Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site.
Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children.
In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.
All of the talks in the Sunday morning session of the October 1971 General Conference were wonderful, but the one I’d like to write about today is Elder Paul H. Dunn’s What is a Teacher? In his talk, Elder Dunn focuses on the three parables of Luke 15: the lost sheep, the piece of silver, and the prodigal son.
Elder Dunn said the he often wondered why the Lord had repeated the same basic message using three different parables. I have never wondered that. I figured it was just for emphasis, or perhaps with the intention that different audiences would relate better to different stories. But, as this example shows, the scriptures often reward those who push a little harder to understand what is going on. Thus, Elder Dunn: “And then one day it dawned. People do get lost in various ways, and here in this great chapter of Luke we find the Savior counseling how to recover them.”
The message of the first story, of the lost sheep, is that some people get lost simply because they get confused. And for those, the solutions are “Family, service, [and] brotherhood… Feeding… brings them home.”
The message of the second story, of the lost coin, is that sometimes “responsible agents… let these priceless gems slip through their fingers.” I thought this was an especially poignant way of looking at the fate of some of those who wander astray. Elder Dunn says that we can’t recover these ones the way we recover a confused sheep. “Love, care, and attention would be the process used to recover lost coins.”
Finally, and most tragically, some are lost because “their free agency takes them down that path.” In this case, “we can’t do a lot… except open our arms and our church doors and let them know they are wanted.”
As part of writing this post, I looked up Elder Dunn on Wikipedia. It turns out that he is a controversial figure, and so I thought that was worth mentioning as well. He liked to embellish his General Conference talks with personal stories that were not true. Ultimately, in 1991, he wrote an open letter to all members (with permission of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve) in which he stated that “I have not always been accurate in my public talks and writings, [and] I have indulged in other activities inconsistent with the high and sacred officer which I have held.” He asked for forgiveness and even stated that the General Authorities, after an investigation, “have censured me and placed a heavy penalty upon me.”
I don’t know what the “other activities” were, nor what the “heavy penalty” was, but I thought it was worth pointing out to show that all of us can wonder and become lost. No one is immune, and that is worth keeping in mind so that we can exercise humility in our own lives and find compassion for those who stumble. (Which, at one time or another, is all of us.)
This opinion piece from the New York Times popped up in my feed a couple of weeks ago: Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts by Justin P. McBrayer. It’s a pretty common sub-topic within the “kids these days” genre and it goes something like this. First, kids these days are taught that morality is subjective (often as a side-effect of misguided tolerance or non-judgmentalism efforts):
What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?
Second, this moral relativism leads to high rates of immoral behavior among students (e.g. cheating):
It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we’ve taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can’t very well blame them for doing so later on.
I don’t know that there’s any direct evidence of this. For example, I don’t know of any survey that specifically asks about cheating behavior and asks about moral relativism, which would be interesting. But the link seems plausible.
McBrayer then points out that, among philosophers, moral relativism is rare:
There are historical examples of philosophers who endorse a kind of moral relativism, dating back at least to Protagoras who declared that “man is the measure of all things,” and several who deny that there are any moral facts whatsoever. But such creatures are rare.
I was interested, so I dug around and found a survey that asked philosophers about that explicitly. Here are the results:
Accept or lean toward: moral realism 525 / 931 (56.4%)
Accept or lean toward: moral anti-realism 258 / 931 (27.7%)
Other 148 / 931 (15.9%)
I’m not sure that almost a quarter of philosophers accepting moral relativism makes it “rare,” but it is certainly the case that they are outnumbered more than 2:1 by philosophers who accept moral realism. That’s really interesting me for a couple of reasons. First, conservatives often blame liberal trends among college kids on the overwhelmingly liberal atmosphere of college campuses, but at least in this regard the students are clearly way out in front of the professors (and heading in the opposite direction). Second, in popular discussion I usually see moral objectivism / moral realism associated with simplistic religious beliefs and therefore looked down on by the cool kids of the Internet who are all convinced that evolution explains morality and therefore morality is socially constructed and relative. Newsflash: moral realism is not just for Young Earth Creationists.
McBrayer also points out that indoctrinating our kids to believe moral relativism starts early:
When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:
Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.
As McBrayer points out, this is a total train wreck that conflates three distinct concepts: true vs. false, objective vs. subjective, and knowable vs. unknowable. Ontology, epistemology, and relativism are all mashed together. What about things that a person thinks that are factual and can be proven? What about statements that are objectively false but also unprovable?
Coincidentally, within day or two of reading this, my son came home with the following homework:
It’s not quite as bad as McBrayer’s example, but it’s not good either.
I’m not really sure who to blame on this one, but it’s just another reason I try to keep a fairly close eye on what my kids get taught at school. Teaching is hard, and my kids have great teachers this year, but it’s important to let ’em know from time to time that the stuff they are taught in school has to be taken with a grain of salt.
One of the most surprising things about Cixin Liu’s award-winning science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem was its direct and unflinching portrayal of China’s Cultural Revolution. The descriptions of bloody civil war and widespread oppression of academic intellectuals was not what I expected from a novel that was first published in China, and the specific dialogue as student protesters harangued a physics professor for daring to teach special relativity was at once chilling and fascinating. In some ways, there are elements of the excellent sequel (The Dark Forest) that are even more haunting. The way that an author who is so willing to stare the political doublethink of the Cultural Revolution directly in the face has no qualms about positively describing the important role that political officers would play in a modern (presumably less totalitarian) Chinese military shows, to me, how deeply embedded some of the assumptions that led to the Cultural Revolution still remain. So many things that do not seem political to use are that way purely because nobody has bothered to politicize them. But physics, like anything else, can be and has been politicized.
And then just a couple of weeks ago, I saw this fascinating article in Foreign Policy about an obscure Chinese folk singer (Yang Le) who was allowed–on national television–to sing about the personal costs to his family of the Cultural Revolution. The article notes that “Yang’s song likely made the cut, even earning accolades in a November 2015 article by Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, by focusing on emotion rather than details, telling a family rather than a political story, and declining to place blame.” Here is a video for you to watch, and then the lyrics (translated into English by Foreign Policy) after:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_DbSDImST0
When I was small A family of six Older brothers and sisters, I was the youngest Dad was handsome and brave Mom was young and beautiful They worked earnestly, and were kind-hearted
After the Cultural Revolution, only five were left. Dad suffered a wrong, he passed on first. Mom had no choice, she married someone from a different place. My siblings went up to the mountains and down to the countryside.
From that time on, our family was dispersed. Brothers and sisters to the four corners of the earth. At each holiday, we could only send distant greetings Distant greetings Distant greetings
Many years later, looking back again, Brothers and sisters, no need to comfort each other We all remember, Dad wanted us to be honest and kind We should never change We remember, Mom wanted us to be strong And happy Even today We sing Dad and Mom’s favorite song Strong and happy Kind and honest We sing Dad and Mom’s favorite song Good and kind Living happily
There were lots of good talks from the Priesthood session of the October 1971 General Conference. I really liked the list of 5 things that every young person needs given by Elder Marion D. Hanks in his talk, Love Unconditional.
