17 Years After the First Symposium

Staying out of Jail

Clayton Christiansen starts his book by talking about Harvard Business School class reunions.  At first everyone was happily achieving their life ambitions, but by 25 and 30 years, many had failed marriages and one had ended up in jail for his role in the Enron scandal.  The last of the three sections of the book is about how to stay out of jail.  All of this leads to two natural questions

1) When is the next PVS reunion? 

2) At our 30 year reunion, who is the most likely to be in jail?

I tried to envision people from Merrill Hall going to jail and what crimes they might commit to get sent to the slammer.  IF one of us ends up in jail (unlikely), here are my top 10 guesses for who and why:

• Jared Hansen - Needing blood for a Halloween costume and tired of punching himself in the nose decides to punch the neighbor kids
• Ronald Elia - Accidental manslaughter from hugging someone too hard
• Jesse Barnes - Embezzlement of investors' funds
• Scott Poelman - Embezzlement of investors' funds combined with indecent exposure
• Christopher Beesley - Convicts a criminal who decides to come after him and his family.  In defending his family, he underestimates his own strength, hurting multiple people.
• James Nuttall - Being in the wrong Southeast Asian country at the wrong time
• Karl Rees - Getting caught up in some anti-protest protest against some ridiculous California thing
• Rob Christiansen - In post-freshman year BYU days, he earned the nickname Mythical Rob.  Perhaps real Rob creates a Mythical Rob that lives in the Bahamas or Switzerland through whom he launders loads of cash.
• Doug Larsen - Running away (barefoot) from the cops as they try to force him to pay medical malpractice $$$ for a mistake he didn't make
• Paul Lattin - Decides its OK to make the roller coasters he's building crash, as long as he's smiling and announces 'Crash!' when it's happening.
  

If Tammy ever dies, don't underestimate my ability to do something crazy enough to merit jail time, like nudging a cyclist out of my lane with my car or using a semi-automatic weapon to decrease the local geese population.

Who among us do you think has the most criminal potential?  Which crime are you most likely to commit? 

What did you hire this blog to do?

You are giving of your resources (i.e. time) to read this blog, and as such, you are expecting this blog to do something for you. 

What are you hiring this blog to do?

a)      Entertain you

b)      Keep you up to date on your widespread BYU friends

c)       Give you a forum to express your thoughts

d)      Other

I’m guessing that you have hired this blog to do a) and b).  For me personally, the content of this blog, when there is content, does a fair job of meeting these goals.  Unfortunately, we do not have a very good system for providing sufficient motivators to you readers to create additional content. 

How can we increase the motivators?  (And don’t say $$, because if you’ve read the book, you know that money is just a hygiene factor.)

Relationships Matter Most, Even For Analytical Overachievers

The whole ‘people matter more than work’ bit is perhaps a bit trite and overly simplistic, but I liked Christiansen’s spin on the topic.  I do value my relationships.  I value my friendship with each of you.  I hope this book club can ramp back up because I do want to hear from each of you more often.  I also realize how hard it is to remember important relationships and recognize that your book club relationships are not the most important ones in your lives.

My wife and I are introverts that often prefer to spend our date nights at home.  To make sure our date nights were still dates and not just, “Um, what do you want to do?”, we’ve insisted on taking turns asking each other out each week.  The picture below is part of what I made for Tammy (aka Sweet T) for a date where we read this book together and had dessert.

Reading this book together and discussing it helped us to think and talk about our relationship together and how we are raising our children.  Tammy and I are extremely happy, and our lives are charmed and easy.  As perfect as our lives our now, this book makes you wonder if you’re the big company that is ignoring the scrappy start-up.  We can be better in allocating our resources, and we can better at teaching our children processes and priorities, not just giving them more resources.   I loved how the book’s business perspective changes how I looked at raising my family.  It made me want to plan and strategize more, instead of just watching things happen.

What was the take home message for you?  What were you inspired to do better?

My Career:   Deliberate vs. Emergent

I thought the section on finding a career was pretty boring, as I have found a career I’m quite satisfied with and have little ambition for change.   Still, I think it might make for some interesting book club discussion to talk about how we found our careers.

For a class assignment in high school, I had to job shadow someone, and I chose an actuary because they were on some list for the ideal career (lots of opportunity, nice pay, low stress and risk, etc.)  When I went to shadow him, however, he worked in a little cube and did stuff on a computer all day.  Not very interesting to watch, so I crossed that career off my list.  How naïve I was then.

I thought the ideal career would have been to be like Hari Seldon from Isaac Aasimov’s Foundation series.  Seldon uses a mix of psychology and mathematics to develop a formula for predicting the future of large groups of people.  Of course, the formula doesn’t work for individuals, and a generation of young fictional scholars spend their careers making small tweaks to his formula.  However, I didn’t think this was an actual possible career path.

I tried being a psychology major in college, but I found out that psychology isn’t very predictive.  I also discovered that there are more psych majors than any other major, which sent up some warning signals.  I liked that Clayton said being a good manager was one of the best ways to help people because maybe that will keep a few young people from studying psychology just because they feel like they have a ‘passion’ for helping people.  It’s nice to have a passion for something, but I also believe in the practicality of finding a job.

My mission president was a statistician, and I recognized my fascination for looking at his tables and charts.  I took my first stats class when I got back, and I quickly switched majors.  Statistics was predictive of the future!  It also could be applied to a lot of different fields, so I didn’t feel like I was pigeon-holing myself too quickly.  After undergrad, I applied to graduate programs, only intending to get a master’s degree, but I found I was eligible for scholarships if I enrolled in a PhD program so I did.

Upon “finishing” my PhD, I interviewed at a wide range of different companies, and I got two offers, one with Capital One’s credit card division and one here at the FDA in their medical devices division.  I have been very  happy with my choice.  So happy that I hope to never have to make another similar choice again.  My job  has, in my opinion, the perfect mix of motivators and hygiene factors. The decisions to pursue a PhD and to work at the FDA were both emergent (not planned, for those of you who haven’t read the book), but it’s easy/necessary to follow emergent paths when you don’t have a really clear vision of what you want.

How did you end up in your current job?  Has your career path been deliberate or emergent?

Culture: Family and Church

My Grandma and Grandpa Cutler, like the Christensens, believed in a culture of hard work.  They decided to buy/plant an orchard for the sole purpose of teaching their boys how to work.  (My mom, being one of the oldest of 10, missed most of the orchard work.)  But I think most family cultures develop in the pattern of their parents.  If mom and dad don’t outsource too much, as Clayton warns against, then you’ll see a lot of the qualities of the parents mirrored in the family culture.  For example, Tammy’s parents never focused on developing a culture of hard work, but they both just worked very hard and all of their children have adopted that.   

My family, on the other hand, is a warning signal of what can happen if you don’t deliberately plan your family’s culture.  We spent a lot of time in family home evenings and family councils.  As bored teenagers, we found that a great way to get attention in such meetings was to say something funny.  I think part of the culture that sprang up was an importance of being funny.  My parents are not funny, and even though they didn’t outsource, qualities developed in their children that didn’t come from them.

Because my parents are not funny, they have a bunch of kids with a desire to be funny and no natural talent for it.  It has led me to participate in an inordinate amount of ward and work talent shows, one brother into being a middle school theater teacher, another to try to write movie scripts, and another to be part of USU’s Improv comedy club.  It also led to my little brothers making jokes at the expense of my older brother’s son that has Asbergers, which is partly responsible for the alienation of my sister-in-law.  In fairness to my parents, the gospel was also part of the culture and all 8 kids served missions and none are in jail yet.

