The answer, which has been stable for many years, is that some stories with political overlap are inevitable and ok, as long as they aren't garden-variety politics and there is something of intellectual interest to be discussed. The current post falls in that category (as long as one skips the title and starts at the subtitle).
A thwack of past explanations about this is accessible via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) familiarize yourelf with some of those, and then still have a question, I'd be happy to take a crack at answering it.
I wonder if there's a better way to phrase this. Keeping politics out is neither possible nor desirable, but we all know that there's something that's related to politics that should be avoided to keep conversations high quality.
It's partisanship that ought be avoided. Team sports. Outside of that politics are a game of ideology, ideas, policy, and power dynamics, all of which are worth discussing.
What does this even mean? Politics is everything, nothing, or whatever a person dislikes. If you're going to complain about it you might as well define it.
Articles on lambda calculus are not political. Nor are articles on prime numbers, golang, Haskell, regex challenges, machine learning, GenAI, history of science, new products (Show HN) et cetera - the stuff I value HN for
I can't speak to your definition of what is political, but if hacker news was just a math forum there'd be no point of visiting it.
> history of science, new products
Ok you're just lying to yourself at this point if you think either of these topics can be divorced from "politics" in even the most facile context. People are gonna disagree about the history of science and whether or not a given product is worth the investment.
From my perspective, almost all technology efforts must contend with the real-world reactions and motivations of people in large groups. We like to think of consumer tech as individualistic but it’s not—that’s what trends are. And most of us work in workplaces where politics and power are part of how decisions get made.
In this case we have an organization with obvious issues but many entrenched interests. From a systems thinking standpoint it seems to have built incredible defensive power, making it virtually impossible for anyone to drive change. That’s pretty interesting.
While I can appreciate the hesitation to move into what is seen as a politically charged topic, I encourage you to not ignore it hoping things will work themselves out. I fully agree that the odds of a technical solution are low, I don't think it is impossible to imagine some technical help.
Which is not to demand that you personally get involved. Feel free to ignore the topics and move on.
