"Dialectics"?

The LW survey says about 1 in 4 of us is a communist

No, it doesn't. In the last LW survey, 0.7% of respondents identified as communists. Perhaps you're talking about the 30% that identified as "socialist"? But "socialism" in the survey was defined as support for a highly redistributive, socially permissive political regime, like they have in Scandinavian countries. That doesn't imply allegiance to Marxist doctrine, or knowledge of it.

As for the idea of "dialectic", Marx got it from Hegel, and a full understanding of Hegel -- if it is possible at all -- is not something that can be effectively communicated in a comment or short internet article, I think (this might help, but probably not). As a rough approximation, though, the dialectical method is basically just systems thinking.

It's presented as an alternative to the analytical method, which involves breaking a system down into parts and attempting to understand each part individually. The idea governing analytical thinking (says the proponent of dialectic) is that the intrinsic nature of the parts can be understood prior to figuring out how they fit together to form the whole.

Dialectical thinking, on the other hand, is based on the idea that the concrete nature of the parts cannot be understood without understanding the role they play in the whole, the relationships between them. So the analytic project, which focuses first on understanding parts considered individually, is doomed to failure, because it ignores the extent to which the overall context is essential for our understanding of the nature of the parts.

"Dialectical materialism" in Marxist thought is basically just an application of this dialectical thinking to economics. One could approach economics analytically by first, say, constructing a model of individual economic agents, and then trying to figure out what happens when these agents interact under certain conditions. The proponent of the dialectical method (like Marx) would, however, insist that this is mistaken. Human nature and human needs cannot be understood in isolation. They are a product of the socio-economic context, just as the socio-economic context is itself a product of human nature and needs, and the individual elements and overall context are constantly changing in response to one another. So to truly understand the dynamics of the economy, you need to approach it from a systems perspective. You need to start by understanding the historical dynamics of the interactions and relationships between elements of the system and how that effects the evolution of the natures of those elements, rather than starting with a static model of the individual elements and only then moving to an analysis of their interactions. The natures of individual elements are constituted by their participation in the system, and they change as the system evolves, so you shouldn't treat those individual natures as logically prior to the system.

So that's a quick and clumsy attempt at explicating what the dialectic method is all about. As for whether the method is useful: There is something right about the idea that focusing purely on the analytical method can lead to mistakes, but a complete repudiation of this very useful pattern of reasoning also seems to be a mistake. It seems to me that the dialectical method (and systems thinking in general) should be regarded as a useful complement (and often corrective) to analytical thinking, but not as a wholesale replacement.

(Reminds me of a joke. Not sure if it will survive translation and internetization, but let's try.)

Two university professors talk with each other, and one of them says: "You know, I have this problem, and it's bothering me. I teach dialectics for years, but I don't understand what it really means."

The other professor, helpfully: "That's easy. I can explain it to you right now!"

The first professor: "No, thanks. I can explain it, too."

Not quite what you are asking, but. From what I recall from reading Engels' bastardized version of Hegel long ago, his "dialectic materialism" is not a thinking tool, but a meta-thinking caution. Of course this is neither Hegel's dialectics, nor the dialectical method in general. With this caveat:

• What Engels called "quantity changes to quality", or some such, is just a statement of emergence, without explaining the reasons why it is so ubiquitous. A mathematical model of why and how accumulating many relatively simple but interacting entities results in sudden appearance of unexpected new complex behaviors once a certain vague threshold is exceeded is still an open problem, as far as I know. The "caution" here is that you should expect emergence when scaling things up, or even changing things incrementally, so you better plan for it. Unfortunately, this caution is neglected almost universally.

• "unity and conflict of opposites" or however it is stated is an observation that what on the surface appears as a stable equilibrium is nearly universally a quasi-equilibrium where two or more opposing forces just happened to balance for a relatively short time. The caution here is against believing that the apparent stability during a certain time period will persist forever. This applies to politics, physics, economics, climate change, what have you. It is, too, nearly always ignored. For example people tend to believe that democracy is the best and final form of governance, or that US dominance will last forever, or that climate will never change, or that the laws of nature are immutable, or that cryonic or Christian resurrection will be the final happy state of humanity, not to ever go bad again, or basically any other "truth" about the world.

