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.
Hilarious article on the perils of trying to eat healthy in a world saturated with (mis)information. Favorite line?
Some people say it’s a little fringe, but you are committed to live a healthy lifestyle. “Okay,” you say, “let’s do this shit,” as you fry your caribou steak and seal liver in rendered whale blubber. You lose some weight which is good, but it costs $147.99 a pound for frozen seal liver out of the back of an unmarked van at the Canadian border.
Everyone knows this man is a grumpy, time-traveling hobbit, right?
[Here there be spoilers!]
Allow me to regale you with a tale of my relationship to George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. Once upon a time, long, long before most of you who watch Game of Thrones had ever heard of it, I read the first book. I was immediately impressed by Martin’s craft. The man can write, and I would never question that. But what he chose to write really rubbed me the wrong way. Specifically: I felt like the books were engineered to manufacture a sense of realism by deliberately doing horrible things to likable characters. When Ned Stark got executed at the end of the book I set it down, and I’ve never been tempted to pick up another one.
So, when all the Red Wedding stuff started breaking out over Twitter, it took me a few days enough to bother to investigate. When I eventually read a description of what had happened, I felt incredibly vindicated. And it’s not just that Martin killed off more likable characters, but it’s why he does it.
Betsy VanDenBerghe has an excellent piece on Real Clear Religion giving the real scoop on what Mormon missions are like. VanDenBergh explains that she’s mostly writing in response to the Book of Mormon Musical:
Pardon my complicating what’s proved an entertaining, laughable, lucrative stereotype, but a Mormon mission fundamentally consists of a whopping dose of reality, humility, and soul searching.
Citing movies (which I didn’t find compelling) and her own experiences (which I did, because they mirrored that of myself and my friends and family), VanDenBerghe proceeds to dismantle three major myths about Mormon missions:
It’s all about converting.
It’s an insular bubble protected from the world.
Missions foster intolerance.
I thought the piece was informative and accurate. I’m not going to say that everything about Mormon missions is perfect because I don’t believe that to be the case. Although some of the things that initially irritated me about missions came to make sense over the course of my own mission (served in Hungary between 2000 and 2002), there were definitely changes that I would have liked to have seen and–in fact–there have been important and constructive changes since I went home. I’m sure there are still many ways that the Church could improve, but in terms of just getting a good understanding of what missions are honestly like, this is a good piece to start with, especially if you’re not a Mormon but are interested in our religion and culture.
I use this image a lot because it has so much truth in it.
There’s an old rule: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I think we could retrofit that for bloggers as: “If you don’t have anything new to blog, don’t blog at all.” The trouble, of course, is that in that event most of us would stop blogging.
For example, I’ve wanted to write a post about the myth of evil for quite some time. What I mean by this is the belief–reaffirmed by media in the wake of every horrific crime–that evil acts are committed by evil people, and that evil people are a different kind of entity than good people. In other words, it’s the opposite of what Sirius Black tells Harry Potter: “The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us.” Contrast that with, for example, the hopeless attempt to use DNA to find out what caused the Sandyhook shooting. That is the 21st century equivalent of looking for demonic possession: an attempt to reaffirm the myth that those who do great evil are essentially different from the rest of us.
When I started writing the post, however, I decided to do a quick Google search first. Turns out, there’s already a book: “The Myth of Evil explores a contradiction at the heart of modern thought about what it is to be human: the belief that a human being cannot commit a radically evil act purely for its own sake and the evidence that radically evil acts are committed not by inhuman monsters, but by human beings.” That took the wind right out of my sails. I don’t know if the book actually makes the same specific arguments I was going to make, but I would feel like a fraud for not reading it first to find out. And if I have to read a book before I write every single blog post…
This isn’t an isolated incident. When I was 10 years old I wrote a piano song of my very own, and then heard the melody played on the radio a couple of days later. Once I spent an entire semester working on a complex systems project that turned out to be just recreating the basics of reinforcement learning. I’d never heard the term before, and neither had most of the folks in the class, but when I gave my final presentation one of the other students pointed out that there was already a textbook. In grad school I spent a lot of time thinking about economic equality and came up with the idea that it had to be measured in terms of opportunity to make any sense. Turns out, that’s part of what got Amartya Sen his Nobel Prize. Everyone’s heard the idea that there are no new stories, but there are new facts and new theories. I just keep thinking up old ones instead. So: why blog?
