#10361

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

#10362

Groulxsmith posted:

this should probably be on every page of this forum

#10363
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
#10364
its not arguing anything socialist
#10365
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.
#10366
[account deactivated]
#10367

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.

#10368
lol
#10369

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!

#10370
What I've read so far is basically Marx was right but WWII temporarily slowed down the rate of capital accumulation because so much capital was destroyed. For some reason, this isn't going to lead to a revolution because that would be "apocalyptic" and anyway, he's got some really great ideas for fixing this problem (doesn't mean dismantling the bourgeoisie but just making them play sorta nice) which he admits straight off the bat are politically unfeasible.
#10371
[account deactivated]
#10372

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.

#10373

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

#10374

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.

#10375

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 ()

#10376
since this is a reading thread i just got this book off aaaarg

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
#10377
but the marxism has very little to do with it really. you're literally arguing that science is a degenerate form of marxism.
#10378

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.

#10379
you're completely nuts man
#10380
have you actually done any science or talked to any scientists about what they actually do
#10381
"I realised this research I was doing on proton beam dosimetry was completely bunk because I wasn't performing it in accordance with the transcendental tenets of Dialectical Materialism! Silly me!"
#10382
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.
#10383
hmm... baby huey is right about everything here......
#10384
#10385

babyhueypnewton posted:

i will admit this is something ive only recently started to learn about

no kidding

#10386

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 ()

#10387
"isolating protons in the lab"
#10388
"oh no id better consult hegel on whether my chaotic semiconductor laser model is Literally Correct before i bother to do any actual testing and discard it if it is wanting"
#10389
so much bourgeois ideology itt
#10390
i mean doing theory work definitely involves returning to concepts that have proven reliable starting points for an analysis, but the whole point of having something that's testable is to let us know when those arguments start to break down and we need to come up with new theoretical foundations.
#10391

babyhueypnewton posted:

so much bourgeois ideology itt

don't let these haters tear you down. they see success and they lash out.

#10392

babyhueypnewton posted:

so much bourgeois ideology itt



the ussr produced scores of great scientists and they would have all laughed at you

#10393
landau was a proud marxist and didn't like stalin's government #wow #whoa
#10394
have you actually read any history of science stuff on sakata? because it was genuinely an accident that his basically arbitrary prejudice against the idea of a fundamental particle yielded some excellent, ahead-of-their-time results
#10395
i tried looking because i think i would be cool but i havent found much. do you recommend anything in particular?
#10396
tbh the idea of phenomenon -> structure -> "essence" has a a lot going for it as far as the process of physics goes or at least how different areas of study are partitioned, although the order is never that clear. like in modern particle/high energy physics that's a relatively neat division between people who are interested in particle phenomenology, designing experiments, calculating probabilities of seeing some event in some model, etc. then you have people who are interested in effective field theories, or what the mathematical structure of the physics we can look at with the energy scales we have available to us. and then you have other people who are more interested in what happens globally but making progress there is pretty difficult but these people are generally interested in quantum gravity of some kind and things like making sense of the black hole information paradox and so on. maybe that's not what you had in mind.
#10397

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

#10398
okay if you have journal access the paper is Staley, Kent W, "Lost Origins of the Third Generation of Quarks: Theory, Philosophy, and Experiment" Physics in Perspective 3, 2001

if you dont, i have a pdf i could email you if you pm me
#10399
yeah i got it. thanks!
#10400
FYAD died