Author: Nathaniel Givens

I agree with Jonathan Green’s description of how most Mormons tend to think about evolution vs. creation. To recap, we tend to: Affirm an active role for God in the creation of human beings Accept basic science as it relates to genetics, natural selection, geology, etc. Reject attempts to force an either/or choice between points 1 and 2. As a general rule, Mormons are happy to embrace science and religion, and do not see a necessary conflict between the two. When it comes to the usual hullaballoo over religion vs. science, this is certainly correct. There just isn’t any particular reason to care very much whether God created Adam and Eve using natural selection or some other means. However, there is a more subtle conflict. It exists between the continuity of the evolution narrative and the way we talk about humanity as a discrete category. Here is one example of the problem from a typical statement of Brigham Young’s: The ordinance of sealing must be performed here man to man, and woman to man, and children to parents, etc., until the chain of generation is made perfect in the sealing ordinances back to Father Adam. There must be this chain in the holy Priesthood; it must be welded together from the latest generation that lives on the earth back to Father Adam. [J.D. 18:213 emphasis added] Clearly Brother Brigham had in mind a sense of completeness that can only exist…

Read more →

I’ve written about the fallibility of our leaders before (here, here, and here) because I think it’s important for us as members to develop greater spiritual independence and because the unrealistic expectations held for the leaders (as often by the critics as by the devout) set people up for unnecessary disappointment. But the concept of fallibility, like the even trendier concept of doubt, can be overplayed. Leaders are fallible, yes, but that doesn’t preclude room for trust. The proximate cause of my ruminations was the announcement of the Church’s addition of a chapel and a commercial apartment tower next to the Philadelphia temple site. Based on reporting in the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, local reception of the proposed projects is quite enthusiastic. From the NYT: [Philadelphia’s] deputy mayor for economic development… praised the church for taking a step that private developers were less likely to tackle, that is, committing to such a project without more evidence of economic vitality in the surrounding neighborhood. From the Inquirer: They [the Church’s developments] could end up as one of the most civic-minded projects now being built in Philadelphia. The Inquirer was notably less enthusiastic about the aesthetics of the project (“The collection of architectural pastiches promises to be one of the weirder ensembles produced in 21st-century America outside of Las Vegas.”), but from everything I’ve been able to determine the residents of Philadelphia are happy to have the projects, both for…

Read more →

Today in Gospel Doctrine I played the role of Devil’s advocate. I spent the last 10 or 15 minutes leading a discussion about the children who died when God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, when God sent the Flood, when Christ died on the cross and Nephite cities were burned, buried, and sunk, and when Alma and Amulek watched as women and children were burned to death before their eyes. Several of the commenters sought to defend God’s justice using familiar arguments (like the idea that there are some things worse than death) or evasions (like the idea that maybe there were no children in Sodom who were not already engaged in or tainted by sin). Some of these arguments make more sense than others to me, but for me no combination makes the problem go away entirely. The whole idea of using modern reasoning to try and justify these stories seems futile given the existence of ancient explanations that are, themselves, just as bad. 10 And when Amulek saw the pains of the women and children who were consuming in the fire, he also was pained; and he said unto Alma: How can we witness this awful scene? Therefore let us stretch forth our hands, and exercise the power of God which is in us, and save them from the flames. 11 But Alma said unto him: The Spirit constraineth me that I must not stretch forth mine hand; for…

Read more →

The argument against perpetuating normative gender roles has two prongs. First, there is the argument that gender roles do not offer anything that is not available to human beings autonomously determining their own roles. Second, there is the observation that no set of gender roles applies universally. There will always be those who, because of individual nature or life circumstance, cannot conform to the prevailing gender roles. In practice, those who conform least are most marginalized. Taken together, gender roles appear to offer little substantial benefit but carry genuine cost. So what’s the case in favor of gender roles? The strength of the first prong of this argument rests on a misleading intuition. Generally, the more beneficial a thing is the easier it is to identify the way in which that things is beneficial. We all know penicillin is beneficial, and we can all state clearly exactly why. Therefore, the intuition goes, if gender roles are really all that important to society it should be the easiest thing in the world to explain how and why. When it comes to human inventions, this is intuition is sound, but gender roles were not invented. Like language and markets, they belong to a class of social mechanisms that predate history. (This much is true whether they evolved, were instituted by divine fiat, or both.) Writing of these kinds of institutions, F. A. Hayek said: It would be no exaggeration to say that…

