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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

"Everything is political" is such a boring tautology.

Everything exists within the political climate of modern society. Institutions are forced to navigate the political landscape in which they exist.

But that does not make the institutions political in nature. There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.

When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"

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The word “political” is rife with confusion. Careful discussion requires slowing down long enough to make sure different people are talking about the same thing.

One of my favorite definitions of politics is the set of non-violent ways of resolving disagreements, whether interpersonal, organizational, or governmental.

Others may reserve the word politics to only apply to governmental issues, campaigning, elections, coalition building, etc.

P.S. Language is our primary method of communication. Ponder this: why are people so bad at it? Do people really not understand that symbols can have different meanings? Do they forget? Do they want to get peeved because they want to think that other people don’t know what words mean?

> "Everything is political" is such a boring tautology.

1. The comment above didn’t say “Everything is political”.

2. "Everything is political" isn’t true. One might say that many things are influenced by politics; that’s fine, but downstream influence is neither pure single-factor causality nor equality.

3. "Everything is political" isn’t a tautology either.

Support for #2 and #3: There are things in the universe that existed prior to (and independent of) politics, like the Earth. There are phenomena influenced by politics but not inherently political, such as the phenomena of global warming or measuring the level of inflation. What to do about global warming or inflation is political, if you are lucky, meaning you have some persuasive influence at all (not the case in a dictatorship) and/or don’t have to resort to violence.

I believe you're nit-picking instead of interacting with the content of my comment.

OP did not literally say "Everything is political", they said "There are no apolitical institutions". Which is functionally the same thing. "Everything is political" is a common phrase used to express a common school of thought, [1] for example. I was interacting with this school of thought directly in my comment.

I agree with you that "Everything is political" is not true. But tpm is arguing the opposite.

"Everything is political" is a trivially true statement when using tpm's definition of "political", which is the point I was trying to get across. tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature. This means that even the rocks and trees and oceans are political, because they are at the mercy of government policy.

I am arguing against this definition of "political".

[1] https://daily.jstor.org/paul-krugman-everything-is-political...

> tpm is claiming that any institution which interacts with the government in any way is political in nature

I am arguing that any institution is political by its very existence. Even if the true nature of the institutions is hidden by the current regime, as it is often the case in the West.

The funniest thing, of course, is that we are arguing under an article containing a political attack in the political magazine Reason, published by the political Reason Foundation. That's not the ideal starting point if you want to prove the possibility of apoliticalness of anything.

Can you define "institution" and "political" for me, then?

I would argue that there is nothing political about a local bakery, for example. Just a dude making some cakes. He may occasionally be forced to interact with the government, but his bakery as an institution has nothing at all to do with government organizations or political theory. By its nature, a bakery is apolitical.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution is as good as any. I would not consider a small (one person or family) bakery an institution. A large one (measured by number of employees etc) would be an institution, and defining the threshold is not important here.

Political - relating to the government or public affairs of a country

Okay. And your argument is that a large bakery is fundamentally related to government affairs? What about the nature of a large bakery is political?

My argument is that every institution is political whether it wants or not. Bakery is very obviously political because everyone tends to eat food and as such food is an evergreen political theme. Perhaps this is more visible in some countries than others, for example in a neighboring country the price of butter is a quite common item in TV news (really), and it's not a poor country.

But also other than that, a few years ago there were some articles about a bakery that refused to bake a wedding cake for gays, and it was a public affair for a few weeks. Is that political enough for you?

I just think we are talking about different things. I hear what you are saying, but I don't think that bakeries being tangentially related to politically charged topics make them a political institution. Bakeries also handle and store money, but that doesn't make them a bank. etc. The nature of bakeries as an institution is not political - they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies. They may interact with the government but that doesn't make it a political institution.

This started as a discussion about whether not-primarily-political institutions (like Scientific American) should have and publish political opinions. It was started by an attack of a political institution (Reason) saying they should not. That attack itself makes the target politically relevant.

Bakeries are in a similar position. Once an owner declines to serve a customer based on his (owner or customer) political leaning, it's politically relevant. If a politican attack bakers because (he feels that) the bread price is too high, it's politically relevant. I think there was an American civil rights movement in the 60's which was in a great part about equal access to services for all ethnicities. Was that not political?

> they are not concerned with the organization of government and policies

'or public affairs'. You wanted a definition and then you are ignoring it?