They need faith.
They need to be accepted as they are, and to be included.
They need to be actively involved, to participate, to give service, to give of themselves
They have to learn somehow that they are more important than their mistakes; that they are worthwhile, valuable, useful; that they are loved unconditionally
They need the example of good men, good parents, good people who really care.
“There have to be standards and they must be enforced,” he later said, “but our love must be unconditional.” The General Authorities have been refusing the false choice between tolerance and righteousness for decades.
Elder Dallin H. Oaks also gave a list of advice in his talk, Strive for Excellence, this time advice for seeking “a balanced and full life of service to God and fellowman.”
Rigorous standards and high achievement in any field of learning are not at odds with faith and devotion to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
In approaching any field of learning, remember the Lord’s direction to “seek learning, even by study and also by faith.” (D&C 88:118.)
Cherish and nourish your spiritual life. Seek spiritual growth at the same time that you are seeking to enlarge your learning in other areas. Nourish your spirit just as regularly as you nourish your body or mind.
Most of all, live so that you can be guided and taught by the Spirit in all your activities, including all your efforts to learn and gain an education: honor your parents; be true to the teachings of the Church; be clean and faithful in all things; and be loyal to the leaders of the Church.
But the talk that stuck with me the most was President Harold B. Lee’s Responsibilities of the Priesthood. He started out with an amazing metaphor that I’d never hear before. A mission president asked one of the missionaries to push over a pillar inside a building. “I can’t,” said the missionary, The reason? “The weight of that ceiling is all on top of the pillar.” So the mission president asked what would happen if the weight were taken off the pillar, and the missionary said that, in that case, he could probably topple the pillar. And so President Lee concluded:
Brethren, you and I are just like one of those pillars. As long as we have a weight of responsibility in this church, all hell can’t push us over; but as soon as that weight is lifted off, most of us are easy marks by the powers that drag us down.
It’s such a profoundly different way of looking at responsibility, although when it is phrased a little bit differently I think it’s more familiar: we need to be needed.
A little later on in the talk, President Lee recounts what one prisoner said about why they were in prison: “We are here in the state penitentiary because there came a time in our lives when we were made to feel that nobody cared what happened to us.”
President Lee then issued message of humility and compassion, along with a warning against self-righteousness:
You and I sit here tonight in a comparative measure of security, but the Lord help any one of us if ever we are made to feel in our hearts that nobody cares what happens to us.
Together, these two quotes (the story of the pillar and the idea that we’d be in dire straits if we ever felt no one cared about us) reminded me of the idea of privilege.
Politically, when it is often heard as “white privilege” or “straight privilege,” privilege becomes a problematic idea, in part because it tends to make people feel isolated and suspicious of each other. Someone who sees the world through the lens of privilege must always ask whether every misfortune they encounter was simply one of life’s unfortunate random events, of if they are experiencing persecution and oppression. This is a horrible way to live and it divides rather than unites people.
But there is a great deal of truth to the idea that some people have privileges that make their lives easier and that, what’s more, they often take these privileges for granted. Imagine, for example, one of those stone pillars holding aloft a heavy ceiling and thinking to itself: “I would be so much more free if only I hadn’t been placed here underneath this heavy load.” Isn’t that very similar to the way some Mormons, raised in the faith and therefore carrying the burden of knowledge of the Restoration, might feel about their own lives? Taking the high standards and high expectations of the faith and the community as a burden instead of understanding how this privilege empowers and strengthens them to stand straight and true against the forces of the adversary?
An even more poignant example is that so many Mormons—who have experienced the privilege of being raised in loving homes by their biological parents—now see the same family unit that provided so much of their formative life experiences as basically a dispensable life choice. Intentionally or not, this cavalier attitude towards the family amounts to kicking away the ladder that one has just used to climb to a higher vista.
The saddest thing about privilege is that, when we take it for granted, we may be tricked into working to destroy the privileges that we have enjoyed so that those who come after us will have to struggle through without them.
The talk that struck me the most this week was Elder A. Theodore Tuttle’s The Things that Matter Most. He began his talk with an excerpt from a Deseret News article about how racing greyhounds, which are trained to chase a fake rabbit around the track, don’t even know what a real rabbit looks like. According to the editorial Elder Tuttle quoted:
We chase social pleasures on a glittering noisy treadmill—and ignore the privilege of a quiet hour telling bedtime stories to an innocent-eyed child. We chase prestige and wealth, and don’t recognize the real opportunities for joy that cross our paths.
This immediately reminded me of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis. In the book, Haidt—a social psychologist we often cite here at Difficult Run because of his work on Moral Foundations Theory—distills important lessons from a variety of world philosophies through the lens of psychology. According to Haidt (writing in a followup book), “One of the greatest truths in psychology is that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.”[ref]The Righteous Mind, page 27[/ref]
In The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt talks about the rider (the conscious, deliberate, rational side of our minds) and the elephant (the intuitive and emotional side of our minds). As an intuitionist, Haidt puts a lot of emphasis on the intuitive sides of our nature (the elephant). He underscores how important our intuition is (even to logical, analytical thinking) and also highlights how sophisticated our intuitive natures are. However, there are drawbacks, one of the most important of which is this:
The elephant cares about prestige, not happiness, and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious. The elephant will pursue its evolutionary goals even when greater happiness can be found elsewhere.[ref]The Happiness Hypothesis, page 101[/ref]
The elephant is the product of evolution and natural selection. It cares about prestige because status—in primates—is what provides access to reproduction. It doesn’t care about happiness or fulfillment because happiness and fulfillment are, from a genetic perspective, kind of beside the point. This is why the pursuit of prestige—nice job, nice car, nice house—is so irresistible. It’s embedded in our biological natures. And it’s a treacherous trap, as Haidt points out, because pursuit of prestige is always a zero-sum game.[ref]In game theory, a zero sum game where any player can only win what they take from another player. That is why it is a “zero sum game”: the total of winnings and losings always amounts to nothing.[/ref]
If everyone is chasing the same limited amount of prestige, then all are stuck in a zero-sum game, an eternal arms race, a world in which rising wealth does not bring rising happiness. The pursuit of luxury goods is a happiness trap; it is a dead end that people raced toward the mistaken belief that it will make them happy.[ref]The Happiness Hypothesis, page 101[/ref]
Sound familiar?
Elder Tuttle then points out that the people who are most vulnerable to being trampled when our inner elephant charges off in search of status and prestige are the people we care about the most:
Our most flagrant violations, perhaps, occur in our own homes. We chase worldly pleasures and neglect our own innocent children. When did you tell stories to your children?
Every single night I pray for help in resisting this. When you’re a parent, the days crawl and the years fly. Children are miracles from God, but—like many of God’s greatest miracles—they are in danger of being overlooked and neglected.
