People in general are far too immature to discuss politics. They are happy to spew opinions an complain about the ignorance of 'the other side' but they don't actually want to listen to other perspectives.

Look at this thread for examples. Comparing ICE agents to Nuremberg, etc.

This platform (due to the vote-based sorting) and this community are not capable of discussing politics in any meaningful sense. It's just popular opinions drowning out unpopular ones. That's why discussing politics is and should be discouraged.

> People in general are far too immature to discuss politics.

But not you, right?

Did you see hueving discussing politics?

I was just wondering if he included himself in the "people" group.

I see this somewhat differently. We discuss politics all the time. We talk about our rights to expression, we talk about the role of legislation in the tech sector (and outside), we discuss domestic and foreign policy of every sort. Five of the top ten articles at the moment are about politics:

- China-based campaign breached satellite, defense companies

- Canada legalises recreational cannabis use

- Lead: America's Real Criminal Element (2013)

- AT&T, Time Warner, and the Need for Neutrality

- GitHub and Medium take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts

We've never not discussed it. But by avoiding discussing party policy directly (which is really what the rule seems to be), we remove many identity issues which keep people from seeing policies objectively.

HN is far from perfect, but that rule makes it a hell of a lot more pleasant and productive than most places for discussing politics.

The reason HN tries to avoid discussing politics is because it's not suited for productive political discussions, so everything would be drowned in noise.

I honestly don't know of any place on the Internt suited for a productive political discussion. I'd join such a space in a heartbeat. Given how politics is both complicated and universally triggers all the bugs in human minds, such a place would have to both structurally and culturally support discovery, fact-checking and moderation that ensures only good-intended, honest people participate.

(Regardless, borderline politics happens here all the time - it's because whenever tech impacts something political, people will bring that up and discuss it. So your complaint here is invalid anyway.)

Actually, what properties would such a place have? I keep thinking that a defining problem of the present day is the absence of such a platform.

I'm even willing to dig in and help put something together. I wonder if an ask HN around:

- How people would like to interact with such a system.

- What it would need to have/do to be useful.

I mean is there even a good format for such a thing? Debates for example are explicitly two sided, but exploring a problem rarely is. You need to track what's been tried, why it might have failed, see if it's worth trying again, allow people to suggest amendments which might help.

There's so much there.

A bunch of ideas:

1) It would need to have good mechanisms for structuring knowledge and discovery (and deduplication) of previous points. Instead of time-based approach, where people read and respond to streams of comments, it should be easy to review past discussions and maybe add updates based on new information or situations that develop.

Structuring and discovery is hard. I spent some time on Kialo[0], which is a "debate platform" that encourages tree-structured arguments. For any stated problem, people post arguments for and against, and each of those arguments can be recursively subdivided into for and against points, ad infinitum. It's a cute concept, but my impression was that the tree structure isn't good enough fit for the problem - frequently, you'd find the same points repeated at many different levels. A point "X" can be found simultaneously as a top-level "against" argument, and as a support argument three levels deep inside a top-level "for" argument, etc. The experience reinforced my feelings that problem spaces tend to form cyclic graphs.

2) It would need to have some mechanisms to encourage proper discourse standards. Moderation is one of them, but also some structural things more focused than just free-form comment textbox.

3) Ultimately, the goal of a platform should be to flesh out the problem space. The result should be an explorable artifact. This would help keep people on the same page, as well as get new participants up to speed (and inform non-participants who just want a honest overview of a problem they're interested in).

I have no clue how such system should be built, but I'd love to see and play with any experiments in this space.

--

[0] - https://www.kialo.com/tour/

Ok that's interesting, you've clearly done a lot in this space already, are you still working in this space and would you be up for a quick discussion about it?

I was actually thinking about it from a different direction.

Allow people to enter free text and then aggressively parse it out into a structure. Make the structure visible and then work with the structure. But allow the free text to stand as metadata.

Allow the person writing to highlight/markup blocks in the main text that support their argument.

The structure I was thinking of as a starting point was a list of clauses. You could then surface people stating a clause, saying that it's sometimes true or false, disagreeing with it, and detect it across the nodes in the graph making discovery a bit easier.

Or even taking a clause and using it as a starting point for a new discussion.

The other thing I think that's necessary is what kind of environment you foster. Something like changemyview[0][1] with the delta system [2] comes to mind. Simply speaking a person awards delta's when they've had their mind changed in any meaningful way by a person, and they're required to give a short explanation or statement about why they awarded it.

--

- [0] https://changemyview.net/

- [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/

- [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem

> Ok that's interesting, you've clearly done a lot in this space already, are you still working in this space and would you be up for a quick discussion about it?

Sure! Feel free to mail me (address in the profile).

I wouldn't say I have done a lot in this space - I am just interested in it, and try to pay attention to any new ways to structure discussions and thoughts that helps people reach agreement.

--

Your concept is very interesting, and indeed a completely different direction than what I was thinking. You seem to want to start from making free-text comments more machine-understandable, so that they can be further analyzed and grouped with similar points from other people? This seems it could mesh with what I wrote in the previous comment - I want to get a graph of ideas, and you just suggested an approach to generating that graph.

