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.

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jjgreen 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Not that it matters ...", What? Of course it matters! I only come to HN for extended arguments on the meaning of the Dialectic.

	▲	AndrewKemendo 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I gave you one in a sibling ;)

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DRMacIver 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Conversation with Will (Antithesis CEO) a couple months ago, heavily paraphrased:

Will: "Apparently Hegel actually hated the whole Hegelian dialectic and it's falsely attributed to him."

Me: "Oh, hm. But the name is funny and I'm attached to it now. How much of a problem is that?"

Will: "Well someone will definitely complain about it on hacker news."

Me: "That's true. Is that a problem?"

Will: "No, probably not."

(Which is to say: You're entirely right. But we thought the name was funny so we kept it. Sorry for the philosophical inaccuracy)

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wwilson 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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1-more 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

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jpadkins 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Seth Godin made the case that its more important for people to make remarks than to be favorable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Cow:_Transform_Your_Bus...)

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.

	▲	amalcon 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"No such thing as bad publicity" is a very old idea. That quote is usually attributed to PT Barnum, but the idea is much older than him.

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dfabulich 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.)

	▲	DRMacIver 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We looked at it and given that the repo was archived nearly two years ago decided it wasn't a problem.

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cmrdporcupine 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

I believe (unless my memory is broken) they get into this a bunch in Ep 15 of my favourite podcast "What's Left Of Philosophy": https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/15-what-is-dialectics-...

Also if you're not being complained about on HN, are you even really nerd-ing?

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sigbottle 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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viccis 4 hours ago | parent [-]

>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.

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sigbottle 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	viccis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>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. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/#SouRatP...

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zero0529 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember first learning about Hegel when playing Fallout NV. Caesar made it seem so simple.

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biggestlou 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is 100% true and a major pet peeve of mine.

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AndrewKemendo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

Someone posted this here years ago and I always thought it was a good visual: https://observablehq.com/@mikaelau/complete-system-of-philos...

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sigbottle 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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?

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AndrewKemendo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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ux266478 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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)

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sigbottle 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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AndrewKemendo 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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

Hegel is irrelevant in the age of measurement

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sigbottle 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	jmalicki 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	AndrewKemendo 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.