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.

Case Study: Winning the Argument Through Framing

by

2014-07-21 Explaining Conservatism

What explains conservatism? Famous left-leaning magazine MotherJones wants to know, and Chris Mooney writes about new research that might explain the puzzle in a piece that’s making the rounds on Facebook: Scientists Are Beginning to Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative. Here’s a part of the solution to the puzzle, right from the article:

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,” as one of their papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The reason I love this paper is because it’s not often that life hands me an example of prejudicial thinking so perfectly gift-wrapped for analysis. In this case, there’s absolutely no reason why the exact same underlying experimental evidence couldn’t be presented using a totally different frame. Instead of talking about a “negativity bias” and wondering why conservatives are so negative and speculating that this might explain conservatism, one could take the exact same data and talk about a “Pollyanna bias” and wonder why liberals are so unaware of threats and speculate that this might explain liberalism.

This is how political partisanship works, folks. It’s not that conservatives and liberals have different conclusions. Sure, that’s what most of the debates are about (for or against gun control, abortion, gay marriage, etc.) Those debates never get anywhere, however, because they miss the point. Conservatives and liberals see the world in different ways, and the way their conflicting world views actually compete with each other for followers is by spreading the assumptions that–if you accept them–lead logically to their policy positions. The way to win a debate is not by having more evidence or better reasoning because people don’t actually pay very much attention to evidence or reason. The way to win the debate–or at least to gin up your own side–is to frame it in such a way that you must be correct before the debate even starts.

Thus, in this case, Mooney starts out with the question: how do we explain conservatism? What he doesn’t actually come out and say–but what is actually the most important part of his piece–is the assumption that conservatism is an aberration and liberalism is the norm. There’s nothing about liberalism we have to explain; it’s just natural. But conservatism? It begs for some kind of explanation. Once you accept that premise, there’s really not much left to talk about. C. S. Lewis even invented a term for this debate style: bulverism:

The modern method [of argumentation] is to assume without discussion that [your opponent] is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third — ‘Oh you say that because you are a man.’ ‘At that moment’, E. Bulver assures us, ‘there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.’ That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth [and Twenty-First] Century.[ref]C. S. Lewis, “Bulverism,” in God in the Dock, p. 273, which I got from here.[/ref]

As pleased as I am to have such a clear case study of Bulverism / winning the argument through framing ready at hand from now on, the thing that makes me sad is that it isn’t just MotherJones engaging in it. The researchers, by using the term “negativity bias” without an accompanying “positivity bias”, are jumping right in as well. (The name of their paper is: “Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology.”) Although sad, it’s hardly surprising. Dr. Jonathan Haidt was quoted about this very problem in the NYTimes back in 2011. Commenting on total domination of social psychology by the political left, he has said:

Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation. But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.

The article goes on to quote him again:

Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

It’s bad enough to have MotherJones serving up the Kool-Aid, but it’s really quite sad to have academic researchers as their direct suppliers.

As a coda: I do think that there are real and interesting psychological differences to study with regards to politics. But I think that this research is most useful when, as Haidt’s own Moral Foundations Theory does[ref]The book-length exposition of this theory in The Righteous Mind is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read.[/ref], it seeks to take all sides seriously and create room for understanding and common ground. And not when, as with the articles in question, it serves as a flimsy excuse to pathologize your political opponents.

Pro-Russian Separatists Probably Shot Down the Malaysia Flight 17

by
2014-07-18 Malaysian Flight 17
Image Source, NYT

By now I’m sure everyone has heard about the Malaysian airliner that was shot down over Ukraine yesterday, killing nearly 300 people including over 20 Americans and about 100 HIV experts who were traveling to a conference in Australia. The plane was flying at an altitude (about 30,000 feet) that is outside the range of shoulder-fired surface-to-air-missiles, but within the range of mobile (truck-mounted) rockets. These kinds of rockets are in the hands of the Ukrainians, the Russians and–alarmingly–also pro-Russian separatists within Ukraine.

