> However, Conservative shadow minister Paul Holmes said the government's position was "hopelessly confused".

> "Why does this government think a 16-year-old can vote but not be allowed to buy a lottery ticket, an alcoholic drink, marry, or go to war, or even stand in the elections they're voting in?" he asked in the Commons.

"It doesn’t matter how smart teens are or how well they scored on the SAT or ACT. Good judgment isn’t something they can excel in, at least not yet."

"The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so."

"In fact, recent research has found that adult and teen brains work differently. Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part."

https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=unders...

I think there is a good argument to be made that young people are the biggest stakeholders in our future, and should have a say.

I really hate when these ideas come of that effectively boil down to creating some kind of litmus test for who can be "trusted" to vote. We have an age limit, maybe the UK wants a lower limit, but at least that's a pretty simple and clear line to be drawn.

This is a ridiculous claim. If you believe children think at all, they do it with the prefrontal cortex, just like every other mammal.

It's certainly true that those parts of the brain continue to influence decision making in adults. Nonetheless, research has shown that those parts of the brain are far more influential in teens.

> A growing body of research strongly suggests that brain development continues well into people’s 20s and beyond. ... There is strong scientific consensus that people’s decision-making abilities can evolve between their early and late 20s

https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/teen-brains-neuroscienc...

Some things that are better supported by multiple lines of scientific research, to quote two consecutive bits from the second article: "young people’s general cognitive skills, including their ability to reason, don’t change much after the age of 14 or so." "What does change with age is the ability to reason while distracted; emotions and peer pressure are more likely to hamper decision making in teens and early twentysomethings." These things are really outside of the pop idea of "your brain isn't fully developed until 25".

Yeah, that's pretty much saying the same thing I posted.

"Young people’s general cognitive skills" (SAT and ACT scores) develop early and "don’t change much after the age of 14 or so."

"What does change with age is the ability to reason while distracted; emotions and peer pressure are more likely to hamper decision making." In other words, "Good judgment isn’t something [teens] can excel in, at least not yet."

By the way, I don't know if you noticed, but what I posted wasn't a popsci article, it was from Stanford Children's Health.

Yes, I did notice the source, and I found that more unfortunate because it's using Stanford's name to peddle crap. It might not be a literal popsci magazine piece, but it's peddling the same popsci flavored falsehood about how the brain isn't "fully developed" until age 25 or so and it follows the same popsci tropes of grossly oversimplifying, exaggerating, and using science words to sound legitimate while discouraging actual scientific inquiry. The article's actual audience is layman parents, not even the general public, and clueless ones at that if they need to be reminded about things like "become familiar with things that are important to your teens". As another example, its claim of saying "Adults think with the prefrontal cortex ... Teens process information with the amygdala" is not just grossly oversimplifying, it's just wrong. Both use both. It's just a very bad article.

I think you're taking it far too literally (do you also complain that the 2D illustration of gravity wells is inaccurate?), but I don't care to argue about it all day. Take it up with Stanford.

Sometimes: https://xkcd.com/895/ Poor analogies usually cheat the learner.

Though at least with gravity well diagrams, it's often (though not always, or explicitly enough) marked up as just a conceptual aid in grasping how the trajectories and orbits we can see arise without Newtonian forces. It's not passed off as the whole thing. Nor, importantly, is it used to justify policies about what people can do or should be allowed to do, or can be seen as responsible for. This bad article isn't just oversimplification, it's a gross misrepresentation of actual developmental science and the name of the site it's on just lends it fake scientific authority that will only further encourage people to use it to justify real decisions based on the false claims. That's not harmless. It's somewhat contained, being an article aimed at clueless parents of teens, until it's spread around more reinforcing the "brains don't mature until 25" meme. I hope you'll at least reconsider if you think of spreading it again.

Sometimes a meme claim just doesn't stand up if you actually look at the paper(s). First you have to find the papers, if a citation isn't forthcoming, but if there even is a literature you can just read some of it. To check if a meme matches, you don't even need to be an expert or have real scientific training, or read the whole thing, all that's needed in many cases is just: read the abstract, the conclusion, check if it matches the meme. Sometimes looking at charts or seeing wait a minute they are basing this supposed human universal on one undergrad subject (or finding fMRI brain activity in a dead fish) can also be illuminating. There's a lot of bunk science out there, and reproducibility is a problem everywhere. This is irritating, though it's not like I'm thinking about it much of the time or crusading to correct everyone wrong on the internet.

