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Comment by 0xcoffee | Hacker News Reader

What makes HN so great is that when a topic is discussed, often someone with direct participation in the topic is somewhere in the thread, to give an inside view.

What I miss about mixing HN and politics, is that HN doesn't have politicians who can pop in and say 'oh hi guys I wrote this bill feel free to ask me some questions'.

(I'm not saying nobody on HN participates on politics, I remember reading an interesting post about someone who ran for governor(?), but those posts are rare).

For example, a podcast I love is Planet Money, and they take the time to interview economists on both sides, people who write some controversial bills, people who take part in lobbying, and even senators. This approach has really opened my eyes to the political process and I have heard many well formed counter arguments which made me reconsider some of my positions.

I cannot say I have ever experienced this on an online forum.

View on HN

Personally I do not enjoy seeing politics posts in HackerNews, similarly how I don't enjoy seeing them in /. or /r/programming. Specially because they are usually US politics and I live outside that country.

I definitely enjoy my share of the circus that is happening in that space. I watch CNN usually in evenings while having dinner as a form of "light entertainment". And in the mornings I do have my share of political news reading on my preferred sources.

But when I get to a science or technology forum, I love to see science or technology news and information. Thus when suddenly the majority of items are related to politics, it turns me off.

I live in the US and still dislike political posts, largely because political differences are such a source of hatred. It always devolves into bad Hitler analogies even among otherwise intelligent people. I imagine there are some people who are just annoyed that HN won't let them spread their thinly veiled political hate; I recognize this isn't a charitable interpretation, but it's been so long since I've heard a productive political conversation online, and I've never heard one involving someone as angsty as the OP.

> a podcast I love is Planet Money, and they take the time to interview economists on both sides

Planet Money is better than average on this, but is definitely in the NPR bubble from my perspective.

I think EconTalk does the best job of airing different perspectives on (at least tangentially) economics related issues. The host has his own perspective, but he's very candid that he knows he has his own cognitive biases and often invites his guests to enlighten him by challenging those biases. It's also a longer format, so there is more time to unpack issues.

...which is a really good point. I think a lot of shallow political dialogue happens because of a lack of attention and space as much as anything else. Explaining why net neutrality is a big deal in emotional terms takes some technical explanation and some narrative building, for example.

I think what the article tries to say is that everything that has at least two people is political by heart. HN is political. Giving you the option to respond and upvote and flag is political. You doing any of this is political. You are a politician, automatically just by being here and interacting with me.

The article is ostensibily about explaining that technology is political, with the tacked-on truth that HN must allow more actual politics. If HN 'squelches political debate', I'm not sure if this refers to whole submissions, or the posters within threads - submissions get flagged for appearing to be preachy with no real intrigue, posters get downvoted and detached for derailing threads. At first I wouldn't know why this submission was flagged, but now I understand it comes on the heels of a spam of Paris threads.

Well. PG is a hacker. By creating HN he didn't just write software, he influenced politics and gave us means to be political.

How you interpret the article isn't contrary to my interpretation. It's part of it. I'd argue that the article also wants to show that by developing technology you can't avoid being political.

PS: Political action does not have to be responsible or ethical. Political just means that it influences other people's life, doesn't have to be positive. And in that regard hackers shouldn't be more responsible but be more aware that they are already participating in politics by writing software, and don't think these are two separate worlds.

That's a big issue. HN has no special insight on politics so the discussions turn into the same old canards and groupthink on Reddit or anywhere else. There's just very little informative or useful about those discussions.

It's pretty often that stuff which is factually wrong but meets emotional needs gets upvoted without a second thought. Disagreement with the notion the world is ending or Trump is literally James Harden and is gonna start the Holocaust (a popular feeling at HN 4 months ago) gets swiftly downvoted because it doesn't meet how people feel.

Every time one of those groupthinky discussions happens it makes HN less attractive to informed discussion.

I'm sitting at -12 in a thread from yesterday in which a guy responded "No offence you don't seem to have much knowledge of post ww2 history" after he was the one who made a weird historical analogy and I more or less copypastad part of a wiki article on the issue. I don't really care about being wrong or losing Internet points, but when stuff like that happens it just convinces me that even really intelligent people would rather agree with their biases over actually debating something. No thanks. It's the kind of behavior expected on r/politics.

I cant find the thread, but last year someone posted something close to 'all Trump supporters are idiots, I don't know how he got so popular,' and someone replied, 'I have a top uni degree, successful career and I am voting for Trump, so start with reassessing your assumptions about Trump supporters if you want to understand them,' and everyone just downvoted him. Nobody asked him anything.

For the record I'm not a Trump supporter, but I can see that when it comes to politics people think emotionally and ideologically, and very few are asking themselves "have I not made any mistakes?" in the same way we do (everyone does make mistakes) when we care about being proficient.

I studied economics and had a passion for public policy and realized how corrupt that all is. There's no moral excuse for anyone to still suffer in 2017--but it persists. People are irrational, greedy, and selfish. Not all, but enough.

