what problem had more intellectual energy dedicated to it in the 20th century?

i think capitalism but the problem is significantly more complicated and the people involved were significantly less coordinated and so it largely washed out

@mutual_ayyde Why do you think capitalism? I was just looking at heat management for one of the rovers yesterday and it's much more advanced than I would have imagined and that's just a tiny thing.

@apodoxus the number of ostensible marxists counted in the millions over the course of the century alone

@mutual_ayyde @apodoxus if you want to count every ostensible Marxist as contributing intellectual energy....the entire US education was overhauled from the ground up to support the space program, so you also need to count every single HS calculus student since Sputnik.

@elfprince13 @mutual_ayyde This is an interesting point... Many who were educated to work on space-related stuff never actually got to work specifically at NASA. They ended up in Silicon Valley and Defense contracting and other stuff. Then there were the large masses which failed out of attempts at it (which there must be some equivalent in the masses of Marxists too.)

Counterpoint though: How big is the US educated population compared to the number of Marxists globally?

@apodoxus @mutual_ayyde ~64.6M HS graduates from 1959-2000, if I'm reading https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_219.10.asp (and using Excel) correctly.

Anyway, the mean, median, and modal contributions are all likely to be very low, but that's true for both populations.

@apodoxus @mutual_ayyde Also, in terms of actual progress - Marxists still don't have an answer to the knowledge and calculation problems, and in some sense this is definitional - anyone who is still a Marxist is likely not taking ECP seriously, and can't really be considered to be contributing intellectual energy.

@elfprince13 @mutual_ayyde This is both moving the goal post and a no true Scottsman fallacy. The question was just who put more thought into it, not who was more successful in their goal. It is not contested that the workers still do not own the means of production (which would be the result if anyone were successful at that.)

@apodoxus @mutual_ayyde I'm still talking about intellectual energy here- if you thought about it really hard and didn't produce any new insights, you might have produced intellectual heat, but you didn't produce any intellectual work.

@elfprince13 @mutual_ayyde Heat and work are forms of energy. Nobody asked who was more successful. You can spend years on a difficult math problem and still fail at solving it. That doesn't mean you didn't spend intellectual energy. Besides, you can't redefine the question *someone else* asked.

@apodoxus @mutual_ayyde my actual hypothesis is that most Marxists actually didn't think about it very hard, or they wouldn't be Marxists anymore.

@elfprince13 @mutual_ayyde Yes, you are transparent and disrespectful, but that is besides the point.

@apodoxus @mutual_ayyde wasn't really expecting to run into tankies in this comment section. I'm like 95% sure OP agrees with me here https://mastodon.social/@mutual_ayyde/109922767436649768

@elfprince13 @mutual_ayyde Touché but no I'm not a Marxists. I don't think it's respectful to devalue their efforts though but I suppose you are right if just taken literally.

@apodoxus @mutual_ayyde We may disagree on certain issues, but I have enormous respect for left-wing thinkers who have taken aspects of Marx (+other early communists)'s critiques of capitalism and combined them with microeconomic critiques of centrally planned economies, and created something entirely new in the various flavors of LWMA.

@apodoxus @mutual_ayyde Modern-day true Marxists are almost invariably tankies, and I view tankies the same way I view Nazis. Zero sympathy for people who do genocide.

Also recognize that there are a bunch of people who identify as Marxists mostly because they are on the left wing and don't know any better. I don't think it's rude to say they haven't thought very much about it, because the alternative is to believe they are tankies.

@elfprince13 @mutual_ayyde I'm with you until the last sentence. I do think it's disrespectful to say they haven't thought very much about it not least because it's false. Do you really think Ptolemaic astronomers and Aristotelian physicists didn't think very hard about problems just because they "failed"?

@apodoxus @mutual_ayyde If I met a Ptolemaic astronomer or Aristotelian physicist in the 20th century, *and they persisted in those views after being presented with modern physics*, I would say they didn't think very hard about it. And if after living for decades in the 20th century they somehow never encountered modern physics, I would have a hard time believing they were thinking about it very hard either, because any sort of inquiry would point them in the right direction.

@elfprince13 @mutual_ayyde

I suppose that's one way to not answer the question. And...

Ah yes, neoclassical economics, that branch of "science" known for its predictive power rivaling that only of quantum mechanics. That great branch of thinking based on a set of assumptions that are known to be and admitted to be literally false by its very founders! Paid by and for no less than those very same people whose interests it serves and which it praises so highly!

@apodoxus @elfprince13 1) there's a bunch of socialists who were involved in the formulation of neoclassical econ or who found it useful, Bockman's Markets in the Name of Socialism covers this in detail

2) Marx brushes off computational limits again and again and again. I can give you plenty of pull quotes showing this. This is a serious problem and for as flawed as they are, Austrian econ did actually try to rigorously think about these limits