I read tpm's core points as (1) all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form) and (2) Therefore, don't take institutions for granted; they rely on compatible upstream governance. I think tpm most wanted to impress the second point upon readers.

When reading dahfizz's comment ""Everything is political" is such a boring tautology."... (a) I didn't see how a point being boring has any bearing on tpm's second point; (b) So I couldn't tell if dahfizz agreed or disagreed with tpm's second point; (c) As a result, dahfizz's comment felt nit-picky to me.

Meta-commentary: It would seem that dahfizz and I both feel like the other is being nitpicky. It seems to me this is a signal that some kind of breakdown is happening on at the conversational level.

Here, I'm thinking out loud. Are "Everything is political" and "There are no apolitical institutions" are functionally the same thing?

When I read "everything is political", I interpret that as meaning "all human interactions involve power relations, competing interests, and/or resource allocation".

When I read "there are no apolitical institutions", I interpret that as meaning "all institutions are downstream of politics (meaning government, whatever its form)".

I think it is useful to differentiate between the two phrases and their meanings. But of course they are closely related. Beyond each of us understanding what the other means, I'm not sure we're making specific enough claims to warrant litigating if "they are functionally the same". It seems like a contextual and subjective choice of where to draw a line. Feel free to say more if I'm missing something.

"There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles"

It will be used as an example of how we are wasting tax money by politicians. It will be used as an example of how homosexuality is natural by one side, and then it will be used as an example of how science is used to "groom" children by the other. There will be fights about whether it should be in school books, and then some states will ban all school books that mention that research, and then publishers will be forced to remove it to still have enough of a market for their books. The authors will be called out on Twitter and receive death threats, their university will cut their funding to avoid the controversy, some students will complain about it, and then that will be used to show how universities indoctrinate our kids.

And so on.

That's what "everything is political" means. When people say things like "get politics out of x," they really mean "make x match my politics", because there's no such thing as "no politics."

The important distinction is that it is possible, and should be the expectation, that you can study beetles and publish the results without any sort of political motivation or bias.

In that sense, it is perfectly possible and reasonable to "take the politics" out of scientific research. Simply do the research and publish the results. There absolutely is a thing as "no politics".

Once the results are out in the world, politicians and pundits are going to talk about it. That doesn't make the science itself a political act.

"Simply do the research and publish the results"

And then you don't get any grants anymore.

>> "Simply do the research and publish the results"

> And then you don't get any grants anymore.

This is exaggerated to make a point, which I interpret as: savvy researchers are mindful of how to conduct their work and communicate their results so they get more grants in the future. To what degree does this distort or corrupt an ideal research process? This is complicated. Political economists often frame this as a principal-agent problem. Organizational theorists discuss concepts such as resource dependence. (What other concepts would you include?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_dependence_theory

Yes, neutrality is an important principle: we want a study to proceed without outside influence.

Yet, there is an additional point worth mentioning: to the extent public money is allocated to e.g. study beetles, it is downstream of a political process. Meaning, there was allocation of resources that allows the study to proceed.

> When people say that SA is being political, they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism. That's very different from your definition of "political"

Could you provide some examples? TFA seems to link to opinion pieces at Scientific American and not actual research, so I'm a little unclear.

> There is absolutely nothing political about studying the mating patterns of beetles or the composition of rocks.

Well, what about studying the mating patterns of humans, studying the decisions to abort, studying the decisions to change gender? Still not at all political in your country? Then, who decides if a study gets funding, who decides if it is ethical, who decides if the results can get published? It's all political decisions around the 'pure' science, which is why I mention different political regimes where stuff like this is often completely explicit unlike in more free societies where it may look like it's free of politics.

> they mean that SA is using science to thinly veil their political activism

And they should be glad, not complaining. Everyone is using their position for political activism, business owners, unions, all sorts of organisations, churches etc. There is no reason SA shouldn't do that. Of course they only complain because they don't agree with SA.

Scientific research is apolitical. Even the act of studying abortion or transgenderism is not inherently political.

Just because scientists have to occasionally interact with political institutions does not make Science itself a political institution. Science is fundamentally apolitical.

What does politicized science look like, exactly? TFA seems to link to several opinion pieces, which aren't science, so I'm a little unclear.

I don't believe anyone here believes that scientific research is political. But how a society funds, publishes, and integrates scientific research is deeply political.

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