The idea that you can create a culture that imbues characteristics that you yourself don't have gives me some hope.  I have certain characteristics that I don’t want my children to have, but maybe if Tammy and I start creating the right culture in our family then we can create super-children that don’t have these weaknesses.   

 That being said, IF I am successful in forming these super-children, I hope I will l like to spend time with them, even if they don’t have a weakness for Cardinals baseball.  Or more importantly, I hope these super-children will like me (even as I spend my time in the nursing home managing my fantasy baseball team.)  Notice how I'm talking myself out of creating a better culture even as I write?  Sigh.

If you have any doubts about the power and self-enforcing nature of cultures, I think it is interesting to look at church culture.  I know that there are some among you that like to hate on many parts of LDS culture, such as Michael McLean and CTR rings.  Personally, I’m a big fan of church culture.  I think Joseph Smith was inspired to encourage the saints to tell their stories of trials.  In focusing on Pioneer stories, Mormon culture has developed to value thrift, industry, sacrifice, etc.  Much of what I enjoy about being a member comes from this culture.  Of course, there are also perhaps bad sides to the church culture like valuing dessert and perhaps a tendency to compare, judge(?).

Are your kids old enough to recognize what the culture is in your family?  Are you consciously trying to build a family culture?  Whether or not you appreciate church culture, what can we do to influence or improve the culture in our wards?

How Will I Measure My Life?

I haven’t put the same deep thought into deciding how I will measure my life that Clayton Christiansen has, at least not yet.  But I admire what he’s done, and I plan to do some more of this deep thinking.  For now, I will measure my life by either:

a)      The proportion of my children that I like and that like me when I’m old or

b)      The number of fantasy championships won by me and my posterity

Whichever makes me look better.

PS I'm serious about the PVS reunion.  Anyone up for a 20-year reunion in Provo in 2015?

Christopher Beesley and the Return of the PVS Bookclub

Greetings and salutations!  I just got back (about an hour ago) from Southern California.  I attended a stats conference in San Diego, where I had the chance to visit with the one and only Christopher Beesley.  While he claims to have gained and lost a lot of weight, he still looks like the same Christopher we all know and love, with the addition of a few gray hairs and perhaps even more solid muscle.

The gray hairs likely come from being bishop and having to preside over 20 funerals in 4 years.  Incredibly, Christopher is bishop of the ward he grew up in, and he appears to love every minute of it.  I think he secretly gets the most joy out of the combination of bishop and ward music chair and ward organist, which allows him to move back and forth between the pulpit and the organ requiring the ward to sing whatever hymn suits his fancy.

Christopher and his amazing wife, Mary, were incredibly accommodating, feeding us, chauffeuring us around town, and even giving us their guest passes to the San Diego Zoo.  Their four kids (ages 2 to 11) are all well-behaved and appear to be quite smart.  No surprise there.

Christopher shared the story of his faith and bravery in following a prompting that led to his dream job of playing Javert, and prosecuting criminals (or at least shooting down their appeals) from the comfort of his desk.  At night he sits on the board of directors of his children's German immersion school.  I tried working on getting him to participate in the PVS book club, but he has some legitimate claims on his free time.

I am so grateful to Christopher for his help this last week and for his example of happy service, self-discipline, and seeking after things that are good and praiseworthy.  I'm also grateful for a network of friends around the country.


With all of that preamble, I would like to take the initiative to choose a new book. 

I've really enjoyed some of Christensen's talks/articles, and I've been waiting to get this book from the library for a long time.  Before it came, my mom sent me a copy in the mail saying she wants all of her children to read it.  I think it has advice for your careers as well as your personal life, so I think it would be great for even you really busy people.

Can we kick the discussion off on Labor Day weekend?  Is that too soon?  Let me know if you want more time.

Euclid and Me

Numerologically, Peter = 28 (Perfect number). Also, Camille = 28. Coincidence? Yes. Also, 28 is a pretty likely outcome for any names of 5-7 characters. But I guess it still gave me a kind of thrill.

I didn't feel the same love for Euclid that Glenn did. I thought it was interesting and enjoyable to read, but I was bothered throughout by little things I felt like Bellos explained poorly, or just got wrong. This seemed to get worse the further into the book he got. There were several things in the chapter on probability that I think were at least misleading, if not incorrect. The section on countable and uncountable infinity was okay, but I think he missed the real meat of the concept, which has to do with being able to order sets. It's there, but he didn't really bring it out (I felt). Also, perhaps the 'c' and 'd' notation is standard in the UK, but in my measure theory class the cardinality of an uncountably infinite set (his 'c') was denoted aleph_1, and similarly his 'd' was aleph_2. Which makes more sense with the countable infinites being denoted aleph_0.

I thought he was strongest at narrative and characterization, rather than exposition (which may explain why he became a writer rather than a mathematician). His vignettes of intersting characters were always fun, and always fairly well put together. I also thought that his deciphering the historical clues around various base systems was great, and I liked his "stick this in your Frenchie cigarette holder and smoke it" defense of non-metric measurement systems.

He seemed to spend a lot of time investigating the intersection of math and mysticism. His bit about the Pathagorean secret society, and numerology, and all that. People who feel uncovering the 2 billionth digit of pi is be like touching the face of God. It was very foreign to me; numbers don't excite me in that way at all. They seem like useful tools, but I am seldom awed by numbers in and of themselves, even though (or perhaps because?) I work with them all day, every day. I don't find myself sharing in the sense of awe, even worshipfulness, that some people seem to feel toward numbers. But then, I find I lack that sense of profunditry for lots of things other people find awe-inspiring: astronomy, evolution, Alvin's physique.

I was a bit bummed the story ended with Cantor (who is a fascinating figure in the history of math). I would have liked a chapter on Gödel, who disproved David Hilbert's hypothesis by showing that no complete system can be self-consistent. It would have given the book a nice, conflicted ending to recognize that on an ultimate level math's logical foundations are grounded in their unprovability. In a way, it's the completion of Euclid's story, showing that while you can prove many wonderful results from a small set of axioms, those axioms are by the nature of the system unprovable and must simply be taken on faith.

Do we have a selection yet for the next book?

Recent and future readings

I just finished reading the Hunger Games Trilogy last week. It was much more political than I anticipated, as highlighted by the following quote from the third book: "... in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power."

Before I started the Hunger Games, I had finished reading The Bridge at Andau, by James Michener, a book about the revolution against communism that occured in Hungary in the 1950s. The people were greatly oppressed by the Soviets, and the brutality and oppression were shocking.

There is a book that I intend to check out from the local library. It is called The Girl Who Was on Fire, and is a collection of essays from other authors' perspectives on the social and political aspects of the Hunger Games series. Not sure when I'll get to it, I recently put together a list of books that would likely be much more educational.

I found out that the National Academies Press has many reads available for free download. http://www.nap.edu/While most of the free download books aren't the most interesting, the site did help me piece together this list of books that I hope to get too eventually (the first one on the list is available to view for free online). Have any of you read any of these books?

