Well... we've had this discussion before, but my attitude is that politics and economics will show up here because they don't violate the guidelines and I thi

Well... we've had this discussion before, but my attitude is that politics and economics will show up here because they don't violate the guidelines and I think it's great. You think that having articles about economics and politics (which do indeed generate conversation of lower quality than the rest of the site) will inevitably pollute the rest of the site and drive away users. Right now economics and politics stories are a small percentage of stories here and I find the negative response rather annoying. If they get to be too much, PG can change the guidelines or the voting mechanism. I'll agree that the discussion in this thread is rather mediocre and is evidence of the phenomenon you are concerned about. But I've seen great discussions about politics and economics here and I like hearing it from the perspective of the users here. I've learned things and I just don't understand why you think we'll be better off not learning about these issues from each other. It reminds me too much of a generic rule for pleasant banal conversation, "don't talk about religion or politics." We disagree about whether such discussion about things we are less knowledgeable is inevitably bad for the site. Ultimately the answer is unknown and I would like to see the limit pushed as far as possible to make the test of not degenerating into the lowest common denominator harder. I think it can be done, though downvoting stories may have to be enabled eventually.