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Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

This is actually my sole complaint with HN. I love the community and I understand where the moderators are coming from, but I feel that it's important to point out that the position of "keep politics out of $X" is the purest expression of privilege, and in general is an attitude that embraces the status quo, no matter how horrifying it might be for the unprivileged.

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.

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I don't see that attitude in HN at all. There are those who wish to see fewer (or none) political discussions, but their wishes don't prevail. Hence the aforementioned "Detox Week", which didn't even last a week.

> 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.

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.

Something can be both an expression of privilege and a very good idea.

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.

Someone pointed out to me that "this is privilege" conflates two very different ideas. It can mean "this is an unfair advantage which should be taken away", but it can also mean "this is a benefit denied to some people, and it should be shared with everyone".

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.

> Someone pointed out to me that "this is privilege" conflates two very different ideas. It can mean "this is an unfair advantage which should be taken away", but it can also mean "this is a benefit denied to some people, and it should be shared with everyone".

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.

Well, as I said, it shouldn't be ALWAYS allowed, otherwise you have that sect of people who bring up the politics inherent in anything, and while it's true and important, it's not what HN is about or should be about.

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.

I think of myself (based on commenting/posting history) as more politically-inclined than the average techie, but I find HN’s mix of tech and politics to be generally good. That might be because I can go elsewhere (e.g. Twitter) to discuss more political things, and thus have an implicit preference for HN to be less political. But I’m interested in what others think would be the ideal mix?

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.

Like 1st day of month are the hiring threads... what about on the 15th we have a very focused political debate - and no other threads are allowed to have it.

I definitely agree that tech lately is so intertwined with politics.

What happens if on the 16th Bloomberg announces that all organizers of the protests at Google have left or been fired?

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.

Most likely, in all these cases the story would be posted anyway and then some small minority of users who find it offensive would flag-kill it. If the moderators/vouchers disagree, the story and comments might be resurrected. Which is to say, things would work much as they do now.

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.

Please note what I responded to was that no other threads may have such debates, so I'm not sure this would be the case.

This is, of course, what the word “privilege” means, both in the sociology context and in everyday language. It’s something good that is only available to certain people or groups.

Wealthy people actually get less sleep than the poor for obvious reasons: their time is more valuable. They also work more hours and have less “free” time for the same reason.

The study mentioned here indicates otherwise https://www.tuck.com/the-inequality-of-sleep/

"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.

And more importantly, even if the wealthy get less sleep, that's by their choice, not circumstance. A poor person loses sleep because they have 2 jobs and the shifts don't line up. A rich person loses sleep because they've taken on too much to do of their own volition, any amount of which they could abstain from with little consequence.

It’s more complicated than that: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2861987/

Your study supports my point and harms yours. From your study:

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 idea isn't that political discussions are unwelcome, or worthless... Rather, it's that people (and comments) are much more emotional, knee-jerk, irrational, etc. - there is barely any actual discussion going on, it's mostly name-calling, strawman arguments or moral/value discussion that basically amount to "I'm good; you're evil" (e.g. both sides of pro-life vs pro-choice debate).

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.

If there's one privilege that I will never feel guilty about taking advantage of, it's the ability to listen to and engage in discussions with folks smarter than I am with the overloaded concept of political belief removed.

Imagine how much better the experience of listening and engaging in discussions with those who are qualified as not simply smarter than you, but who have different lived experience, values, and/or models for ordering the Universe?

Your implication seems to be that we don't have that - I disagree. HN is full of folks with different backgrounds. One particular category of topics is moderated - politics. There's massive inclusion of different lived experiences etc. In other forums I've found political discussions to be particularly irrational. The topic is just so fundamentally emotional that folks lose objectivity.

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.

" The comments on this site are superb. "

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.

I agree 100% with what you say but have to point out that your last "even" is a small example of how politics creeps in. In short, what often happens is that statements that are highly opinion-based are presented as broadly-agreed-upon facts.

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).

My intent was to convey that intelligence or brilliance, alone, are not sufficient.

Breadth of experience and background matter. And if sufficiently broad, will cross boundaries of endowment or empowerment, and hence enter into political realms.

>...the position of "keep politics out of $X" is the purest expression of privilege, and in general is an attitude that embraces the status quo, no matter how horrifying it might be for the unprivileged.

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.

There's a time and place for that stuff though, if all of a sudden you start bringing up politics during your local Arduino project meetup you can't be surprised if they stop inviting you.

Hacker News sort of splits between technology and politics so drawing a line is a bit tricky.

Politics, IMHO, are about applied relationship and applied power.

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.

You could say the same of knowledge also as it is a power and one applied and accrued by relationship; by what material one reads, by whom and from which source it is linked from and to. Academics of various groups tend to have their own sort of tribalism. I think the mods came to the correct conclusion that politics, although annoying as hell sometimes, is a fabric of society which is nigh impossible to shed when discussing just about anything.

There are other forums* where people can discuss those things (*as in, the word forum, not necessarily “internet forums”). It’s refreshing to have a medium like Hacker News where technology news can be discussed without the polemics endemic to other message boards.

While you might have a point, I don't see many examples where people advocating the political to speak "truth to power". What I see is "be mindful with controversial opinions that could affect corporate sensibilities" and I do believe many people share this point of view.

Who do you think are these unprivileged people you are speaking off anyway and what do you think would hinder them at participation?

Question: who does a policy of "no political discussion" most favour?

The empowered, or the disempowered?

>Question: who does a policy of "no political discussion" most favour?

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.

I don’t think it particularly favors either. Neither benefit from pro-life/pro-choice debates on HN.

Not all places need to support discussion of politics. If you want to discuss the intersection of tech and politics you have many options to go to without bringing that stuff here.

Exactly this! HN for me is the safe place. It’s politics free and memes free, if someone wants all that stuff you can easily go to Twitter or any other website.

Everything is political.

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)

> Everything is political.

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.

Building your own video card is political, sorry. I'm not even kidding.

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.

No, an article about building your own video card is not political. Admittedly, if an article about building a video card went into opinions on open standards, included anti-consumerist comments, talked about legal considerations then it would be political to a varying degree. But an article about building a video card in of itself does not have to mention any of that and would therefore be non-political.

If everything is political then the word political has no meaning.

You can't just reply to a detailed explanation of why something is political with "no, it isn't". That's not an argument and I'm pretty sure it isn't in the spirit of HN's guidelines (whether or not I personally agree with them in general or not).

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).

> You can't just reply to a detailed explanation of why something is political with "no, it isn't".

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.

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