Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.
If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments."
One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.
A sort of broadening of Cunningham's Law (the fastest way to get an answer online is not by posting the question, but by posting the wrong answer—very true in my experience). If there's no issue of fact at hand, then you end up getting some engagement about the intentional malapropism/misattribution/mistake/whatever and then the forum rules tend to herd participants back to discussing the matter at hand: your company.
Trump did this a lot with the legacy media in his first term. He would make inaccurate statements to the media on the topic he wanted to be in the spotlight, and the media would jump to "fact check" him. Guess what, now everyone is talking about illegal immigration, tariffs, or whatever subject Trump thought was to their advantage.
People always need to be reminded, though. It seems to be in human nature to fear bad publicity, and the people who fear it less end up with disproportionate power as a result.
If that's not motivation enough for you to rename it, well, TypeScript already has a static type checker called Hegel. https://hegel.js.org/ (It's a stronger type system than TypeScript.)
I think it's more that Hegel was fine with "dialectics" but that the antithesis/synthesis stuff is not actually what's going on in his dialectic. It's a bit of a popular misconception about the role of negation and "movement" in Hegel.
From what I understand, it's a proof technique (other techniques include Kant's Transcendental Deduction or Descartes's pure doubt) that requires generating new conceptual thoughts via internal contradiction and showing necessarily that you lead from one category to the next.
The necessity thing is the big thing - why unfold in this way and not some other way. Because the premises in which you set up your argument can lead to extreme distortions, even if you think you're being "charitable" or whatever. Descartes introduced mind-body dualisms with the method of pure doubt, which at a first glance seemingly is a legitimate angle of attack.
Unfortunately that's about as nuanced as I know. Importantly this excludes out a wide amount of "any conflict that ends in a resolution validates Hegel" kind of sophistry.
>other techniques include Kant's Transcendental Deduction or Descartes's pure doubt
This is not quite accurate. Kant says very explicitly in the (rarely studied) Transcendental Doctrine of Method (Ch 1 Section 4, A789/B817) that this kind of proof method (he calls it "apagogic") is unsuitable to transcendental proofs.
You might be thinking of the much more well studied Antinomies of Pure Reason, in which he uses this kind of proof negatively (which is to say, the circumscribe the limits of reason) as part of his proof against the way the metaphysical arguments from philosophers of his time (which he called "dogmatic" use of reason) about the nature of the cosmos were posed.
The method he used in his Deduction is a transcendental argument, which is typically expressed using two things, X and Y. X is problematic (can be true but not necessarily so), and Y is dependent on X. So then if Y is true, then X must necessarily be true as well.
Sorry I meant "proof method" as more like "this was this guy's angle of attack", not that they would've thought each others angles were valid at all or that they're commensurable with say, 20th century formal proof logic (or Aristotelian logic for example). Descartes and Leibniz were squarely the rationalists that Kant wanted to abolish, and Hegel rejected Kants distinction between noumena and phenomena entirely, so they're already starting from very different places.
I guess it would be more accurate to state Kants actual premises here as making the distinction between appearance and thing-in-itself rather than the deduction, but the deduction technique itself was fascinating when I first learned it so that's what I associate most with Kant lol.
I guess I have not thought critically why we couldn't use a Transcendental argument to support Descartes. I just treated it as a vague category error (to be fair I don't actually know Descartes philosophy that well, even less than I know Kants lol). Could be a fun exercise when I have time.
>I guess I have not thought critically why we couldn't use a Transcendental argument to support Descartes.
The previous section within the Transcendental Dialectic that focuses on the nature of the soul goes into a refutation of Descartes' statement. Kant basically finds "I think therefore I am" to be a tautology that only works by equivocating the "I" in each clause. "I think" pretends that the "I" there is an object in the world which it then compares to the "I am" which is an object in the world. Kant argues that "I think" does not actually demonstrate an "I" that is an object but rather a redundant qualification of thinking.
I am being a bit imprecise, so here is SEP's summary:
>For in each case, Kant thinks that a feature of self-consciousness (the essentially subjectival, unitary and identical nature of the “I” of apperception) gets transmuted into a metaphysics of a self (as an object) that is ostensibly “known” through reason alone to be substantial, simple, identical, etc. This slide from the “I” of apperception to the constitution of an object (the soul) has received considerable attention in the secondary literature, and has fueled a great deal of attention to the Kantian theory of mind and mental activity.
>The claim that the ‘I’ of apperception yields no object of knowledge (for it is not itself an object, but only the “vehicle” for any representation of objectivity as such) is fundamental to Kant’s critique of rational psychology.
Eh… it’s always worth keeping in mind the time period and what was going on with the tooling for mathematics and science at the time.
Statistics wasn’t really quite mature enough to be applied to let’s say political economy a.k.a. economics which is what Hegel was working in.
