Mormon Doctrine

Dear K.,

Your friend asks two questions, one about doctrine and canonization and the other about salvation. You asked for my take and I'll give it to you as scripturally and clearly as I can. Hopefully I've gotten all the typos out.

Love,

M.

I. Are prophetic teachings considered canon?

In relation to the first question, "Are the teachings of Presidents of the Church considered canon or just educational material?": while I am comfortable expressing my own opinions, one of the major functions of a prophet is to speak on the Lord's behalf, not necessarily to reveal new and unusual information, but to say it in a way that will touch the heart and enlighten the mind of the hearer. Therefore instead of speaking for myself, I have selected relevant quotations from two past Presidents of the Church (Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee), in which they themselves quote the scriptures and other past Presidents to explain this matter.

[I'm not sure whether the italics in the following are in the original, or if the emphasis was added by me when I threw these quotes into my Gmail account a while back.]

Joseph Fielding Smith - It makes no difference what is written or what anyone has said, if what has been said is in conflict with what the Lord has revealed, we can set it aside.  My word, and teachings of any other member of the Church, high or low, if they do not square with the revelations, we need not accept them.  Let us have this matter clear.  We have accepted the four standard works as the measuring yardsticks, or balances, by which we measure every man's doctrine.  You cannot accept the books written by the authorities of the Church as standards of doctrine, only in so far as they accord with revealed word in the standard works.

Every man who writes is responsible, not the Church, for what he writes.  If Joseph Fielding Smith writes something which is out of harmony with the revelations, then every member of the Church is duty bound to reject it.  If he writes that which is in perfect harmony with the revealed word of the Lord, then it should be accepted." (Doctrines of Salvation, v. 3, p.203-204)

Harold B. Lee - If anyone, regardless of his position in the Church, were to advance a doctrine that is not substantiated by the standard Church works, meaning the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price, you may know that his statement is merely his private opinion.  The only one authorized to bring forth any new doctrine is the President of the Church, who, when he does, will declare it as revelation from God, and it will be so accepted by the Council of the Twelve and sustained by the body of the Church.  And if any man speaks a doctrine which contradicts what is in the standard Church works, you may know by that same token that it is false and you are not bound to accept it as truth.  (The Teachings of Harold B. Lee, p. 544)

Harold B. Lee – We can know when a man speaks as a prophet. Now, when does a person speak as a prophet?  Do you recall that oft-repeated revelation in which the Lord said:     

"And, behold, this is an ensample unto all those who were ordained unto this priesthood [and he is talking of General Authorities], whose mission is appointed unto them to go forth-    

"They shall speak as they are moved upon by the Holy Ghost.  

"And whatsoever they shall speak when moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture, shall be the will of the Lord, shall be the mind of the Lord, shall be the word of the Lord, shall be the voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation."  (D&C 68:2-4.)    

This is so when a General Authority is speaking by the power of the Holy Ghost.  

Someone has rightly said that it is not to be thought that every word spoken by our leaders is inspired.  The Prophet Joseph Smith wrote in his personal diary: "This morning I visited with a brother and sister from Michigan, who thought that 'a prophet is always a prophet'; but I told them that a prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such" (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 278.)

It is not to be thought that every word spoken by the General Authorities is inspired, or that they are moved upon by the Holy Ghost in everything they write.  I don't care what his position is, if he writes something or speaks something that goes beyond anything that you can find in the standard Church works, unless that one be the prophet, seer, and revelator - please note that one exception - you may immediately say, "Well, that is his own idea."  And if he says something that contradicts what is found in the standard Church works, you may know by that same token that it is false, regardless of the position of the man who says it.  We can know or have the assurance that they are speaking under inspiration if we so live that we can have a witness that what they are speaking is the word of the Lord.  There is only one safety, and that is that we shall live to have the witness to know.  President Brigham Young said something to the effect that "the greatest fear I have is that the people of this church will accept what we say as the will of the Lord without first praying about it and getting the witness within their own hearts that what we say is the word of the Lord" (see Discourses of Brigham Young, p. 135). 

If upon reading this you find that there are aspects of the standard which rely upon individual interpretation ("how do you know when a prophet is speaking as a prophet?", "was President Lee speaking as a prophet when he said this?"), all I can say is, "Exactly!" There are many things which are true but which are not taught as doctrine, but revealed by the Spirit to an individual as he ponders the scriptures and words of the prophet. Individual study and meditation are a necessary part of the process, including the process of distinguishing where individual interpretation is needed and/or valid. I'm conscious of the irony in this infinite regress: like Hawking's story of the mythical flat earth on the back of a giant turtle carried by other turtles, "It's turtles all the way down!"

(If you've ever studied proof systems in mathematics you'll know that this same infinite regress applies to all proof systems, not just to the gospel.)

II. Who will be saved?

It is fundamental to the gospel, as believed by Latter-day Saints, that not everyone will be saved, and that all who will be saved are saved only through Christ. Alma chapter 1 tells the story of a man named Nehor who "testified unto the people that all mankind should be saved at the last day, and that they need not fear nor tremble, but that they might lift up their heads and rejoice; for the Lord had created all men, and had also redeemed all men; and, in the end, all men should have eternal life." In practice Nehor's followers were covetous, hard-hearted, and worldly, and they entirely rejected that Christ was needed or would ever come.

It is also true that the word "salvation" has many meanings, depending on the context, both inside and outside the LDS church. (Dallin H. Oaks, as an apostle, gave a General Conference talk on the various meanings which Martin may want to read: link.) Elder McConkie had a specific meaning in mind, in Martin's quotation. I think the best overall explanation is given in Doctrine and Covenants Section 76, from which I excerpt the following out of order:

1.) Those who are (103) "liars, and... adulterers, and whoremongers, and whosoever loves and makes a lie..." (106) "are cast down to hell and suffer the wrath of Almighty God, until the fulness of times, when Christ... shall have perfected his work" and then receive (89) "the glory of the telestial, which surpasses all understanding".  They are (109) "as innumerable... as the sand upon the seashore."

2.) The (75) "honorable men of the earth, who were blinded by the craftiness of men", (79) "who are not valiant in the testimony of Jesus... obtain not the crown over the kingdom of our God." They receive even greater happiness than the liars and adulterers do, because (91) "the glory of the terrestrial... excels in all things the glory of the telestial, even in glory, and in power, and in might, and in dominion." They (77) "receive of the presence of the Son, but not of the fulness of the Father."