On Sunday I taught Gospel Doctrine and we focused on the murmurings of Laman and Lemuel in chapters 16 – 18. For the first time, I noticed a very definite pattern in the slow hardening of the hearts. At first, in chapter 16, all it took was a lecture from Nephi to bring them to repentance. Later, when Nephi’s bow broke, it took the indirect voice of the Lord (through the Liahona) to bring them to their sesnse. Later, when Ishmael died, the voice of the Lord directly was required. Finally, when Nephi started to build a ship, it took a threat of physical violence to humble them. The problem wasn’t that Laman and Lemuel murmured. Everyone murmurs. It’s that their hearts grew harder with every passing trial.
But when the penultimate confrontation came it wasn’t a result of trial or tribulation. The argument that prompted Laman and Lemuel to tie Nephi to the mast of their ship for days wasn’t the result of hardship. The spark that started that fire happened when things were going well. The ship was built, the supplies were loaded, the journey was easy, and there was no hard work to do. And that was when the greatest crisis erupted. Which explains why Elder Tuttle writes:
The trials through which today’s young people are passing—ease and luxury—may be the most severe test of any age. Brothers and sisters, stay close to your own! Guide them safely! These are perilous times. Give increased attention. Give increased effort.
You want a simple example of this? Screen-time is the easiest. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not one of those families with no TV and no screens. My wife is getting her PhD in computer science and my job is in software development. My kids are expert Minecraft players and I enjoy playing Castle Crashers with them. We’ve watched Avatar: The Last Airbender all the way through twice and started it a third time. So screens can be—and are—a part of this family. But they’re also perilous. The older your kids get, the easier it is to tell them to leave you alone and have them actually do it. An infant can’t leave you alone. A toddler can sometimes, but only for a few minutes. But a 9-year old is perfectly capable of entertaining him or herself for a few hours or more. Throw in a TV or a video game console or an iPhone and you could—if you wanted—basically live in the same house as your children and never really interact with them.
That is the peril—for them and for you—of “ease and luxury.” As a parent, I have learned that the greatest tragedy is not that your kids don’t listen to you. It’s that they do. If they hear “I’m busy” often enough, or “Daddy doesn’t have time” frequently enough, the message does sink in, and then there’s no way to take it back.
These are indeed perilous times. Growth is always risky. It is always perilous as your children grow more independent and begin to take on more and more freedom for themselves. But that ordinary course of getting older is even more perilous in our society, which makes it so easy to curate digital connections and so easy to forget the flesh-and-blood variety.
And finally there is this:
The responsibility rests on the family to solve our social problems. Youth search for security. They search for answers to be found only in a good home. No national or international treaty can bring peace. Not in legislative halls nor judicial courts will our problems be solved. From the hearthstones of the homes will come the answers to our problems. On the principles taught by the Savior, happiness and peace will come to families. In the home youth will receive strength to find happiness.
As I wrote about last week, I believe this to be entirely literal. Laws and governments are a superficial veneer on society. They are important, but they are not essential. What matters more than formal institutions are the informal ones: friendships, associations, churches, clubs and—far, far and away the most important—families. This is born out be reams of social science research (another topic we cover at Difficult Run, especially Walker Wright) which underscores the empirically validated truth that stable families are the most important ingredient for stable, prosperous, safe, flourishing, happy societies. It’s not rhetoric and it’s not exaggeration. It’s the truth: the family is the one and only solution to our deepest social problems.
The world doesn’t believe this. “The world is full of foolish schemes.” Many of these schemes are attempts to root a stable society in some foundation other than families. They will not work, and—to the extent that they lead people to turn their attention away from the life-long endeavor of nurturing families—they will lead to unhappiness and suffering.
What is wanted, first and foremost, is true motherhood and true fatherhood. And, as Elder Tuttle writes, we must “face the fact that true fatherhood and true motherhood are fast disappearing.”
He doesn’t spend as much time talking about what those concepts mean. I think the world continues to have a relatively robust account of what true motherhood is about. We continue to understand, to a greater degree than with fatherhood, the dignity and importance of mothers who nourish, protect and care for their children. But fathers—especially if you judge by the bungling, incompetent depictions in popular television—are viewed more and more as auxiliary and disposable. In contrast, Elder Tuttle describes true fatherhood this way:
Fatherhood is a relationship of love and understanding. It is strength and manliness and honor. It is power and action. It is counsel and instruction. Fatherhood is to be one with your own. It is authority and example.
The line that speaks the most to me there is that “Fatherhood is to be one with your own.” I haven’t finished processing it, but it continues to resonate long after I first read it, a bell reverberating on and on in my heart, and calling attention to a message I haven’t fully received yet.
I have learned, in my marriage and in my parenting, that the messages I’ve been taught by the world about being a husband and a father range from irrelevant to insidious. I’m still learning to sift the true meaning of fatherhood from the surrounding chaff. I don’t have it all figured out, but talks like this encourage me to keep going and help guide me along my way.
Image by Flickr user Jeff_golden. Cropped to fit blog dimensions. Click for original on Flickr.
I love books. A lot of my happiest memories are of whiling away long summer hours reading in the backroom of my grandfather’s book store.
Covers like this one by John Berkey defined my childhood daydreams.
But for a few years in grad school, I didn’t read very much. At one point I realized it had been several months–maybe a year!–since I had read a book cover-to-cover. I decided that simply would not do, and I started reading again. (I believe that was about the time I got into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga.) The only other period in my life when I wasn’t reading was the time before I knew how.[ref]For what it’s worth, lots of people brag about how they or their kids start reading at age 2 or 3 or whatever. If it makes you feel any better, I started reading around age 5 or so and I don’t think that I really missed a ton getting an average start. I’m not sure a lot of great works of literature are written for the pre-K demographic. Just saying: a life-long love of learning doesn’t need a precocious start.[/ref]
I stumbled upon Goodreads at about the same time, and I’ve been tracking my reviews on there ever since. I don’t really go in for the social networking aspects of Goodreads. I basically treat it as a convenient reading journal. The best part is being able to look at a chronological timeline of the books I’ve read over the last couple of years. Individual titles or covers will bring me back to places where I was–literally and metaphorically–when I read those books. And all it takes is a glance at my bring the books back to life for me, little anchors that keep me from forgetting all the places that I’ve been.
But by far the greatest change to my reading life has been my subscription to Audible.
Getting sick was never quite as bad when I knew I could stay home from school and listen to this.
I have always loved audiobooks. As a kid, my go-to for getting through the flu was a dramatization of The Hobbit on cassette tapes stored in a small, wooden box. Later on, I acquired a CD dramatization of The Lord of The Rings (way before the movies were out) that I also listened through a couple of times.[ref]I tried to listen to them in the car once, but my wife stomped on that pretty hard. The 70s cheesiness that I was oblivious too was intolerable for her. Oh well.[/ref] The first few Harry Potter books (this was before the last ones had come out) also helped me get through hours of tedious desk work back in the day. But back in the day, an audiobook could set you back $50 or more, easily, and there was no way I could afford that as a replacement for used books and $7 paperbacks.
