1. Temperature increases have been concentrated in the interiors of Asia and North America in winter. This is significant, because if increased carbon dioxide is the cause, warming would be strongest where there is the least water vapor– interior land masses with cold dry air. That’s a lot stronger evidence than just the correlation with increased CO2 levels. (Has anyone applied sophisticated time series techniques to that correlation, by the way? Maybe non-economists don’t know those techniques.)

2. There is some possibility of a catastrophic cycle of increased warming, turning the Earth into another Venus. Posner has emphasized this, I hear, in his book. That is much more serious than a few degrees of extra heat, even if less probable.

That these two things get so little play makes me wonder about the judgement of the pro-action people. But it means they may be even more correct than they think, too.

1. On your curriculum vitae (resume), put somewhere “A recording of me speaking English is available at http:/www.iu.edu/jkjkjk.mp3, and a movie of me teaching is available at http:/www.iu.edu/jkjkjk.mov.”

You might want to omit the movie, but for a foreign student the recording is crucial. Think of it this way. For Korean students, the employer’s prior is that the job applicant can’t speak English well enough to be worth looking at seriously. You need to provide information to possibly change that belief.

Advisors’ letters are information, but extremely poor information, and unless your advisor can truthfully put you in the top 5% in terms of English-speaking ability, his letter won’t help. (If he lies, and you are only top 10%, not 5%, in English, then when the employer finds out, your advisor won’t be believed on anything else either and you’ll lose your research credibility.)

To be sure, your web recording will show that you have a heavy accent. But that won’t change your employer’s belief– that’s his prior anyway. Without the recording, you have zero chance of being interviewed in person; with the recording, you have a positive chance. The employer may decide, “Yes, he speaks English poorly, but he’s not as bad as I thought he might be, and it’s hard to find good applicants, so let’s try him out.”

You will have changed the employer’s belief in two ways. First, you may be able to increase the expected value of his belief as to your ability. Second, even if you actually reduce the expected value because you speak English poorly even for a Korean, you will still have reduced the variance of his belief. He will at least learn that you are not in the bottom 10%, and that may be enough for him to be willing to interview you.

2. Include your photo on your vitae, first page. That will help readers spot which is yours in a big pile and help them connect vitae to you around interview time.

3. Include the websites of your thesis committee, so employers who become seriously interested can check out members they haven’t heard of.

4. Do include the fact that you were invited to give papers at conferences, but don’t give that a lot of space. Don’t bother to include the titles of the papers, for instance.

“I have been invited to present papers at The Fourth Annual Corporate Reporting & Governance Conference/ The Sixth Annual SEC Financial Reporting Conference, Irvine, California (September 2007), The VII International Finance Conference, Monterrey, México (September (2007), and The International City Break Conference on Business and Economic Research, Athens, Greece (October 2007).”

5. Put the list of committee members on the first page, but don’t put the addresses till the last page. You need to save space on the first page for the titles of your thesis papers. Keep in mind that most readers will throw away your vitae before reading the second page.

It is okay to repeat information. You can have a long vitae with lots of junk on it, so long as the first page contains everything that really matters. Imagine your readers has having a stack of 200 vitaes and one hour in which to select the best 20.

6. If you have done lots of teaching, list it all but at the start give a summary such as “I have taught 5 sections as a principal instructor and 4 sections as a teaching assistant over the past 3 years.” Get that statement on the first page of the vitae.

Back when Tim and I had four or five children, all elementary school or younger, life seemed pretty easy. Like many earnest young Christian parents, we’d worked hard at intentional parenting and now we had these generally well-behaved, delightful children. We were fooled into thinking that we had something to do with the fact. I’m embarrassed to say, Tim and I were cheeky enough to feel that we knew how this parenting thing ought to be done, and we were happy to share our “wisdom” with anyone who wasn’t quite so far along as we were.

In reality, we were arrogant fools.

Well, God had some work to do in humbling us, and he proceeded to do it in the subsequent years. Our next babies (all equally delightful to the first four) began coming in rapid succession. Life with six and seven children was more difficult, and our “control” began slipping. By baby number eight things were even more challenging and then baby number nine, born prematurely following a difficult pregnancy, threw us over the edge. Any illusions we’d had about being able to handle this parenting thing on our own were gone as we daily cried out to God for His strength, mercy and wisdom to raise our children. …

A second thing changed as our family grew in both size and age: we began to see more of the complexity of parenting children with different personalities and needs, varying strengths and weaknesses, over different ages and stages. In retrospect we can see how gentle the Lord was with us in our early years. Our first several children were for the most part quickly obedient, though of course there were testing moments with each of them. Many of our later children have, well, been more challenging. We’ve had a chronic biter, an ultra-low sleep need child, and a preschooler who would tell us that she hated God. To top it off, sometimes the very things that had worked with the earlier children were not working with the younger ones. What were we to do?

