6 ms·

”Let’s not talk politics, it’s just inflammatory. Hey, cool LLM model. Shiny!”

by actionfromafar 1y ago

jacquesm 1y ago
That would be very funny if it weren't disturbingly close to the truth.
- user2722 1y ago
  I believe 90% of mean people on the web talking about politics are actually bots.
  - mlrtime 1y ago
    Are you a bot? Prove it, one way or another. Also, is there something like Poe's law but for bots? Bot Attribution Fallacy?
esperent 1y ago
And when people do talk about politics it's exactly the kind of hot takes you'd expect from people who think they're very smart (and probably are when it comes to choosing a database) but are completely uninformed about the current topic and only capable of parroting referred opinions, or making statements they expect the group to agree with. Nobody comes out of the conversation smarter than they went in. Honestly, I think it's better that we do keep conversation here to shiny technology. If you want to talk politics, go and find a group of people who know what they're talking about. That way you might learn something.
- immibis 1y ago
  Problem: Everything is political. Pretending not to talk about politics, is mostly just supporting a certain kind of politics (the one that you get by default if you avoid talking about politics).
  - mlrtime 1y ago
    Disagree, not everything is political unless you make it so. Otherwise we should fork this to political discussions only.
  - Esophagus4 1y ago
    I don’t think it’s that I’m avoiding politics… It’s that I know the day-to-day headlines from DC are mostly noise, and do not inform in the same way that ESPN talking head analysts do not inform about football. To understand the state of American politics and of the world, I have news sources I trust. Hacker News will never be one of them. Neither will Reddit. Nor will Facebook. I don’t want HN to turn into another outrage-bait pseudo-news commentary site. Look at the front page of Reddit (it’s atrociously bad) to see how far this forum could fall. I flagged this article. If you want to talk about daily political news with other internet people, there are myriad options: WSJ, NYT, and Washington Post all have comment sections. Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and Threads all have comment sections. YouTube has comments. Blogs have comments. Why do people insist that keeping HN free of politics is tantamount to being blissfully ignorant of world affairs? And why do people insist on turning HN into Reddit v2?
- ruszki 1y ago
  Most people do the same thing with shiny technology topics too. But you’re right. It seems to be a better place than the alternatives, but heck, I learn rarely from comments compared how often I did 10 years ago on a - back then - small subreddit. Most comments can be inferred just from headlines, not even from the articles.
  - smugglerFlynn 1y ago
    When it comes to tech topics this is an insiders discussion. When it comes to political topics, 99% of people in HN threads have close to zero insights, and circle around publicly known information. Big difference. It is very dangerous to expect deep insights on every aspect of human life from a HN thread, regardless of how well educated and well meaning average HN commenters are.
- mexicocitinluez 1y ago
  > And when people do talk about politics it's exactly the kind of hot takes you'd expect from people who think they're very smart (and probably are when it comes to choosing a database) but are completely uninformed about the current topic and only capable of parroting referred opinions, A-MEN. Ton of takes by armchair enthusiasts who think they have the ability call a spade a spade because they're grandmother told them they were a genius after restarting her computer. I swear to god, DHH has to got to be the best example of this. His blog piece about free speech is so funny in retrospect it's hard for me to read and believe he takes himself seriously.
- mlrtime 1y ago
  1000%. Don't talk about Religion, Politics or Sex. It's a great way to fight and divide and we will NEVER agree.
  - esperent 1y ago
    That's not even close to what I said. You should absolutely talk about these things, but you should find knowledgeable people who will challenge you and help you to grow. HN isn't the place for that, when it comes to topics outside of tech.
    - cudgy 1y ago
      How do you determine that people are knowledgeable and are going to help you grow? How do you verify they’re “knowledgeable”? Hacker news should not become strictly or dominated by political discussion, but given AI and its impact on society amongst many other technologies like social media, which are intertwined within political discussion these days, some of the “knowledgeable“ people and particularly those whose careers have been impacted by AI are right here on hacker news.
      - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
