Nathaniel

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.

The Fragile Beliefs of Terrorists

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Triumph of Faith over Idolatry by Jean-Baptiste Théodon (Wikimedia Commons)
Triumph of Faith over Idolatry by Jean-Baptiste Théodon (Wikimedia Commons)

Since 9/11, it has been conventional wisdom among many on the left, and especially among the New Atheists, that religious conviction is bad, bad news. The logic is pretty straightforward: it takes a very high degree of religious conviction to kill yourself in the name of God. You have to really, really believe. Meanwhile, folks who don’t believe are unlikely to do anything extreme. So we’d all be a lot safer and more comfortable if religious folks would just sort of calm down.

The conventional response from religious folks is that, well: yeah, sometimes great faith makes people do acts of great evil. But it also makes people do acts of great heroism, right? Mother Theresa, right? This is a qualified defense at best. It says, in effect, that there really is a link between religious faith and extreme actions. It doesn’t actually show that these great acts of evil an good balance out, and there really isn’t any good reason to suspect that they should. What’s the exchange rate between an extremist terrorist with a nuclear weapon and an extremist nun with a desire to help poor people in Calcutta?

But maybe the central premise needs to be reconsidered. Maybe it’s not great faith that leads terrorists into extremism. Thus, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in an article for the New Statesman:

It effectively may appear that the split between the permissive First World and the fundamentalist reaction to it runs more and more along the lines of the opposition between leading a long satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent Cause. Is this antagonism not the one between what Nietzsche called “passive” and “active” nihilism? We in the West are the Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle up to their self-destruction. William Butler Yeats’ “Second Coming” seems perfectly to render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” This is an excellent description of the current split between anemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able fully to engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism.

However, do the terrorist fundamentalists really fit this description? What they obviously lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated, by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation.

This is an important new way at looking at the intersection between faith and social stability. (Hat tip to Miles Kimball, who cited the article in his own blog post.)

Prejudice and Favoritism Don’t Cancel Out

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Michael Derrick Hudson
Michael Derrick Hudson

An interesting story has been making the rounds. A guy named Michael Derrick Hudson was having trouble getting his poetry published. So he decided to use a pseudonym. That, in and of itself, is of course perfectly benign. But the pseudonym he picked was Yi-Fen Chou. So, after 40 rejections under his own name, he got another 9 under his Chinese-sounding pseudonym before landing the poem in an anthology.

You can read all the rest of the details via New York Magazine: What a Poetry Kerfuffle Can Teach Us About Bias.

Here are some lessons worth taking away. First, let’s not pretend that using the Chinese-sounding name didn’t help Hudson. Obviously it did. The numbers bear this out (a little), but so does common sense and this is born out by the testimony of the guy who picked out the poem for the anthology (he admits reading it in a different way because he assumed the author was Chinese, and therefore being more open to it.)

So, does this prove that white males are really the ones being oppressed?

No, it doesn’t. It illustrates something that should be obvious but for some reason isn’t: bias is local. When you’re applying for a job it really doesn’t matter what the aggregate level of bias in the industry is. It matters what your specific (potential) boss thinks. And this trend can vary. So, do (for example) homosexuals face discrimination? In the NFL: probably. In Hollywood: probably not. Being of Chinese descent may very well hurt if you’re running for nationally elected office (I’m speculating, but it’s reasonable) or competing for CEO. But it actually helps out if you’re tying to get published.

This should make us all be a little bit more cautious about making wide, sweeping claim about privilege and prejudice.

And one more thing: I don’t think that prejudice and favoritism cancel out. Being given favorable treatment in one area of your life does not somehow make prejudice that you face in another area of your life go away. Just something to consider.

The Solar System to Scale

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811 - Space Shuttle Atlantis Viewed from the ISS
The launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, as soon from the ISS, is also a wonderful glimpse into the scale of space.

You have probably seen this video already because everyone is sharing it, but I had to share it too. I have always wanted to do exactly this: go out to some giant field and set up a scale model of the Solar System and just wander around and try to drink in the sheer scale of it all. Little did I know that, starting with an earth the size of a marble, you’re going to need 7 miles of empty space to do the setup to scale, and that’s without including Plutos’ orbit. (It only goes out as far as Uranus.)

