CapitalistImperialistPig

  ‘It is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence—rather, it is his social existence that determines his consciousness.’ Popper, Karl R.. The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton Classics) . Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.  I am back to Popper after a long literary diversion.  By contrast with his disdain for Hegel, Popper clearly feels some affinity for Marx, whom he seems to regard as a good scientist brought down by the unfortunate disease of historicism - the belief that history unfolded by ineluctable laws as inevitable as the motions of the planets.  One thing he likes about Marx is his insistence on the autonomy of sociology as in the epigram quoted above.  He contrasts this with J. S. Mill's notion that society is a product of human nature and psychology - psychologism to Popper. For Popper, Mill too is a victim to "historicism" in Popper's view. Popper devotes a chapter to the conflict, but to me it is bogus one. ...

Notes from Caste , by Isabel Wilkerson After Obama's victory in 2012, optimists predicted a new era of post-racialism in the US.  That turned out to be wishful thinking.  When Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960's, he predicted that Democrats had lost the South for a generation.  Well, it is two and a half generations and counting.  Not since Lyndon Johnson has any Democratic Presidential Candidate received a majority of the white vote. The passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments after the Civil War outlawed slavery and granted the vote to Black American men, but the end of Reconstruction and the return to power of Southern whites brought Jim Crow and American Caste system, analogous in its principles and effects to the caste system of India in systematically creating rigid barriers between black and white, depriving Blacks of the vote, and consigning them to menial and poorly paid jobs. Wilkerson argues that little in the US, and al...

 Alexander at 30 something grieved that there were no more world's to conquer.  Robbert Dijkgraaf writing in Quanta, asks whether physics has reached that sad state.  While he concludes in the negative, his denial sounds more like "hey, we can still add a few decimal points here and there." Lubos Motl and Peter Woit both have commentaries up today, and Lubos is predictably outraged at his one time coauthor, and Peter is more measured. The Universe still has some puzzles for us of course, but it is not clear that their understanding will have the same kinds of revolutionary import that the discoveries of Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and the quantum theorists have had.  In particular, the Cosmos is starting to feel a bit cramped.  Of course it is indeed large beyond our imaginings, but there don't seem to be dragons out there, or at least not dragons that we don't already know about.  Black holes, quasars, gamma ray bursters all seem to fit pretty neatly under k...

 ...is the creation of Isaac Asimov and the central element in his Foundation series.  I'm not much of a fan, but it seems that he was anticipated both by J. S. Mill and (negatively) by Marx.  Popper calls Mill's notion that sociology can be reduced to psychology "psychologism," and seems generally approving of Marx's rejection of it in favor of independent foundations for sociology, though of course rejecting Marx for the even greater crime of "historicism," the notion that the historical future is baked into the past, and determined by ineluctable laws of historical development. Marx apparently made it his project to discover those laws, but like many another philosopher discovered mostly those laws that he wanted to believe. I wish I could remember who said "prediction is hard, especially of the future.*" *Well of course it was Niels Bohr.  Google remembers all.

 But bad results. The collectivists … have the zest for progress, the sympathy for the poor, the burning sense of wrong, the impulse for great deeds, which have been lacking in latter-day liberalism. But their science is founded on a profound misunderstanding …, and their actions, therefore, are deeply destructive and reactionary. So men’s hearts are torn, their minds divided, they are offered impossible choices. WALTER LIPPMANN. Popper, Karl R.. The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton Classics) . Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.  Popper, like Lippman, gives Marx credit for good intentions, but attributes his failures to the fundamental error of his analysis.  Like Plato and Hegel, Marx was a "historicist" who was convinced that history was deterministic and headed inevitably in the direction that he predicted.  Marx, says Popper, was influenced by the determinism of Laplace and the physicists of his time, a notion neither justified by theory and law o...

Popper's Hegel is the most loathsome of philosophers.  He was the court philosopher of Fredrick Wilhelm III of Prussia and as such, his primary impulse was to justify the monarch's absolutism in a world turning against it.  Many diseases of German politics and history can be traced to him - the fascism, the racism, the bellicosity that plunged the world into two global wars and shattered the German empires. An obscurantist and a charlatan, he poisoned generations of German philosophy.  Not least of his crimes, I imagine, is his role in inspiring Marx, but I haven't gotten that far in the book yet. 

OK, I always wanted a post with a title stolen from Yeats "The Second Coming" but the punchline here is that when they do, they fall apart into roughly cubical shapes (on average).  Such, at any rate, is the claim of a geologist and a mathematician.  The core insight comes from pure mathematics.  If you slice any large scale object up with random plane slices, you tend to wind up with pieces with six faces and eight vertices. Oddly enough, this result seems to have been anticipated by Plato in his dialogue Timaeus , where he assigned each of his essences (earth, air, water, fire, and a fifth, cosmic essence) to one of the Platonic solids.  Earth got cubes.  So far as I know, there is no cosmic link with the dodecahedron. Some details here:   https://www.quantamagazine.org/geometry-reveals-how-the-world-is-assembled-from-cubes-20201119/