What I and others are saying is that you can't be "intellectually curious" and dismiss large areas of conversation at the same time. It doesn't matter that it's "just a week" since it's not the experiment that we are concerned about, it's the basis of the experiment. You keep using words like "politics", "curiosity" and "thoughtful" in a manner that is biased to include only the things you define.
I'm really trying to be both clear, concise and unconfrontational, yet I feel you are casually dismissing my and others opinions.
If HN is serious about its "Political Detox Week" (which included topics like nation and ideology) stories like this can't be allowed. This is literally about on nation competing with another by the means of government support. The sources discuss how China is changing capitalism (ideology), comparing different nations (nation) and the economic policies of China (politics). The comments are just as political.
> Politics is tribal, so we're talking about something that profoundly undercuts thoughtfulness.
Politics isn't always tribal and many people on HN are capable on thoughtful arguments on politics. HN suffers from the "LKML-effect". Few people can or are interested in following the linux-kernel mailing list, so naturally it only gets attention when Torvalds is screaming at someone. It's the same with politics.
When "diversity in tech" became more popular on the Internet it would get flagged off HN repeatedly. Some stories would get through and thoughtful discussions would start, but people quickly learned (maybe without knowing it) that if you just flame the story it would hit the controversy algorithm. So people would submit more sensationalist stories so it could get more upvotes to counter the flags and flame. Now the level of discussion is set and people don't mind how they express themselves on the topic.
If instead HN would have owned the issue and moderated it heavily it would increasingly have gotten better. People would have learned that flagging or flaming wasn't a good idea and those with more reasoned arguments would formed a critical mass to self moderate comments.
Programming is often tribal, yet there aren't a lot of flame over things like Erlang on HN. Because even if not a lot of people know Erlang, we haven't alienated all the Erlang programmers. So Erlang stories are generally advanced enough to not attract bad arguments and even they would someone would presumably challenge it.
Yes, there are political stories that aren't relevant and/nor thoughtful. But those aren't the stories that could, presumably, be categorized as "fit for HN" anyway. But by just banning entire segments of political but relevant stories is letting the "unthoughtful" people win at the cost of the thoughtful ones.
It might not be relevant enough to fight for discussions about Trump in general. But are we going to avoid to talk about e.g. surveillance, like we always have, just because the president is controversial? That would, if anything, be changing HN.
It's not impossible to say "this is a technology site, here we discuss technology" which would make it much less arbitrary which things are politics and not. You might not want to do that, but it's certainly not impossible as an alternative. "Technology only week" is probably even an easier sell for an experiment.
The fear is mixing the x and y axis of opinions. Most people can probably see why something like party, ideology or nation can be damaging. Not talking about those things generally doesn't prevent people from having a certain opinion on another level. But then you mix that with things like race, gender and class where wanting to talk about it generally (but not always) constitute an opinion.
If I recall correctly you've previously requested feedback on were they line is between moderation and censorship. I think this is the line. At least I define censorship as when certain things cannot be expressed despite being relevant and expressed in a similar way as other argument.
Removing political discussions is in itself tricky since the definition of what is political is subjective. But removing certain kinds of political discussions is even harder to do well, if not impossible. If it's still going to be allowed to post things about housing markets, education, economics, regulation or other areas where social science arguments are relevant. You must also be able to express arguments or submit stories that uses subjects like class or gender. Otherwise you are removing certain perspectives from the discussion in favor of arguments outside those perspectives, which is censorship.
I don't think polarization is the problem, nor even that society is more polarized now than before. In many way it's the opposite. Subcultures and large dividing issues are to some extent a thing of the past. People tend to have less developed views and less experience with other peoples views. Which makes disagreements more personal.
I'm really trying to be both clear, concise and unconfrontational, yet I feel you are casually dismissing my and others opinions.