        > How do you determine that people are knowledgeable and are going to help you grow? How do you verify they’re “knowledgeable”? How do we do this with tech topics? We rely on our expert knowledge to evaluate the claims of others. If someone is seriously asking this question about political discussion on HN that means they're not at the point where they're ready to have political discussions that are anything more than just saying "hey did you read that mainstream news article?" "yeah". If you know even a modicum of politics or political theory it's almost trivial to prove, disprove, or add color to what's being said in these threads. If you want a really simple way to do this hop onto one of the big prediction markets like Polymarket or Kalshi. You can probably disprove a solid 15% of top-ranked commenters just by doing that. If you want to use more brainpower, hop over to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and read one of their long articles. In particular they have a great set of articles on US policy thinking around China right now. It's pretty saddening to read HN commentary on China and compare it to CEIP's readings. The conclusion I've come to on this site is that the incentives around participating on a public internet site, like HN, Reddit, Facebook, etc are such that they attract a crowd of people who are more interested in talking than listening or understanding. There's a subset of them who really enjoy debating but without being grounded in fact or consequence from misprediction it turns largely into verbal sparring games. There's also little difference between these sites because from what I can tell it's the same set of people attracted to all of the same sites.
DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
The people who say that mostly support Trump, but are just embarrassed to say so in public.
- mlrtime 1y ago
  I voted for Trump. I don't support everything he does as he's not my sports team, but I agree with a lot of what he's doing. I've started this line of discussion on reddit many times being open and honest. Nobody wants to engage in honest discussion.
  - DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
    Do you agree with things like the following? 1. Blatantly violating the 14th Amendment by signing an executive order that ends birthright citizenship, potentially stripping tens of millions of Americans of their citizenship. 2. Sending the military onto the streets of major cities, in a fundamental break from the centuries-old principle that the military does not police American citizens. 3. Tolerating open corruption by senior officials, such as the border czar Tom Homan accepting a $50,000 bribe. 4. Openly calling for the Justice Department to go after his political enemies, and firing people who refuse to do so. 5. Appointing dangerous and unqualified people like RFK Jr. and Kash Patel to head agencies whose missions they oppose. RFK Jr. is out there making wild claims about autism and vaccines. 6. Trump trying to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results, including calling up the Georgia Secretary of State and demanding that he add 11,000 votes to Trump's total, in order to flip the state in Trump's favor, while threatening to criminally prosecute the Secretary of State if he refuses to change the election result. 7. Trump repeatedly threatening that he will annex Canada, and refusing to rule out the use of military force. I could go on and on, but I think the above is enough to make the point. This is not just another administration that you can have this or that view about. This is the downfall of the American political system. RIP, 1787 - 2025. With all of this, you should be sheepish about saying you support Trump.
    - lunias 1y ago
      It's all about trade-offs. Sadly the package deals keep getting worse and even if you refuse to buy, one shows up at your doorstep and they charge you anyways. The parties exist more to oppose each other than to identify and address issues. They serve their donors more than their electorate and sew discontent amongst the populace to distract from the role of capital in the current system. I think it's unrealistic to say you "support everything Trump does" just as it is to say you "do not support anything Trump does". The trend of extreme polarization has allowed them to continually worsen the package deals offered because they know that for a lot of people, it's all or nothing.
Esophagus4 1y ago
For the record, I’m also dog tired of hearing about LLMs as well…
ben_w 1y ago
In fairness, the LLMs are also inflammatory.
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  To my GPU.
numpad0 1y ago
But LLMs are great piece of technology and closest analogue to the AGI in past 30 years! It's truly a gamechanging future technology. ... And, incidentally, knowing that my value judgements are as broken and human tangential as Borg transwarp control computers, I know that it's a massive bubble that is going to financially ruin absolutely everybody.