• A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature
• Here's Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion through the Astonishing World of Math
• Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities
• Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra
• The Secret Life of Numbers: 50 East Pieces on How Mathematicians Work and Think
• The Matchbox that Ate a Forty-ton Truck: What Everyday Things Tell Us about the Universe
• Degrees Kelvin: A Tale of Genius, Invention, and Tragedy
• The Man Who Stopped Time: The Illuminating Story of Edward Muybridge - Pioneer Photographer, Father of the Motion Picture, Murderer
• Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics
• Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science

Keeping New Year's Resolutions

Last night, I had a dream that Peter was riding his BMX bike past the place where I was giving blood, so I guess I need to respond to his post. I think Peter's ideas about having a schedule and a theme are brilliant. The schedule would be the more helpful of the two. Then I can reserve books in advance and plan time on the calendar to write a post. (It's surprising how much more effort it takes to write than to read.)

In my opinion, the first schedule should include 4 books between now and the end of June. Then we can adjust from there. I know that most people won't read 4 books, but if only 2 are scheduled, then there's a greater chance that you won't like any of the options. Plus, the rotation in who gets to choose goes faster. (Note: I can be convinced of 3 if they're going to include long books, like Rob's suggestion of Ayn Rand.)

I think the theme idea is fun. I would make slight tweaks to Peter's suggested themes. For example, instead of "Leadership", I would say "Leaders and Legends", the proposed names of two divisions in the Big Ten. You can tie ANYTHING into a theme, so no one needs to feel limited. If you've ever played Bible Scattegories, you know what I mean. Of course, if you are subsequently going to ignore the theme, then there's really no point in having one. So perhaps a theme is unnecessary.

Anyway, let's get this party started. Just make a decision, Peter, and we'll all try it out. I'm looking forward to more stimulating virtual conversation this year.

Happy New Year's Day

Happy 2011 PVS!

I've been less active on the blog than I would like recently. I chalk it up to guilt over wasting spending time writing anything other than my thesis. Of course, I'm not as actively writing my thesis as I should be, so really it just means I'm depriving myself of blog activity for no good reason, but whatever. Did I mention Happy New Year?!

And welcome to mythical Rob. I'm pretty positive I invited you to join a couple of times, but maybe the hotmail address I was using was defunct.

I've been thinking about a way forward for the PVS book club; it seemed to fizzle a bit at the end of 2010, and I had a couple of ideas I thought might make it more enjoyable for 2011. First, I'd like to choose a broad theme for the year, something to tie the books together. I had thought something like "Leadership" or "Death" or "Marriage". This will decrease the eclecticism somewhat (unfortunately), but I think it might make the overall experience more rewarding. My other thought is that we should choose the list of books and discussion dates in advance (set a schedule through June, for example); according to Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, this would be a helpful nudge that might make participation easier.

So, if you like these ideas, or if you hate them, or if you have a suggestion for a theme, or if you have other suggestions on the book club, I'm pretty sure you can find the comment box. And even if you don't have any comment other than "yeah, I wanna keep the book club going," that would be still be helpful to gauge interest.

Born to Conserve Energy

Since at least 3/4ths of the active book club members have already read Born to Run, I will kickoff the request to have a little discussion. The book's thesis is that early humans survived because they could out-run their prey. Thus, as part of our evolutionary DNA we are all potential distance runners. The fact that distance runners need to conserve energy, which would explain the human tendency toward laziness, makes the thesis all that more convincing. But were you completely convinced?

The author weaves his main thesis and his many sub-theses, quite entertainingly, into his story of legendary, super-runners. So lets' play a game called...

Do You Believe

I'll give a series of statements proposed directly or implicitly in the book, and you decide if you believe it or not. My answers are at the bottom and feel free to add to the list, as it has been a few months since I read the book.

Do you believe...

1. In evolution as a general principle?
2. That you, specifically, and modern humans in general are a product of evolution?
3. That modern man evolved from early distance runners?
4. That running injury-free is a realistic possibility?
5. That running barefoot, or close to barefoot, is the key to healthy running?
6. That shoe companies are a large racket that will eventually be exposed and fail?
7. That beer and magic beans are key components to a healthy diet?
8. That salad is the best breakfast?
9. That a species that evolved to chase down animals is better off not eating meat?
10. That an occasional drunken love-fest would be good for all societies?
11. That being happy makes you a better runner?
12. That you have the mental and physical powers to run an ultra-marathon (if you really wanted to)?
13. That you love your wife enough to run a marathon beside them as she runs an ultra-marathon?
14. That a super-fast lost indian tribe where the runners where capes and sandals is the coolest thing to ever happen to distance running?

My answers:
1. 100% Yes.
2. Unsure. There is certainly a lot of evidence for human evolution, and I think Mormonism includes all truth. Still, there are some Mormon doctrines that appear to be in conflict with human evolution (no death until after the fall, Adam as the first human, etc.), though there may certainly be ways for both the doctrines and evolution to be completely true. Gods ways are higher than mine own.
3. If 2 is true, then I like 3, as it explains laziness.
4. No.
5. I believe it should help.
6. Yes, and so are mattress companies.
7. No.
8. No. It's cereal.
9. The Word of Wisdom agrees with the little to no meat philosophy, but it seems contrary to point 3.
10. No.
11. It's difficult to separate cause and effect here, but being happy and loving what you do will tend to make you better at anything.
12. Nope.
13. No, but I'd drive beside her.
14. Most definitely. I loved the underdog sports story element to this book. The visual image of these happy, painfully-shy indians running against the best racers in the world in these impossibly difficult races was just awesome.

I really liked the book.
I liked the desire I had to run when I had finished the book.
Too bad that has passed.

One Nation, Under Science

Sorry for the extreme lateness of this response to the book club. I'd planned on writing something about three weeks ago, but life intervened. And I know that Alvin used the "One nation" schtick in his title too, but I really am just that unoriginal.

I enjoyed most of The Nation, right up until Daphne/Ermintrude's father arrived at the island. But I found the final few chapters thoroughly off-putting, to the point where I now tell people that I didn't much like the book. My particular gripes are about the need that Pratchett (an avowed humanist) had to intervene in the story and make it a moralistic play about the ability of science and exploration to give semi-mystical meaning to our otherwise purposeless civilization. Maybe that's putting it a bit strong, but I felt like the author spent four-fifths of a book exploring the interesting interstices of faith, doubt, miracle, perserverance, love and devotion, and then resolved it with some pablum about how "science doesn't belong to anybody" and can somehow both preserve our cultural traditions and at the same time unite us across all cultural boundaries. Which I think is absolute tripe. Science is (IMO) too revered in our Western culture (even our anti-authoritarian American culture); it's a useful tool, but it's not the answer to life, the universe and everything. Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Carl Sagan notwithstanding.

Whew, rant out of the way. What's hidden in there is I really did think it was a rippingly good book for about 200 pages. I think all of the questions Alvin and Paul raise are interesting and deserve a more full treatment than I can give at the moment, but I'll write my thoughts on a few.

The Culture and the Necessary I don't know to what degree I try to separate those aspects of my belief system that are culturally bred from those that are fundamental and invariant under multi-verses. I often ask myself questions like, "How absolutely wrong is it to drink alcohol?" (appropriate, given the context of the question within the poison beer). Obviously in ancient times and within the modern church prophets have drunk alcohol, presumably without everlasting consequences. So if alcohol isn't absolutely wrong, why is it wrong now in this time? Is it a cultural reason?

