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#15170112
Rugoz wrote:AFAIK a larger sample means you're less likely to make a type II error (i.e. not rejecting the null when it is false), it doesn't affect they type I error rate (given the same p-value). It's always better. The size of the effect is a different matter.

Not that you said anything to the contrary, but it could be misunderstood.

Obligatory:
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Indeed, that's a good point. The issue here has to do with type-II error (i.e. power), but that also affects not the p-value itself but the threshold that researchers use.
#15170124
I think the connotation of religious dogmatism is simply a point that many people may not think through their own beliefs. However, one can sometimes dismiss someones serious effort to understand what they believe and to have clear and satisfactory reasons for such beliefs/views as being dogmatic. So I think there are a lot of good points to draw from the work of famous Marxists but they can be dismissed on the grounds of an emotional reaction to Marxism as extreme, conspiratorial, and dogmatic as it assumed to be in the USSR where everyone dons the appearences of being a Marxist as they had to conform to the state.

However in Marx himself you will find only a ruthless pursuit to understand things. He was originally a liberal who only sought to understand on what basis utopian socialism/communism emerged. As ideas could not be vanquished because you censor them but come from the human world itself.

And the point that a meaningful conversation can only occur among those who truly understand ones position is a general fact. How foolish someone appears when they criticize things they haven’t yet understood, rendering their criticisms inadequate because they don’t even know what to aim at. So people talk passed one another when there isn’t a shared understanding. Good Marxists understand this point clearly as Marxist analysis entail synthesizing knowledge in often oppositional positions of understanding.
Whether someone actually does as much can be disputed but the best Marxists are synthesizers of knowledge already developed by others. Marx himself did a critical review of the political economy to show the limitations and truth of abstractions. Lev Vygotsky did the same in his work Thought and Language. Andy Blunden who you mention has done the same thing in the field of CHAT/Cultural Historical Activity Theory in order to find the concrete universal/unit of analysis which allows one to synthesize different positions. The one fact that allows one to ‘sublate’ dichotomies and resolves them rather than deny their contradictions in emphasizing one side as true.
The idea is that for a immanent critique to actually be as such, you have to accept the premises of other frameworks to actually show the limitations of it. External criticisms don’t register as they are from the standpoint of an alternative framework.
One must truly empathize and open oens self up to be properly critical which is hardly dogmatic as that is the stage for the immature and newly initiated who are yet to even learn of the limits of what they’re learning.

And Marxism as inspired by Marx’s work has always been about the analysis and synthesis of things. Properly delineating the limits in which things are true. This being part of what makes it dynamic as one adopts the method and can work to find a new understanding while one who simply adopts the system is not necessarily that much brighter and may well be overly attached to abstractions with no sense as to why they believe in them or how one actually defends such an ideas superiority because its not used as a method to really think through things.
#15170264
Second Rule of Marx Club: always refer to everyone as "comrade".
#15171011
Cartertonian wrote:
It seems to me that in most cases – of which Marxist writings are the most striking exemplar – it is simply not possible to follow the logic therein unless you have already accepted, uncritically and unquestioningly, a particular set of core tenets. Hence the association with ‘religion’.


Cartertonian wrote:
This leaves me with the impression that unless I uncritically and unquestioningly accept the need for revolution, blood, war and tyranny, there can never be any prospect of a more equitable world, where individuals are free from the malign influence of others. In even more lay terms, it reads like a philosophy of, ‘jam tomorrow’…but in a tomorrow few if any will live to see, rather like the Christian belief in suffering in life for the promise of ascending into Heaven.



There's a *qualitative* difference, that you're overlooking -- the *subject matter* of Marxism is with political economy, while the subject matter of religion is with the individual.


Cartertonian wrote:
Marxism is no different. It’s just another system of thought, constructed to further rather than counter, ‘man’s inhumanity to man’, but for a notionally noble cause. Visiting misfortune, misery and death on other human beings becomes something that is seen as, ‘regrettable but necessary’ on our way to the utopian goal and some are so besotted in their beliefs that such inhumanity is not regrettable at all.



