goats_ebooks posted:it's cool that in like 50 years we'll never be able to get into space because we've put so much useless self-propagating junk up there you can't safely launch anything.
but enough about chris hadfield's autobiography
littlegreenpills posted:the second law of thermodynamics is what makes life worse. fuck you Boltzmann
right up there with the first law of motion for worst physical law
goats_ebooks posted:useless self-propagating junk up there
i don't think we're that close to human colonization of space yet
tpaine posted:the backlash against science and atheism is probably the number one thing holding any kind of popular communism movement back aside from external factors
actually it's scientists and atheists who are against communism, no wonder when STEM people are all socially retarded manchildren. it's also true that too much scientific inquiry is undesirable since certain discoveries w/r/t human nature could unravel communist ideals, some level of delusion is always required
why would anyone want to do away with social technology like religion anyway. it's no different to childish anarchists demonizing "the state". religion is unmatched in harnessing social cohesion, which is why traditionalist patriarchal forms like fascism and islam will last forever while communism will remain a dead 20th century fantasy. it's also no coincidence that atheists live less & are more depressed than religious people
also albania, the most retarded commie state, was also the most atheist
I guess it's better to accept that the time window for communism to happen passed many decades ago and the apparatus for socialist revolution that existed during the 20th century will never be assembled again. Leftism has been too definitely slandered and everyone is too deeply poisoned with cynical reaction.
Even when the battle ground was much fairer the West managed to crush as many emancipatory movements as it could and murder Ben Barka, Lumumba, Sankara etc. Socialism collapsed mainly because actually existing commies were too dumb I guess. Now the ruling class has tech to immediately crush any potential uprising, and subtle ways to modulate our desires through all media. It's better to just live out our days in the first world and stop thinking.
Chears.
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
COINTELBRO posted:But yeah it's pathetic that leftists are reduced to whiteknighting the Taliban and begging for the last scraps of social democracy or whatever these days. People will namedrop the Maoists in South Asia but deep down everyone knows theirs isn't a communist-modernist project like the ones we Western commies idealize, they're desperate indigenous people caught in a deadly struggle.
I guess it's better to accept that the time window for communism to happen passed many decades ago and the apparatus for socialist revolution that existed during the 20th century will never be assembled again. Leftism has been too definitely slandered and everyone is too deeply poisoned with cynical reaction.
Even when the battle ground was much fairer the West managed to crush as many emancipatory movements as it could and murder Ben Barka, Lumumba, Sankara etc. Socialism collapsed mainly because actually existing commies were too dumb I guess. Now the ruling class has tech to immediately crush any potential uprising, and subtle ways to modulate our desires through all media. It's better to just live out our days in the first world and stop thinking.
Chears.
enjoy your revolutionary nihilism, i guess
anyway, i think that thinking about "science" as some sort of ideological monolith with some coherent political teleology is really dumb.
c_man posted:anyway, i think that thinking about "science" as some sort of ideological monolith with some coherent political teleology is really dumb.
anyone itt that's posting about "science" wrt communism has no idea what science actually is.
i like to imagine rhizzoner/lfers back in the day passing notes to their imaginary reincarnations of marx during science classes rather than learning anything. compare this to any students i have irl who did much the same but to real people.
guidoanselmi posted:c_man posted:anyway, i think that thinking about "science" as some sort of ideological monolith with some coherent political teleology is really dumb.
anyone itt that's posting about "science" wrt communism has no idea what science actually is.
what do you think science "is" then, and what do you think they think it "is"
COINTELBRO posted:I guess it's better to accept that the time window for communism to happen passed many decades ago and the apparatus for socialist revolution that existed during the 20th century will never be assembled again. Leftism has been too definitely slandered and everyone is too deeply poisoned with cynical reaction.
nah
littlegreenpills posted:guidoanselmi posted:c_man posted:anyway, i think that thinking about "science" as some sort of ideological monolith with some coherent political teleology is really dumb.
anyone itt that's posting about "science" wrt communism has no idea what science actually is.
what do you think science "is" then, and what do you think they think it "is"
science is a label that people put on practices based on a family of characteristics they're presumed to share. i made a big stupid post in the philosophy thread on SA about some of the differences between the sciences, in the context of why steven pinker is a piece of shit especially when he chides the humanities for not being "scientific" enough, given his field of choice.