Read more →

Superheroes are a different breed. For a lot of them, this is literal. Most of the well-known superheroes in the Marvel Universe (Fantastic Four, X-Men, Avengers, etc.) are mutants. One of the central themes is the tension between ordinary humans and those genetically gifted with extraordinary mutant powers.  Other superheroes start out as perfectly normal human beings before something happens to set them apart. Peter Parker is consecrated by the bite of a radioactive spider. The Green Lanterns are called and chosen by an ancient alien race at the center of the Universe and endowed with power rings that let them fulfill their duties as Guardians. It’s no coincident that one of the oldest superheroes, and perhaps the archetype of the entire genre, is defined in contrast to human beings: Superman. Quentin Tarantino, cribbing from earlier work by Jules Feiffer, included a monologue in Kill Bill that gets to the heart of this: Superman stands alone. Superman did not become Superman, Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he is Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red S is the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears, the glasses the business suit, that’s the costume. The villainous Bill (in the movie) interprets this to be Superman’s condemnation of a weak humanity, but others have suggested a more…

Read more →

It is an ancient and time-honored tradition of fathers to leap out from behind corners and startle their little kids. According to the venerable template, the little one will shriek in faux terror and scamper away in expectation of pursuit. My son has different ideas. If my son is startled by something truly unknown, like the low-flying medical helicopter that often passed over our apartment in Michigan, then he will get scared. But if he can identify the source of a perceived threat, then his instinctive reaction is immediate and unrestrained aggression. This has been the case at least as long as he’s been able to walk. If I, or anyone else, tries to startle the little dude, he lowers his head, defiantly bellows his war-cry, and charges. So when my wife realized that he was slated for several shots at his routine checkup on Friday, I took off work to go to the appointment with her. It’s a good thing I did, because they were short on nurses. It was up to me and my wife to hold the little guy firmly down while the nurse stabbed him three times in the left leg and twice in the right. His sister went outside to hide under a table in the hall. After the shots were over, his rage—and it was rage—continued unabated. My wife hesitated for a moment, torn between comforting her angry son and her terrified daughter. I…

Read more →

Although general terms like “liberal” and “conservative” should always be handled with care, there’s a basic understanding that the movement to ordain women is predominantly a liberal movement and that the skeptics are predominantly conservative. Broadly speaking, this is correct. But some go farther and argue that the default conservative position is to defend the status quo. This is a grave error. The error arises from a misunderstanding of how conservatism operates in a Mormon context. That basic idea of conservatism is “retaining traditional social institutions.” This is always more complex than merely a reflex to defend the status quo. Conservatives exercise judgment in which principles and institutions from the past deserve to be preserved. They translate those principles and institutions into new forms to fit a modern context. And, when the present moment has moved sufficiently far from past principle and institutions, the status quo must be attacked in order to recover past traditions. In short: conservatism cannot be relegated to just a brutish and arbitrary defense of the status quo. In the context of Mormonism, however, the underlying nature of conservatism is even more radical. This is because the tradition that Mormon conservatives seek to preserve is a tradition of constant change. Let’s start with the 9th Article of Faith: We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to…

Read more →

When I was a missionary from 2000-2002, we taught about the Restoration in the third discussion. We often drew a picture to convey the core concepts. There was a mirror (representing the Church) a string (representing the Apostles) and a nail (representing Christ). The Apostasy came about, we taught, because the Apostles died, and so the string was cut, and so the mirror fell, and so it was destroyed. If you want to see clearly, you cannot tape together the shattered shards of a mirror. So too, we taught, Christ had to abandon the broken remnants of His former Church and—with Joseph Smith—start all over again. Christ’s Church could not be “reformed” back into existence, it had to be restored. That’s fine as it pertains to the concept of priesthood authority, but unfortunately we specifically taught that the shards of the broken church corresponded to theological truths. Our message was clear: if you want all the truth, you have to come to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We’ve got it all. Except, of course, that we don’t. The Apostasy did not constitute a sudden revocation of divine truth from the Earth, and God was not on some kind of extended vacation during the intervening centuries. Writing of the time, President John Taylor said: There were men in those dark ages who could commune with God, and who, by the power of faith, could draw aside the curtain…

