Why What I'm About to Say is Wrong

I hate reading books like this because I like my religion and I like my science but I hate trying to figure out all of the possible places where they may or may not contradict each other.  My brain starts trying to conceive the next great General Theory until my gray matter starts to melt down.  My thoughts are more tangential to what the book said, and I hope even those that didn't read the book will feel free to chime in.

1. Science is wrong! - What we know about science now will most likely (barring an apocalypse) look pretty silly compared to what we know about science 100 years from now.  So much of what we "know"  according to the author of the book and scientists in general are extrapolations from tiny bits of information.  They are highly sensible, very well reasoned extrapolations, but they are extrapolations nonetheless.  As a statistician, I hate extrapolating.

The Big Bang Theory and the Theory of Evolution sound great, and I think they explain a lot about our expanding universe and the variety of species.  As I don't believe that God works by magic but by science I don't completely understand yet, I prefer scientific explanations over magical explanations.

Still, these theories don't offer predictive power.  Evolutionists haven't predicted (successfully) X-men or Kevin Costner with gills.  Cosmologists haven't had to predict another bigger bang.  Explanations of the past are a lot easier than predictions of the future, mostly because the full truth is more complicated than simple explanations.  That's why I stopped being a psychology major and became a stats major.  Psychologists can only predict the past, while statisticians can at least give you a probability of predicting the future.

I feel like the crazy, anti-science climate-change denier even typing that last paragraph.  Look, I believe the earth is really, really old, etc., I just think there's room for skepticism and that we don't know as much as we sometimes think we know.

Now, about being wrong,  I heard once something like this, "The following statements about the shape of the earth are both wrong:
1. The earth is flat.
2. The earth is round like a ball.
However, it is absurd to think that they are both equally wrong."

While I say that science is wrong, I am not at all beginning to suggest that we ignore science and all of the progress we have made.  Scientists recognize the incompleteness of their work.  Science is still very useful (a point I'll come back to) even when it is wrong. 

2. My ill-fated quest to be right.
There was a short period in my life when I got really into politics.  I studied the issues feverishly until I was convinced that I knew the 'right' position on every issue.  This lasted approximately until the next election, when the person I voted for was not elected and realized that the world doesn't much care what I think is right.  I didn't so much care about the election as want some sort of validation that my way of thinking was the right way. 

If we assume that there is a right choice in politics (debatable), then most of the country has voted for the wrong person at some point in their life.  It happens.  We don't have all of the information and we make poor choices.  I'm sure my kids will tell me some day all the things I did wrong as a father.  I'll have too many kids or not enough.  I'll send them to the wrong elementary school or college.  If I get one right, it will inevitably ruin the next kid.  The internets are full of articles telling me "You're doing it wrong..."  

No one believes they're perfect, but we all believe that we're right much more than we're wrong.  We have to believe that.  Yet, there are so many religions, so many cultural differences in raising children, so many different circumstances and perspectives.  If there is a right way to do things, then the odds are that we (and most of the rest of the world) are doing things wrong.  Great historical figures who changed the world often did things wrong, and modern historians find their weaknesses (Jefferson had slaves?, Roosevelt believed in Eugenics?).

Personally, I feel confident that I married the right person for me.  However, in theory we may not all make the optimal or 'right' nuptial decision, but there comes a point where you have to stop worrying about if the person you married was the absolute optimal choice, given your available options, timing, etc..  You just enjoy the life and marriage you have.  Maybe you could have been 3% happier if you'd chosen someone else, but you'll certainly be 15% less happier if you keep worrying about it all the time and ruin what you have.

Not everything I do will be right, and that's OK.  I can still be happy and make the world a better place.

3. "All models are wrong but some are useful." 
Once I get past my overzealous drive to know which side is right and which side is wrong, I find a lot more peace in analyzing the science and religion dilemma. 

