(no snark! genuinely intrigued!)
Political interest and intellectual interest are not the same. There is overlap, of course [1], but there is also a huge amount of political and social material which is not primarily about intellectual curiosity. Most of that is off topic on HN (as the site guidelines say), even though much of it is far more important—as you say—than most anything on HN.
People who feel intensely always want us to change this, but if we changed it then HN would become a current affairs site [2] – and there are always people who feel intensely.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Perhaps a call for an LLM labeler to categorize posts to enable auto hiding by topic or interest with a browser extension or authenticated against your HN account. Shiny tech for some, human systems for others (with some overlap of course). I won't say we can all get along, but I will say I believe we can share the same firehose in a reasonable manner and self sort accordingly.
The amount of political content posted since Trump won the election has already greatly reduced my enjoyment of this site, and I'm sure that I'm not alone in this. As I said earlier, there are innumerable other places to discuss politics and such discussions really should be held somewhere else. The political discussions here aren't even high quality. They always devolve into a liberal circle-jerk as all arguments that run counter to that viewpoint are downvoted and flagged out of existence immediately. I greatly fear that this site will continue down the path of becoming yet another leftist politics echo chamber. I can't imagine anything more dull.
I wouldn't even mind if HN added some way to tag such posts and allow people like me to opt out of them.
It’s a free country…post what you want and I’ll ignore what I want. :)
From the HN Guidelines...
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Can we please stop with all the political postings on here. It's really drowning out the interesting content. There are plenty of other avenues to discuss politics.