Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Talkin’ about a Revolution

drb.ie

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 307 posts

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#81

Post by facile3232 »

username332211 wrote: post #73
nonrandomstring wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tired old contention that some great historical thinker is somehow single-handedly responsible for the fall of civilisation is nothing more than railing against intellect itself.

It is precisely the opposite. A world where Karl Marx isn't responsible for millions of deaths is a world where the existence of intellectuals is ultimately pointless. There, a wise potentate could send philosophers into labor camps and he'd only benefit from the elimination of waste. If you believe that ideas matter, then you should allow for spectacularly bad ideas to have spectacularly bad real world consequences.

> If ideas matter, then spectacularly bad ideas should have spectacularly bad real world consequences.

to me this seems to imply ideas don't matter, or we wouldn't be living in a market-oriented society. I suppose there's still room for global warming to demonstrate your point.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#82

Post by keiferski »

paganel wrote: post #67
DeathArrow wrote: post #17

[flagged]

Always interesting how the Anglo world never really got into Hegel, I guess it's their lack of real philosophical spirit that explains it. They never really got passed Hume's empiricist reflexes.

They did get into Hegel for a bit, but the subsequent developments in math, language, etc. (what is now called Analytic Philosophy) kind of wiped out the interest in them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_idealism

But yeah, you could probably argue that the empiricist approach never quite went away. Even today, analytic philosophy (which is predominantly an Anglo-American phenomenon) is notoriously uninterested in politics and "big society" questions.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#83

Post by nonrandomstring »

username332211 wrote: post #73
nonrandomstring wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tired old contention that some great historical thinker is somehow single-handedly responsible for the fall of civilisation is nothing more than railing against intellect itself.

It is precisely the opposite. A world where Karl Marx isn't responsible for millions of deaths is a world where the existence of intellectuals is ultimately pointless. There, a wise potentate could send philosophers into labor camps and he'd only benefit from the elimination of waste. If you believe that ideas matter, then you should allow for spectacularly bad ideas to have spectacularly bad real world consequences.

Of course ideas matter and have consequences. The mistake is to identify them with individual responsibility. Do you blame Newton every time a vase falls off a shelf?

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#84

Post by baxtr »

watwut wrote: post #74
sofixa wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’ll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better lives. What could that be based on? Ask the people in Venezuela, South Africa for instance, things can definitely get much worse even for decently developed countries with democracy and a solid economic foundation. Combine with the growth of religiosness in young people across multiple growing co…

To be fair, he was making wild guesses. He is professor of history, not a professor of omens. He can't read future, no more then anyone else.

Yeah exactly. People read way too much into this

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#85

Post by 082349872349872 »

keiferski wrote: post #42
nonrandomstring wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not limited to philosophy. All of academia is broken this way. Sadly, we think the only alternative is "industry", an equally broken set of incentives. That limits fronts of human progress to two types. We either get committee-driven institutional science leveraging huge resources, supercomputers, particle accelerators - blighted by cutthroat competition, opaque "publishing" and fraud - or radical popu…

Agreed and that is a really good, but simple, point that I didn't realize as clearly before: there is no real alternative to the academia vs. industry dichotomy. What is needed might be a third option that allows for exploration without the pressures of profits or publications.

Your third option sounds suspiciously similar to golden-age DARPA, which had been created in response to the launch of Sputnik in 1957?

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#86

Post by baxtr »

CalRobert wrote: post #61
baxtr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talked to a history professor recently and asked him how he viewed the whole situation. He leaned back, thought for a bit and answered: It’ll be all fine on a 200 years perspective, democracy will continue to increase its footprint, people will lead better lives. It’s the next 30 years I’m worried about. PS: ofc, I have no clue if he’s right or not. But I thought it’s an interesting take to share.

“democracy will continue to increase its footprint” What was this based on?

Extrapolation from what he knows about history.

Things looked very bleak right after the French revolution for example.

We see our history as a dot, because we live in it.

But people in the future will take a more long-term view and might say: oh this was a difficult phase in history.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#87

Post by bluecheese452 »

sofixa wrote: post #72
lynx97 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love if the public discourse would allow for more diversity of opinions. Unfortunately, where I come from, the left has simplified the rhetoric to "If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi." Unfortunately, this elitist attitude has only contributed to the divide of the people.

> If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi Depending on where you are from, this could absolutely be true, as "elitist" and insulting as it might be. Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries.

Minor quibble but wouldn’t it be a subset?

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#88

Post by ourmandave »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #83
username332211 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is precisely the opposite. A world where Karl Marx isn't responsible for millions of deaths is a world where the existence of intellectuals is ultimately pointless. There, a wise potentate could send philosophers into labor camps and he'd only benefit from the elimination of waste. If you believe that ideas matter, then you should allow for spectacularly bad ideas to have spectacularly bad real world consequences.

Of course ideas matter and have consequences. The mistake is to identify them with individual responsibility. Do you blame Newton every time a vase falls off a shelf?

In hindsight, naming my cat Newton may have been a bad idea.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#89

Post by rongrobert »

baxtr wrote: post #86
CalRobert wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“democracy will continue to increase its footprint” What was this based on?

Extrapolation from what he knows about history. Things looked very bleak right after the French revolution for example. We see our history as a dot, because we live in it. But people in the future will take a more long-term view and might say: oh this was a difficult phase in history.

I just don't agree with any of this.

This is a difficult time compared to what? The black plague? WW1?

This is the easiest time ever to be alive.

I would say on a 200 year time line though, the way the black plague broke the power of the Catholic Church, the internet has broke democracy.

The idea democracy is ascendant is pretty delusional IMO.

This professor is still living in the unipolar moment that has passed.

Re: Talkin’ about a Revolution

#90

Post by thomassmith65 »

hagbard_c wrote: post #69
thomassmith65 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we could organize gatherings where we purify ourselves of such works of degenerate literature by gathering all the copies we can find and burning them /s

That's the wrong way - the way of the likes of 'fascists' and 'anti-fascists' alike - to go at that problem. A better way is to point out where Hegelian thought can lead and has led in the past. No books need to be burned, more books need to be published and read while educational institutions should stop pushing books which promote the destructive aspects of Hegel's thoughts. Yes, that means that Howard Zinn should…

I appreciate the thought put into this reply, but there's been some sort of miscommunication. An /s tag, like the one at the end of my previous comment, is meant to indicate sarcasm. I'm about as edgy a person as Donny Osmond.
Post reply on HN