[V]irtually every major national environmental organization continues to reject nuclear energy, even after four leading climate scientists wrote them an open letter last fall, imploring them to embrace the technology as a key climate solution. Together with catastrophic rhetoric, the rejection of technologies like nuclear and natural gas by environmental groups is most likely feeding the perception among many that climate change is being exaggerated. After all, if climate change is a planetary emergency, why take nuclear and natural gas off the table?
While the urgency that motivates exaggerated claims is understandable, turning down the rhetoric and embracing solutions like nuclear energy will better serve efforts to slow global warming.
So concludes an excellent op-ed in The New York Times. I remember reading in The Economist a couple years ago that America’s CO2 emissions had decreased largely due to fracking and the shale gas boom. Yet, many environmentalists continue to object to both natural gas and nuclear power as solutions to climate change.
Just one more reason why I think a serious scientific issue has been hijacked by political agendas.
New research has found a significant correlation between time spent online and decline in religious affiliation over the past few decades. Correlation is not causation, as the article points out, but the research feels that the relationship is causal based on the fact that most other possible factors have already been controlled for. These statistics are not iron-clad, but let’s assume for the moment that they are true. What should we conclude?
Although the article does not suggest this, the standard assumption is that when people go online they will find out uncomfortable truths about their religion that they were not taught growing up, and that this will have a double-impact that drives them away from their faith. First, the new information is intrinsically troubling. Second, the fact that they didn’t learn about it creates a sense of betrayal. (This theory is widely known among Mormons.) There’s a corollary to this which states simply that religion is kind of dumb and irrational, and so the more educated people are, the less religious they become. (That correlation is also well-known.) So perhaps the Internet is just educating people to a sufficient point where they outgrow religion.
I feel like I should pause for laughter at this point, as everyone spends a couple of moments thinking about what most actual Internet usage is like. Aside from Wikipedia, it’s basically lolcats, porn, and pointless political debates. Not exactly a crash-course in human intellectual history.
So I don’t take seriously the “Internet makes people too smart for religion” theory, but I do think that the “Internet airs religion’s dirty laundry” theory is worthy of consideration. But it’s still a matter of interpretation. The superficial response, of course, might be that more knowledge is always better and so people learn more and ditch religion and they should. But, thinking again of the Mormon intellectual community as a model again, one thing I’ve noticed is that there tend to be three levels of knowledge about religion.
The Surface
Folks at the surface really don’t know much about their religion at all, and as a result they are not really troubled by it. Conversely, they are probably not comforted by it either, at least on an intellectual level, although the emotional resilience of tradition can still be important and beneficial.
The Mantle
Go down beneath the surface, and things start to look weird and uncomfortable. As a simple example: folks who are born and raised in a particular faith almost always undergo a kind of cognitive vertigo when they one day see traditions and assumptions that they had taken for granted through the eyes of an outsider. All religions are kind of weird, just like all families are kind of weird, and this can easily lead to a sense of disenchantment and disassociation.
The Core
A lot of folks get as far as the mantle and decide that they have had enough, but other folks press deeper. They realize, for example, that their religion is weird to other traditions not because it has some defect, but just because everything that is foreign seems weird. Properly contextualized, that ceases to be an irritant and can even become comforting, the same way that we can treasure our family traditions even after we realize that they may have no real rational basis. These guys dig deeper into their respective traditions, unearth the problems, but then also find gems and insights that (for them) are worth the trouble.
In other words, even if we assume that the Internet is exposing people to a host of uncomfortable truths about their faiths[ref]And let’s be honest, that’s pretty generous given a lot of the conspiracy theory nonsense that is also out there about all religions.[/ref] there’s already a religious concept for that experience: the refiner’s fire. Nietzsche may be an odd source of comfort for the religious, but the old “whatever doesn’t kill you” line is actually probably more true of ideas than it is of people.
There’s a really ugly way this theory can be applied. You could say that the folks who don’t stick around are too weak or ignorant to handle the fire, and so good riddance. That’s taking the metaphor too far, however. I don’t buy into the judgmentalism behind it (we can’t really know the reason people have for leaving or for staying), nor the superiority behind it (notice that I didn’t specify any particular denomination or faith tradition, for example), nor the mean-spiritedness behind it.