]]> http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/08/18/1745/feed/ 0 http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/08/02/nazi-refusal-to-face-reality/ http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/08/02/nazi-refusal-to-face-reality/#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:42:01 +0000 admin http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/08/02/nazi-refusal-to-face-reality/

Maybe I will write a book inspired by reading Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich and by fussing with MS Windows, a book about leaders with giant blind spots. Speer’s book is very good on the principal-agent problem and how to manage organizations.

Windows is awesomely bad. How can as big a company as Microsoft do things so poorly? I do not mean that rhetorically. Rather, why don’t they spend a little more money and make a far better product, for which they could charge more? I suppose Bill Gates must be blamed– he controls the company, and he must not have a good feel for technology and so doesn’t understand why good design matters. There is not market corrective for the problem of a monopolistic leader who fails to see something imoprtant. This matters for policy purposes, because such incompetence only survives because of a government-granted monopoly— copyright and patent on software.

Here’s an example, which I’ll list so I can use it as a standard reference. What matters is not that this is so important to operation, as that it shows such incompetence in design.

I want to cancel all my print jobs, because one job is jamming the printer for some reason. Windows has a window that shows print jobs and supposedly allows the user to cancel any one of them, but as often as not, that command is ignored by the computer. Probably that’s incompetent design too, but let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt– maybe there is some technical reason why some print jobs can’t be cancelled without restarting the machine. So I went to the Web.

It turns out that there is a command line command to cancel print jobs: prnjobs -x. This is put onto one web page with various other commands.

Point one: Microsoft hides many of Windows features in command-line commands that go unmentioned in its standard documentation. It would be easy enough to link them to the standard help, but MS doesn’t.

Point two: Instead of using HTML properly, MS slaps together a bunch of commands onto one web page just like a computer manual, except without professional typesetting layout.

There seems to be no way to cancel all jobs at once, though. The MS documentation instead says that the user must first find the job id of each print job that is to be cancelled, using a separate command, prnjobs -l.

Point three: There ought to be a command to cancel all jobs at once.

The prnjobs -l command fails, though. It turns out that you have to take the comamnd-line window to a special directory for the command to work, though the MS documentation doesn’t tell you that.

It’s important to understand that running the printer utilities can be a bit tricky due to the terse rules governing command line scripts. Techrepublic, having billions of dollars less than Microsoft, but billions of brains more, tell us this:

It’s important to understand that running the printer utilities can be a bit tricky due to the terse rules governing command line scripts.

To begin with, the six printer utilities are located in the systemroot\system32 folder, which on most Windows XP installations is C:\Windows\System32. Now, even though this folder is listed in the path by default, you must actually change to this folder in order to run the utilities. And, since these utilities are designed to run from the command line, you’ll need to launch them from a command prompt, and you must run them using Windows Script Host’s command line script host (Cscript.exe).

Point four: Windows only lets the command be issued after moving to a particular directory.

Even Techrepublic fails to note another problem: the actual command is not prnjobs, but prnjobs.vbs. Prnjobs by itself fails. You need to issue

c:/windows/system32/cscript prnjobs.vbs -l

c:/windows/system32/cscript prnjobs.vbs -x 4

(if 4 turns out to be the job number)

Point six: The MS documentation gives the wrong command in all its examples.

Point seven: Windows requires the suffix *.vbs, for no good reason.

I should mention, too, that cut-and-paste doesn’t work in the DOS-style command-line window, even though practically always when I use it, I am typing in commands that need to be typed verbatim from some other source.

Point eight: Windows blocks cut-and-paste into the DOS-style command-line window.

And also: if you make a mistake,although a window comes up to tell you, you can’t simultaneously look at the help window for what to do and do it– you have to close the window first. (And remember–no cutting and pasting allowed!)

Point nine: Help windows must be closed before you can use them. You presumed to have a photographic memory.

Finally, the command doesn’t work. We’re back to where we started.

