/edu/ - Education

What are the best books that provide an introduction to economics and economic theories/concepts?
These books don’t necessarily have to be socialist/communist.

I hate G.E. Moore so much. His entire career was built off of declaring unfounded assumptions as true because, just, like, come on man. Trust me.

Look at his argument against hedonism. Henry Sidgwick says that "good" only exists as an objective property in one context: within conscious experience. He argues that beautiful objects cannot have any value in the external world, and that only the images of beautiful things within a mind are beautiful. In other words, he argues that things are only beautiful when they are perceived. G.E. Moore says this isn't true, because he imagines a world that he thinks looks nice, and then another world that he thinks doesn't, and says it's just intuitively obvious that the first is objectively better than the second! But you're still just comparing things in your mind, not things in the real world! The only thing you've demonstrated is that it's better for you to think about the first world than the second, not that the first world contains any objective quality that makes it better than the second! Someone else with opposite aesthetic tastes to your own could think about both worlds, and come to the opposite "intuitive" conclusion! You haven't provided any evidence for your assertions at all! It's madness! And they let this guy into Cambridge?

G. E. Moore's dogmatic adherence to intuition will forever live in infamy in one of the worst arguments in philosophical history, dwarfing his already quite stupid argument in favor of objective beauty. He claims to prove that we can be certain about the existence of the external world and that all skeptical hypotheses are false, because… the external world exists and all skeptical hypotheses are false. He just declares it, and so therefore it must be true. No epistemology needed. Damn. Why didn't Descartes think of that? Just think really hard that something is true, and then it must be true.

Ray Monk called him "the most revered philosopher of his era." Kill yourself Ray Monk. Fuck G. E. Moore and fuck intuitionism.

I read this article and it claimed that leaders of the anti-gov protesters were acting entirely in self interest and that majority of casualties were soldiers of the PLA who were murdered by the protesters when they tried to solve things peacefully.

Is this true? I don't trust western propaganda one bit but this is the tiananmen square massacre!? I don't want to jump to conclusions right away. What are your thoughts on this?

I also tried to check the sources and I got a 403/404.

website:
https://www.liberationschool.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt/

pdf:
http://76i2c3hn55fcj5nut3tqlboqqbbh23zvphv7lefk3vftpx6wketlanyd.onion/leftypol/src/1682222954384-0.pdf

What are the best historical examples of ousting concillatory/bourgeois leaders from the trade unions? A few specific events and detailed context would be incredibly helpful as compared to the profound but broad insight that Lenin's works have. I don't expect people to write essays here, just topic to look into since just searching up "change" or "resign" along with unions comes up dry on material to study.

It was a dress rehearsal, without which the final victory of the proletariat in October 1917 would have been impossible. (Lenin)

The revolution of 1905 came as a surprise to everyone, although Russia had been going to it for a long time. For example, the American historian Richard Pipes considers it a prologue to the student unrest of 1899. The Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander Izvolsky believed that the tsarist regime began to collapse even under Alexander III, and the publicist Mark Vishnyak counted the end of the autocracy from the mid-1870s, when Alexander II stopped the Great Reforms and decided to" freeze " the country. Russia and the ruling dynasty could only be saved from revolution by the introduction of a constitutional monarchy. But the last Romanovs, in an effort to preserve the unshakable autocratic foundations of their power, eventually lost everything and led the country to the catastrophe of 1917.

Interactive map of the 1905 revolution
https://libcom.org/history/interactive-map-1905-revolution

So as it turns out, I actually know very little about imperial Japan, aside from very surface level things such as attempting to become a new colonial power. The only thing I know is that it didn't have a concrete racial science like Germany had developed under the nazis, although I could be completely wrong about that since I learned about that from a reddit post. I'm actually still unsure if it had a concrete ideology or rather a mishmash of idealogies but I have no idea if that's correct either.

If I got any of the above wrong feel free to correct me, and I'm also wondering if there are any good sources for learning something about this.