Is Mormonism as I know it wrong?  Almost certainly.  Mormonism is a fluid religion.  Early converts didn't know about the temple.  The temple ceremony has changed.  There are surely revelations coming that we don't know anything about. My religious beliefs are probably wrong, but for me, they are useful.  I love the tradition, culture and community.  I love serving and the selfless examples I see at church.  I love that Mormonism embraces science (See the BYU magazine article encouraging everyone to become scientists) and encourages all truth.  I love the peaceful feelings of the spirit that come with worship.

The God that the author argued for, The God of the Interstices, as Peter put it, isn't very useful.  This God doesn't explain anything, doesn't provide hope or inspire worship.  What's the point in believing in this type of God? I'd rather be an atheist than believe in a God of the Interstices.  I can at least see the usefulness of being atheist.

In conclusion, I find there is a lot of useful truth in science and a lot of useful truth in my religion.  I can't imagine the changes that will take place in science and religion  over the next 100 years.  My opinions and views of the world have changed immensely since freshman year at BYU, and I'm sure they'll continue to change.  Still, I wouldn't give up those freshman year experiences for anything.  I will keep growing and learning, but whatever is wrong about my current beliefs doesn't invalidate the experiences I have and the happiness I currently experience.  So while I wait for science and religion to clarify the parts that are fuzzy for me, I'll continue to seek for knowledge, truth, beauty, and all that is good. 


PS I liked the author's discussion of infinity and how it gets used to prove everything.  I've never liked the monkeys/typewriters/Hamlet theory. 

The God of the Interstices

I finished the book last night (actually early this morning). Like Glenn, I wasn't overwhelmed by it. I felt like the author was very defensive, and didn't provide a really fair reading of the New Atheists points. Which is fine on one level, since it's exactly these sort of polemical, overly-mechanistic, debate-style tone that the New Atheists themselves promote in their writing. But on another level, I think he was trying to transcend that sort of thing, and didn't really succeed.

I think my biggest disappointment with the book was that there was no room in it for a God of miracles. Aczel starts from a position that any miraculous events, because they are beyond the explanation of science, must be apocryphal. This includes not only things like God causing the sun to stand still in the sky, but also central tenets of my belief like the Resurrection. In Aczel's view, science does and has disproved the God of the Bible (and Joseph Smith's First Vision). What's left is a God who does not communicate with man, who doesn't impact us in any material way, who is found in the parts of nature that are not yet explained by science. Not only does this conflict with my own (reasonable, IMO) belief in a God of action, but it seems like a losing proposition. Science will progress, and if your faith hinges on the fact that we haven't yet found an explanation for how molecules or cells first came to Earth, or what exactly consciousness is, then when science does eventually come up with answers to those questions, your faith will have no further place.

I did like several things about the book, however. I found the discussion of consciousness very interesting, and the most persuasive of his arguments (even though he admits he is most persuaded by the anti-anthropic principle). The failure of committed materialists (who believe people are really just biological computers) to recognize that model's fundamental inability to explain autonomy, introspection, and consciousness strikes me as one of their greatest blindnesses.

I disagreed, although not strongly, with his run down of the anthropic principle. Personally, I don't find the tuning of the fundamental parameters of the universe to be a particularly persuasive point. Furthermore, by rejecting the idea of the multiverse (which New Atheists use to justify the anthropic principle), I don't see how he can maintain that the apparent fine-tuning of parameters is remarkable. I mean, to me it seems like for something to be surprising or remarkable, you have to admit that there could have been some other outcome of events. In this case, that would mean that a universe could have existed that didn't have those parameters. Which is exactly the idea of a multiverse.