More directly on the brain maturity thing, I suppose part of the interest also comes from how I really find the ongoing infantilization of western society grotesque and see the meme as part of it. I also just remember being a teen, and remember many teens around me from then. Some were scouts, some had jobs, a lot of us drove carefully, some not so carefully. There were temptations, some succumbed and some didn't. We were alright, overall. People change, but not usually by a huge degree, this cuts both ways for those who were more responsible and those who were more reckless. Still, comparing stupid stuff done then with stupid stuff done now by 30-somethings... a lot of the time it's a tossup which is really more stupid. The 30-somethings can cause a lot more collateral damage though, generally having greater assets and responsibilities.

Or accept that growing up is part of life, and that there are short term consequences of political choice too that groups of people are currently denied?

Liz Truss was only PM for 49 days. How much impact on the economy did she have?

https://fortune.com/europe/2022/09/27/uk-stock-bond-markets-...

The article was published 22 days into her tenue.

Thus, no political choice, is short term.

Or even if they did, the amount of effort they'd put in researching, considering and modelling the potential outcomes would would be commensurate to the impact they would expect their vote to have. I suspect for a good chunk of adult voters, this is in fact the case.

So it's not obvious to me that including more voters whose decision-making is more emotional will necessarily produce worse outcomes. It's conceivable it'll produce better outcomes.

Edit: I'm being downvoted. To be clear, I'm an ardent democrat, but the idea that people vote analytically and rationally doesn't make sense for the above reason. The most informed voters are, in my experience, often highly emotional.

> Or even if they did, the amount of effort they'd put in...

This is actually quite an interesting area if you look into the game theory of making choices in a group setting. Strong strategies typically often don't involve doing much research, but they are rather frustrating for the people who take an interest in politics. Real-world behaviours are arguably quite reasonable on this front too, although they are limited by the ability of the average person to reason their way through the policy suggestions being made by though leaders.

Although I do agree that more voters isn't better. There is a certain level of objective correctness in political decisions if we admit basic ideas like "policies should be tested to see whether they achieve the goals that they were intended to" as a measure of success and the point should be to design systems that optimise on it to some degree.

Yes. And in detail, with this model of a rational electorate, skilled influencers put the effort in to devise a policy platform and convince others that it is good for them. The majority pick a platform that they are convinced by.

It's worth it for the influencers, because they have an outsized impact. It's worth it for everyone else only if choosing a coalition is very low-effort. Or if they are entertained by the influencers.

Again, I'm an ardent democrat. I'm just pointing out the flaws in any argument that assumes rational voters are a good thing - because it's rational to not waste much time on voting. Instead, democracy works best when voters feel an arguably irrational sense of duty and civic pride.

But that wouldn't be rational. The rational approach is to vote when you are in (or plausibly in, or plausibly going to eventually be in) the majority coalition. The hyper-rational equilibrium is politicians do exactly what a majority coalition of voters want and no-one bothers to vote, but once the politicians start becoming flawed or preferences change over time the equilibrium shifts quite rapidly to a rational voter base forming large coalitions that turn up to vote.

It isn't rational to vote if for people who aren't affiliated with a coalition to some degree (and never will be) but people like that are basically a political non-factor anyway and are probably legitimately wasting their time when they vote because there is no policy formula available that they want to support, by definition.

A rational anaylsis would therefore conclude I'm wasting my time and energy even just walking to the polling station, let alone keeping up with political developments through the intervening months and years. As you say, in a hyper-rational world turnout would be way lower - whether it would oscillate and overcorrect as you suggest, or reach a stable equilibrium, I'm not sure.

But whatever my motivation for voting and trying to stay informed, I do not believe it is primarily rational. It's probably some mixture of duty, diversionary entertainment, and ritual. If lowering the voting age to 16 could help inculcate that sense of duty and better establish that ritual, that would be a pretty convincing reason to do it in my opinion.

No it wouldn't. You haven't established the link between your premise and conclusions and the rational view is the opposite of what you came to. You've established that in the best case the candidate you prefer will win by more than one vote - which is correct but not the end of the line of thought.

