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Comment by amasad | Hacker News Reader

It's such a powerful mental model and a phenomenon that presents itself in social, political, and other types of systems.

I recently applied dialectical thinking in a discussion about progress in programming. The main question I was trying to answer: "are we make any kind of progress in programming or are we just randomly traversing the space of possible languages and frameworks?" (https://amasad.me/dialectical)

At first it seemed like there is a lot of arbitrary jumping back and forth. One example: in web development we started out by rendering the UI on the server, and then client-side rendering became the norm and now we're back at server rendering with the various "SSR" techniques. This seems like a totally useless hop back and forth. But in reality we might end up in a -- to use Hegel's language -- "synthesis" where we have universal rendering (server + client rendering).

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Problem with dialectics is zero predictive force and zero utility. It can be used to argue about things in hindsight nearly universally, but otherwise entirely useless.

There are generative forces of new statements not "predictable" prior to statements like Euclid's or Newton's Laws that newly rendered features of both past and future suddenly known to be determinate upon measured examinations. What generates any hypothesis? Do we imagine exhaustive search of every generated hypothesis like monkeys banging on typewriters. Software developers should have a keen sense for evolving composition and syntheses against conundrums.

Let me illustrate. Consider this thread from dialectic perspective: a pro argument, followed by (my) cons, develops the spiral with more detailed pro followed by my (now taking it into account) counter. A very clear dialectic thread developing!

Was that easy to come up with hindsight? Yes.

Was it hard to predict the reiteration of pro and contra arguments? Not really.

Could you use dialectic approach to predict the exact character of follow up arguments? Of course not.

To sum up, none of dialectics observations are important or in any way non-trivial if you put Hegelian grandeur aside. The only attempt to put it for a practical test (Marxist theory of social development) didn't really pan out.

I don't think anyone is claiming they have predictive power. I think judging all our thinking tools the same way we judge Science (scientism) makes it harder to make sense of the world. That's why I emphasize it being a "mental model".

As for it being trivial, to prove otherwise I observe that a lot of things, if not most things, don't follow a dialectical pattern. Most things can worsen, improve, evolve, devolve, spiral, stagnate, or change randomly. Rarely do I find a dialectical pattern in say the weather, the economy, the stock market, my hunger patterns, my mood swings, or my shoes.

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