Weekly Lesson (12)

“A preoccupation with originality destroys originality itself, and true independence is given only to those who do not stop to think of the possibility of not being independent. Only the feeble talk of their strength of character. And only the man who is afraid of being easily discomfited is afraid of exposing himself to the influence of others. Current preoccupation with originality is a preoccupation with form. A man who has any real content will not worry unduly about originality. Preoccupation with form leads to baseless fabrications and emptiness.”

-Nikolai Chernyshevsky [my emphasis].

The Magical Jet Engine and Global Monetary Disconnect

When engineers were developing the jet engine they encountered a very strange phenomenon: while holding the fuel level, the input to their system, constant the engine at some point starts to turn faster, the output to their system; to avoid an explosion they would lower the fuel level, but the engine would keep on turning faster. At that point the engineers would stop the flow of fuel and still the engine would keep on going faster for a while and then power down.

This strange phenomenon was not only a violation of physical laws (conservation of energy, etc) but was in stark contrast to what engineers have been doing since the first steam engine: engineers usually work on getting output from their input and not the other way around. After much testing they had no other choice but to take the engine apart and see what was happening inside; tests, finally, showed the problem was in the flow of the fuel inside the fire chamber.

Weekly Lesson (11)

“It is not so much from as through slavery that man acquired freedom.”

-Attributed to Hegel’s History of Philosophy.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Society

There are certain actions that have a short-term gain but a long-term loss such actions are attractive but deadly. When a person commits a sin he usually does it to attain a short-term pleasure, but all sins have a long-term pain and that’s what makes them sins.

Social sins are not the sum of people’s sins, they are sins on the social scale and not the individual scale, of course all social phenomena must manifest themselves on the individual scale, each individual participates in every social phenomena.

The time scale for social phenomena is not the scale of the individual, usually actions that are committed by one generation have results that manifest themselves in the next generation, so that social sins might not function as a sin for a single individual who enjoys the pleasure and leaves the pain for others; those who live too long will view their age as a curse when they suffer for the deeds of their youth.

If we would rise from the individual level to the social level and view society not as the sum of all its individuals but rather as a living organism with a life of its own, then we can view the actions taken by society, as a whole, and the consequences of these actions on society and its well-being. When the actions of society have a short-term pleasure and long-term pain then we can call them social sins.

Here are the seven deadly sins of society:

Weekly Lesson (10)

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

-Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—Section I [my emphasis].

The Fable of the Cannoneer and the Observer

The Fable

A cannoneer sets up his cannon on a high plateau and starts firing cannonballs into the valley below him. His cannonballs are all alike but for every shot he varies the elevation of the cannon and the charge-the charge affects the velocity of the cannonball as it leaves the cannon-according to a pattern set in advance.

Science would say that an observer in the valley who would observe where the cannonballs hit the ground and how fast they are travelling would be able to deduce the elevation and charge used by the cannoneer, thus deducing the pattern used to vary them and subsequently predicting where the next cannonball would fall.

In practice an observer placed in the bottom of the valley measuring the velocity of the cannonballs would discover that they all hit the ground at the same velocity! All cannonballs would be moving at their terminal velocity, because air friction would reduce the velocity if it is higher and gravity would increase it if it were lower than terminal velocity.

Weekly Lesson (9)

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

-Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy-Preface.

The Passenger Pigeon and the Coming Economic Crash

There was a time when there were millions upon millions of passenger pigeons in North America, now there is none. Hunters shot them in the second half of the nineteenth centaury. It seems crazy that people kept on hunting them to extension.

One wonders how they could keep on hunting them while their numbers declined? It seems as if people had a personal grudge against these pigeons, but reality is rather different:
 

Weekly Lesson (8)

“Truth may be ascertained by several methods, each of which however is no more than a form. Experience is the first of these methods. But the method is only a form: it has no intrinsic value of its own. For in experience everything depends upon the mind we bring to bear upon actuality. A great mind is great in its experience; and in the motley play of phenomena at once perceives the point of real significance.”

-Hegel’s Shorter Logic, §24n [my emphasis]