Think of it like building an embankment. If you design the embankment to exactly hold back the maximum amount of water you expect it to hold it'll probably fail in an emergency when it shouldn't have because something slightly unexpected happens. The rational thing to do is engineer in a margin of safety. You're trying to optimise the wrong metric which is ~30-60 minutes of a voters time vs. probability of the legislature behaving in a way that is favourable to them. In both voting and embankment building it'd be silly (dare I say, irrational) to aim for a narrow success. The median election (analogy: median storm) should make the margins for your candidate (analogy: embankment tolerance) look excessive (analogy: over-engineered).

Otherwise, you're basically arguing that rational people should optimise their way to being on the losing side of elections - which is a big tip-off you're making a logic error in your argument somewhere. Rational behaviour can't, almost by definition, predictably lead to bad outcomes.

Maybe, it depends on the risk and the distance I've got to carry it.

In all likelihood many won't bother without being directed, encouraged or otherwise socially motivated. And they must ignore the surprisingly persuasive pro-flooding lobby, of course.

> Rational behaviour can't, almost by definition, predictably lead to bad outcomes.

Given you previously mentioned Game Theory, this is a surprising claim. Prisoner's dilemma? Tragedy of the commons?

Note that I'm not sure how much any of this applies to the real world. My main argument is against a model of voters as purely "rational". They are not, and in some ways at least, that's probably a good thing. I certainly think rationality is a very poor argument against extending the franchise to 16 year-olds.

Yes. You should put the brick where the engineer tells you too, and at the end of it you will observe there are more bricks than were strictly needed. Any other approach would be reckless.

Again, you're arguing that the rational thing to do is to not build the thing properly. You've misunderstood rationality and you're getting nonsense conclusions where people choose to get to get poor results by their own standards because they aren't very good at risk assessment. That isn't how rational actors behave. Rational people take a holistic view of all the foreseeable costs and benefits of an action (like, for example, having a government that aligns with their policy preferences) and are capable of probabilistic thinking.

> In all likelihood many won't bother without being directed, encouraged or otherwise socially motivated.

Well sure, but in practice people aren't rational. If they were rational, they would just quietly assess whether their coalition had the potential to win at some point and - if so - identify that it is in their best interests to vote. Then do it without prompting.

> Given you previously mentioned Game Theory, this is a surprising claim. Prisoner's dilemma? Tragedy of the commons?

The game theoretic optimum in both those cases is to achieve the best possible result through communication and coalition building.

Of course in many (most?) situations, we get the best outcome overall by acting socially. But, to me, free-riding on the socially-motivated activities of others is a "rational" strategy (with a insignificant chance of one brick/vote making a difference), if not a laudable one. Which is why I don't advocate the "rational" strategy.

I appreciate your point that if everyone took that strategy we'd all suffer. I can never control what everyone does, but maybe I can build or support a big enough coalition to improve outcomes for the majority, or at least people like me. But free-riding will still be an option many choose, unless punished severely (which most countries don't when it comes to voting).

I don't argue that people "choose to get poor results", I argue that some proportion may recognise their possible effect on the democratic outcome is so small that on some level they have no effective choice at all. That's just the reality of being one among an elaborate of many millions. Democracy is still the best option we have, I hasten to add.

In Prisoner's Dilemma, as originally formulated, I believe communication is expressly forbidden. And even where it's allowed, in a one-off game the optimal strategy for an individual uninterested in the welfare of their comrade is to collaborate with the authorities. If both participants take this strategy, it's to the detriment of both. This apparent paradox is what makes it so interesting. Now you can solve the paradox with communication through repeated games, which I think is what you allude to.

No, the disagreement stems from different beliefs over whether you've taken a rational position. Especially odd since at some level you understand it is an irrational conclusion since you're voting anyway.

What you are calling "rational" probably would make sense in a world where people were unable to communicate and playing a one-off game. The issue that idea runs in to is people can communicate and elections are a repeated game. If voting is modelled as a game where people don't communicate then a lot of nonsense results turn up. The rational strategy for most people when communication is possible is to join up with a coalition that can win, then vote. There is a minority of people with unusual enough political opinions that they can't realistically join a coalition and they rationally wouldn't vote, but by definition they are fringe groups. In the main, most people would vote if they are rational. And indeed, in a move that makes one hopeful for humanity, most people do indeed make the rational decision on that one.

Any study of coalition games like voting quickly discover that voting is entirely rational and a theoretical optimum in practice for most participants in a society. If you do a course on game theory there should be entire lectures on the subject. I suspect you might have done a course on game theory so I'm not sure why that wasn't drilled in. The mechanics of coalition building among rational actors is a fundamental topic.

