Item — HN Reader

Probably because this is an obviously hot political topic, not new, and something that will indeed be sufficiently mainstream to be (heavily) covered in the usual news channels. Whereas the guidelines explicitly state:

> "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

This story will just attract the usual partisan posturing and is very unlikely to bring any really interesting high value conversations.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

3 comments

The Guardian article is a new analysis about unchecked AI technology use by a government health official claiming to support science. Surely that’s HN-worthy, not off-topic? Is it fair to assume any element of politics involvement will be low-value or against the guidelines?

"No politics" weighs heavier than even the combined power of "interesting," "emerging phenomenon" and "tech related."

But only if the politics is related to the current regime in America. Can also be non-political news like something about Grok, because that's adjacent to Mr Musk and must also be flagged on sight.

Do you see a lot of high value political discussion? I see a lot of political posturing. I despise what's going on at the moment, it's not normal, and it's not OK. But discussing it here is utterly pointless and detracts from the stuff that is worth discussing here.

High value comments / posts are good to look for, though high value political discussion is almost an oxymoron. The post about it here was the first I heard of it, which is valuable to me. Zombot's comment (44133962) quotes TFA: "He outlined plans for creating government-run journals instead." this is important context to highlight, especially given the already demonstrated flaws that makes me want to read the article. The quote is instantly insightful and the commentary "There once was a time when we fought an entire Cold War to stop ideas like that." is a fair point. I come for the gems among the rough, and I'm really glad HN exists, even though it could use Slashdot style comment categories or a personal spam and ranking system! Maybe I should make a UserScript for spam and ranking.

I don't agree that it's pointless.

> Probably because this is an obviously hot political topic, not new, and something that will indeed be sufficiently mainstream to be (heavily) covered in the usual news channels.

I submit that prominent US government agencies generating bogus propagandistic scientific papers to justify its policies is, in fact, new.

Dunno, I got one of my misconceptions about Archimedes corrected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44134348