Dialectic refers to the process of reasoned argumentation or discussion where opposing viewpoints or contradictions are explored in order to reach a higher understanding or synthesis.
One side effect of dialectic is that the same sentence potentially holding multiple contradictory ideas within it. We're going to be investigating that idea a lot in this post.
Hagel's dialectic imagined that you would take the thesis, and antithesis and combine them to create a synthesis of the best of the thesis and antithesis.
Superposition essentially means where more than one thing is sitting in the same place at the same time. For example, in circuit analysis, superposition has the engineer calculate currents based on every individual energy source, and the current along a certain wire is the sum of all the different currents induced by all the different energy sources. All of the different induced currents are active at once. Quantum superposition is where before a measurement is taken a particle can be in multiple states at once and one is only selected once the measurement is taken causing the thing being measured to collapse into a set state.
I think the superposition of opposites in meaning is something Hagel's model doesn't account for. Instead of thesis and antithesis combining and collapsing into one new whole, the thing can consist of both the whole of the thesis and the whole of the antithesis.
One of the key problems with political discourse at the moment is dialectic -- The same speech can be heard two different ways because different groups hold different definitions for the same word. As an example, when a right-winger says "Make America Great Again", it's obviously a throwback to the cultural, economic, and familial success of the postwar period which is an undeniable truth. It isn't related to race, and during that time period it was a time of relative success for women and minorities as well as the majority. The left-winger hears a demand for a throwback to the racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise bigoted realities of the postwar period. That is also an undeniable truth, but it means you can't say the exact same thing to both groups and expect the same reaction, because they both hear different meanings for the same words.
"Defund the police" is another good example, because for some on the left, it's actually meant to imply reforms rather than actually shutting down the police forces (the implication being that money shouldn't be spent on abuses of power), but people on the right take it at face value and correctly point out that defunding police will lead to an increase in crimes because there won't be enough police to prevent such crimes.
I think many on the right could agree that there needs to be something done to respond to police corruption or negligence. One additional problem with dialectic is that some people on the far right do want a return to the bigotry of the past, and some on the left actually do want a complete defunding of police forces (except their secret police). This fact muddles things because now there's 4 meanings in essence, the positive meaning for the left, the positive meaning for the right, the negative meaning for the left, and the negative meaning for the right. And this is just one example.
This is one reason why longform content is growing in popularity, because the limitations of short-form content are exactly that meaning cannot be fully expressed in a short period of time. Prior to the current age, people like Peter Schiff or Ron Paul won large followings because they spent hours on end explicitly describing exactly what they mean when they say certain things, and the ideas they held had merit once described. Good long-form writers, or in the case of podcasts, good moderators or hosts, will ask obvious questions that often get neglected in short-form content, or will ask guests to explain terms that might seem obvious but may have the capacity for superpositions of meaning.
Twitter's evolution over the decades is a good example of the dangers of shortform discussion. People are forced to rely on shorthand that their intellectual tribe understands but may carry all kinds of baggage, so people of the same tribe understand the message, but there's a massive potential for misunderstanding from people who are outside the tribe. On the other hand, sometimes that's intentional, with people who want to express politically unpopular ideas without backlash, intentional dialectic is a good way to present one message to believers and another message to non-believers.
In one sense, I think a sort of intentional rhetorical dialectic is a common tool in politics. Take Barack Obama's famous "Hope" campaign. The vagueness of the lines are such that every individual might see them differently. For some, "Hope" might refer to extreme socialist policies, but for others it might refer to a pulling back of legislation such as the USAPATRIOT act and pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq. The vagueness and the overwhelming superposition of ideas that can be placed on such a word means it means anything to anyone and simultaneously nothing to everyone. Compared to a policy wonk such as Ron Paul, who had a list of concrete policies that someone would have to agree with or disagree with, it's much easier to run such a campaign. This is likely the genesis of the Kamala Harris "Vibes election" campaign, which could have worked if Harris herself was a more exciting candidate. Instead its hollowness only resonated with her hollowness.