Definitely. I'll fire you an email =)... I basically want to get an understanding of what pitfalls and issues that you had exposure to.

Fundamentally however the reason I keep thinking about that graph is that I keep wanting it. I wander into a complex nested discussion online which seems interesting and just want to see it visualised. Select statements and see who's making them. Focus on a part of the discussion one step at a time. Find commonalities and differences marked up.

EDIT: I sent that email I mentioned, not sure if you've seen it =)...

In addition to the CMV reddit, this is also a good one: https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/

Heavy moderation is the key here.

There are many forums for discussing and debating politics. HN can decide not to be one of them; nothing reprehensible about it.

I read this as "HN can decide that technology and morality don't ever come into conflict" and see it as both ridiculous and false.

What else are all the posts about Facebook/Uber/Net Neutrality/Security about? These are primarily moral issues that relate to tech, not tech itself. Most commenters here regularly engage in these conversations, as they should. But not allowing for other conversations to veer into the discussion of politics and morality isn't realistic. We need to be having those conversations more and more as tech becomes a part of the world.

The original post in this thread is 100% correct. You can't just isolate tech.

We are discussing politics, in every single post here. When people say we shouldn't, they're saying they want things to stay the same.

>we should readily engage in political discussion

You must mean political lecturing, because 'discussion' implies more than one side, which means hearing from more than one side, which means not censoring or aggressively punishing voices apart from one side, which means "giving a platform to hate". Where 'hate' is one them magical words that is taken literally and figuratively at the same time, whichever is tactically convenient.

Discussion involves multiple views not multiple sides.

Not every discussion needs to be adversarial or black and white. Discussions can be constructive with all members on the same side talking about ideas .

Most development discussions that happen daily are just that, constructive with people throwing ideas around.

For example if we are discussing the best design pattern in a c++ API , and someone comes in and says "let's rewrite in basic" , when they're shut down, that is not shutting down a discussion, because that is not a constructive view point.

Similarly in politics, not everyone's opinion or view is valid or adds to the discussion. Being dismissed with reason is not the same as being disregarded and barred from discussion. It's simply saying, come back with something that adds to it rather than subtracts.

If you constantly find yourself left out of a discussion maybe consider your approach or your view points. Not every view needs to be considered by others, and either the way it's presented or the view itself may not be worth considering.

As it stands, my opinion is that separating children from their families seeking asylum is morally reprehensible. I'm willing to discuss immigration reform, but I think anyone arguing for the detainment of children is not adding anything of value to the discussion or humanity and is worthy of being disregarded with reason. Just like I would for someone who told me to rewrite a c++ codebase in basic.

> but I think anyone arguing for the detainment of children is not adding anything of value to the discussion or humanity and is worthy of being disregarded with reason.

I think it is a sensible policy.

Can you articulate why you think it is any worse than child services putting a kid into foster care when the parents go to jail for any other crime?

Illegally immigrating to the US is a serious crime but you can't jail the kids for the crimes of the parents.

The best option is to detain the kids until a relative can get them.

We have been detaining kids trying to illegally cross the border for over a decade now - if you have a better solution then voice it.

>Illegally immigrating to the US is a serious crime

In the first instance it is a misdemeanor offence.

Well, in principle it's worse because normally child services avoid doing that if at all possible; they try and place the kid with relatives or other people who've cared for them in the past, whereas these kids are pretty much all institutionalised in big warehouses.

I don't think that's actually what people object to though. Remember the big (bogus) claim on social media that ICE had lost 1475 children who'd been seized from their parents? That was about unaccompanied kids who'd been united with family members. The entire thrust of that complaint is that it was some kind of Nazi-esque atrocity that ICE weren't totally controlling and tracking those kids.

Fundamentally, I think the objection is to two things: Trump being president, and the border being controlled. The only politically acceptable position right now is for every person to cross the Mexican border with a kid to be let through, and even that might not be enough because Trump.

> Can you articulate why you think it is any worse than child services putting a kid into foster care when the parents go to jail for any other crime?

I'd hope normal foster care in the US looks slightly better, and is better communicated (assuming the reports about ICE not telling parents what they are doing with their children are accurate). E.g. normally I'd expect incarcerated parents to still know about the whereabouts of their children, being allowed to communicate with them, ... unless there's strong reasons to forbid this.

While I think it's at least an interesting question if it is strictly necessary to separate families, I'd guess that if the process appeared less horrific there'd be a lot less of an outcry.

From what I've read, it also appears that the vast majority cases are first-time entries, which only is a misdemeanor in the US? While it makes some sense to "keep" people somewhere in this case (can't just let them go with a fine like you'd do for a traffic offense), it seems less than clear to me that this has to be to the same "standards" as people being jailed for serious crimes, and regular access to the children can't be possible. (And to be clear, I'd generally argue for such policies, not just in the case of immigrants)

> it seems less than clear to me that this has to be to the same "standards" as people being jailed for serious crimes

It seems clear to me they should be - it's a clear deterrent against a serious problem.

> I'd guess that if the process appeared less horrific

I agree - the optics don't look good. But part of me thinks they shouldn't look good and this will quickly lead to fewer people trying to illegally enter the country.

When you are against something, then obviously you hate it, therefore any argument you present is a hate speech, thus should not be allowed /s