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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Given the number of topics that are flagged from the HN home page because they involve politics it's difficult to disagree...

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He's talking about the neutrality vs agency of technology, which is largely unrelated to most of the political articles on HN. For context, here is a good thread with a bunch of Ph.D. researchers linking to their favorite academic resources on this topic:

https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/oSUhsJffQNCxSFVBQNCLKA/air-age...

This thread on technological determinism vs social construction of technology is also very relevant.

https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/QNW9-XK6RdmoeRtUp4b5eQ/air-see...

Anyway this is what Turner is talking about when he's talking about algorithmic bias and actor-network theory. It has nothing to do with random articles about Trump's immigration policies or affirmative action or whatever, which is most of what gets flagged on HN.

I dunno, I've seen a few HN posts about, for example, the Facebook news feed and its connections to the propagation of fake news. That's absolutely connected to the "neutrality" of the news feed (it's an algorithm! Algorithms can't be bad, they're just math!), but will be flagged all the same. It's a shame for many reasons, but not least that it's a fascinating topic.

There have been quite a few major discussions of that. I think people start to flag such a topic when it enters a later stage of repetitiveness. Call it the Snowden effect.

There's politics, and then there's politics. The topics that get flagged usually are ones for which it's near-impossible to have a productive discussion. The HN guidelines are spot-on with "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." The important topics usually filter through here. If you want to indulge in shouting at each other over what outrageous thing some political figure did or did not say this week, there are plenty of other venues on the Internet which encourage just that.

I've seen, and very occaisionally moderated, productive discussions on difficult topics. It's not easy, or pleasant. It requires firm rules for participation, and a steel will on the part of the moderator. People will be (or act) hurt. And in any sizeable discussion, many comments will be moderated out. Preemptive moderation (hold for publishing) may be necessary.

This isn't something HN are likely to entertain frequently, but I can think of a few topics for which I'd like to see the attempt made, perhaps every few months, on a scheduled basis.

I have no problem with this rule. This isn't SV's domain expertise.

Maybe if political/social science is included in engineering schools as Fred Turner suggests, the quality of discussion and outcomes produced could be more constructive over the long term.

But with the current generation or two or three forget about it.

I think you have the causality backwards. If we never talk about it, the quality of discussion isn't going to get better. And as the article says, "The design of technology hides its political imperatives by presenting as neutral." Us not discussing politics here is part of that pretense that what we do is somehow neutral. The pretense that things that touch millions, maybe billions of people could possibly be apolitical.

The only choice in the current high noise/low signal environment is to pretend to be neutral or pretend to know what you are talking. Both Obama and Trump fall in the later category.

You and everyone else who believes talking is a route to solutions is delusional. Especially in the current environment of self reinforcing echo chambers and us vs them narratives. There has not been a single major issue solved in the last twenty years of social media and 24*7 news "educating and informing" the public.

Will technocrats who are political have any success? That experiment is currently running in China and the default American narrative is it will fail. So either way you look at it an SV entry into politics will fail.

What they can do is change the environment. Remove the retarded mechanisms that increase "engagement" at the cost of dividing people. This is much more in the realm of their domain expertise than thinking they need to spend their time talking or propping up talkers more.

I've started compiling a list of things HN seems unable to discuss.

The ability to search for highly-voted, significantly discussed, and yet still flagged posts would be handy.

And no, the problem is nnot specific to HN. But it exists, despite both public and private denials by the mods, whom I generally respect

How could I go about obtaining this list?

It's items as I encounter them. This is a rough and overly-inclusive search, the first two items (at present) are relevant.

There are a few other examples I've submited to the mods via email.

https://plus.google.com/s/From%3A104092656004159577193%20"ha...

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