Perhaps more along the lines of what Alvin was thinking, I remember my shock during my first few weeks in Belgium when the Priests didn't cover the sacrament bread with a white cloth! I had seen in so many US wards the ritual of the sacrament that it seemed naked somehow without the solemn folding back of the cover to expose the bread, and then recovering and folding back the side to reveal the water. And I was doubly shocked when I realized that the sacrament ritual I was so used to was nowhere prescribed in the Scriptures. It was a bit of culture that had crept into the observance.

Are such things bad? I think they are, but not as bad as what can happen when you choose to confront them overly often. Specifically, performing spurious rituals and accepting as true and right things that are really just cultural appendages is (generally) preferable to attacking misfounded belief and risking 1) hurting another's faith and 2) accidentally hewing too deep and attacking well-founded belief. Excessive piety has seldom (it seems to me) led to excommunication, but if you slaughter too many sacred cows you may eventually find yourself killing something truly sacred (no offense to the Hindoos).

North vs. South In actual terms of North and South, it's interesting to note that most of the people live north of the equator (which makes sense since about 70% of the habitable land mass is north of the equator). So on one level it's almost inevitable that history would have a Northern slant to it.

To the more salient question of cultural superiority and subjugation, I feel pretty sensitive to it. I see within the US itself an increasingly homogenized culture, as regional dialects and accents disappear and we all shop for the same cheap crap at identical Walmarts and eat the same cheap food in identical plastic booths at fast food chain restaurants. I recognize that it's a completely rational decision; there are real to cost and efficiency benefits of the homogeneous culture. But I find it distressing that all local flavor seems to be disappearing from America. And I worry that the same thing is happening as a result of modernizing forces throughout the world.

While I feel that loss of cultural identity is a real problem, both within the US and internationally, I don't know that I would support any organized efforts to combat it. I think cultural preservation, and the desire and energy for cultural preservation must come from within the culture rather than without. Tying into the book, I thought the eventual protective role played by the British Empire while the island Nation made itself into a scientific Shangri-la derives from the same nation-building hubris that makes us believe we can export ideology. While I think it's important to engage on such matters (I'm a big supporter of muscular US diplomacy), I think the idea that a system in which local culture needs a global protector is doomed to failure.

Is there a time to lie In the tenth grade we were assigned to write an in-class essay on this very question. More specifically, on the portion of Adventures of Huck Finn when Huck lies to protect Tom Jim and whether that was a moral decision or not. I rebelliously refused (in the most passively aggressive way possible) to write the essay until the final two minutes of class. Then I wrote a short note called "Lying: an existential viewpoint" in which I argued that lying was just a social construct and hence the question itself was meaningless. My teacher ate it up.

I think there is definitely a time to lie. I wouldn't be able to construct scenarios in which it is unambiguously the right decision, but I feel confident in a Nephi and Laban way that all actions, no matter how abhorrent in normal everyday life, may be right in certain circumstances. That said, I'm pretty careful about giving honest answers to my kids about things like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I don't seek out opportunities to puncture their innocense, but if they come to me with questions I pretty unapologetically give honest answers. Because I think a lot of harm can be done when you put your child's trust in you at risk, and I think there are few reasons to do such a thing.

Still, though, I would not say never; I can easily conceive of scenarios in which I would purposefully mislead and even straight out lie to my children in order to protect them from truths which would, in my belief, harm them. And if slave-traders were really after my friend Jim, I would tell them he ran the other way and try to sneak off while they weren't looking.

Nation: I would like to eat your brains someday

I liked the book. The questions were also good.

Grandfathers speak

I listened to a story about an atheist who had been asked to pray to know if God was real—when he did, he decided that anything that he would receive as an answer would just be himself telling himself what he wanted to hear. I tend to disbelieve the religious experiences of a lot of people, which is probably the skeptic in me.

It seems to me that Mau was trying to resolve his tradition with his loss of faith in the Gods. His out-of-body Locaha experience was, I think, where he came to terms with the Gods. I liked the paradox and I think that is typical of finding out for oneself what one believes. Often, I think that the testimony someone shares is, if not a lie, a stretch of the truth they've accepted, and only then can the “voices of the Grandfathers” confirm the truth.

Spit Makes Good Beer

I am more curious what is in saliva that makes the beer turn out. There are a lot of cultural things that are nice to hang onto, but it's important to know the reason—like Daphne understanding there's something in the length of the song that makes the spit work its magic.

When we bless the refreshments, do we really thing the soda and sugar cookies will nourish and strengthen our bodies? Why do we have to bless the food before we eat? In our house, anytime before the dishes are put away counts.

What if _____ had never happened?

I don't think I really believe in “if” or a multiverse, but I like thinking about it, Schrodinger's cat and all that. Its amusing to think of what life would have been like had I done X, Y or Z instead of the what I actually chose. Considering that life is everlasting, does that make the multiverses infinite for each individual, or are they limited to a finite spectrum based on a finite character set which would never change? I suppose we've all got another multiverse involving drunken psychology.

Quotes and Comments

"When much is taken, something is returned"
This must be just another quantum version of the scripture. I like the version we have, as this seems like a little more vague platitude.

"Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be."
Spinoza was frustrating to me for that reason. I don't know if there were answers in the philosophy, it just was at odds with the way I perceive the world, and I couldn't find a way to brush him away.

"I don't think he believes in his gods, but he believes in belief."
I like to think that I would be a Mormon even if something shook my faith—living the gospel makes me so happy. I believe in the ability of living my religion to make me happy.

On Good vs. Discussable Books

I remember a few years ago enough people told me to read the Da Vinci Code that I finally skimmed it and afterward I swore I would never waste that much time on filth. But I've done it since then. Popularity is occasionally valuable, but I value opinions of some more than others. In my mind a book club book should thought provoking first, enjoyable second. Though I've not enjoyed all the books I've read, I don't feel like I've wasted time (one of the benefits to reading rather than listening is that I control the pace).

One Nation. Under God Anchors.

I hope a lot of you have read or are reading this book because I have a lot of questions, more than I expect any one person to answer.

"Angels [and Grandfathers?] speak by the power of the Holy Ghost"

Mau has his whole world shattered around him when the wave comes. He suddenly does not believe in the Gods his people had always believed in. Yet, at the same time he hears the voices of his ancestors talking to him; he has conversations with Locaha, the God of Death; and he has an out of body experience. I thought this was an interesting and not altogether uncommon paradox.

I think sometimes we grow up with certain beliefs about religion, and then we have a catastrophe (like the wave) or a 'coming of age' (and Mau was right between boyhood and manhood) where we realize that our religion is not what we thought it was. It is then our tendency to throw it all out and not believe in anything, but simultaneously, we may be having experiences that should be affirming our faith that there is much more than science and reason can explain.

I used to see things in black and white, and I had a hard time when I came upon things that weren't so clearly defined. It was tempting to say that because some things weren't clear maybe nothing was clear, but I think the 'voices of the Grandfathers' are not just in my head. And I'm strengthened when others say they've heard the 'voices of the Grandmothers'. Am I making sense? Have you had your perception of religion shift drastically? Were the voices of the Grandfathers real or just in Mau's head? Why could the ghost girl hear the Grandmothers but not hear anything after the death of her mother?

