and just to say: clearly a hostility toward philosophy in general. attempts like michael’s to systematically rethink what marxism requires to have a consistent normative foundation simply fail to register as a contribution because of certain prejudices re: what it must be. lame.

#OtD 6 Oct 1976 the Thammasat University massacre took place in Thailand when state forces and far-right royalist mobs murdered dozens of student demonstrators who were protesting against the return of military dictator Thanom Kittikachorn stories.workingclasshistory.…

Oxford researchers argue that LLMs can never invent anything. It is mathematically impossible. They published a paper called “Theory Is All You Need" and it argues against the claim that computational models can generate genuine novelty or new knowledge. They analyzed the limits of generative ai, and the results are a brutal reality check for the idea that ai will replace human decision making under uncertainty. Here is why AI is stuck and human cognition wins: backward-looking vs forward-looking.. llms are probability machines that look backward at existing data. human cognition is forward-looking and capable of generating genuine novelty. human cognition operates theoretically "top-down" rather than "bottom-up" from data. the "data-belief asymmetry".. the researchers use the invention of "heavier-than-air flight" to illustrate this concept. an ai relies on data-based prediction, which is largely imitative. humans, however, use theory-based causal logic that allows them to hold beliefs that go beyond existing data. the intervention gap.. humans don't just process information; we use theory to practically "intervene" in the world. we engage in directed experimentation to generate entirely new data. ai-based models are theory-free and place primacy on existing data and prediction. tldr? AI uses a probability-based approach to knowledge and ia largely imitative. It can process data and make predictions, but human cognition relies on theory-based causal reasoning. The decades-old analogy comparing human minds and computers to mere "input-output" devices is fundamentally flawed.

It’s funny how nobody knows what “dialectics” are

Few know WWII was a intra-Hegelian debate that went horribly wrong.

Chris O'Kane presents the latest edition of Marx’s Capital as another attempt by translators to crystallize a particular political interpretation of Marx—this time, the novel synthesis misapprehended as a straightforward “Marx revival.” @chrisokane_nyc web.sas.upenn.edu/jhiblog/20…

My review of Gabriel Rockhill’s book substack.com/@alextglee/note…

As reflected in many of my posts over the past few months, I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory. What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria. I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978. Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely. Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies. But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies. I see this at the university. Do you think the corporation you deal with is self-serving and incompetent? Wait until you need to deal with the Graduate School at a private Ivy League university. The incentive problems (asymmetric information, career concerns, lack of timely feedback, pressure toward conformity) that cause dysfunction in the former are even more pronounced in the latter because of the absence of a profit motive, the sharpest disciplinary mechanism. At a very fundamental level, Marx got modernity wrong; Weber got it right. Time to spend much less time with Marx and much, much more time with Weber.