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Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

This article asserts a lot without backing it up. I've been convinced to take political actions as the result of thoughtful discussions with coworkers over lunch for example; even if that's rare acting like it's impossible ignores that work is a large part of our lives and political discussion matters.

I agree with the author that it can take up too much space, but the argument here seems to be that because of that failure mode we must throw the baby out with the bathwater and implicitly assume the politics you infer of your boss.

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I don't think the author is asserting that you can't talk politics with your coworkers?

The context is specifically about online sites like HN and the well known phenomenon where the technical usefulness of the site is inversely proportional to how many participants are trying to bring their preferred politics into it.

If you are able to have productive discussions about tech & politics with your coworkers, that might be because you are exceptional humans, or because you were in person rather than online, or because you already shared your co-workers political opinions. None of those apply to an online space like HN.

I’ve also changed my mind because of HN and other technical forum discussions. I brought up the counter example at the workplace because it is a case the article mentions without argument.

I think it’s ridiculous to pretend there isn’t massive overlap between political discussion and tech. Obviously there can be too much of a thing, obviously there are uncurious partisans, but I don’t think that is particularly different from the other kinds of flame wars HN guidelines already discourage.

I'd argue that a large, international forum is the kind of place where this kind of conversation adds much more noise than signal. There are too many people of too many age ranges who live in too many different places for political conversation to meaningfully result in situations where, on balance, the space agitates for change moreso than collapses into a negative-sum bash fest.

Political activism still seems to be most effective in democracies when folks go in person and try to talk about why they think their positions are good and useful ("canvasing") or when individuals talk to their representatives about issues. IMO many of the problems of democracy right now originate because too many people think that emoting online about politics is a substitute for building consensus in focused groups that have the power to change the issue at hand.

basic human rights are not preferred politics.

ah, see, there you go "bringing" politics into a "purely technical" discussion

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