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.

Is Private School Evil?

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Group of students wearing uniforms

Allison Benedikt has a piece at Slate urging people to “not just acknowledge your liberal guilt—listen to it.” Specifically, Benedikt states that “you are a bad person if you send your children to private school.”

I’d like to give Benedikt credit for having good intentions. The problem is that nothing in her argument actually substantiates her blind belief that if all kids went to public school, then public schools would improve. She even acknowledges that the rich would cluster in rich neighborhoods and nothing could be done about it, but somehow inner city public schools would miraculously rebound anyhow.

How? Benedikt doesn’t say. I feel bad pointing it out, but Benedikt might have done a better job at stringing together a cogent argument if her own education hadn’t been so poor. That’s not a mean-spirited slam on my part. I just don’t know what else to take from a piece that fails to provide any rationale whatsoever for its core thesis, but does include statements like “I left home woefully unprepared for college, and without that preparation, I left college without having learned much there either.” along with an eyebrow raising claim that “getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house” is an equivalent experience to reading Walt Whitman. Maybe if Benedikt had ever read Whitman, she would be qualified to weigh in on that, but since she claims to have hardly read any literary books ever I’m not sure why she thinks anyone would be interested to her opinion on the topic.

In the meantime, my kids don’t go to private school because my wife and I are rich and it’s a status symbol or class affectation. We stretch our budget to the breaking point to afford their tuition (and go without things like a second car) because we don’t want them to have to relive experiences like the vicious bullying I endured or the rampant sexism my wife survived. If you want us to risk putting our kids through that, you’ll have to do a damn site better than this as an argument. I’m guessing Benedikt doesn’t actually have kids, or she would understand that.

At the end of the day, the sad irony is that Benedikt’s piece is so terribly reasoned it is a stark warning against sending your kids to public school. If you do, they may end up writing nonsense like she does.

Exquisite Rendition of Advice from Bill Watterson

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There’s a stunning comic at ZenPencils that splices together text from a commencement speech Bill Waterson gave in 1990 with new, original artwork intentionally mimicking the beauty of Calvin and Hobbes.

The art and text are an incredible and thoughtful call to a life of independent, existential creativity. If you don’t feel a deeper drive to live life fully after reading this, you’re probably beyond all help.

Here are the first few panels.

2013-08-28 Bill Waterson's Advice

Now go read the whole thing.

Breakthrough Human Brain-to-Brain Interface

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2013-08-28 Human-to-Human Brain Interface

From the Verge:

Rajesh Rao, a professor at UW who has worked on brain-computer interfacing for more than a decade, looked at a screen and had to fire a cannon to shoot down an enemy plane while avoiding friendly planes. On the other side of campus, Andrea Stocco had the keyboard to execute those commands, but couldn’t see the game itself. But using their brain-to-brain interface, Rao imagined that he was using his right hand to click the space bar on a keyboard — and Stocco’s right hand carried out the command without any conscious movement on his part. Stocco likened it to an involuntary twitch or a nervous tic.

We’ve had rat-to-rat and even rat-to-human interfaces before, but this if the first human-to-human interface. We’re living in the future, folks, and sometimes, the future is equal parts cool and creepy.

Social Attitude Test

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2013-08-26 Hans Eyssenck

Saw this social attitude test (mostly about politics) earlier today. It claims to be based on the work of Hans Eysenck, who was a famous but also controversial research psychologist. (At the time of his death in 1997, he was the most frequently cited psychologist in academic literature.) My scores were:

Radicalism 61
Socialism 18.75
Tenderness 75

These are on a 0 – 100 scales with the starting point at 50, so it means I’m slightly radical, very much not a socialist, and tender” (whatever that means). Apparently this makes me a laissez faire capitalist, a moderate progressive, and a libertarian all at once. In other words: ” the political profile one might associate with an animal rights activist”. Sounds like a strange description of a social conservative, but if you factor in that I think unborn human beings are in more need of protection than animals this is actually just about right.

I’m curious to see what other people get.

Monday Morning Mormon Madness: We Are All the Work of Thy Hand

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2013-08-26 We Are All The Work Of Thy Hand WITH TEXT

I missed last Monday due to scheduling snafu’s at Times & Seasons, but I’m back in my current Monday slot this morning with a piece about accepting growth and, by implication, accepting that growth takes time.

The Gay Marriage / Bestiality Link that ISN’T

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2013-08-23 Byron Rushing with Elizabeth Warren

It’s fun to pass along every sensational tidbit that validates your world view, but it radicalizes debate, shuts down real communication, and erodes the credibility of whatever side you are attempting to support. In fact, the biggest difference between a partisan ideologue and someone with sincere principles may be the ability to scrutinize arguments that come from your own “side”.