Fiddle Oak is the name of a precocious 14-year old photography / digital manipulator, and his work is fantastic. I found a gallery at demilked (who names these things?) with some fantastic examples.
They are all so good, and I didn’t want to pick the very best ones here, so these are just two that I happened to grab as examples.
Check out the full gallery and, if you’re interested in how the photos were made, Fiddleoak has his own blog where he explains his process.
I don’t post a whole bunch of personal stuff at my blog, but I thought that this article was worth sharing. It’s a high-intensity circuit-training workout designed to be as condensed as possible. There are a lot of gimmicky workouts, but when I noticed that the article on this one was from the New York Times, I thought it was worth taking a look. Here’s the entire workout in one picture:
The NYT article in turn linked to the original article in Health and Fitness, which is the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine. Here’s what I like about the workout:
It doesn’t require any weights or tools. All you need is yourself, a chair, and a wall. (Technically I suppose you also need a floor.)
It’s short. The NYT article claims that it’s 7-minutes long, but it’s not actually quite that short. You can get through the 12 exercises in about 7 minutes (30 seconds each with very little rest between), but the article says you can then repeat the circuit 2-3 times. So we’re looking at 15 – 30 minutes, realistically. That’s still good, however.
It doesn’t promise too much. The article specifically says that for peak performance you’ll have to do something much more time-consuming. This is a workout designed for folks who aren’t pro athletes (I’m not even close, and never have been) and want a solid workout. No miracles promised.
It’s based on scientific research, both in terms of the general concept (combining muscle and aerobic exercise in short, focused workouts) and also this particular plan (you alternate major muscle groups as you go through the 12 exercises).
I just tried it out for the first test run, and I was really surprised at how high my heart rate got. Guess that means it’s working. Some of the exercises are also a lot tougher than they appear, but then again I’m a n00b. The planks and tricep dips got me good this time around. For my trial run I only went through once (I’ve also already done a 3.8 mile run today, which is a lot for me at this point), but I’m looking forward to including this routine more because it seems like something I can realistically stick with over a long period of time, and (in my 30s) I really need that. Starting to workout when you’re out-of-shape really sucks, and I’d really love to never be completely out of shape again.
Slate has a great set of interactive maps for exploring abortion and contraception laws around the world. One of the stubborn bits of misinformation that I regularly come across (even with otherwise politically informed and aware individuals) is the idea that the United States has moderate laws on abortion that only allow abortions under certain exceptions. This is not true. As the very first selection on the very first map indicates, abortion is legal in the United States for any reason whatsoever.
The useful thing about these maps, of course, is that they come from Slate. I don’t think anyone accuses Slate of having a pro-life slant. Slate, for its part, credits a variety of sources running from ostensibly neutral, like the UN, to the overtly pro-choice, like the Guttmacher Institute. (The Guttmacher Institute is a branch of Planned Parenthood.)
There are other useful maps as well. The second one reinforces the point of the first one: every possible exception category is included in the US (because no reason at all is needed). Farther down, the “Abortion: Laws by state” map has a setting for “Trigger laws” that helpfully illustrates the fact that overturning Roe would not, by itself, make abortion illegal. Only 6 states (including my home of Virginia) have bans that would automatically go into effect if Roe were overturned.
And, just to preempt objections from folks who are familiar with Roe but not with Doe, it was the two court cases working together that created our present circumstance where no reason at all is required for an abortion in the United States. Although Roe ostensibly allows states to enact regulation based on trimester, they are forced to leave open a “health” exception. Doe, handed down the same day as Roe, defined “health” so broadly that basically anything goes and–in addition– left the determination in the hands of the woman’s doctor. Which is to say: the abortionist gets to decide if the abortion is for the woman’s “health”, with no oversight or penalty. This is, in effect, abortion without any restriction whatsoever.
