(Thread IKs:
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mycomancy posted:I'm very new to reading theory, so perhaps others can chime in with the Marxist interpretation of the biology here, but the takeaway is "individual experiences potentially affect the health of future generations." thanks for high quality science posting, btw imho, like we were talking ealier on, a Marxist interpretation of sciences is just... Science. If anything else, what came with a "Marxist awareness of science" was the perception that scientific thought is not exempted from being ideological, which was elementary to denounce bullshit in the two directions of either straight out pseudoscience (phrenology) or scientism (eugenics)
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Jul 26, 2021 16:25
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indigi posted:how? When has China stopped fighting poverty and increasing quality of life
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Jul 26, 2021 16:25
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Mr. Lobe posted:why, was it the names being similar? or the way that carbons can connect with each other with different amounts of covalent bonds, producing molecules with different physical properties? yes
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Jul 26, 2021 16:31
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Junkozeyne posted:When has China stopped fighting poverty and increasing quality of life never afaik but the pace has slowed dramatically. hopefully they will pick it back up soon
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Jul 26, 2021 16:32
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yeah "genetics" traditionally refers to genetic code, the nucleotide sequences, and for a long time it was thought that this was all that mattered in phenotypic expression turns out nope, two identical bits of DNA that go AATG-CGCG could be expressed differently in response to modification from environment factors! but they are still always going to remain AATG-CGCG, the genetics don't change
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Jul 26, 2021 16:33
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Isn't something like 95% of DNA non-coding too? But I bet a lot of it still participates in gene expression regulation idk
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Jul 26, 2021 16:48
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indigi posted:never afaik but the pace has slowed dramatically.
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Jul 26, 2021 19:58
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wtf china you eliminated extreme poverty within your borders and now you're taking your sweet time eliminating the less extreme forms of poverty within your borders how very uncommunist of you 
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Jul 26, 2021 20:00
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you’re right, better things aren’t possible
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Jul 26, 2021 20:02
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sure, china more than doubled life-expectancy between 1950 and 1980 but have you considered they didn't double it again between 1980 and 2010? unless and until every chinese citizen is a record-breaking centagenarian china should be considered a failed state
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Jul 26, 2021 20:04
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indigi posted:you’re right, better things aren’t possible
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Jul 26, 2021 20:04
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*me, reading player of games* "why isn't china doing literally this literally right now, smdh"
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Jul 26, 2021 20:05
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you could characterize lysenko's flaw as voluntarism, ie thinking that because everything in nature is a process of transformation rather than a static essence then anything can be turned into anything else by just wanting it hard enough, when in fact things only transform if the resolution of their internal contradictions is also supported in the correct way by their external environment. mao's example is that you can warm an egg and see it hatch into a chicken, but will be disappointed if you warm a stone the same way
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Jul 26, 2021 20:06
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:sure, china more than doubled life-expectancy between 1950 and 1980 but have you considered they didn't double it again between 1980 and 2010? unless and until every chinese citizen is a record-breaking centagenarian china should be considered a failed state consider, however, that if china's per-capita carbon use climbs at the same rate it has been we can expect each individual citizen to be vomiting entire pompeii eruptions into the air daily by 2050
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Jul 26, 2021 20:07
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Ferrinus posted:consider, however, that if china's per-capita carbon use climbs at the same rate it has been we can expect each individual citizen to be vomiting entire pompeii eruptions into the air daily by 2050 that would markedly cool the globe due to albedo increase so I think it’s a good plan
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Jul 26, 2021 20:08
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Ferrinus posted:you could characterize lysenko's flaw as voluntarism, ie thinking that because everything in nature is a process of transformation rather than a static essence then anything can be turned into anything else by just wanting it hard enough, when in fact things only transform if the resolution of their internal contradictions is also supported in the correct way by their external environment. mao's example is that you can warm an egg and see it hatch into a chicken, but will be disappointed if you warm a stone the same way
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Jul 26, 2021 20:10
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Ferrinus posted:vomiting entire pompeii eruptions into the air daily by 2050
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Jul 26, 2021 20:11
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you couldn’t get it from the extremely simple egg v stone example? e: want to clarify that I was making joke because I didn’t find the example to be particularly illustrative either indigi has issued a correction as of 20:21 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 20:12