The Parable of the Poison Beer

I think the spitting and singing to make the beer safe is a lot like many of our spiritual traditions. Some of it is necessary to keep us safe (i.e. the spitting and waiting) and some of it is just culture (i.e. the song about the 4 brothers vs. baa baa black sheep). If we are smart, we may be able to seperate the culture from the necessary, but it doesn't make the culture bad. It is much better to follow the entire spiritual tradition (culture and all) then to get lifted up in pride (as Foxlip did) and get killed. Do you agree? Do you try to separate culture from the necessary? Do you like to sing Baa, Baa Black Sheep? Does it affect the quality of your beer?

False Priests

I enjoyed the character of the priest that was silently struggling with his own faith in the Gods while simultaneously trying to restore everyone else's faith. He said some wise things in between acting rather stupidly. When he tried to keep Mau from bringing up the God Anchor that hadn't been there before, he showed that he believed in a dead religion. There are so many historical examples of religious leaders that fought against change because they thought it proved their religion to be false or it weakened their position. I'm grateful to be in a living church where we are encouraged to believe all things that are true. What is the appropriate way to react when things we thought were true turn out to be incomplete or false?

If North were South

While it's probably not unique to this book, I'd never really thought about the idea that the orientation of our globes (with North being on top) is arbitrary. I've never seen a map turned the other way around, and the idea of it would be difficult to adjust to. I liked how Pratchett said the cannibal looked like the Prime Minister; how he pointed out who the true savages were; and how the original thinkers were from the Nation. Do you think that museums and the idea that artifacts should be 'where the world can see them' are racist or cultural supremist or whatever the right word for that is? Do people in the Southern Hemisphere have inferiority complexes?

What if _____ had never happened?

At the end, Mau and Daphne wonder if they would have been better off if the wave had never happened. Daphne decides that she's glad the wave happened, and Mau decides not to decide and thinks there would be good and bad parts to each scenario in the multiverse. This illustrates the growth that can come through tragedy and trials and why they are an important part of this life.

However, just because we've grown from a trial does not mean that the trial was good. I've never met someone that has had a child out of wedlock that has regretted having that child. After all, how can you regret the creation of a wonderful child? But does that mean that the decision that led to having the child was good? Or that it was meant to happen?

We change through our life experiences and trials have an ability to change us faster than comfortable living, but the retrospective look back on our lives may not be the best way to decide if an event was good or from God. How does one determine if one's path was guided by God vs. allowed to happen by God? Or are all paths always guided by God at all times?

I don't know if I believe in a multiverse, but I like the idea of it from the ability of God to judge our actions. For example, He could say that if event A had happened, then we would have behaved like so, but if event A never happened, then we would have turned out like such and such. What are the multiverse versions of you doing right now? One of mine is in Texas with a PhD. Another might be a drunk psychologist.

Quotes and Comments

"When much is taken, something is returned"

It's like the inverse of the scripture (D&C scripture mastery!): when "much is given, much is required". Is the inverse of any scripture true? Is he that is compelled to do nothing a wise and not a slothful servant?

"Please give us a simple answer, so that we don't have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don't fit the way we want the world to be."

How limited are we in our learning because we fix a perception of the world and make everything fit into it? I like to think that I think more than the average person, but I find it quite difficult to have lots of unresolved questions.

"You shout and stamp and yell that there are no gods, and then you shake your fist at the sky and revile them for not existing! You need them to exist so that the flames of your denial will warm you in your self-righteousness! That's not thinking, that's just a hurt child screaming in pain!"

Even atheism is a belief system.

"She just wanted an explanation that was better than "It's the will of God," which was grown-up speak for "because."'

We have inherent needs for explanations. If they don't exist or if we don't know them, we'll make them up. In sports, for example, we're quite good at coming up with explanations for random events.

"I don't think he believes in his gods, but he believes in belief."

There is lots of evidence for the power of our beliefs to have real effects on our health and other tangible events. Unfortunately, perhaps, I don't think you can just 'believe in belief.' You have to believe in something, and you have to really believe it for it to have any positive benefit.

"And that was a sin. Even if you have no god at all, that was a sin. Some things are a sin all by themselves. And I'm going to murder you, and that is a mortal sin, too."

Certainly ethics can exist outside of religion. In theory, things can be wrong (though perhaps not a sin) without a moral authority to say it is wrong. However, Cox reached a point where murder wasn't wrong, as did the cannibals.

"If a lie will make us strong, a lie will be my weapon. People want lies to live by. They cry out for them."

I do think that people want lies (including children), but lies are a dangerous weapon. When lies are uncovered, then any gain from the lie becomes nullified by the increased pain of discovering the lie and the consequent lack of faith. Of course, in this case, if the truth was discovered, then they would all be dead anyway. Is there a 'time to lie'?

On Good vs. Popular Books

I agree with Peter’s comment on my last post that the popularity of the book doesn’t make it a good book. And just because it’s a good book doesn’t mean it’s the best book for the book club. I wasn’t trying to demean any of the previous choices (except Peter’s) because I think all of the books have led to interesting discussions, and the only reason I tried to pick on Peter was because he hasn’t liked any of my book choices and I was trying to validate myself. (I really liked 2 of his 3 choices.)

I chose this book over the other options I presented because I remembered wanting to discuss it with the book club when I finished, even though the other options were probably both better and more popular. I value all of your opinions and thoughts, and I hope you’ll comment even if you haven’t read the book.

PS In case you haven’t read the book and in case it wasn’t clear from all of this rambling, the author ends the book on a note that indicates he does believe in God.

Better, Best and Alice

I really enjoyed A Town Like Alice. I'm sorry that neither Paul nor Alvin thought it was that good, but I'm not sure I can create a sufficient defense to change anyone's impressions.

The thing I liked most about Alice was the strong protagonist. I thought she was characterized quite well, put through a series of interesting and trying experiences, and yet remained an effective every(wo)man. In a lot of ways I saw one of my favorite movie protagonists in her: Andy Dufresne from Shawshank Redemption. Dealt a rather tough hand, she proceeded to give hope to those around her and constantly work to improve their situation. When she was given money, she went on to return kindness to those who had shown kindness to her, and then through her courage and vision provide prosperity to a host of people.

To Paul's point about her money being misspent from a utility standpoint, I certainly see the truth of that statement. She could obviously have spent her money providing wells throughout Malaysia; this would likely have represented a greater "bang for her buck" way of approaching humanitarian aid*. But the message I took from her actions is slightly different, and more in-line with my own feelings on charitable giving. You have a greater moral obligation to those who come into your path than those who don't. I see justification for this in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The point wasn't to help _everybody_ or to help those most in need (although those are good things to desire), but rather that it is sinful to be in a unique position to help and not provide that help.

Consider the following hypothetical: you're all alone on your way to a job interview when a plane crashes into a nearby pond. The small plane is sinking, and you can hear the voices of a few passengers calling for help. The only thing it will take to save them is to wade into the lake, swim over, and pull them out. But in the process you will ruin your expensive interview shoes (seems a little unreasonable, but go with me here). Alternatively, you could keep your wardrobe pristine, go get your job, sell your shoes, and dedicate a portion of your salary and the sale of your shoes (second hand) to buying mosquito netting to save children from malaria in Africa. As in most hypotheticals, treat this as an exclusive set of options. What is the moral thing to do?