I guess it's better to accept that the time window for science to escape the trap of corporate capture passed many decades ago and the apparatus for scientific revolution that existed during the 20th century will never be assembled again.
Chears.
edit: im pretty sure research into celestial mechanics was largely applied to sea navigation, but i cant remember where i heard that
Edited by c_man ()
c_man posted:uhhh science was always part of the military and the flow of capital. a lot of famous mathematicians and physicists (esp in france) had teaching positions at engineering and military schools training artillery people to hit their targets properly. unless that was your point?
littlegreenpills posted:guidoanselmi posted:
c_man posted:
anyway, i think that thinking about "science" as some sort of ideological monolith with some coherent political teleology is really dumb.
anyone itt that's posting about "science" wrt communism has no idea what science actually is.
what do you think science "is" then, and what do you think they think it "is"
g point. i have honestly no idea what think it is, especially since the context of this thread was/is our lord and savior NDT, peace be upon him, etc. i can guess, but that's probably unproductive, maybe along the lines of what c_man wrote just above.
on that note, i can define a broad concept of science as any empirically driven effort to define existence/human condition, a major subset of which is the natural & physical world. more colloquially, science as science where it is using the same empirical methods but specific in those subjects. I don't have the notes for a lecture i gave but I defined science, with respect to engineering, the development and use of empirical methods to understand and characterize the natural and physical world. engineering, otoh, was the practice of scientific knowledge for man to overcome problems faced by the natural, physical, (and possibly sociological) world. with this definition of science I don't know what the above posters mean or what the connection is. the laws of kinematics and allele heredity don't change. you can take whatever post-modern assessment you want of their significance or the significance of their discoveries on society - but these are laws inherent in nature that have been uncovered. nature won't change nor would the curiosity in mankind to seek out some order to reality or alleviate the burden nature has placed on man.
as far as c_man's comment and the social sciences, indeed there's science, or at least scientific method, there. the major problem isn't in rigor but the assessment of hypothesis in highly complex systems. i tell/flatter people in the social sciences that their work is far harder than mine; physics is quite simple. it is de facto the simplest science (give or take applied math). everything is built on the foundations of the physical laws - but the explosion in complexity that arises is impossible to comprehend on a 1:1 level. concepts of system boundaries and interrelations to define and account for complex interactions are required to just get a sense of social science behavior. (e.g. in my (ex?)girlfriends linguistics work she has to parse the phonemes from a language that no one has characterized. she has two consultants. what happens when they contradict on the pronunciation of a word? what happens if she gets more data from more speakers? what variation exists in phonemes as a function of sample size, geography, heritage, their peers growing up? the latter part is swept under the rug simply because those questions can't be meaningfully answered. the scientific problem still exists, its answer can be "correct" but only by some degree of convention and not necessarily objectively or universally.)
Edited by guidoanselmi ()
guidoanselmi posted:littlegreenpills posted:guidoanselmi posted:
c_man posted:
anyway, i think that thinking about "science" as some sort of ideological monolith with some coherent political teleology is really dumb.
anyone itt that's posting about "science" wrt communism has no idea what science actually is.
what do you think science "is" then, and what do you think they think it "is"g point. i have honestly no idea what think it is, especially since the context of this thread was/is our lord and savior NDT, peace be upon him, etc. i can guess, but that's probably unproductive, maybe along the lines of what c_man wrote just above.
