discipline posted:it's not hard to conceptualize. the more transactions you run the faster you make money. the faster you go, the less distance exists between object point a and point b. opportunity cost is calculated in the millionth of a second. they have parasite (well all capitalist finance is parasitical) servers set up as close to wall street as humanly possible in order to run trades faster which barely makes sense until you realize their profit margin hovers in that place where it's 12 feet closer to the trading floor than the other guy. computers run the whole thing, they create minicrashes often that last only like a tenth of a second because the computers readjust their calculations or whatever. it's absolute madness. people are starving in the world, living and dying in abject misery, and these idiot wizards are buying yachts because of nothing they can clearly explain even to themselves
ok, i see you solved my problem of not being entirely sure how to translate the sense of this into something properly relatable. thank you! never mind my hypothetical post everyone, just read this one
Groulxsmith posted:
this should probably be on every page of this forum
what i mean is... *sigh*.. do i have to read it myself
littlegreenpills posted:biology?
please do not let bourgeois propaganda convince you that 'hard' sciences exist or are more real than 'soft' science, nor that natural sciences are somehow above ideology. the history of not just biology but also physics and dialectical materialism is really interesting, and many of the major discoveries in these fields are the result of ideologically left-aligned scientists (this is of course the worst sin and will never be taught in american academia, i hope its harder to avoid in UK academia because most of the british biologists were marxist).
i will admit this is something ive only recently started to learn about and its difficult because you need to piece it together yourself, but here are some people ive started with:
http://www.marxists.org/subject/science/ (nice collection)
http://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/sakata/
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~marqu002/whynatsciphil.htm
this is of course an extremely narrow way to look at it, we need to study what soviet and maoist scientists were able to do that western scientists could not (and where they failed), how scientists like oppenheimer and einstein were influenced by marxism even if they never wrote anything about it, how philosophy of science like althusser but also kuhn interact with dialectical materialism, etc
the problem is economists, sociologists, philosophers, etc in the U.S. have it drilled in their heads since day 1 that they are inferior to natural scientists they are scared to touch it, the difficulty of approaching science as a layman (and the ideology that prevents real scientists from thinking about their work philosophically) plus the bad history with lysenko, the current global retreat of the left, and a history of dumb people in degenerate 1st world parties dismissing large swaths of science make this subject very hard to grasp.
drwhat posted:so what's up with this piketty thing, people are talking about it a lot. i had it described to me pretty positively but i have a hard time believing something this popular is actually arguing something truly socialist
what i mean is... *sigh*.. do i have to read it myself
I'm reading it now so no spoilers please!
roseweird posted:.custom227651{}NoFreeWill posted:You don't need to know anything about them to put them to sleep.
whats up friend are you gonna smash some heads
i wish. or someone else should.
NoFreeWill posted:piketty is just flavor-of-the-month 'inequality is bad' guy. his math and numbers are very convincing to mainstream economists which is why he's causing a sensation, but his solutions are tax the rich more and thats about it. he was criticized on naked capitalism for focusing on income rather than wealth, but obviously income is a lot easier to find stats for.
to be fair its quite a bit more than "inequality is bad", its an argument for why it will only get worse, and how inherited wealth will again take pride of place
babyhueypnewton posted:littlegreenpills posted:biology?
please do not let bourgeois propaganda convince you that 'hard' sciences exist or are more real than 'soft' science, nor that natural sciences are somehow above ideology. the history of not just biology but also physics and dialectical materialism is really interesting, and many of the major discoveries in these fields are the result of ideologically left-aligned scientists (this is of course the worst sin and will never be taught in american academia, i hope its harder to avoid in UK academia because most of the british biologists were marxist).
i will admit this is something ive only recently started to learn about and its difficult because you need to piece it together yourself, but here are some people ive started with:
http://www.marxists.org/subject/science/ (nice collection)
http://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/sakata/
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~marqu002/whynatsciphil.htm
this is of course an extremely narrow way to look at it, we need to study what soviet and maoist scientists were able to do that western scientists could not (and where they failed), how scientists like oppenheimer and einstein were influenced by marxism even if they never wrote anything about it, how philosophy of science like althusser but also kuhn interact with dialectical materialism, etc
the problem is economists, sociologists, philosophers, etc in the U.S. have it drilled in their heads since day 1 that they are inferior to natural scientists they are scared to touch it, the difficulty of approaching science as a layman (and the ideology that prevents real scientists from thinking about their work philosophically) plus the bad history with lysenko, the current global retreat of the left, and a history of dumb people in degenerate 1st world parties dismissing large swaths of science make this subject very hard to grasp.
dude sakata only came up with the quark model because of dialectical materialism being his arbitrary aesthetic commitment. i mean you could argue the same might be true for the renormalisation group or the "nuclear democracy", but this is all metaphysical rubbish on your part.
jools posted:babyhueypnewton posted:littlegreenpills posted:biology?
please do not let bourgeois propaganda convince you that 'hard' sciences exist or are more real than 'soft' science, nor that natural sciences are somehow above ideology. the history of not just biology but also physics and dialectical materialism is really interesting, and many of the major discoveries in these fields are the result of ideologically left-aligned scientists (this is of course the worst sin and will never be taught in american academia, i hope its harder to avoid in UK academia because most of the british biologists were marxist).