Anyway, I was glad I read the book, but I don't know that much from it will stick with me long-term. One final thought, a favorite story of mine that relates to these epistemological questions of evidence, truth, reason, etc. This is a story told by John Wisdom, an English philosopher in the post-WWII period: "Two people return to their long neglected garden and find among the weeds a few of the old plants surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these plants.’ Upon inquiry they find that no neighbour has ever seen anyone at work in their garden. The first man says to the other, ‘He must have worked while people slept.’ The other says, ‘No, someone would have heard him and besides, anybody who cared about the plants would have kept down these weeds.’ The first man says, ‘Look at the way these are arranged. There is purpose and a feeling for beauty here. I believe that someone comes, someone invisible to mortal eyes. I believe that the more carefully we look the more we shall find confirmation of this.’ They examine the garden ever so carefully and sometimes they come on new things suggesting that a gardener comes and sometimes they come on new things suggesting the contrary and even that a malicious person has been at work. Besides examining the garden carefully, they also study what happens to gardens left without attention. Each learns all the other learns about this and about the garden. Consequently, when after all this, one says, ‘I still believe a gardener comes’ while the other says, ‘I don’t,’ their different words now reflect no difference as to what they have found in the garden, no difference as to what they would find in the garden if they looked further and no difference about how fast untended gardens fall into disorder. … What is the difference between them?"

Why Science Does Not Disprove God

The first half of the book is spent "charting the history of science: with some commentary about religious implications. The latter half explores "modern" concepts and discoveries of math and logic as well as cosmology and biology. I really had to force myself through the early parts of the book, whereas the latter half seemed much more interesting.

This book isn't something on which to build a testimony, but it does present some interesting concepts and points out some important logic. The author writes "The purpose of this book is to defend the integrity of science." He must have the feeling that Richard Dawkins is a real threat to science; I sometimes had the feeling that the author's intended audience was Dawkins and other aggressive atheists. Personally, I don't worry about people like Dawkins. I enjoy science, but I don't lean upon it for testimony, and I don't expect to reference the Book of Mormon in any science publication.

A couple of things in the book that caught my attention:
page 17, Daniel Dennet claims that evolutionary psychology explains the development of consciousness and morality and there is no need for religion to tell us how to behave. I haven't read any of Mr. Dennet's writings, but I find it hard to believe that anyone can completely explain consciousness and morality. I am grateful for the guiding compass of the gospel and have wondered where atheists turn to for moral direction. It seems dangerous to have no source of right and wrong.


The book wasn't a powerful book for me, but there were a few interesting arguments.

Strong arguments with infinity concepts
Strong arguments with anthropic principle, IMMENSE probability & alternative universes. limited ability of anthropic principle to explain things such as dinosaur meteor
String arguments
limits of evolution (altruism)
limited ability

Goedel's theorems proving that we cannot know everything mathematical implies that we may not be able to  know via science everything about our universe.
"Because of the assumption that God may well 'reside' outside the universe we inhabit, it stands to reason that the question of the existence of God may be one of those Goedel-like mathematical truths that will forever stay outside our sphere of knowledge."

Return to Merrill Hall

While this blog appears to be dead, I think it is only mostly dead, and we all know there's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.

I've been inspired by a string of run-ins with former posters on this blog.  Karl let me stay with his beautiful family in his beautifully remodeled home in San Jose in April.

Then Glenn came bearing gifts and spiritual thoughts to my home. (You are all welcome when visiting the DC area!)

Soon after I made my way west again, where Paul carried my children across a river like he was trying to assure his eternal salvation on one Saturday morning.

And though Rob was busy planning his family's reunion, he still made time to give me a hug.

On Monday I'm headed to Boston, but I think both Peter and Jesse are skipping town.  Boo.  But maybe next spring, as a friend I just saw in Utah says he's running the Boston Marathon next year.

While Glenn was here, we decided on the next book club book.  Glenn chose "Why Science Does Not Disprove God".  I know nothing about it, but I have checked the book (the actual book, not the audio) out from my local library.  I'm trying not to jump to any conclusions before I even open it.  But if you want to jump to conclusions, you are welcome to join the discussion, even if you don't read the book.  Let's aim for late September for the book discussion.

Until then, I leave with this photo I took while I was indoctrinating my kids about the importance of going to BYU:

Love you guys!

Actually, I prefer celery over salary

Hello friends. Good to see you're still out there and getting these blog posts.

I saw this piece about economic inequality in the US. An increase in the minimum wage is a common topic, but I had never heard of the idea for a maximum wage being tossed about. I think rather than setting a maximum wage tied to the national minimum wage, it would make more sense to tie executives' compensation to the minimum compensation of that individual company.

