Month: May 2016

Transgenderism

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I want to visit this topic briefly because, while the subject never seems to leave the news, the fundamentals of the subject come up rarely. In keeping with the confusion that reigns regarding many subjects, transgenderism ultimately is not a question of science. Rather, the question lies in philosophy. I would sum up the question this way: What is the really real which defines a person’s identity? More specifically, in a mismatch between the body and the mind, is the body or the mind in error?

For this reason, the scientific facts of transgenderism only make sense in the light of choosing an answer to the above philosophical question. The possession of a penis or a vagina only proves definitive if you have answered the above question with “The physical aspects of our body define our identity.” Conversely, the fact that transgender people often possess a brain structure somewhere in between men and women definitively rules in this case only if you have first answered “The mental defines our identity.”

In other observations, the debate over transgenderism has seemingly brought gender essentialism back to circles from which it was long ago banished, because you cannot be something unless that something has fixed traits. One clever professor and journalist caught onto this trend during Caitlyn Jenner’s transition:

jenner comment

Now, what is my opinion? I identify the real with the physical body. The topic of transgenderism is, so far as I can tell, the only subject where we identify the real with the mind. When a person experiences a phantom limb, we all identify the really real with the fact that they lack a limb, not with their mind which believes the body still has that limb. On the flip side, when people profess a desire to amputate a healthy limb based on their mental image of themselves as an amputee, we do not amputate the limb because, once more, we identify the body as real and the mind as in error. We also show an abhorrence to amputating a healthy limb based on desires. I believe, in all cases except transgenderism, we unanimously identify the real with the body for good reason. Namely, a common human experience is the individual (and sometimes even the collective) mind in error compared what is real. Making the individual mind into the sole arbiter of the real cannot help but lead to conclusions both absurd and damaging.

As a final thought, I do not want to leave this subject without acknowledging that an immense amount of human suffering is bound up in this topic. We’re not just discussing abstract theories of the really real. We’re discussing people’s lives. I try to be sensitive to that fact. I doubt my opinion will change on this subject, but I am always open to people sharing their experiences because, even if no one changes their opinion, I find it helpful to know what people are experiencing.

A Grand Fundamental Principle

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DTS_Photography_Movie4

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Elder Marvin J. Ashton gave the first talk of the Friday afternoon session in October 1972, and it was fantastic. What Is a Friend? is timely in so many ways, and is one of my favorite talks since starting the General Conference Odyssey last year.

One of the things I’m sure people noticed when reading it, is Elder Ashton’s push back against the conventional wisdom that “A friend is a person who is willing to take me the way I am.” In contrast to that view, Elder Ashton taught that “we are something less than a real friend if we leave a person the same way we find him.”  He expounded:

There seems to be a misunderstanding on the part of some men today as to what it means to be a friend. Acts of a friend should result in self-improvement, better attitudes, self-reliance, comfort, consolation, self-respect, and better welfare. Certainly the word friend is misused if it is identified with a person who contributes to our delinquency, misery, and heartaches. When we make a man feel he is wanted, his whole attitude changes. Our friendship will be recognizable if our actions and attitudes result in improvement and independence.

This became the central theme of the talk; friendship requires that we be willing to

  1. take a person as they are and
  2. leave them improved.

We need both, but so often the world teaches only the first. It teaches that a friend is “a person who passively nods approval,” rather than one who will “suggest and render the best for us regardless of the immediate consequences.”

I also loved the idea of friendship as Elder Ashton applied it to the priesthood hierarchy. “President Less is our friend,” he wrote, and also said, “I love President Tanner and I love President Romney because they are my friends.” This contrasts to starkly with the conventional view of leadership in the world. One example of this is the dichotomy between enlisted and officers in most military forces. The distinction, which hearkens back to class differences, has a useful purpose in a human institution. In On Killing, he wrote about “the paradox of war” saying that “to be a good leader you must truly love (in a strangely detached fashion) your men, and then you must be willing to kill (or at least give the orders that will result in the deaths of) that which you love.”

