Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

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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

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.

> Hegel is irrelevant in the age of measurement

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

> there are better heuristics to use and using old ones means you’re operating on old software

You’re making a lot of pronouncements that are arbitrary to you

It’s a rare condition called having an educated and informed opinion

I don’t want to punch down, but that comes across a lot like trump saying he has the biggest words.

You may not have the time or inclination, but there is a lot to learn from studying Hegel and the history of philosophy. No ‘measurement’ is required.

That was never a question.

There are structural limits to the Hegelian Dialectic being used as a universal epistemology

Marxism and other non-numerically based epistemology traditions refuse to accept this

The majority of people aren’t even as deep as hegel and yet even the hegelians still think they have a universal epistemology

when they have a keplerian version at best that hasn’t even heard of subatomic particles

> That was never a question

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.

They can both be true

For an ignorant uneducated person with absolutely no education thinking dialectically is an improvement

If you are a doctor or prime minister in 2026 you’re neglegent if your epistemological roots are based on a hegelian dialectic

But go off queen

Top-notch philosophical argumentation. All of your rare, educated and informed opinions really shine.

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