3.) Those who (51) "received the testimony of Jesus, and believed on his name and were baptized after the manner of his burial... keeping the commandments they might be washed and cleansed from all their sins..." and who (53) "overcome by faith... [and] are just and true" are (54) "the church of the Firstborn" and (62) "shall dwell in the presence of God and his Christ forever and ever." (58-59) "They are gods, even the sons of God—wherefore, all things are theirs," and the glory they receive is (70) "celestial... even the glory of God, the highest of all." Entering into celestial glory requires making covenants, and the reason the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was restored to the earth was to enable men and women to make and keep celestial covenants.

4.) Finally, there are those who "[deny] the Only Begotten Son of the Father, having crucified him unto themselves and put him to an open shame... who shall go away into the lake of fire and brimstone, with the devil and his angels." They are (38) "the only ones who shall not be redeemed in the due time of the Lord, after the sufferings of his wrath." They (D&C 88:32) "shall also be quickened [resurrected]; nevertheless, they shall return again to their own place, to enjoy that which they are willing to receive, because they were not willing to enjoy that which they might have received."  Usually in the church they are called the "sons of Perdition", which means "loss", and (D&C 88:24) "he who cannot abide the law of a telestial kingdom cannot abide a telestial glory; therefore he is not meet for a kingdom of glory. Therefore he must abide a kingdom which is not a kingdom of glory."

Clearly everybody is "saved" to a greater or lesser degree through the actions of Jesus Christ, even the sons of Perdition who at least receive a resurrection. What kind of "salvation" someone is talking about needs to be judged from the context, but in the Church we tend to talk mostly about celestial glory because that is the Church's raison d'être, and we also want to see everyone attain their full potential. Elder McConkie would, if pressed, admit that murderers and adulterers will receive a kind of salvation, but they will also be missing out on even more, and that is why he said salvation is only available within the Church.

-- 

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Model-checking climate models

Andrew Gelman has me thinking about how you'd want to model-check climate models. It seems as if the predictive machine-learning of withholding parts of the data set might be inappropriate in his framework, both because you're modelling a process and not simply a functional relationship (so withholding a random subset of data points from the domain doesn't prevent over-fitting--and the data you have aren't gathered independently from the input domain in the first place) and because Gelman advocates an iterative approach, which seems reasonable. So, how would you check them? Gelman talks some about comparing the generated model to the original data inputs and seeing whether it "looks" like the original data, particularly in ways that you weren't fitting for. That seems like a start but I'm not sure how to do it, or if it's sufficient.

Anyway, in this context I read about checking climate models by comparing their regional predictions for climate change, which naturally are much richer than the single "global temperature change" metric. Seems like a reasonable approach. The models are compared against each other and against simple statistical models which incorporate no knowledge of physics or climatology.

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/06/13/junk-science-week-climate-models-fail-reality-test/ 

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Decision Making Under Uncertainty

D.,

How do you make important decisions when you're not sure what all the choices are, nor what the effect would be of all the choices, nor even which outcome you most want? I spend a lot of time thinking about this problem, both in general and for specific instances (climate change, the economy, social interactions with friends, etc.). This post made a few interesting suggestions that I see as broadly applicable:

1. Small, incremental steps have an advantage over big policy swings because they are "corrigible," i.e. reversible. From this perspective, timidity can be a good thing, e.g. in a Congress[1], because the small initial steps help build consensus once they start taking effect.

" A wise policy-maker consequently expects that his policies will achieve only part of what he hopes and at the same time will produce unanticipated consequences he would have preferred to avoid. If he proceeds through a succession of incremental changes, he avoids serious lasting mistakes in several ways."

2. Policy choices function as revealed preferences, even if you can't articulate precisely what your desires are. Focus on the policy and not the utility analysis.

"The test is agreement on policy itself, which remains possible even when agreement on values is not."

For instance, I used to get frustrated when I couldn't figure out why a girl agreed to a particular date, e.g. sushi lunch Wednesday. Is she just being nice, or does she just like sushi, or does she think we might be interested in each other? This principle says, "It doesn't matter. Do you want to eat sushi with her? Then go eat sushi."

3. It may be valuable to delay decisions until the situation changes.

"Consider options themselves as assets. Try to retain them or create new ones."

"Seek alternatives whose consequences are observable."

"Plan to allocate resources for monitoring consequences and (if appropriate) gathering more information."

Fencing analogy: I usually do better when I remember to be patient. Eventually the other guy makes a mistake and I can exploit it, but that doesn't happen when I rush to create my own openings, or commit to an all-out attack just because I can't think of anything better to do.

4. Build in resilience.

"Seek alternatives that are 'robust' regardless of outcome." 

This is a weaker than a "dominant strategy" in game theory: the decision doesn't have to be better than every other decision under every possible set of circumstances, but it has to be pretty good regardless of circumstances. Of course, dominant strategies are always robust if you can find them.

5. Be patient.

"Don't assume that getting rid of ignorance and uncertainty is always a good idea."

"Build and utilize relationships based on trust instead of contracts... Trust relationships are more flexible and robust under uncertainty."

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it may be better to tolerate uncertainty than to pay the costs of getting rid of it. It depends upon what the cost is. See point #3 above for an example. "DTRs" between friends could be another example, if it puts stress on the friendship.

All of these things except #4 are 180 degrees opposite to my instincts, which makes them interesting to think about. Any thoughts/recommendations?

-M.

[1]  I could use a bit more timidity myself. I tend to charge ahead recklessly. Did I ever tell you about my former plan to inject myself with HIV to test whether it really causes AIDS, per Koch's postulates? 

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

NASA reform

Hey man, check this out. From http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=7579, it looks like NASA has changed their ways of doing business while we weren't paying attention. This could lead to good things, including cheaper science, and further development of propulsion technology (since they'll have a customer to pay for development and a reason to try to operate efficiently).

Excerpt:

This is just the first step, but it's a big one. I have been asked by a colleague why this is different. NASA paid for this, didn't it?

Yes, but not in the old NASA way, with cost-plus contracts and with NASA trying to run things as they did with Space Station. Dragon wasn't designed at Marshall or in Houston, and NASA inspectors weren't wandering around the factory floor and insisting in "testing" components (as Marshall did with the tanks for DC/X, which they managed to break and had to weld back together – it was the failure of the weld that caused DC/X to burn up, thus ending the DC/X threat to NASA's plans). Just as NASA doesn't operate the trucks that deliver the chow to Fort Hood mess halls, it's not NASA's job to build and fly the Falcon and Dragon. They just collect the cargo. And that cargo was delivered.

