Hacker News is a little hard in these times. That it has kept politics unrelated to tech out is a great achievement, but as scientific method is being equated to flat-earth thinking by elected leaders talking about what's new in Rust seems off.
The distinction that there are separable and unrelated domains of knowledge and activity is a kind of Fordism of the mind that our current society has impressed upon us. It's artificial to not talk about politics in the same breath as science, since science and technology produce the resources that make our political process for distribution of those resources necessary. I think this is a correction for an aberrant distinction in our thinking.
> That it has kept politics unrelated to tech out is a great achievement
I see your point, but is it an achievement? Is there not some amount of civil rights abuse or a breakdown of society that would warrant discussion on all possible spaces?
I say this as someone that feels conflicted to see a daily twitter feed of tech leaders celebrating the performance of their favorite LLM breaking some new record when citizens and residents are being detained or discriminated against in violent and appalling ways... sometimes just meters from a fancy tech office!
Many of those tech "leaders", who are celebrating the performance of their favorite LLM are also large donors to politicians who are enabling the violent abuses of power you mentioned. I don't feel conflicted, because we're seeing exactly what they want to play out, play out.
Can I make a distinction of separating politics (especially US politics) from current affairs?
Shining a light on current affairs, sure. It’s nice to engage with those on this site. I get just as tired of seeing the same posts about LLMs and the Ai BuBbLe as you do. And there are some political stories that are probably worth the real estate here.
But where I’ll draw a distinction is that there will always be a political story grabbing attention on social media. And someone will always be outraged enough about it to deem it important enough for your outrage as well.
For example, I’m sure there are people who would say this is important news: “politician responds to other people who respond to Trump’s ballroom construction”[1].
If we don’t have some line on politics specifically (because that has proven to be engagement-bait high-sugar content for the internet), we will end up with a lot of low quality content here and less interesting / focused discussion with the people that make this site interesting.
Someone will always think every political story is important enough for discussion, but I think it’s healthy to keep HN free of most of it. Most of the low hanging, high-sugar fruit, at least.
It's especially hard given that big tech companies and their leaders are working closely with government and explicitly supporting certain political missions, there are few truly apolitical corners of tech now.
It was easier when "politics" and typical tech news overlapped now and then but not endlessly. You could filter ...
Now the culture wars and loyalty tests of the current government occur just about everywhere. There is no limit to the scope of topics that are part of the test, no objection will be tolerated. Any objection means you're <insert buzzword here>.
We're nearing the point where your point of view might even limit your choice of college (or maybe any college) if the president gets his way.
I guess doctors, scientists, and politicians are going to need to stop pretending COVID never happened then and acknowledge the massive loss in public trust that resulted in the pendulum swinging the other way.
I'm talking the mandates pushed by "experts" to force young K-12 students (Like my sister) into remote schooling that had profound impacts on their social life and education. Or when California arrested people for going to a beach or a public park based on the advice of their respective health experts. Or when Nevada closed Churches, but not Liquor Stores and Pot Dispensaries, because the experts had decided Constitutional Rights weren't an essential activity.
Perhaps when those mistakes are acknowledged things can go back to normal.
A church is literally a place for mass assembly, while a liquor store or dispensary can easily be configured for social distancing, i.e. only let up to N customers in the store at a time depending on the size.
But just think how good of a talking point this is!
Bad government stop CHURCH allow LIQUOR and DRUGS! Want to corrupt your CHILDREN, steal them from GODS arms and deliver to SATAN!
>A church is literally a place for mass assembly, while a liquor store or dispensary can easily be configured for social distancing, i.e. only let up to N customers in the store at a time depending on the size.
This logic makes 0 sense. Churches have the same capabilities to reconfigure, if not more most of them are just one big room. The same capabilities to limit patrons if it was required. They could split services and space the people out, or only let in N numbers of people as you suggested
A liquor store or dispensary functions just fine with as low as 3-5 customers in the store. A church with only 3-5 patrons allowed at a time is effectively closed for most purposes.
Public figures never had a problem with mass assembly.
That's why the Governor of California wined and dined at the French Laundry restaurant in violation of his own COVID protocols at the height of the pandemic. Or why public figures encouraged people to attend large protests. It's pretty obvious in retrospect that they were playing fast and loose with the science for entirely political reasons.
Sure, that doesn't give you license to play fast and loose rejecting science for entirely political reasons.
Individuals are fallible, politicians are hypocritical, news at 11. Rather than aim for consistent application of rules and justice, your movement seems to have overextrapolated these failings into a rejection of having any kind of society in the first place.
I think people view it more as an irreparable shattering of the social contract. Society exists, but the rules just don't matter. Many people have become strict conflict theorists, to borrow a term from sociology.
What political goals do you suppose they were trying to accomplish by restricting public gathering establishments? Is the governor of California secretly a Republican trying to help create right wing talking points?
There's a reason that churches were closed. It's an event which encourages lots and lots of people to gather in close proximity for an extended duration of time at the same time.
> There's a reason that churches were closed. It's an event which encourages lots and lots of people to gather in close proximity for an extended duration of time at the same time.
And to sing hymns loudly together in that enclosed space (which almost certainly helps spread a respiratory disease just that much more easily).
> Or when Nevada closed Churches, but not Liquor Stores and Pot Dispensaries, because the experts had decided Constitutional Rights weren't an essential activity.
People die from alcohol withdrawal, and dispensaries are medical care for a lot of folks.
> People die from alcohol withdrawal, and dispensaries are medical care for a lot of folks.
This is the exact type of argument that merely helped to inflame the debate.
The real distinction is that church services are mass gatherings of people, whereas liquor and pot are retail establishments that only serve a few people at a given time. Stores can institute policies to make people come into even less contact - whereas for churches the mass of people coming together is intrinsic.
The original argument fallaciously skips over that actual reality, and frames it as if public health administrators are godless heathens more interested in people getting their weed and booze than people going to church. Your counter argument, despite being technically correct, actually buttresses support for the original one.
I'm with you on the idea that fascists will make any argument, and only value arguments as weapons rather than a good-faith attempt to figure things out. But I still believe there are people in the middle who are swayed by better arguments.
Maybe that's just my fatal flaw of being eternally hopeful that people will actually use their intelligence. But if this isn't the case, then what are we even doing?
(as for your actual argument, one can make the same argument that people will die without being able to get their fix of social church interaction. so then we're talking about numbers for hypotheticals, and right back to the dynamic where it's not even about logic)
I think it was more meant as the society is ignoring it like a trauma that no one wants to talk about. This results in missing learnings on decisions that were taken back then.