Means-and-ends.


Means and Ends CHART

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Potemkin wrote:
Any system of thought, any system of belief, can be used to retrospectively rationalise whatever somebody wants to believe. For example, Christianity is used by Calvinists to rationalise their own material prosperity as 'proving' their good standing in the eyes of God, and other people's poverty as 'proving' their sinfulness in the eyes of God. Likewise, Darwinian evolutionary theory can be used to retrospectively rationalise entire races of human beings as being 'inferior' to the 'superior' races, or even 'unfit' to exist. This does not invalidate Christianity, or invalidate Darwin's theory of evolution. This is just human nature at work.



I'd characterize these examples as typical ideology-driven *politicizations* of various worldviews (religions), and scientific paradigms (Darwinism).


Cartertonian wrote:
The point of my thread, though, was to observe that my impression of Marxist theory is that to even suggest, let alone question, that the assumptions upon which it is based might be incorrect or incomplete is seen as the height of blasphemy by the zealots of the Church of Marx. I further see that as an unhelpful impediment to philosophical progress.



Nice abstract attack from afar, but what's your objection to the labor theory of value, for instance?


Cartertonian wrote:
As I intimated in the OP - perhaps too softly - there is much about Marxist philosophy that I like and admire, but then they go and spoil it all by insisting that there has to be violence and bloody revolution to achieve their goals.



Self-appointed political consultant from the opposing camp -- ? Does it pay well?


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Heisenberg wrote:
This isn't out of some inherent love for "violence and bloody revolution". It's out of a recognition that the current ruling class will not accept changes of the magnitude advocated by Marxists without violent resistance. And I'd say history has proven them absolutely correct on this front.



Cartertonian wrote:
As I said in the OP, it's seen by some as 'regrettable but necessary', but by others as 'necessary and desirable'.



In Colombia, 17 Dead in Pandemic-Related Protests

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/worl ... tests.html


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Heisenberg wrote:
the main changes to the concept of how the "revolution" will work are tactical (think Mao's "mass line", "protracted people's war", etc) and are the result of learning from real-world experience.




Much of the left around the world had enthused at the Cultural Revolution. In many countries opponents of the US war in Vietnam carried portraits of Mao Zedong as well as the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. The trite sayings in the Little Red Book of ‘Mao’s thoughts’ were presented as a guide to socialist activity. Yet in 1972, as more US bombers hit targets in Vietnam than ever before, Mao greeted US president Nixon in Beijing, and by 1977, under Deng, China was beginning to embrace the market more furiously than Russia under Stalin’s successors.

The Western media saw such twists and turns as a result of wild irrationality. By the late 1970s many of those on the left who had identified with Maoism in the 1960s agreed, and turned their backs on socialism. A whole school of ex-Maoist ‘New Philosophers’ emerged in France, who taught that revolution automatically leads to tyranny and that the revolutionary left are as bad as the fascist right. Yet there is a simple, rational explanation for the apparently irrational course of Chinese history over a quarter of a century. China simply did not have the internal resources to pursue the Stalinist path of forced industrialisation successfully, however much its rulers starved the peasants and squeezed the workers. But there were no other easy options after a century of imperialist plundering. Unable to find rational solutions, the country’s rulers were tempted by irrational ones.



Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 576



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B0ycey wrote:
Marxism has been influenced by the Frankfurt School of thought that has basically used his ideas and thought process



No need for the workers to *seize* the means of mass industrial production, apparently -- it'll just be 'donated', and *purchased* with workers' wages, so as to become the new-kids-on-the-block in the pre-existing capitalist game.


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Rich: Your hyper-individualist vision and ideology isn't working out. The world has larger problems than your idealized society of atomized individuals can feasibly address at the individual scale -- like global warming -- and the world doesn't look like that anyway, and never has. There are *group* dynamics like institutions and, ultimately, *class* interests, that prevail over your imagined bureaucratic-segmented worldview.


