It's an interesting idea for sure, but I'm not sure how or if such a thing can exist. Moderation becomes a headache, and well, a lot of truly brilliant people I've met in life have zero interest in debating it. How do you keep out the YT commenters, Fox News or r/politics commenters, etc?
It would be interesting if HN had some bucket like /offtopic, for things that are flamebaity and removed from the main view, but I fear it would attract the aforementioned people who only ever troll there, and dang probably having zero interest in mod'ing it.
Not OP, but it's not smart/educated that I like to have these conversations with. It's humble, polite, open minded people. For the most part these two axes are usually orthogonal and independent. The one correlation I've found is that if one's lack of education is approached in a way that contributes to them feeling insecure, then they move into survival mode, become defensive, and thus less open minded.
HN tends to attract people from an educational/professional background that encourages critical thinking. Even if the user has a degree in the liberal arts, the application of their mind in technology forces their thoughts in a way that pushes them to think critically and not just accept what is given to them without question - I would think. As with all thoughts and theories, this is a general rule and a hypothesis, I might be way off the mark.
Generally speaking, though, people who have learned critical thinking skills seem more willing to discuss an issue in a reasonable manner and drill down to the truth of it, rather than "dig in" and just decide they're right with whatever information they might have on hand.
I only bring this up as I have a fine arts degree, but shifted into programming as I wrote scripts for different art applications and the transition was natural as I had a background as a script kiddie from my high school days. A large amount of the people I went to school with, however, are absolutely unwilling to apply critical thought to specific subjects even though some have masters degrees.
I couldn't disagree more.
HN is one of the few places where you will get people who have no idea about a topic expounding at length on that topic. The psychology of this place is fascinating.
It is unrelated to education and, for some people, education is deleterious. Engineering is, in my experience, definitely one of the worst subjects for teaching false confidence. I worked in finance, sometimes client-facing, and worked a lot with individual investors in a business I started...any kind of engineering background was a red flag because, time after time, they rarely accepted the limits of their knowledge (doctors is another one, I don't think anyone who has met a doctor would dispute this either). Engineering backgrounds also seem to the cornerstone of most modern authoritarian states (the CCP and Singapore's fetish for engineers as an example).
So learning critical thinking is something that is totally distinct from attending university or even the job you do. People who are totally ignorant of something are far more aware of the limits of their knowledge. Not always, they are probably more prone to irrational or emotional reasoning but, again, I don't think critical thinking is something that can be taught in every case.
On the original post, I think people believe that it is difficult to have conversations about politics because of the behaviour of a small minority of people. In some online places that minority is very large. And in many communities, moderation is also aimed at limiting disagreement. The result is inevitable. HN has the community it moderates for.