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Volunteerism

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/eon1130pp.html 

Emphasis added.

The school-district leadership finds itself caught between the volunteers and the union, seeking to pacify both parents and the CSEA. Meanwhile, important positions lost to budget cuts that volunteers could handle remain unfilled. Deputy Superintendent Steve Bolman is left to quote from the union contract and labor law: "It's not policy, this is law. [Volunteers] can't do work 'usually, ordinarily or regularly done by classified employees.'" For her part, Kruusmagi sounds a little sketchier on the legalities: "I can't cite the exact thing," she says, "but there are state rules. I believe it's in [education] code that volunteers are not allowed at schools." 

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

How to find the best food

J.,

I think I'm going to try these tips next time I go out. What do you think? Excerpt follows.

At fancy and expensive restaurants (say, $50 and up for a dinner), you can follow a simple procedure to choose the best meal. Look at the menu and ask yourself: Which of these items do I least want to order? Or: Which one sounds the least appetizing? Then order that item.

The logic is simple. At a fancy restaurant, the menu is well thought-out. The kitchen's time and attention are scarce. An item won't be on the menu unless there is a good reason for its presence. If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good.

Many popular-sounding items, on the other hand, can be slightly below the menu's average quality. For instance, you should be careful not to get too enthusiastic about roast chicken, especially if you are in a restaurant that, like virtually all restaurants, does not specialize in roast chicken. Roast chicken is an exceedingly familiar dish, and many people will order it to experience the familiar. Consider the incentive this provides the chef. And consider that a few items may be on the menu specifically because they are generally in demand, not because the chef cooks them with special brilliance.

So order the ugly and order the unknown. You'll probably get a better and more interesting meal.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/six-rules-for-dining-out/8929/ 

-M.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Really fascinating article on statistics

[Cc J.]

D.,

This article on something called "colliders" and selection bias in statistics has fascinating implications. I think the following two paragraphs give the flavor (emphasis added).

Conditioning on a collider can occur any time that there is an underlying selection regime that involves either variables in the dataset or correlates of variables in the dataset. This is almost inevitable if you have built a composite dataset out of multiple constituent datasets. That is, a case appears in the sample if it meets one or more sampling criteria. This is actually a fairly common sample design, usually premised on the idea of not wanting to "miss anything" and/or wanting to increase the sample size. 

Once you start looking for it you see it in a lot of studies. For instance, suppose a researcher were interested in which firms had donated to a particular PAC. The researcher might start with a basic sample like the Fortune 500 but then notice only 5 firms had donated to the PAC. Because statistical power in analysis of a binary variable is a function of both the number of cases (higher is better) and the proportion (close to .5 is better), the analysis would have minimal statistical power. The researcher might then add to the data all firms that donated to the PAC, regardless of whether or not they were in the 500. If the researcher were then to do a logistic regression of donating to the PAC as a function of annual revenues the results would almost inevitably be a strong negative effect. The reason is that inclusion in the sample is defined by high revenues (which is the inclusion criteria for the Fortune 500) OR donating to the PAC. There are firms with low revenues that didn't donate to the PAC, lots of them in fact, but they don't appear in the dataset.

This is definitely something I will keep in mind when reading analyses.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/when-correlation-is-not-causation-but-something-much-more-screwy/256918/ 

-M.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Quick explanation of Bayesian probability (mondo typo fixes)

[Ack. Fixing a ton of horrible typos.]

Okay, I can't resist sharing the formula. The formula is provably rational (and optimal), though the tricky part lies in coming up with probabilities to plug into it.

Notation:

P(x) = probability of x occurring/being true/etc.

P(x|y) = probability of x given y

For example, P(person is male) is about 0.5, but P(person is male | person has deep voice) is high, say 0.995 if one deep-voiced person in two hundred is a woman who smokes or something. Okay, now the way you do Bayesian inference is to take two or more competing hypotheses h1 and h2 to which you have assigned a probability. Then you observe some evidence e and compute P(h1 | e) and P(h2 | e). Since you know that e is true because you observed it, these are the new probabilities you should use for h1 and h2.

There's some simple math involved in proving this next statement, but

                    P(e | h) * P(h)

P(h | e) =  --------------------------

                        P(e)

That is, the probability of h after given e is the probability that h would produce e, weighted by how probable h already was and by the probability that you would have seen e anyway. Surprising evidence carries much more weight than commonplace evidence.

Suppose I am evaluating whether my neighbor is a serial killer. Let's say that I believe, for some reason, that normal people have blood leaking out of their garage very infrequently, 1/10,000 of the time. Serial killers leak blood out of their garage 1/100 of the time. Say I sneak onto his property tonight and look for blood. I will show how I should adjust my beliefs based on whether or not I find blood, and I will show how to do it for two different levels of a priori belief in his serial killer-ness.

CASE 1: I'm 99.9% sure he's not a serial killer.

  P(blood) = 0.999/10,000 + 0.001/100 = 0.0001099 

  P(no blood) = (0.999 * 0.9999) + (0.001 * 0.99) = 0.9998901

  1a. I find no blood. Since even serial killers leak no blood 99% of the time, 

     P(killer | no blood) = (0.99) * (0.001) / 0.9998901 = 0.000990108813

     I didn't really think he was a killer, and I didn't really change my beliefs much by not finding anything.

   1b. I find blood!

     P(killer | blood) = (0.01) * (0.001) / 0.0001099 =  0.0909918107 

     I still don't really think he's a serial killer, but I was surprised to find the blood and I'm probably going to pay close attention to him in the future.

CASE 2: I think it's 50/50 that he might be a serial killer.

  P(blood) =  (0.50 / 10 000) + (0.50 / 100) = 0.00505

  P(no blood) =  (0.50 * 0.9999) + (0.50 * 0.99) = 0.99495 
  2a. I find no blood. Since serial killers leak no blood 99% of the time,

    P(killer | no blood) =  (0.99 * 0.50) / 0.99495 = 0.497512438
    I'm still pretty convinced he might be a serial killer. It's going to take many, many nights of lurking outside his garage to convince me otherwise, but if I only find blood about 1/10,000 of the time, eventually I'll decide he's innocent.
  2b. I find blood!

    P(killer | blood) = (0.01 * 0.50) / 0.00505 =  0.99009901 

    I thought he might be a killer before, and now I'm dead certain.