All I’m saying is that sometimes the folks who have to struggle to retain or regain their faith are the ones who realize more than anyone else exactly what it is they have.
I had the opportunity to read and review David Bokovoy‘s (Ph.D., Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East) new book Authoring the Old Testament: Genesis – Deuteronomy for Greg Kofford Books over at Worlds Without End. The book description is as follows:
For the last two centuries, biblical scholars have made discoveries and insights about the Old Testament that have greatly changed the way in which the authorship of these ancient scriptures has been understood. In the first of three volumes spanning the entire Hebrew Bible, David Bokovoy dives into the Pentateuch, showing how and why textual criticism has led biblical scholars today to understand the first five books of the Bible as an amalgamation of multiple texts into a single, though often complicated narrative; and he discusses what implications those have for Latter-day Saint understandings of the Bible and modern scripture.
This is an incredible book for those interested in biblical studies, especially Latter-day Saints. Check out it out.
It’s always interesting to check the correspondence between the headline of an article and it’s URL. In this case, the headline reads: “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?” and the URL includes: “is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexist/.” That nuance, that it is designed to be sexist, is going to be important as we delve into this story and ask ourselves this simple question: where do we reach the point where silliness outweighs legitimacy in the discrimination olympics?
So here’s the first fact: virtual reality (like the Occulus Rift) tends to make some people hurl. In fact, a major design point for the upcoming Occulus Rift has been to figure out how to alleviate headaches and nausea that can arise with use. And here’s the second: women tend to react much more to VR then men. But does it really make sense to fling around the term “sexist”? Danah Boyd, who wrote the piece for Quartz, clearly thinks so:
That’s when a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality. Being an activist and a troublemaker, I walked straight into the office of the head CAVE[ref]Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, a 1997-era VR technology[/ref] researcher and declared the CAVE sexist.
So, to be clear, we’re now declaring inanimate objects to be sexist.
But wait, is this just short-hand for calling the designers sexist? If someone makes a technology that is designed to make women spew chunks, but not men, that would indeed register as “sexist” in my book. But what’s actually going on?
Based on some interesting research, Boyd concludes that men and women process two different cues for depth perception differently. Men rely on motion-parallax, which basically means that closer things move more than things that are far away. Look at the way the clouds in this video (the most distant) move the slowest vs. the tubes (the closest) which move the fastest. That’s parallax.
Women, by contrast, tend to rely more on “shape-from-shading,” which Boyd describes as “a bit trickier.” She goes on to describe it:
If you stare at a point on an object in front of you and then move your head around, you’ll notice that the shading of that point changes ever so slightly depending on the lighting around you. The funny thing is that your eyes actually flicker constantly, recalculating the tiny differences in shading, and your brain uses that information to judge how far away the object is.
It’s not just trickier to describe, however. It’s also much trickier to implement. This is obvious to anyone who knows even a little bit about computer graphics (lighting is hard!) and Boyd agrees:
It’s super easy—if you determine the focal point and do your linear matrix transformations accurately, which for a computer is a piece of cake—to render motion parallax properly. Shape-from-shading is a different beast. Although techniques for shading 3D models have greatly improved over the last two decades—a computer can now render an object as if it were lit by a complex collection of light sources of all shapes and colors—what they they can’t do is simulate how that tiny, constant flickering of your eyes affects the shading you perceive. As a result, 3D graphics does a terrible job of truly emulating shape-from-shading.
So that’s my problem with calling VR “sexist”. The problem isn’t, or at least isn’t primarily, that you’ve got a bunch of dudes who don’t care what women need and/or enjoy excluding women. The problem is that the kind of technology that men react to is computationally easierthan the kind that women react to. I’m all for recognizing that fact and working to mitigate it. Now that Facebook owns Occulus I think there’s no doubt that they are going to work hard to get to the bottom of that because you don’t want to alienate half your market. (When Occulus was a hardcore gaming device there may have been a perception that this wasn’t as important. Not anymore.)
