I'm not saying HN should allow ALL political discussion, but when technological issues inevitably and undeniably involve politics, either by influencing or being influenced, it seems a little cowardly that the general attitude of HN is "just don't discuss it" when the it in that case is core to the issue at hand, even if it happens to be political.
Ignoring the discussion of both relationships and power leads to an anemic understanding of freedom and what it takes to enable it which leaves us unbalanced and brittle as a civil society.
The exercise of this privilege is a systemic, cultural mistake and the tendency of conversations to often devolve into tribalism highlights our lack of sophistication and maturity when it comes to these topics.
Example: The advice to get at least 8 hours of sleep at a regular time each night. This reflects:
- the economic privilege of not needing to do irregular shift work
- not having a chronic disease which interrupts sleep
- not being a parent
- having a regular place to sleep at all.
However, it is still a good idea for one’s physical and mental health.
Likewise, a community might reasonably decide that certain political discussions are too acrimonious to have productively. Even if this decision reflects privilege, it might be the only decision under which the community could survive without rupturing.
I feel inclined to agree with your second paragraph, but just don’t know if such discussions are actually productive.
Hacker News sort of splits between technology and politics so drawing a line is a bit tricky.
The empowered, or the disempowered?
AFAIK noone has figured out how to have a substantial political discussion, at scale. Until that problem is solved, it makes sense to just tune it out a bit.
BUT, and this is a big but here, there are a small number of discussions on HN where it can be argued that the politics involved in an issue are more important than the technology. Or, that the technology involved is actively shaping the politics related to it. Or, that the politics of those building the technology are informing the technology. And so on.
And I feel like the attitude here is one mirrored strongly in the tech industry at large, that somehow by not discussing it openly, we avoid the stains and the ugly realities of the situations we're involved in, and I'm sorry but that's just not true. Simply refusing to discuss the political angles of what we all do doesn't mean we're above it or beyond it, we're simply ignoring it, and ignoring politics can have catastrophic consequences.
Who do you think are these unprivileged people you are speaking off anyway and what do you think would hinder them at participation?
HN generally bans explicitly political opinion pieces, articles with overt political statements and articles primarily covering current political affairs (e.g. articles about something a US politician said). But even what is or isn't "political" in this sense is again down to the unstated biases of the moderators (e.g. what if the US politician said something about a well-known tech company).
A lot of articles that make the cut tend to be overtly about economics, but those are still extremely political. Universal basic income is political, climate change is political, how companies treat their employees is political, the "sharing economy" is political.
HN isn't free of politics, HN is centrist (with a neo-liberal bias, i.e. anti-regulation, pro-market). And centrism isn't an ideology, it's merely a compromise relative to wherever the current Overton window is.
Saying you don't want to talk about politics riles people up because in order to think of something you talk about as "non-political" requires you to be considerably aloof and far removed from the real-world impacts.
And for completeness sake: yes, even saying "when a company makes an economical decision that negatively impacts people that's not political" is political because it presupposes a laissez-faire capitalist worldview where the Friedman doctrine is unquestioned.
(Hopefully we don't need to talk about why any pretenses of a "meritocracy" or "only hiring the best" is political as these specters should have been cast out of most tech forums at this point)
I definitely agree that tech lately is so intertwined with politics.
To take some old settled examples: sovereign immunity was a privilege to be taken away because everyone should be accountable under the law, but voting rights were a privilege to be extended because self-determination is good regardless of race or gender. Sometimes it's obvious what people mean, but sometimes it's very useful to be explicit about what's meant. I think "keep politics out of $X" extends across both categories.
To the extent that a space affects policy on some issue, banning 'politics' effectively empowers the people who benefit from the current state of affairs. As you say, it could still have a payoff worth the cost if some concrete good is being achieved, but I think it is a cost; in an ideal world people would be free to discuss both the current state of affairs and changes they'd like to see. But when spaces are genuinely divorced from any position on an issue, it seems like a privilege to share, to give more people the freedom and resources to at least temporarily step away from problems. Issues are harder to escape or forget for the people who are directly affected, so there is a privilege there, but I don't think the people harassing "rainy day moodboard" Tumblrs to post about Yemen are actually improving anything.