History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

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[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

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wat0n wrote:
If Marxian economic concepts can be seen as a special case of a neoclassical model, then why not just use the latter?



You're mistaken -- ever hear of the labor theory of value?


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

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Wellsy wrote:
the material forms of production also hide the social relations.



Hence the need to make the distinction between *use* values, and *exchange* values.


Wellsy wrote:



Marx's theory of historical materialism and his economic theory revolve around one and the same basic problem: the relationship between productive forces and production relations.



Roughly approximated and indicated as 'cooperation / competition', or social history, for 'productive relations', while 'productive forces' is basically *technology*:


Humanities-Technology Chart 2.0

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Lee Smolin - How Can Space and Time be the Same Thing?




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inductive vs. deductive reasoning

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wat0n wrote:
Okishio's Theorem



His theorem is only good for a brief snapshot of time, when a given industrial innovation gives one market participant an 'edge' over its competition -- nominally benefitting the entire industry, briefly, apparently, according to the theory -- but soon the novel improved technology or technique diffuses out, with runaway market competition prevailing, causing capitalist *overproduction* and plunging rates of profitability. (Consider the internal combustion engine, for example.)
#15171014
^ except if innovation is constantly being carried out, under Okishio's assumptions at least.

As for your LVT comment, so you're saying John Roemer and others like him are wrong? And why would you rely on a manifestly limited theory?
#15171016
wat0n wrote:
^ except if innovation is constantly being carried out, under Okishio's assumptions at least.



You mean capitalist *incrementalism*, wherein every tiny marketable "development" creates an entirely new ocean of markets (tech), that participants then have to pay for, to stay competitive / current.

Again, this "theory" is just capitalist triumphalism, since it's only looking at one *aspect* of capitalist technological development, meaning its incrementalism, for the sake of exchange-value-measured 'new' markets.


wat0n wrote:
As for your LVT comment, so you're saying John Roemer and others like him are wrong? And why would you rely on a manifestly limited theory?



I don't see any friction in what you're indicating:



Roemer's program was then to propose definitions of embodied labor time,



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roem ... _economics




[Adam] Smith saw the price of a commodity in terms of the labor that the purchaser must expend to buy it, which embodies the concept of how much labor a commodity, a tool for example, can save the purchaser.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
#15171019
ckaihatsu wrote:You mean capitalist *incrementalism*, wherein every tiny marketable "development" creates an entirely new ocean of markets (tech), that participants then have to pay for, to stay competitive / current.

Again, this "theory" is just capitalist triumphalism, since it's only looking at one *aspect* of capitalist technological development, meaning its incrementalism, for the sake of exchange-value-measured 'new' markets.


So Okishio's Theorem is just capitalism. Got it :roll:

ckaihatsu wrote:I don't see any friction in what you're indicating:


Have you read his book on the matter? I mean this one:



You can see what it's about, and his central claims in the available introduction extract here:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Va ... frontcover
#15171023
Potemkin wrote:Empirical reality? No matter how many times we measure the speed of light in a vacuum relative to any number of inertial observers, we can never be certain that the speed of light is always and everywhere a universal constant for all observers. But the theory of relativity depends on the assumption that it is a universal constant. Not some of the time, not even most of the time, but all of the time. This is an assumption. Likewise, the laws of physics being the same for all inertial observers is an assumption; they certainly aren't the same for all non-inertial observers. Another assumption.

The difference is relativity is a theory that is critically questioned and tested constantly by other scientists. People are always trying to disprove the theory with evidence and Einstein would drop the theory in a heartbeat if evidence showed it was faulty, as would any scientist worthy of the title.

Many religious god-believers don't have this level of criticism for their own beliefs, it's the total opposite. They conveniently ignore facts and make up excuses for criticism/failures of their chosen beliefs and create loopholes to bypass logic and maintain steadfast faith in their beliefs without the evidence to back it up, not unlike most Marxists i've encountered.

A theory without evidence backing it up is just a bunch of scribbles on a page. Any theory needs to be tested, again and again, to prove it's robustness and usefulness. This is the basics of science, including social science.