Read more →

The changes at the Gospel Topics section of LDS.org (which I wrote about two weeks ago) and especially the Church’s new Race and the Priesthood article have rekindled questions about the fallibility of Church leaders. After all, the Church’s current position completely disavows the past practice of denying the priesthood to blacks and all but explicitly states that the practice was an error from the start. Chalk it up with Adam-God and blood atonement and poor Brother Brigham seems to be batting 0.000 at theological innovation. It’s difficult to reconcile such grave errors with the statement, canonized in Official Declaration 1, that “The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray.” It’s possible that President Woodruff had in mind an even more grave contravention of God’s plan when he spoke and so is still correct, baseless priesthood ban notwithstanding. But if institutionalized racism is not “astray”, then what is? The simpler solution is that he was mistaken. I don’t think that suggestion should come as a mighty shock. The Book of Mormon (also canon, after all) specifically talks about its own mistakes in, eg, the title page (“if there are faults they are the mistakes of men”), Alma (“but behold, I mistake”), and 3 Nephi (“if there was no mistake made by this man in the reckoning of our time”). Just as no book in the Bible claims that the Bible is inerrant, no work in the broader…

Read more →

I’m spending time moving my family into our new home and getting ready for Christmas, so here’s a song from Dustin Kensrue’s Christmas album This Good Night Is Still Everywhere. It’s not the usual sound, but that’s part of why I like it so much. (And now I’m going to get some Mannheim Steamroller going…)

Read more →

I told my Gospel Doctrine class yesterday afternoon that since we had run out of lesson manual for the year we were going to go rogue. Then I proceeded to give the first lesson I’ve ever given (I think) in which I exclusively used officially-approved Church materials[1].  I could pick anything I wanted to teach about, and I choose to cite three videos and four articles from the Gospel Topics section of LDS.org. And yet I did feel like there was something quietly revolutionary about the material we covered in the lesson. The article that has riveted the Bloggernaccle and even the world beyond this week is the article Race and the Priesthood [2], and that’s where I got started. I’d heard vague mentions about efforts on the part of the Church to revise the curriculum and/or to start addressing difficult issues head on. I even think I’d heard something about the article on the First Vision accounts, but I sort of figured that if there was a major policy shift I’d hear about it in General Conference or some other official outlet. I hadn’t heard anything definitive, but I went to the Gospel Topics section of lds.org (where Race and the Priesthood is posted) and started poking around in preparation for my lesson. Still under the impression that if anything significant was afoot I would have heard about it elsewhere, I started watching the three videos posted there. The first one, featuring Elder…

Read more →

In my imagination there is a hall of records in the future Celestial Zion where anyone can review the mortal life of any other person as seen from their perspective. It is an imposing structure in its own right, one part great library and one part museum, but it lies in the shadow of grander and more glorious edifices. The business of Zion will be eternal progression, and so the hall of records receives fewer visitors than the other communal spaces of learning. It is vast and solitary place. A person could enter and spend an entire day walking between the towering shelves on the buildings many levels. Outside the sun would roll across the sky, and inside that person would encounter only a couple of other souls, and those at a distance, as each quietly pursued answers to their own questions. The shelves are loaded with the weight of a hundred billion human lives. The impressions, the thoughts, the fears, and the hopes. All that is learned and all that should have been learned. The fading echoes of all the confusion and glory and darkness of humankind’s brief but pivotal period of mortal existence reverberate quietly within that building. Mormon 5:8 And now behold, I, Mormon, do not desire to harrow up the souls of men in casting before them such an awful scene of blood and carnage as was laid before mine eyes; but I, knowing that these…