Audible has changed that, however. For $15/month, you get one audiobook. That’s good, but it’s not great. In addition, however, you can buy 3 credits for about $36 (so, more books for about $12/each.) Best of all, however, are their promotions. They send out a daily deal that offers a random book for $3-5 and frequently have other sales at $5 each. Most of these books will probably not suit your fancy, but even if only 5%-10% of them do, then you’re going to be picking up at least a couple more books every month for basically pocket change. Now, the economics of buying audiobooks being to make sense!
This is the secret to how I “read” over 100 books last year, and how I plan to get through about 120 in 2016. But you might have some questions, so let’s talk about how to get the most out of your Audible subscription (or similar) along with some unexpected pros and cons.
First: learn double-speed, love double-speed
You might not even realize this, but most audiobook apps (including Audible and iTunes) have the ability to increase narration speed while keeping the narrator’s voice at a level pitch (so you don’t end up listening to chipmunks). The math here is pretty obvious: faster narration means you get through books faster. Right now, the longest book in my Audible library is Brandon Sanderson’s monstrous Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive, The), which clocks in at over 48 hours, followed by Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (almost 32 hours) and then Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World (about 27 hours). Most books fall in a more normal range of about 12-16 hours each, however, which means that double-speed means it takes only 6-8 hours to get through a typical book. And that’s an amount of time most people can probably find in one week.
Now, if you try to skip straight to double-speed, you’re going to get frustrated and give yourself a headache. It didn’t even occur to me to speed up the tracks until a friend suggested it. I started at about 1.25x and for a while that was all I could do. Once that was natural, however, I moved up to 1.5x and, after getting used to that, I finally went all the way up to 2.0x.
It says “Speed 3x,” but it lies. It is only double-speed.
Unfortunately, that’s the fastest you can go. Don’t get me wrong, if you look at the app you will see a button that claims you can also do 2.5x and even 3.0x, but it’s a lie. They don’t actually speed up the narration beyond 2.0x. I tested this myself back in December 2014 with the iOS version and a stopwatch to confirm, and it’s true. There are no speed increases after 2.0x.[ref]I have no idea why, and the friendly Audible customer service rep did not either.[/ref]
Second: when to listen
The conventional time to listen to audiobooks is in the car, and that’s a great one. I often have to travel in from Williamsburg, VA to Richmond, VA which is about a 1-hour trip (one-way), so every time I get four hours of listening done (remember: double speed). That’s about half a novel. Not bad! But I also work from home many days, and then I’m not in the car at all. So, what are some other good times to listen? Walking the dog is a great one, especially ’cause your dog will appreciate the extra time if you’re not in a hurry to get back. Doing chores is another great one. A lot of annoying things that have to get done (like folding the laundry) become a treat if they’re also your excuse to return to a great book. One of my favorites has also been long-distance runs.
There’s a caveat here, however. Audiobooks can be addictive. I’ve gotten in trouble on more than one occasion because I’ve got headphones in my ears (while I’m doing the chores) and my wife wants to talk to me. This, as you can imagine, is a bad scenario. Anything in life can be taken too far, and audiobooks are no exception. Be sensible about it.[ref]My wife would say that I’m not one to talk, but I’m working on it.[/ref]
Here’s another caveat, however. When I listen to really, really interesting non-fiction I often like to enter notes into Evernote. And this is where audiobooks are less than amazing. Few things in the world frustrate me more than transcribing 40 or 50 notes from an Audiobook. I’ve done this a lot, and so here are some tips.
When you want to take a note, you can just add a bookmark with a note in the Audible app. Always type a note. Often you will think that it will be obvious when you come back, but the timing of the bookmark is not exact (especially on double speed) and if you have a lot of notes or a very long book, then by the time you come back to get your notes you might have to listen to rather long portions to remind yourself of exactly what you wanted to make a note of. In fact, if the quote is short, you should just try to write the entire quote out in the note field.[ref]Obviously this doesn’t work if you’re driving. Please don’t take notes if you’re driving.[/ref] If it’s not short, at least write the first phrase of the quote. That will make it easy to find.
As for transcription: good luck. For a while I tried reducing the speed to 1x, putting the phone on speaker, holding up to my mic, and trying to let Dragon: Naturally Speaking transcribe it. Results were mixed. Dragon could pick up on a lot of the words, but not everything. It was basically a toss-up whether manually transcribing the whole thing or fixing the mistakes in Dragon’s transcription was faster. Either way, it took about 2 minutes on average for a single note, which–if you have more than a few notes–will get very frustrating.
In other words: if you have something to listen to that you suspect is going to involve a lot of underlining, highlighting, or brain-waves: get it in paper and do it the old-fashioned way.
This doesn’t mean that audiobooks have to be light. I have listened to some great literature this way, books like Angle of Repose or Gilead, but it does skew towards fiction for me and away from the most interesting non-fiction, which I still prefer to get in hardcopy (or Kindle).
One word of caution, however. The rise of self-publishing has an impact in the Audible ecosystem as well. There’s really no easy way to separate self-published books (which are often abysmal in quality) from traditionally published books (which are only sometimes abysmal in quality). My recommendation is this: If you see something that looks interesting but you don’t recognize it, look up the book on Amazon and check out the editorial reviews. NOT the customer reviews![ref]Those can be faked, and often are.[/ref] The first thing you want to look for is not what the reviews say, but who they are from. Best case? Prominent newspapers like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Next best case? Super-famous authors. Worst case? Authors you have never heard of and/or outlets you have never heard of. It’s not a perfect way to gauge quality–obviously–but it will help you avoid the worst of the nonsense that is out there.
Fourth: did you learn anything?
Some folks will tell you that listening to audiobooks isn’t really reading. Well, sure, literally it isn’t. But I did find a Forbes article that tackled the question: Is Listening to Audio Books Really the Same as Reading? According to the article:
So on an intellectual level, is listening to a book really just as good as reading it?
Pretty much, but it depends on the type of book. Studies on electronic media consumption are still relatively limited, and the audio book genre has been “woefully unaddressed by the academic community in general,” wrote philosophy professor William Irwin in a 2009 essay.
However, even research that predates CDs suggests that reading and listening are strikingly similar cognitive processes. For example, 1985 study found listening comprehension correlated strongly with reading comprehension – suggesting that those who read books well would listen to them well, also. In a 1977 study, college students who listened to a short story were able to summarize it with equal accuracy as those who read it.
“The way this is usually interpreted is that once you are good at decoding letters into sound, which most of us are by the time we’re in 5th or 6th grade, the comprehension is the same whether it’s spoken or written,” explained University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham.
That matches my experience, and so does the rest of the article which qualifies this a little bit by pointing out that some complex text can benefit from being literally read because it lets you easily skip back to re-read difficult sections. However, in my experience, it’s also true that some books are actually better when read. This really worked for Gilead, for example, because as an epistolary novel the narration was a perfect fit.