I'm not sure what the perfect balance is, but I appreciate that HN rules try to uphold that distinction. There's significantly more leeway to debate politics when tech engages politics (e.g. government contracts, codes of conduct, privacy), than there is to inject non-tech political discussion simply on the grounds that it's an important topic.
Is there evidence that arguing politics over the internet is causing a net improvement in the world? I'm inclined to think political discussions on social media are causing political dysfunction, not fixing it.
What happens if on the 17th, during a big ML conference, a prominent computer vision scientist was able to conclusively prove that x% of current facial datasets are majority white male and that this results in y% increase of false positive rates when identifying nonwhites as criminals?
What happens if on the 19th there is a report delivered by a special UN comissioned research group that issues that global warming has destroyed coral reefs in a way such that they will never recover?
What happens if on the 25th it is definitively revealed through a security report that voting machines were actively hacked to detect if the voter was registered female and made them vote for $party?
What happens if on the 1st Reuters publishes a investigative piece that explores how Microsoft has been delivering accurate censorship algorithms to China and the specific people behind it?
What happens if on the 12th a NIH paper is published unveiling definitive brain architecture differences between male, female, and nonbinary brains due to an innovative computer vision collaboration in MIT?
What happens if on the 14th a scientist who happens to be an assigned-female-at-birth nonbinary latin american publishes the definitive proof that P != NP? Also, this researcher takes 'they' pronouns, so commentors can either use "she" or "they" and both are political statements? (Or is it inappropriate to talk about the researcher and their/her work to discover this at all?)
That is to say- in the article, it was discovered that "what is political debate" turned out to itself be a political debate, because some things are obviously political, and other things are political just by existing and referring to it.
For example, here’s the front page from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-07-07
I’m on mobile so I’m only skimming, but if you sorted that day list by upvotes, the 4th most upvoted story would be the one about a new African trade coalition (450+ upvotes). There’s also a 200+ upvoted submission about FBI/ICE having access to state driver license photos. And a bunch of other sub-100 upvoted threads that are political, or aren’t explicitly tech — e.g. forest kindergarten, FCC and robocallers, the Durian King. And this doesn’t account for the tech articles in which politics are prominently discussed, e.g. anything to do with the Boeing 737 MAX.
Seems like a solid mix to me, even as at least a third of the tech-focused submissions don’t interest me (e.g. Lisp and RaptorJIT). There’s enough political content for that day that if I wanted to read only non-tech HN threads, I’d have my fill.
You can't argue with results. The comments on this site are superb. I probably read the comments 3x more than I read the base articles. Take a look at the comments on MSNBC, Fox News, or even the Washington Post. It's shrill emotional blather.
This is absolutely not true. The best postings on hacker news are cool technical stuff that doesn't have an ounce of political.
And yes, there are plenty of articles with a political lean but they are really the least interesting ones here because you can read those anywhere else.
I'd much rather read about the guy who built his own video card than what (non-technical) thing Uber is doing this week.
"the likelihood of short sleep increased with greater poverty"
Poor people are much more likely to work irregular shifts and night shifts, which have a serious impact on sleep.
The difference would be that there would be at least one day per month when unpopular opinions could be voiced without (potentially) being censored. The most important unpopular stories of the previous month would get some discussion, whereas currently they get none.
EDIT: to be clear, I don't think you did it intentionally, and it was a minor thing, I just found it amusing to spot it.
EDIT2: to be even clearer, I'm referring to the implied fact that WP commenters are better-informed than the other two groups (on which I don't have a strong opinion).
HN allows (and frequently features) political discussion in those contexts, so while I agree that it would be a problem if your description was accurate, I can't agree that the description is accurate.
You missed a third: “this is a product of a particular pattern of life experience which not everyone shares, and people should be mindful that it is not universal”.
IME, when a particular comment is described as coming from privilege, to the extent there is a “should” point along with the “is” point, the “should” point is about recognizing the different lived experience that the privileged comment disregards, not about resolving the difference in experience by universalizing either the privileged or unprivileged experience.
