I'm starting to see now why some people say engineers can be prone to rigid and extremist political views. When your day job requires you to prove things to a certain degree of correctness, maybe it makes sense to believe the world and people should work the same way. There seems to be far too much cynicism, vitriol and condescension here around some subjects, and too many people who seem to think those are the qualities of a keen intellect. Maybe politics is one of those fields everyone just thinks they're an expert at.

I really don't see engineers being in any way unique in that regard.

While the political discussions on HN are predictable, I do think the overall politics of the site have shifted significantly over time. Six or seven years ago I was pretty much the token crazy liberal or whatever. Whereas now my politics generally aren't even noticeably out of the mainstream, without my views having shifted significantly on most issues.

I think a better guideline might be "avoid just expressing your opinion unless you can make it both polite and interesting."

The only issue I have predicting that stuff here is related to the surprise I sometimes feel at how much the bias of this site has drifted over the past couple of years. There's definitely been a pronounced uptick in the prevalence of left'ish wing /socialist'ist thinking here. At one time opinions focusing on individual rights, free markets, etc. were mainstream here. Now they routinely get heavily downvoted.