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:what do you mean when you say "internal contradictions" here? I see this sometimes like e.g. something I watched a few weeks ago which tried to explain dialectical materialism with examples like protons and electrons, predator and prey, and so on, and it struck me at the time that they were committing the same category of error that led to lysenkoism i actually don't think that's a category error. to paraphrase the great post mycomancy just made, biology happens when things stick together. in general stuff happens when things attract or repel or otherwise interact. it is actually very easy and scientifically helpful to think of basically any system as the resolution of a bunch of opposing forces, whether they're literal physical forces (normal force vs. weight, restoring force of a spring vs. tension, etc) or more general flows of activity or behavior like predator vs. prey populations in an ecosystem, two different chemicals going through a reversible reaction in a dynamic equilibrium, or whatever. rather than hard lines between discrete things there are fuzzy boundaries between places where certain processes are stronger or weaker and basically all observable nature comes out of how those processes interact so, lysenko wasn't wrong that nature works dialectically. however, his own understanding of dialectics was flawed - transformation doesn't proceed off a blank slate. there actually are initial material conditions which could transform into various things based on contingency but can't transform into anything. there are political analogies to be made here, for instance stalin vs. trotsky on the strategy of the soviet union in the 30s vis a vis the world situation. should the ussr avoid direct conflict with the capitalist world and build itself up, or should it throw itself forward and try to kickstart more revolutions in europe until the entire world is communist? well, the latter certainly sounds more appealing and principled, and has only one teeny little problem: it wouldn't work because the rest of the world was not actually ready to go communist. it's actually idealist, not materialist, to minimize or ignore the limitations of the army you have because you're so enamored with the idea of the army you want as to how this applies to capitalism specifically, i just read this great essay https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/ruling-class-capitalist-state-reform-theory in jacobin of all places, and i'm frankly shocked that they published it because it points in the exact opposite direction of the general jacobin "line", but it outlines very well how the rational function of the capitalist state isn't a result of conscious conspiracy by genius billionaires but, as above, an emergent consequence of the combination and resolution of haphazardly-arrayed opposing forces Ferrinus has issued a correction as of 20:23 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 20:20
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indigi posted:you couldn’t get it from the extremely simple egg v stone example? e: ah okay - yeah me neither, then
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Jul 26, 2021 20:28
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the egg vs stone example was just meant to illustrate lysenko's own flaw, which is that he thought that dialectics meant you could hatch a chicken from a stone just as easily as you could from an egg. even though mao would tell you that it's the contradictions internal to the egg (various biochemical interactions) that allow the egg to transform into a chicken in the first place, those contradictions will only resolve the way you want if the egg's environment is suitable, and also those contradictions exist in an egg but not in a stone that is to say, pretending DNA isn't real or is arbitrarily rather than eventually mutable is not materialist
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Jul 26, 2021 20:31
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this is what I'm getting at:Ferrinus posted:it is actually very easy and scientifically helpful to think of basically any system as the resolution of a bunch of opposing forces Ferrinus posted:so, lysenko wasn't wrong that nature works dialectically.
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Jul 26, 2021 20:36
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indigi posted:you’re right, better things aren’t possible thank you, china's life expectancy should be 180 years by now. but it isn't, all thanks to the accursed deng xiaoping mila kunis has issued a correction as of 20:41 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 26, 2021 20:37
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:this is what I'm getting at: an easy example from biology is the idea of a "species" of animal or plant or whatever. scientists commonly divide lifeforms into different species and use a can-they-have-viable-offspring rule of thumb to determine what is or isn't in the same species. but in fact this is just a rule of thumb and there's not actually such a thing as distinct species, just constantly shifting gradations arising from shifting combinations of genes, which themselves don't actually remain apart as discrete little building blocks but often blend together and swap bits of code and such at random so, it is helpful to think of systems as processes which evolve from constituent opposing forces because they actually are that, because that's actually how nature works. so lysenko wasn't mistakenly treating dialectics as descriptive when he should've thought of it as purely philosophical or a mnemonic aid or something. he was just failing to do dialectical materialism, that is, downplaying or ignoring the importance of starting conditions to the possible outcomes of dialectical transformation
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Jul 26, 2021 20:42
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left expectancy
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Jul 26, 2021 20:42
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indigi posted:never afaik but the pace has slowed dramatically. hopefully they will pick it back up soon well they annihilated Covid which will give their population a leg up over the rest of the planet for who knows how long. the rest of my life most likely lol
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Jul 26, 2021 20:42
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In Training posted:well they annihilated Covid which will give their population a leg up over the rest of the planet for who knows how long. the rest of my life most likely lol yeah that owns, it’s a great example to shove in liberal faces
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Jul 26, 2021 20:44
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indigi posted:how? language, post code and income are heritable, and all have an impact (potentially significant) on physiological development
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Jul 26, 2021 21:00
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indigi posted:yeah that owns, it’s a great example to shove in liberal faces 100% chance they think the government is lying
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Jul 26, 2021 21:03
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Ferrinus posted:so, it is helpful to think of systems as processes which evolve from constituent opposing forces because they actually are that, because that's actually how nature works. More importantly, if you claim that dialectical materialism is true (or helpful) because it's the same thing as the laws of thermodynamics, then there really isn't any reason to talk about dialectical materialism at all: just talk about the laws of thermodynamics. But of course, they aren't the same thing - dialectical materialism is more about how human brains work and while we may think this way about things in large part due to the laws of thermodynamics (i.e. brains that incorporate some intuitive understanding of thermodynamics into their perceptive framework have better evolutionary fitness) you don't need to know anything about thermodynamics to, for example, use dialectical materialism to think about human history. But, also human brains aren't perfect, and the intuitive understanding of thermodynamics that is baked into them will not always map cleanly to real physical law. (I want to be clear that when I say "intuitive understanding of thermodynamics" I am not referring to like knowing the laws of thermodynamics - I mean physical processes common to all human brains and probably most animal brains.) And under these circumstances, it might still make sense to analyze human behavior using dialectical materialism, but then trying to map that to some physical process that we also want to call "dialectical" (because we are conflating that with thermodynamics) will fail.
