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]

Philosophical Graphs

Here are some graphs that I find useful in visualising some philosophical points.

First are five graphs of bifurcation:

Weekly Lesson (7)

“Applied mathematics is generally not an immanent science, precisely because it involves the application of pure mathematics to a given material and its determinations as derived from experience.”

-Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, §202 [my emphasis]

The Coming Unemployment Tsunami

People who are interested in the stock market will be familiar with technical analysis of stock charts, the reason this analysis works is the stochastic element in the stock charts-the results of the interaction between a large number of actors-the reason the analysis ultimately fails is that stock indices are not stochastic processes.

Leaving aside the question of why the technical analysis works or fails let us apply such analysis to a different kind of a chart, we examine the chart of employment-population ratio for the US for the last sixty years.

Weekly Lesson (6)

“From the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three:

• The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
• The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
• The law of the negation of the negation.

All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought.”

-Engels’ Dialectics of Nature.

Reviewing the Review - Supplement

Here are more graphs that I have been extracting from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2007 (available as an MS Excel workbook on the Internet at: http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview).

Graph 10: This graph shows oil production in different parts of the world, which has experienced significant decline. It plots total US production (thousands of barrels per day-right side) and the total production of Australia, UK and Norway (thousands of barrels per day-left side) from 1965 to 2006.

Reviewing the Review

Reading BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2007 (available as an MS Excel workbook on the Internet at: http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview), I was forced to convert the raw data into graphs to make any sense of them; this post contains these graphs.The graphs are presented without any conclusions or arguments, just an explanation of the data.

Graph 1: First we start with the price of oil. Two prices are plotted ($-left side) one for nominal price and the other inflation-adjusted price from 1861 to 2006.

Weekly Lesson (5)

“Freedom is just thought itself; he who casts thought aside and speaks of freedom knows not what he is talking of. The unity of thought with itself is freedom, the free will. …It is only as having the power of thinking that the will is free.”

-Hegel’s History of Philosophy, French Philosophy.

The Humility of Uncle Scrooge

Fed up with uncle Scrooge’s smugness Donald Duck decides to take his uncle and show him real wealth, so he takes him to the biggest ranch in Texas. The ranch owner starts showing them the almost Herculean dimensions of his ranch, really silly stuff, to the astonishment of Donald Duck and the indifference of uncle Scrooge who says nothing but only take notes. At the end they are shown a very small exit door, in contrast to the big entrance, where people who entered with a big head exit with a humbled disposition.

At this point Donald Duck expects his old uncle to exit humiliated at the great wealth just witnessed, instead he congratulates the rancher on his success and demands payment for the loan that the rancher took to buy the magnificent ranch; humbled by this revelation Donald exits from the small door.