I succeeded eventually. Disconnecting the printer’s power and USB failed to work. But I tried deleting some plausible processes in the Windows Task Manager and got the job deleted (I also deleted the printer’s operating process too, and had to get it started up again, though.)
]]> http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/07/31/an-extended-example-of-microsoft-windows-incompetence-printing-deletion/feed/ 2 http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/07/15/wesley-on-involuntary-sin-and-condemnation/ http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/07/15/wesley-on-involuntary-sin-and-condemnation/#comments Sun, 15 Jul 2007 14:11:32 +0000 admin http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/07/15/wesley-on-involuntary-sin-and-condemnation/

For my small group at church, we are reading a Richard Foster book of excerpts. One (which by the way Foster rearranges without telling us) is excerpts from John Wesley’s sermon, THE FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT. It is a sermon worth pondering, on the topic of the effect of a Christian’s sins. His past sins are imputed to Christ and bear no condemnation, all agree. But what about present sins? And what about self-condemnation?

One thing I realized from this sermon is that when people talk of Wesleyan “perfectionism” as the idea that a Christian can avoid all sin, that can perhaps be true if “sin” is defined, as Wesley does below, to exclude inward and “involuntary” sin. It is a lax standard.

I will comment in between excerpts.

“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” Rom. 8:1 [+/-]Romans 8:1 [8:1]There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. (ESV)
…

3. They who are of Christ, who abide in him, “have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts.” They abstain from all those works of the flesh ; from “adultery and fornication”; from “uncleanness and lasciviousness”; from “idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance “; from “emulations, wrath, strife, sedition, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings”; from every design, and word, and work, to which the corruption of nature leads. Although they feel the root of bitterness in themselves, yet are they endued with power from on high to trample it continually under foot, so that it cannot “spring up to trouble them”; insomuch that every fresh assault which they undergo, only gives them fresh occasion of praise, of crying out, “Thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord.”…

Here, Wesley is excluding almost everybody from being “in Jesus Christ”. That is wrong. Many who are saved– all, I would say, still succumb to sin.

And, first, to believers in Christ, walking thus, “there is no condemnation” on account of their past sins. God condemneth them not for any of these; they are as though they had never been; they are cast “as a stone into the depth of the sea,” and he remembereth them no more. God, having “set forth his Son to be a propitiation “for them, “through faith in his blood,” hath declared unto them “His righteousness for the remission of the sins that are past.” he layeth therefore none of these to their charge; their memorial is perished with them.

2. And there is no condemnation in their own breast; no sense of guilt, or dread of the wrath of God. They “have the witness in themselves:” they are conscious of their interest in the blood of sprinkling….

This is orthodox.

3. If it be said, “But sometimes a believer in Christ may lose his sight of the mercy of God; sometimes such darkness may fall upon him that he no longer sees him that is invisible, no longer feels that witness in himself of his part in the atoning blood; and then he is inwardly condemned, he hath again “the sentence of death in himself” ‘: I answer, supposing it so to be, supposing him not to see the mercy of God, then he is not a believer: For faith implies light, the light of God shining upon the soul. So far, therefore, as any one loses this light, he, for the time, loses his faith.

…

Point 3 is contrary to 5-Point Calvinism but it is correct that to the extent that a person feels condemned, he does not have faith. I’d still call him a believer, but not a perfect believer.

4. They are not condemned, secondly, for any present sins, for now transgressing the commandments of God. For they do not transgress them: they do not “walk after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” This is the continual proof of their “love of God, that they keep his commandments”; even as St. John bears witness. “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin. For his seed remaineth in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God:” he cannot, so long as that seed of God, that loving, holy faith remaineth in him. So long as “he keepeth himself” herein, “that wicked one toucheth him not.”…

Wrong. Believers do sin presently, all the time. But the Cross propitiates for all sins, regardless of temporal position.

5. They are not condemned, thirdly, for inward sin, even though it does now remain. That the corruption of nature does still remain, even in those who are the children of God by faith; that they have in them the seeds of pride and vanity, of anger, lust, and evil desire, yea, sin of every kind; is too plain to be denied, being matter of daily experience….

Here, we see the standard relax remarkably. What about adultery in one’s heart?

