astine

Marx: "Let us now take two commodities, for example corn and iron. Whatever their echange relation may be, it can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron, for instance 1 quarter of corn == x cwt of iron. What does this equation signifify? It signifies that a common element of identical magnitide exists in two different things, in 1 quarter of corn and similarly in x cwt of iron. Both are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is niether the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third thing. [...] As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value. If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour."

In other words, Marx excludes use-value (what normal economists call "utility") as being a factor in the price of a commodity, apart from needing to exist at all (he reduces its relationship to a boolean relationship,) and makes it a function of labor quantity. This is so central to his argument that it comes up in the first few pages of Capital.

No it doesn't. Having to poach employees to increase your labor pool doesn't mean that you are willing to raise wages without and bound. A food crisis is where an inelastic demand meets a hard supply limit, so prices can go up dramatically, but they don't go up infinitely, not even in a famine.

Supply and demand does not allow for unbounded rises in prices because demand is never infinite. Rather, prices go up to the highest amount demand will allow for. For things like food for which demand is inelastic, prices can go up pretty high and people will eat into their savings if they have to, but labor will more likely be limited by the marginal productivity of individual workers.

Thanks for those links BTW. Those events over in Europe do appear to be of real concern. But, given the nature of the source, it's hard to tell how representative they are.

Can you show one instance of this actually happening? I'm not aware of any and what does get banned seems to be a pretty far cry from that sort of thing. Honestly, this registers as more of a pretext than a legitimate concern.

Positive claims are about what is true. Normative claims are about what should be true, or rather what decisions we should make. Put another way, positive claims deal only with facts while normative claims deal also with values.

GP is saying that it's the data-scientist's job to give the executive the facts and it's the executive's job to decide what to do about the facts.

For a more concrete example, I'll tell you about something I have some experience with, commission systems. Commissions seems like it would be something that was straightforward to calculate but it's tied to business strategy and that's different for every company. Most companies for example will want to compute commissions on posted invoices, which makes the process much simpler because posted invoices are immutable, but I once built a commission calculator for a company years ago that often had a long gap (months) between a booking and when they could invoice the client, so they wanted to calculate commissions from bookings but only pay them when invoiced. Because bookings were mutable, and there were legitimate reasons to change a booking before you invoiced it, that, combined with a lot of fiddly rules about which products were compensated at which rates and when, meant that there was a lot of "churn" in the compensation numbers for sales reps from day to day; they're actual payment might differ from what they thought they earned. That was a problem that the company dealt with, the tradeoff being that they could show earnings numbers to the sales reps much more quickly and incentivize them to follow up with the clients on projects so that they could eventually be paid.

I remember another commissions situation where there was a company that sold a lot projects with labor involved. They were able to track the amount of labor done per project, but they compensated the sales reps by line item in the invoices, and the projects didn't necessarily map to the line items. This meant that even though the commissions were supposed be computed from the GP, there wasn't necessarily a way to calculate the labor cost in a way that usable for commissions so the company had to resort to a flat estimate. This was a problem because the actual profitability of a project didn't necessarily factor into the reps' compensation. Different companies that had a different business model, different strategy, or just different overall approach would not have had this problem, but they might have had other problems to deal with created by their different strategies. This company could have solved this problem, but they would have had to renegotiate comp plans with their sales reps.

There are off the shelf tools available for automatically calculating commissions, but even the most opinionated of them are essentially glorified scripting platforms that let you specify a formula to calculate a commission, and they don't all have the flexibility that manager might want if they wanted to changed their compensation strategy. And this is only one tiny corner of accounting practice.

Basically, when it comes to arithmetic very few accountants are out there manually summing up credits and debits. In large companies, the arithmetic has been automated since the 70s; that's largely what those old mainframes are still doing. But every company has a different compensation plan, different org structure, different product, different supply chain, different legal status, different reporting requirements, etc, etc, and that requires things to be done differently.

> What information do they use to validate numbers? Why is it not possible for today's AI to do it?