”Let’s not talk politics, it’s just inflammatory. Hey, cool LLM model. Shiny!”

jacquesm 1y ago

That would be very funny if it weren't disturbingly close to the truth.

user2722 1y ago
I believe 90% of mean people on the web talking about politics are actually bots.
- mlrtime 1y ago
  Are you a bot? Prove it, one way or another. Also, is there something like Poe's law but for bots? Bot Attribution Fallacy?

esperent 1y ago

And when people do talk about politics it's exactly the kind of hot takes you'd expect from people who think they're very smart (and probably are when it comes to choosing a database) but are completely uninformed about the current topic and only capable of parroting referred opinions, or making statements they expect the group to agree with. Nobody comes out of the conversation smarter than they went in. Honestly, I think it's better that we do keep conversation here to shiny technology. If you want to talk politics, go and find a group of people who know what they're talking about. That way you might learn something.

immibis 1y ago
Problem: Everything is political. Pretending not to talk about politics, is mostly just supporting a certain kind of politics (the one that you get by default if you avoid talking about politics).
- mlrtime 1y ago
  Disagree, not everything is political unless you make it so. Otherwise we should fork this to political discussions only.
- Esophagus4 1y ago
  I don’t think it’s that I’m avoiding politics… It’s that I know the day-to-day headlines from DC are mostly noise, and do not inform in the same way that ESPN talking head analysts do not inform about football. To understand the state of American politics and of the world, I have news sources I trust. Hacker News will never be one of them. Neither will Reddit. Nor will Facebook. I don’t want HN to turn into another outrage-bait pseudo-news commentary site. Look at the front page of Reddit (it’s atrociously bad) to see how far this forum could fall. I flagged this article. If you want to talk about daily political news with other internet people, there are myriad options: WSJ, NYT, and Washington Post all have comment sections. Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and Threads all have comment sections. YouTube has comments. Blogs have comments. Why do people insist that keeping HN free of politics is tantamount to being blissfully ignorant of world affairs? And why do people insist on turning HN into Reddit v2?
ruszki 1y ago
Most people do the same thing with shiny technology topics too. But you’re right. It seems to be a better place than the alternatives, but heck, I learn rarely from comments compared how often I did 10 years ago on a - back then - small subreddit. Most comments can be inferred just from headlines, not even from the articles.
- smugglerFlynn 1y ago
  When it comes to tech topics this is an insiders discussion. When it comes to political topics, 99% of people in HN threads have close to zero insights, and circle around publicly known information. Big difference. It is very dangerous to expect deep insights on every aspect of human life from a HN thread, regardless of how well educated and well meaning average HN commenters are.
mexicocitinluez 1y ago
> And when people do talk about politics it's exactly the kind of hot takes you'd expect from people who think they're very smart (and probably are when it comes to choosing a database) but are completely uninformed about the current topic and only capable of parroting referred opinions, A-MEN. Ton of takes by armchair enthusiasts who think they have the ability call a spade a spade because they're grandmother told them they were a genius after restarting her computer. I swear to god, DHH has to got to be the best example of this. His blog piece about free speech is so funny in retrospect it's hard for me to read and believe he takes himself seriously.
mlrtime 1y ago
1000%. Don't talk about Religion, Politics or Sex. It's a great way to fight and divide and we will NEVER agree.
- esperent 1y ago
  That's not even close to what I said. You should absolutely talk about these things, but you should find knowledgeable people who will challenge you and help you to grow. HN isn't the place for that, when it comes to topics outside of tech.
  - cudgy 1y ago
    How do you determine that people are knowledgeable and are going to help you grow? How do you verify they’re “knowledgeable”? Hacker news should not become strictly or dominated by political discussion, but given AI and its impact on society amongst many other technologies like social media, which are intertwined within political discussion these days, some of the “knowledgeable“ people and particularly those whose careers have been impacted by AI are right here on hacker news.
    - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
      > How do you determine that people are knowledgeable and are going to help you grow? How do you verify they’re “knowledgeable”? How do we do this with tech topics? We rely on our expert knowledge to evaluate the claims of others. If someone is seriously asking this question about political discussion on HN that means they're not at the point where they're ready to have political discussions that are anything more than just saying "hey did you read that mainstream news article?" "yeah". If you know even a modicum of politics or political theory it's almost trivial to prove, disprove, or add color to what's being said in these threads. If you want a really simple way to do this hop onto one of the big prediction markets like Polymarket or Kalshi. You can probably disprove a solid 15% of top-ranked commenters just by doing that. If you want to use more brainpower, hop over to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and read one of their long articles. In particular they have a great set of articles on US policy thinking around China right now. It's pretty saddening to read HN commentary on China and compare it to CEIP's readings. The conclusion I've come to on this site is that the incentives around participating on a public internet site, like HN, Reddit, Facebook, etc are such that they attract a crowd of people who are more interested in talking than listening or understanding. There's a subset of them who really enjoy debating but without being grounded in fact or consequence from misprediction it turns largely into verbal sparring games. There's also little difference between these sites because from what I can tell it's the same set of people attracted to all of the same sites.

DiogenesKynikos 1y ago

The people who say that mostly support Trump, but are just embarrassed to say so in public.

mlrtime 1y ago
I voted for Trump. I don't support everything he does as he's not my sports team, but I agree with a lot of what he's doing. I've started this line of discussion on reddit many times being open and honest. Nobody wants to engage in honest discussion.
- DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
  Do you agree with things like the following? 1. Blatantly violating the 14th Amendment by signing an executive order that ends birthright citizenship, potentially stripping tens of millions of Americans of their citizenship. 2. Sending the military onto the streets of major cities, in a fundamental break from the centuries-old principle that the military does not police American citizens. 3. Tolerating open corruption by senior officials, such as the border czar Tom Homan accepting a $50,000 bribe. 4. Openly calling for the Justice Department to go after his political enemies, and firing people who refuse to do so. 5. Appointing dangerous and unqualified people like RFK Jr. and Kash Patel to head agencies whose missions they oppose. RFK Jr. is out there making wild claims about autism and vaccines. 6. Trump trying to overturn the 2020 Presidential election results, including calling up the Georgia Secretary of State and demanding that he add 11,000 votes to Trump's total, in order to flip the state in Trump's favor, while threatening to criminally prosecute the Secretary of State if he refuses to change the election result. 7. Trump repeatedly threatening that he will annex Canada, and refusing to rule out the use of military force. I could go on and on, but I think the above is enough to make the point. This is not just another administration that you can have this or that view about. This is the downfall of the American political system. RIP, 1787 - 2025. With all of this, you should be sheepish about saying you support Trump.
  - lunias 1y ago
    It's all about trade-offs. Sadly the package deals keep getting worse and even if you refuse to buy, one shows up at your doorstep and they charge you anyways. The parties exist more to oppose each other than to identify and address issues. They serve their donors more than their electorate and sew discontent amongst the populace to distract from the role of capital in the current system. I think it's unrealistic to say you "support everything Trump does" just as it is to say you "do not support anything Trump does". The trend of extreme polarization has allowed them to continually worsen the package deals offered because they know that for a lot of people, it's all or nothing.

Esophagus4 1y ago

For the record, I’m also dog tired of hearing about LLMs as well…

ben_w 1y ago

In fairness, the LLMs are also inflammatory.

cosmicgadget 1y ago
To my GPU.

numpad0 1y ago

But LLMs are great piece of technology and closest analogue to the AGI in past 30 years! It's truly a gamechanging future technology. ... And, incidentally, knowing that my value judgements are as broken and human tangential as Borg transwarp control computers, I know that it's a massive bubble that is going to financially ruin absolutely everybody.