Speaking of notes, I really do recommend using Goodreads. Trying to go back and re-enter books you already read is a rabbit hole I suggest you don’t try to go down, but writing out reviews of everything you read–and recording the start and end date for each book–is a fantastic project that starts to really pay dividends within a couple of years of starting. Give it a shot.
So, have I sold you on Audible yet? Well, first let me point out to alternatives that might save you some cash. First, check with your local library to see if they let you digitally check out audiobooks. Mine does, and I was really excited. At first. Unfortunately, the particular app I had to use with my local library was the worst-designed thing imaginable. Most egregiously? No option to increase playback speed. That was a dealbreaker for me, and the library’s selection was also pretty meh. Still, you might have more luck. (I’m going to try again when we move to a new area.) Second, you can also check out iTunesU. I listened to some really great courses several years ago when that was getting started (including a fantastic overview of modern cosmology), but eventually these courses started to rely more and more heavily on video which, you know, defeats the entire purpose of an audiobook. There’s probably still a lot out there, however, and a lot is free, so you might want to check that out.
If you are interested in Audible, however, then let me make a suggestion: join Audible.
If you use that link just above to join, I get a little commission. Which is nice. But the real reason I decided to post this today is that Audible is also having a great members-only sale: $4.95 for the first book in a series. I don’t get a commission for that particular sale, by the way. I was just looking through the options, and saw some great ones. If you like sci-fi, then there are some fantastic deals. The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo last year, and it deserved it. Leviathan Wakesis the first book in a great sci-fi series that is currently running on SyFy as The Expanse.[ref]The later books are better, but the first one is solid.[/ref]. Golden Son is my favorite book of 2015. It’s not on the list, but it’s also #2 in a trilogy and the first book–Red Rising–is on the list.[ref]The last one, Morning Star, is out on audibook in 4 days![/ref] There are lots of other legitimate books on there as well. Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch) took the Hugo in 2015, for example. Revelation Space, Ringworld (A Del Rey book), and The Memory of Earth (Homecoming) are also all very good sci-fi (or, at least in the case of Ringworld, very famous sci-fi).
So, if you haven’t joined Audible yet, now might be a great time to try. And if you’re already a member, check out that sale.
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith for the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Public Domain)
That’s the thought that I had as I read this article from the Washington Post: ‘Eyewash’: How the CIA deceives its own workforce about operations. Prior to this article, I was already something of a skeptic. For one thing, the CIA doesn’t seem to have actually done us a lot of good, historically speaking. High-ranking double agents like Kim Philby (actually in British intelligence) meant that in the early days of the Cold War the only limits to Soviet supremacy were their own suspicions. When it comes to the CIA’s biggest operations, the CIA either bungled them horribly (like the Bay of Pigs Invasion), succeeded only to bring serious blowback on the United States (like Operation Ajax) or–perhaps worst of all–never bothered to show up at all (as with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956). Then there’s the plain old villainy of Project MKUltra. Altogether, this is not a track record to inspire either trust or gratitude.
One of the problems that run through these examples is the fact that the CIA brings intelligence and operations under one roof. As I understand it, this is considered a bad idea by most national intelligence agencies. It is why, for example, the British have both MI5 (operations) and MI6 (intelligence). The main problem with merging the two functions into a single organization is that it creates a conflict of interest: operations folks have the ability to interfere in research gathering and analysis to support their plans (ahead of an operation) or obscure mistakes (after an operation).
The idea of splitting the CIA might seem crazy. Don’t we have enough intelligence agencies already? Why yes, we do. We have an “intelligence community” of 17 distinct federal agencies that are supposed to coordinate to handle national intelligence. But note that that’s all intelligence. We could certainly use some streamlining and consolidation of intelligence agencies, but merging intelligence and operations is precisely the wrong kind of merger.
The one thing that has kept me sort of on-the-fence about the CIA is the notion of trust. I don’t think of myself as an overly trusting person, but I do think of myself as fairly pragmatic. As a conservative, I have the tragic vision of the world. That’s the idea that the world, in its natural state, is full of limited resources and conflicting incentives. It doesn’t go as far as Hobbesian paranoia, but it is a view of the world where most choices require tradeoffs and where conflict with other players[ref]In the sense of game theory, which isn’t really about “playing” or “games” at all.[/ref] is something that has to be managed and navigated but cannot be entirely avoided. George Orwell’s statement resonates with me: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence upon those who would do us harm.” A nation state needs an intelligence apparatus and it needs some covert operational capabilities as well.
Most importantly, the declassification of early Cold War era documents served to me as a kind of delayed verification of what the CIA was up to.[ref]Stuff like the Venona Project, which was declassified in 1995.[/ref] Even though declassifying something decades after the fact may not provide the kind of immediate public scrutiny that is important for other government action, it seemed like a good balance of the need for secrecy with the need for public oversight. After all, the incentives of a typical member of an organization are to not only look after their own needs and desires but–to at least some degree–to those of the organization they belong to. This is where concepts like loyalty and legacy and prestige all come into play. If CIA leadership knows that eventually the public will find out what they have done, I think that’s a useful incentive.
And so we come back to the WaPo article:
Senior CIA officials have for years intentionally deceived parts of the agency workforce by transmitting internal memos that contain false information about operations and sources overseas, according to current and former U.S. officials who said the practice is known by the term “eyewash.”
OK, so that sounds kind of bad, but you could see how that would actually be an important counter-intelligence strategy. If you want to know where a leak is, then you give different information to different suspects and you see what gets turned over to the other side. And obviously if you can dole out fake information this makes it easier to come up with different “facts” to check against more leaks and it also prevents the betrayal of real operatives and real operations. You could see how it could be abused, but also how the CIA would need the flexibility to do this from time to time. But then I read this:
Officials said there is no clear mechanism for labeling eyewash cables or distinguishing them from legitimate records being examined by the CIA’s inspector general, turned over to Congress or declassified for historians.
And that’s when I threw my arms up in the air and thought to myself, “We probably need to dismantle this entire institution and start over.”
If the false information is not documented somewhere, then the one and only reason I had for hoping the CIA could be kept in check–eventual declassification, scrutiny, and some form of (perhaps watered down) accountability–is gone. If the leadership of the CIA gets to release false information in official documents without any distinction between the lies and the truth, then the potential of abuse seems basically limitless and the opportunity for accountability (even indirect accountability through ideas like reputation and legacy) disappears.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of honor and about the important of principle not just in an idealized world, but in a very practical one. I think our country has made a fatal mistake in our abandonment of these concepts in favor of real politik. The amount of goodwill that the United States has squandered all around the world is incalculable, and it’s not just about feelings. It has real impacts on our safety, our foreign policy, our economy, and global stability. If we had traded that for real and tangible benefits, you could make the case that it’s a tough but necessary tradeoff, but I just don’t believe we can rely on that anymore.
If the CIA has license to lie to the people of the United States indefinitely and without recourse, then in what conceivable sense does it remain an arm of government by, for, and of the people?