JB Say (1) was the leading mind in statistics at the time but wasn’t as popular in political circles (Notably Proudhon used Says work as epistemology versus Hegel and Marx)
I’ve been in serious philosophy courses where they take the dialectic literally and it is the epistemological source of reasoning so it’s not gone
This is especially true in how marx expanded into dialectical materialism - he got stuck on the process as the right epistemological approach, and marxists still love the dialectic and Hegelian roots (zizek is the biggest one here).
The dialectic eventually fell due to robust numerical methods and is a degenerate version version of the sampling Markov Process which is really the best in class for epistemological grounding.
I thought the dialectic was just a proof methodology, and especially the modern political angles you might year from say a Youtube video essay on Hegel, was because of a very careful narrative from some french dude (and I guess Marx with his dialectical materialism). I mean, I agree with many perspectives from 20th century continental philosophy, but it has to be agreed that they refactored Hegel for their own purposes, no?
Oh the amount of branching and forking and remixing of Hegel is more or less infinite
I think it’s worth again pointing out that Hegel was at the height of contemporary philosophy at the time but he wasn’t a mathematician and this is the key distinction.
Hagel lives in the pre-mathematical economics world. The continental philosophy world of words with Kant etc… and never crossed into the mathematical world. So I liking it too he was doing limited capabilities and tools that he had
Again compare this to the scientific process described by Francis Bacon. There are no remixes to that there’s just improvements.
Ultimately using the dialectic is trying to use an outdated technology for understanding human behavior
> The continental philosophy world of words with Kant
Interestingly, a lot of arguments and formulations Kant had were lifted from Leibniz and reframed with a less mathematical flavor. I remember in particular his argument against infinite regress was pretty much pound for pound just reciting some conjecture from Leibniz (without attribution)
I mean I don't know about Hegel, but Kant certainly dipped into mathematics. One of the reasons why he even wrote CPR was to unify in his mind, the rationalists (had Leibniz) versus the empiricists (had Newton). 20th century analytic philosophy was heavily informed by Kantian distinctions (Logical Positivism uses very similar terminology, and Carnap himself was a Neo-Kantian originally, though funnily enough Heidegger also was). In the 21st century, It seems like overall philosophy has gotten more specialized and grounded and people have moved away from one unified system of truth, and have gotten more domain-driven, both in continental and analytic philosophy.
It's no doubt that basically nobody could've predicted a priori 20th century mathematics and physics. Not too familiar with the physics side, but any modern philosopher who doesn't take computability seriously isn't worth their salt, for example. Not too familiar with statistics but I believe you that statistics and modern economic theories could disprove say, Marxism as he envisioned it.
That definitely doesn't mean that all those tools from back then are useless or even just misinformed IMO. I witness plenty of modern people (not you) being philosophically bankrupt when making claims.
My claim is that genuinely all of those previous analytical forms are absolutely useless if you have the capacity to utilize a more mathematical framework
The problem is, those more mathematically challenging frameworks are inaccessible to the majority of the people
so they don’t actually take off because there’s no mechanism to translate more rigor in social studies and social sciences in large part because humans reject the concept of being measured and experimeted with, which is understandable if not optimal
So as a function, applications of mathematics trended towards things that were not human focused and they were machine focused and financial focused
So the big transition happened after TV and Internet (really just low cost high reach advertising) became pervasive and social scientists began utilizing statistical methods across consumer and attention action as social science experimentation platforms
Social science moved from the squishy into the precise precisely to give companies a market advantage in capturing market share through manipulating human behavior
ultimately that was the wet dream of political philosophers since pahotep
Oh interesting. I've basically quotiented out all social science all my life and stuck strictly to STEM, so my stack is, a lot of analytic + philosophy of science. A lot of pure math and CS (all across the stack), and recently physics because of job. I try not to comment on social issues (though Continental vibes generally seem righter to me the more I study it)
But I've never thought critically (in a long time) about applying it back to social science / political philosophy. Mind discussing more about what you're reading and targeting? I've personally avoided a lot of studies in this area because I didn't think they were actually rigorous but I probably just don't know where to look.
Microeconometrics tends to be quite rigorous and easy to validate.
They won't hold up to physics levels of rigor, of course - probably a bit more at the medical studies level of rigor.
David Card, Gary Becker, McFadden, etc.
Rigor is also... there's something about letting perfect be the enemy of the good.
If noone will apply math unless you can 100% reliably reproduce controlled experiments in a lab, the only thing left is people just talking about dialectics.
The challenge is how to get as much rigor as possible.
For instance, David Card saw New Jersey increase minimum wage. You generally can't truly conduct large-scale controlled social experiments, but he saw this as interesting.