There are some states, of course, that ban late-term abortions, but these bans are in tenuous legal territory. Pennsylvania, where Kermit Gosnell operated his clinic, has a law against late-term abortions without a health exception, but when the PA law was challenged in the Supreme Court (Planned Parenthood v Casey), Planned Parenthood decided not to contest that aspect of the law. Since it was not challenged, it remains on the books. Does that mean late-term abortions are illegal in PA? Well, you tell me. Kermit Gosnell was performing them for decades without any enforcement. He was only ever charged with illegal late-term abortions during his trial for murdering infants after they were born. I haven’t found any prosecution of an abortionist for illegal late-term abortions independent of the death of an adult patient. I would argue that if no one is ever independently charged with violating a law against late-term abortions (even when they obviously conducted thousands and are on trial for other, related charges) it’s safe to conclude that late-term abortions are still legal in practice.
Which brings me to the final map I found interesting. It’s still the “Abortion: Laws by state” map, but this time the “Abortion providers” filter. What this illustrates is how few and far between abortion providers are. The real difficulty in securing an abortion in this country (when it exists) is not about legality. It’s about the fact that so few doctors are willing to perform abortions. To what extent this is from pressure by the pro-life movement vs. the internal psychological toll of killing human beings for a living is a topic I’ll leave for another day. (If you think the psychological toll is not important, however, I suggest you try reading this paper, which gives a pro-choice abortionist’s perspective on the matter.)
[NOTE: This post updated at about 5:30pm Eastern to correct an error. The original post stated that Kermit Gosnell was never charged with illegal late-term abortions, but a friend of mine who attended the trial told me that he was. She also provided this article.]
There’s a general assumption among most Americans that democracy is a good thing and that, as a general rule, more democracy is better. With the single exception that we ought to have a Bill of Rights to carve out protections so that the majority cannot persecute the minority, reforms like direct election of Senators (before the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, state legislatures elected national Senators), direct involvement via ballot initiatives, and even reform of the Electoral College to apportion votes equitably with respect to population all seem to strike most people as more or less common sensical. The same general attitude is applied internationally as well, which is why so many Americans were initially supportive of the Arab Spring revolutions that swept the Middle East.
I think this is all wrong. Democracy, in my mind, is overrated. And for clarity, “democracy” means to me “rule by the majority” or even just “rule by the people”.
Let’s start at the beginning with the American Revolution. There’s a widespread urban legend that 1/3 of Americans supported the Revolution, 1/3 were neutral, and 1/3 opposed it. The problem with this view is that it’s not actually accurate. It stems from a letter by John Adams written in 1813 that was actually about American opinions of the French Revolution, although it has been mistakenly quoted by historians dating back to the early 1900’s. The best explanation I’ve found for this issue comes from the Journal of the American Revolution, which addressed the issue directly. According to that piece, no one really knows what the actual breakdown for support of the American Revolution was. In addition to the absence of statistical polling at the time, the issue is complicated by the fact that the American population was growing very rapidly. However (citing the Journal of the American Revolution again), historians like Robert Calhoon estimate that between 40% and 45% of the free population (so African American slaves are not included) or “at most no more than a bare majority” supported the Revolution. So the 1/3-1/3-1/3 quote is erroneous, but the idea that the Revolution was supported by a minority of Americans is reasonable.
This is a controversial claim. Another organization that weighed in on this issue is the Independent Institute, a conservative/libertarian think tank. William F. Marina wrote a piece for them denouncing the “minority myth” as a malicious lie to support elitism and citing “the obvious delight that these writers take, which is, indeed, a major reason they cite it, in the notion that it is a minority that often knows best.” Despite Marina’s foreceful defense of the view that the majority of Americans supported the Revolution, however, the Founders themselves seemed less clear about it. Writing to a friend in 1813, John Adams responded to his friend Thomas McKean’s assertion that the overwhelming majority of Americans had supported the Revolution, Adams demurred. He cited the strength of the Loyalist cause and then wrote (again, Journal of the American Revolution): “Upon the whole, if we allow two thirds of the people to have been with us in the revolution, is not the allowance ample?”