One scripture has been on my mind more than any other over the last several years. That scripture is Alma 31:5. This takes place just after the story of Korihor (who met his end in Alma 30) and successive Lamanite invasions led by Amalekites (in Alma 25 and 27-28). No sooner have the Nephites survived that war, then then apostate Zoramites threaten to lead the Lamanites into starting a new one. So it is a time period of great uncertainty and danger for the Nephite people, with divisive threats inside their lands and betrayal and invasion lurking on the borders. This would have been a dark, dangerous, and confusing time.
This is how Alma reacts to the impending crisis:
And now, as the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them—therefore Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God.[ref]Alma 31:5[/ref]
The idea that the “preaching of the word” could have such an impact was one of those things I just had to take on faith when I read the Book of Mormon as a young man. To me, it seemed that the arc of history was largely dominated by soldiers and spies, by politicians and inventors. That even seemed to be the message of the Book of Mormon at first, with Captain Moroni’s brilliant strategies and defensive innovations.
The longer I’ve read, however, and the more I’ve lived I realize how superficial that perspective is. All of the things that we usually pay attention to—the wording of laws, the exact structure of government, specific inventions, or individual leaders—none of them matter compared to the sum total of a million individual, every-day decisions by ordinary people. We just don’t like to pay attention to that because it’s almost impossible to measure, quantify, or incorporate into formal models and theories. But in the long run, I believe that’s what really matters. And so the biggest influence on the course of nations and cultures is not found in momentous events, but in the accumulation of the lives of the individuals who make up those nations and societies. And those lives are themselves most heavily influenced by what people believe in. What they want. What they hope for. What they work for. And that is where the “preaching of the word” has such a profound impact.
It’s something to keep in mind as we head into another contentious election season. I am not saying that it doesn’t matter who is president, but I am saying that the character of the voters in the years leading up to an election have a much, much greater impact on the nation than the outcome of any particular vote.
This was all brought to mind in reading Elder Mark E. Peterson’s talk, Honesty, a Principle of Salvation. He begins by making a claim I have never heard before:
Honesty is a principle of salvation in the kingdom of God. Without it there can be no salvation. Just as no man or woman can be saved without baptism, so no one can be saved without honesty.
He then goes on to list all the ways in which dishonesty, that relatively minor offense (at least, that’s how we often think of it relative to murder or rape or even theft) leads to huge cumulative impacts: drug addiction, fornication, fraud, infidelity, theft, all come down to dishonest. Even the generation gap—a frequent topic in these talks—comes from “the light of the child—and too often also the parent.” An individual lie may indeed be a small thing, but in the end, “to resort to dishonest practices is to apostatize from the Christian way of life.”
The most important line in the talk, for me, is one that doesn’t at first seem connected to honesty. Elder Peterson says that “if we are interested in the gospel in the least degree, we should live it wholeheartedly.” Of course there is a connection. What we say we care about should mesh with what we actually care about. What we say and believe with what we do. And this, too, is a kind of honesty, although it often goes by the expression “integrity” as well.
And that is a message that resonates deeply with me. I’ve started two personal blogs in my life, one in 2006 and then this one as a reboot in 2012. In both cases, one of my first blog posts was a recap of that very idea: pursuing integrity—honesty—between what we think we care about and what we actually care about, between what we want to be and what we actually are. Here’s the 2012 version, if you’re curious: Mind the Gaps.
These are small things. An individual lie in a person’s entire life, an individual honest person in a whole society, but the big things—the life, the society—aren’t made of anything else.
At the beginning of every year, I post a review of the prior year.[ref]Here’s the review of 2014 from January 2015, if you’re curious.[/ref] I like to go over traffic stats, finances, other changes, and then talk about the year ahead. As an added bonus this time, I’m going to also review some of the stories from 2015 that have caused me second-thoughts since I wrote them.
2015 Traffic
Traffic stats do not motivate our posts here at Difficult Run, but as a data nerd I find them inherently interesting. And let’s not kid around: writing is a lot more rewarding when it has an impact. And for that to happen, other people have to read your stuff.
On that score, I’m pleased with the healthy growth we have here at Difficult Run. It might be a small fish in a big pond, but it’s our fish, and it’s growing nicely. Here’s a look at blog traffic for the three complete years DR has been online.
The exact totals are 57,270 (for 2013), 112,668 (for 2014) and 146,936 (for 2015).[ref]If you’d like a little context for those numbers, you can compare them with John Scalzi’s stats for the same year. John Scalzi is an award-winning author who just signed a multi-million dollar, 10-year book deal, and his blog (The Whatever) has been an Internet fixture since 1998. In 2015, he got nearly 6,000,000 views. So, about 40 times what we get at Difficult Run.[/ref] Here’s to cracking 200,000 in 2016!
We also have a Facebook Page that is up to 215 followers and an email list with 140 members. I also use a WordPress plugin called Jetpack to do basic site monitoring, traffic, and a few other things. And Jetpack puts its own year-in-review together. Here it is.
2015 Top Posts
Here are top 5 posts from along with their total views by the end of 2015:
It’s kind of an interesting range of topics: politics, sci-fi, and Mormonism. Eclectic. That’s how we like to roll here at Difficult Run, although we also tend to have a lot of posts on economics (but no big ones that made the list this year.)
2015 Finances
We display Amazon ads on Difficult Run. The way those work, is that if you click the ad and then buy something from Amazon (even if you don’t buy the thing we were advertising), we got a small percentage of the order (usually about 4%).
We also ran some ads for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the end of the year, and that’s something we might try again in 2016, if they’d like us to. (None of the money from that brief campaign was received in 2015, however.
Additionally, I’ve received two very generous and unsolicited donations from an anonymous reader. Here’s how that all stacked up:
Amazon Ad Revenue: $100.78
Donations: $600
Total: $700.78
During 2015, we were paying $30/month for hosting, and we spent another $15 on domain registration. So that was $375. So, for the first time, Difficult Run paid for its own hosting this year! That’s pretty exciting, and there’s enough money left over to pay for (most of) the hosting in 2016.
Difficult Run was never intended as a major source of revenue. The only goal has been to cover the hosting costs, which will continue to go up as our traffic increases. So far, we look to be self-sufficient (thanks primarily to our generous benefactor), and that is really nice.
Blog Changes: New Host! New Domain Registrar!
At the start of 2015, we outgrew the budget $5/month hosting that I’d been using since launching Difficult Run. Instead, we migrated to a dedicate WP hosting company. It was a huge improvement, but by the end of the year the new host was starting to let us down with extended outages and emergency server migrations. (Luckily a lot of this was during the Christmas – New Year’s period when traffic is pretty light.) So, earlier this month, we migrated to a new host.
Our new host is Appteryx. They were absolutely great about the transfer, despite the fact that I goofed and took down the old site before telling them that we had a deadline to get the new one up. They were gracious about that and—more than that—really, really fast. Website speed and reliability has also been great. If you’re looking for a host, definitely consider them.
