Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article and some interesting insights into how marxism-leninism actually played well with the scientific method.

There was another pathology, as the author calls it, in the Soviet scientific system: pretty much like what it did to genetic science, some ignorant officials essentially outlawed computer science, or what was called cybernetics back then. I don't know much about the motivations and how exactly banning cybernetics was in line with marxism-leninism, but needless to say what a fatal mistake it was. Bringing back computer science later, I think in the 1970s didn't help much: the Soviets were already light years behind in the area. All the Soviet computer scientists and engineers could do at the time was to steal and copy. If anyone here remembers ДВК - that was an almost exact copy of PDP-11 and its OS. (My God, I think I can even remember its smell now.)

Bottom line being, all arguments regarding political and economic systems aside, you can't trust one person or a single "ideologized" organization on anything, ever. There should always be alternatives and eventual consensus. Kind of obvious today, isn't it.

>you can't trust one person or a single "ideologized" organization on anything, ever

All organizations are ideologized; if you can't see the ideology, that just means you agree with it.

I think he was going for the argument that your decisions should come from the integration and evaluation of different ideologies, rather than any one single ideology.

Then again, if you follow that too closely, it might become dogmatic itself :P so iunno. Epistemology is hard.

But decisions only come from ideology in a tertiary sense. Goals are the central contribution of any ideology. What criteria are you basing your decisions on? That is your ideology, and you can't just elide it; your goals come from somewhere and not all goals are interchangable.

> All organizations are ideologized; if you can't see the ideology, that just means you agree with it.

Ditto for technology.

There are intersting talks about reverse engineering intel processors under microscope. We also reversed ram, floppy and some hdds.

Cybernetics was considered western science, and most scientists had west connection. Good example is Antonin Svoboda. He ran away from Czechoslovakia before nazis invaded, hiding antiaircraft missile computer plans in frame of bicycle. Then he returned, build Czech Cybernetic Institute, become director and emigrated when soviets invaded. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%C3%ADn_Svoboda

Cybernetics were wrong because they began as efficiency optimization in the economy. It was wrong because it necessarily assumed shadow prices, which is incompatible with labor theory of value. The upper echelons were really that dumb.

There's a book about the whole optimization debacle, "The Red Plenty" by Francis Spufford.

Cybernetics were wrong because they began as efficiency optimization in the economy. It was wrong because it necessarily assumed shadow prices, which is incompatible with labor theory of value.

No, it conflicted with party dogma, not with the labor theory of value. In what way do you think the existence of shadow prices conflict with LTV?

I think almost all new branches of 20th century Western-originating science suffered some degree of unhelpful ideological scrutiny at one point or another although most of these cases were not as damaging or as well-known as Lysenkoism.

The pure science itself perhaps had the capability to catch up and recover but the centrally planned, often military-dominated industrial system was profoundly awful at actually managing industry and innovating. Much of Soviet industry remained woefully behind its Western counterparts - in capacity, precision, quality assurance, material science, you name it. One can reasonably argue that a great deal of Soviet engineering design ingenuity in a number of fields was driven by the constraints of what they could realistically produce.

Actually the reverse happened in 70s - instead of pursuing indigenous R&D, it was decided to clone Western hardware and software instead. This really crippled Soviet computer science and engineering.

In 50s-60s Soviet computers were not that far behind, but late it was harder and harder to compete with West simply because of economy scale disadvantage. Unlike nukes and space exploration, computer technology was not receiving the funding to maintain parity.

Therefore it was decided that copying and cloning Western tech would be cheaper then trying to compete in yet another high-tech industry.

Interesting how facing competition, following the others (between nations, or even companies) ideas is rarely a worthy plan for long term. It's depriving your brains of real pressure to invent.

And of course things were harmed by the party politics. A Polish engineer invented a computer which is now considered to be few years ahead of its time, and was ready to enter production,but then it was shut down because of a direct order from the party,as it would conflict with the party-backed Elwro company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-202

Edit: of course Poland was never part of the Soviet Union,but the political system was heavily influenced by orders from Russia.

Even consensus is repressive, though. Sometimes you need an alternative to consensus: ideologized personality.

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