I want to point out two things here:

1.) Probabilities are subjective, but even if you may not agree with someone about the probability of a hypothesis, you may be able to come to an agreement on how likely some evidence is under that hypothesis (P(e|h)), and thus how strongly to weight the evidence. "I don't think Senator Lugard is corrupt, but I agree that having lunch with that lobbyist all the time is suspicious. If I didn't know him so well personally I'd probably agree with you, but I think he's probably just being naive." If you can't even agree on P(e|h) though there's not much to talk about.

2.) Falsifying a theory quickly requires looking for improbable evidence. Finding no blood never changes belief much in either 1a or 2a. To prove someone (likely) innocent, you need to come up with something that would be very unlikely for a serial killer and see if he has that characteristic, like doing anonymous good deeds. Surprising evidence is what changes minds quickly.

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Quick explanation of Bayesian probability

[Part of a conversation about belief. Related to http://bluishcertainty.blogspot.com/2012/04/on-belief.html but I was talking with J. not D. She said she'd never heard of Bayesian inference. -B.C.]

Okay, I can't resist sharing the formula. The formula is provably rational (and optimal), though the tricky part lies in coming up with probabilities to plug into it.

Notation:

P(x) = probability of x occurring/being true/etc.

P(x|y) = probability of x given y

For example, P(person is male) is about 0.5, but P(person is male | person has deep voice) is high, say 0.995 if one deep-voiced person in two hundred is a woman who smokes or something. Okay, now the way you do Bayesian inference is to take two or more competing hypotheses h1 and h2 to which you have assigned a probability. Then you observe some evidence e and compute P(h1 | e) and P(h2 | e). Since you know that e is true because you observed it, these are the new probabilities you should use for h1 and h2.

There's some simple math involved in proving this next statement, but

                P(e | h) * P(h)

P(h | e) =  ---------------------

                     P(e)

That is, the probability of h after given e is the probability that h would produce e, weighted by how probably h already was and by the probability that you would have seen e anyway. Surprising evidence is carries much more evidence than commonplace evidence.

Suppose I am evaluating whether my neighbor is a serial killer. Let's say that I believe, for some reason, that normal people have blood leaking out of their garage very infrequently, 1/10,000 of the time. Serial killers leak blood out of their garage 1/100 of the time. Say I sneak onto his property tonight and look for blood. I will show how I should adjust my beliefs based on whether or not I find blood, and I will show how to do it for two different levels of a priori belief in his serial killer-ness.

CASE 1: I'm 99.9% sure he's not a serial killer.

  P(blood) = 0.999/10,000 + 0.001/100 = 0.0001099 

  P(no blood) = (0.999 * 0.9999) + (0.001 * 0.99) = 0.9998901

  1a. I find no blood. Since even serial killers leak no blood 99% of the time, 

     P(killer | no blood) = (0.99) * (0.001) / 0.9998901 = 0.000990108813

     I didn't really think he was a killer, and I didn't really change my beliefs much by not finding anything.

   1b. I find blood!

     P(killer | blood) = (0.01) * (0.001) / 0.0001099 =  0.0909918107 

     I still don't really think he's a serial killer, but I was surprised to find the blood and I'm probably going to pay close attention to him in the future.

CASE 2: I think it's 50/50 that he might be a serial killer.

  P(blood) =  (0.50 / 10 000) + (0.50 / 100) = 0.00505

  P(no blood) =  (0.50 * 0.9999) + (0.50 * 0.99) = 0.99495 
  2a. I find no blood. Since serial killers leak no blood 99% of the time,

    P(killer | no blood) =  (0.99 * 0.50) / 0.99495 = 0.497512438
    I'm still pretty convinced he might be a serial killer. It's going to take many, many nights of lurking outside his garage to convince me otherwise, but if I only find blood about 1/10,000 of the time, eventually I'll decide he's innocent.
  2b. I find blood!

    P(killer | blood) = (0.01 * 0.50) / 0.00505 =  0.99009901 

    I thought he might be a killer before, and now I'm dead certain.

I want to point out two things here:

1.) Probabilities are subjective, but even if you may not agree with someone about the probability of a hypothesis, you may be able to come to an agreement on how likely some evidence is under that hypothesis (P(e|h)), and thus how strongly to weight the evidence. "I don't think Senator Lugard is taking corrupt, but I agree that having lunch with that lobbying all the time is suspicious. If I didn't know him so well personally I'd probably agree with you, but I think he's probably just being naive." If you can't even agree on P(e|h) though there's not much to talk about.

2.) Falsifying a theory quickly requires looking for improbable evidence. Finding no blood never changes belief much in either 1a or 2a. To prove someone (likely) innocent, you need to come up with something that would be very unlikely for a serial killer and see if he has that characteristic, like doing anonymous good deeds. Surprising evidence is what changes minds quickly.

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

School innovation

http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/time-will-render-bold-oconomowoc-school-plan-effects-da56n8d-149398195.html 

Faced with a budget crisis, this school is going to: decrease from 75 to 60 teachers, keep class sizes the same, ask teachers to teach more classes, and increase salaries by $14K/yr. The most interesting quote for me was this:

Which gets to another part of the change at Oconomowoc: No one will discuss it openly because of confidentiality rules, but the 15 teachers who have been told they will not be back next year were not picked casually. The old seniority rules are gone under Act 10. A mix of factors, including subject area, was involved, but it is a sure bet that administrators' assessment of quality played a big part. And quality is not something everyone agrees on - more than 2,000 people became "friends" of a Facebook page expressing solidarity with the 15.

We'll see if it works.

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

RE: Dimorphism

(Haha, my coworkers are having a conversation right now about the Matrix. "It's not you bending the spoon, it's the spoon bending you." It has professional relevance to programming, I promise. :))

J.,

About the subject at hand, I want to say first of all that I am asking you because two minds are better than one. I hate trying to reason things out all by my lonesome because there's too much risk I'll overlook something important. Thank you for taking the time to disagree, and thank you for asking questions. I may be wrong about this topic--I frequently am--and I value your opinion.

I'm not sure which question to answer first. Maybe feminism/gender roles? I'm not sure what you mean by "gender roles" actually, but maybe this imaginary story will help: my female counterpart takes up blacksmithing for fun. Some people disapprove and tell her it's not a very "feminine" occupation. She laughs and replies that there's a female doing it, so it's a female occupation now. Then she ignores them and keeps right on doing it.

