4 ms·
Yes, of course, if an experiment gets the wrong result, you declare the experiment faulty and try again. You should never let your ideas become polluted by empi
by mseebach 13y ago
Yes, of course, if an experiment gets the wrong result, you declare the experiment faulty and try again. You should never let your ideas become polluted by empirical evidence.
- deadairspace 13y ago> You should never let your ideas become polluted by empirical evidence. Maybe you should take a leaf out of your own book and revise what socialism actually is, and how the USSR wasn't that.
- mseebach 13y agoNo, it's not socialist, because the socialist nation is a utopia, and thus practically unreachable. The USSR (and DDR, Cuba, Zimbabwe, pre-Deng China and so on), however, is what you get when you make an attempt at reaching it.
- steveklabnik 13y agoThere are two major branches of socialism: utopian and scientific, actually.
- finnw 13y agoVerbal irony rarely works well on HN
- maaku 13y agoIt does when it's dressing up an actual, valid point.
- steveklabnik 13y agoEspecially given that Marxism is a science, and has undergone major changes as things are learned. Hence "Marxism" vs. "Marxism-Leninism" vs. "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism." Edison: "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."
- mseebach 13y agoIf Edison had killed even a millionth as many people failing to invent the light bulb as socialists did failing to invent socialism, I suspect he would have stopped trying.
- steveklabnik 13y agoCapitalism has also killed millions of people. Feudalism has killed millions of people. Mercantilism has killed millions of people.
- moheeb 13y agoDid someone just finish a game of Civ?
- dragonwriter 13y agoLeninism (and Trotskyism and Stalinism, depending on which side of the Stalinist/Trotskyist divide you fall on as to which one was simply fidelity to Leninism and which one was a substantial revision that unfairly characterized the other) and Maoism were not scientific revisions of Marxism; that is, they were not a result of Marxism being a hypothesis that was empirically tested, failed, and alternative hypothesis whih better fit the available evidence being offered and tested.
- steveklabnik 13y agoMy understanding is that ML and MLM _were_ considered to be legitimate, scientific advancements, and that's why it's just M, ML, and MLM, and why Trotskyism/Stalinism/Hoaxianism/Luxemburgism don't get the full-on status that the top three too. That said, I am not as educated on the topic as I would like to be. Also, let me just say that I never expected to read a post like yours or type a post like mine into an HN comment box, kudos.
- superuser2 13y agoAnd if an experiment gets the result you want, condescendingly dismiss any attempt to question its validity.