Instead of just let these thoughts stew in my head, why not open it up for discussion with the wisest fellows I know. And resurrect the PVS at the same time.

Well friends, what are your thoughts?

A crazy week in Boston

I've been thinking of my friends out there in Boston. I hope you are safe and well, and that things return to a sense of normal soon.

A Little Measure Theory

I really liked "How Will You Measure Your Life". I'm so glad that Alvin recommended it. I'll give some of my own thoughts on what I found meaningful in the book, but first I'll try to answer a few of Alvin's questions.

(Q) What are you hiring this blog to do?
(A) I often feel stifled when I try to discuss the sorts of issues we talk about on this blog with other people. Never in my life have I found a group of people with whom I can have such a good discussion (excepting Cami, who isn't really a group anyway). I hired this blog because I felt the need in my life for those enriching discussions.

(Q) How can we increase the motivators?
(A) Unfortunately, despite my recognition of the need for these enriching discussions, I find it terrifically hard to actually engage in them. It's so much easier to simply throw a movie or tv show up, or bury myself in a book. I don't know that there's some motivational magic that can be worked to incentivize me to post more often; it's more a matter of my fundamental lack of self-discipline to do things I know will bring me happiness, but which require effort on my part.

(Q) What was the take home message for you? What were you inspired to do better?
(A) Without fail, I found the suggestions made in the book both trenchant and insightful. If I had to choose one lesson, it might be the one under the title 'sending your children off in Thesus' ship'. The idea being that eventually your children will leave your immediate control, and that the social norms you have endowed them with while they were in your home are what will protect them throughout their lives. Those norms form a family culture, on that can only be developed through repetition and routine. So now when I question whether we can skip family scripture study today, or family prayer, I have this vision of my children leaving on the ship without my having instilled the reflexive need for those things. I still struggle with frequently trying to be 98% obedient rather than 100% obedient (another lesson from the book), but it was a good reminder of what these little daily decisions add up to.

(Q) Is your career deliberate or emergent?
(A) Probably a bit of both. My intention for quite some time has been to become a Professor. I am not a Professor. In that sense, my current research job was not what I'd planned. However, that Professor job still seems on my horizon, I still hold on to the possibility of getting it someday, and so the choices I've made have, to a significant degree, been calculated to achieve that. So it's deliberate. My chosen field is something I've always found interesting and which I've felt good at, so my chosing it was deliberate. However, when I came to BYU as a Freshman I was undecided between a couple of majors, both of which I enjoyed and thought I could do well at. In the end, I chose engineering because of the free internet access through the CAEDM lab (as I recall, otherwise you had to pay $3/month for access at the dinky Route Y terminals). So in that sense it was emergent. I think it's pretty inevitable that you're future is shaped both by plans and by chance or fate.

(Q) How will I measure my life?
(A) Abstractly, I would say the amount of love I create in my family, the strength of the bonds that unite us. That's a lousy measure, though, because it's not one that can be easily taken. A more pragmatic answer would be the number of hours I spend directly working on my family relationships.

I think I covered a lot of what I had to say in these answers, which probably means that Alvin did a good job of coming up with interesting questions. As a closing thought, I wanted to write a little (without knowing exactly where it's going) about Measure Theory.

I took a class in Measure Theory a few years ago, and I think one of the most valuable lessons I learned was that there is room for style, taste and judgement in the formulation of measures. In my opinion, the best measures are those that lead to increased light and knowledge, that manage to take abstract objects and generate order. A good example might be Google's invention of a measure for webpages. By creating something that matched so well our intuitive sense of what was important and what was not, Google not only made its founders loads of money, it dramatically increased the ability of people around the world to function at a higher level.

I'm not sure what lesson that lends to taking the measure of a man. I guess it's two-fold: (1) don't be afraid to let personality influence how you choose to measure; it's inherent, objectivity is unachievable, so just accept your biases and let them be reflected in your measure, but (2) you should strive to find that measure compatible with your values that best brings further illumination to you and those you share it with.