6. And yet, for all this, they are not condemned. Although they feel the flesh, the evil nature, in them; although they are more sensible, day by day, that their “heart is deceitful and desperately wicked”; yet, so long as they do not yield thereto; so long as they give no place to the devil; so long as they maintain a continual war with all sin, with pride, anger, desire, so that the flesh hath not dominion over them, but they still “walk after the Spirit”; ” there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.” God is well pleased with their sincere, though imperfect. obedience; and they “have confidence toward God,” knowing they are his, “by the Spirit which he hath given” them. (1 John 3:24 [+/-]1 John 3:24 [24]Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us. (ESV)
).

True, God is pleased with their imperfect obedience, but so he is in the same way with imperfect outward obedience.

7. Nay, fourthly, although they are continually convinced of sin cleaving to all they do; although they are conscious of not fulfilling the perfect law, either in their thoughts, or words, or works; although they know they do not love the Lord their God with all their heart, and mind, and soul, and strength; although they feel more or less of pride, or self-will, stealing in, and mixing with their best duties; although even in their more immediate intercourse with God, when they assemble themselves with the great congregation, and when they pour out their souls in secret to him who seeth all the thoughts and intents of the heart, they are continually ashamed of their wandering thoughts, or of the deadness and dulness of their affections; yet there is no condemnation to them still, either from God or from their own heart. The consideration of these manifold defects only gives them a deeper sense, that they have always need of that blood of sprinkling which speaks for them in the ears of God, and that Advocate with the Father “who ever liveth to make intercession for them.” So far are these from driving them away from him in whom they have believed, that they rather drive them the closer to him whom they feel the want of every moment. …

Point 7 has a lot in it. The believer is ashamed, but does not feel condemned. That seems right to me. He is disappointed that he has displeased God, but not because he fears punishment. And it is a very good point that this kind of sin drives us closer to God, not further away.

8. They are not condemned, fifthly, for sins of infirmity … by sins of infirmity I would mean, such involuntary failings as the saying a thing we believe true, though, in fact, it prove to be false; or, the hurting our neighbor without knowing or designing it, perhaps when we designed to do him good. Though these are deviations from the holy, and acceptable, and perfect will of God , yet they are not properly sins, nor do they bring any guilt on the conscience of “them which are in Christ Jesus.” They separate not between God and them, neither intercept the light of his countenance; as being no ways inconsistent with their general character of “walking not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

I’m not so sure of that. When I kill someone accidentally, I have done wrong, even though with no ill intent. It is a bad thing. And I often would rather deal with a competent sinner than with an incompetent Christian— the Christian will do me more harm, even if not intentionally.

9. Lastly. “There is no condemnation “to them for anything whatever which it is not in their power to help; whether it be of an inward or outward nature, and whether it be doing something or leaving something undone. For instance, the Lord’s Supper is to be administered; but you do not partake thereof. Why do you not? You are confined by sickness; therefore, you cannot help omitting it; and for the same reason you are not condemned. There is no guilt, because there is no choice. As there “is a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, not according to that he hath not.”

10. A believer, indeed, may sometimes be _grieved_: because he cannot do what his soul longs for. He may cry out, when he is detained from worshipping God in the great congregation, “Like as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God: When shall I come to appear in the presence of God?” he may earnestly desire (only still saying in his heart, “Not as I will, but as thou wilt”) to “go again with the multitude, and bring them forth into the house of God.” But still, if he cannot go, he feels no condemnation, no guilt, no sense of God’s displeasure….

What of people who cannot keep themselves from stealing or murdering? There is a fine line to be found here, and Wesley does not help us to find it.

11. It is more difficult to determine concerning those which are usually styled sins of surprise: as when one who commonly in patience possesses his soul, on a sudden and violent temptation, speaks or acts in a manner not consistent with the royal law, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Perhaps it is not easy to fix a general rule concerning transgressions of this nature. We cannot say, either that men are, or that they are not, condemned for sins of surprise in general: but it seems, whenever a believer is by surprise overtaken in a fault, there is more or less condemnation, as there is more or less concurrence of his will. ….

Weakness of will is in itself a sin.

13. On the other hand, there may be sudden assaults, either from the world, or the god of this world, and frequently from our own evil hearts, which we did not, and hardly could, foresee. And by these even a believer, while weak in faith, may possibly be borne down, suppose into a degree of anger, or thinking evil of another, with scarce any concurrence of his will. Now in such a case, the jealous God would undoubtedly show him that he had done foolishly. He would be convinced of having swerved from the perfect law, from the mind which was in Christ, and consequently, _grieved_ with a godly sorrow, and lovingly _ashamed_ before God. Yet need he not come into condemnation. God layeth not folly to his charge, but hath compassion upon him, “even as a father pitieth his own children.” …

Look back to point 7. How does this dffer from intentional sin?