The officer / enlisted distinction serves to create that “strange detachment” that allows officers—even those who love their men—to send them to their deaths according to the cold calculus of war. This pattern of leadership persists across much of our society, even when there is no such rational basis for it. Leaders are different. They are aloof. They are separate.

But not in the Church. In the Church, there are not officers and enlisted. We’re all enlisted. There are no such barriers between the clergy and the lay members, we’re all lay members. And so we’re all—or we should all be—friends.

And then, Elder Ashton extended this principle even farther, citing several passages from the scriptures that describe God as our friend and concluding, “We need God’s friendship. He pleads for ours.” This is a concept that is only possible with the correct view of friendship, that love motivates both acceptance of a person and an unmitigated desire to help that person become better.

Of course, in our relationship with each other, we have to be wary of motes and beams, but the fundamental motive to help each other rise higher is fundamental to friendship, and it is that principle that animates our friendship with God who—unlike us—always knows exactly what we need to continue our ascent to be more like Him.

And so it is that, as Joseph Smith said, “friendship is one of the grand fundamental principles of ‘Mormonism’.”

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

“I’ll Be There For You”

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This is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Friendship is the grand fundamental principle of Mormonism.

So preached Joseph Smith in 1843. Years earlier, when asked how Mormons differed from other Christians, Joseph answered, “We believe the Bible and they do not.” Yet, within the same month as the friendship quote above–and after many theological innovations that put more distance between Mormonism and traditional Christianity–Joseph answered the same question with: “In reality & essence we do not differ so far in our religious views but that we could all drink into one principle of love.” By the end of his life, Joseph had, in the words of Mormon historian Philip Barlow, found

broken or incomplete virtually every essential dimension of how humans related to one another: their rudderless sectarian religion, their baseless sources of authority, their social classes which no longer cohered, and their politics and economies. He made bold assertions about how people may know what they know, what they in essence are, their connection to God, their means and understanding of “salvation,” and their entrapment by the great barrier of death. It was not merely that the Prophet inhabited a time of “rapid social change” and consequent “social dislocation,” which various historians have used to explain the Smith phenomenon. It was rather that the universe of relations and conceptions itself was splintered, which included but cannot be reduced to social dislocation. All of this required repair, and the worldly philosophers and sectarian preachers, Smith thought, could not put Humpty-Dumpty together again. The prophet aspired to mend a fractured reality.

The year following his declaration of friendship as the essence of Mormonism, Joseph taught in his now famous King Follett Discourse, “You have got to learn how to make yourselves Gods in order to save yourselves and be kings and priests to God the same as all Gods have done–by going from a small capacity to a great capacity from a small degree to another from grace to grace until the resurrection of the dead from exaltation to exaltation–till you are able to sit in everlasting burnings and everlasting power and glory as those who have gone before sit enthroned” (pg. 201). It seems that friendship and progression had become fused in the Prophet’s mind late in life, even to the point of mending intergenerational relations: “And now, my dearly beloved brethren and sisters, let me assure you that these are principles in relation to the dead and the living that cannot be lightly passed over, as pertaining to our salvation. For their salvation is necessary and essential to our salvation, as Paul says concerning the fathers—that they without us cannot be made perfect—neither can we without our dead be made perfect” (D&C 128:15).

This fusion of friendship and progression seems to be at the heart of Marvin J. Ashton’s October 1972 talk:

Acts of a friend should result in self-improvement, better attitudes, self-reliance, comfort, consolation, self-respect, and better welfare. Certainly the word friend is misused if it is identified with a person who contributes to our delinquency, misery, and heartaches. When we make a man feel he is wanted, his whole attitude changes. Our friendship will be recognizable if our actions and attitudes result in improvement and independence.

It takes courage to be a real friend. Some of us endanger the valued classification of friend because of our unwillingness to be one under all circumstances. Fear can deprive us of friendship. Some of us identify our closest friends as those with the courage to remain and share themselves with us under all circumstances. A friend is a person who will suggest and render the best for us regardless of the immediate consequences.