On the PVS reunion, I'm all for it. I don't know about holding it in Provo, though. We could rent out a beach house somewhere, or a cabin in the woods, or take a cruise together. It would require a bit higher level of commitment, but I think it would really increase the value we got from it.

Omaha, home of the College Baseball World Series

I thought that title would at least draw Alvin in to reading this post.
Actually, his interrogation of where I am and what I'm doing made me realize that I haven't kept you guys up to date on the latest progress (at least I hopes it's progress) in my life.

On Aug 20th I signed the contract for the job in Omaha. We finished packing and put stuff into storage on August 22nd, visited Omaha from the 23-26th to look for housing, returned to Columbia and closed on the sale of our house on the 27th. On Sept. 3 we drove up again to Omaha, and I deposited Sara and the girls at a hotel and then I drove back down to Columbia. On the 4th I pulled a couple of mattresses out of storage, along with some boxes of kitchen stuff and toys, put the items into the minivan, and again drove up to Omaha. The following morning (the 5th, I drove out to Curtis, NE for several days of training at the technical college where the veterinary technology program is housed. The week of September 10th was essentially my first week on the job in Omaha, though I took the day off on the 12th when the moving truck finally arrived with all our furniture and other household items.
Most of my waking hours during the past month have been consumed with preparing curriculum, visiting other colleges to get to know faculty and administration while promoting the forthcoming comparative medicine vet tech program, unpacking, and trying to study for the laboratory animal medicine board exam.Somewhere in there I managed to finish writing my dissertation, which now is sitting on my advisor's desk waiting to be read.

Well, that's about it. Baby Eleanor is doing well, as are the rest of the Jacksons. I hope you are too. Feel free to come visit us sometime.

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?

The Righteous Mind and Measuring Your Life

I've requested How Will You Measure Your Life from my local library, but I don't think it'll be available for another few weeks. Maybe Jesse would be willing to drop by Brother Christensen's house and get the inside story on the book, for those who aren't able/planning to read it.

I did just finish an interesting book called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. The author, Jonathan Haidt is a Professor of Psychology at UVA. His research has focused on how we make moral decisions, and he summarizes what he's learned in his career. It's fairly standard social science written for a broad audience.

The three core principles he attempts to establish are:
- Moral 'reasoning' is really moral intuition followed by logical justification, which is why debate and dialogue so seldom sway people's opinions.
- Our moral senses have many dimensions, but (industrialized, Western, educated) society only recognizes a few as valid bases for moral judgements.
- While we usually consider moral judgements individually, occasionally we can be turned to a 'hive' view, with a more group-level perspective.

In all, I found a lot of the book to match very well with my own feelings about how and what we choose to value, as individuals and as a society. I particularly liked Haidt's attempt to broaden the moral matrix (2nd point above); this is something I think rationalists in both parties largely neglect. Liberal (or libertarian) legal justification admits only 'harm' as a valid mechanism for determining whether something is 'right'. Haidt began his research by relating stories to college students, narratives which most people would agree were 'wrong', but which couldn't be categorized as such by an appeal to them having caused harm. Repeatedly, students would attempt to introduce new elements into the narrative, in order to inject some harm, in order to provide what they felt was a justifiable reason for finding the behavior in the narrative immoral. Haidt's prescription, and I think I agree with him, is that we should recognize that our moral vision is much broader than can be encompassed by the concept of harm, and that we should be moral 'pluralists' in the sense of recognizing the varied mechanisms by which we deem things 'immoral'.

To that end, Haidt established a website called yourmorals.org. You can go and register to participate in a variety of questionnaire-based studies. The primary study, called the 'Moral Foundations Questionnaire', asks you to rate how much or little you take various things into account when making a moral decision, and then provides a personalized 'rating' based on five moral dimensions identified by Haidt's research, as well as providing comparison to the average ratings for self-identifying liberals and conservatives. You should all go do it; it doesn't take long and I think it can provide interesting insight. Here are my scores:

Harm - 2.7
Fairness - 2.8
Loyalty - 3.3
Authority - 3.5
Purity - 3.3

Jackson 5

It’s been a good day. New little girl (#5), my first author manuscript was accepted by JAALAS, I got a phone interview invite for a civilian position with the Army (Aberdeen Proving Ground), and I finished my summary/future studies chapter in my dissertation. What should I do next?