That’s the spirit with which I decided to dig deeper into a series of Facebook posts I glimpsed today with headlines like “The First US State to Legalize Same Sex Marriage Now to legalize bestiality, adultery, repeal public morality, and stop teaching children about values and virtues.” Now, let’s be honest, if you have a rule “Never trust a headlines that verbose” you’re actually probably getting off to a great start. Following that up with a rule like “Never trust news sources with over-enthusiastic titles” (this story comes from “Wakeup Call News”) you’re going to end up filtering a lot of this stuff out without having to bother to scrutinize it. Practically speaking: that’s not a bad idea.

But I wanted to dig a little deeper and find out what is going on with a claim like this one. Here’s what I found. 

Read more

The Gay Marriage Bait and Switch

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2013-08-23 Elaine Huguenin

In contrast to the laissez faire rhetoric of the gay rights  movement, one of the concerns raised has been that ultimately legalizing gay marriage (using the prevalent rationales) will infringe on the civil liberties of those who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.

With gay marriage proponents on the cusp of total victory, these fears may be starting to be realized. New Mexico recently ruled that a private photography business violated anti-discrimination law by refusing to take photos of a gay commitment ceremony.

I call this a “bait and switch” because it’s clearly not what the majority of Americans signed on for when they got beyond the libertarian rhetoric of the gay rights movement: “85 percent of Americans support the right of the photographer to say no.”

Which Famous Economist Are You Like?

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This survey uses an interesting definition of “famous” since I had never heard of the economists I was most similar to: Judith Chevalier, Pete Klenow, and Luigi Zingales. At least Zingales has his own Wikipedia page.

2013-08-23 Luigi Zingales

I liked what I read about him, but as I answered more questions about the EU (which I know very little about) I drifted away from him and towards Klenow / Chevalier, going back and forth several times before ending up nearest to Klenow.

2013-08-23 Survey Results

 

Who do you end up closest to?

New CDC Gun Study: Everyone Looks Foolish

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2013-08-21 Gun Control

If you Google “obama cdc gun study” you get interesting results: a bevy of mainstream pieces from January or February of this year when President Obama overrode Republican obstructionism to fund CDC research into gun violence and then a smattering of much more recent articles from conservative outlets crowing that the first such study proved they were right all along and that it “shreds” Obama’s position.

One of the first appears to be The New American which also links to a draft of the report. It’s mostly a glorified literature review an reinforces statistics gun advocates have long known about, such as the fact that lawful, defensive use of a firearm is more common (500,000 – 3,000,000 / year) than illegal use to commit a violent crime (300,000 / year). The study also found that many gun control laws are not reliably effective and, interestingly, it turns out that if you take California, Illinois, New Jersey, and Washington D.C. out of the national crime statistics, we go from a country that has 20 times the violent gun crime rate of the rest of the developed world to being basically average. These states have the most restrictive gun control laws in the country, and it doesn’t seem to be helping very much.

Good for the conservatives, but here’s the question: if they knew all along that this would be the result, why did they defund the CDC’s investigations to begin with? It’s a little rich to take credit for a report you would never have willingly permitted.

I’m glad more good evidence is out there, but both sides end up looking like fools to me.

Should Women Be Allowed to Go to College? Feminists Unsure

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2013-08-21 o-alma-mater

This headline is much more provocative than the blog post that inspired it (O, Alma Mater), so let me explain why I think it’s warranted. In the post, Anne-Marie Maginnis responds to the idea that women who earn Ivy League degrees and choose to be stay-at-home moms are wasting their degrees. She cites a recent article in The Guardian:

Any Harvard Law School degree obtained by a woman who then chooses not to use it in any sort of professional capacity throughout most of her life is a wasted opportunity. That degree could have gone to a woman who does want to spend her entire life using it to advance the cause of women—or others in need of advancement—not simply advancing the lives of her own family at home, which is a noble cause, but not one requiring an elite degree.

The quote is ostensibly about advanced degrees at elite schools (not “college”) and specifically about stay-at-home moms (not “women”), but the truly alarming thing about the argument–which Maginnis exposes immediately–is that it assumes that women aren’t worth educating for their own sake. If you take it seriously, this brand of feminism says that a woman’s value–her right to be educated–is dependent on her usefulness to the capitalist machine. So much for liberalism, in pretty much every sense of the word.