• "negation of the negation" is an example of the "pendulum swinging" between the said opposites, when there are only a couple of them. Seems like a wild oversimplification.

EDIT: Wikipedia attributes this interpretation to a few mildly famous evolutionary biologists.

Also, I've read through most of the sequences, and it didn't use the word dialectics in there at all, which seems strange if it's such a useful thinking tool. Is there something wrong with it as an epistemological practice? Is the word just outdated?

Analytic philosophers generally don't like it. On the other hand continental philosophers and postmodernists still use dialectics. Dialectics has no real place in the Bayesian framework that Eliezer advocates.

The David Stove piece that Richard Kennaway links to is important, wonderful, and very funny, but doesn't shed much light on Hegel, (Why on earth is he sometimes considered the greatest modern philosopher?!) and no light on dialectic, in the Hegel sense. (There is also the not-unrelated Plato sense; the dialogue model of philosophy; philosophy as a conversation, analyzing, developing, refining as it flows on.)

William James' essay On Some Hegelisms (in The Will To Believe) is very good on Hegelian reason and logic - James noticed remarkable similarities between Hegel's reasoning and his own insane thoughts while tripping on laughing gas, which he recounts with extraordinary candour and.. well, can you imagine an academic philosopher or psychologist of today writing such a thing?! He is onto something else - Marxism and Hegelism, like other huge and obscure systems, seem addictive and hard to escape from once inside, "lifelong romances", judging by their true believers.

Contra Chomsky, I do have a foggy idea of what it is; I studied it many years ago in some detail. I've done, among other things, a whole course on Hegel's Philosophy of Right, (given by an extremely sympathetic-to-Hegel Marxist) which examines many levels of society, community, politics, law, etc, in a way similar to pragmatist's excellent description, only with a dozen or so of these levels in a chain, or ladder, each passing to the other, because unsatisfactory or incomplete in its own terms. Thus Hegel's doctrine of everything being contradictory, except everything. (I was tempted to put that second 'everything' as 'Everything', then before I know i will be putting '-in-itself' after words to try to clarify them etc... hehe. A slippery slope.) I even once read McTaggart's Studies in Hegelian Dialectic with enjoyment and apparent understanding.

Hegel's dialectic seems to me as much a method of exposition, of telling ('just so') stories of the evolution of levels of complexity in a system, as a revelation of structure. I think experiencing the feeling of climbing one of these ladders of multi-level explanation gives the essence (or at least, appeal) of it better than an analysis from outside can. I highly recommend reading R.G. Collingwood's Speculum Mentis (1924), which passes 'up' through the realms of art, religion, science, history and philosophy in a recognizably Hegelian way. Only it's written delightfully, with great clarity and insight, unlike nearly all texts in the Hegelian universe. E.g. the chapter on art is one of my favourite things ever written about the nature of art and artists.

James again, on Hegelian dialectics : "The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of this procedure, someone will accuse you of misunderstanding it." At least Hegel has the partial excuse of not using the term, but his willfully obscure writing has done, and goes on doing and inspiring more mischief in the world than is at all easy to believe. Santayana's Egotism in German Philosophy (1915) brilliantly and entertainingly dissects the whole tradition, from Leibniz to Nietzsche, after which Nazism seems an unsurprising next step.

On the whole, I suspect ChristianKl is right (even generous) when he says "the word appears like it doesn't appear to pay its rent and doesn't help us to understand things better and it's probably more useful to frame the issues differently."

Few communists would be useful sources of information on Chris Sciabarra's views on dialectics, as he is an Ayn Rand scholar and libertarian. He has studied Marx, but few Marxists would have studied him.

If the Marxist commentary on Stirner is any indication, even the commentary available will have next to no value.

Advocates of dialectic thinking / politics claim an idea (thesis) will meet an opposing idea (antithesis) and the outcome (synthesis) will be closer to truth / right.

Like Karl Popper, I disagree. An idea meeting a counter-idea might (hopefully!) result in being able to abandon an error but there is no assurance it will generate facts.