zlacker

>>dang+(OP)
I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. HN is a community of hackers and entrepreneurs and politics affects these subjects one way or another wether we want to avoid it or not, and are an important component of entrepreneurial and technical subjects. It might be fine if HN was a scientific community, but it is not the case, and even then politics do interact with science, as one can conduct scientific experiments on government decisions, or politics can attack scientific community positions (e.g. climate change).

The way this sounds is that you are more concerned about politics as in people who take party positions and may feel excluded as a group when the majority of the community takes a different position. This is a slightly different issue i.e. party politics, and I think it is fine/a good thing, but it is also important to distinguish the two. This should essentially be under the same umbrella as personal attacks, as they are essentially the same thing.

>>tarikj+34
I find it disturbing too. Right now one of the top stories on HN is about Amazon Go and the top comment is about whether the destruction of jobs it could cause is socially acceptable.

I don't know whether that is politics or not but I can't imagine discussing Amazon Go as a technology without having that discussion. In fact when you look at HN very little is about particular technologies. Most of our discussion is around the implications.

>>golemo+0a
I've been attending a lot of AI/Data Science conferences lately, and it's incredible to me how this is not a major part of any conversation about AI and automation.

A talk I recently attended by a data scientist from Amazon had him gloating about how many jobs he could eliminate.

Ironically, the only speaker who brought it up as a major social problem we'll have to tackle is someone from Uber. His solution was less than satisfactory, but at least he recognized the issue.

I don't want to pretend we live in a world of algorithms without consequence.

>>michae+jd
As a "data scientist" myself and more importantly as a human being, I witness the same behaviour almost every day and it baffles me.

Yes, what we do can have consequences. We need to think about that!

I have friends working for weapons manufacturers. They don't gloat about building stuff that can blow children up!!! Why the hell should we be absolved from any moral consequences for our acts?

I am not equating elimating jobs and kill children, but I would prefer if our industry abstained from any thought on the consequences of its trades.

I once had to choose between working for a weapons manufacturers for a very nice salary. I chose not to work for them. But I thoroughly thought about it and I don't blame my friends for making a different choice. I politically object to that choice, but it does not mean I am some sort of white knight...and it does not mean that sometimes in the future, if presented with another opportunity, I wouldn't make a different choice...

>>karamb+4h
It's the gun-manufacturer/shooter dissociation.

Anecdotally, I had a neighbor who programmed the guidance systems for bombs, and the only reason I remember him is because immediately after introducing himself as such, he followed up with, "But I'm not the one who's dropping them. By making them smarter I can save lives".

I think that no matter how technically intelligent a field's operators are, they are still subject to the same dissociations as everyone else.