Read more →

In 2009 the “threefold mission” of the Church was extended to include a fourth point: “to care for the poor and needy.” Obviously practical charity is not a new concept for Mormonism. The very same chapter that included the famous “If any of you lack wisdom…” verse that led ultimately to the First Vision also contains this emphatic assertion: Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. (James 1:27) This New Testament precedent was echoed in modern revelations. For example, Joseph Smith revealed the link between poverty and spiritual unity in the definition of Enoch’s Zion: And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heard and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them. (Moses 7:18) Next year came an even more stark revelation: It is not given that one man should possess that which is above another, wherefore the world lieth in sin. (D&C 49:20) Clearly, Mormon doctrine has had an economic aspect from the very beginning. And of course it wasn’t just a matter of doctrine. The focus on economic welfare was maintained out of necessity throughout the Church’s early history. Persecution and the hardships of frontier life and intercontinental immigration ensured that temporal needs were always in focus. What’s more, this focus has not been lost in modern…

Read more →

Dave Banack wrote just two weeks ago–here at Times And Seasons–about the atheological atonement. His two conclusions were first, that the Church doesn’t have a specific theory of the atonement and second, that this is  probably a good thing: The Church’s prior forays into theology have produced questionable results. Silence on the subject gives LDS thinkers leeway to publish their own helpful speculative discussions. In any case, it’s the atonement that will save you, not a theory of the atonement or even the one true theory of the atonement. I definitely agree with the general wariness of formal theology Dave espouses, and there’s no contesting that the track record thus far is mixed at best. In fact, I think there are lots of additional reasons to view the atheological nature of our faith as a feature rather than a bug. If we accept that final theological truths are most likely far beyond the understanding we will attain in this life, the only real result of attempting to be final and precise in theology would be an endless argument where no one really knows what they are talking about and everyone is always wrong. (As I’ve said: don’t debate the Trinity!) That’s bad enough, but if the theology is formal and authoritative then the squabble becomes weaponized. No longer a pure contest of ideas, it must invariably become a struggle for power. In this sense, I think it’s quite plausible that official…

Read more →

The study of management—of human beings going about their ordinary business of making a living—is one of the richest and most profound venues for the study of theology. Once you’ve considered the idea, it seems obvious. But of course, most of us don’t consider that idea. I never did, until very recently. What could be more antithetical to spiritual reality than the world of business? Even if I thought Hugh Nibley’s critiques on business were a disappointingly infantile digression from an otherwise heroic figure, the idea that the world of mammon could actually be a source of spiritual insight (other than as a temptation to be denied or a trial to be endured, of course) never entered my mind. But why shouldn’t it? If we are to take seriously the theology of the mundane, and that is something I believe we should take seriously, and locate insight and meaning in pedestrian and everyday human activities, then why would we except the realm of business and commerce? Management always lives, works, and practices in and for an institution, which is a human community held together by the bond that, next to the tie of family, is the most powerful human bond: the work bond. And precisely because the object of management is a human community held together by the work bond for a common purpose, management always deals with the Nature of Man, and (as all of us with any practical…

Read more →

Mark Oppenheimer wants to know why there are no great Mormon writers. More specifically: In the United States, Jews, blacks and South Asians, while they have produced no Milton or Shakespeare — who has, lately? — have all had literary renaissances. Mormons are more likely to produce work that gets shelved in niche sections of the bookstore. And as it turns out, Mormon authors themselves wonder if their culture militates against more highbrow writing. They have a range of possible explanations. Now, before we get to the question of why there are no great Mormon writers, I have to at least address the assumption that genre fiction cannot be great art. I don’t want to refight the whole high-brow vs. pop-art war, but I’m going to at least plant my flag and say that I believe that some popular works of “genre” fiction, whether we’re talking J. K. Rowling or Raymond Chandler, are great works of art without any qualification, caveat, shame, or apology. The presence of or aspiration for commercial success does not preclude artistic success. Ask Charles Dickens. Ask Mark Twain. Ask the Beatles. So the assumption that genre works must not be “real” art is highly suspect. This is especially true when the genre categories seem to be established precisely to maintain that illusion after the fact. Who thinks of Herman Hesse as a science fiction writer? And yet his novel The Glass Bead Game, which won the…