I contend that 1) it's not clear what the moral thing to do but 2) I'd be personally swayed to save the people on the plane because I am uniquely able to help them and 3) that there's nothing wrong with that per my understanding of the gospel. Similarly, for Jean Paget the option of dedicating her money to saving people in Malaysia by building wells would be a noble sacrifice, but I think the good she did to the town of Alice is no less in keeping with the moral of the Good Samaritan parable.

I guess in the end I liked the book for two reasons. One, I just found it entertaining. The plot line wasn't strong (particularly once the war ended), but I felt like there was a good blend of tension and description and characterization. And two, I felt buoyed up by Paget's example that if you work hard and smart, regardless of the circumstances you find yourself in, you can not only help yourself but help others in the process. If I were to summarize the moral of the novel (for me) it would be that strong character and perseverance can bring happiness and prosperity not only to an individual but to all those with whom she comes into contact. That probably isn't true (c.f. Candide), but it is what I wish were true.

*As an interesting side note, I recently read a story of an Afghan village where a well was built (by USAID, I believe). After a few months the well was destroyed, but not by the Taliban or by outraged village Elders. Rather it was the women of the village themselves who destroyed it because it took away their only opportunity to gather and socialize at the river. They saw the daily treks as a break from the monotony of the day. The point of the article was the US has invested huge resources in understanding the enemy in Afghanistan, but not many in understanding the culture of the Afghan people themselves.

Some Post-Alice Book Options

I'm expecting a few more posts on Paul's book, but as I'm next on the list, I thought I'd throw out some options. You can comment on the options as you share your Alice thoughts (or lack of Alice thoughts, like me.)

Since Paul has recommended choosing books we've already read (and I'm really hoping to get Peter's approval on one of my book choices (I'm 0 for 2 so far)), here are some of my favorite books from the past year:

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
For all of the runners out there or those who want to be inspired to run or just read about over-the-top runners.

The Nation Fiction, but there are some interesting religious and philosophical themes to discuss.

Hunger Games From a pure entertainment standpoint, this one is hard to beat. It's a bit violent in parts, as the story revolves around a futuristic gladitorial games with teenagers. Book three in this series comes out in August.

Outliers: The Story of Success I like all of Malcolm Gladwell's stuff, but I think this is my favorite.

And if you want an option for one that I'm hoping to read, but haven't:
Who's Who in the Doctrine and Covenants I'm teaching seminary this year, and I could use all of your stories and insights.

Alice Lost Her Muchness

To quote: “Oh my word.” I chose this book partly on a recommendation of a sister in law and I likely won't put her recommendations high on my list from now on. My mom likes books like this—we call them “isha” books—about women suffering through lots of things and don't we respect them for it; we're so grateful that we don't have to suffer like them. The second half seemed like a something between a Zane Grey novel and a self help book, “A Step by Step Guide to Establish Utopia”

I understand that the author based the Malaya portion on a true story about a group of women who were trucked around for a few years in Sumatra. I didn't mind the narrator but could understand why others would think this book was lame. I rather liked the Christ symbolism even though it was downplayed and later trivialized.

Interesting that the author didn't seem to have a lot of prejudice against the Japanese—the characters seemed to judge them as individuals—but his characters accepted the discrimination toward the Aborigines.

I think the part of this book that made me think the most was the second half. The book was originally entitled The Legacy, which seems just as good a title as Alice. I like the somewhat presumptuous notion that with a few thousand quid one can create an oasis in the desert. This half of the book is based on Burkestown in Queensland, which I believe had a similar population increase. I want to believe that with enough care and drive, it could be done. It did seem to paint a simple picture of how to make life more pleasant. Part of what bugged is that it was seeking for pleasantness rather than doing the most good. I wish, instead, that Jean and Joe would have decided to found an orphanage for poor Malayan children.

Digging a well for poor people to provide them with safe drinking water is a life changer. I have an older friend who went on a service mission to Fiji and dug wells for underprivileged communities—I hope to be able to do something like that (Paul Farmer again).

While I enjoyed the book, I usually adjust my reading speed based on how interesting and valuable the book is to me, and I read this one very fast. Incidentally, I also sat through the entire movie made in the 50's. I would understand if you didn't get too far into it, and my new rule for my turn on the PVS book club will be only to pick books I have already read.

Quants

1) Is Wall Street moral?

No. Are there moral people working on Wall St? Yes, I'd imagine. Do they allow their morality to affect their strategies? I imagine they wouldn't succeed if they allowed morality to influence them significantly. I guess that's the crux; Wall St. measures success in monetary gains. Money is an inherently amoral metric of success. So in that sense I would say Wall St. lacks morality.

That said, I think it would be a mistake to compel Wall St. to be "moral." I think a better question (although probably still not a very good one) is "Is Wall St. fair?" Fair is about as difficult to define in a rigorous way as moral, but I think it's plausible that society would be better off as a whole if Wall St. were more fair.

2) Does the solution have something to do with leverage?

Echoing Jesse, the solution to what exactly? Drastic rises and falls in aggregate stocks? I imagine bubbles will happen whether the government more strictly regulates leverage or not. To the question of whether hedge funds were at all regulated in their use of leverage, I don't know an absolute answer. But Patterson certainly gives the impression that they were internally regulated, either through overarching strategies (when they resided in investment banks) or through external pressues (as in the "run on the bank" deleveraging that Patterson describes in the last third of the book).

The issue of a hedge fund's (or an investment bank's) failure causing a hole in the economy that hurts lots of people "who didn't necessarily have it coming to them" I suppose that's sort of what I meant by "fair." You'd like the costs to be borne more heavily by the main actors rather than peripheral actors (presumably the staid retirment 401k investors, or the small business owners who can't make payroll because there's a credit crunch). But what you're perceiving as a lack of fairness (again, I'm not sure I'd define it that way) cuts both ways; during the boom years, small investors and small businesses benefitted from the cheap credit that was being generated primarily for the big players.

3) Did the quants really play as big of a role in the crash as Patterson makes out?

It seems unlikely to me that the Quants really played as significant a role as Patterson makes out. If I were assigning blame, it'd be 1) to the Fed for keeping interest rates too low for too long, 2) to the ratings agencies who weren't sufficiently reactive to the creation of new products and 3) to the government agencies who should have been more capably overseeing at least the foreign markets for US products.

4) Should the quants have seen it coming?

Do you mean "should they have been able to see it coming" or "were they wrong not to see it coming?" I would certainly say no to the second case, but a qualified yes to the first. At least from the analysis Patterson provides (which I recognize is not only incomplete, but likely biased) it seems like several of the strategies failed to learn adequately from the fall of LTCM. At least in Patterson's telling, it was viewed as an aberration that was statistically unlikely ever to occur again (lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice). If that's truly the case, then I would say anyone generating a market model that fails to explain what happened in the lead-up to the failure of LTCM was being myopic.

As an additional point, I know Patterson heaps contempt on the VAR and the Gaussian cupola, and probably rightly so. But it seems like there are regimes where the approximations work quite well. Perhaps some of those Phyics PhDs could come up with some sort of near field-far field approach to the markets, and particularly discover if there's a phase transition between the two.

5) Adaptive Market Hypothesis.

I thought the AMH (and the related "ecological" approach out of Sante Fe) were a little bit silly. Not that evolutionary algorithms or models can't perform well, but I didn't see (at least from Patterson's brief descriptions) any sort of rigorous analysis of why they should work.