I’d really love to see this done as a permanent installation somewhere. I want to spend an entire day walking around, watching the planets move, imagining the delicate art of sending tiny craft across immense gulfs of emptiness to deliver rovers (or astronauts!) to alien worlds.

(If you’re receiving this blog post via email, you’ll have to visit the site to watch the YouTube clip. Sorry, they don’t embed in the emails for some reason.)

T&S Post: “A woman is a woman no matter what, but manhood can be lost.”

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861 - The Suicide of Edouard Manet LARGE

In keeping with my renewed every-other-week schedule at T&S, I posted some speculations about theology and gender at Times and Seasons yesterday: “A woman is a woman no matter what, but manhood can be lost.” The article is about as popular as you’d expect, which is to say: not very.

I am reasonably certain that the rise of gender and sexuality politics in our culture is an opportunity for theological and cultural growth, but also that neither of the prevailing political attitudes are capable of revealing the lessons that are there to be learned. Social liberals are too committed to a view of human nature that is too shallow and superficial to do anyone any good. (In this, I’m basically echoing Pinker’s critique in The Blank Slate.) Social conservatives, I think, are doing a good job of holding onto important traditions that are necessary for a healthy society, but are also too willing to veer towards fearfulness that leads to bigotry on the one hand and prevents consideration of new explanations for why these traditions are important on the other.

This article is just another example of me trying to extricate myself a bit from this morass–without abandoning positions I think are important–and reach for new understandings of old truths.

Salon: Glenn Beck vs. Donald Trump

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Note: the initial headline misattributed the story to Slate instead of Salon. My mistake.

Salon has an interesting article: Glenn Beck vs. Donald Trump: Why the wing-nut icon’s new war on the billionaire really matters.  It’s always a little hard to read analysis that is so overtly partisan, and the schadenfreude is dense in this article, but I do think it is important that Beck is taking a stand against Trump.

I have a soft spot for Beck. Unlike every other conservative pundit I’ve listened to, I think he’s really sincere, and I find that endearing even if I don’t actually agree with him a lot of the time. Last time I checked, for example, he was a big Cruz supporter and for me Trump, Cruz, and Huckabee sort of round out the Axis of Crazy within the GOP. Still, it is significant because Beck represents–or is supposed to represent–exactly the kind of radical, unthinking segment of the base that is supporting Trump.

I’m not sure exactly what this means, but it undermines the conventional “establishment vs. base” narrative that has been used to explain Trump’s rise. It’s also, to the extent that Beck can galvanize some of the base to actually oppose Trump meaningfully, a potential ray of hope. Because right now, the GOP could use any and every internal ally to displace Trump and put a grown-up back in charge. (It still shouldn’t be Cruz, though. Come on.)

Inequality and Efficiency: Not Caring vs. Having the “Wrong” Values

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813 - Ultimatum Game

Slate has a write-up that is ostensibly about the mystery of rising income inequality in the United States (and the “tepid” response), but is in actual fact more interesting as a case study in how bias works.

The setup is simple: researchers conducted a variant of the venerable “ultimatum game:”

The ultimatum game is a game in economic experiments. The first player (the proposer) receives a sum of money and proposes how to divide the sum between himself and another player. The second player (the responder) chooses to either accept or reject this proposal. If the second player accepts, the money is split according to the proposal. If the second player rejects, neither player receives any money. The game is typically played only once so that reciprocation is not an issue.

The twist in this case was that the researchers adjusted the rules so that giving money away was more or less effective. In some games, if you gave $1 to the other player[ref]Economists always refer to the participants as “players” even though the “games” in game theory are really not games at all.[/ref], the player would only get $0.10. In other cases, if you gave $1 away, the other player received $10. By looking at how much money people gave away vs. how how effective it was, the game purported to measure how the players valued equality vs. efficiency.

