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Comment by niels_olson | Hacker News Reader

Meh. There have never been more ideas than there are today. The inability of the tweed-jacketed offspring of the wealthy, living their noblesse oblige in the self-imposed poverty of humanities, are struggling with the reflections in the mirror:

-their theories aren't changing the world as fast as they want

-they didn't study the hard sciences that would allow them to understand the theories that are changing the world.

The older I get, the more I see this: outside of the young men whom the society annoints "whiz kids", the entire culture seems paralyzed by fear of math and science.

That's surely a generalization. I know at least one old classmate who's a quantitative historian and quite gainfully employed. But how many people are going into history for the quantitative angle?

Don't get me wrong, I think the humanities are important. But those who choose this route have got to level up if they want to play.

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The 19th and 20th Century were, in many ways, the era of philosophical ideas being taken more seriously than they deserved.

Marx and Engels took Hegel more seriously than he deserved. Lenin took Marx and Engels more seriously than they deserved. Hitler took Neitzche more seriously than he deserved.

> The 19th and 20th Century were, in many ways, the era of philosophical ideas being taken more seriously than they deserved.

Insofar as that's arguably true of the 19th and 20th Centuries, its equally true of most of the centuries before those as well, and also so far of the one we've seen after that.

> Lenin took Marx and Engels more seriously than they deserved.

How seriously could Lenin have taken Marx and Engels to take the rhetoric of Marxism while throwing out its entire theoretical underpinning?

While it doesn't all get described as modernism, I think the idea that the scientific method was being applied to everything, art, history, politics, economics, etc. was a major part of most of that periods ideas. Ayn Rand is a good caricature, since she actually dealt with modernism as a subject matter.

They saw themselves or strived to be "the Newton of __". Marx' theories of history an politics were treated as a theory in the same sense as darwin's was. They named the departments political science. We are still dismantling many of these ideas, especially in areas like economics or psychology where they use math or experimentation and seem more scientific.

> We are still dismantling many of these ideas

Aside from a general political war on science from a certain faction in general (and not specifically on social science), I don't see dismantling of any of the ideas of science being applied in these domains. On the contrary, I see increased sharing of tools, mechanisms, and ideas between mathematics (including, e.g., computer sciences), the social sciences, the life sciences, the physical sciences.

There might be a rejection that Marx's work is good (or even methodologically valid) science -- but there was plenty of that from Marx's contemporaries, too. But there certainly is not a general rejection that the subject matter that Marx studied is amenable to scientific investigation.

I think we disagree. "The enlightenment" and periods/movements that followed it were ignited by excitement and optimism about what science is and what it can achieve. Science is a bit of a broad term and it doesn't exactly mean what I want it to in this context.

Marx is a good example, he strived to (and claimed to have) put forward theories on politics, history, ethics & economics that were the somewhat like of Darwin's theory on the origin of species. That they could be validated and built on in the same way. Further theories and technologies could be based on them in the way that rockets can be built based on Newton's mechanics.

The left isn't unique here. Ayn Rand is almost a caricature of this point, partly because she actually deals with modernism as a subject matter. She claimed to have described a theory of morality derived from pure logic and politics derived from morality.

There are some fields where "scientific" endeavors produce some outcomes, but have never really driven the kind of progress that was hoped for or claimed. Psychology and economics are big ones, IMO. Early economists like Ricardo could pose theories that work logically and are somewhat available for experimentation or prediction-measurment, but the kind of theories produced by modern economists like Marx, Keynes or Friedman (to be balanced) are not testable. They also haven't really produced any decent technology based on them or a reliable understanding of the mechanics.

Whether or not "the humanities" or the areas between humanities and sciences are amenable to scientific investigation is a big question. I'm not confident in any clear answer but I suspect the truth is that there's a spectrum. I am pretty confident though that the subject matters have been, up until now, for less amenable to scientific investigation than biology, physics, chemistry, etc.