> In Prisoner's Dilemma, as originally formulated, I believe communication is expressly forbidden.

You can look it up [0]; as originality formulated it was a 100-round game where cooperation is an entirely rational behaviour (for most rounds, anyway). It is a very powerful example of how cooperation followed by tit-for-tat is a near-optimal strategy under a lot of realistic assumptions and requires only the tiniest of communication channels to pull off and improve from an inefficient Nash equilibrium to a Pareto efficient one.

In fact, I suspect the actual mistake you're making is thinking that a Nash equilibrium is equivalent to a rational one, when in fact it is not. When communication and coalitions are possible the Nash equilibrium is usually just a starting point for negotiations before the rational agents decide to get a better result for themselves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

I don't see how this applies to voting at all in countries without compulsory voting.

Communication and iterations also don't seem that relevant to my argument about free-riding, since one's voting record is not usually visible.

I wonder how to reconcile those stats with the stories I hear about the CS job market.

(We'll know when new numbers come out of the feeling is correct?)

Most of the stories you hear about difficulties getting hired are from new grads. Anecdotally, companies have become far less willing to train juniors over the past few years, they only want to hire seniors that other companies have already trained. It would be interesting to see these per-major underemployment numbers filtered by whether someone had recently graduated.

Might have something to do with the appalling employee retention numbers in today’s tech scene.

Why bother spending six months, and five figures, training someone, only to have them hop to another company in 18 months?

For some reason, companies would rather pay insane salaries, than treat employees well enough to encourage them to stay.

The stats come from website trackers - do people browse the web on Steam Decks?

People are sent to third countries (with permission from that country) because they say they can't return to their own country. Why wouldn't they be safe in another Spanish speaking nation that agreed to accept them? Latin America isn't a death trap.

They aren't sending immigrants back to each immigrant's preferred, safe country, as you insinuate; they're sending back to their country of origin.

That's exactly the kind of ignorance I'm talking about.

Same-sex marriage is legal in most (by population and area) of Latin America. Nations that haven't legalized that still have laws that ban anti-gay discrimination. English colonies like Jamaica and Guyana are worse. Many parts of the US are worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_the_Americas

"Outside of the North Atlantic, no region in the world has undergone more progress in expanding LGBT legal rights than Latin America"

"Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin American countries (SPLA) are unquestionably in the lead in the region. If one excludes non-SPLA countries, which are mostly small countries in the Caribbean, the record of progress is even more impressive."

- LGBTQ+ Victory Institute

https://victoryinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/LAC-...

Citing marriage equality in Brazil or Chile does nothing to change the reality in the Northern Triangle, where same-sex marriage is illegal, hate-crime enforcement is weak, and impunity for anti-LGBT violence hovers around 80–90 percent. Honduras has recorded more than 470 LGBT murders since 2009; Guatemala’s congress tried in 2022 to criminalize sex education and explicitly ban gay marriage; El Salvador’s LGBT activists report routine police harassment and gang “social cleansing.” Saying “many parts of the U.S. are worse” ignores that federal law now protects LGBT workers nationwide and that homicide rates for LGBT people are a fraction of those in the receiving countries. In short, legal progress in parts of Latin America is real, but deporting vulnerable people to Guatemala, Honduras or Mexico is demonstrably dangerous and, for many, a potential death sentence.

You're also concerned about rapes and other crimes against deportees. I would remind you of the hundreds of thousands of rapes committed against migrants trying to come to the USA. Removing the temptation that draws so many to endure such risks is the best thing we can do to reduce the crimes you mentioned.

Comparing forced removal to voluntary north-bound migration also misses the legal and moral point. People who choose to set out on a dangerous route retain agency; deportees have none. International law bars the U.S. from pushing anyone—especially those who are LGBT or otherwise vulnerable—into countries where the state cannot keep them safe, regardless of how perilous the journey to America may have been. Ending that legal protection would not “remove temptation”; it would simply trap people in danger and outsource responsibility for whatever happens next.

Assuming your stats are accurate, the population of Honduras is 11 million, so 31 per 100k equals 3410 murders. 40 LGBT murders is only 1% of that, significantly below the population share for a likely number of LGBT people (around 8%).

Please check your stats more carefully so I don't have to, thanks.