The first edition of a work would have been more precious to me than the others but I should have understood by the first edition the one I read for the first time. I should seek original editions but by that I should mean books from which I got an original impression. For the impressions that follow are no longer original. I should collect the bindings of novels of former days, but they would be the days when I read my first novels, the days when my father repeated so often “Sit up straight”.

Like the dress in which we have seen a woman for the first time, they could help me to recover my love of then, the beauty which I had supplanted by so many images, ever less loved; in order to find it again, I who am no longer the self who felt it, must give place to the self I then was in order that he shall recall what he alone knew, what the self of to-day does not know. The library which I should thus collect would have a greater value still, for the books I read formerly at Combray, at Venice, enriched now by memory with spacious illuminations representing the church of Saint-Hilaire, the gondola moored at the foot of San Giorgio Maggiore on the Grand Canal incrusted with flashing sapphires, would have become worthy of those medallioned scrolls and historic bibles which the collector never opens in order to read the text but only to be again enchanted by the colours with which some competitor of Fouquet has embellished them and which constitute all the value of the work. And yet to open those books read formerly only to look at the images which did not then adorn them would seem to me so dangerous that even in that sense, the only one I understand, I should not be tempted to become a bibliophile. I know too well how easily the images left by the mind are effaced by the mind. It replaces the old ones by new which have not the same power of resurrection. And if I still had the _Fran?ois le Champi_ which my mother selected one day from the parcel of books my grandmother was to give me for my birthday, I would never look at it; I should be too much afraid that, little by little, my impressions of to-day would insert themselves in it and blot out the earlier ones, I should be too fearful of its becoming so much a thing of the present that when I asked it to evoke again the child who spelt out its title in the little room at Combray, that child, unable to recognise its speech, would no longer respond to my appeal and would be for ever buried in oblivion.

Colin Bird asked what I thought about Hayek’s view of economic methodology, in particular, about his criticism of it in his 1937 Economica article. I might not be understanding it fully, but my impression is that what he doesn’t like about the economic theory of his day is that it:

1. Ignores the fact that people are imperfectly informed and differently informed about prices, products, and methods;

2. Ignores the interesting question of how people become informed;

3. Makes policy conclusions on the basis of theories deficient in their treatment of information (i.e., from points 1 and 2).

This is clearest in his 1945 AER article, the most famous one, which is mostly about the role of prices rather than methodology:

I fear that our theoretical habits of approaching the problem with the assumption of more or less perfect knowledge on the part of almost everyone has made us somewhat blind to the true function of the price mechanism and led us to apply rather misleading standards in judging its efficiency. The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or “normal” level….

…there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man’s knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired. Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people’s knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleads some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is time that we remember that it does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem. (The Use of Knowledge in Society F. A. Hayek The American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 4. (Sep., 1945), pp. 519-530.)

Hayek’s 1937 article in Economica, also well-known, is mainly about method.

I am certain there are many who regard with impatience and distrust the whole tendency, which is inherent in all modern equilibrium analysis, to turn economics into a branch of pure logic, a set of self-evident propositions which, like mathematics or geometry, are subject to no other test but internal consistency. But it seems that if only this process is carried far enough it carries its own remedy with it. In distilling from our reasoning about the facts of economic life those parts which are truly a prior;, we not only isolate one element of our reasoning as a sort of Pure Logic of Choice in all its purity, but we also isolate, and emphasise the importance of, another element which has been too much neglected. My criticism of the recent tendencies to make economic theory more and more formal is not that they have gone too far, but that they have not yet been carried far enough to complete the isolation of this branch of logic and to restore to its rightful place the investigation of causal processes, using formal economic theory as a tool in the same way as mathematics…. (Economics and Knowledge F. A. von Hayek Economica, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 13. (Feb., 1937), pp. 33-54.)

I see this as saying that he does not object to rigorous theory, but one of its advantages is that a tight, ceteris paribus theory highlights its own flaws, by making it clear if something importan– information, in this case— is omitted.