I would agree with this... with caveat. The comments on this site are superb when discussing highly technical topics within the STEM sphere. However, the comments here tend to trail off to not much more insightful than average population for the following:
* Lifestyle posts (keto diets, IF, cold therapy, supplements, probiotics...)
* Drugs (microdosing LSD, ketamine therapy...)
* "Identity" politics (female-in-tech topics become a hotbed of debate, much of it not insightful)
* Nuances in economics or international affairs
At least IMO unless you can broadly anticipate that it's a subject that most commentors have significant education on, the discussion generally falls to either spitballing or anecdotes, neither of which are more insightful than a general public.
How about people who are sick of the silly ass and mostly irrelevant toxic political bullshit lizard men and their PR firms use to drum up electoral turnout? I'm here for the 1337 h4x0rz, not what some blue haired SRE ops ding dong or buzzcut f35 engineer thinks about Todays Issues as defined on TV.
Anyway, hats off to sctb and dang, who do a great job despite the wanking that is allowed on here.
Breadth of experience and background matter. And if sufficiently broad, will cross boundaries of endowment or empowerment, and hence enter into political realms.
To elaborate:
* To get the obvious one out of the way: it's something you need sufficient free time, money and knowledge in order to even do, so the author likely comes from a certain amount of privilege which colors his experience.
* Building a video card is in itself only possible due to the existence of open standards and free access to the relevant information, which is absolutely political.
* The act in itself is to a certain degree anti-consumerist because it's likely driven by a desire to understand rather than merely use the technology.
* Building a video card that actually works will likely require some reverse engineering and working around proprietary restrictions, which may enter DMCA territory. So it's willfully doing something legally questionable if not downright illegal, i.e. protesting the laws in question, which is absolutely political.
Everything is political. If you don't see the politics it's only because you agree with them and think they're a no-brainer.
You may see a cool hobby project but try to explain the project to a non-technical person and you might find that you're carrying a lot of preconceived notions of what the world is like, how it functions and what is acceptable or not. That's all politics.
If everything is political then the word political has no meaning.
Lower income and educational attainment was associated with more sleep complaints. Employment was associated with less sleep complaints and unemployment with more.
Rates of sleep complaints in African-American, Hispanic/Latino and Asian/Other groups were similar to Whites. Lower socioeconomic status was associated with higher rates of sleep complaint.
The word "political" doesn't have no meaning, unless you take it to be understood as purely binary (i.e. "there are politics in this or there are not") in which case it's indeed a useless qualifier because, as I explained, there are always politics in it if there are humans involved. So yes, "x is political" is a useless statement because it is practically tautological in most situations where it is uttered -- but the same is true for "the Earth isn't flat", yet that's a perfectly sensible thing to say when dealing with Flat Earthers, just as "everything is political" is sensible to say when someone claims it very much isn't.
You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
EDIT: It's also important to understand the distinction between "x has no meaning" and "x is no useful distinguishing quality". "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do, including what humans write, especially when they write about other humans. That's meaningful. But the qualification of something humans do as "political" is indeed useless just as qualifying water as "wet"[0] is generally also useless, because if those qualities are always present for everything in that category (i.e. all water is "wet", all human communication is "political") there's nothing the presence of the quality distinguishes any of those things from (of course water is "wet", hence why we don't talk about "wet water" and just talk about "water" instead, with the implicit understanding that because it is water, it is also wet).
[0]: Using the colloquial definition of "wetness" here. There are other definitions according to which e.g. soapy water is "wetter" than pure water but that's not generally what a layperson means when they say something is wet (i.e. is covered or soaked in water).
That's an interesting take since I refuted your points. You simply added a bunch of potential political concepts to something that wasn't political and then claimed it was.
> You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics
> "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do
If it applies to everything that humans do then there is no "involves politics" or "expresses politics". A human taking a shit isn't expressing politics no matter how hard the struggle is -- so I've just refuted that obviously over-broad point.