Let’s make this plain (more plain than the Slate piece) with a simple example where there’s initially $10 at stake. A player who values equality is going to try to have both players end up with the same amount of money. In a situation where there is low efficiency, they would give away about $9.00 to give the other player $0.90 and would keep $1.00 for themselves. This achieves equality, but it also means that both players (combined) have less than $2.00. In a high-efficiency scenario, they will give away $1.00 and the other player will get $10.00, leaving $9.00 for the original player. This means that the total amount of money (combined) is $19.00.

Now let’s look at a high-efficiency player. When giving is very inefficient, the player might give away $1.00, leaving the other player with $0.10 and keep $9.00. Now the two players have $9.10 (combined) whereas in the equality scenario, both players (combined) had just $2.00. When giving is very efficient, the player might give away $9.00, leaving the other player with $90.00 while they keep just $1.00. Now they players together have $91.00, while in the equality scenario the two players together had just $19.00.

In other words: a bias towards efficiency meant that the size of the pie available to both players might grow by roughly 500%.

Is that actually what happened in the results? I have no idea. The Slate article was vague. But it was more than just vague, it set up a really strange and forced dichotomy that suggests players had to value equality or… nothing.

Second paragraph:

But our results suggest that, at least when it comes to attitudes toward inequality, Fitzgerald is right: Elite Americans are not just middle-class people with more money. They display distinctive attitudes on basic moral and political questions concerning economic justice. Simply put, the rich place a much lower value on equality than the rest. What’s more, this lack of concern about inequality among the elite is not a partisan matter. [emphasis added]

Notice how this is not described as a trade-off between efficiency and equality. Even though that’s pretty much the entire point of the experiment, the Slate article treats efficiency as a non-issue beneath consideration, as you can see once again in the penultimate paragraph:

Our results thus shine a revealing light on American politics and policy. They suggest that the policy response to rising economic inequality lags so far behind the preferences of ordinary Americans for the simple reason that the elites who make policy—regardless of political party—just don’t care much about equality. [emphasis added]

This is a major problem because efficiency is a serious practical consideration. One obvious reason for this is the idea of externalities. Consider early-adopters. By definition, an early-adopter has to be relatively affluent in order to invest time and money in bleeding-edge products that don’t necessarily work that well and are quite expensive. The benefit to the rest of us, of course, is that by paying for the over-price, unstable versions of products, early-adopters ensure that the rest of us can buy the cheaper, more stable versions. This sounds frivolous, but something like it applies to virtually every technology that defines our modern existence, from the Internet to penicillin.

My point is not that I know the right way to balance efficiency (the size of the pie) with equality (the relative slices of the pie). My point is just that: it’s a tradeoff we have to make. We’re not going to do a very good job of having a reasonable, civil discussion about that trade off if we can’t even admit that it exists. (Looking at you, Slate.)

Was Fiorina Telling the Truth About Abortion?

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For me, the only moment of genuine passion and conviction in the entire GOP debate came when Carly Fiorina linked the Iran issue (“the defense of the security of this nation”) with abortion (“the defense of the character of this nation”) Here is what she said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cy5mYuyMCA

Fiorina has been excoriated in the media for this statement, not least because the debate was the most-watched event for CNN. Planned Parenthood has been in damage-control mode over the ongoing release of undercover videos documenting the sale / donation[ref]A legal distinction without a meaningful ethical difference in this case.[/ref] of human organs procured during abortions. This kind of coverage does not help make their federal funding any safer.

This pro-Fiorina article from First Things (Fiorina Was Right) gives a good rundown of some of the criticism Fiorina has faced, for example, straight from Planned Parenthood:

The images show nothing like what Carly Fiorina said they do, and they have nothing to do with Planned Parenthood. The video footage that she claims exists—and that she ‘dared’ people to watch—does not exist. We have a word for that: It’s a lie.