Read more →

Back in 2009, Pew Research released a research package on public opinions about evolution in honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Just last month, a friend on Facebook posted the headlining chart from that package, and a lively debate ensued. The tone of the folks posting this chart (I saw it on several walls) was one of exaggerated dismay, e.g. “A depressing — but unsurprising — revelation about Mormons.” The fact that the result fit so neatly alongside myriad preexisting cultural skirmishes should have been a major indicator that the results were unreliable, however. Lots of people argued that the question was  poorly worded, primarily because it seemed to set up an unnecessary dichotomy between evolution-without-God and creationism-with-God, thus precluding the middle ground of evolution-with-God. This criticism is legitimate, but it also serves as another big, red, warning indicator. If the responses to a survey question ostensibly about a scientific theory fall neatly within established cultural narratives, then we have good reason to be very skeptical that the survey illuminates the topic it purports to cast light upon. In this case, the superficial narrative is that the survey reflects attitudes about evolution as the origin of human life. The first thing to note is that there is essentially no cost to affirming or denying this belief. If the truth is that evolution really is the best explanation for the origins of human life here on earth, what’s at…

Read more →

As a friend of mine living in Germany informed me, Ender’s Game has already started to play in some markets, and the United States release is coming up this week. With that in mind, I thought I’d return to the novel once more. In the days before The Hunger Games and Battle Royale made the idea of children murdering each other part of mainstream entertainment, the combination of very young characters and serious violence was one of the more provocative and controversial elements of Ender’s Game. Young Ender Wiggin is only six years old when he beats another child to death, and he subsequently kills another kid with his bare hands while in Battle School. Orson Scott Card described one reader who criticized the book for unrealistic depiction of children by noting that “it was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don’t actually think or speak the way the children in Ender’s Game think and speak.” He went on to write that the simplest explanation for why the children in the book don’t think and act the way (some) adults expect children to think and act is that they don’t think of themselves as children. As Card put it, “Never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along.” The concept of childhood is a common theme for the child soldiers in the book. One of Ender’s earliest friends at the Battle School,…

Read more →

As Mormons, we practice a faith full of ritual ordinances. We are taught in scripture that some of these ordinances, like baptism, are necessary for salvation. We are also given very specific instructions for performing these ordinances, and failure to execute them properly seems to nullify their efficacy. Taken together, the precise instructions for carrying out ordinances and their eternal significance seem dischordant. When we are immersed during baptism, does the water actually do something? If not, why is it so strictly required? I know of three three conventional attitudes to this problem. The most straight-forward is to believe that our actions in conducting ordinances actually work to bring about the effect of the ordinance. So, when the sacrament is blessed, the words themselves (in the presence of the proper priesthood as a catalyst) bring about the effect of sanctifying the bread and water. They are changed in some metaphysical sense. This, in all seriousness and gravity, is the magical view of ordinances. They work exactly like spells in Harry Potter. You have to have the power (wizarding blood in Harry Potter or the priesthood in real life) and then you have to say the right words and if both conditions are met: something happens. There are clearly problems with this view, however. It requires some very speculative metaphysics to explain, for example, what role water has in the baptism that allows sins to be washed away. It’s also strange to…

Read more →

I remember reading a story in the Ensign while I was on my mission. The story was about a police officer who had been searching for a toddler who had been lost when his mother’s car was stolen while the child was still in the back. The mother was desperate to be reunited with her child, and time was running out. The police officer prayed, he followed a hunch, and the child was found and returned to his parents safe and sound. The story bothered me. It wasn’t the story itself. I have had miraculous experiences in my own life, and they are an important part of my faith. The problem is that emphasizing stories at all sets an impossible expectation. A narrative is a very artificial thing. They are human creations. A narrative is not what happens. A narrative is the result of a person processing what happens. It is what you get when a person is able to take a series of events and organize them in way that makes sense. Narratives have a beginning, a middle,  and an end. They have meaning and closure. Life, all too often, does not. That’s not the only sense in which the story sets high expectations, of course. What about the prayers that go unanswered? For every story of a person having a prayer answered or being miraculously prompted to be alert to danger there are stories of prayers unanswered and of senseless…