Another note on modeling; where are the game theoretic models? If there's a shortcoming of the EMH, I would say it's in its failure to adequately model the impact of homogeneous strategies. Again, in the simultaneous deleveraging that occurred in Oct. 2007 (and throughout 2008) it seems like having an adversarial model (something akin to a multi-stage Prisoner's Dilemma) would have improved performance. But who knows; maybe that's exactly what triggered the deleveraging. Some company that decided they would deleverage first and stick everyone else with the sucker's payoff.

6) The last lines of the book are:

"Just look: exotic leveraged vehicles marketed to the masses worldwide, hedge fun ds gaming their returns, lightning-fast computerized trading robots, predatory ninja algorithms hunting liquidity in dark pools...Here come the quants."

This encapuslates much of what I don't like about the book. Patterson's moral (if there is one) is a cautionary tale about the harm in being overly certain. But then he lauds "non-Quant" investors like Warren Buffett and Bill Gross because they do things "the right way" in a certain sense. But the idea that theirs is "the right way" betrays (to me at least) the same sense of hubris and certainty in his own "rightness." After spending all book knocking the quants for believing in "the Truth," here's Patterson himself, in the final pages, looking to prophets like Taleb and Gross as conduits of the Truth. And he seems oblivious to the fact that he's doing, which is sort of disheartening.

7) What is the moral to Patterson's narrative?

See my answer to (6).

I did really enjoy the book. I didn't think I would after the first chapter, guessing it would suffer from the "Tracy Kidder" disease of overly flowery lauding of the protagonists. But once it got down to business, so to speak, I really felt it picked up and pulled me in.

Thanks for a great read!

June Book--Alice

Based on the comments, I'm going to pick A Town Like Alice. Sorry Alvin--as a consolation, you could watch the 1950s movie on YouTube. There are a few things about the book that I feel I should disclose: the characters are rather flat; the second half is, I'm told, a little boring; and you should skim the end of chapter 7.

Homo Politicus http://www.amazon.com/Homo-Politicus-Strange-Tribes-Government/dp/0385517505 was tedious, politically biased, and felt like a tabloid Magazine featuring only ugly evil people. It reminded me, however, how much I like DC but dislike Potomac Man.

The Drunkard's Walk http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0375424040 felt like a well-written statistics primer until the last chapter, which was very interesting. It was interesting to have read this book prior to The Quants

The Nine http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Inside-Secret-World-Supreme/dp/0385516401#noop (ever so slightly dated Supreme Court expose, and though I've not read it, likely politically charged)

A Town Like Alice http://www.amazon.com/Town-Like-Alice-Nevil-Shute/dp/0345353749 (mostly fictional WWII story)

Right Ho, Jeeves http://www.amazon.com/Right-Ho-Jeeves-Audio-Editions/dp/1572704233/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275410088&sr=1-1
PG Wodehouse is one of the funniest people ever to have lived; Jeeves, I think, is best on audio book.

Red State, Blue State, which state are you?

It's been a few weeks since I finished Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State. As a denizen of a rich, blue state (possibly the bluest, if not the richest) and a former denizen of a poor, red state (possibly the reddest, though certainly not the poorest) I found the book very interesting. I guess that's mostly as a fan of quantitative social and political science.

To recap for non-readers: the fundamental paradox Gelman's team set out to understand was why wealthy individuals voted Republican but wealthy states voted Democrat. The resolution of the paradox was that individual wealth impacted voter preference much more in poor states (where it made one much, much more likely to be a Republican) than in rich states (where it made one only marginally more likely to be a Republican).

I don't feel that Gelman ever really answered the question of what causes this paradox, at least not to my satisfaction. He analyzes a few other societal features (like race, income inequality and religious ideology), but doesn't come up with a convincing explanation to my mind. Does anyone have a speculative theory on why rich states tend to vary only slightly in partisan id with income, but poor states vary more dramatically?

I thought his insight about the red state-blue state phenomenon occurring primarily at the upper end of the income scale was insightful if not surprising. Poor people seem to be (according to Gelman's numbers) fairly ideologically homogeneous, while it's the rich who are bitterly divided. I think it also speaks to the wealth of the political elites (both in office and in the media) that they seem to be so focused on the partisan divide when it really only impacts a small portion of the overall citizenry (albeit an overwhelmingly influential subpopulation). So why is there such power in the red state-blue state meme? Is it because we want it to be true, in some sense? Because it speaks to a fundamental tension within each of us as citizens and within the structure of the nation as a whole?

A divide that Gelman touches on, but didn't seem to dive into really, is the urban-suburban-rural divide. I read an article during the 2008 election at Salon.com that I thought was somewhat insightful on this topic. As a rural idealist (in the form of Tolkien) I tend to denigrate the urban value system (or lack thereof). Having lived for some time now near a major city I've yet to be persuaded that urbanity has anything positive to offer from a moral perspective. When I've asked proponents of urban values to justify them, they almost universally point to multi-culturalism and tolerance as values you get in a city that you can't in the country. But to my perspective, those who tout the value of such multi-culturalism have only a thin veneer of tolerance, particularly across socio-economic lines. I think I learned significantly more tolerance of "the other" living in rural Utah than I have in multi-cultural Massachusetts. Reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me about flying out to Harvard for graduate school...

Another thing I found interesting in Gelman's development was breaking out social vs. economic value systems. While I don't know that those are necessarily the "right" axes to separate our political ideology, they certainly are evocative. In the comparison of economic values to income, being richer makes you uniformly more economically conservative, and by almost identical amounts regardless of ones stances on social issues. The social values aren't as uniform, but the strong trend is for more money to make you more socially liberal. So the real mass of people seem to be economically liberal (tax and spend, redistributionist Socialists) and socially conservative (values voting, gay-bashing religious Nutjobs). And that's where I tend to find myself, in direct counterposition to the socially liberal, economically conservative libertarians (of which David Frum is a light-hued version; for more pure examples, go to www.reason.com). And yet, as a Republican it's hard to ignore the youth appeal and renewed vigor of the libertarian movement with its Ron Paulistas and Tea Parties. So I feel conflicted; I'd like my party to look more like me (the compassionate conservativism that got lost post-9/11) but I also want my party to be strong and win elections, which right now seems to imply letting it look less like me.

Anway, I liked the book. I hope a few other people had the patience to check it out, and to wait all these weeks until I managed to get a post off about it.

P.S.- One final point I wanted to make (sorry if this reedit is generating lots of extra emails). When contemplating why I'm socially conservative but economically liberal I would point to my religion. But many of my co-religionists are much more economically conservative, and some are much more socially liberal, so I don't know that that captures the true reason. Thinking deeper, my "social image" (for lack of a better term) is that poor people have greater moral authority than rich people. And I think that's what leads me primarily to that upper-left quadrant in Gelman's 2-D political belief matrix. So a question I wanted to put to the crowd is whether you feel rich people or poor people have greater moral standing (or neither)?

Next Book of the Month, and an aside

I'm going with "The Quants" for the Book of the Month.  The question now is, which month?  I have a somewhat long vacation coming up over Easter, and will be reading it then.  And it seems like everyone's been pretty busy anyway, so should we just bump things back and make this the Book of the Month for April?

As an aside, I found this article to be the most sensible political piece I've read from a Republican in a while (granted, I haven't been reading too many political articles lately): http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/22/frum.healthcare.gop.strategy/index.html?eref=rss_topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+rss/cnn_topstories+(RSS:+Top+Stories)&utm_content=Google+Reader.