Glenn Stanton, writing the First Things piece, argues that the video is real and provides the YouTube link with time stamps to see exactly what Fiorina is referring to. I don’t like watching these kinds of videos, but I did for the sake of understanding. The video produced by the Center for Medical Progress shows exactly what Fiorina describes. However, the video of the unborn human being with a beating heart and twitching leg is clearly not footage from the undercover sting operation. So what’s going on? Here’s MSNBC:

What does exist is a video interview of a former employee of StemExpress, a tissue procurement agency like the fictitious group represented by the anti-abortion activists behind the video. In it, she claims she saw a fetus with a heartbeat, and says her supervisor planned to procure the fetus’s brain for medical research. The video also includes unrelated stock footage of a fetus outside the womb that purports to be from an abortion… No one in the videos has even alleged that a fetus was kept alive to harvest a brain, nor is there footage of it.[ref]MSNBC also notes that the Center for Medical Progress has passed off images of stillbirths as images of abortions in the past. That’s a legitimate point in general, but not relevant in this particular case as we’ll see in a couple of paragraphs.[/ref]

So here’s what happened: the Center for Medical Progress (which has been releasing the undercover videos) used stock footage from another pro-life group called the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform during this segment of the video. They cut back and forth between an interview with a former “Procurement Technician” from Stem Express, LLC[ref]A real-live company that makes money acting as a middleman between abortionists and medical researchers who want human organs[/ref] describing the incident that made her quit her job and stock footage. The footage is clearly labeled, as this image (cropped to avoid any disturbing imagery) shows:

815 - Labeled Footage

This isn’t dishonest on the part of CMP. They were interviewing a woman about what she was asked to do (cut through the face of an unborn human being to harvest the brain) and why she was unable to do it (it was too horrific for her to go through with). Showing footage of a fetus of the same gestational age during the interview is neither misleading nor gratuitous given the content of the interview. Furthermore, the CMP video does not allege that the footage of the fetus was from the  specific incident being described by the interviewee. In fact, that would be strange because if they had undercover video of that incident they would be playing that video in addition to / instead of an interview. You interview people precisely because you don’t have primary evidence of the thing you are interviewing them about. That is what, to a large extent, interviews are for. Nor does the CMP video allege that the fetus in the footage is aborted, and why should they? That is not actually relevant. The fetus that is the subject of the interview was aborted, the fetus in the stock footage is there as an illustration to show viewers what we’re talking about. This woman was asked to cut through the face of an unborn human being. This is what an unborn human being looks like. Given euphemisms about “products of conception” and “uterine contents” and so forth, the inclusion of illustrative footage is entirely legitimate.

So let’s turn to Fiorina’s comments. It’s clear that she, either in watching the video or in remembering it after the fact, conflated the stock footage with actual footage of a fetus that was about to have its brain harvested. I do not think it was a lie because I do not think it was intentional. People misremember. That’s part of being human. More importantly: I don’t think it matters.

Think about the Planned Parenthood rebuttal for a moment. A woman testifies that PP conducted an abortion that led to a living, intact fetus and then ordered this women to harvest that fetus’s brain. Fiorina passionately declares that this kind of barbaric treatment is a threat to our national character. Planned Parenthood says, “Aha, but you don’t actually have video of that specific incident.”

This non sequitur is as morally bankrupt as one of Donald Trump’s failed enterprises. Does it really matter if this particular fetus in this particular video is the one that had its brain harvested? Or doesn’t it actually matter whether or not there was such a fetus that had its brain harvested on or off camera? Does Planned Parenthood think that something morally repugnant becomes morally acceptable just because it was not caught on video?

Probably not. But they do understand very, very well that as long as something is not seen it cannot generate or sustain outrage. And that is the real secret to Planned Parenthood’s ongoing success. They do not provide the assistance to poor women that they claim to[ref]For example: they do not offer mammograms.[/ref], and every single service they do offer other than abortion can be accessed at other community health clinics that don’t perform abortions (not to mention harvest and sell human organs). But they continue to enjoy widespread support and hundreds of millions of dollars of government funding and the abortion industry as a whole continues on largely unregulated and unopposed because abortion is invisible. We don’t talk about the unborn human beings who die, we don’t even talk seriously about the costs to the women who procure abortions, we don’t even talk about the toll this kind of routinized violence takes on abortion providers.

The specific video that Fiorina thought existed does not exist. But the kind of incidents that threaten our national character did take place and continue to take place. Which of those truths matters more? Planned Parenthood doesn’t really care; they just want you to think there’s nothing to see here so that you’ll move along without looking too closely.

