Even further, not everything is a math proof, where everything has been standardized and open (although understanding the proof is a whole other topic). Heck, take it one step lower - coding - and even though theoretically the source code is 100% transparent, still often times your claims are not reproducible because of environment. Now lower it one more to any kind of science where replication is expensive and/or hard, and then one step lower to personal experiences... And yeah, things can seem tough, can't it?
And even in the case of mathematics proofs, that tells you nothing about things such as: extendability, taste, where future direction should go, what this philosophically means, etc. Which we definitely do care about.
It's funny because the people throwing around fallacy accusations everywhere don't understand that they are semi selectively using fallacies alongside claiming universality while not actually practicing it (not that you have to, of course, I very much don't agree with that premise, but if you're the one saying it...)
Anyways. /rant, it's crazy how many people don't discuss these basic but subtle ideas. To be fair, I struggled with the same exact things when I was 15, and it doesn't seem like you get taught this kind of nuance until maybe the tail end of a rigorous bachelor's degree, though personally I only learned this stuff on my own through extensive trial and error and suffering.
Observing, measuring, but also repeatability and ground truth.
Math (and theoretical adjacents like TCS) claim not to make any fundamental claims about the actual world (compared to 17th century philosopher-mathematicians like Leibniz), and physics studies the basest of, well, physical phenomenon.
I don't even know how you would begin actually rigorously studying sociology unless you could start simulating real humans in a vat, or you inject everybody with neuralink. (but that already selects for a type of society, and probably not a good one...)
To be clear, I don't think all sociological observations are bad. However, I tend to heavily disregard "mathematical sociological studies" in favor of just... hearing perspectives. New ones and unconventional ones especially, as in a domain where a lot of theories "seem legit", I want to just hear very specific new ways of thinking that I didn't think about before. I find that to be a pretty good heuristic for finding value, if the verification process itself is broken.
Damn. I've put quite a lot of effort into open source tools w.r.t. debugging and bugfixing, but yeah putting that for a corporate product that doesn't even respect you must be draining.
Super interesting stuff, but won't this require multiple (possible untrustworthy / adversarial parties) to abide by your protocol? Like if you don't control all the nodes in the VPN then why can't the Kremlin just enforce a blacklist at said bad node?
The "AI Vampire", huh. Unironically, I've been feeling that way.
Well, there was also a lot of unrelated things that happened as well around last November for me, but yes, getting into vibecoding for real was one of them, and man I feel physically drained coming back from work and going to use more AI.
Not sure what it is. I'm using AI personally to learn and bootstrap a lot of domain knowledge I never would have learned otherwise (even got into philosophy!, but man is it exhausting keeping up with AI. I would burn through a week's worth of credits in a day, and now I haven't vibe coded a week.
AI Vampire is from Steve Yegge, credit where it's due.
My take is that it's similar to what Amber Case described in Calm Technology - with AI you are not steering one car, you're really steering three cars at the same time. The human mind isn't really designed for that.
I am finding that really structuring my time helps in terms of fighting back. And adopting an hours restriction, even if I could rage for 4 more hours, I don't. Instead I stop and go outside.
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.
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've also never bought into the belief that "if we just had full control over everything, everything would be perfect". If AI didn't exist, society was headed this way anyways in a few decades because of this notion.
Centralize power, which centralizes perspective of what "good" counts as, and quotient out the accidental humans. A tale as old as time, but with AI it seems like this could be a reality within even the next decade.
I feel like reading some of these comments, some people need to go and read the history of ideas and philosophy (which is easier today than ever before with the help of LLMs!)
It's like I'm reading 17th-18th century debates spurring the same arguments between rationalists and empiricists, lol. Maybe we're due for a 21st century Kant.
And even in the case of mathematics proofs, that tells you nothing about things such as: extendability, taste, where future direction should go, what this philosophically means, etc. Which we definitely do care about.
It's funny because the people throwing around fallacy accusations everywhere don't understand that they are semi selectively using fallacies alongside claiming universality while not actually practicing it (not that you have to, of course, I very much don't agree with that premise, but if you're the one saying it...)
Anyways. /rant, it's crazy how many people don't discuss these basic but subtle ideas. To be fair, I struggled with the same exact things when I was 15, and it doesn't seem like you get taught this kind of nuance until maybe the tail end of a rigorous bachelor's degree, though personally I only learned this stuff on my own through extensive trial and error and suffering.
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