Political discussion is supposed to be banned because it's mainstream, like celebrity gossip, and mainstream discussion dilutes the intellectual quality and purpose of the community and only hastens the Eternal September effect.
If anything, the moderators have probably been too lenient about letting political content through. It's starting to become the HN equivalent of a junk buffet. Far too little of it passes the bar of "satisfying intellectual curiosity," and far too much appeals only to tribalism and emotion.
> Political discussion is supposed to be banned because it's mainstream, like celebrity gossip...
This may be true of some political discussion, but one could equivalently say that most technological discussion is about big screen televisions and mobile phone service plans.
Just as HN digs deeper on technical topics, it should dig deeper on political and ethical topics.
>Just as HN digs deeper on technical topics, it should dig deeper on political and ethical topics.
It should, but it often doesn't. For some reason, politics short circuits people's brains. And one way to encourage people to dig deeper is to keep shooting into the trenches, being more aggressive about downvoting political content than apolitical, technical content.
I think this is a very cynical view. To some extent the demagogues and "ruling class" among us try to oversimplify things and create emotionally potent talking points.
But ultimately as citizens we must figure out reality for ourselves without the emotionally potent, over-simplified explanations offered by partisans.
We must be patient that some of us may not have realized (yet) how to think in a rational way about politics, not just abandon it completely.
"people who were strong at math were able to effectively solve an analytical problem. However, when political content was added to the same analytical problem – comparing crime data in cities that banned handguns against cities that did not – math skills no longer predicted how well people solved the problem. Instead, liberals were good at solving the problem when it proved that gun control reduced crime, and conservatives were good at solving the problem when it proved the opposite"
Not an endorsement of this paper, just something I've seen going around on social media. When I followed the citation for the statement quoted above, it didn't seem quite as cut and dry, that summary is eliding quite a few details of the the experiment I think, but I just skimmed.
If anything, the moderators have probably been too lenient about letting political content through. It's starting to become the HN equivalent of a junk buffet. Far too little of it passes the bar of "satisfying intellectual curiosity," and far too much appeals only to tribalism and emotion.