Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: philosophy

  • Capital, Labor and Lincoln

    Somehow, 160 years after the war between the states, there are a lot of people who have forgotten (or never learned) that the Republican party that nominated Abraham Lincoln wasn’t exactly a capitalist. It has been fun to look at Lincoln’s writings, and quotations. I never wrote a test asking students to identify whether the author was Lincoln or Marx – but I kept these quotes on hand in case I ever decided to write an extremely tough test.

    “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Abraham Lincoln

    “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name – liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.” Abraham Lincoln

    “A commodity has a value because it is a crystallization of social labor. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production.” Karl Marx

    “Labor, being itself a commodity, is measured as such by the labor time needed to produce the labor-commodity. And what is needed to produce this labor-commodity? Just enough labor time to produce the objects indispensable to the constant maintenance of labor, that is, to keep the worker alive and in a condition to propagate his race. The natural price of labor is no other than the wage minimum.” Karl Marx

    “All that serves labor serves the Nation. All ^ that harms labor is treason to America. No line can be drawn between these two. If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool. There is no America without labor, and to fleece the one is to rob the other.” Abraham Lincoln

    “The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed.” Karl Marx

    “And, inasmuch [as] most good things are produced by labour, it follows that all such things of right belong to those whose labour has produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.” Abraham Lincoln

    “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Karl Marx

    “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Abraham Lincoln

    “The product of mental labor – science – always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.” I didn’t say I would give all of the answers – figure out who this sounds most like.

  • Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity

    I’m looking at reports of Artificial Intelligence citing things as fact “that ain’t necessarily so.” The basis for scientific method is to test assertions, that we need to verify our beliefs – testability is the determinant. Time was that bad air was believed to be the cause of malaria – we now know it’s a Plasmodium that is spread by mosquitoes. There are times when common sense just doesn’t go far enough to predict how changing one thing will affect the whole.

    I recall the lessons of the Kaibab deer – a spot where reduced predators and domestic grazing competition allowed the deer population to grow to a level where they were starving. The first level interpretation was that reduced predation would result in more deer. True enough. The second level thought was that the greatly increased deer population would exceed the Kaibab’s food production. True enough – and matching Thomas Malthus essay. Still, eighty years after these more obvious results were observed, later researchers were discovering the long-term effects that the huge deer populations had on the area’s Aspen trees. Biological intelligence and natural ignorance can combine very effectively.

    There’s the example of anthropic climate change – the basic number can be calculated. A gallon of gasoline is equivalent to about 30,000 calories or 114,000 British Thermal Units. Since we’re using – or to use a more nuanced word, burning – about 100 million barrels of oil annually, those calories pretty well have to be warming the planet. That conclusion is fairly obvious for biological intelligence. It’s probably just as obvious to artificial intelligence. Likewise, it’s fairly obvious that, without humanity and our recent technological progress, we wouldn’t be burning nearly that amount of oil. The problem is figuring out how much it affects things and where. Natural stupidity stops the thinking process with a conclusion that this is horrible and we’re all going to die. We need more analysis to better understand how much threat anthropic global warming is – or, if it might combine with the farmable lands in Canada and Russia to provide huge food surpluses. I don’t have the answer – but I don’t believe Greta Thunberg understands the question.

    The strength of an Artificial Intelligence application is that it can review the literature on a topic with amazing speed. The weakness is that – so far, anyway – the application isn’t nearly so good at telling good data from bad. It’s not enough to be the fastest – you also need to be the most accurate – and Artificial Intelligence needs to be protected from natural stupidity.

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