If I had to bet on a solution to addiction, I would place a bet on either a neuroscience approach or a totally nonscientific approaches (like AA or religion) over psychoanalysis. I have almost no confidence in the idea that a theorist will figure out a better form of government. The process that will drive these things will probably continue to be cultural emergence.

I'm not saying that humanities are useless. I'm a big fan of the humanities. I'm not saying that science is bad either, I'm a fan of these too. I am saying that modeling the sociology or genera sturdies departments on the physics one turns out to have been a mistake. It hasn't been productive and it doesn't produce science or its derivatives.

I think many of Marx' ideas are valid, particularly his definition of class. I think his (and most modernist "political scientists") insistence that his theories on history or political progression are based on logic and science or that they can be is like a monarchy's insistence that they are chosen by the gods. Bunk.

Well, Marx said Hegel "stood history on its head", and still took (part of) Hegel as a critical starting point. To take a position more seriously than it deserves, it's not necessary to take swallow all of that position...

"Hitler took Neitzche more seriously than he deserved."

Curious, I've never heard of this link/reason before. Care to elaborate a little, or some links, please?

My reading of Nietzche left me with the sense that he was about as conceited and anti-egalitarian as they come.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hitler%20nietzsche%20philoso...

> My reading of Nietzche left me with the sense that he was about as conceited and anti-egalitarian as they come.

Nietzsche was anti-democratic and anti-socialist, yes. In most of his works he goes to extreme lengths (almost pathetic lengths) to rant against German nationalism and German antisemitism. Nietzsche was, without a shadow of a doubt, one hundred percent opposed to the Nazis.

Indeed this was the primary reason for his split with (and apparent hatred of) his sister. The Nazis may have co-opted Nietzsche but they hardly be said to have taken him seriously.

From a draft letter to his sister:

After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end. I am now in a position of emergency defense against your spouse's Party. These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!"

From Gay Science: [...]we are not nearly "German" enough, in the sense in which the word "German" is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine. For that we are too open-minded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well-informed, too "traveled": we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, "untimely," in past or future centuries, merely in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are desolating the German spirit[...] We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being "modern men," and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today

Indeed Nietzsche went so far as to deny he was German at all but rather of Polish descent even though this was almost certainly not true and he almost certainly would have known it, simply because of his opposition to the German nationalism and anti-semitism that had overtaken Germany - basically in a big F U.

It's nonsense. While his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche did promote a distorted version of his work in order to promote fascism, there is no reason why Nietzsche should not be given consideration of the highest kind. Furthermore, his ideas themselves undermine fascist ideology. See the writings of Walter Kaufman on this topic for more details.

Hitler may not have followed all of Neitzche, but he almost certainly took the "will to power" idea from him. It also seems to me that Hitler took the "superman" idea - the man who is above morality and can do whatever he wishes to those below him - but I'm less certain of that.

> Hitler may not have followed all of Neitzche, but he almost certainly took the "will to power" idea from him.

Hitler reinterpreted Nietzsche's will to power, yes.

> It also seems to me that Hitler took the "superman" idea - the man who is above morality and can do whatever he wishes to those below him - but I'm less certain of that.

The ubermensch is not a moral nihilist who can do whatever he wants, he's the answer to the moral nihilism that is the inevitable consequence of the death of god. This is very hard to reconcile with Nazi ideology which promoted (their version) of Christian Protestantism and genocide for racial reasons, which Nietzsche maligned.

A bit more research shows that Hitler reinterpreted the "Ubermensch" (superman or above-man) idea as well.

> The ubermensch is not a moral nihilist who can do whatever he wants, he's the answer to the moral nihilism that is the inevitable consequence of the death of god.

Yes and no. The ubermensch comes into a situation where there is no god, and therefore there is nihilism - there is no moral authority. The ubermensch creates a moral authority. But because there is no god and therefore no external moral authority, there really is nothing constraining the ubermensch to create any particular moral standard. The moral standard created is therefore essentially arbitrary. That is, by his choice of morality, he can proclaim that it is moral to do anything to others.