John Adams
So we should take two things from this. The first is that we don’t really know if the majority of Americans supported the Revolution or not, and neither did (at least some of) the Founders. The second is that, to this day, that assertion is hotly contested. Why? Because of an idea that the American political system is founded on the “will of the people” and that–if the Founders did not follow the will of the people–they were “a pretty slippery and hypocritical bunch”, as Marina put it.
I have a different perspective. I think that there is an important distinction between (to use my own terminology) the consent of the governed and the intent of the governed. And I think that when most Americans envision “democracy” they are implicitly assuming that government ought to reflect the intent of the governed. For example, I think that most Americans believe that the purpose of elected representatives is basically practical. We can’t ask Americans for their opinion on every single law, and so we elect representatives, and their job is to go and act as a simple stand-in for their constituents. That is why we passed the 17th Amendment: so that Senators would directly represent their constituents, as opposed to having the state legislature exist as an intermediary. Based on this idea (the intent theory of representative government), not only do legislatures act as stand-ins for their constituents, but the rest of government (the executive and judicial branches) are also simply practical necessities. We have a President because, especially in times of crisis, we need a single person who can act decisively and unambiguously. We have a judicial system purely as a kind of expert legal consultant, although in recent years there has been increasingly a theory that even the Supreme Court ought to reflect the changing mores and attitudes of society. In short: the intent theory is the idea that the entire apparatus of the American political system is an elaborate attempt to enact the will of the American people. In this view, the government (and everyone who works there) is essentially a passive filter that processes the intent of Americans into official law and action.
I believe this is entirely wrong.
First of all, I don’t believe that was the intent of the Founders in creating the system. This is clear from both their actions before and during the Revolution and also from the system that they created. In terms of actions: they acted proactively without waiting for the will of the majority to be clear. John Adams’ letter reflects this. It’s obvious that the will of the people was crucial to their view of governmental legitimacy, but it didn’t serve as the source of government action. In simple terms, the Founders asked for permission from the American people, but didn’t wait for instructions. That’s fundamentally incompatible with the idea that the government merely enacts the intent of the American people. In terms of political structure: the design of the American political system laid down in the Constitution is incompatible with the idea that it is merely a passive filter. After all, the 17th Amendment wasn’t passed until the 20th century. The original intent of the Founders was to intentionally create a layer between national and state government, and have that layer remove the American people a step or two from the process. Since there’s no practical reason for that design decision (it wouldn’t have been significantly more difficult to have popular election for the Senate), it shows that the Founders deliberately chose a less-democratic political system.
Why? Because the Founders were not fools.
The most influential writer on this topic that I’ve read is the modern libertarian scholar Bryan Caplan who wrote The Myth of the Rational Voter. Caplan’s main point, in this book, was to document specific systematic biases common to American voters that lead to poor economic policies. But, along the way, he also pointed out that an important advantage of voter ignorance is that it leaves wiggle room for their representatives to make better decisions that would be unpopular if (biased) American voters knew exactly what was going.
Now I expect that this line of argument is going to raise all kinds of red flags with people, and it should. But the fundamental reality is that elitism has some things going for it. Who do you want to do analysis about global warming, PhD scientists or the man on the street? Who do you want to perform surgery on your kid, a trained and accredited surgeon or a randomly selected poll respondent? Then elitism has a role to play in our society. The government makes policies based on or impacting scientific, strategic, economic, and other matters where expertise is absolutely essential if you want good policies. Then elitism has a role to play in our government.
But obviously the possibility for reliance on elites to be abused is incredibly dangerous. There has to be a counterweight to elitism, and that counterweight is the consent of the governed. Our political system is designed to allow representatives (hopefully representing our elite in the best sense of the word) a wide range of latitude in governance, but to make them ultimately accountable to the people. It is neither populist nor elitist, but a fusion of the two.
So what happens when the balance between populism and elitism is disrupted? Well, take a look at the increasing partisanship and dysfunction in Washington D.C. since the rise of the Internet to get an example. Knowledge is power, and power can be abused. The Internet is, fundamentally, a communication technology that allows for the wide and targeted distribution of information. How much easier is it for activist groups (like the NRA) to micromanage elected representatives and then pass that information directly to their self-selecting constituents who have this information in the absence of any meaningful context. We complain that there’s so little real compromise in Washington, but who can compromise when there are hundreds of single-issue and ideological groups who are literally scoring our legislators on every vote they take?