I don’t mean to chalk this up to Boyd’s hyperventilating victim-complex. I know that editors choose headlines, and her concluding paragraphs are quite reasonable. But calling the technology itself sexist? Alleging, as the URL does, that it was designed that way? Come on, people. It’s getting silly.
Economist Mark Perry has a rather different take on the gender wage gap:
Economic theory tells us that the “gender occupational fatality gap” explains part of the “gender pay gap” because a disproportionate number of men work in higher-risk, but higher-paid occupations like coal mining (almost 100 % male), fire fighters (96.6% male), police officers (84.8% male), correctional officers (72% male), farming, fishing, and forestry (77.3% male), roofers (98.5% male) and construction (97.5% male); BLS data here. On the other hand, a disproportionate number of women work in relatively low-risk industries, often with lower pay to partially compensate for the safer, more comfortable indoor office environments in occupations like office and administrative support (73.3% female), education, training, and library occupations (73.6% female), and healthcare (75% female). The higher concentrations of men in riskier occupations with greater occurrences of workplace injuries and fatalities suggest that more men than women are willing to expose themselves to work-related injury or death in exchange for higher wages. In contrast, women more than men prefer lower risk occupations with greater workplace safety, and are frequently willing to accept lower wages for the reduced probability of work-related injury or death.
In a recent debate, feminist Camille Paglia made a similar point:
Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall. Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role–but women were not its author.
I’ve adjusted for hours worked (full-time vs. part-time), education choices, job choices, time off, etc. when analyzing the gender wage gap. Can’t say I’ve ever taken fatalities into consideration.
We’ve written critically about the proposal to raise the minimum wage here at Difficult Run before. (Quite a lot, in fact.) In one of the first pieces I wrote back in February I pointed out that there are basically three criticisms of the minimum wage hikes.
By raising the cost of labor, they eliminate jobs.
The benefits tend to go towards families that aren’t poor.
There are much better alternatives (like the EITC).
The minimum wage is not the most evil policy in the history of the world, obviously, but I really loathe it because it’s so obviously a bad idea and therefore the only reason it gets advanced is either because politicians are negligent or are intentionally exploiting public ignorance about how bad of a policy it is. If we can’t stop a policy like minimum wage, what hope do we have of rational policy in general?
There’s one more aspect to the debate, however, and that is the fact that as the price of human labor raises, the likelihood of replacing their jobs with robots increases as well. That’s the gist of a new post from Nate Silver’s 538 website: The Shift From Low-Wage Worker to Robot Worker. The article covers recent research by economists trying to see which jobs are most vulnerable to being replaced by robots. The short version? Millions of low-wage jobs are incredibly vulnerable to being replaced by robots.
These probabilities are estimated over a 20-year window, but the trend is clear: millions of American jobs are at risk of automation. In the long run, this is a good thing. In the long run, we don’t want anyone to have to do dull, repetitive, simple work just to put food on the table. In the long run, it would be great if all people worked relatively complex jobs that required minimal physical pain and injury and maximal creativity. The question is how we transition from where we are now. We need a gradual transition accompanied by ample educational opportunities. What we absolutely do not need is an artificial increase in the price of labor. Raising the minimum wage might be good politics, but it’s absolutely terrible policy. In addition to the three problems noted above, it can only serve to make the transition more rather than less gradual.
Criticisms of iPhones, Facebook, the Internet, etc. have been around for years. The complaint is often along the lines of “texting is destroying language” or “kids these days are antisocial because all they do is play on their phones.” People have been making strikingly similar claims for centuries and it has never really come to pass. My own skepticism of these claims and those similar emerged when I read science writer Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Plus, even if the criticisms were true, the benefits of these new technologies seem to far outweigh the costs.
An article from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley explores several recent studies that analyze the connection between technology and social capital. The conclusion?:
Taken together, these three studies hint at a compelling story—that social networking services can be a significant way of developing, maintaining, and strengthening our social connections, both online and in person. Using social networking services builds social capital in a number of ways: greater emotional support, lower levels of loneliness, and more feelings of connectedness. But these studies also contain a note of caution: Too many followers and too much participation can lead to information overload, depression, and feelings of disconnectedness.