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.

Unemployment rate versus employment to population ratio

Given the tepid new jobs numbers out today, I got interested in private sector versus public sector job growth over the past several years. I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, hoping to get a handle on to what degree the storyline of recovery is different for the two sectors. I wasn't able to find any obvious numbers on that question, but while I was playing around with their data tool, I found something else interesting.

This is a plot of the unemployment rate over the past 6+ years. It topped out at 10.0 in October 2009 and has been falling fairly steadily since and is now around 8%.

This is a plot of the ratio of employed persons to the total population. In October 2009, when the unemployment rate topped out, the employment/population ratio (as a percent) was 58.5. However, while the unemployment rate has declined, the ratio of employed to population has remained static. Since October 2009 it has fluctuated between 58.7 and 58.2, and is currently at 58.4. So the only reason the unemployment rate has gone down (and Republicans have been saying this for a year or more) is because people have stopped identifying themselves as job seekers. I can think of several plausible scenarios in which that might happen:

1) Older workers who planned to retire in a few years but who have become unemployed choose to retire early rather than look for a job.
2) Students choose to pursue further education, delaying entry into the job market.
3) Dual-income households shrink to single-income households.
4) Discouraged unemployed workers decide to depend on welfare and charity rather than work.
5) Employees shift to unreported employment.

There may be other explanations that I'm not thinking of, but it seems to me that all five of these have significant downsides and only a couple of possible upsides. (1) probably means that people aren't sufficiently prepared for retirement financially, and will put an even greater strain on the Medicare/SS system. (2) means that a large pool of job seekers will hit the market at a future point, pushing the unemployment rate statistic back up. (3) means families survive on decreased income. (4) and (5) represent failures of the state, either to encourage productivity among the populace or to fairly distribute taxation. On the other hand (2) means a better educated workforce, which I think is generally a good thing (although not always) and (3) potentially means greater availability of parents to children.

I guess I'm wondering whether this divergence between the two numbers is temporary (in which case the media focus on the unemployment rate leads to a wrong impression of the true state of employment), or whether there's been a permanent shift in the percentage of the US population participating in the job market (in which case I'm unsure, but generally have a negative feeling about, the long-term implications).

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?

I Am Number Sixty-Six

And so is my wife's maiden name. "Density. I mean, destiny."
Our numbers don't quite add up the way Alvin and Tammy's do. I used the system of "professional numerologist" Jerome Carter, who used the pythagorean numerology chart.



Now, 66 isn't a master number (though both my wife's middle name and my own each add up to master numbers), but it is a pretty cool number. Another cool number "coincidence" is the fact that my first name has 5 letters in it (a prime number), my middle name has 6 letters in it (a perfect number), and my last name has 7 letters in it (also a prime number), making my name a numerical series! What is perhaps even cooler is that using the pythagorean numerology chart, GLENN adds up to 25, the square of the number of letters in the name, making it perhaps the awesomest name in existence (except perhaps Glennjamin). It's a good thing more people don't know about numerology, or everyone would be naming their kids Glenn (yes, I'm looking at you, Glenn Close).

Numerology aside, this book was sooooo much fun. It doesn't read like most other books which is great. It wasn't a book that can be rushed through, but one that must be savored, and enjoyed, like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
And it's hard to pick a favorite part. I could flip open to any page and find something interesting and enjoyable to read. It was fun sharing what I was learning with my wife and kids, though they sometimes gave me strange looks (except my 3-yea-old who just smiled at me as though she understood completely).