(Now, true, Neitzche said that the morality was supposed to be life-affirming, as opposed to other-world centered moralities that were not. But in a nihilistic context, there are few constraints on what "life affirming" might mean, and in practice it will come to mean anything the ubermensch might wish. Anyone wishing to say otherwise must not be coming from a nihilistic position, which means they must be either pre-death-of-god, or be ubermensch themselves.)

> Marx and Engels took Hegel more seriously than he deserved.

Yeah, if you think Stalinism is what Marx and Engels had in mind...

And yet, isn't one of the premiere goals of science, at least of the sort aiming at ontology, i.e. physics, to formulate a "Theory of Everything"? In other words, one idea to rule them all? Of course such an idea probably won't explain "higher level" structures in the Universe without some additional "subroutines"—just like understanding the periodic table does not result in instantaneous explanation of biochemistry, the brain, or human society (funny, maybe natural selection does something of the sort...). Though I do not fully agree with everything here, and I'm not sure that the author is wholly maligning the state of affairs in his thesis, we should remember there is a degree of immunity to ultra-logical semiotics in literature and (continental) philosophy that imparts subjective states that reinforce one's humanity (and maybe even intangibly touches holy-grail-ontology), and that is by no means an endorsement of at best childish, at worst deleterious, obfuscation.

> we should remember there is a degree of immunity to ultra-logical semiotics in literature and (continental) philosophy that imparts subjective states that reinforce one's humanity (and maybe even intangibly touches holy-grail-ontology), and that is by no means an endorsement of at best childish, at worst deleterious, obfuscation.

Can you honestly say that you wrote this sentence in order to be understood widely?

> Can you honestly say that you wrote this sentence in order to be understood widely?

I can't say I didn't. But perhaps my subconscious finally prodded me to go beyond lurking and post my first comment so as to ensure I engage with the masses and thereby improve the clarity of my hermetically sealed self expression. So let me rephrase that: Stuff like great novels and the writings of Nietzsche can make you feel as alive as when you consider the findings from the LHC or read the "Selfish Gene". That being said, I think we should use the ideas of science, and philosophy of science, to improve our art and make it more meaningful and fecund for ideas. Since the results of science have no intrinsic meaning at this point in time (nor do they say anything utterly conclusive about what really exists at the lowest level of ontology), we still need something else. Obfuscation is one way to encourage the reader to really understand the context and layers of some piece of writing by making them dig deeper (there was an interesting link about this a few weeks back).

Since the results of science have no intrinsic meaning at this point in time (nor do they say anything utterly conclusive about what really exists at the lowest level of ontology), we still need something else.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "intrinsic" in this context? Also, does there have to be an absolute lowest level of anything?

The answer to the first question is related to an interpretation of David Hume known as Hume's Law, paraphrased as, "you can't derive an ought from an is". In other words, the results of science cannot tell us anything conclusive about ethics/morality or what we should do day to day. The submission contained the following quote regarding neuroscience from a well-regarded paper: "it 'can help us see that all behavior is mechanical, that all behavior is produced by chains of physical events that ultimately reach back to forces beyond the agent’s control.'" Some pretty drastic changes to the rule of law could result from equating such results with "there is no free will". How do we decide what ought to comprise such changes? Secondly, as exhilarating and awe inspiring as learning the results of science can be (for me at least), how do we take knowledge and do anything with it? We can use it for technology, sure. But what if tomorrow we conclusively determine there are extraterrestrial beings through the results of one of our scientific instruments? How does society respond in relation to what the discovery means to each person despite the fact the experiment says nothing about such meaning? You could also think of it all this way: what ought we to do once we know every possible provable (or Popperian falsifiable) statement about existence?

As for the second question, to me, it makes sense that there has to be a lowest level of ontology, unless the lowest level is some sort of recursive structure (which in a sense would still be a "lowest level thing"). I believe most of us expect that there is some sort of monadic entity that is equivalent to Democritus's atom. In the standard model the quark is that sort of thing (if I'm not mistaken), but the string theorists hypothesize that a lower level (think more complete, i.e. not assuming zero dimensional entities in reality) object is the basis for a quark. Or say, if we can somehow determine our universe is a simulation, then it would be nice to know what the "basement universe" that is running this universe is. Of course, it's possible such knowledge will remain forever inaccessible, in which case, we'll probably need novels and philosophy to deal with the voids left in our hungering minds.