The bottom line? I’m going to keep my iPhone and my Facebook account—but I think I’ll also keep setting limits.
When I wrote about Brendan Eich being forced out (he resigned, but under duress) from Mozilla one of the sources I leaned on was Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is an interesting voice because he is not only in a homosexual marriage, he was the guy who wrote the very first article in a major, mainstream outlet in support of legalizing gay marriage[ref]Here’s a reprint of the 1989 essay.[/ref] He has had some time to think about his initial response to the controversy and he’s decided “the more I have mulled this over, the more convinced I am that my initial response to this is absolutely the right one.”
Sullivan believes his response is “a vital one to defend at this juncture in the gay rights movement.” I, on the other hand, do not support gay marriage. So why is it that I like his post? It’s not just because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s because Sullivan is actually defending “liberalism” in its original, authentic sense. He’s preaching tolerance. We disagree on gay marriage, but I agree with him on the need for real tolerance:
The ability to work alongside or for people with whom we have a deep political disagreement is not a minor issue in a liberal society. It is a core foundation of toleration. We either develop the ability to tolerate those with whom we deeply disagree, or liberal society is basically impossible. Civil conversation becomes culture war; arguments and reason cede to emotion and anger.
He then goes on to say:
A civil rights movement without toleration is not a civil rights movement; it is a cultural campaign to expunge and destroy its opponents. A moral movement without mercy is not moral; it is, when push comes to shove, cruel.
This all makes me want to cheer. Someone gets it. But is Sullivan in the majority on this one? I do not have any scientific polls, but I have a strong suspicion that he is not, and that perhaps his protests represent some of the last gasps of genuine moral principle in a movement that long since sacrificed principle for expedience in its headlong rush to win by intimidating rather than convincing the skeptics. I think you have to read this entire piece to really understand just how far we’ve come in a few short years, and it’s that rapid transition that makes me think there is too much momentum to stop the train now.
The article starts with the claim that Christians who have opposed Disney movies over the years have focused on the wrong issues (e.g. modesty of the Little Mermaid) and not the truly nefarious message at the heart of Disney:
Nearly every Disney animated film for decades taught us the same core moral principle. In most contexts, it looked like “love is a feeling that must be acted on at all costs.” At a more fundamental level, though, it was “following your heart is always the right thing to do.” Disney didn’t make most of us a witch, or a pantheist, or a nude sunbather, but boy did it teach us to value nothing above our own desires.
It then argues that Frozen directly contradicted that message: “Instead, the entire plot of the movie is built around the two main characters unlearning these givens of Disney morality.” I’m not sure I 100% agree with the criticism of the criticism of past Disney movies[ref]I think sometimes Christian objections are caricatured as being just about trivial issues because the world can’t grasp their more substantive concerns[/ref], but I think the praise of this aspect of Frozen is absolutely right. I’m glad it’s the movie my kids insist on watching on repeat.
He killed her father and three brothers during the Rwandan genocide twenty years ago. In their faces there is pain. There is suffering. There is, as the powerful New York Times piece says, “little evident warmth…[A]nd yet there they are, together.” As one survivor said regarding a man who had participated in his brother’s murder,
Sometimes justice does not give someone a satisfactory answer — cases are subject to corruption. But when it comes to forgiveness willingly granted, one is satisfied once and for all. When someone is full of anger, he can lose his mind. But when I granted forgiveness, I felt my mind at rest.
Read it. And stare into faces that have experienced true evil and true forgiveness.
[V]irtually every major national environmental organization continues to reject nuclear energy, even after four leading climate scientists wrote them an open letter last fall, imploring them to embrace the technology as a key climate solution. Together with catastrophic rhetoric, the rejection of technologies like nuclear and natural gas by environmental groups is most likely feeding the perception among many that climate change is being exaggerated. After all, if climate change is a planetary emergency, why take nuclear and natural gas off the table?