Lots of folks are saying we shouldn’t rush to judgment, and that’s usually the position I take, but in this case I think the evidence is already pretty clear. Within hours of the tragedy, NPR and others were reporting that a leader of the pro-Russian separatists had bragged on Twitter about downing a Ukrainian military transport plane at approximately the same time the Malaysian flight went missing. No such Ukrainian transport plane is missing, and the tweet was quickly deleted.

“In Torez An-26 was shot down, its crashes are lying somewhere near the coal mine “Progress,” read the tweet, obtained by FoxNews.com and translated into English. “We have warned everyone: do not fly in our skies.”

The self-titled “Self-defence forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic” boasted in a June 29 press release of having taken control of Buk missile defense systems. The Buk, or SA-11 missile launchers, have a range of up to 72,000 feet.[ref]Source[/ref]

The wreckage of plane came down in a separatist held region, and the black boxes are reportedly already shipped off to Moscow. It’s very unlikely that we will ever get really open, credible evidence because it is probably damning for Russia (since they gave the rocket launcher to the separatists). Meanwhile, the Ukrainians want to blame not only the separatists, but Moscow directly by alleging that it was Russian military forces (and not just their hardware on loan to rebels) that shot down the plane. It’s because we’re unlikely to get good information going forward that we may as well tentatively conclude what happened at this point.[ref]”We” in this case refers to folks just reading the newspapers like you and me. I hope that the experts, of course, conduct as thorough and objective an investigation as possible.[/ref]

The other reason it seems OK to call a tentative conclusion at this point is that the political ramifications are just not as important as people believe they are. ABC has a list of commercial airliners that have been shot down, and it includes the Ukrainians accidentally shooting down an airliner from Air Siberia in 2001, the infamous downing of Iranian flight 655 by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes in 1988 and a Soviet fighter jet shooting down a Korean Air Lines plane in 1983.[ref]There are eight instances on the list altogether, going back to 1973.[/ref]

I don’t mean to diminish the tragedy at all. Quite the opposite. In some ways what is most tragic about this is that, from a geopolitical standpoint, it probably won’t really have much of an impact. If the Ukrainians, Russians, and Americans have all shot down passenger planes before on accident (and there’s no reason to suspect this wasn’t an accident as well) and World War III was averted, it’s unlikely major changes will come from this either. It might serve as a goad or a pretext for the EU to stiffen their stance somewhat in regards to Russia’s role in Urkaine, but it’s not going to change the fundamental nature of the conflict. The only real result, and I saw this with a sense of resignation, will be that airlines give up a little bit in their fuel-saving algorithms and re-route flights around the region.[ref]Airplane flight paths almost never look like what you expect them to, by the way, because we’re not very good at thinking about the world as a sphere. Look how far “north” the SF-Tokyo route goes, for example. That’s why I’ve got no idea what routes might usually fly through this region.[/ref]

One more note: part of why I think the first theory (that pro-Russian separatists shot down the plane when they thought it was a Ukrainian military transport) is that it’s so non-conspiratorial. There’s no great mystery, just a case of mistaken identification in a warzone. Something that, tragically, happens all the time. But if you do need any additional perspective on why a conspiracy is unlikely, read this: Count to ten when a plane goes down… It’s the first-hand account of how a 23-year old techie accidentally ignited decades of conspiracy theories after that Korean Air Lines jet was shot down in 1983 with a single mistaken keystroke.

Steep Learning Curve Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does

by

Earlier this morning I read an article in The Verge about the resurgence of rogue-like games, which the author characterized with three core traits: “turn-based movement, procedurally generated worlds, and permanent death that forces you to start over from the beginning.” So far so good, but the author then added one additional, non-essential characteristic:

They also often have steep learning curves that force you to spend a lot of time getting killed before you understand how things actually work.

And that’s when I lost my mind.