Again: when I make an argument that says “less informed voters would be better” that ought to send up some red flags. But viewing it as less / more informed isn’t helpful. It’s not just about the amount of information that voters have, but also the kind of information that voters have. I would absolutely love to have voters who are more informed about the nature of our government, what the various branches are responsible for, and so on. I think that a kind of basic citizenship test before voting is a good idea (but not an unproblematic one). But when voters get myopic rankings on hot-button issues without any context: that’s more like noise than information. Voters don’t actually know what votes their representatives cast. They don’t even understand the arcane and complex procedures by which the House and Senate operate. They don’t know when a vote represents a pure capitulation, and when it represents a give-and-take. All they know is that on Position X Candidate Y has a D- from their favorite activist organization. So we’ve got a bunch of elected representatives who have to game the system with their votes in order to stay in office.
And that’s thanks to democracy.
What’s the solution? Well, there’s no silver bullet, but I do believe the first step is a recognition of what the American political system is for. And I don’t think that the American political system was designed or intended to get representatives to either guess what Americans would want if they were asked or merely act out their reactions to poll questions. I think the American political system harnesses the concept of consent of the governed to create accountability by creating healthy incentives. In short, representatives (in the past) have had more incentive to get good outcomes then to react to the preferred ideologies of their constituents. But, since we’ve lost an appreciation for that distinction, we risk reforms that will actually make the problem better rather than worse. Banning single-interest groups or clamping down on their free speech is not, in my mind, a viable solution. Reforming the way we create districts (to restrict gerrymandering), reforming the way we vote (to eliminate strategic voting), and reforming the schedule for primaries (to decrease entrenched special interests) all are.
In short: you have to know how the machine is supposed to work before you can understand how to repair or improve it.
[This post has no real spoilers for the most recent Star Trek movie, but it does have spoilers for a lot of older Star Trek material as well as World War Z and especially the book version of Ender’s Game.]
Gary Westfahl has an interesting review of the most recent Star Trek movie (which I haven’t seen) at Locus. In it, he laments the fact that recent Star Trek movies have abandoned Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic view of the future:
Essentially, Roddenberry envisioned a future universe in which everybody could get along; intelligent beings might have their differences, but they could still respect each other and strive to resolve their conflicts without resorting to all-out war.
For Westfahl, the first Star Trek movie epitomized this essentially peaceful narrative structure:
[It] was completely congruent with the spirit of the original series: an enormous alien construct approaches Earth and threatens to destroy humanity, but investigation reveals that it is merely being motivated by a confused recollection of instructions that the machine absorbed when it merged with the space probe Voyager, and when it then combines with a human partner, it peacefully leaves Earth to pursue new goals.
Unfortunately, however, this movie was not very commercially successful. It was Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan that breathed new life into the franchise. And it did so by taking an empathy opponent from an earlier episode (Khan) and rendering him purely evil so that he could get blown up at the end and everyone would cheer. For Westfahl, this represents the unfortunate trend towards polarization in modern society, and it’s regrettable that it became the pattern for additional Star Trek movies (including the most recent one). I’m with Westfahl on most of this, but there are two glaring omissions that struck me as extremely puzzling.
Over at Worlds Without End, Walker Wright (fellow blogger and frequent commenter here at DR) has an excellent article critiquing one of Hugh Nibley’s most famous essays. The essay Walker is criticizing is Leaders to Managers: The Fatal Shift, and Walker’s article is titled Like a Boss.
When I was serving my mission, I found out that FARMS (now the Maxwell Institute) had a bunch of Nibley’s articles online. I was in the office at the time (trying to wrangle visa problems and tax audits) and reading Nibley’s articles saved my sanity. But, as much as I love Nibley, his anti-business bias really bothered me as being fundamentally uncurious–in contrast with his otherwise expansive intellect–and after studying economics myself I’m more sad than ever that Nibley never took the time to understand some of his favorite rhetorical punching bags. “Leaders to Managers” is a great example of that, and I like Walker’s take on it.