He relates this concept to James 1:27 and “pure religion”: “Our responsibility to the widow and the fatherless is to accept them as we find them, but to not leave them without improvement.” A true friend, in Ashton’s mind, “is a person who is willing to take me the way I am but who is willing and able to leave me better than he found me.”

A friend should not just fill a social need. A friend should better us as well.

 

The Long-Term Effects of Disruptive Peers

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Class disruptions are known to worsen educational achievement in the short run, but new research demonstrates that being exposed to disruptive peers can even lead to worse adult outcomes:

Results indicate that there are persistent effects on both test scores and educational attainment. We estimate that exposure to one disruptive peer in a class of 25 throughout elementary school is associated with a 0.02 standard deviation reduction in test scores during high school, and nearly a one percentage point reduction in the likelihood of receiving a college degree. This suggests that the impact of disruptive peers does persist with respect to educational outcomes years afterward.

…Figure 1 shows that while individuals who have idiosyncratically low exposure to disruptive peers (those on the left-hand side) tend to earn more than predicted, those with idiosyncratically high exposure tend to earn somewhat less than predicted. Specifically, we estimate that exposure to one disruptive peer in a class of 25 throughout elementary school reduces earnings by 3–4%, with effects being driven by exposure to disruptive boys.

The researchers conclude,

Our findings…speak to the extent to which differential exposure to disruptive students can lead to income inequality later in life. We calculate that the increased exposure to disruptive peers by students from low-income families can explain 5–6% of the earnings gap between adults who grew up in low versus high-income households. This is significant given that we have only one particular measure of disruptive peers in our sample, and it highlights the extent to which sorting into schools can lead to the persistence of long-term income inequality across households.

While the researchers look specifically at children in families exposed to domestic violence, their findings have broader implications about family breakdown, behavioral problems, and income inequality. As Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan and Harvard’s Christopher Jencks explain, family breakdown can lead to more behavioral problems in children:

[A] father’s absence increases antisocial behavior, such as aggression, rule breaking, delinquency, and illegal drug use. These antisocial behaviors affect high school completion independent of a child’s verbal and math scores. Thus it appears that a father’s absence lowers children’s educational attainment not by altering their scores on cognitive tests but by disrupting their social and emotional adjustment and reducing their ability or willingness to exercise self-control. The effects of growing up without both parents on aggression, rule breaking, and delinquency are also larger for boys than for girls. Since these traits predict both college attendance and graduation, the spread of single-parent families over the past few decades may have contributed to the growing gender gap in college attendance and graduation. The gender gap in college completion is much more pronounced among children raised by single mothers than among children raised in two-parent families.

This new research suggests that the retreat from marriage has a spill-over effect: the behavioral problems of children from broken families not only negatively affect their own educational and financial outcomes, but the outcomes of their peers. When we consider that marriage tends to decrease the chances of children being exposed to both domestic violence (the study’s selection of choice as mentioned above) and violent crimes within neighborhoods, the importance of healthy, stable marriages becomes all the more clear.

Intact families are necessary for the flourishing of children and the adults they will eventually become.

The Science of Alcohol Consumption

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Is alcohol good for you? According to The Economist, the debate rages on:

Pro-oenological forces point to a large body of evidence demonstrating wine’s positive effect on both the cardiovascular system and longevity. This viewpoint was given additional support this week by a new study in mBio led by Ming-liang Chen and Man-tian Mi of the Third Military Medical University in China. Using mice, the team showed that resveratrol, a molecule found in grapes and berries, reduced the formation of plaques in arteries—a cardiovascular condition known as atherosclerosis that limits blood flow and can trigger heart attacks and strokes.

…But anti-alcohol advocates can claim a victory of their own in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. Tim Stockwell of the University of Victoria in Canada and Tanya Chikritzhs of the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University in Australia carried out a meta-analysis of 87 epidemiological investigations. They concluded that so-called moderate drinkers do not benefit from a reduction in mortality compared to abstainers. This finding strikes a blow at the very heart of the imbibers’ claim.