Edit: However you try to obfuscate it, the plain fact is, 40 murders among 11 million people is an LGBT homicide rate of 0.4 per 100k. That's extraordinarily low, and you're trying to misrepresent it as a death trap.

I didn't "cherry-pick" that statistic. You chose it. Now you don't like the obvious conclusion it leads to, so you're changing to a different argument about solving crimes. I don't think you're even interested in discussing this honestly.

First, the 40 deaths are not an “LGBT share” of the national homicide database; they are cases that activists could confirm were LGBT. In Honduras the police almost never record a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity, families often conceal it, and many deaths of queer people are classified simply as “motive unknown.” Cattrachas (the local observatory you quoted) and Human Rights Watch both emphasize that their numbers are a floor, not a census. When the underlying variable is systematically under-reported, dividing it into the total homicide count will always understate the risk.

Second, vulnerability isn’t measured only by raw percentages but by the pattern of violence and the state’s response. Honduras’s Public Ministry reports a 90 % impunity rate for LGBT killings versus ~70 % for homicides overall. In other words, queer victims are far less likely to see a perpetrator arrested or tried, which is exactly what international law calls a “failure of state protection.” Add daily threats, police harassment, corrective rape, and forced displacement—none of which appear in the homicide tally—and you have a risk profile that far exceeds the simple population-share math you’re using.

So the point stands: Guatemala and Honduras remain dangerous places for LGBT asylum-seekers, and the U.S. cannot lawfully or morally treat them as safe havens by cherry-picking incomplete statistics.

Response to your edit: When you divide 40 LGBT murders by Honduras’ entire population (11 million) you’re using the wrong denominator. Risk has to be measured against the group that is actually at risk—i.e., LGBT people themselves. If we take the conservative estimate that 5 % of Hondurans are LGBT (≈550 000 people), 40 murders translate to roughly 7.3 killings per 100 000 LGBT residents. For comparison, the United States recorded about 30 anti-LGBT hate-motivated homicides in 2022; against an LGBT population of ~18 million that is ~0.17 per 100 000—over 40 times lower than Honduras. And that Honduran figure is almost certainly an undercount, because police reports rarely note a victim’s sexual orientation and families often conceal it; Cattrachas and Human Rights Watch call their tally “the floor, not the ceiling.”

Homicide numbers also capture only the tip of the danger. LGBT Hondurans face routine death threats, “corrective” rape, forced displacement, and police harassment, with a documented impunity rate of about 90 %. That systemic failure of protection—not just the body count—is exactly what international law treats as grounds for asylum and what makes forced returns unsafe. So the data, properly read, confirm the opposite of what you claim: Honduras remains one of the riskiest places in the hemisphere for LGBT people, and treating it as a “safe” destination for deportees ignores both math and reality.

"South Sudan descended into a civil war from 2013 to 2020, enduring rampant human rights abuses, including forced displacement, ethnic massacres, and killings of journalists by various parties."

Most were murderers. One was convicted of sexually abusing a 12 year old. One was only convicted of robbery and assault, but South Sudan was his country of origin.

“No country on Earth wanted to accept them because their crimes are so uniquely monstrous and barbaric,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security.

https://apnews.com/article/deportees-south-sudan-ice-immigra...

The Supreme Court approved the deportation 7-2.

Edit: Nothing the Supreme Court does is strictly procedural. Unlike other courts, they have complete freedom to ignore precedent and procedure and rule (or refuse to hear the case) based on the outcome they desire, and they frequently do so.

Response to your edit: Emergency shadow-docket orders don’t confer moral or constitutional absolution; they just postpone the real fight. By the founders’ own logic, knowingly dumping people into a war zone where torture is likely remains a breach of the natural-rights compact—no matter how many procedural shortcuts the government wins in the meantime.

Or by the cartels, for whom smuggling people into the United States is a lucrative (and violent) business. [2]

1: https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-arrested-after-ambush-texas-ice...

2: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/us/migrant-smuggling-evol...

The obvious intent is to terrify the general population with masked shock troops. This is third world warlord shit. It's more likely that what the lawyers are afraid of is their employability after this nightmare is ended.

Right here in this very discussion there are comments calling for "violent revolution" and the "duty of the American people to overthrow [the government], up to and including violence".

The threat of violence against government agents is very real. If you don't see, it's only because you don't want to see.