If I'm being honest, superposition is something we must account for even within ourselves because sometimes we need to hold opposing positions that can't be directly reconciled. With respect to immigration, for example, you can understand that some hardworking people do deserve to come to the country and share in our wealth, but you can also understand that there must be limits on immigration to protect the country and the wealth of the nation. Both are true, both are opposing viewpoints, so if someone is to have a robust point of view they must carry both realities at once, and not try to reconcile them into a single simple answer. However, that's a sort of honest superposition, compared to an unintended or deceptive superposition I'm talking about here.
A famous example of someone trying to do a sort of "dialectic expansion" of a carefully chosen and specific argument is the Kathy Newman interview with Jordan Peterson. As an example, he carefully explains that because lobsters have been found to have hierarchies and they diverged from human evolution millions of years ago, it cannot be said that hierarchy is a uniquely human phenomenon we just need to convince ourselves out of, and instead it's an ancient mechanism. She attempted to expand that out to be "we should set up our society like lobsters" which is obviously not what Peterson was saying, and she did that many times in that interview in many points. Once such a dialectic expansion is successful, people will no longer see the original argument, but instead the new second meaning that's been successfully fused on top of the original argument. This is a great example because it's so clear and straightforward, and the only way it can be confused is to be trying to confuse it intentionally.
One example of a highly successful dialectic expansion is the tea party movement in the US Republican party. The tea party refers to the Boston Tea Party, which was a famous protest against taxes levied by England against the colonies, and was intended to invoke the idea of individuals standing up to a government that overtaxes its people and isn't percieved as providing commensurate services. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart successfully started referring to Tea Party Republicans as Tea Baggers, which is a reference to a vulgar act of slapping one's scrotum against a person's face as a means of degrading them. This is a particularly good example because the resulting divergence had no basis in the actual argument whatsoever and was just a puerile joke.
The biggest challenge for creators of longform content is that it's easy to use the long form not to explain a compelling idea at length, but instead to become a long indoctrination session of simplistic ideas or to introduce more rhetorical dialectic rather than dismantling it. For example, I was listening to a longform podcast about Donald Trump where the interviewee said something like "When Trump says he wants to bring prosperity to all, he's really alluding to this speech from Hitler where he says he wants to bring prosperity to all the aryans" -- and I started to nod in surprise "oh, that's what that meant?" before I realized that what the interviewee said just now with extreme confidence was totally baseless and false and solely meant to get normal people to hear normal sentences with sinister undertones. It takes discipline to flatten out ideas without building new towers using the same time and materials. Imagine how dangerous it is that some people will leave that podcast not realizing that they've been indoctrinated to a major false dialectic, and unless someone knows exactly how they were indoctrinated someone couldn't even begin to diagnose the problem, let alone resolve it. The individual would just be trained to hate you once they hear the innocuous sentence.
One final note on this topic is that at this moment in time you have opposing factions using the same word to refer to often conflicting ideas intentionally, and without malice. To the left, for example, "freedom" may be the government enforcing pronouns on the populace so a trans person can be "free" to live the life they feel most aligned with. For the right, the same program would be a violation of freedom because the speaker's ability to speak their percieved truth is eliminated. On the same political topic, for the right, "freedom" in women's sports is the freedom from people who grew up and developed with male hormones which cause skin, muscle, and bones to develop differently causing that person to be naturally stronger regardless of recent hormone use. For the left, "freedom" in womens sports is the freedom for people who identify in a certain way to participate in sports as if they are that thing. The right sees freedom of speech violated because the government colludes with megacorporations to delete speech they don't like. The left might see that same collusion as protecting freedom because certain messages could have a chilling effect on marginal populations. Holding one of these opinions on their own, or trying to neatly collapse such conflicts into a simple answer, they're all wrong. Only a superposition makes sense, and the word will always have a sort of dialectical power such that both sides of the argument claim the same hill and do in fact have that hill.
One side effect of dialectic is that the same sentence potentially holding multiple contradictory ideas within it. We're going to be investigating that idea a lot in this post.
Hagel's dialectic imagined that you would take the thesis, and antithesis and combine them to create a synthesis of the best of the thesis and antithesis.