This has annoyed me for a while and I would like to have addressed this for people who are also interested in this subject. I am not studied in physics and specifically quantum physics. I just take a general interest in this subject on the periphery of all the other things I am occupied with. When learning about physics through popsci videos and occasionally reading articles on the matter it has always bothered how nonsensical ideas and contrived theories are spread on this subject, and that shit needs to die.

You‘ve probably heard claims before such as
<„Consciousness collapses the wave function“
<„The collapse of the wave function produces a parallel universe for each possible outcome“
<„A particle could be anywhere until it is observed“

Much of this is straight up bullshit and some claims are an aberration of technically correct statements turned fantastical and far fetched.

First of all, „observe“ is misleadingly phrased. This gives credence to a consciousness-centered explanation of the wave function‘s collapse as people think of a person looking at something when they hear the word „observe“. By „observe“ physicists actually mean that a device physically interacts with something to measure a physical property. We aren‘t simply looking at something when we „observe“, instead we are physically interacting with it.

Additionally, the wave function isn‘t real. The way this term is used it makes it sound like it‘s a physically existing entity in the world. It isn‘t. The wave function is a mathematical abstraction that describes that we approximately know where, for example, an electron is probably going to be, whilst lacking precise knowledge where exactly it is UNTIL we have „observed“ it, i.e. physically interacted with it through a device that pinpoints this incredibly small object that we could otherwise not locate. The „collapse“ of the wave function is having moved from probabilistic knowledge to discrete knowledge. „Collapse“ yet again makes it sound like as if we are dealing with a materially real thing when in fact the term is just a mere abstractions describing the amount of knowledge we have about something on the quantum scale.

The wave function is not collapsed by consciousness. Your consciousness is the emergent product of neurochemical processes inside of your brain that are stiPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

New chart thread where you can dump your charts about books, drop everything you have off charts, old chart new charts, let's try to concentrate all things here, for future use.

Postmodernity is not an "ideology" but an advancement of material conditions for the age of digital technologies, which increasingly simulate Reality and thus cause an ontological shift which reverses the order of production, which now begins in the superstructure (mass culture, mass media, the "spectacle" of late capitalism and so on) and then flows into the affective instruments of (post)industrial nodes of distribution. This is a direct reversal of the Marxist dialectic, where now the unrepresentable base of production is the web of public interest, democratised along lines of free markets, which then flow into machines of production to give abstraction to the "real movement".
Today, the qualitative virtuality of culture leads in productive capacity, which gives false pretence to the necessity of industrial labour. The truth is that a youtuber and their data are more useful today than any warehouse slave. This is the postmodern turn, where all things real have become unreal, so that the very term has been overcome. We can no longer speak of Reality with authority - like Zizek says, ideology is imagining we have escaped the matrix, when the truth is that every red pill is actually a double-dosage of blue pills, since it gives the illusion of escape. There is no escape from The Wired of the Deleuzean "new earth", which has ensnared the earth within the capacities of its magnetic mantle, giving life to the artificial and artificializing life.
This is sustained by Keynesian mediation, which maintains crises of overproduction and overemployment, such as FDR said after the new deal, "I have saved capitalism", but of course, capital is the agent, which has saved itself by wrapping itself into the state structure, amplifying its reach over the world. As Keynes says in his prophetic tone: "in the long run, we are all dead".
So its good to accept the attitude of postmodernity, which embraces play over purpose, as nihilism broadens by the extraction from the well of abstraction that it builds itself upon. Today we have the multiverse of multimedia involutions, reflected in quantum mechanics and cinematic representation. Reality is expanding like the dark energy ripping the universe apart faster than the speed of light.
You imagine communism, but what does it look like in contradiction to today's progress? the worst among you idolise poverty as a sign of "authenticity", but isn't this already wrapped in the cloak of self-deception, like the PMC who Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Can you recommend any material so I can better understand his work? I have a hard time wrapping my head around Sein und Zeit. Do you know good lectures, introductions or guides that you can recommend for that?