significant volume of targeted propaganda is involved?
I tend to work with anticipatory/momentary/episodic research and data for the latter is considered proof (at scale).
JonoMarshall-
I do think it makes a difference, yes. Nothing is ever a guarantee of course and no one is immune to manipulation and propaganda (though different people clearly respond to very different things). But if you look at it the other way around, if anything might give you some amount of 'protection' from being manipulated, it's being at least somewhat informed about how things work and what's going on. Especially as in my mind, this presupposes the existence of some skills, such as online research, and having a certain amount of scepticism.
At least there's been some move towards trying to teach more of that in school (e.g. online research skills), and I do think the younger generation growing up now is less likely to read one of those chain letter thingies on Facebook and believe everything it says like some people clearly do.
Bit of a clichee example, but yes: the rub is usually in the interpretation of data. That's why there are people who do nothing else: it's really not straightforward.
SwissChap
Well there's two sides to this - on the one hand, obviously there's a big qualitative difference between 'data' such as measurements in a physics experiment, and 'data' from gained from an attempt of assessing how well-informed people are about political processes and the like. If you want to be ultra-pedantic though, data can still never truly be proof, even when you're talking about physics experiments - it can show high concordance with a hypothesis, which can then be used as an argument that this hypothesis has a high likelihood to be true. But yeah, that's a bit too pedantic.
Also, what I said previously was obviously not a scientific statement, and I certainly didn't claim brexiters have a lower IQ. I don't really believe in the whole 'IQ' thing the way it is measured anyway, and I certainly don't think it has much of a bearing on anything else.
I do however absolutely stand by my opinion that a majority - in some countries a vast majority - of people are not particularly well-informed about political processes and politics in general, the history of their country, the way international trade works, etc. etc. And that in turn does mean that what a majority of people want, for whatever reason, is in no way guaranteed to be a smart choice when taking into account the well-being of the country as a whole.