Read more →

(This post is the second in a series on Ender’s Game. Read the first here.) Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is a Third. This means that he is the third child in a family which–in the strictly population controlled United States described in Ender’s Game violates both the law and social taboo. Ender’s oldest sibling is Peter, a sociopathic genius who takes to torturing small animals when his favorite target, Ender, is shipped to Battle School. Peter himself was rejected because the military concluded he “had the soul of a jackal.” After Peter, his parents had Valentine. Although just as intelligent as Peter, she was also rejected from the Battle School because “she was too pacific, too conciliatory, and above all too empathic.” And so Ender’s parents were granted a rare exception to the two-children policy and Ender was born. There’s no doubt from the earliest pages that Peter is an evil character. His maliciousness comes across not just in his physical abuse of his younger brother, but in the mind games he plays with Ender and Valentine. When Valentine stops him from attacking, and possibly killing, Ender early in the book, Peter promises to kill Ender at a future time, saying: There’ll come a day when you aren’t there with him, when you forget. And suddenly you’ll remember, and you’ll rush to him, and there he’ll be, perfectly all right. And the next time you won’t worry so much, and you won’t come as…

Read more →

With very few exceptions, everyone loves the Harry Potter books. (The exceptions consist of people who cannot read and people who have no soul.) The appeal is fairly straightforward, with themes of magical escapism, coming-of-age, and friendship woven directly and beautifully throughout the narrative. Ender’s Game is also a very popular book. Although of course it’s not as widely read as Harry Potter (very little is, after all), it’s one of the best-selling and most-awarded science fiction novels of all time. The most interesting contrast between the two, however, is that whereas everyone seems to be on the same page as to the topics and themes of Harry Potter, Ender’s Game seems to be almost an entirely different book to a wide array of diverse audiences. For example, it’s been rebranded as a young adult story (complete with new cover art) based on the youthfulness of its central protagonists, but it’s also been listed on the United States Marine Corps Professional Reading List since that list’s inception where it is seen alternately as a treatise on leadership and an exposition on tactical innovation. One of my copies of the book, on the other hand, bears Card’s inscription “A survival guide for geniuses.” Accordingly, the book functions as a kind of banner for my generation of geeks, who watched with hope and trepidation as our social circle went from the bottom to the top of the pyramid at the close of…

Read more →

Our Mormon faith places a great deal of emphasis on obedience, and to great (and mostly positive) effect. It’s quite common, especially in the Bloggernaccle, to fault the Church and its members for being too conformist, and as I’ve written there is some legitimacy to those complaints. But I’ve also been struck in my life–more and more as I get older–that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it exists in practical reality does a pretty darn good job of making decent folk and/or making folk decent. There’s a culture of practical service that is easy to take for granted as it is pervasive. It also invariably fosters a perception of obedience as being defined by outward, practical behavior. So we’ve got ourselves a conundrum. There’s an intrinsic tension between an emphasis on obedience and an emphasis on the atonement. Between an emphasis on following the law and the reality that it’s a doomed endeavor from the start. In terms of scripture, between Matthew 11:38-30: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. And Matthew 5:48: Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. In what sense is a command…

Read more →

I started thinking about the phrase “stumbling block” recently. It’s such a common phrase that it’s easy to take its significance for granted. And maybe miss its meaning and current relevance. The literal meaning of the words is obvious, and “stumbling block” is in that sense basically the same phrase as “tripping rock”. But “tripping rock” is fresh and so it forces you to take a look at what the words actually mean: a stone that causes people who are walking somewhere to fall. Why should such an apparently innocuous concept be so deeply ingrained in scripture that it becomes an integrated part of our religious lexicon? I thought I’d consider another such phrase for comparison. If you used the phrase “tipping point” in the first half of the 20th century, the literal meaning would be clear. But as the graph below (created using a simple Google tool that searches a vast library of books and checks frequency of use), the term didn’t really come into its own until the second half of the 20th century. Of course the Malcolm Gladwell book of the same name explains a lot of the uptick in recent years, and is probably the reason (directly or indirectly) that you’ve heard the phrase. But Gladwell’s book was published in 2000. What explains the upwards trend in the 1960s? A quote from Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who was a pioneering computer scientist, might explain that: “Life was…

Read more →

The Temple and Observatory Group, which sponsored an event in July in Provo featuring Richard Bushman, Fiona Givens, and Terryl Givens is bringing the same lineup to New York City. Come listen to the three speak about negotiating LDS history and faith challenges on Saturday, September 28th from 10am – 3:30pm at 390 Broadway 3rd floor in Manhattan. (Here’s a copy of the official flyer.) Additional events are being planned for the East Coast in coming months including Washington, D.C. (October 19) and Boston (November 9). You can visit the website to keep informed (and learn about the groups’ name) 0r follow the group on Facebook.