We also switched our domain registrar. Our new registrar is Google. The old one went down several times in 2015, and I’m hoping that with Google that will no longer be an issue!
Second Thoughts from 2015
There are two posts that have given me second thoughts since I posted them in 2015. I’m sure these aren’t the only mistakes I’ve made. In fact, I don’t even really consider either one to be a mistake. (Although I have certainly made some of them!) They are just posts that haven’t really sat well with me in the months since I posted them. Let me tell you why.
This story seemed so simple to me when it broke. More than that, it resonated with me. Kids being bullied for being different? Especially nerdy kids? Yeah, that hit home. And so—along with a great deal of the Internet—I rushed to the keyboard to vent my outrage.
Don’t I know better than that?
I do. Or at least, I should. Looks like I had to learn the lesson one more time.
As far as I can tell, a lot of the original criticisms are still valid. The school’s reaction—and the police’s—seems unreasonable. No one ever thought that anyone was in real danger. However, the more that I read the less clear-cut it seemed. There was no single article that opened my eyes, but I paid attention over the coming months and lots of little things combined to make me think I’d been hasty in my rush to judgment. Examples: first, no clock was created. The kid just broke open an old clock and stuff it inside a little pencil case that looked like miniature briefcase. Those images were missing from the first stories (I saw one before I published mine, but ignored the second thoughts it prompted). This gets worse rather than better combined with stories that Ahmed actually was fairly skilled. He had made cool projects, but this wasn’t one of them. Several other things didn’t feel quite right, and then—most recently—came word that he was suing for $15 million. Given all the incredible gifts, opportunities, and offers he’d received from Silicon Valley and others, that just seems excessive.
I’m not going to make the same mistake in reverse. I don’t know exactly what was going on. I just can’t feel any confidence in my initial response, and I wish I’d waited rather than rushing to judgment.
Even more than with the previous issue, the emotional core of this is something I stand by. Reaching out in love and rising above our fear is so important to who we are—or should be—as a nation. I watched another GOP primary debate (this one without Trump), and it was so depressing to hear the candidates fall over each other to talk about how scary the world is, how scary ISIS is, how scary everything is. ISIS is a bunch of truly evil dudes, yes, but they’re not the USSR. We’re not facing the possibility of existential defeat in ISIS. Not from their guns or bombs, anyway. The bigger thread, by far, is that in our overreaction and in our fear we lose our own soul.
However, when it comes to the actual policy of immigration (especially to Europe), I have to admit that some of the skeptics had a point. One thing that was covered frequently at the time was that a great deal of the incoming refugees were unaccompanied young men rather than families. That raised red flags at the time, not necessarily in terms of their intentions, but in terms of the unique problems that this could have for integration.
Since then, one article that caught my attention came from the Gatestone Institute in October.[ref]A quick Wikipedia search shows that they are a conservative think tank. So there’s bias, but they aren’t a conspiracy theory website either.[/ref] Titled Germany: Migrant Crime Wave, Police Capitulate, the article cites the President of the German Police Union saying that German police “hardly dare to stop a car” in some neighborhoods, “because they know that they’ll be surrounded by 40 or 50 men.”
Meanwhile a December article shows that the response in Germany has been a historic run on weapons of all kinds.[ref]That comes from Infowars, which is a conspiracy theory website, but the bare facts—that Germans are buying handguns, pepper spray, etc. in record numbers appears substantiated with links to legitimate articles. My German is rusty (to put it mildly), but I’m asking a friend who speaks much better than I to look over them and confirm that Infowars accurately represents the information.[/ref]
And then early this month there were the harrowing tales of mass sexual assault committed by immigrant populations against young German women in cities across Germany, most notably in Cologne. It’s important to be cautious about stories that fit so neatly into racist stereotypes (“We have to protect our women!”), but the facts seem beyond dispute. One IB Times article has the total number of criminal complaints from New Year’s Eve up to 516, with nearly ½ of them related to sexual assault. Reporting at CNN and Der Spiegel concurs.
We should not be reckless and we should not be irresponsible, but we should also not be afraid to take chances to do what ought to be done.
I knew things could go wrong. I just didn’t expect it to be so blatant or so fast.
I’d like to end on a positive note. As covered by the BBC, in December 2015 Muslim Kenyans refused to allow themselves to be separated from Christian Kenyans and in so doing prevented their Christian neighbors from being massacred by Islamist terrorists. And then, just a couple of days ago, a conference of Muslim leaders meeting in Morocco released a statement citing religious freedom in the ancient Constitution of Medina, highlighting the “urgent need for cooperation among all religious groups,” and saying that “such cooperation must go beyond mutual tolerance and respect, to providing full protection for the rights and liberties to all religious groups in a civilized manner that eschews coercion, bias, and arrogance.”
Religious understanding is possible. It is essential. But it can also be hard and complicated. For me, this means I assess the risks as even higher than I thought they were, but still believe in the essential mission of moving against the current of fear instead of giving into it.
Difficult Run in 2016
We already have a ton of great articles lined up. As for myself, personally, I have several topics that I want to do some research on before presenting them here. Sites like Wait But Why and Slate Star Codex along with pieces like When Social Justice Isn’t About Justice and Some Sad Puppy Data Analysis all give me confidence that if you invest the time in research and longer, original pieces you can find an audience and make an impact. In particular, I’ve got a series of articles on the definition of religious freedom a friend (and law professor) gave to me and also a series of articles comparing the role of Sharia in the US court system to ecclesiastical courts from other faiths (especially Jewish Halakha.) So look forward to those, and also to some new members we hope to bring on board this year.
This week we’re covering the Friday afternoon session of the October 1971 General Conference, and there is one talk that stood out to me: Should the Commandments Be Rewritten? by Elder Richard L. Evans.[ref]Spoiler alert: the answer is no.[/ref]
The title of the talk is stern, and the opening paragraph is blunt:
Perhaps I could begin with an interesting question posed recently and an equally interesting answer. The question was, “Don’t you think the commandments should be rewritten?” The answer was, “No, they should be reread.”
It’s easy and it’s tempting to write off a talk that opens like this as a fossil of an older, more black-and-white time. Just obey. Stop thinking. Right?
Well, no. Absolutely not. What this talk conveys–and what is probably the number 1 lesson for me in going through General Conference talks written before I was born–is that they reward the person who comes with an attitude of humility and a thirst to learn. Not only that, but they quickly, consistently, and emphatically confound the stereotypes. Consider Elder Evan’s words from just a couple of paragraphs further into the talk:
Some things the commandments say thou shalt not do, and if that is what they say, that’s what they mean, and there’s a reason for it.
This paragraph starts out on a straight railroad track headed directly to Divine Command Theory Central. Divine command theory is “a meta-ethical theory which proposes that an action’s status as morally good is equivalent to whether it is commanded by God.”[ref]Wikipedia[/ref] In simpler terms: DCT is the idea that if we ask God, “But why?” he will respond with just “Because I said so.” And that’s all there is to it.