Versions of Marxism have been tested in real world application numerous times and have almost always failed spectacularly. That doesn't mean some new version of Marxism won't work much better, but there's little to no actual evidence that it will either. Given the horrors previous testing has caused, going forward one needs to be EXTREMELY cautious at best, and foolishly naive at worst. Unfortunately I see a lot more foolishly naive Marxists than extremely caution ones, because they tend to have more blind faith and optimism than good sense, not unlike a Bible thumper.

I'm 100% for new thought experiments with the goal of improving society, but again proceed with caution because lives and livelihoods are on the line. Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot etc were overly optimistic fools. You don't inject an entire country with a totally new vaccine without some controlled trials first to see if it's likely to work.
#15171071
wat0n wrote:
So Okishio's Theorem is just capitalism. Got it :roll:



As I implied, it's *propaganda* -- it's capitalist *triumphalism*, because it's so one-sided and doesn't include the dynamic of capitalist *overproduction* and the declining rate of profit.


wat0n wrote:
Have you read his book on the matter? I mean this one:



You can see what it's about, and his central claims in the available introduction extract here:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Va ... frontcover



You may want to just stay on-track and make whatever points about the author that you want to make.


Unthinking Majority wrote:
The difference is relativity is a theory that is critically questioned and tested constantly by other scientists. People are always trying to disprove the theory with evidence and Einstein would drop the theory in a heartbeat if evidence showed it was faulty, as would any scientist worthy of the title.

Many religious god-believers don't have this level of criticism for their own beliefs, it's the total opposite. They conveniently ignore facts and make up excuses for criticism/failures of their chosen beliefs and create loopholes to bypass logic and maintain steadfast faith in their beliefs without the evidence to back it up, not unlike most Marxists i've encountered.

A theory without evidence backing it up is just a bunch of scribbles on a page. Any theory needs to be tested, again and again, to prove it's robustness and usefulness. This is the basics of science, including social science.

Versions of Marxism have been tested in real world application numerous times and have almost always failed spectacularly. That doesn't mean some new version of Marxism won't work much better, but there's little to no actual evidence that it will either. Given the horrors previous testing has caused, going forward one needs to be EXTREMELY cautious at best, and foolishly naive at worst. Unfortunately I see a lot more foolishly naive Marxists than extremely caution ones, because they tend to have more blind faith and optimism than good sense, not unlike a Bible thumper.

I'm 100% for new thought experiments with the goal of improving society, but again proceed with caution because lives and livelihoods are on the line. Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot etc were overly optimistic fools. You don't inject an entire country with a totally new vaccine without some controlled trials first to see if it's likely to work.



*Or*, humanity doesn't have the luxury of 'shopping around' and weighing Brand A versus Brand B -- contrary to the common phrasing around here, society isn't some kind of top-down clinical 'experiment', but rather it's mostly *emergent*, though structural, as according to *class* interests, dividing humanity against itself.

So excuse us for not 'scrubbing down' to the elbows on this one, but no one's doing intricate authoritative *surgery* in an operating room, on society. Rather it's enough to say that *capitalism* (and capitalist militarism) is the problem, and that anti-capitalist and anti-militarist approaches would all be *improvements*, whatever the particulars.
#15171072
ckaihatsu wrote:As I implied, it's *propaganda* -- it's capitalist *triumphalism*, because it's so one-sided and doesn't include the dynamic of capitalist *overproduction* and the declining rate of profit.


Or maybe even Marxian economists began to revise the economics of Marxism.

ckaihatsu wrote:You may want to just stay on-track and make whatever points about the author that you want to make.


I think you should read that part. I can't quote from it.
#15171075
wat0n wrote:
Or maybe even Marxian economists began to revise the economics of Marxism.



What are you referring to here exactly?


wat0n wrote:
I think you should read that part. I can't quote from it.



Okay, you clearly have no point to make yourself.
#15171079
ckaihatsu wrote:What are you referring to here exactly?