Read more →

The Prisoner’s Dilemma came up in the comments to a post of mine from about a month ago. I outlined my thoughts very briefly there (see comment #12), but I’d like to return to them in more depth today. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is perhaps the most important scenario studied in game theory, and “it shows why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so.” To understand the analysis, however, I’ll need to back up and give a very brief game theory primer.   In game theory, a game is a situation where two players each face two or more options in pursuit of goals which are at least partially in conflict, and where the outcome of the situation depends on the choices that each player makes. This interdependence is what game theory from more general decision theory. In traditional parlance, games are won and lost, but in game theory game are solved when you understand exactly what decisions the players will take when each takes into account the actions of every other player This arrangement of complementary player actions is called an equilibrium. There are many kind of equilbria, but the most important is the Nash equilibrium. A Nash equilibrium is a set of of player actions such that each player has no incentive to change his or her action in response to the actions chosen by other players. Now we’re ready to see how the concept…

Read more →

I often heard, growing up, that teenagers think they are immortal. I always thought this applied to other teenagers. For the most part I didn’t get into the sorts of shenanigans that make adolescence famous. I felt I had a perfectly rational aversion to death and dying that manifest itself in, among other things, a general trepidation about learning to drive. Passing other cars at a cumulative speed of 100mph with only a few inches and some yellow lines as separation is still a kind of scary thing, I think, if you stop and consider it. It wasn’t until I was nearing my 30s that I for the first time encountered a new and heightened fear of death. It forced me to reconsider whether or not the old saying had applied to me after all. I remember the specific day–an ordinary week day after an ordinary day on the job–when I lay on my bed for a few minutes in the afternoon and the thought suddenly occurred to me: one day I will die. This body, with which I have grown so comfortable, will cool to room temperature. If I were to die right then, my heart to simply cease striving for one beat after the next, it would take minutes or even hours for my wife to find my body. I pictured her shock, horror, and sadness as she found me–but not me–inert and unrespsonsive. There would be nothing I…

Read more →

A number of years ago, a friend wrote me an email that included this reminiscence: Friday was my last day of spring break. I had worked all through the break, and really wanted to do something fun, something indulgent. I immediately thought of the only thing I have ever done when I wanted to be indulgent in past years– go to Barnes and Noble. I have always been haunted by a trip to the temple 20 or 30 years ago, and an old mission friend was along. We went to the book store, and he just loaded up with an armful of good books. I almost cried as he checked out so casually. I of course couldn’t even afford to buy one on our budget at the time. My happiest birthday memory was about 10 years ago, my wife took me to B&N, where I spent a few hours and I bought two books and we went home and lit a fire and I just read all day. Well, last Friday those thoughts came back. But you see, I have had the research stipend for 7 or 8 years now. I can buy any book I want at any time, and I have spent thousands sating every bibliographic lust I have. So last Friday, my idea about going to B&N just wilted before my eyes. I just worked instead. It’s a sad story, of course, but I think there’s a…

Read more →

The story of the blind men and the elephant is as useful as it is widespread. It features in Jain, Buddhist, Sufi and Hindu lore and has also  been applied in modern physics and biology. In case you haven’t heard it before, the essence of the story is that a few blind men each touch a different part of an elephant (like the tail or ear or leg or tusk) and each conclude that the elephant is like the part that they see (brush, fan, pot, or spear). Depending on the version of the story, they either cooperate to understand the elephant as a whole or get into a fight because each clings to his own perception to the exclusion of all others. Thus the story of the blind men and the elephant has a happy resolution, or at least it can have a happy resolution, because the different perspectives can all be resolved. The function of the blindness in the story (sometimes the men aren’t blind but are in a dark room) is to temporarily hobble their perspective. Because of their inability to see, they have to get very close to the elephant, and this proximity robs them of the chance to step back and adopt a wider perspective. Since what we see depends on our perspective, they are ultimately limited not by lack of site, but by lack of perspective. The perspective needed to see the whole truth of the…

Read more →