Because Elder Evans’ talk has a stern tone, you might think that this is where he’s headed. But at the last moment, Elder Evans suddenly veers off in a completely different direction. We aren’t supposed to keep the commandments just because God says so. No, “there’s a reason for [them].” Just a couple of paragraphs later, he elaborates:
Essentially this is what the gospel is: counsel from a loving Father who says to his children, “You have limitless, everlasting possibilities. You also have your freedom. It’s up to you how you use it. This is what you can become if you take my advice—and this is what will happen if you don’t. The choice is yours.”
Now, let me make a quick digression. The quote from LDS.org actually says “a living Father” instead of “a loving Father.” I was pretty sure that was wrong. “Loving” makes a lot more sense than “living.” So I cued up the video and watched. First of all: I was right. Elder Evans is talking about a loving father. Secondly: hearing him read the talk was also incredibly eye opening for me.
We all know, as denizens of the Internet, that tone is hard to convey in text. We’ve all had experiences where we got into trouble because we tried to make a joke online and it was taken the wrong way, or because someone said something that seemed rude or unkind to us, only to realize later that they had been trying to be playful. The same thing is going on here. I can’t help but think of Nephi writing,
I, Nephi, cannot write all the things which were taught among my people; neither am I mighty in writing, like unto speaking; for when a man speaketh by the power of the Holy Ghost the power of the Holy Ghost carrieth it unto the hearts of the children of men.[ref]2 Nephi 33:1[/ref]
Nephi understood the difference between the spoken word and the written word, and he well understood the limitations of writing. One of those limitations is tone.
If I’d been listening to Elder Evans’ talk all along–instead of just reading the text–I would have realized much sooner that his dogged emphasis on obedience was not born of an authoritarian disposition but out of a sense of urgent concern. In this sense, Elder Evans is modeling our Father. In that case, too, commands are not about bossing underlings around. They are about beseeching wayward, recalcitrant, stubborn, and (quite frankly) bumbling and incompetent children to be careful.
As I continue to read these talks, I am humbled again and again to find that a lot of the things that I have grumbled about in the past “Why aren’t the General Authorities more clear about X?” or “Why don’t they just come out and say Y?” are actually there, plain as day, in talks that I could have easily read any time. It is, quite frankly, a little humiliating. In a good way.
The first is the clear dismissal of DCT in favor of moral realism. Here’s another one, from this talk: sometimes I’m frustrated that the General Authorities aren’t more clear about the need for members to be autonomous and independent in our obedience. To figure things out on our own. To stop depending so much on the leaders. And yet here is Elder Evans:
The Lord expects us to use wisdom and common sense and not quibble about what obviously isn’t good for the body or mind or spirit or morals of man.
Also, this is a talk where Elder Evans quotes from Emerson, Cromwell, and Ruskin. Clearly, when Elder Evans said, “I have a great respect for scholarship, for education and research, for academic excellence, and for the magnificent accomplishments of sincere and searching men,” he meant it. He knew what he was talking about. And so clearly, when he followed that up with, “But I also have great respect for the word of God, and his prophets, and life’s purpose; and it comes to a question of where to place our trust,” I should pay attention.
So that’s my experience with the General Conference Odyssey thus far in a nutshell: I’m embarrassed that I didn’t start reading these much earlier, and incredibly grateful that I finally have the opportunity to do so now. I won’t have time, unfortunately, to watch the videos for all the talks. I read much, much faster than the talks are given. But, in addition to learning that I have a tendency to misread the tone, this also makes me more grateful that in just a couple of months I’ll be able to listen to the talks live.
Yes, that’s right. It’s January, and I’m actively looking forward to General Conference. And not just because I get to stay home. No, I’m actually impatient to have a chance to listen to the talks. That’s a really, really big shift in my approach. I’m honestly kind of shocked at how much of a change this project has already had on me, and I’m as excited as ever to see what the next decade brings.
Now, here are some other quotes from some of the rest of the talks given during this session.
“There are many lonely people, people whose loneliness is hidden. We need to seek them out and relieve them.”
The reason this struck me so forcefully is that it reminds me of some of the most important research I’ve ever learned about: Adverse Childhood Experiences. Read this article to see more about that topic, and how true it is that there are so many people–friends and neighbors–laboring under the burdens of invisible tragedy. This whole talk was a really beautiful sermon on service.
“Each child should be made to feel at all times by his parents that he is of great importance in the family.”
Definitely something for me to keep in mind in my own home. My children are in sort of the childhood sweet-spot. They’re old enough to be mostly self-sufficient, but they are still young enough to hold my hand now and then in public. It’s a treacherous time, however, because now that they don’t literally require supervision, it’s tempting to turn away too often. And I know if I do that that, in the blink of an eye, the window of opportunity will be gone and they will be teenage strangers living in my house. And so I appreciate–deeply and truly–every single reminder I get to focus my energies consciously and deliberately on being a more present parent. It’s not just a duty to be there for my kids. It’s one of life’s greatest blessings.
Which, if you think of it, is a great model for all commandments. They’re not really obligations. They’re stepping-stone to peace, happiness, love, and safety.
One of the most surprising things about Cixin Liu’s award-winning science fiction novel 
) that are even more haunting. The way that an author who is so willing to stare the political doublethink of the Cultural Revolution directly in the face has no qualms about positively describing the important role that political officers would play in a modern (presumably less totalitarian) Chinese military shows, to me, how deeply embedded some of the assumptions that led to the Cultural Revolution still remain. So many things that do not seem political to use are that way purely because nobody has bothered to politicize them. But physics, like anything else, can be and has been politicized.
, which clocks in at over 48 hours, followed by Neal Stephenson’s 
(almost 32 hours) and then Susan Wise Bauer’s 
(about 27 hours). Most books fall in a more normal range of about 12-16 hours each, however, which means that double-speed means it takes only 6-8 hours to get through a typical book. And that’s an amount of time most people can probably find in one week.
[/ref], another of T. E. Lawrence[ref]
[/ref], and also a history of the Plantagenets[ref]
[/ref]). You can also get a lot of Great Courses through Audible, so there’s a ton of great material on anything from quantum physics (I recently listened to a short one on the Higgs Boson) to marketing or music appreciation.
or 
, but it does skew towards fiction for me and away from the most interesting non-fiction, which I still prefer to get in hardcopy (or Kindle).
If you use that link just above to join, I get a little commission. Which is nice. But the real reason I decided to post this today is that Audible is also having a great members-only sale: 
is the first book in a great sci-fi series that is currently running on SyFy as The Expanse.[ref]The later books are better, but the first one is solid.[/ref]. 
is my favorite book of 2015. It’s not on the list, but it’s also #2 in a trilogy and the first book–
–is on the list.[ref]The last one, 
, is out on audibook in 4 days![/ref] There are lots of other legitimate books on there as well. 
took the Hugo in 2015, for example. 
, 
, and 
are also all very good sci-fi (or, at least in the case of Ringworld, very famous sci-fi).
