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.
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.