That whether the rate of profit has a tendency to fall or not depends on the technology used to produce. It's not something inherent to capitalism.

ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, you clearly have no point to make yourself.


I already did: My reading of that book, and he hints to it at the intro, is that Roemer translated Marxian economic concepts into neoclassical theory.
#15171096
wat0n wrote:
That whether the rate of profit has a tendency to fall or not depends on the technology used to produce. It's not something inherent to capitalism.



Nope -- you're harboring a misconception:



The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) is a hypothesis in the crisis theory of political economy, according to which the rate of profit—the ratio of the profit to the amount of invested capital—decreases over time. This hypothesis gained additional prominence from its discussion by Karl Marx in Chapter 13 of Capital, Volume III,[1] but economists as diverse as Adam Smith,[2] John Stuart Mill,[3] David Ricardo[4] and Stanley Jevons[5] referred explicitly to the TRPF as an empirical phenomenon



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_ ... it_to_fall



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wat0n wrote:
I already did: My reading of that book, and he hints to it at the intro, is that Roemer translated Marxian economic concepts into neoclassical theory.




Roemer's program was then to propose definitions of embodied labor time, for economies with more general production sets, which would preserve the CECP [Class Exploitation Correspondence Principle]. This led to the observation that, for general production sets, embodied labor time cannot be defined before one knows equilibrium prices. Thus, contrary to Marx, labor value is not a concept which is more fundamental than prices.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roem ... _economics



Roemer, according to the Wikipedia entry, is a hack, trying to *obfuscate* the labor theory of value by making a chicken-or-the-egg type of argument regarding 'First Cause' -- ignoring that labor is a *recurring* input at every step of capitalist commodity production, even over complex supply chains, over time.

Here's my own depiction of labor inputs into any aspect of capitalist commodity production:


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

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#15171102
wat0n wrote:
So all of those who dare criticize orthodox Marxian concepts are hacks? Well, then don't whine when it gets labeled as a religion :roll:



Did you really think that people would go with *your* version, the contrary, that all who criticize Marxist political economy are somehow *correct* -- ?

All you're doing is forwarding facile *characterizations* -- opinion-making -- without addressing any of the *content*.


Generalizations-Characterizations

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#15171106
ckaihatsu wrote:Did you really think that people would go with *your* version, the contrary, that all who criticize Marxist political economy are somehow *correct* -- ?

All you're doing is forwarding facile *characterizations* -- opinion-making -- without addressing any of the *content*.


Generalizations-Characterizations

Spoiler: show
Image


Showing that some of Marx's claims are actually dependent on many more assumptions than he realized or that prices themselves are necessary to understand exploitation (and Roemer actually claims a lot more than that) is not a failure to address the content.
#15171113
wat0n wrote:
Showing that some of Marx's claims are actually dependent on many more assumptions than he realized or that prices themselves are necessary to understand exploitation (and Roemer actually claims a lot more than that) is not a failure to address the content.



Market pricing of the resulting finished commodity -- good and/or service -- takes place *after* the production (process) of the commodity in the first place.

The prerequisite production of the commodity requires inputs of capital and labor, under capitalism, and if the labor power provided by workers is not proportionately compensated-for, by wages -- which it *isn't* -- then that means that laborers are being *exploited* for every hour that they work, as outlined in the 'Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends' diagram.
#15171178
ckaihatsu wrote:*Or*, humanity doesn't have the luxury of 'shopping around' and weighing Brand A versus Brand B

If you want to change society the burden is on you to show that what you support is going to be better than what you want to replace. If it's emergent and organic then we don't even have to worry about any of this and let organic pressures take its course.

So excuse us for not 'scrubbing down' to the elbows on this one, but no one's doing intricate authoritative *surgery* in an operating room, on society. Rather it's enough to say that *capitalism* (and capitalist militarism) is the problem, and that anti-capitalist and anti-militarist approaches would all be *improvements*, whatever the particulars.

Sorry but the particulars matter, because sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease.
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