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Technology and politics go hand in hand

This just reads like a cop-out to me, in the same way that large media orgs have been parroting the "it's impossible to be truly unbiased" line as if it were an excuse to throw up their hands and stop trying altogether.

Not that I'm saying you're being disingenuous here, mind, it just reads like defeatism. "All tech is politics so it's pointless to try delineating them". This mentality gets worse and worse as you go down the main thread...

Not all, or even most tech talk is political related. I'm just looking down the front page right now.. a new Golang web framework, Elixir and Ruby IPC, OpenAI, new SSDs..

Those topics aren't even tangentially political in nature.

>>Karuna+(OP)
> Not all, or even most tech talk is political related. I'm just looking dowen the front page right now.. a new Golang web framework, Elixir and Ruby IPC, OpenAI, new SSDs..

And these are the articles that matter the least to me. I come here to discuss applied technology, not theory. How can technology improve quality of life? How are we going to deal with automation replacing the need for jobs? How are startups and their culture effecting both their employees and society as a whole (I'm looking at you AirBnB and Uber).

To each their own. I don't believe it's a cop out, but that's my opinion. You can have your threads and I can have mine without any interference. That's my problem. There's no need to censor politics threads if you simply skip them because you have no interest.

>>Karuna+(OP)
OpenAI is one of the tools that might be used to replace whole swaths of people from their jobs. How can it not be political?

>>icebra+p4
>How can it not be political?

Short answer: Because oftentimes a thread about a technology is about its concrete operational characteristics and applications, not it's social effects.

When you start dragging those into the topic, there's shockingly little depth to probe. AI will automate people out of jobs eventually - okay, and? You've moved the thread off topic. I came to read about how OpenAI works, not what the left, right, center, and upside-down think about the larger concept of AI, rather than the specific implementation called out in the thread title.

Here's the thread I was talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103742

A cursory reading suggests that somehow, that particular rabbit hole was avoided by everyone there. This kind of goes into what dang was saying, broaching the topic you just did in that thread would have just been unwelcome noise.

Do we really to relitigate "what about the jobs?" any time an AI or deep learning framework comes up? Is that really an interesting discussion to have in every thread?

>>Karuna+mw
One can refuse to approach the inherent political nature of the topic, but not deny it exists, which was what I was responding to.

That said, sure, not every thread should re-hash the same conversation, but that's neither exclusive to politics (see the discussions in every thread about JS frameworks) nor is it the problem being called out by the moderator.

>>icebra+Dx
If they go "hand in hand", they are inextricable in all ways that matter. Yet somehow, here is a very healthy discussion thread where it isn't brought up, at all, ever. That tells me that they are not as inextricable as people seem to think.

Again. Do we really to relitigate "what about the jobs?" any time an AI or deep learning framework comes up? What if there are sites that are not Hacker News that are better for that kind of discussion?

>>Karuna+Tx
Sorry, I edit my post, so the answer to the relitigation problem is above :)

As for other sites, no, absolutely not. Politics is unavoidable. You can enforce a silent acceptance of the status quo, but that's in itself a strong political (reactionary) position.

>>icebra+qy
And yet the other thread somehow managed to discuss the technical nature of OpenAI without touching any of this other stuff, absent any enforcement (the political cooling-off period was started after that thread was submitted), or obvious attempts to not touch it.

These two views are mutually exclusive. Either technology discussion can be separated from politics discussion (and given the other thread, we have evidence that it can), or it can not.

You're telling me that I can't discuss a topic without touching this other topic, and yet here that is happening right in front of us.

>>Karuna+Wy
No, I'm saying that lack of discussion is a political position, and a community-wide ban, or even refusal to discuss it is yet another - in particular, one that silences everyone who is not okay with the social impact of the topic.

>>icebra+xz
What if I am not interested, at a meta level, in discussion on the social impact of the topic? (Note: Please appreciate the distinction between topic X in general, and discussion of topic X on board Y)

There are times and places to have political discussions - the fact that I do not engage with my mom on political topics over Thanksgiving turkey does not mean I am not interested in politics, it means I am not interested in politics in that particular context.

Mostly because I know that the discussion will end in anger, hurt feelings, and not a single changed mind. It has happened enough on this board that people, myself included, start getting very flag-happy when they get a whiff of partisanship in the air.

I especially do not appreciate the implication that not wanting to have the discussion "here" is a political statement of anything other than wanting to avoid a headache. I must point out that insisting that X be talked about when someone has expressed disinterest in the topic is hard to interpret in any way other than hostile disregard.