| Wow, that's a lot to attribute to Hegel. I've never read him. Where should I start in order to not absorb the wrong interpretation that is apparently so prevalent? I have a historical bogeyman of my own: I think Newton--perhaps accidentally--encoded a lot more of his own non-mathematical perspective into his work on Calculus. These biases got baked into our current theory of "real numbers" (which are pretty spooky, once you get to know them, and don't strike me as befitting their name). This was done primarily because the pure mathematicians in the centuries following Newton couldn't justify his results, which was an embarrassment since his work was so useful that it obviously was true. As you say: > people are self-interested not truth interested So now we have this element of arbitrariness baked into our numbers, theories that underpin the sort of methods that the article refers to here: >Faith in this methodology certainly unites a much larger number of research psychologists than does any kind of commitment to a particular theoretical framework Somewhere between physics and psychology, an assumption that worked for Newton stopped working for us, but we didn't notice because we had only it to compare it to. I similarly extrapolate this accusation to wider political spaces (i.e. the failure of standardized testing to make the kind of differences we wanted it to, or the propensity of our economic system to generate jobs that don't actually matter). I see some parallels between our reactions to this piece, so I want to read Hegel and see if we're just similarly out there, or if we're out there in similar ways. |