“Steep learning curve” does not mean what Andrew Webster thinks it does. Yes, yes, I know: someone is wrong on the Internet. Egads! We can also bring up the usual academic description: should linguistics be descriptive (merely documenting how people talk) or should it be prescriptive (laying down grammatical rules and standardized definitions). In the long run, words  mean whatever people think they mean. Nothing more and nothing less. So I might be appalled by the fact that everyone uses “enormity” as though it meant “enormousness” these days[ref]It actually means “great evil,” or at least is used to.[/ref], but as a general rule I sigh, shake my head, and get on with my life.

The reality, of course, is that most of us understand grammar as a mixture of following the rules and knowing when to ignore or break them. The Week published a list of 7 bogus grammar ‘errors’ you don’t need to worry about, and their last category was “7. Don’t use words to mean what they’ve been widely used to mean for 50 years or more.” For example, the word “decimate” originally meant to kill 1/10th. It derives from a particularly brutal form of Roman military discipline[ref]”A cohort (roughly 480 soldiers) selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots…, and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing.” – Wikipedia[/ref] so it’s not a happy word, but it certainly doesn’t mean “to kill just about everyone.” Except that these days, it pretty much does, and you’ll get strange looks if you used it in any other way. How long before “enormity” goes on a similar list, and only out-of-touch cranks cling to its older definition and go on rants about ancient military laws?

It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of linguistic innovation is pretty fun and cool. For example: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet.

But I draw the line at “steep learning curve” because we’re not just talking about illiteracy. We’re talking about innumeracy[ref]See? I’m down with neologisms[/ref].

A learning curve is a graph depicting the relationship between time (or effort) and ability. Time is the input: we put time into studying, practicing, and learning. And ability is the output: it’s what we get in return for our efforts. Generally we assume that there will be a positive relation between the two: the more you practice piano the better you’ll be able to play. The more you study your German vocabulary, the more words you will learn.

Basic Learning Curve

The graph right above this paragraph shows a completely ordinary, run-of-the-mill learning curve.[ref]Don’t worry that it’s actually a straight line. That’s just faster to make in Excel.[/ref] What units are we measuring ability and time in? Doesn’t matter. It would depend on the situation. Time would usually be measured in seconds or minutes or whatever, but in physical practice maybe you’d want to measure it in calories burned or some other metric. And ability would vary to: number of vocab words learned, percent of a song played without errors, etc. Now let’s take a look at two more learning curves:

Learning Curve Comparison

The learning curve on the left is shallow. That means that for every unit of time you put into it, you get less back in terms of ability. The learning curve on the right is steep. That means that for every unit of time you put into it, you get more back in terms of ability. So here’s the simple question: if you wanted to learn something, would you prefer to have a shallow learning curve or a steep learning curve? Obviously, if you want more bang-for-the-buck, you want a steep learning curve. In this example, the steep learning curve gets you double the ability for half the time!

You might note, of course, that this is exactly the opposite of what Andrew Webster was trying to convey. He said that these kinds of games require “you to spend a lot of time getting killed before you understand how things actually work.” In other words: lots of time for little learning. In other words, he literally described a shallow learning curve and then called it steep. Earlier this morning my son tried to tell me that water is colder than ice, and that we make ice by cooking water. That’s about the level of wrongness in how most people use the term “steep learning curve.”

It’s not hard to see why people get confused on this one. We associate steepness with difficulty because it’s harder to walk up a steep incline than a shallow one. Say “steep” and people think you mean “difficult.” But visualizing a tiny person on a bicycle furiously peddling to get up the steep line on that graph is a fundamental misapprehension of what graphs represent and how they work. By convention, we put independent variables (that’s the stuff we can control, where such a category exists) on the x-axis  and dependent variables on the y-axis (that’s the response variable). Intuitions about working harder to climb graphs don’t make any sense.

Now, yes: it’s by convention that we organize the x- and y-axis that way. And conventions change, just like definitions of words change. And the convention isn’t always useful or applicable. So you could argue that folks who use the term “steep learning curve” are just flipping the axes. Right?

Wrong. First, I just don’t buy that folks who use the term have any such notion of what goes on which axis. They are relying on gut intuition, not graph transformations. Second, although the placement of data on charts is a convention, it’s not a convention that is changing. When people get steep learning curve wrong, they are usually not actually talking about charts or data at all, so they are just borrowing a technical term and getting it backwards. It’s not plausible to me that this single instance of getting the term backwards is actually going to cause scientists and analysts around the world to suddenly reverse their convention of which data goes where.

People getting technical concepts wrong is a special case of language where it does make sense to say that the usage is not just new or different, but is actually wrong. It is wrong in the sense that there’s a subpopulation of experts who are going to preserve the original meaning even if conventional speakers get it wrong and it’s wrong in the sense of being ignorant of the underlying rationale behind the term. Consider the idea of a quantum leap. This concept derives from quantum mechanics, and it refers to the fact that electrons inhabit discrete energy levels within atoms‘. This is–if you understand the physics at all–really very surprising. It means that when an electron changes its energy level it doesn’t move continuously along a gradient. It jumps pretty much directly from one state to the new state. This idea of “quanta“–of discrete quantities of time, distance, and energy–is actually at the heart of the term “quantum mechanics” and it’s revolutionary because, until then, physics was all about continuity, which is why it relied so heavily on calculus. If you use “quantum leap” to mean “a big change” you aren’t ushering in a new definition of a word the way that you are if you use “enormity” to mean “bigness”. In that case, once enough people get it wrong they start to be right. But in the case of quantum mechanics, you’re unlikely to reach that threshold (because the experts probably aren’t changing their usage) and in the meantime you’re busy sounding like a clueless nincompoop to anyone who is even passingly familiar with quantum mechanics. Similarly, if you say “steep learning curve” when you mean “shallow learning curve” then  you aren’t innovating some new terminology, you’re just being a dope.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, and maybe it’s even mean to get so worked up about technicalities. Then again, lots of people think the world would be a better place if people were more numerate, and I think there’s some truth to that. In any case, I’m a nerd and the definition of a nerd is a person who cares more about a subject than society thinks is reasonable.[ref]There’s a reason Cyrano de Begerac is my hero: “What? It’s useless? I know. A man doesn’t fight to win./It’s better when the fight is in vain.”[/ref]

Most importantly, however, if you get technical terms wrong you’re missing out. Because the term were chosen for a reason, and taking the time to learn that reason will always broaden your mind. One example, which I’ll probably write about soon, is the idea of a technological singularity. It’s a trendy buzzword you probably here futurists and sci-fi aficionados talking about all the time, but if you don’t know where the term originates (i.e. from black holes) then you won’t really understand the ideas that led to the creation of the term in the first place. And they are some pretty cool ideas.

So yeah: on the one hand this is just a rant from a crotchety old man telling the kids to get off his lawn.[ref]And turn down their music.[/ref] But my fundamental motivation is that I care about ideas and about sharing them with people. I rant with care. It’s a love-rant.

What Would a Tea Party USA Look Like?

by

Conservative Political Action Conference Draws Major Leaders From The Right

I wouldn’t have expected such a fair piece from Slate, but this article about a hypothetical alternate universe where the Tea Party is in charge and Rand Paul is President is really useful for understanding some of the basic beliefs and aspirations of the Tea Party. Here’s a sample:

Deep divisions notwithstanding, there are a number of principles that unite the movement. The most important of them is a devotion to subsidiarity, which holds that power should rest as close to ordinary people as possible. In practice, this leads Tea Party conservatives to favor voluntary cooperation among free individuals over local government, local government over state government, and state government over the federal government. Teatopia would in some respects look much like our own America, only the contrasts would be heightened. California and New York, with their dense populations and liberal electorates, would have even bigger state governments that provide universal pre-K, a public option for health insurance, and generous funding for mass transit. They might even have their own immigration policies, which would be more welcoming toward immigrants than the policies the country as a whole would accept.

I don’t consider myself a Tea Partier, but I have been to one rally (it was fun) and I’m sympathetic to a lot of the sentiments and principles that animate the movement. From my standpoint, this article is definitely worth the read if you want to understand a little bit more about it.

Stunning Medieval Style Lord of the Rings Illustrations

by

2014-06-21 Russian LOTR Illustrations

I stumbled across a piece at The Verge that linked to a Tumblr page full of incredible illustrations from a Russian edition of Lord of the Rings that are done in a medieval style. They look incredible. Be sure to check them out out, because they really are amazing.

2014-06-21 Russian LOTR Illustrations 02

Sun News Network Shows How to Cover Mass Shootings

by

2014-06-20 Sun News Network

About two weeks ago, a killer in New Brunswick killed three Royal Canadian Mounted Police and left two more in critical condition. Sun News Network covered the story closely, but in a way that is very different from what the American mainstream press does in similar situations: they refused to release the name or the photo of the killer. They then published an editorial explaining their decision.

Far more people have been killed in the bad neighbourhoods of Chicago than were killed in all the mass shootings combined. But these rare incidents are never forgotten. And with the rise of social media, they’ve become a spectacle… Following the deadly Newtown, Connecticut shooting in December 2012 that left 26 dead, including 20 children, it was discovered that the perpetrator kept a “score sheet” of previous mass shootings. Did he hope his name would be placed at the top of the list?

The theory that publication of mass killings leads to more mass killings is very hard to study empirically because mass killings are so rare, but copycat suicides provide a plausible basis for the fear. In copycat suicides, a well-publicized suicide sparks a wave of imitation suicides. This is a very old phenomenon, with the first notable example dating to the 1774 publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Because of this well known effect (called suicide contagion) many news agencies around the world place limitations on the amount of publicity they will give to suicides.

I would like to see similar levels of self-restraint–on the part of news agencies and us, the audience–here in the US. The sad reality is that it’s only a matter of time until we have the opportunity to put it into practice. I do not think that such self-censorship would end mass shootings overnight, but I do think that it could help. And that it’s the least we can do.

 

Gun Control and Celebrity Bodyguards

by

 

Emma Watson next to her private, undercover, armed bodyguard.
Emma Watson next to her private, undercover, armed bodyguard.

I’ve seen gun control opponents point out that the President uses guns (via the Secret Service) to protect his family. That’s a bit silly and, for bringing his daughters into the debate, out of bounds. But this post from Downtrend makes a related point that I think is more valid. When Emma Watson (AKA Hermione Granger) graduated from Brown, she appears to have brought her armed personal bodyguard along for the ceremony, despite the fact that Brown is emphatically a gun free zone:

There probably aren’t too many Brown students from working class families, but for argument’s sake, let’s suppose one of them was there on a special scholarship. Now imagine that this average Joe or Jane showed up to graduation with a loaded pistol just for personal protection. There would be a lockdown, the SWAT team would be called in, and that student would be looking at years behind bars.

A famous person shows up with an armed guard, just for personal protection, and it’s like nothing ever happened. The gun-free zone only applies to those not fortunate enough to have been born into money or who have never starred in a string of blockbuster movies.

I’ve got nothing against Emma Watson at all, or her decision, but the casual disregard of the rules when it comes to celebrities is particularly noxious on an issue as important as the right to self-defense.

You can read about Watson’s security guard ($150k/year, is with her everywhere) at the New York Post and see how an armed bodyguard going undercover in cap and gown was covered by the celebrity media via EOnline. (It’s “Pretty Sneaky (but understandable!)”)

It’s worth pointing out that Watson isn’t just a celebrity flouting the rules because she can. She has specific, real threats against her safety. As long as Brown would be fine allowing a non-celebrity with stalker problems to also carry a gun themselves (I doubt they could afford a personal bodyguard), I’m OK with things. This isn’t a cause for outrage. Just a bit of concern.

On the Selfishness of Sweatshop Anxiety

by

2014-06-11 London Apartment

So apparently someone wants to rent this tiny London apartment (pictured above) for $1,230/month. Outrage ensues.

Now, the weird thing is that it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine someone wanting to rent that apartment for that price.[ref]I’m not sure about the exact price, of course, but I hear London is pretty expensive. And isn’t microhousing a thing these days? So where’s the outrage coming from?[/ref] I once had to commute up to the Northern Virginia area while my family lived in Williamsburg for work every week. I was lucky enough to have a kind friend with a guess suite, but if I hadn’t had recourse to that, such a tiny little domicile would have been perfect. I seriously investigated living out of my car before my benefactor appeared.

Think about it this way: if someone offers to pay that money for that apartment it is because they have evaluated their alternatives and found that to be the best course of action for them. In what world does eliminating the best course of action someone has available help that person? When someone makes a reasoned consideration that a course of action is the best course of action available, then some do-gooder stepping in to prevent them from taking that course of action is by definition harmful.[ref]Unless you think that the person is incompetent to make their own decision. Which, baring mental illness or a child, just adds “patronizing” next to “harmful”.[/ref]

I think the intuition is that if someone is willing to pay $1,230 for such a tiny apartment, then they must have pretty crappy alternatives. And that is true. But taking away the apartment doesn’t actually improve that person’s prospects. It just removes the evidence of their misfortune from public view. This isn’t about helping anyone any more than placing spikes where homeless people sleep is about helping homeless people. And yes: that’s a real thing. In London they don’t want you to rent out a tiny, cheap apartment but they also don’t want you to sleep on the pavement, either. This looks less like compassion for the poor and a lot more like spraying your house for ants. You don’t really care if the spray kills them or helps them or hurts them, as long as they aren’t in your house anymore.

I call this “Sweatshop Anxiety” because that’s sort of the biggest example of the problem. The thought of poor people in third world countries working long hours in terrible conditions makes rich Westerners want to shut down sweatshops. Which helps the poor… how?

I’m not saying there’s nothing we can do. I’m just saying that reducing options probably almost never helps.

Can Christians Rock?

by

There’s an interesting review over at First Things of Christopher Partridge’s new book, The Lyre of Orpheus. Partridge’s theory, according to First Things’ Stephen Webb is as follows:

Rock is essentially transgressive. Christianity upholds a sacred order that excludes the profane. Therefore, contemporary Christian music cannot be true rock and roll, because it is “unable to establish a credible presence in [rock’s] profane affective space.”

Webb contests this theory, but he does so very weakly, writing: “Satan might or might not be beyond redemption, but everything else, including the devil’s music, isn’t.” That may be true, but it’s not really informative (how does one go about redeeming a genre or music?) nor does it actually address the core point. If rock is intrinsically transgressive, then when you redeem it you don’t really have rock anymore. The question that Partridge begs, and that Webb never spots, is this: transgressive of what?

I know it’s only a short review, but all the musicians noted were born in the 1950s – 1970s. It’s certainly easy to surmise that in the time they were making music (the 1970s and 1980s) traditional family values were still relatively dominant in America. In that context it makes sense to assume that “transgressive” meant contradicting these traditional values of modesty, self-restraint, and fidelity. But that assumption doesn’t make sense any more. No big surprise, by the way, Partridge himself was born in 1961. His cultural reference points were already stale in the last millennium.

By coincidence, I also picked up this story from the Daily Beast today: Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent. The article’s first paragraph shows what Partridge and especially Web could have been talking about all along:

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.

When the powers that are in charge change, so does the meaning of the term “transgressive.” Music that is truly subversive now is effectively opposite of what was subversive back then. This makes sense: terms like “subversive” and “transgressive” are value-neutral without context. They are good or bad and useful or damaging entirely dependent on what it is they are attacking and promoting in its stead. It’s entirely possible for Christian rock to be subversive of the dominant culture while authentically embracing Christian tenets. In fact, because it faithfully embraces Christian tenets. You probably won’t get this if by “Christian rock” you are thinking of the kind of praise or worship music that you’ll find on Christian radio stations, because that music is geared towards being played in houses of worship. It doesn’t oppose or subvert anything. It probably can’t be real rock and roll. But it’s only one particular variant of Christian rock. How about my favorite band of all time: Thrice?

Yeah, I’m biased, but pay attention to which way the causality runs. I’m not endorsing Thrice as an example of a counter-cultural Christianity because I like the band. I liked the band in the first place precisely because of its subversive (in relationship to the Clerisy) nature. Nowhere is this more obvious than the official video of their song “Image of the Invisible” (off of their 2005 album Vheissu). The music alone screams beleaguered defiance and the lyrics match it perfectly: So raise the banner, bend back your bows / Remove the cancer, take back your souls and Though all the world may hate us, we are named / The shadow overtake us, we are known. But, in case the subversion theme wasn’t overt enough, the video drills the point home with a distinctly dystopian theme in which Christians are part of a modern underground resistance movement, fighting to get out a message that the world hates, has always hated, and will always hate.

Has Webb forgotten the relationship between the Church and the world depicted so directly in the New Testament, culminating in the crucifixion of God’s Son by the greatest political empire of the time? How about Paul’s words to the Ephesians:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Give me a break, Christ’s alleged crimes were basically variants of “subversion.” Subversion of the orthodox religious view and subversion of the Roman political order. We worship someone who was tried and executed for subversion 2,000 years ago, and Partridge thinks some aging rock stars have a damn thing to teach Christians about what it means to be subversive?

I think not.

 

Shrinking Waves May Save Sea Ice

by

2014-06-10 sn-seaice

The whole global warming issue is pretty controversial, and one of the reasons for that is that–no matter what the consensus on the science might be–there’s actually a long and convoluted path from “human carbon emissions make the world warmer” to answering the question “what should we do about it?”

One of the big uncertainties, of course, is the cost-benefit analysis of policies designed to slow global warming. That’s what the Freakonomics guys did in one of their chapters from Super Freakonomics, and their conclusion was that–assuming climate change is real–there might not be any policy to stop it that is worth the cost. That claim, as you can imagine, landed them in some hot water.[ref]Time, The New Yorker, and many, many others weighed in as well. Questioning the global warming orthodoxy, which includes policies as well as science, is a big deal.[/ref]

But there are other uncertainties as well. So the planet gets warmer. So ice at the poles melts and sea levels rise, right? Well, maybe not so fast:

It’s a nagging thorn in the side of climatologists: Even though the world is warming, the average area of the sea ice around Antarctica is increasing. Climate models haven’t explained this seeming contradiction to anyone’s satisfaction—and climate change deniers tout that failure early and often. But a new paper suggests a possible explanation: Variability in the heights of ocean waves pounding into the sea ice may help control its advance and retreat.

That’s Carolyn Gramling writing for Science. She goes on to summarize the paper’s theory: warmer climate means lower waves, lower waves means less pounding on sea ice, less pounding on sea ice means slower melting to the point where (as noted above) sea ice in Antarctica is actually growing instead of shrinking.

The reality is that the Earth’s atmosphere and land and ecosystems and the sun’s radiation all work together to form a very, very, very complex system full of all kinds of negative and positive feedback loops that we know nothing about. This is just one example. Ice has been growing since at least 1979 despite projections, but no one had a clue. Now they have one but it is, of course, still just a clue. As science goes: this is great. When the data doesn’t line up with your predictions, it means you’re not understanding something and you have a chance for a new discovery.

But as a basis for expensive, global policy-making goes, this is not so great. The one thing all policies to thwart global warming have in common is making energy more expensive which will have the effect of lowering growth which will have the effect of keeping more people in the developed world in poverty for longer. We can be much more certain about that then we can about the corresponding threat from global warming. After all, we can’t even predict if the sea levels will rise at all, let alone by how much, so how can we begin to make a careful evaluation of the cost/benefit of policies to mitigate this unknown danger?

The consensus on global warming is often trotted out as a cudgel with which to beat skeptics, but this isn’t really effective once you step back and realize that climate change, itself, is only one part of a much, much more complex puzzle.