I recently saw a T-shirt advertised with the following wording:
There are 2 types of people
- Those who can extrapolate from an incomplete data set
(And that was that)
I suppose it made me feel a bit superior, understanding the joke immediately, but I really don’t want to talk down to people, I’d much prefer to have a discussion based on evidence. Please stay with me on this and I will make the links a little later.
When travelling around with the children we used to play a game where we looked at the number plates of the vehicles we passed, (mostly lorries), to find which countries they came from. We’d then find out where those countries were on an atlas when we got home. As my folks lived near Dover we saw quite a few lorries from Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
That was twenty five years ago. Coming back yesterday from a visit to my son, his wife and their two boys I played the same game with my wife. We travelled about half the distance back on the A14 from Cambridge. There were lorries from Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania, among others. I hadn’t realised just quite how linked we were to the eastern European members of the EU, but it was a very good illustration of current reality.
Without being in the Customs Union, such trade, both ways, will be immeasurably more bureaucratic. If we crash out of the EU without a proper deal, then having the M26 as a lorry park, food rotting in containers and industries unable to continue will become reality. That is what will happen. There will be rampant inflation, food and medicine shortages and lay-offs in huge numbers.
Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab has only just realised that this will happen. He has noticed that lorries come in via Dover and other ports, and that this forms a large part of our trade. What a revelation! This totally ignorant pillock has had a light-bulb moment and now knows about trade, when he hadn’t a clue about it before, but still lectured us on the subject. https://fullfact.org/europe/lorries-dover/
But he still “BELIEVES” in Brexit. And he says this without ever coming up with a single idea as to how this country will not crash in flames without a deal. Perhaps Raab is an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
“In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I would humbly suggest that Dominic Raab is among those who is unable to extrapolate from an incomplete data set.