Why is the science of public health so fraught with mixed messages? The article concludes,

First, the statistically significant results reported in journals are often not biologically relevant, because a measurable outcome may be so small that it has no meaningful effect on patients. Second, animals are imperfect models for humans. Third, findings from the laboratory, for reasons not always fully understood, often do not translate to the field. The difficulty of reconciling multiple conflicting lines of evidence means the alcohol debate will rage on. Cheers! 

Less Marriage, More Inequality

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“In a word,” writes sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and Anna Sutherland,

the increasingly “separate and unequal” character of family life in the United States is fueling economic, racial, and gender inequality. How is family life “separate and unequal”? First, Americans exhibit a growing class divide in marriage where the college-educated are more likely to enjoy high-quality, stable marriages than the less-educated. For instance, since the divorce revolution of the 1970s, divorce has fallen among college-educated Americans, while remaining comparatively common among Americans without college degrees.

class divide

Furthermore, the timing of these trends provides “strong evidence that family change preceded growing economic inequality. Specifically, the rise of nonmarital childbearing and divorce date back to the 1960s, well before economic inequality began growing in the late 1970s.”

The authors find that “scholarly research demonstrates that America’s growing marriage divide has helped to fuel three forms of economic and social inequality”:

  1. “First and foremost is inequality in Americans’ family income, which has risen since the 1970s.”
  2. “The retreat from marriage also looms large in another form of economic inequality in America: racial inequality.”
  3. “Third, the growing marriage divide is fueling a historically unusual type of gender inequality in low-income communities…”

There’s much more. The research is both compelling and important. Check out the full post.

The Science of Sexual Orientation

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This is a photo of a couple holding hands.A new report in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest provides “a comprehensive review of the scientific research on sexual orientation.” Based on the latest research, the researchers draw several conclusions:

  • Across cultures, a “small but nontrivial” percentage of people have non-heterosexual feelings. The specific expression of sexual orientation varies widely according to cultural norms and traditions, but research suggests that individuals’ sexual feelings are likely to develop in similar ways around the world.
  • Men’s and women’s sexual orientations manifest in different ways: Men’s sexual orientation is more closely linked to their patterns of sexual arousal than women’s sexual orientation is.
  • Various biological factors—including prenatal hormones and specific genetic profiles—are likely to contribute to sexual orientation, though they are not the sole cause. Scientific evidence suggests that biological and non-social environmental factors jointly influence sexual orientation.
  • Scientific findings do not support the notion that sexual orientation can be taught or learned through social means. And there is little evidence to suggest that non-heterosexual orientations become more common with increased social tolerance.

Lead author J. Michael Bailey argues, “Sexual orientation is an important human trait, and we should study it without fear, and without political constraint. The more controversial a topic, the more we should invest in acquiring unbiased knowledge and science is the best way to acquire unbiased knowledge.”

Quick Thoughts on Trump and Predictions

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Now that Donald Trump has wrapped up the GOP nomination, there are two kinds of articles flooding the national conversation:

  1. Surely this is a sign of the End Times.
  2. Pundits are dumb!

I can’t really contest #1 because, in a nutshell, I agree.

But let me talk about #2 for a second. First: yes, articles like this one and this one and this one that are full of  screenshots of pontifications about how Trump has no chance are funny now that he is the winner of the primary after all. But hold on a second. Does the fact that somebody was wrong about a prediction actually mean that they were dumb? That their prediction was a stupid one? Not necessarily.

If you bet your life savings on being able to flip a coin 5 times in a row and get heads every time, I am going to say you have made a dumb decision. You’ve got about a 97% chance of losing everything and only a 3% chance of winning. But lets say you ignore me, place your bet, and you manage to get lucky and win. This doesn’t make you a genius. It makes you an idiot who got lucky.