I'm especially in favor of dumping government incentives for employer-subsidized health care, for both the reasons he mentions (hiding the cost of health care to the end consumer), and for the reason that, ultimately, I suspect that government incentives for employer-subsidized health care result in an unfair distribution of government subsidies to those who 1) are employed; and 2) are employed by employers who can afford to offer health care.  (However, I'm not familiar enough with the tax code to be able to say with certainty that tax breaks on health care plans selected by individuals aren't commensurate with tax breaks offered to employers).

Anyone want to discuss?

(The only point I disagree with is his point #1.  Surely the $500,000 is or would eventually be keyed to inflation, rendering his primary argument that it would cover increasingly more Americans moot.)

Justice

I've been reading my runner up selection for book o' the month last month (The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen) and thoroughly enjoying it, although I'm still convinced it would have made a lousy book club selection.

I've also been watching a series of lectures by Harvard professor Michael Sandel called, simply, Justice. The production quality is pretty good; Harvard teamed with WGBH to put it together. The lectures are fairly engaging, even if I feel too much time is given to Harvard underclassmen and not enough to in-depth topical development.

I'm wondering if there would be critical mass here at PVS for a discussion of some of the material. Is anyone interested in watching, say, one lecture a week (25 min.) and then having a collective discussion? Anyway, just a thought.

As for Red State, Blue State, I finished it some time back. I'll try and collect my thoughts and post something about it tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks for all the Ghosts

I thoroughly enjoyed Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I read it through in about a week. Unfortunately that was almost a month ago now, and so it might not be terrifically fresh in my memory.

Picking out some interesting (to me) instances of the belief/doubt theme:
- I thought Dirk's rejection of his own clairvoyance and any supernatural explanation of his coming up with all the exam questions was interesting. When someone knows for certain that something (e.g. seeing the future) does not exist, no amount of evidence to the contrary can convince them.

- The revelation of how the vase trick was perpetrated, particularly the reliance on a child's naivete, illustrates how Adams simultaneously wants us to think we're too constrained by the rigid ideologies of "acceptable" reality and that we shouldn't go off believing absurd things, like (in his opinion, I suppose) religion. Time travel, if it explains the evidence, is great; I doubt he would exhibit such sangfroid over a religious explanation.

- Gordon Way's surprise at discovering himself to be dead and yet still in existence was interesting. I think Way is set up as a fairly normal, non-introspective member of society. He assimilates the new knowledge rather quickly, all things considered, and dramatically alters his world view to accept the new evidence. Compare that to Robin William's character in What Dreams May Come where he takes some time to accept the fact that 1) he's dead but 2) he still exists. I think that, in general, Adams' writings lead me to believe he approves of rapidly evolving world views in light of new evidence, but again this seems at odds with his antithesis not only to religion but to religionists.

- The music of the spheres that Richard and the others find so enamoring indicates to me Adams' deep-felt desire to believe in an overarching, harmonizing force from which all that is good derives. This is echoed in the whole Anthem (?) development, and Richard's evidence-less conviction that the arc of a bird's wing in flight would produce beautiful music.

- The hypnotism and possession sequences, in which characters behave in ways they believe are rational and reasonable and arrived at by their own agency, but are in fact decided by an agent completely external to the individual.

So, I guess I've belabored the point a bit, but I think it's interesting in its contradictions. We should free ourselves to believe whatever best reconciles the evidence, except when it disagrees with my prejudice which is infallible despite its evidence-free basis, and oh, By the Way, you can't be sure that your logic is really your own because what if you're possessed. From a technical standpoint, my own research touches on some of these topics tangentially, and the more I know about how we know what we know the more I believe ideological devotion to deductive logic in its purest form is utterly insane. There's such a host of evidence-less assumptions that must be made before the first deductive step that anyone who claims such a process is bias-free ought to blush.

I hadn't intended to rant on the failings of deductive logic. Really, I just thought the book was a fun exploration of some of these ideas with a pretty good story that had me guessing for about 200 out of 300 pages and entertained for the full 300. Cami, who says she enjoyed it almost as much as I did, claims to have known exactly what was happening from the very first chapter. I guess some people are just like that.

Those silly Brits

I get a kick out of British humour. Off the wall, subtle, clever. It's not clear to me why, but I enjoyed the book more last time (or my memory tells me that I enjoyed the book more 5 years ago) when I listened to an audiobook version of it. No Alvin, it was not the dramatic version complete with sound effects.

In an effort to get this post on the board and allow the discussion to proceed, I won't spend too much time thinking things through before I type them. It will be like speed chess, but without the chequed board.

• The electric monk is such a creative labor-saving device: "Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe." Douglas Adams had a knack for inventing ideas that were funny in an odd way, like the babelfish. What "life-changing" device(s) would you have Mr. Adams create for you if he were still alive? I think I would like to see a device that goes around and scoops up dog poop. Like a Roomba for the backyard.
  
• Douglas Adams' initials happen to be DNA. He was born in Cambridge, England in 1952. Watson and Crick proposed the double helix structure of DNA in 1953 in Cambridge, England. Coincidence? Hmmm.
• DNA's writing style reminds me of the product lead-ins on woot.com
• One of my favourite parts of the book was the description of the software program Reason. Rather than giving it facts so that it could help make a decision, the user gave the program the decision it wanted and the relevant facts, and the program would create "a series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion." It's creator used Reason to get a Porsche despite the fact that he was broke. He later sells it to the US gov't (which must be what the current administration is using to fix the economy).
• I found the mention of fractals interesting. I remember seeing something on PBS about fractals and their occurrence in nature, and how using fractals in engineering could improve the performance of antennas.
• The two big themes in the book that I saw were belief vs doubt, and regret.
• Theme #2 was covered quite nicely by Alvin
  
• Theme #1: Ironically, DNA's father was a student of theology at Cambridge, and DNA became a "radical atheist." His handling of the idea of evolution, and his implication of blind faith in Salt Lake City, fit with his professed non-beliefs. Another famous atheist, Richard Dawkin, really enjoyed this book, though not necessarily because of its religious undertones.
  I thought it was funny, and somewhat true to life, that "the more vague and ambiguous [Dirk Gently's] 'predictions,' the more other people's wishful thinking would close the credibility gap." While this is not quite the same thing as Dirk's classmates' jumping to illogical conclusions, I think I have been guilty of my brain completing a task that my body hadn't done. Example: "Are you sure I didn't take out the garbage? I could have sworn I did." The mind is an amazing powerful thing, it can almost create a virtual reality. I think DNA was suggesting that anything that is not based on concrete evidence is created by the mind. How did this book affect your thoughts about belief?
• Perhaps my favourite quote from the book: "Only a child sees things with perfect clarity?, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see." In other words, children see things as they truly are. Do you think that is so? To some degree yes, but if that is completely true, then why in the world do all those millions of kids believe in the Easter Bunny?
• Did you find yourself frequently flipping back in the book in order to try to catch details that you missed the first time through? Did you have an "aha" moment as you approached the last few chapters, or did you see it coming early on?
• I think this book may have prepared me well for this final season of Lost. As the last few episodes come and I realize what the show was all about, I will probably have a urge to watch it all over and see it with new eyes, similar to my experience when I first read this book. I wonder if people in the Spirit Prison might have a similar feeling when they are taught what this life was really all about?

And with that, my time here is finished. Thank you, and good night.