 

Draft Mitt

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816 - Draft Mitt

After the most recent debate, there has been a spate of new articles about how and why Romney needs to come save the GOP. For example, Politico: It’s Time for Romney. KUTV (CBS affiliate in Utah) also got in on the action: Renewed calls for Romney to enter presidential race get louder after debate.

Turns out, there’s even a site–DraftMit.org–where you can go and sign up to do your part to try and drat Mitt into the 2016 campaign. Yeah, I went and signed up.

The reality is, there are several GOP contenders that look promising to me: Rubio, Fiorina and yes, even Jeb Bush.[ref]It grates on me to say that, but I thought he did well in the debate and I deeply respect his refusal to cave into ignorant populism on the immigration issue.[/ref] But as long as none of them are even seriously challenging Trump, why not hold out hope for my favorite?

While we’re at it: Rubio or Fiorina would make really great VP candidates.

 

Opposition in All Things and the Evolution of Love

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817 - Wedding Rings

This piece is cross-posted at Junior Ganymede.

One of the most famous phrases in Mormon scriptures comes from Lehi’s farewell message to his son Jacob[ref]I called this Jacob’s sermon when I first wrote it. Oops. Fixed after a commenter pointed out the error.[/ref] in the Second Book of Nephi: “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.” The entire verse reads:

For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.[ref]2 Nephi 2:11[/ref]

As I was compiling my notes from my read-through of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, I came across this really stunning echo of that concept. It’s a long quote, but definitely worth the read:

Donald Symons has argued that we have genetic conflicts to thank for the fact that we have feelings toward other people at all. Consciousness is a manifestation of the neural computations necessary to figure out how to get the rare and unpredictable things we need. We feel hunger, savor food, and have a pallet for countless fascinating tastes because food was hard to get during most of our evolutionary history. We don’t normally feel longing, delight, or fascination regarding oxygen, even though it is crucial for survival, because it was never hard to obtain. We just breathe.

The same may be true of conflicts over kin, mates, and friends. I mentioned that if a couple were guaranteed to be faithful, to favor each other over there kin, and to die at the same time, their genetic interest would be identical, wrapped up in their common children. One can even imagine a species in which every couple was marooned on an island for life and their offspring dispersed at maturity, never to return. Since the genetic interests of the two mates are identical, one might at first think that evolution would endow them with a blissful perfection of sexual, romantic, and companionate love.

But Symons argues, nothing of the sort would happen. The relationship between the mates would evolve to be like the relationship among the cells of a single body, whose genetic interests are also identical. Heart cells and lung cells don’t have to fall in love to get along in perfect harmony. Likewise, the couples in the species would have sex only for the purpose of procreation (why waste energy?), and sex would bring no more pleasure than the rest of reproductive physiology such as the release of hormones or the formation of the gametes:

There would be no falling in love, because there would be no alternative mates to choose among, and falling in love would be a huge waste. You would literally love your mate as yourself, but that’s the point: you don’t really love yourself, except metaphorically; you are yourself. The two of you would be as far as evolution is concerned, one flesh, and your relationship would be governed by mindless physiology… You might feel pain if you observed your mate cut herself, but all the feelings we have about our mates that make relationship so wonderful when it is working well (and so painful when it is not) would never evolve. Even if a species had them when they took up this way of life, they would be selected out as surely as the eyes of a cave-dwelling fish are selected out, because they would be all cost and no benefit.

The same is true for emotions towards family and friends: the richness and intensity of the feelings in our minds are proof of the preciousness and fragility of those bonds in life. In short, without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all.

The idea that our capacity to experience love is tied to the imperfections in our relationships, to their fragility and capacity to fail, is profound.

Live-Tweeting the GOP Debate Tonight

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I’ve had a Twitter account forever. Thought I’d try something new with it tonight and live tweet the GOP debate on CNN tonight, starting at 8pm. Follow me on Twitter if that sounds interesting: @NathanielGivens.

If I’m happy with the results–who knows?–I’ll post them here.