He looked at the NJ/PA area around Philadelphia as a somewhat unified labor market, but half of it just had its minimum wage increased - which he looked at to study as a "natural" experiment, with PA as the control group and NJ as the experimental group, to investigate what happened to the labor market when the minimum wage increased. Having a major metro area split down the middle allowed for a lot of other concerns to be factored out, since the only difference was what side of the river you happened to be on.
He had lots of other studies looking at things like that, trying to find ways to get controlled-experiment like behavior where one can't necessarily do a true controlled experiment, but trying to get as close as possible, to be as rigorous as is possible.
Is that as ideal as a laboratory experiment? Hell no. But it's way closer than just arguing dialectics.
Well if you’re interested in the history of it the best start is really just Jeremy Bentham’s consequentialism.
To be clear I don’t believe in consequentialism
He built what was called Fellicific calculus (iirc) that would allow you to more or less take measurement of decisions. It was a mess and it obviously doesn’t work but this is kind of the first serious attempt to bring mathematical rigour to political philosophy.
You could argue that the tao te ching teaching does this in the way that it’s utilized in the sense that you have a set of things that you measure to give you predictive capabilities, but that’s closer to mysticism and tarot card reading its worth acknowledging the input as it’s the basis for like half the human population.
I have my own perspective of this which I wrote out in a fairly lengthy document (General Theory of Cohesion) on my website if you wanna go read it. Warning it’s not particularly scruitable if you’re not already pretty deep into cybernetics and systems theory.
That’s bs. Even just the preface to Phenomenology of Spirit is chock full of ideas that folks would be better off if they contemplated. Hegel can be considered a visual thinker (or visionary) whose ideas don’t need “measurement”. If folks understand his thoughts on the master-slave dialectic, for example, they would have an idea as to why we have such incompetent leaders like trump. His thought suffers from the same problem of any thinker who tried to be systematic, but it is still worth being inspired by.
The point is not “could someone get benefit from this” it’s that there are better heuristics to use and using old ones means you’re operating on old software
By that standard literally anything is valuable even as just an example of what not to do so it’s a meaningless measurement
You originally made the statement that "Hegel is irrelevant in the age of measurement", to which I objected. Unless you're going to back pedal further, you did find studying Hegel questionable.
I'm not going to go on the attack, but your pronouncements and self-certainty do not sound well considered.
I fear a motorcycle blasting down my street at 10pm. What's the difference.
Once my cats realized the robo vac won't hurt them they don't even move for it anymore... Seems intelligent to initially be terrified of something and update your perception of it.
Having spent my entire life around cows I can say there's a great deal of evidence that cows are quite intelligent. Most of the time when people say they're dumb it's because they're hindering a human from forcing them to do something. Why should a cow "know" to go one way or the other or to not stop in a chute, or to not back up...these are just human constraints. We know what we WANT the cow to do and if they don't do that they're dumb. Sure I've seen cows do dumb things. If I was an outside observer looking at the severity and frequency that humans do dumb things I would come to the same conclusion, they're dumb.
I'm with both of you. Growing up on a beef farm taught me that cows can be very dumb (no, you can't walk through the barbed wire, and no, you can't get to the water in the cistern without falling in and drowning) but also do show intelligence in some ways (the personal vendetta against the veterinarian's truck, or seeing their best friend in spring pastures and absolutely going apeshit).
"This behavior is quite common..." is very misleading. This specific behavior is not common. Scratching an itch does not equal using a tool to scratch an itch. Every animal I've seen in nature knows how to use external static objects to help them scratch somewhere they can't reach. Dogs cats, bears, pigs, cows... etc. I think my cats are very intelligent, I've seen them use the bristle brush attachment we have on the wall to scratch themselves. If I ever watched one of them pick up a fork with their mouth and orient it in a way to scratch their back I would absolutely lose my mind. These are not the same behaviors.
If your cats picked up a fork, it would be to eat you after they killed you in your sleep; but, I could see how that could be considered “scratching an itch.”
I've seen my cats pull on a cord in order to reel in the toy at the end. I don't find that to be all too different from the cow orienting a scratcher. Should I?
Idk I guess that's really up for you to decide. My opinion is that behavior seems very uhhh instinctual? Like if they were eating something that was running away from them I'm sure they would employ a similar tactic/behavior. Thing far away from me I need it closer. The logical steps to use a tool that would have 0 instinctual context seems leaps and bounds more "complex". I'm no animal/evolutionary scientist, just my opinion. It very well could be!
Braindead to think salary is somehow attached to morality. I would say some of the most immoral people are people with a lot of money, and there are countless examples of that.
My logic is that, if you are trying to evaluate whether you'd want to be a politician, consideration of cost/benefit is rational. If you aren't ethical, the benefit of being a politician is a lot higher (because you can get unethical sources of funds). If we want to attract more sane, talented, ethical people, we need to pay more — and prevent blatant corruption like privledged trading.