I don't know about personality being binary, but I think from experience that it's certainly bimodal. In my observation, gender is the single most important independent variable influencing personality. We spend lots of time nowadays looking for subtle DNA effects, genes for autism and schizophrenia and aggression etc., expecting a few accidental base pair changes to make a large difference in behavior. Men have a whole chromosome chock-full of genes that alter behavior and neurology, not to mention millions of years of evolution exerting selective pressure specifically on those genes. It would be crazy to expect all that DNA to have no effect on brains.

That doesn't mean the differences will always be stark, "binary" as you called it. It's generally true that men are taller than women, for example, but some women are taller than most men. Women have extra processes going on in their bodies that make certain kinds of cancer more likely for them, but that doesn't mean there's no pathway which results in men having that same kind of cancer sometimes too. Women have a different neural architecture which seems to increase their ability to process emotion and cognition simultaneously, whereas men have a more serialized architecture and can more easily compartmentalize--but not in all cases. Etc. etc. Trying to understand a cause from its downstream effects is a murky process. I wish I had a better understanding of what the intrinsic differences between masculinity and femininity are, but all I've got is an intuition from personal experiences and lots of reading. (For instance, reading books by women on how to succeed in the male business world. "If you cry in public," she may say, "men will assume you're not thinking rationally." Then she'll cite examples from interviews with men talking about how they perceive displays of emotion, and how they generally shut off their emotions when they need to think. This is interesting because the fact that she bothers to point this out implies that she and her audience function differently.)

I think religion affects my view to a certain extent. In particular, modern revelation from the prophets confirms my intuition that gender is intrinsic and not merely biological--you were female before you ever had a body with X chromosomes in it. (Even though I'm not quite sure what the definition of "female" is.) If it weren't for religion I wouldn't be as sure. 

Finally, to answer your question about feminism: I am grateful for feminism. I may not know exactly what the differences between men and women are, and I may not know exactly how we should treat each other, but I think feminism moved the line closer to the truth. I want my counterpart to have the freedom to blacksmith or run a research lab if she feels like it, and without feminism it would have been a lot harder for her to do that. I don't reject gender roles per se, but I tend to dislike them, and I think the ones we were using in the 50's were wrong and didn't correlate well with reality.

What does it mean to reject gender roles? Do you reject specific gender roles or the validity of the concept of gender? I've done a lot of talking, but I need to hear from you in order to learn.

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Prophets, opinion, revelation

Some good quotes, some of which I have gone hunting for before. I got this from an Internet document that was sitting in my "Downloaded" folder, but I have no idea where it came from. Maybe a friend on Facebook?

Putting it in gmail so it becomes searchable. The Harold B. Lee quote on opinions is one of my favorites.

-Max

Joseph Fielding Smith - It makes no difference what is written or what anyone has said, if what has been said is in conflict with what the Lord has revealed, we can set it aside.  My word, and teachings of any other member of the Church, high or low, if they do not square with the revelations, we need not accept them.  Let us have this matter clear.  We have accepted the four standard works as the measuring yardsticks, or balances, by which we measure every man's doctrine.  You cannot accept the books written by the authorities of the Church as standards of doctrine, only in so far as they accord with revealed word in the standard works.

Every man who writes is responsible, not the Church, for what he writes.  If Joseph Fielding Smith writes something which is out of harmony with the revelations, then every member of the Church is duty bound to reject it.  If he writes that which is in perfect harmony with the revealed word of the Lord, then it should be accepted." (Doctrines of Salvation, v. 3, p.203-204)

Harold B. Lee - If anyone, regardless of his position in the Church, were to advance a doctrine that is not substantiated by the standard Church works, meaning the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price, you may know that his statement is merely his private opinion.  The only one authorized to bring forth any new doctrine is the President of the Church, who, when he does, will declare it as revelation from God, and it will be so accepted by the Council of the Twelve and sustained by the body of the Church.  And if any man speaks a doctrine which contradicts what is in the standard Church works, you may know by that same token that it is false and you are not bound to accept it as truth.  (The Teachings of Harold B. Lee, p. 544)

Harold B. Lee – We can know when a man speaks as a prophet.  Now, when does a person speak as a prophet?  Do you recall that oft-repeated revelation in which the Lord said:     

And, behold, this is an ensample unto all those who were ordained unto this priesthood [and he is talking of General Authorities], whose mission is appointed unto them to go forth-    

They shall speak as they are moved upon by the Holy Ghost.  

And whatsoever they shall speak when moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture, shall be the will of the Lord, shall be the mind of the Lord, shall be the word of the Lord, shall be the voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation.  (D&C 68:2-4.)    

This is so when a General Authority is speaking by the power of the Holy Ghost.  

Someone has rightly said that it is not to be thought that every word spoken by our leaders is inspired.  The Prophet Joseph Smith wrote in his personal diary: "This morning I visited with a brother and sister from Michigan, who thought that 'a prophet is always a prophet'; but I told them that a prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such" (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 278.)    

It is not to be thought that every word spoken by the General Authorities is inspired, or that they are moved upon by the Holy Ghost in everything they write.  I don't care what his position is, if he writes something or speaks something that goes beyond anything that you can find in the standard Church works, unless that one be the prophet, seer, and revelator - please note that one exception - you may immediately say, "Well, that is his own idea."  And if he says something that contradicts what is found in the standard Church works, you may know by that same token that it is false, regardless of the position of the man who says it.  We can know or have the assurance that they are speaking under inspiration if we so live that we can have a witness that what they are speaking is the word of the Lord.  There is only one safety, and that is that we shall live to have the witness to know.  President Brigham Young said something to the effect that "the greatest fear I have is that the people of this church will accept what we say as the will of the Lord without first praying about it and getting the witness within their own hearts that what we say is the word of the Lord" (see Discourses of Brigham Young, p. 135). 