on that note, i can define a broad concept of science as any empirically driven effort to define existence/human condition, a major subset of which is the natural & physical world. more colloquially, science as science where it is using the same empirical methods but specific in those subjects. I don't have the notes for a lecture i gave but I defined science, with respect to engineering, the development and use of empirical methods to understand and characterize the natural and physical world. engineering, otoh, was the practice of scientific knowledge for man to overcome problems faced by the natural, physical, (and possibly sociological) world. with this definition of science I don't know what the above posters mean or what the connection is. the laws of kinematics and allele heredity don't change. you can take whatever post-modern assessment you want of their significance or the significance of their discoveries on society - but these are laws inherent in nature that have been uncovered. nature won't change nor would the curiosity in mankind to seek out some order to reality or alleviate the burden nature has placed on man.
as far as c_man's comment and the social sciences, indeed there's science, or at least scientific method, there. the major problem isn't in rigor but the assessment of hypothesis in highly complex systems. i tell/flatter people in the social sciences that their work is far harder than mine; physics is quite simple. it is de facto the simplest science (give or take applied math). everything is built on the foundations of the physical laws - but the explosion in complexity that arises is impossible to comprehend on a 1:1 level. concepts of system boundaries and interrelations to define and account for complex interactions are required to just get a sense of social science behavior. (e.g. in my (ex?)girlfriends linguistics work she has to parse the phonemes from a language that no one has characterized. she has two consultants. what happens when they contradict on the pronunciation of a word? what happens if she gets more data from more speakers? what variation exists in phonemes as a function of sample size, geography, heritage, their peers growing up? the latter part is swept under the rug simply because those questions can't be meaningfully answered. the scientific problem still exists, its answer can be "correct" but only by some degree of convention and not necessarily objectively or universally.)
i think opinion is kinda similar to what i said here
i don't claim to be an expert so im curious what you think about what i said there.
tpaine posted:guidoanselmi posted:
anyone itt that's posting about "science" wrt communism has no idea what science actually is.
i agree, thinking about and constructing a coherent and evidence based philosophy, totally not scientific at all. maybe a centuries-long process of accumulation of wealth among the power-holders resulted in capitalism, or maybe a ghost just did it. whatever. it's hard to think
guidoanselmi posted:you can take whatever post-modern assessment
i mean there's foucault and power/information dichotomy. discovery is never universal and comes from singular individuals or larger projects. democratizing scientific knowledge is important but i wonder how dysfunctional society would be if everyone had to go through the motions to understand quantum field theory. moreover, how much of that knowledge is useless in asserting power or can be capitalized on? how much do people capitalize on existing discrepancies scientific knowledge between people? if this were the case, mad scientists would have taken charge of the world a long, long time ago.
in a post/structuralist sense, the existing scientific society operates at the behest of the capitalist power structure - but it's driven to due to the level of sophistication required to better understand nature after having understood it as much. this wasn't always the case (i'll admit i can't think of any examples here). though at some point capital was required to sustain the understanding of nature. notably, around the ~industrial rev knowledge exploded because capitalism & scientific knowledge did reenforce each other - but it wasn't simply because scientists were acting as scientists. heilbroner's 'history of economic systems' or something had some good descriptions of the time and personalities involved.
c_man posted:i think opinion is kinda similar to what i said here
i don't claim to be an expert so im curious what you think about what i said there.
i dunno what steven pinker wrote but he sounds like he's still in college w/ that attitude. if i do find someone who actually acknowledge other fields, it's seldom with a disparaging opinion.
i will say that theoretical work doesn't always mesh with the existing framework of scientific progress. like string theories & quantum gravity are just there waiting for tests - many of which are fundamentally impossible (as far we have understood).
guidoanselmi posted:i dunno what steven pinker wrote but he sounds like he's still in college w/ that attitude. if i do find someone who actually acknowledge other fields, it's seldom with a disparaging opinion.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities
c_man posted:guidoanselmi posted:
i dunno what steven pinker wrote but he sounds like he's still in college w/ that attitude. if i do find someone who actually acknowledge other fields, it's seldom with a disparaging opinion.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities
Wow thanks, just for clicking that I now only have 7 out my 8 free New Republic articles left for this month