Comment by dang
9 years ago
Yes, and the key words there are "intellectually interesting" (as opposed to other kinds of interesting) and "some".
The other thing to understand is that this has always been the policy. It hasn't changed, other than the few times we've run explicitly temporary experiments, like the no-politics one or Erlang day as described elsewhere in this thread.
Right. In fact, I included your quote saying "the existing guidelines have it about right" in my essay. So I thought it was pretty entertaining that the top-rated comment here summarizes the discussion in the post announcing the experiment without paying any attention to the result of the experiment.
>without paying any attention to the result of the experiment.
The results are not relevant to my criticism of JM's specific essay:
He's misrepresenting the people who don't want politics discussion as "ostriches". The extra nuance he ignores is that many HN'rs acknowledge the pervasiveness of politics. Many also desire political discussion -- but not on HN.
He equates "avoidance of politics" == "politics not important fingers stuck in ears"
His essay does not address the issue of "avoidance of politics" == "avoidance low-quality emotional posts".
By omitting the full nuance of the opposing position, he's distorting the argument in his favor.
The people you're citing in that thread were supporting an absolute ban on political discussion on HN. That certainly sounds like ostriching to me. And sure, JM could have pointed out the specific nuanced intellectual incoherency of the people in that thread acknowledging pervasiveness of politics and then trying to exclude politics from discussions here - 'dang described it as "delusional" - but I don't see him leaving that out as distorting his argument.
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