My least favorite parts would probably be number series and infinity. The number series, though perhaps not as much as numerology, often seemed as though people were "finding" patterns that weren't really there, like seeing George Washington's face in a Chicken Nugget. The series were often fairly abstract, which strained my brain, as does the concept of infinity. Infinitely more mind warping than infinity is the idea of an infinity bigger than infinity. When I read the Hilbert Hotel parable I tried arguing with the author, attempting to come up with arguments that would parry his attack on reality. I thought, "Well why doesn't he just make everyone move to the next room up, like he did before to make a vacancy for his invented number?" But though I can't quite say his logic was hermetically sealed, I did see his point. Still, as perfect as my name is, I'm not ready for the mental rigors of godhood.
My favorite parts of the book were the discussions on numbers in games, mental acrobats (like anzan participants), and base number systems. I thought the old british counting system was hilarious (tan-a-bumfit!?!), and the 12-base system was simply awesome.

The book rekindled my love of geometry, it's simplicity and beauty, and makes me want to get a compass and a copy of Euclid's The Elements, and introduce my kids to the greater wonders of math.

Taking refuge in Numberland's abstract beauty.

I was not surprised when my name's numerological sum wasn't the same as my wife's, but the difference between them is 7, which happens to be the number of people in our family. I take that as a sign from the gods.

I love series. My favorite quote from the chapter: “the land is dying, even the oceans are dying, but one can take refuge in the abstract beauty of sequences like Dion Gijswijt's A090822”.

This is the second PVS book in which Thorp's Beat the Market/Dealer have been referenced. I looked to see if I could check it out from the library: lots of copies of Beat the Dealer, but no copies of Beat the Market in Las Vegas--figures. It's nice to know to stick with the Kelly strategy when at the tables.

We spent a family night exploring the Pythagorean theory—glue and scissors, etc. Our 3-year old liked using scissors; our 9-year old got the concept but was underwhelmed. I still think it is magical.

I also liked the chapter on hyperbolic curves and Infinity. Since God is infinite, is he aleph or c or d? Does this fit into our theology?

I'm with you Alvin—this book reminded me how much I like math. I kind of gave up on math in college when we got into vector spaces and things I couldn't visualize, but thinking about it now, all math (or at least algebra) is an abstraction, right? Numbers are so much fun.

By the way, one of the chapters is titled "Life of Pi". I'm sure everyone's read it, but it is one of my favorite books.

How Numerology Shaped My Eternal Destiny

A Riddle

Before jumping into my post, see if you can name the following figure:

A L U P
P U L A
L A P U
U P A L


Answer at the end of the post.

Numerology and Me

I loved the section on Numerology, even though most of it was a bit ridiculous. It makes it seem like the numerologist was behind Puff Daddy/P. Diddy's name change, though a quick Google search did not confirm this.

When Tammy and I were dating, she was teaching elementary school, and she did a math lesson where she had all the kids add up the letters of their names (A=1, B=2,... ,Z=26). So we decided to add up the letters in our names (first and middle names), and Alvin Cutler and Tammy Lynn both add up to the same number: 137. And that number is prime! (For those non-readers out there, a long section was devoted to prime numbers.) It's an obvious sign that we were meant to be together.

My roommate at the time was a computer science major, and after learning of our connection, he wrote a program to calculate numbers of different names. Then he fed the ward list from our singles ward through his program. His number didn't match any of the girls in our ward. Not surprisingly, he did not marry any of them.

Hopefully, your name/number matches that of your wife, but if not, I guess not all of us are lucky enough to marry our soul mates.


Short Thoughts

Did you know that the British title for the same book is Alex's Adventure in Numberland? I like the American title better.

I thought I understood the China-men puzzle when it was described in the book, but when you see it in action, it's much cooler.

I have never used or even seen a slide rule before, though I'd heard lots of old people use it as a reference for how old they are. Slide rules are really quite ingenious. And for as often as I use the log function in my work, I have to admit that I really didn't understand it very well before reading this book.

I have mixed feelings about an American getting credit for the original Sudoku puzzle because Sudoku is one of my least favorite kind of puzzle. They're very tedious.