A prophet may not always speak as a prophet.  We had a bishop from down in Florida that had a great problem.  A third of his total ward membership had been trying to buy a large piece of property, twenty-six thousand acres.  They had obligated themselves to a bank and an insurance company and things hadn't gone right, and now the bank and the insurance company were going to foreclose.  The property was worth twice as much as they had borrowed, but somebody had to bail them out.  So this good bishop called the First Presidency's office and said, "I'd like to come to Salt Lake.  I'd like to see if we can do something to save my people."  This good bishop, good old Southerner that he was, came with all the papers.  He just neglected everything else pertaining to his business, because he wanted to save his people.  And so for two hours the First Presidency listened to him, and I sat there and I said, "No, we can't do that.  We can't invest the Lord's money in that property.  It can't be done.  No, I can't see a way out.  We'd get into more trouble."  I could see all these difficulties, and so he was sent on his way back home.  The President of the Church had said no.  But before the next morning came, I knew that the President of the Church hadn't been speaking by the Spirit of the Lord.  And when I met my counselors the next morning I said, "Where's the bishop?" And they said, "Oh, he's left on an early morning plane back home."  And I said, "Well, I've had a complete change.  I've done some praying; I've done some thinking.  We mustn't let that bishop go down there without sending somebody down to see if we can help him.  I don't know whether we can or not, but we can't send him back with just saying, 'No, there's nothing we can do to help you.' We've got to see if there's not some alternatives."  We've had some brethren down there this last week trying to see if we can find a way by which part of the land might be purchased for what is all owing on the balance and save them sixteen thousand acres of their property.  Now, I don't know what they're coming back with, but I knew that I hadn't spoken by the Spirit of the Lord the night before.  But I knew before the next morning what the Lord was trying to say to me.    

Now, do you see the difference of what I'm trying to say to you?  Sometimes we can speak just as a man.  But when we get the Spirit of the Lord we may think differently, and so it's our responsibility when we stand in holy places that we speak by the Spirit of the Lord and make as sure as we possibly can that we're speaking as the Lord directs us to speak. 

Prophets may speak their own opinions at times.  There have been times when even the President of the Church has not been moved upon by the Holy Ghost.  There is, I suppose you'd say, a classic story of Brigham Young in the time when Johnston's army was on the move.  The Saints were all inflamed, and President Young had his feelings whetted to fighting pitch.  He stood up in the morning session of general conference and preached a sermon vibrant with defiance at the approaching army, declaring an intention to oppose them and drive them back.  In the afternoon he rose and said that Brigham Young had been talking in the morning but the Lord was going to talk now.  He then delivered an address the tempo of which was the exact opposite of the morning sermon.  (The Teachings of Harold B. Lee, p. 540-542)

Mark L. McConkie - Thus it is that prophets are entitled to personal opinions just like any other man (Alma 40:20; 1 Corinthians 7:25), and sometimes have differences among themselves.  They even make mistakes (Galatians 2:11).  Orson Hyde, for instance, once preached a sermon that contained some false sentiments.  Joseph Smith was present, and following the meeting said, "I told Elder Hyde that I was going to offer some corrections to his sermon this morning," and, to Elder Hyde's eternal credit, Elder Hyde replied, "They shall be thankfully received."  In the afternoon meeting Joseph spoke and "then corrected Elder Hyde's remarks, the same as I had done to him privately" (Nelson, 1979, p. 215-16).  Similarly, we have in our history an account of Brigham Young preaching something in the morning session of a conference and returning in the afternoon session of the same conference and saying "this morning you heard what Brigham Young thinks about this subject, and now I would like to tell you what the Lord thinks about it."  He then reversed the position he had taken in the morning session (McConkie, 1966a).  (Remembering Joseph, Personal Recollections of Those Who Know the Prophet Joseph Smith, Deseret Book Company, 2003, no pg number available.)

N. Eldon Tanner - I would like to explain to you exactly what took place following the unexpected death of President Harold B. Lee on 26 December 1973. I was in Phoenix, Arizona, to spend Christmas with my daughter and her family, when a call came to me from Arthur Haycock, secretary to President Lee. He said that President Lee was seriously ill, and he thought that I should plan to return home as soon as possible. A half-hour later he called and said: 'The Lord has spoken. President Lee has been called home.'

President Romney, Second Counselor, in my absence was directing the affairs of the Church, and was at the hospital with Spencer W. Kimball, President of the Council of the Twelve. Immediately upon the death of President Lee, President Romney turned to President Kimball and said, 'You are in charge.' Remember, the Prophet Joseph Smith had said that without the President there was no First Presidency over the Twelve.

Not one minute passed between the time President Lee died and the Twelve took over as the presiding authority of the Church.

Following President Lee's funeral, President Kimball called a meeting of all the Apostles for Sunday, December 30, at 3 P.M. in the Salt Lake Temple Council Room. President Romney and I had taken our respective places of seniority in the council, so there were fourteen of us present.

Following a song, and prayer by President Romney, President Kimball, in deep humility, expressed his feelings to us. He said that he had spent Friday in the temple talking to the Lord, and had shed many tears as he prayed for guidance in assuming his new responsibilities and in choosing his counselors.

Dressed in the robes of the holy priesthood, we held a prayer circle; President Kimball asked me to conduct it and Elder Thomas S. Monson to offer the prayer. Following this, President Kimball explained the purpose of the meeting and called on each member of the quorum in order of seniority, starting with Elder Ezra Taft Benson, to express his feelings as to whether the First Presidency should be organized that day or whether we should carry on as the Council of the Twelve. Each said, 'We should organize now,' and many complimentary things were spoken about President Kimball and his work with the Twelve.

Then Elder Ezra Taft Benson nominated Spencer W. Kimball to be the President of the Church. This was seconded by Elder Mark E. Petersen and unanimously approved. President Kimball then nominated N. Eldon Tanner as First Counselor and Marion G. Romney as Second Counselor, each of whom expressed a willingness to accept the position and devote his whole time and energy in serving in that capacity.

They were unanimously approved. Then Elder Mark E. Petersen, second in seniority in the Twelve, nominated Ezra Taft Benson, the senior member of the Twelve, as President of the Quorum of the Twelve. This was unanimously approved.

At this point all the members present laid their hands upon the head of Spencer W. Kimball, and President Ezra Taft Benson was voice in blessing, ordaining, and setting apart Spencer W. Kimball as the twelfth President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Then, with President Kimball as voice, N. Eldon Tanner was set apart as First Counselor and Marion G. Romney as Second Counselor in the First Presidency of the Church. Following the same procedure, he pronounced the blessing and setting apart of Ezra Taft Benson as President of the Quorum of the Twelve." (Ensign, Nov. 1979, p. 43–44, quoted in TLP, 7-5.)

NOTE:  # of counselors in the 1^st Presidency – Besides President Kimball having a 3^rd counselor,  David O McKay had 3 counselors in 1961, 3 again for 1 day in 1965, 4 in 1965-1968 and 5 from 1968-1970.