People are terrible at statistical reasoning. We like reality simple and we like it deterministic. That means we like to believe that if Y happened, then it’s because of X and obviously X had to cause Y and couldn’t have caused W or Z or coconut soup.

But reality is messy. Sometimes good predictions fail because there was systematic information that nobody had access to. Sometimes good predictions fail because of just plain old dumb luck (like in my example with coin flips). The point is just that even someone who is right 95% of the time is going to get it wrong 5% of the time, and that doesn’t mean that in those 5% of cases where they get it wrong there was actually anything they could or should have predicted differently.

Take a guy like Nate Silver. Unlike your average pundit, he’s got a track record of getting things right by using objective, transparent, quantitative methods. He was largely right in 2008, 2010, and 2012. And this year, he was one of the leading voices telling people to calm down and not worry too much about Trump. As a result, he is now being singled out by name by, for example, Business Insider: NATE SILVER: ‘We basically got the Republican race wrong’ as one of those silly propeller heads we never should have listened to in the first place.

Not so fast.

First, this is actually a meaningful question. Journalistic credibility is already at historical lows, and that has dire consequences for society. A strong, free press is a bedrock institution of democracy, and if the press is perceived to be hopelessly biased or suborned or just plain old incompetent, that’s bad for our nation. And it matters whether the perception is real or false. In reality, it’s probably a little of both. My read on Nate Silver (who fulfills the role of a journalist even if he doesn’t fit the old, pre-21st century conception) is that he’s an honest guy doing good work. On the other hand, there is a legitimate argument that journalism is fracturing into a thousand click-bait seeking echo chambers. If we, the reading public, don’t discern between episodic mistakes and systematic corruption, then we can’t provide the necessary incentives for the good ship Free Press to right herself.

It’s also meaningful because we need to know what happened with Trump. Yes, obviously Silver (and most everyone else) predicted the wrong outcome. But the question is why were they wrong? Was it incompetence? Was it information nobody had access to? Or did Trump keep getting heads every time he flipped the coin? Almost none of the articles I’ve read address this question. They just assume that if your prediction fails it was a bad prediction. In other words, they are assuming incompetence. And this means we’re likely to draw all the wrong conclusions about what Trump’s victory means.

So–even though he got it wrong–I strongly recommend reading Silver’s take. In it, he raises this important question explicitly:

What’s much harder to say is whether Trump is a one-off — someone who defied the odds because a lot of things broke in his favor and whose success will be hard to repeat — or if he signifies a fundamental change in American politics.

In answer, he notes the three ways his prediction was systematically off:

  1. Voters are more tribal than I thought.
  2. GOP is weaker than I thought.
  3. Media is worse than I thought.

It’s not clear if these are things Silver should have known or if these are new facts that we only know now because of Trump’s victory, but the point is that–because they are systematica rather than merely random–these are new facts that can help us understand and predict the world going forward.

But there is also room for randomness. Take a look at this chart:

 

silver-postin-1

Prior to the New York state primary, Trump had never taken a majority in a GOP primary. Since then, he’s never not taken the majority. What happened? Silver’s guess is that voter rationally and deliberately evaluated Trump’s argument that whoever gets the most votes should get the nomination (even if they fall short of a majority) and so decided to make sure Trump got the majority to avoid a contested election. To me, this makes very little sense, because “rationally and deliberately” are not adverbs I usually apply to voter action. And I’m not making a dig at Trump’s voters, I just mean that group action seldom has that kind of rational, deliberate nature without some kind of elaborate infrastructure to support it.

My guess? Well, two of the big stories leading up to New York were Ted Cruz’s statements about “New York values” and his machinations to win delegates without winning elections in Colorado and Maine. So, what do you think happens when a populist demagogue leading a movement of voters who feel bitter, dispossessed, and disenfranchised by a corrupt, elitist system gets to tar his top challenger as a conniving insider using questionable technicalities to steal votes? Oh, and he insulted you, too. Cruz walked face-first into Trump’s zeitgeist, and that–I am guessing–fueled Trump’s unprecedented win in New York state which, in turn, snowballed into his further victories after that.

