Actually you're not that bad. You only misflag articles 17% of the time.

As for political articles, the test is whether the article is an instance of the ordinary back and forth of debate on some political question, or whether it's about some deeper underlying phenomenon that only happens to be related to politics. E.g. "Politician A accuses Politician B of X" or "Why policy Y is good/bad" are probably both offtopic, whereas "How political campaigns use statistics" is probably ok.

How do you judge misflags? Do you compare against yourself and the other editors kills? Or, do you compare to popular opinion? Which might could be wrong if the community grew too fast. ...Does it help to flag dead articles?

A 17% misflag rate simply means that 17% of the articles you flag don't end up getting killed. Which is pretty good: it means your flags are an 83% accurate predictor of whether an article will be killed.

That has the unfortunate effect of silencing minority constituencies that may have a substantive and HN spirit-compatible reason for thinking that an article is important to get out there and discuss, but whose thoughts do not mirror the prevailing trend of the groupthink.

I suppose it would be a good strategy for those who want their flags counted to flag newer rather than older articles then. The more hours that have passed, the higher the odds are that those who would flag already have.

It would also be a deterrent for those such as myself who flag articles for nauseatingly bad grammar. I don't have that much patience when reading pages with verbless sentences, "there is" vs "there are" mistakes, and that sort of thing. Most 20-somethings do, though. I flagged one just this week after running into a paragraph that started with the following sentence:

Anyway.

The way I had looked at the issue up until now was that this sort of flagging still had some use. Articles would rarely get killed for terrible grammar alone, but if they were also somewhat inappropriate for another reason, then the grammatical errors could push them over the edge.

"As for political articles, the test is whether the article is an instance of the ordinary back and forth of debate on some political question, or whether it's about some deeper underlying phenomenon that only happens to be related to politics. E.g. "Politician A accuses Politician B of X" or "Why policy Y is good/bad" are probably both offtopic, whereas "How political campaigns use statistics" is probably ok."

"Why the US healthcare system is broken" (well written or not) can be judged "politics" by this guideline according to the "Why policy Y is good/bad" part.

That said,

suggestion 1: This would be a great addition to the HN guidelines. Appending the above to "Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." would add clarity.

suggestion 2: Can the "misflag rate" be made visible to flaggers as part of their profiles? This would help us improve our flagging.

Here's the answer: No one wants politics articles here. You can tell that this is not a politics article by 1) reading, instead of ignoring, the multiple assertions in the comments that this is not a "politics" article or 2) reading it.

I read it, and it boils down to a discussion of the allocation of health care resources, which is economics/politics.

For instance, if you're going to critique it, he says:

> Such a transition would require the slow reduction of Medicare taxes, premiums, and benefit levels for those not yet eligible, and a corresponding slow ramp-up in HSAs. And the national catastrophic plan would need to start with much broader coverage and higher premiums than the ultimate goal, in order to fund the care needed today by our aging population.

It's very difficult to take away benefits that people already have, which is eminently a matter of politics.

Also, note the "POLICY" at the top of the page. That's pretty indicative that it is politics.

I'm not saying it's not a good article, but it certainly isn't about hacking code or electronics, and only tangentially related to startups (in a way that lots of things are, if you want to make tenuous connections).

pg, however, thinks it is worth having this sort of article, so I am asking, honestly, how one distinguishes a good politics article. It strikes me as being a difficult thing to do, but perhaps he has some insight that I am not picking up. Perhaps it's simply a matter of taste.

The article obviously appeals to hackers (myself included), but I am not sure that it appeals more to hackers than to other intelligent people, so that test doesn't really work.

A good chunk of the technology articles on HN can be boiled down into eminent matters of politics. The test for whether an article is political or not is whether the article is about something, or whether it's about the politics of something. This article is studiously not about the politics of something.

"it certainly isn't about hacking code or electronics"

I, for one, like articles which intelligently discuss hacking economic and social issues. To me hacking is hacking. Almost all the software hacking I do is a part of a form of economic hacking, i.e. my business plan.

I think your point is reasonable but you are not doing it a service by conflating economics and politics. Economics is only political in the sense that anything can have a political implication - is the discussion of the LHC political because of its enormous cost?

Well... ok, point conceded that they are separate things, but the reality is that they're so often linked that for practical purposes of sites like this they might as well be the same thing.

Reason being, is that a good discussion of the economics of some policy is about the most efficient to make it happen, but invariably the question comes up about whether it should happen or not. For instance, with health care, some people deeply believe that it should be available to all; others think the government shouldn't spend money on that sort of thing. With an article on the economics of cap and trade vs taxing carbon emissions, people will invariably pop out of the woodwork and deny that people can or are creating negative environmental externalities, or if they are, that anything should be done about it. And so on...

So... yes, they're separate, but the resulting discussions are indistinguishable in most cases.

As an example, if you look below at the comments, regarding school vouchers, someone corrects me that a "real" libertarian solution would simply be to abolish the idea of public schools paid for through tax dollars. There's such a fundamental disconnect in terms of someone who wants that, and someone, who, for instance wants a Nordic style state, that discussions aren't likely to go anywhere very good.