For an example, they would need to cross check with a sales rep and an engineer to makes sure that the engineer had not turned on a service for the customer that the sales rep had not sold. If that happened, they would have to figure out how to account for the cost. Given that the SOPs were written in plain English, I suppose it's possible that an AI might be trained to notice the discrepancy, but if you could do that, you could just as easily replace the engineer. And that didn't account for situations where the engineer might have had an excuse or good reason for deviating from the SOP that would only come to light by actually talking to them.

Also, accountants don't just track the numbers, they also validate them. Some of that validation can be done automatically, but it's not always cheeper to hire a programmer to automate that validate than to just pay a bookkeeper to do it. But even if you do automated it, you still need someone to correct it. The company I used to work had billing specialists who spent hours every week pouring over invoices before we sent them to clients checking for errors that were only evident if you understood the business very well, and then working with sales and members of the engineering teams to figure out what went wrong so they could correct the data issues.

In short, a typical accounting department is an example of data-scrubbing at scale. The entire company is constantly generating financial information and you need a team of people to check everything to ensure that that information is corrects. In order to do that, you need an understanding, not just of basic accounting principles, but also of the how the specific company does busines and how the accounting principles apply to that company.

There's a parellel in the early expeditions to Pompeii or Troy which did a lot to destroy the sites in question and destroyed a lot of knowledge in the process.

Huh? Yes it does. You can't go on a rant in favor of moral anti-realism and them criticize people for not having the right set of values. I mean, you can, but it makes you an idiot.

Plato's dialogues were works of fiction that used fictionalized versions of real people as characters in order to illustrate philosophical points. The guy who relates the story of Atlantis is Critias, one of the members of the Thirty Tyrants, a clique who ruled Athens for a while, and Critias claims that he got the story from his distant ancestor Solon who was one of the lawgivers for Athens. To a contemporary of Plato's this would be as if he'd written a story about George Bush, relating a story that he'd gotten originally from George Washington, about how the United States had once fought a war against a long-lost evil empire back in the bronze-age. You weren't supposed to think it was true.

1. https://news.yahoo.com/psychiatrist-colorado-movie-gunman-th... 2. https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/25/justice/sandy-hook-shooting-r... 3. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/107885790

If I was being generous, I would say that TOF was pushing back against the overwrought hagiography that often surrounds Galileo and his confrontation with the Church. It's true that the common story is an over simplified account and there are some persistent myths that have worked their way into the story over the years into in order to make Galileo look more heroic and the Church more villainous than they either actually was. The real story is a bit complicated.

But the Church really did ban heliocentrism and it really did punish Galileo for arguing for it. That's not in question. I feel that TOF's argument otherwise rests on a deliberate misrepresentation.

TOF's argument the Church was actually just smartly waiting for proof before it changed it's doctrines is a bit rich in that Galileo offered proof and was punished for it. Now, Galileo's proof was bad, but that's not why he was punished. If it was, the Inquisitors would have mentioned that and not simply accused him of heresy for arguing that the Sun stood still. Not to mention that this whole idea rests on the bizarre notion that science works best when you silence debate until proof can be provided

Ironically, that whole argument stems from a quote from Robert Bellarmine's letter to Foscarini, where he admits that Galileo has a point about not interpreting scripture in a way that is provably false. In that quote, Bellarmine isn't saying that the Church is waiting for proof, he's saying that while proof would force him to change his mind, he doesn't think such proof is possible so he may as well go ahead and ban Copenicanism anyway. It's real obvious if you read the very next sentence that TOF for some reason doesn't quote:

> I add that the one who wrote, "The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose," was Solomon. who not only spoke inspired by God, but was a man above all others wise and learned in the human sciences and in the knowledge of created things; he received all this wisdom from God; therefore it is not likely that he was affirming something that was contrary to truth already demonstrated or capable of being demonstrated.

In other words, he doesn't believe that Galileo or anybody else will be able to find proof that the sun stays still because that would contradict what he already believes based on his reading of the Bible!

So no, TOF is misrepresenting the stance of the Church in 1616. A lot of people repeat this because it looks like a clever debunking of a common myth, but it's actually more of bunking in that he inserts a lot of detail in order to disguise some blatant misrepresentation.