Joseph Smith had up to 6 counselors at a time.  Brigham Young had 3 in 1866-1873, 8 in 1873-1875 and 7 from 1875-1877.

Also, there were several instances where counselors were not ordained apostles.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Dimorphism

J.,

Because of the whole "gay marriage in Washington" thingie going on, I've been thinking deeply about the meaning of marriage. Can I share my thoughts with you, and maybe get your thoughts in return?

I am pro-marriage-differentiation, i.e. marriage = husband + wife. I do not think men and women are equivalent or interchangeable. People can do what they want but if there's no wife or no husband in it, they need to make up a new word for it. The issue here isn't really about gay marriage at all, per se. It's about role differentiation. The reason I object to "marriage = 1 man + 1 woman" is that it's completely missing the point. A husband isn't just a spouse who happens to be male, he's someone who is responsible for loving, protecting, and providing for his wife and family. A wife isn't just a spouse who happens to be female, she's someone who has primary responsibility for the nurture and education of the family. The roles are different enough to have different names.

My wife will be my partner and my peer. But a large part of my job is to support the family so she has freedom to pursue her dreams, whether it's having a family or running a research lab. We are friends and equals but we are not interchangeable.

I'm grateful to feminism for many things, including the freedoms it has won for women I care about. However, humans are a sexually dimorphic species, and marriage originated in that dimorphism. It's real. Instead of trying to deny the differences, we need to understand them and utilize them.

What do you think?

-M.

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Words

J.,

I read a background piece once which criticized someone (Barack Obama but it doesn't matter) for once responding to someone who said "I love you" with the words "Thank you." Why do people think this is an inappropriate response? "I love you" is an expression of warmth and support. "Thanks" and "I know" are perfectly fine ways of accepting that support.

I don't believe in the words, "I love you too." That's just a way of changing the subject. 

-M.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Skepticism of skepticism

[Cc J. & T.]

D., 

Here's an interesting blog post from a statistician, about skepticism on global warming, and confirmation bias on the skeptics' part. Gelman makes a really good point here that you shouldn't make confident assertions about what the other side is doing unless you really are very in touch with their work.

Recently I was disturbed (but, I'm sorry to say, not surprised) to see Seth post the following:

Predictions of climate models versus reality. I [Seth] have only seen careful prediction-vs-reality comparisons made by AGW [anthropogenic global warming] skeptics. Those who believe humans are dangerously warming the planet appear to be silent on this subject.

In response, Phil commented:

Funny, on the day you [Seth] made your post saying that you haven't seen comparisons between models and predictions except by skeptics, thetop entry on RealClimate, the single most prominent global-warming-related blog that is not run by skeptics, was "Evaluating a 1981 temperature projection."

Pretty amazing, huh? On its face it would seem surprising to claim that the majority of leading climate scientists don't do "careful prediction-vs-reality comparisons," and indeed on the very day of Seth's post, there is such a comparison right there on the first place you might look for what the climate scientists are doing!

How did Seth miss it?

[snip]

I think this is important not only for the followers of Seth Roberts but more generally in that it illustrates the traps that people can fall into when seeking out confirmation of their beliefs. Seth is better-equipped than most people to read about scientific evidence, yet he is stuck, not only in holding a scientific view which I find implausible (after all, I might be wrong) but in not understanding that Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Rein Haarsma, etc etc etc are doing serious science. It's sad, and it's scary. 

His point is well-taken. This mistake is one I am sometimes guilty of, because I am really judgmental and quick to generalize from examples without thinking about how I encountered those examples. Be skeptical of your own skepticism. And then be skeptical of that too.

:)

-M.

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

On belief

D.

I can relate to this statement (from a blog on statistics and inference). I live my life based on strong assumptions, which I try to check and re-check frequently... but I move while I'm checking them.

Sometimes I'm horribly wrong.

-M.

http://andrewgelman.com/2012/04/any-old-map-will-do-meets-god-is-in-every-leaf-of-every-tree/#more-15099 

On the one hand, belief is powerful. By conditioning on assumptions, we can rule out alternatives and move quickly and surely. But belief is risky, especially since all of our beliefs, if stated precisely enough, [are] false. The resolution is that we can use the strength and power of beliefs to better study their limitations.

From a statistical (and philosophy-of-science) perspective, strong assuptions play two roles: First, with strong assumps we can (often) make strong and precise inferences. The likelihood function is a powerful thing. Second, strong assumptions are strongly checkable and falsifiable. We take our models seriously, work with them as if we believe them unquestioningly, then use the leverage from this simulation of belief to check model fit and explore discrepancies between inferences and data.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Cultural sensitivity (story)

[Cc J. as FYI]

D.,

You will find this story amusing. It's embedded in an interesting Greg Cochran blog post about trying to understand the real root causes of homosexuality but I think it stands on its own as well.

-M.

P.S. The comments are worth reading too, for the debate/discussion. 

[Greg Cochran writes] Let me tell you a story.  In certain parts of west Africa,  boys are expected to start menstruating around age 14.  And they do,  sort of:  you  start seeing blood in their urine.  When that happens, there's a big ceremony, everyone says 'today you are a man'.  Whatever.  The thing is, that's about the time they put the boys into the flooded rice fields, where they're exposed to schistosoma haematobium, which causes urinary schistosomiasis.  It's bad for you: it can impair growth and cognitive development in  children, reduces productivity,  and is a potent cause of bladder cancer over the long term.

Our explanation of male menstruation as urinary schistosomiasis must undermine these people's traditional culture. Eliminating schistosomiasis would undermine it even further,  just as the rubella vaccine dealt a heavy blow to deaf culture by cutting the number of congenitally deaf children in half. .

Isn't that just too **** bad.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Pioneer anomaly solved

[Cc J. as FYI]

D.,

It's been known for a long time that the Pioneer spacecraft are slowing more than General Relativity predicts. Some people have wondered if, perhaps, this means that gravity doesn't fall off with distance quite as rapidly as we think it does. (I.e. there may be a linear term as well as a quadratic term.)

Another possibility is that it's caused by the spacecraft design emitting more heat in front than in back, thus creating a tiny bit of excess thrust to the front, and slowing the craft down.

How do you answer a question like this? Well, you could try modeling the spacecraft in detail, and comparing your calculations of its heat radiation to changes in the unexplained deceleration over time. Somebody did this, and it looks like the second alternative (anisotropic heat emission) is probably the cause.