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Jul 26, 2021 21:04
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iirc in biological terms the concept of "X% heritability" just refers to the likelihood of a particular trait having come from one place rather than another and as exmarx says does not necessarily have anything to do with genetics, so when racists hear that an IQ score is 60% heritable or whatever they incorrectly assume it means that your IQ is equal to your parents' times 0.6 plus 10d8 rather than, like, if your parents were rich you will probably have had more of a chance to develop your reading skills or something if you have upwards of 3 hours to kill this is a very nice deep dive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
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Jul 26, 2021 21:05
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I didn't mean to start this weird dialectical science derail, I just thought it important to point out that according to the CDC Stalin was right about everything.
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Jul 26, 2021 21:05
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:Well no, that's how thermodynamics works, and while thermodynamics is incredibly important to understanding nature it isn't literally everything. Like you can not derive physical law in its entirety by starting with the laws of thermodynamics. the reason that dialectics is a more useful way to think about physical processes as well as social processes is that it describes them more accurately, though. you're right that any mental model of anything will involve some level of abstraction because there is no point in trying to derive chemistry from physics or biology from chemistry. but, models themselves can map more or less accurately to what they're modeling. so i don't really understand the distinction you're trying to draw between thinking dialectically and nature actually operating dialectically - the former is helpful because the latter is true, even though we're always going to have to use verbal and heuristic shortcuts as we describe things to ourselves and each other
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Jul 26, 2021 21:08
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I didn't mean to start this weird dialectical science derail, I just thought it important to point out that according to the CDC Stalin was right about everything.  time for r.guy to return as an admin
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Jul 26, 2021 21:14
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Ferrinus posted:there is no point in trying to derive chemistry from physics or biology from chemistry. Can you explain this a bit? I don't think I really understand this statement. For the most part, this disagreement seems to be a matter of framework. For example, you could see mass and energy as having a dialectical relationship in that changes in one cause changes in the other. However, the laws which govern those changes are largely immutable and at that point the dialectical framework falls apart. I think.
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Jul 26, 2021 21:19
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Can you explain this a bit? I don't think I really understand this statement. someone once told me a joke that goes "biologists wish they were chemists, chemists wish they were physicists, physicists wish they were mathematicians, mathematicians wish they were philosophers, and philosophers wish they were employed" but this isn't really a marxist idea, just the basic fact that sciences don't "scale up" into each other even though they theoretically do. like even though protons, neutrons, and electrons all behave according to fundamental physical forces, you would have a bad time if you tried to use particle physics to predict how chemical reactions turned out. the discipline of chemistry exists as its own field rather than a special application of physics because new dynamics arise once you're dealing with matter at a certain scale, since quantity has a quality all its own. oops there's dialectics again
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Jul 26, 2021 21:24
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I didn't mean to start this weird dialectical science derail, I just thought it important to point out that according to the CDC Stalin was right about everything.
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Jul 26, 2021 21:24
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referring both to dialectical materialism and stalin being right about everything according to the CDC
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Jul 26, 2021 21:24
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a thing i think should be stressed in discussions of lysenkoism is that vernalization was used to reduce the effects of famine in a particularly trying time for the soviet union, so the fact that his theories were given some weight is somewhat understandable. as for lysenko, guy had a great idea that saved lives, can't blame him for trying similar ideas (though possibly for not being willing to change his views once experiments did not show them to be true or possible).
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Jul 26, 2021 21:38
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 08:12 |
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Ferrinus posted:the reason that dialectics is a more useful way to think about physical processes as well as social processes is that it describes them more accurately, though. you're right that any mental model of anything will involve some level of abstraction because there is no point in trying to derive chemistry from physics or biology from chemistry. but, models themselves can map more or less accurately to what they're modeling. so i don't really understand the distinction you're trying to draw between thinking dialectically and nature actually operating dialectically - the former is helpful because the latter is true, even though we're always going to have to use verbal and heuristic shortcuts as we describe things to ourselves and each other well I guess my point is that while it's useful to use the abstractions, you have to at all times remember that you're doing it or you will from time to time, do stupid poo poo like using your examples from chemistry, physics, and biology, from time to time your models will break down and you will have to reexamine them at the level of physics (for chemistry) or chemistry (for biology) and then refine your models, but you should refine the models not just decide that physics == chemistry from now on, because you won't get anything done in the case of diamat because you can often drill down to an arbitrary level of granularity, where you're basically talking about thermodynamics, and say "wow that looks an awful lot like diamat" I think there is a temptation to presume that nature will always look like diamat if you dig deeply enough, and then to go a step even further and assert that diamat is a property of nature. and I think that's an error, but not one that, as it might in chemistry or biology, require reexamining diamat - it just means that you can't apply it to literally every last physical process in the universe
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Jul 26, 2021 21:38
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