Hacker news should not become strictly or dominated by political discussion, but given AI and its impact on society amongst many other technologies like social media, which are intertwined within political discussion these days, some of the “knowledgeable“ people and particularly those whose careers have been impacted by AI are right here on hacker news.
How do we do this with tech topics? We rely on our expert knowledge to evaluate the claims of others. If someone is seriously asking this question about political discussion on HN that means they're not at the point where they're ready to have political discussions that are anything more than just saying "hey did you read that mainstream news article?" "yeah".
If you know even a modicum of politics or political theory it's almost trivial to prove, disprove, or add color to what's being said in these threads. If you want a really simple way to do this hop onto one of the big prediction markets like Polymarket or Kalshi. You can probably disprove a solid 15% of top-ranked commenters just by doing that.
If you want to use more brainpower, hop over to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and read one of their long articles. In particular they have a great set of articles on US policy thinking around China right now. It's pretty saddening to read HN commentary on China and compare it to CEIP's readings.
The conclusion I've come to on this site is that the incentives around participating on a public internet site, like HN, Reddit, Facebook, etc are such that they attract a crowd of people who are more interested in talking than listening or understanding. There's a subset of them who really enjoy debating but without being grounded in fact or consequence from misprediction it turns largely into verbal sparring games. There's also little difference between these sites because from what I can tell it's the same set of people attracted to all of the same sites.
Why do you think, an US centric, vaguely leftist think tank focused on US politics with seat in Washington, financed by American donors, initiates the use of brainpower and understanding? More than any other media, that is. There is such a thing as the rest of the world (95% of the world population) who may be more incentivised to ask honest questions on HN than reading yet another U. S. publication that regards them as a remark in the margins, as demonstrated by the CEIP front page https://carnegieendowment.org/?lang=en
> Why do you think, an US centric, vaguely leftist think tank focused on US politics with seat in Washington, financed by American donors, initiates the use of brainpower and understanding?
Incentives. Do you really think that internet commenters are going to produce better research than folks paid to research things and provide insights to decision makers? Everyone has a bias. Having a bias doesn't stop you from doing deep analysis. The CCP traces its ideological origins from Marx-Leninism and still uses that to develop their policy positions. It's a very different perspective than US policy which traces its philosophy back to the European Enlightenment, but that doesn't mean their analysis is any less rigorous.
[1]: https://cepr.org/ [2]: https://www.jiia.or.jp/en/
JIIA is the only one of your examples, covering worldwide topics right there on the front page, even Africa. Promoting research.
So far, your selection confirms only one of your statements: bias. Everyone has them. Do you really think, the first two of your choices would engage in"deep analysis" on topics contrary to the political agenda of their donors and hence their incentives?
I'll hold that I get more varied opinions and links to sources on HN than from strictly conforming U. S. publications, but thanks for introducing me to JIIA - which, you know, verifies the first part of this sentence.
The philosophical roots of states is not on topic here, so I'll skip that.
Glad that it was almost :)