Good science!

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003459/ 

-M.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Reflections on prayer (long)

Dear J.,

Can I share with you a couple of experiences from the Army that made me think? In English not Latin this time. :) Both concern communication between heaven and earth.

The first one is about one of my buddies.

Right after we got to Ft. Benning, we spent about 10 days in a reception battalion, basically doing paperwork and getting issued equipment (and eating chow, and standing in lots of lines all day in order to do all these things). This guy, Private Ontiveros, joined the Army in large part to support his girlfriend and their daughter, in particular so his daughter would have access to medical care through the Army system. However, it turns out that because they're not married, he needed to have a paternity test in order for his daughter to be acknowledged as his by the Army. Fortunately for him, he'd had one done previously for some reason (something about a custody struggle at a point when he and his girlfriend's relationship had been on the rocks) and he just needed his girlfriend to fax the info for him. However, he's been waiting for it for a while and it was almost time for us to ship out downrange and start actual training, and he still didn't have the fax reply. He was quite concerned about it, and the night before we had to leave he approached me privately and asked me to pray on his behalf that the fax would come through. (I did so, silently. "Dear Heavenly Father, I know you're aware of this already and you may already be on it, but would you please help Ontiveros get his daughter's paternity results in time? I would really appreciate it. Thank you. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.") I presume he probably asked the same thing to a few of the other guys who were also Christians. I talked to him the next day, right before we left, and he was really happy. He had been going through the old faxes from the previous week, and a name on one of the faxes happened to catch his eye as being his girlfriend's grandmother's name. It turned out to be the paternity test result fax, and it had actually arrived several days prior, it had just gotten overlooked. Everything turned out okay.

Reflection:

The experience made me think about how what was actually needed to answer Ontiveros' prayer was not to make something *happen* (fax arrive), but to make something *known* (the fax had already arrived), and how that is not that unusual. Many prayers can be answered by inspiration through the Holy Ghost, as I think happened in this case, without doing *anything* with anything made from molecules which a normal person would call a "miracle".

The second experience I want to share is my own.

About a week before HBL (Holiday Block Leave), and the day before we were scheduled to take a PT (Physical Training) test, I got a bad muscle cramp or something in my left calf. I tried stretching it out and drinking water, but the muscle was still knotted up or something several hours later, and in fact it was feeling worse--my tendons felt hyperextended as if I'd been stretching too far for too long and it was getting pretty distracting. I was going to say a quick prayer asking for it to get better quickly, but someone I felt that would be inappropriate. Instead I felt that this was a trial which was supposed to last for a while, and that it would be better to ask for there to be no permanent injury, and for me to endure it well in the meantime. Later that night it was feeling yet worse and I was resting when Private Messmer noticed that my calf was swollen to about twice normal size--so it wasn't just a muscle cramp, there was something going on--which alarmed everyone sufficiently that I had to go to the hospital emergency room to get checked out. (The Army is really concerned with preventing injuries.) Several hours later they had ruled out anything immediately serious, but still didn't know exactly what the problem was. I was issued crutches and told to keep weight off that leg for a few days and to come back for a followup ultrasound on Monday. It is, by the way, extremely annoying to try to function in boot camp while wearing crutches--either you try to carry your own stuff and it's awkward physically, or someone helpfully carries your stuff for you and it's awkward socially. By Tuesday night things hadn't improved noticeably--still couldn't put much weight on the leg without cramping up, still going crazy from residual feelings of hypertension in the tendon--and I was ready to be done with crutches, but the doctors still had no idea what was wrong. After thinking it over, I decided that it no longer felt inappropriate to pray for the injury to get better, and I did[1]. By morning I felt functionally improved to the point where the crutches were more trouble than they were worth--I no longer felt hypertension when standing, could walk unassisted, and could even run for short distances again. The calf was still swollen (even as I write this it's still about 1 cm bigger around than my right calf, although partly maybe that's because of fencing :)) and the doctors still spend a few more days worrying about it, but the real problem was gone.

Reflection:

For me, the interesting part of this experience was what was described in Doctrine and Covenants 46:28-30, being inspired what to pray for and what not to, and also knowing how that prayer would be answered. It's the first time I can remember experiencing anything like that.

"And it shall come to pass that he that asketh in Spirit shall receive in Spirit... He that asketh in the Spirit asketh according to the will of God; wherefore it is done even as he asketh."

-M.

[1] I also felt it was appropriate to ask for a blessing of healing from two guys in my platoon, Private Kelly and Private Allred in my platoon, who I had recently learned were both ordained elders in the priesthood--rather unusual for a military platoon to have three of us there but so it was. We found a handy supply closet and discreetly did the blessing in there just before bedtime.

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
-Jordan Rixon

"They said it couldn't be done, and he did it"

Via LambdaTheUltimate.org, Herb Sutter has some interesting things to say about C's contribution to the modern world of programming:

http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie/

Bjarne Stroustrup made an eloquent point about the importance of Ritchie's contributions to our field:"They said it couldn't be done, and he did it."

Here's what Bjarne meant:

Before C, there was far more hardware diversity than we see in the industry today. Computers proudly sported not just deliciously different and offbeat instruction sets, but varied wildly in almost everything, right down to even things as fundamental as character bit widths (8 bits per byte doesn't suit you? how about 9? or 7? or how about sometimes 6 and sometimes 12?) and memory addressing (don't like 16-bit pointers? how about 18-bit pointers, and oh by the way those aren't pointers to bytes, they're pointers to words?).

There was no such thing as a general-purpose program that was both portable across a variety of hardware and also efficient enough to compete with custom code written for just that hardware. Fortran did okay for array-oriented number-crunching code, but nobody could do it for general-purpose code such as what you'd use to build just about anything down to, oh, say, an operating system.

So this young upstart whippersnapper comes along and decides to try to specify a language that will let people write programs that are: (a) high-level, with structures and functions; (b) portable to just about any kind of hardware; and (c) efficient on that hardware so that they're competitive with handcrafted nonportable custom assembler code on that hardware. A high-level, portable, efficient systems programming language.

How silly. Everyone knew it couldn't be done.

C is a poster child for why it's essential to keep those people who know a thing can't be done from bothering the people who are doing it. (And keep them out of the way while the same inventors, being anything but lazy and always in search of new problems to conquer, go on to use the world's first portable and efficient programming language to build the world's first portable operating system, not knowing that was impossible too.)

Thanks, Dennis.

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon