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.
This image seems to have started making the rounds before Elder Oaks even finished his remarks on priesthood authority. I mostly ignored it at the time, but a couple days ago I came across this post which analyzed the origins of the two quotes. Biggest point? The Elder Oaks quote is wrong. He did not say that women are not free to alter the divinely decreed pattern. He said that the General Authorities are not free to make that change. That takes it from a kind of chauvinist slap-down to an expression of modest humility in what leaders can do. And, after all, the argument that God would have to reveal His will on this matter is something that even OW seems to support.
Phelim McAleer is a controversial documentarian whose past work includes FrackNation (a defense of hydraulic fracturing), Not Evil Just Wrong (a critique of global warming alarmism), and Mine Your Own Business (a critique of environmentalist opposition to the Roșia Montană mining project).[ref]I haven’t seen any of these, so can’t speak for or against them.[/ref] He used Kickstarter to garner $212,000 from 3,305 backers for his most recent film (that was FrackNation), and so he returned to Kickstarter for his current project: a documentary about Kermit Gosnell.
Kickstarter wrote to tell us that it “couldn’t” go ahead with our posting — first, we needed to remove our (utterly factual) descriptions of “thousands of babies murdered” in order to “comply with the spirit” of the site’s “community guidelines.”
Well, that sounds sort of plausible at first glance. But wait.
This was shocking — and even more so when I looked at which projects don’t violate those standards. One project about a serial killer had a photograph of a dead body. There were 43 about rape, 28 with the F-word in the title or project description and one with the “C” word. There was even one called “Fist of Jesus” (don’t ask).
McAleer switched from Kickstarter to IndieGoGo to try and get the project going. Then Kickstarter decided to accept the project, but only on condition that they could subsequently cancel it at any time if they didn’t like McAleer’s updates. McAleer stuck with IndieGoGo.[ref]As of this writing, on April 10, they have raised $556,673 out of their goal of $2,100,000 with 32 days to go.[/ref]
The attempt to squelch the Gosnell story is nothing new. Any other story about a serial killer would have been made into a movie by now, but when it comes to abortion no one wanted to touch the story. Just look at the empty seats at the trial that were set aside for media who never came.
It’d be nice if we could just write of the whole Gosnell incident as one isolated, horrific case. The problem is, we can’t. Just last week, Secular Pro-Life ran an article highlighting how New York state has inspected exactly 17 of its 225 abortion clinics in the last 14 years. That kind of political protection is what allowed Gosnell’s house of horrors to continue. Even if you’re not pro-life, anyone who is sincerely concerned with protecting women’s health ought to be concerned at the way the Gosnell story is being swept under the rug as though it had never occurred.
I got up early this morning and the kids cooperated by sleeping until nearly eight. As a result, I was able to finish up a post for Times And Seasons: What It Would Take to Not Believe. It’s a followup to the piece that I wrote two weeks ago called As Much As I Know Anything. In particular, I wanted to respond to a question from one of the commenters: “What would it take to convince you that (in as much as you know anything) propositions such as God exists or the BoM is historical are false? Or do you consider such propositions unfalsifiable?” That’s the question that I answered today, with a little help from Paul Samuelson and Karl Popper.
OK, so it’s not actually a hood that’s transparent. In a way, it’s even cooler. As The Verge describes it:
The Transparent Bonnet Concept utilizes cameras mounted in the car’s grille to capture a view of the road that’s usually obscured by the hood. This data is then fed to a heads-up display that shows the video in real-time at the bottom of the windscreen, overlaying where a driver sees their car’s bonnet and effectively giving the impression that it — and the engine — are transparent.
Sound cool? Watch the video. It’s even cooler.
I’m still holding out for self-driving cars, but this ain’t bad either.
If you’ve ever heard the term “patent troll” and wondered just what that was all about, here’s a great video that explains what they are and why they are a problem.
From time to time a member of the Christian left will admonish the Christian right to stop obsessing about sex. This is a clever move because in addition to undercutting traditional sexual morality it also suggests that those who are concerned with the topic are acting on some secret ulterior motive. Voyeurism? Projection? Repression? Whatever the precise cause, it definitely sounds unhealthy.
Thus begins my post on whether or not traditional Christians are really motivated by sex-obsession in their support of traditional sexual morality. (Spoiler alert: they’re not.)
The folks at First Things thought it was interesting enough for their readers, and so that’s where it’s posted. I’m really humbled to have an outlet that I respect so much publish something I’ve written.
New research has found a significant correlation between time spent online and decline in religious affiliation over the past few decades. Correlation is not causation, as the article points out, but the research feels that the relationship is causal based on the fact that most other possible factors have already been controlled for. These statistics are not iron-clad, but let’s assume for the moment that they are true. What should we conclude?
Although the article does not suggest this, the standard assumption is that when people go online they will find out uncomfortable truths about their religion that they were not taught growing up, and that this will have a double-impact that drives them away from their faith. First, the new information is intrinsically troubling. Second, the fact that they didn’t learn about it creates a sense of betrayal. (This theory is widely known among Mormons.) There’s a corollary to this which states simply that religion is kind of dumb and irrational, and so the more educated people are, the less religious they become. (That correlation is also well-known.) So perhaps the Internet is just educating people to a sufficient point where they outgrow religion.
I feel like I should pause for laughter at this point, as everyone spends a couple of moments thinking about what most actual Internet usage is like. Aside from Wikipedia, it’s basically lolcats, porn, and pointless political debates. Not exactly a crash-course in human intellectual history.
So I don’t take seriously the “Internet makes people too smart for religion” theory, but I do think that the “Internet airs religion’s dirty laundry” theory is worthy of consideration. But it’s still a matter of interpretation. The superficial response, of course, might be that more knowledge is always better and so people learn more and ditch religion and they should. But, thinking again of the Mormon intellectual community as a model again, one thing I’ve noticed is that there tend to be three levels of knowledge about religion.
The Surface
Folks at the surface really don’t know much about their religion at all, and as a result they are not really troubled by it. Conversely, they are probably not comforted by it either, at least on an intellectual level, although the emotional resilience of tradition can still be important and beneficial.
The Mantle
Go down beneath the surface, and things start to look weird and uncomfortable. As a simple example: folks who are born and raised in a particular faith almost always undergo a kind of cognitive vertigo when they one day see traditions and assumptions that they had taken for granted through the eyes of an outsider. All religions are kind of weird, just like all families are kind of weird, and this can easily lead to a sense of disenchantment and disassociation.
The Core
A lot of folks get as far as the mantle and decide that they have had enough, but other folks press deeper. They realize, for example, that their religion is weird to other traditions not because it has some defect, but just because everything that is foreign seems weird. Properly contextualized, that ceases to be an irritant and can even become comforting, the same way that we can treasure our family traditions even after we realize that they may have no real rational basis. These guys dig deeper into their respective traditions, unearth the problems, but then also find gems and insights that (for them) are worth the trouble.
In other words, even if we assume that the Internet is exposing people to a host of uncomfortable truths about their faiths[ref]And let’s be honest, that’s pretty generous given a lot of the conspiracy theory nonsense that is also out there about all religions.[/ref] there’s already a religious concept for that experience: the refiner’s fire. Nietzsche may be an odd source of comfort for the religious, but the old “whatever doesn’t kill you” line is actually probably more true of ideas than it is of people.
There’s a really ugly way this theory can be applied. You could say that the folks who don’t stick around are too weak or ignorant to handle the fire, and so good riddance. That’s taking the metaphor too far, however. I don’t buy into the judgmentalism behind it (we can’t really know the reason people have for leaving or for staying), nor the superiority behind it (notice that I didn’t specify any particular denomination or faith tradition, for example), nor the mean-spiritedness behind it.
All I’m saying is that sometimes the folks who have to struggle to retain or regain their faith are the ones who realize more than anyone else exactly what it is they have.
It’s always interesting to check the correspondence between the headline of an article and it’s URL. In this case, the headline reads: “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?” and the URL includes: “is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexist/.” That nuance, that it is designed to be sexist, is going to be important as we delve into this story and ask ourselves this simple question: where do we reach the point where silliness outweighs legitimacy in the discrimination olympics?
So here’s the first fact: virtual reality (like the Occulus Rift) tends to make some people hurl. In fact, a major design point for the upcoming Occulus Rift has been to figure out how to alleviate headaches and nausea that can arise with use. And here’s the second: women tend to react much more to VR then men. But does it really make sense to fling around the term “sexist”? Danah Boyd, who wrote the piece for Quartz, clearly thinks so:
That’s when a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality. Being an activist and a troublemaker, I walked straight into the office of the head CAVE[ref]Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, a 1997-era VR technology[/ref] researcher and declared the CAVE sexist.
So, to be clear, we’re now declaring inanimate objects to be sexist.
But wait, is this just short-hand for calling the designers sexist? If someone makes a technology that is designed to make women spew chunks, but not men, that would indeed register as “sexist” in my book. But what’s actually going on?
Based on some interesting research, Boyd concludes that men and women process two different cues for depth perception differently. Men rely on motion-parallax, which basically means that closer things move more than things that are far away. Look at the way the clouds in this video (the most distant) move the slowest vs. the tubes (the closest) which move the fastest. That’s parallax.
Women, by contrast, tend to rely more on “shape-from-shading,” which Boyd describes as “a bit trickier.” She goes on to describe it:
If you stare at a point on an object in front of you and then move your head around, you’ll notice that the shading of that point changes ever so slightly depending on the lighting around you. The funny thing is that your eyes actually flicker constantly, recalculating the tiny differences in shading, and your brain uses that information to judge how far away the object is.
It’s not just trickier to describe, however. It’s also much trickier to implement. This is obvious to anyone who knows even a little bit about computer graphics (lighting is hard!) and Boyd agrees:
It’s super easy—if you determine the focal point and do your linear matrix transformations accurately, which for a computer is a piece of cake—to render motion parallax properly. Shape-from-shading is a different beast. Although techniques for shading 3D models have greatly improved over the last two decades—a computer can now render an object as if it were lit by a complex collection of light sources of all shapes and colors—what they they can’t do is simulate how that tiny, constant flickering of your eyes affects the shading you perceive. As a result, 3D graphics does a terrible job of truly emulating shape-from-shading.
So that’s my problem with calling VR “sexist”. The problem isn’t, or at least isn’t primarily, that you’ve got a bunch of dudes who don’t care what women need and/or enjoy excluding women. The problem is that the kind of technology that men react to is computationally easierthan the kind that women react to. I’m all for recognizing that fact and working to mitigate it. Now that Facebook owns Occulus I think there’s no doubt that they are going to work hard to get to the bottom of that because you don’t want to alienate half your market. (When Occulus was a hardcore gaming device there may have been a perception that this wasn’t as important. Not anymore.)
I don’t mean to chalk this up to Boyd’s hyperventilating victim-complex. I know that editors choose headlines, and her concluding paragraphs are quite reasonable. But calling the technology itself sexist? Alleging, as the URL does, that it was designed that way? Come on, people. It’s getting silly.
We’ve written critically about the proposal to raise the minimum wage here at Difficult Run before. (Quite a lot, in fact.) In one of the first pieces I wrote back in February I pointed out that there are basically three criticisms of the minimum wage hikes.
By raising the cost of labor, they eliminate jobs.
The benefits tend to go towards families that aren’t poor.
There are much better alternatives (like the EITC).
The minimum wage is not the most evil policy in the history of the world, obviously, but I really loathe it because it’s so obviously a bad idea and therefore the only reason it gets advanced is either because politicians are negligent or are intentionally exploiting public ignorance about how bad of a policy it is. If we can’t stop a policy like minimum wage, what hope do we have of rational policy in general?
There’s one more aspect to the debate, however, and that is the fact that as the price of human labor raises, the likelihood of replacing their jobs with robots increases as well. That’s the gist of a new post from Nate Silver’s 538 website: The Shift From Low-Wage Worker to Robot Worker. The article covers recent research by economists trying to see which jobs are most vulnerable to being replaced by robots. The short version? Millions of low-wage jobs are incredibly vulnerable to being replaced by robots.
These probabilities are estimated over a 20-year window, but the trend is clear: millions of American jobs are at risk of automation. In the long run, this is a good thing. In the long run, we don’t want anyone to have to do dull, repetitive, simple work just to put food on the table. In the long run, it would be great if all people worked relatively complex jobs that required minimal physical pain and injury and maximal creativity. The question is how we transition from where we are now. We need a gradual transition accompanied by ample educational opportunities. What we absolutely do not need is an artificial increase in the price of labor. Raising the minimum wage might be good politics, but it’s absolutely terrible policy. In addition to the three problems noted above, it can only serve to make the transition more rather than less gradual.
When I wrote about Brendan Eich being forced out (he resigned, but under duress) from Mozilla one of the sources I leaned on was Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is an interesting voice because he is not only in a homosexual marriage, he was the guy who wrote the very first article in a major, mainstream outlet in support of legalizing gay marriage[ref]Here’s a reprint of the 1989 essay.[/ref] He has had some time to think about his initial response to the controversy and he’s decided “the more I have mulled this over, the more convinced I am that my initial response to this is absolutely the right one.”
Sullivan believes his response is “a vital one to defend at this juncture in the gay rights movement.” I, on the other hand, do not support gay marriage. So why is it that I like his post? It’s not just because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s because Sullivan is actually defending “liberalism” in its original, authentic sense. He’s preaching tolerance. We disagree on gay marriage, but I agree with him on the need for real tolerance:
The ability to work alongside or for people with whom we have a deep political disagreement is not a minor issue in a liberal society. It is a core foundation of toleration. We either develop the ability to tolerate those with whom we deeply disagree, or liberal society is basically impossible. Civil conversation becomes culture war; arguments and reason cede to emotion and anger.
He then goes on to say:
A civil rights movement without toleration is not a civil rights movement; it is a cultural campaign to expunge and destroy its opponents. A moral movement without mercy is not moral; it is, when push comes to shove, cruel.
This all makes me want to cheer. Someone gets it. But is Sullivan in the majority on this one? I do not have any scientific polls, but I have a strong suspicion that he is not, and that perhaps his protests represent some of the last gasps of genuine moral principle in a movement that long since sacrificed principle for expedience in its headlong rush to win by intimidating rather than convincing the skeptics. I think you have to read this entire piece to really understand just how far we’ve come in a few short years, and it’s that rapid transition that makes me think there is too much momentum to stop the train now.
