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Comment by MichaelZuo | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this a fairly trivial insight though?

Same as saying that everything anyone, or any organization, does is political.

Which may be the literal case, but we have to maintain some cutoff threshold to make the phrase meaningful and tractable to think about.

Otherwise, scratching the left or right side of your nose may be a political statement and preferring a trackpad or a mouse may be a statement regarding values.

"Technology that has Y net impact on more than X number of people is not values neutral" may be a better phrasing.

And the challenge will be to find broad agreement for X and Y.

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It’s only a trivial insight if you agree. Most people don’t. I have worked with many developers who believe that whatever they value is obviously the right values and everybody else just don’t get it. Every time a developer claims they have made a “rational” choice you know you are seeing one of them in their natural inhabitant.

>I have worked with many developers who believe that whatever they value is obviously the right values and everybody else just don’t get it.

My go-to example of developer hubris is all the language-mangling technology I have to work around everyday, because it's on by default: auto-complete, phrase suggestions, fuzzy searching, etc. I'm perfectly capable of expressing my intent. I don't need a computer to say "well, um, actually I know you really want something else."

> It’s only a trivial insight if you agree. Most people don’t.

Do you mean it's only a trivial insight if you already know it?

> I have worked with many developers who believe that whatever they value is obviously the right values and everybody else just don’t get it. Every time a developer claims they have made a “rational” choice you know you are seeing one of them in their natural inhabitant.

Some of the most pernicious ideological-adherents are the ones who don't realize their beliefs are an ideology, and instead confuse it for reality (or that their values are the only valid values). They have a really hard time understanding anything else, or analyzing their own beliefs.

You see this a lot with people who read a couple libertarian pop-econ books and then run around like everything is a simple question of supply, demand, and prices and that an ideal free market is "values neutral." It's also common in other areas, through (e.g. most deeply-polarized people of whatever party, "the reality-based community", etc.).

Yep agree. Always be aware of simple solutions to complex problems. Economics as you say is a great example of this. There are more than 9 major schools of economics. All of them disagreeing with each other and with people promoting each one with the dogmatic frenzy of religious fanatics.

> Otherwise, scratching the left or right side of your nose may be a political statement and preferring a trackpad or a mouse may be a statement regarding values.

This isn't keeping things tractable, it's keeping them rational. You're not required to limit your scope to remain rational. In fact, the claim that scope has to be limited can be a way to intentionally exclude things from being evaluated rationally.

If there's a reasonable way that the orientation of a nose scratch can have political implications, then it should be considered. There's not one, though, so we don't really have to worry about it. But I fear that the criterion you're using for your nose-scratching example is the "Oh, come on..." criterion. If someone comes up with a real argument that there's a right way to scratch your nose, you don't exclude it because of "really?"

The limitation argument applies to the meaning of the word political rather than the application of the concept. While one can look at the political angle of anything, describing everything as political means the label "political" ceases to have any meaning whatsoever.

If everything is political then what's not political? Definitionally nothing. So saying "X is political" becomes equivalent to "X is".

This is a specific case of a broader truth, which is that expanding the definition of a category lowers the information entropy of that category.

>Isn't this a fairly trivial insight though? >Same as saying that everything anyone, or any organization, does is political.

The are both trivial (e.g. post-modernism) and non-trivial (e.g. McLuhan, Postman, Ellul) versions of this idea. They have vastly different implications.

All software engineers would benefit from at least some understanding of the non-trivial versions.

For example, I've heard many engineers seriously suggest that it would be for the benefit of the whole society if traditional publishing would collapse and be completely replaced by self-publishing on Amazon. When they say that they have all the imagined benefits right in front of their mind's eye. (Everyone can publish! Cheap books! Fast/digital delivery!) Simultaneously, it's blatantly obvious that they haven't spent even a minute thinking about what that would lead to. (Hypercentralization. Turning books from artefacts to services. Complete demolition of the highly evolved ecosystem that produced good books in the past.) This is how tech people are trained to think.

Extend this example. Search for some articles or comments debating eReaders. Pretty much none of them ever consider anything beyond the immediate tactile experience and convenience. I mean, even people who argue in favor of physical books.

Well that is understandable since most people are, at best, amateurs outside of their field of expertise, and sometimes within too.

But thankfully not everyone's opinion is of equal competence nor should they be treated as if they were of equal competence. And we don't have to spend much time worrying about these folks.

For example, if thousands in positions of importance started advocating to replace the publishing industry that would be worrying.

But I highly doubt several thousand disgruntled junior folks could destroy the publishing industry, even if they combined their efforts and committed their all to it. And I would bet very few of these folks would ever climb into positions of real importance so they aren't much of a latent threat either.

> Isn't this a fairly trivial insight though?

Outside of HN it is.

Here the only technology that is ever seen with some skepticism is the blockchain. Everything else is golden.

Git is blockchain though.

The downvotes are telling.

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