You must be careful not to look so broadly as to conflate a child's cry for nourishment with the tortured wailings of the soul's quest for peace. :-)

>the results of science cannot tell us anything conclusive about ethics/morality or what we should do day to day.

It depends on how you define "science". If construed broadly, to mean using reason and evidence-based approaches to evaluating claims, then science tells us a lot. Is it better for the nations of Europe to strive to live in mutual cooperation with each other? Or should they instead perpetually wage war against each other, at any cost? Imagine posing that question to both pre- and post-enlightenment peoples and contrasting the responses.

>Or say, if we can somehow determine our universe is a simulation, then it would be nice to know what the "basement universe" that is running this universe is. Of course, it's possible such knowledge will remain forever inaccessible, in which case, we'll probably need novels and philosophy to deal with the voids left in our hungering minds.

Science is presently the best cure for the voids that exist today. You'll need a really good argument for switching to novels and philosophy for the voids of the future.

>using reason and evidence-based approaches to evaluating claims

It takes some philosophy to decide how to do science. I prefer Popper's approach for the methodology.

>Or should they instead perpetually wage war against each other, at any cost?

I think we answer this question via the realization that every human is a subjective being and has a right to pursue happiness, a realization which comes from the humanities (a-hem) as much as it does from the theory of natural selection or quantum mechanics (and actually, we have no way of looking at a brain and saying it assuredly causes consciousness, so we can't even say who's a subjective being with science). Heck, the universe's "way of doing" might be a nearby gamma ray burst far harsher than any human war ;)

>You'll need a really good argument for switching to novels and philosophy for the voids of the future.

I wholeheartedly concur, but there are already concerns that if something like the multiverse is the "explanation" for the constant values in our universe, then there might be aspects of existence inaccessible to our experiments. I will need much consolation if such a thing is true.

Soooo... let me test my understanding: you would agree that Amazon Direct Publishing is a good thing?

No, I think only the masters of the ivory towers and those with an eye for the lucrative should decide what is printed.

Troll confirmed.

"Though I do not fully agree with everything here, and I'm not sure that the author is wholly maligning the state of affairs in his thesis, we should remember there is a degree of immunity to ultra-logical semiotics in literature and (continental) philosophy that imparts subjective states that reinforce one's humanity (and maybe even intangibly touches holy-grail-ontology), and that is by no means an endorsement of at best childish, at worst deleterious, obfuscation."

Troll detected.

>>>> And yet, isn't one of the premiere goals of science, at least of the sort aiming at ontology, i.e. physics, to formulate a "Theory of Everything"? In other words, one idea to rule them all?

Perhaps a more humble way to describe the pursuit of "theory of everything" is simply to uncover and reconcile contradictions and compromises between the theories that we've already got. The one that comes to mind is between quantum mechanics and gravity. So far as I understand what's going on, the term "theory of everything" is limited to that specific context.

You are right, but wouldn't the grand unification provide the framework to lead to the loftier conclusions/insights/ah-hahs? Or are you saying QM and relativity and thereby their presumed common denominator are currently entirely divorced from ontology?

Honestly I don't know. I haven't studied philosophy in any formal sense since the 101 course in college. Physicists differ on whether they are interested in philosophy at all.

Perhaps one way to think about it is: Are there different schools or beliefs within ontology, and would a unification of QM an GR help philosophers choose one of those schools from among the others, or develop a new school?

I interpret this to mean that you find value in literature, even unscientific as some is, because of the ontology-expanding and vocabulary-expanding potential and for literature's capacity to introduce the reader's mind to new ways of thinking by hinting through ontological structure the author's thought processes...thus hopefully reinforcing or expanding upon the individual reader's humanity by imparting from the sociosphere varied and unique personal human perspectives.

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