Superposition essentially means where more than one thing is sitting in the same place at the same time. For example, in circuit analysis, superposition has the engineer calculate currents based on every individual energy source, and the current along a certain wire is the sum of all the different currents induced by all the different energy sources. All of the different induced currents are active at once. Quantum superposition is where before a measurement is taken a particle can be in multiple states at once and one is only selected once the measurement is taken causing the thing being measured to collapse into a set state.
I think the superposition of opposites in meaning is something Hagel's model doesn't account for. Instead of thesis and antithesis combining and collapsing into one new whole, the thing can consist of both the whole of the thesis and the whole of the antithesis.
One of the key problems with political discourse at the moment is dialectic -- The same speech can be heard two different ways because different groups hold different definitions for the same word. As an example, when a right-winger says "Make America Great Again", it's obviously a throwback to the cultural, economic, and familial success of the postwar period which is an undeniable truth. It isn't related to race, and during that time period it was a time of relative success for women and minorities as well as the majority. The left-winger hears a demand for a throwback to the racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise bigoted realities of the postwar period. That is also an undeniable truth, but it means you can't say the exact same thing to both groups and expect the same reaction, because they both hear different meanings for the same words.
"Defund the police" is another good example, because for some on the left, it's actually meant to imply reforms rather than actually shutting down the police forces (the implication being that money shouldn't be spent on abuses of power), but people on the right take it at face value and correctly point out that defunding police will lead to an increase in crimes because there won't be enough police to prevent such crimes.
I think many on the right could agree that there needs to be something done to respond to police corruption or negligence. One additional problem with dialectic is that some people on the far right do want a return to the bigotry of the past, and some on the left actually do want a complete defunding of police forces (except their secret police). This fact muddles things because now there's 4 meanings in essence, the positive meaning for the left, the positive meaning for the right, the negative meaning for the left, and the negative meaning for the right. And this is just one example.
This is one reason why longform content is growing in popularity, because the limitations of short-form content are exactly that meaning cannot be fully expressed in a short period of time. Prior to the current age, people like Peter Schiff or Ron Paul won large followings because they spent hours on end explicitly describing exactly what they mean when they say certain things, and the ideas they held had merit once described. Good long-form writers, or in the case of podcasts, good moderators or hosts, will ask obvious questions that often get neglected in short-form content, or will ask guests to explain terms that might seem obvious but may have the capacity for superpositions of meaning.
Twitter's evolution over the decades is a good example of the dangers of shortform discussion. People are forced to rely on shorthand that their intellectual tribe understands but may carry all kinds of baggage, so people of the same tribe understand the message, but there's a massive potential for misunderstanding from people who are outside the tribe. On the other hand, sometimes that's intentional, with people who want to express politically unpopular ideas without backlash, intentional dialectic is a good way to present one message to believers and another message to non-believers.
In one sense, I think a sort of intentional rhetorical dialectic is a common tool in politics. Take Barack Obama's famous "Hope" campaign. The vagueness of the lines are such that every individual might see them differently. For some, "Hope" might refer to extreme socialist policies, but for others it might refer to a pulling back of legislation such as the USAPATRIOT act and pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq. The vagueness and the overwhelming superposition of ideas that can be placed on such a word means it means anything to anyone and simultaneously nothing to everyone. Compared to a policy wonk such as Ron Paul, who had a list of concrete policies that someone would have to agree with or disagree with, it's much easier to run such a campaign. This is likely the genesis of the Kamala Harris "Vibes election" campaign, which could have worked if Harris herself was a more exciting candidate. Instead its hollowness only resonated with her hollowness.
If I'm being honest, superposition is something we must account for even within ourselves because sometimes we need to hold opposing positions that can't be directly reconciled. With respect to immigration, for example, you can understand that some hardworking people do deserve to come to the country and share in our wealth, but you can also understand that there must be limits on immigration to protect the country and the wealth of the nation. Both are true, both are opposing viewpoints, so if someone is to have a robust point of view they must carry both realities at once, and not try to reconcile them into a single simple answer. However, that's a sort of honest superposition, compared to an unintended or deceptive superposition I'm talking about here.