i will admit this is something ive only recently started to learn about and its difficult because you need to piece it together yourself, but here are some people ive started with:
http://www.marxists.org/subject/science/ (nice collection)
http://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/sakata/
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~marqu002/whynatsciphil.htm
this is of course an extremely narrow way to look at it, we need to study what soviet and maoist scientists were able to do that western scientists could not (and where they failed), how scientists like oppenheimer and einstein were influenced by marxism even if they never wrote anything about it, how philosophy of science like althusser but also kuhn interact with dialectical materialism, etc
the problem is economists, sociologists, philosophers, etc in the U.S. have it drilled in their heads since day 1 that they are inferior to natural scientists they are scared to touch it, the difficulty of approaching science as a layman (and the ideology that prevents real scientists from thinking about their work philosophically) plus the bad history with lysenko, the current global retreat of the left, and a history of dumb people in degenerate 1st world parties dismissing large swaths of science make this subject very hard to grasp.
dude sakata only came up with the quark model because of dialectical materialism being his arbitrary aesthetic commitment. i mean you could argue the same might be true for the renormalisation group or the "nuclear democracy", but this is all metaphysical rubbish on your part.
whats wrong with metaphysics? of course science will not appear dialectical, as we live in a capitalist-empiricist hegemony. a 'commitment' is exactly what we need, as once we establish the truth of dialectical materialism as a method for understanding the world and not only certain aspects of it (economics because Marx did the work for us) we need to critique all that appears as 'common sense' especially the scientific method. and yes, you could probably go your whole life as a scientist and never think about dialectics, but that doesnt mean the history isnt there (which as far as i can see has never been studied) or that dialects isn't essential to understanding science, even if there had never been marxist scientists
it takes a lot of courage to go up to a physicist and tell him he's ideologically blind, and many dumb ppl have done that (like some Maoists dismissing the big bang as undialectical or whatever) but that doesnt mean we shouldnt have the courage to try
e:
and yes i agree that you can vomit the word "dialectics" onto anything that sounds like it in science and make it sound like it was always there. and this is not good. but that post was more talking about the history of dialectal scientists which has been forgotten, and there is a way to also claim that all correct science is dialectical (or is lacking because it is not dialectical) without trying to claim things to seem more important than you are.
like i said, this is hard work because so much ideology is against marxists in the sciences, and the barriers to even know what you're talking about wrt physics are high. we need courage, especially the courage to be wrong
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dialectics-New-Century-The-Frontier/dp/0230535313
and will be reading it if i have time on buddha's birthday
so im not just talking out of my ass
jools posted:but the marxism has very little to do with it really. you're literally arguing that science is a degenerate form of marxism.
im arguing the scientific method is a degenerate form of dialectical-materialism. perhaps even that our conception of science under capitalism is also. 'science' is a word that needs to be rescued from it to mean nothing more than the materialist analysis of reality. marxism is really just the actually scientific analysis of economics, which happened to be the epistemology break that revealed a fundamentally new and better way of doing science.
all im saying is that empirical research is the first step not the last, isolating protons in the lab is no different than isolating the accumulation of surplus value from the real world in vol.1. one happens in the mind and one in reality but the method is the same.
babyhueypnewton posted:i will admit this is something ive only recently started to learn about
no kidding
babyhueypnewton posted:how is that different than saying "i was modeling options on the derivatives using a black-scholes model, but turns out all my math is silly because i forgot to add marxism". few of us have mathematical training in economics but we have the full confidence to say that economics and finance are fundamentally incomplete or flawed without dialectical materialism. we can even admit that much of economic mathematical modeling is useful and still admit this. marxism is just smith and ricardo with the method of dialectical materialism added, leading to different conclusions.
all im saying is that empirical research is the first step not the last, isolating protons in the lab is no different than isolating the accumulation of surplus value from the real world in vol.1. one happens in the mind and one in reality but the method is the same.
fyi the problem with black scholes isn't even that the model was wrong. it made some very simple assumptions about derivatives and them simplified them even more because apparently doing all of the math is too hard for finance people. even the simple physical systems (gases, heat transfer, more generally diffusion) which were the allegory for derivative prices don't follow the diffusion equation (which is what black scholes models derivatives as) exactly, they interact with each other, something which is assumed not to happen in the derivation of the diffusion equation. so if you built a hugely sensitive global economy founded on the idea that hydrogen gas diffuses perfectly (or even better, proteins diffusing through a cell perfectly) and then started making approximations based on that assumption you'd definitely see a similar crash sooner or later. like, i dont think this is actually too far off from something you would agree with but actually knowing where these things come from and why can make this sort of thing a lot easier.
edit: from a scientific point of view economics has almost the opposite problem to biology. biology has lots and lots of data and was until fairly recently an almost entirely empirical science. it's hard to get data on stuff you really want to see but people are always coming up with clever ways of indirectly probing different kinds of systems and comparing hypotheses etc. economics on the other hand seems to have a lot more theory than it knows what to do with, and is so wrapped up in ideology and politics that actually doing a controlled study with the necessary nuance to test sufficiently precise claims is next to impossible (or at least doesn't seem to happen very often, with the caveat that i don't keep up with academics economics nearly as much as i do with biology and know less about the culture of the field).
Edited by c_man ()
babyhueypnewton posted:so much bourgeois ideology itt
don't let these haters tear you down. they see success and they lash out.
babyhueypnewton posted:so much bourgeois ideology itt
the ussr produced scores of great scientists and they would have all laughed at you
c_man posted:i tried looking because i think i would be cool but i havent found much. do you recommend anything in particular?
yeah i read an interesting journal article on it a while back i'll try to find it again
if you dont, i have a pdf i could email you if you pm me