The world is a big place with lots of people in it. If you search hard enough, you can find a cult following (and an ensuing competition) in anything. Abacus using championships, recognizing random sequences of 50 digits from pi, ability to multiply large numbers in your head, etc. Apparently you can also find people that literally don't have numbers in their vocabulary.

The first couple chapters I had to stop every couple of pages and tell Tammy what I was learning. I loved the history of numbers, explaining why we have 60 minutes in an hour, etc. It's amazing how such elementary mathematical concepts took the most brilliant minds in the world thousands of years to discover.

Overall, I thought the book was very interesting. I agree with an assessment Glenn sent me via email, "fascinating, fun, and frictional (it slows me down to the point where I have to stop reading and think)." Not a breezy read, but good nonetheless.

Riddle Answer

It's a Lattin Square!

Get it? A Latin square with Paul's name in it. Feel free to ROFL.

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

Health Care Costs ("bending the curve")

Below is an graph of three phases of healthcare costs, from 1960-1979, 1980-1989, and 1990-2010*. The data are taken from the OECD statistics database. The red curve tracks US spending on healthcare (normalized to the beginning of each period) and the blue curve tracks the normalized spending of all other OECD countries**.



The graph represents a comparison of cost growth between the US and non-US-OECD during three unique phases. What strikes me about the plot is that the growth in costs has been remarkably similar between the two groups for forty of the past fifty years, despite differences between the systems. This indicates to me that claims that changing the system alone will "bend the curve" are ill-founded.

That's not to say the US's system is ideal, or good, or fair, or efficient, or anything else. It's just to say that inasmuch as long term costs are driven by growth, and growth seems to be relatively similar between the US and non-US-OECD countries, simply changing the healthcare system is unlikely to control long-term costs.

What I really want to know is what happened during the 1980's. Up until that point, the US costs were fairly similar to most OECD countries (again, despite differences in the delivery systems) both in terms of absolute costs and growth. But during the 1980's, the US saw healthcare spending relative to GDP grow at a similar to the previous two decades, while other OECD countries saw no appreciable growth (on average). Does anyone have a thought on why that would be? Did something change in Europe in the late 70s early 80s? Or something in the US that caused us not to realize the relative gains our industrialized brethren enjoyed?

*Note: the downtick in the blue curve at 2010 is due to sparsity of reporting. Data isn't yet available from most countries, so the final data point is largely spurious.

**The set of OECD countries expanded throughout the period graphed. So each blue data point is the average of a slightly different set of countries.

Federal budget deficits (Redux)

Given the apparent deal on raising the debt ceiling (*sigh of relief*), I've again become interested in what's driving our persistent deficits. I went back and plotted historical federal spending by subcategory [edit] and revenues by source[/edit] as a percentage of GDP (see plots below).



Spending Plot
A couple things I notice about the spending plot. First is that the major increase in social spending (as a % of GDP) happened between 1965 and 1975. I guess this was Johnson's "Great Society." It also coincides with the period of divergence in health care costs between the US and the rest of the industrialized world (something I don't really understand the causes of). The other thing is that, while social spending rose precipitously with the onset of the Recession, prior to that it was relatively flat for about 20 years. This gives me some small hope that projections of continued significant increases in social spending are not as accurate as I'd previously believed.

But really, the story of the spending plot is the inverse relation between defense and social spending. For the past 60 years we've consistently chosen to fund increased social spending through cuts in defense spending. I don't think that is necessarily bad, but at a minimum it brings up the issue of what to do when we can't decrease military spending any more.

Revenue Plot
The revenue plot shows that federal revenues have been remarkably flat (as a % of GDP) over time. They've hovered around 18% of GDP for the past 60 years. The interesting trends I see in this plot are the decrease in receipts of corporate income taxes and the rise in taxes due to social insurance (increases in FICA and so forth). Total federal revenue is at a 6-decade low, due largely to the fall in income tax receipts. This is a result both of the two recessions in the 2000s and the Bush tax cuts (particularly those for the middle class).