A famous example of someone trying to do a sort of "dialectic expansion" of a carefully chosen and specific argument is the Kathy Newman interview with Jordan Peterson. As an example, he carefully explains that because lobsters have been found to have hierarchies and they diverged from human evolution millions of years ago, it cannot be said that hierarchy is a uniquely human phenomenon we just need to convince ourselves out of, and instead it's an ancient mechanism. She attempted to expand that out to be "we should set up our society like lobsters" which is obviously not what Peterson was saying, and she did that many times in that interview in many points. Once such a dialectic expansion is successful, people will no longer see the original argument, but instead the new second meaning that's been successfully fused on top of the original argument. This is a great example because it's so clear and straightforward, and the only way it can be confused is to be trying to confuse it intentionally.
One example of a highly successful dialectic expansion is the tea party movement in the US Republican party. The tea party refers to the Boston Tea Party, which was a famous protest against taxes levied by England against the colonies, and was intended to invoke the idea of individuals standing up to a government that overtaxes its people and isn't percieved as providing commensurate services. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart successfully started referring to Tea Party Republicans as Tea Baggers, which is a reference to a vulgar act of slapping one's scrotum against a person's face as a means of degrading them. This is a particularly good example because the resulting divergence had no basis in the actual argument whatsoever and was just a puerile joke.
The biggest challenge for creators of longform content is that it's easy to use the long form not to explain a compelling idea at length, but instead to become a long indoctrination session of simplistic ideas or to introduce more rhetorical dialectic rather than dismantling it. For example, I was listening to a longform podcast about Donald Trump where the interviewee said something like "When Trump says he wants to bring prosperity to all, he's really alluding to this speech from Hitler where he says he wants to bring prosperity to all the aryans" -- and I started to nod in surprise "oh, that's what that meant?" before I realized that what the interviewee said just now with extreme confidence was totally baseless and false and solely meant to get normal people to hear normal sentences with sinister undertones. It takes discipline to flatten out ideas without building new towers using the same time and materials. Imagine how dangerous it is that some people will leave that podcast not realizing that they've been indoctrinated to a major false dialectic, and unless someone knows exactly how they were indoctrinated someone couldn't even begin to diagnose the problem, let alone resolve it. The individual would just be trained to hate you once they hear the innocuous sentence.
One final note on this topic is that at this moment in time you have opposing factions using the same word to refer to often conflicting ideas intentionally, and without malice. To the left, for example, "freedom" may be the government enforcing pronouns on the populace so a trans person can be "free" to live the life they feel most aligned with. For the right, the same program would be a violation of freedom because the speaker's ability to speak their percieved truth is eliminated. On the same political topic, for the right, "freedom" in women's sports is the freedom from people who grew up and developed with male hormones which cause skin, muscle, and bones to develop differently causing that person to be naturally stronger regardless of recent hormone use. For the left, "freedom" in womens sports is the freedom for people who identify in a certain way to participate in sports as if they are that thing. The right sees freedom of speech violated because the government colludes with megacorporations to delete speech they don't like. The left might see that same collusion as protecting freedom because certain messages could have a chilling effect on marginal populations. Holding one of these opinions on their own, or trying to neatly collapse such conflicts into a simple answer, they're all wrong. Only a superposition makes sense, and the word will always have a sort of dialectical power such that both sides of the argument claim the same hill and do in fact have that hill.
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tldr, sodomite.
ass is Exit Only.
boys are not girls.
girls are not boys.
learn basic biology, whore.
life begins when sperm meets egg.
-end_of_line
ass is Exit Only.
boys are not girls.
girls are not boys.
learn basic biology, whore.
life begins when sperm meets egg.
-end_of_line
@sj_zero @koropokkur HEWEGO YAW UNKUH SAM GAWN PAY FUH AWW DIS HERE STOOPIT SHIT NIGGA LIVIN HIGH ON DUH NICE CREW AIN'T DAT WAY WE PROUD BLACK FEDIVERSIANS YALL KNOW WHAT I'M SAYIN'