As a counter-anecdote, about half a year ago a a self-described 'Alt Right Trump supporter' posted, and I posted a comment asking him about his beliefs, since I had only heard people hating on 'Alt Right' from my own sources, and was curious why he believed what the believed. You can see it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12971897

So not everyone here tries to silence alternate viewpoints, at least.

Here's an example.

The parent post was at +5 and now it's in the grey. The downvoters don't bother responding, they just downvote, because differing opinions aren't welcomed.

It's presumably because you're breaking the HN guidelines by complaining about downvotes and calling names (in the sense we use the term), and posting unsubstantively while complaining about the lack of "informed discussion".

> a podcast I love is Planet Money, and they take the time to interview economists on both sides

Great tip. The solution to so many problems is to involve challenging opposing points of view.

There is a big problem with the left in America rejecting opposing points of view. "Safe space" and "shut it down" culture, etc. Mainstream media newsrooms packed with only liberal reporters, etc.

But unfortunately everyone gravitates to places of comfort around people with like-minded views, because its too difficult to constantly be questioning your beliefs or challenging someone else.

Good examples are Fox News' Hannity and Colmes and CNN's Crossfire. Both shuttered, and just ended up with replacement shows with one point of view.

I find that more and more Trump people can make the arguments of left-wing people, but the inverse is not true.

I would love to have an open and honest (and civil) AMA from people who are writing these bills. Especially "cyber" legislation.

I personally helped create a government commission in Oakland, California that now decides on privacy topics that go to city council. We need more things like that.

Here's a challenge: how to enable honest AMA for a politician? Every thing a public figure says is read by the media, which gives a very strong incentive for them to not say anything that could damage their public position.

I would absolutely love to get insight into thoughts of politicians and problems they face, but it's hard to trust anything they say on-record, simply because of media pressure.

There's no "answer" in AMA.

I must be misunderstanding you. Answers are the whole point of AMAs.

AMA is incomparable to anything society had experienced before and it is that way because ordinary me could ask anything unordinary them.

That is unprecedented, and the other part, the answers, are just an usual part of the process - "unordinary they" could use and have used all the tools society has developed since the beginning how to not answer if that suits them. That's called diplomacy.

Still not sure what you mean (besides AMAs being something new on the world stage).

I'm interested in making AMAs more likely to produce honest answers.

You're having some strange attitude toward politics and politicians, precisely you're thinking there's some kind of consequences that block politicians' "honest" approach to things.

So with the AMA too, you're kind of thinking some politician would tell you things in four eyes differently than they would do in front of the millions.

That's the feature dude, not a bug!

This is why the Planet Money approach works so well. Rather then an AMA, perhaps there should be two guest economists, and a political topic is chosen to be discussed. The discussion could focus on the economics, which would appeal to the technical side of HN and remove a lot of the typical emotional appeal. I would also propose that for those topics, voting be disabled for the guests replies. The purpose is to show both sides a discussion, and voting typically turns populist on political discussions. (I know about false equivalency fallacy, but I think for politics it is important both sides have a voice)

That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if there is already a HN economical equivalent website somewhere, just its outside our tech bubble so we (I at least), have not stumbled across it.

The very framing of "both sides" is a fallacy: most issues have many distinct sides, not two.

Find a retired politician. They tend to speak the most honest about issues, especially if the issue is over & they're no longer working on it.

It's hard to fault them for this tendency–they have seen too often that complete openness tends to be risky, without rewards. They're reacting to the incentives the public sets.

One very small thing I'm trying to do is to speak up against unreasonable criticism when it's coming from "my side". That could be conspiracy theories (although the left is somewhat laking in those), or just the silliness of making a big deal out of some misspelled tweets by Trump.

It's much more effective, especially if people know I'm "on their side". I also hope that it could create a "culture of good faith", where politicians could be less afraid of their statements being taken out of context, or being interpreted in the worst possible way.

I have, from time to time, seen some excellent interviews with politicians actually showing that they have deep understanding far beyond the talking points. What usually works is: long (an hour or more), one-on-one, with an interviewer who is genuinely interested in the conversation, and mostly non-confrontational. There was a series of these interviews, called "Through the night with...", I believe, that had a few excellent episodes with this basic setup. "The fog of war" also comes to mind, although it's a different format.

> It's hard to fault them for this tendency–they have seen too often that complete openness tends to be risky, without rewards. They're reacting to the incentives the public sets.

I agree. The problem is systemic. That's the reason why e.g. I never say that some politician is stupid, and very rarely try to attribute malice.

I see how the system is broken, I just wish for some way to work around it, so that we could have a honest and factual conversation with the political sphere.

> One very small thing I'm trying to do is to speak up against unreasonable criticism when it's coming from "my side".

I try to do the same. People look at me weird sometimes, because it's not common. I've raised some eyebrows over the family table by being able to, in the scope of a single conversation, defend both atheism and religion from uncharitable attacks from the other side.

There are serving politicians from a variety of legislatures around the world who have accounts on HN and have made comments in the past.

I haven't seen one from the US, however.

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