this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
8 points (70.0% liked)

Asklemmy

55051 readers
332 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
 

That is all policies and political structures are testable and tested to see their effect on those three (or other suggested) factors. If a policy doesn't reasonably work then it's simply not continually employed. I'm curious to see what factors others think ought to be used.

It seems most political systems now were built without science in mind and utilize it as an afterthought to help develop legitimacy for policies individuals want. Generally politics across countries seems deeply emotionally driven and not fact driven. That is people have a feeling that an idea is a good idea and then they cobble together whatever they can to support that point without any unified measure of good or better. Ideally it ought to be the other way around, fact or evidence informed policy generation.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Again, you're pretending I'm arguing against science. I'm not arguing against science, I am arguing against vulgar empiricist forms of science, and not dialectical materialist forms of science. I explained the limitations of refusing to acknowledge that science is interpreted by humans, therefore philosophy impacts the way we read results.

[โ€“] Zephyr@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Sure but can you give one singular real world example? I keep asking and again you are deeply convinced of your idea so I'm assuming you have many real world cases that exemplify exactly what you're talking about.

[โ€“] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I gave you an example already, one deeply relevant to our conversation considering it centers social science. The liberals that believe they can simply keep trying different reforms and testing them empirically are right along with you, but this ignores the gradual changes in how wealth is distributed and capital is concentrated.

[โ€“] Zephyr@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I mean that really doesn't have to do with what I'm speaking about though and I've already addressed that. Like yeah if one is set on a particular political philosophy or collection of policies that's going to seriously limit the solution space. That's more so the issue with that example than it being an issue with using the scientific method as a means of governance.

[โ€“] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not talking about political philosophy, but how we actually interpret empirically tested data. I never made the claims you believe me to be making.

[โ€“] Zephyr@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Let's get back to the beginning here. We were talking about Marxism-Leninism and how it is superior to vulgar empiricism and of course I've kept on with my original point from the beginning of using the scientific method to determine the best policies and political structures for governance, best in those that measurably increasing human wellbeing.

I guess you could bring in something like the double slit experiment and lot of esoteric science in which there isn't a clear way to tell which interpretation is the correct one or if it really maps to reality to begin with aka maybe the math works but that's not actually what's happening. Although I wouldn't see the connection between that and deciding how best to structure a city.

It really doesn't take much to see if people are healthy and happy, are prospering and living in a better state of being than they were before a policy was implemented.

[โ€“] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 hours ago

Okay, then returning, vulgar empiricism is inferior to dialectical materialism because the dialectical materialist understands how change occurs and develops, while vulgar materialists fail to. I gave an example of how at a macro level this manifests in either focusing on reformism or revolution and development.

Why don't you propose an example of how you would use the scientific method in practice to test for a better system, and we will see if you make metaphysical errors in your approach. After all, my point is that philosophy is simply how we view the world, and we all have a given philosophy, even if we don't acknowledge it, and it determines how we interpret the objective reality of the world.