Who knows if I’m right or not, though, and that’s my point. This is basically the blind luck category. If I’m right, then it took the coincidence of Cruz and Trump being pretty much right where they were leading up to New York in the polls, plus the rules being what they were in Maine and Colorado, etc. You can find explanations for all of that, but at a certain point we’re just making stories up after the fact to explain what is, in reality, an essentially chaotic reality. Or hey, maybe I’m wrong, in which case nobody knows.

Either way, this matters a lot for the big question: is Trump a one-off? Or a sign of the new reality? I don’t know the answer definitively, but I do know the shallow and vapid articles where some pundits make fun of other pundits for not punditting well enough are just a distracting waste of time.

The Cumulative Cost of Regulation

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A recent study out of George Mason University concludes that “[b]y altering investment decisions and disrupting the innovation that comes from investment in knowledge creation, regulations have a cumulative and detrimental effect on economic growth—and, over time, have a real impact on American families and workers.” The key findings:

  • If regulation had been held constant at levels observed in 1980, the US economy would have been about 25 percent larger than it actually was as of 2012.
  • This means that in 2012, the economy was $4 trillion smaller than it would have been in the absence of regulatory growth since 1980.
  • This amounts to a loss of approximately $13,000 per capita, a significant amount of money for most American workers.

Check it out.

The Darkness of Game of Thrones

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There will be Game of Thrones spoilers in this post. 

The cover of Game of Thrones, back before it went mainstream.
The cover of Game of Thrones, back before it went mainstream.

George R. R. Martin can write. I’ve known that since I read A Game of Thrones nearly 20 years ago. I was bothered by crippling a child in one of the first scenes, and by the time I got to Ned Stark’s execution at the end of the book I knew that the series wasn’t for me. I haven’t read any other books in the series, and I haven’t watched a single episode of the HBO adaptation. But, because I follow a lot of pop culture with interest, I do keep up with most of the memorable moments. From the Red Wedding to the death of Jon Snow, I keep tabs.

And it’s pretty grim stuff.

It turns out that Jon Snow’s not dead after all, by the way. This is the big reveal in the most recent episode, but it was overshadowed by, you know, brutally feeding a mother and her child to a pack of ravenous dogs. Here’s what Kelly Lawler wrote about it:

So in an episode where fans were given what might be the greatest news they could hope for, they were also treated to a mother and newborn child being eaten alive by dogs. Why? I couldn’t tell you, but I can tell you that an episode like “Home” demonstrates what is the fundamental underpinning of this show: It will do anything in its desperation to shock you. And while having actors and producers flat-out lie for a year in the press is the more innocent end of that spectrum, we certainly hope we’re not forced to listen to more infants being eaten alive. Because that’s not the shock we’re looking for.

Lawler goes on:

And so the audience was treated to the sounds and very nearly the sight of a woman and her newborn son being ripped apart by dogs. We’ve already seen countless women raped, a young girl burned alive by her own father, not to mention the weekly grind of violence and death we’ve become accustomed to. Sure, some of that is par for the course with the genre and the path this show has decided to take, but even for the most ardent fans, for the most faithful viewer, when is enough enough? Is there no line this show won’t cross?

There is something that people do not seem to understand about values, and it is this. Particular values are subjective and contingent. But having values at all is objective and universal. Where a society chooses to draw lines in what is acceptable and what is not changes with history and location and context. That societies draw lines is not.

Lawler seems to think that the important question is, how far do you go? But that doesn’t really matter, because different societies–and different individuals–have their own tolerances and their own lines in the sand. Location is largely meaningless. What matters is direction. Lawler writes that the show “will do anything in its desperation to shock you.” Why desperation? Because the more you shock the audience, the less sensitive they become.

No matter what your tolerances are, the danger–I believe–comes in crossing them habitually and for no higher purpose and in so doing desensitizing yourself. The world we live in certainly does not need less sensitivity. It certainly does not need less empathy. It does not need less light.

Just something to think about.