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Comment by v413 | Hacker News Reader

This is the second "law" of the dialectical materialism by Engels:

"The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes"

According to Wikipedia it has its roots from ancient Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism

There is a spin on the same idea when working with data (maths/stats/comp/ML) and having to skirt around the curse of dimensionality. Suppose I have a 5-dimensional observation and I'm wondering if it's really only 4 dimensions there. One way I check is - do a PCA, then look at the size of the remaining variance along the axis that is the smallest component (the one at the tail end, when sorting the PCA components by size). If the remaining variance is 0 - that's easy, I can say: well, it was only ever a 4-dimensional observation that I had after all. However, in the real world it's never going to be exactly 0. What if it is 1e-10? 1e-1? 0.1? At what size does the variance along that smallest PCA axis count as an additional dimension in my data? The thresholds are domain dependent - I can for sure say that enough quantity in the extra dimension gives a rise to that new dimension, adds a new quality. Obversely - diminishing the (variance) quantity in the extra dimension removes that dimension eventually (and with total certainty at the limit of 0). I can extend the logic from this simplest case of linear dependency (where PCA suffices) all the way to to the most general case where I have a general program (instead of PCA) and the criterion is predicting the values in the extra dimension (with the associated error having the role of the variance in the PCA case). At some error quantity >0 I have to admit I have a new dimension (quality).

Interesting, thank you for point that out! I've heard this before but never knew the source.

It is also a quote from Stalin.

Engels pre-dates Stalin by a considerable period of time and we can assume Stalin has read Engels. Safe to say its Stalin just paraphrasing Engels.

Not safe to say at all, no. It is such an obvious thing to say, and such an easy observation, many people have said something of this nature for a very long time independent of each other. The is basically another phrasing of the question: “how many grains of sand makes a pile?”

I’m not impressed by a cheap observation like this, even when phrased in a clever sounding way. I am impressed when people make new observations when this applies, such as when they are able to model a specific macro system that behaves very differently when the number of inputs is increased by a lot, and show how that is useful for our understanding of nature (including human nature).

I suspect that Stalin read that from Engels. I think that is a reasonable suspicion.

Hmm, maybe you could write to Engels to tell him just how unimpressed you are?

And, further, Engels is just paraphrasing Hegel.

Kant etc.

As I understand it, Stalin said, "Quantity is its own kind of quality." But I don't have the original Russian (someone here no doubt does) where he was referring to the USSR's ability to produce arms faster than their opponents even though the quality was lower.

This is a quote by Thomas A. Callaghan Jr, but is often mis-atrributed to Stalin.

https://klangable.com/blog/quantity-has-a-quality-all-its-ow...

in this[1] work titled “On Dialectic and Historic Materialism”, Stalin references the idea and properly attributes it to Engels.

1 https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/stalin/t14/t14_55.htm

And people ask why I still come to this site :-). That is a great link.

Certainly that dialectic principle is broadly known. But it's specifically (mis)attributed to Stalin with the reference to wartime production/conscription and you won't find that in his works, recorded speeches or memoirs of contemporaries.

This goes in fact for most of his grand quotes. Whatever deep sounding passage are attributed to him and can't be traced back to Marxism tenets, are typically adaptations from the Bible, reflecting his education as a priest.

I misread Engels as Hegel. Of course it makes more sense now.

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