"trying to evaluate...". Normal people aren't trying to evaluate becoming a politician. It's a lifelong career for most people and you think the lunch lady or librarian who constantly gives back to their community was evaluating on "becoming" a politician? The financial incentives should be lowered. Pay them like you pay a school teacher and ban insider trading. Then you wouldn't have all these worthless nepo babies who just want a lax job and power over people in these positions.
We want highly talented people to be in government — it’s a lot better than the alternative. Why should we treat comp so differently than other fields?
I think a better choice would be to simply remove the ability or to profit from the job. Perhaps politicians give up all their property and become wards of the state after serving their terms, or agree to aggressive post-service surveillance and corruption enforcement.
Do people really think that all of the most capable people are motivated by money? I've made several career moves in my life which have prioritized things other than my salary or financial security. I don't feel this is that rare.
Yes, of course they are. Not solely by money, but the most capable workers are not going to work for less than market rate because they don't have to. They can get meaning and power and everything else they want, and still make way more than Congressmen get.
The problem is, a corrupt capable person is far more dangerous. I rather have a honest but maybe less capable politician in charge, than a evil mastermind.
I understand this, but at the same time the concept of this to me is absolutely wild.
We see this in the UK, the exact same argument. Yet I was paid more to manage a small tech team than an MP for fewer hours. You actively disincentivise people like me from taking public positions. I'm doing tech contracting and earn more than Prime Minister.
The UK gets about a trillion dollars a year in, and spends more. The US takes in something like five trillion dollars.
An exceptionally small improvement in improving the economy pays for itself indefinitely because these countries are absolutely enormous. Our MPs are paid about 90k/year, if you could improve the tax take of the government by 0.1% by improving the economy in some way *once* you could pay them £1M/year *tax free* and you could pay that *forever* even if future people aren't as good they're just not actively detrimental. This is also for paying people who aren't actually making big decisions, just the elected representatives.
Money should not be an issue, missing a good person because of the money is utter insanity given the payback.
"For the money" is a weird way of framing it. I wouldn't run for Congress "for the money", but I would need the job to pay me enough to keep living where I'm living (when I'm not in DC) and cover my needs, with the ability to contribute to my savings as well... which it wouldn't, at current levels.
Because the most capable among us are able to command high salaries regardless of whether they're 'in it for the money'. Congress needs to be competitive with industry for the best talent.
Also, giving politicians legitimate income makes them less susceptible to bribery and other forms of unethical income.
This is so naive. No amount of money could force me to work for a company I didn't agree with morally, if I am able to "command" a higher salary I can command it elsewhere. And less susceptible to bribery? I can guarantee you that someone bringing in ~ $200k a year doesn't need to be looking for other sources of income. What do they tell poor people? Stop buying starbucks? Pull yourself up by the bootstraps! Shame they'd have to live a less lavish lifestyle as a public servant :( So at this point we should have to beg people and incentivize them with astronomical salaries to not be a piece of shit? I think this is just the product of late stage capitalism. Nobody gives a fuck about anything besides money and how to get more of it.
Lmao. $200k a year doesn't even get you a nice 1 bedroom apartment in many of the cities these representatives represent. Let alone pay for the 2 separate residences that they effectively need to maintain.
And you are arguing against strawmen. Please point to an example of two of current Congress reps telling poor people "Stop buying starbucks? Pull yourself up by the bootstraps!"
> So at this point we should have to beg people and incentivize them with astronomical salaries to not be a piece of shit? I think this is just the product of late stage capitalism. Nobody gives a fuck about anything besides money and how to get more of it.
This is the deeply naive view. It is not begging to pay market rate for top talent. The most capable people who we should want to run our government are worth far, far more on the open market than the current salary levels we pay Congress. If we want those people to consider Congress a viable option, we need to pay them accordingly. See Singapore for a strong example of this.
> $200k a year doesn't even get you a nice 1 bedroom apartment in many of the cities these representatives represent.
This is getting a little bit ridiculous. Manhattan is surely the most expensive housing market per square meter in the United States. You can get a nice 1 bedroom for about 5,000 USD per month. That is 60K USD per year. That is only 30% of their salary.
> Let alone pay for the 2 separate residences that they effectively need to maintain.
Their second place of residence while in Washington D.C.: That is paid for by the US gov't.
The nice thing that I've found with Kagi is the AI summarization has to be intentional. Sometimes I don't care and just want a simple answer to a search type question tossing a question mark at the end is a super simple way to interact with that feature when I want to
This is an extremely limiting view. They are both CSS at the end of the day. If extracting the complicated inline TailwindCSS class to its own vanilla CSS class makes sense for readability then what's the harm? You could also just define your own variables. Tailwind gives you full control to do this.
I don't understand the point of the rule sets and constant classes? TailwindCSS still obeys the same specificity rules of CSS so instead of `font-medium` on every <a> tag under nav why not just put `font-medium` on the parent <nav> tag?
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