He says that:

…price expectations and even the knowledge of current prices are only a very small section of the problem of knowledge as I see it. The wider aspect of the problem of knowledge with which I am concerned is the knowledge of the basic fact of how the different commodities can be obtained and used,l and under what conditions they are actually obtained and used,…

…economics has come nearer than any other social science to an answer to that central question of all I social sciences, how the combination of fragments of now- ledge existing in different minds can bring about results which, if they were to be brought about deliberately, would require a knowledge on the part of the directing mind which no single person can possess. To show that in this sense the spontaneous actions of individuals will under conditions which we can define bring about a distribution of resources which can be understood as if it were made according to a single plan, although nobody has planned it, seems to me indeed an answer to the problem which has sometimes been metaphorically described as that of the ” social mind “.

At one point, though, he does seem to be attacking modelling, and attacking it simplistically:

The device generally adopted for this purpose is the assumption of a perfect market where every event becomes known instantaneously to every member. I t is necessary to remember here that the perfect market which is required to satisfy the assumptions of equilibrium analysis must not be confined to the markets of all the individual commodities ; the whole economic system must be assumed to be one perfect market in which everybody knows everything. The assumption of a perfect market then means nothing less than that all the members of the community, even if they are not supposed to be strictly omniscient, are at least supposed to know automatically all that is relevant for their decisions….

I wonder whether he really means that, since surely he knows that perfect information can be made as a simplifying assumption, not as a substantive assumption. If people’s info is a little imperfect, it does not change the conclusions of the perfectly competitive models to any important degree.

I think Hayek would be quite happy with the direction economics has taken. The economics of knowledge is a huge part of the theory by now– both of the effects of imperfect information, and teh process of information acquisition.

The similarities between modern evangelicalism and liberalism are striking. Both emphasize an experience with Christ over the truth about Christ. Throughout history, some of course have made the opposite error, that of holding to bare propositions instead of holding rightly to the truth — but in our century few have gone in that direction. Our tendency is to exalt personal experience over dogma. Indeed, I at first hesitated to use the word dogma because in today’s climate, it is a dirty word. Taking all this together, I like to tell people that Christianity is not a relationship; it is a religion. Of course it is a religion with a covenant relationship at the heart of it. God promises to be our God, and we will be His people. But the liberal (and modern evangelical) emphasis is on what we are pleased to call a personal relationship (meaning private relationship) — and not the biblical notion of a public covenant relationship. When the relationship becomes “personal,” the truth that undergirds it becomes equally “personal.”

Second, both liberalism and modern evangelicalism seek to accommodate unbelieving culture. The only real difference here is that liberals pursued high culture, while the modern evangelicals pursue low culture. The result of this is that the liberals maintained what we might call residual standards longer. The modern evangelical pursuit of unbelieving low culture includes the pragmatism of church growth techniques and the slavish imitation of pop culture in worship. Those who desire another example need only wait a few months.

Third, both liberalism and modern evangelicalism utilize the ecclesiastical equivalent of Lenin’s useful idiots. When the modernists captured the current backwater Presbyterian church, that church was still overwhelmingly dominated by conservative evangelicals. They wouldn’t fight, but they had conservative evangelical hearts. Both heresies effectively use those who personally hold to the truth, but who for various reasons tolerate those who do not hold to it.

Both have highly-developed social agendas which are divorced from the Bible….

Here’s what he should have said to defend his position, an argument harder to attack. (I cross post this as a comment on Wilson’s blog, BLog and Mablog)

“Human morality is the result of evolution. We all share brain wiring that makes us feel guilty when we murder our fathers, steal from our sisters, and lie out of pure malice. Therefore, a human is well advised not to do these things. That is why I call them immoral. Also, our wiring makes us feel happy in condemning them, so I do.

I admit that our hard-wired morality won’t take us as far as I’d like. I can’t really say that infanticide or genocide are wrong, because too many people do these things without guilt, if the context is right. Our innate morality is designed for small groups of hunter-gatherers. But on top of that, we have the norms of our society, and the laws. My parents taught me to feel guilty if I stole even from strangers, plus I might get caught, so I don’t do it. Someone from India might well disagree, but I will cheerfully stand by my society’s principles and condemn him to other people in my society, at least. That’s fine for keeping me happy, even if it’s not universal.”

That argument require admissions of relativism and lack of personal autonomy, but it’s an argument, which Hitchens didn’t have. Also, I’m afraid that it does cause a collapse of the silly side Hitchens is defending in the debate, that Christianity has been bad for the world. A lot of his morality is society-linked, not universally human. His problem is that as a moralistic atheist, he really ought to concede that Christianity is a huge influence on his personal notion of morality and that Christianity’s influence is why he prefers the moral climate in England to that Iraq or India. His preferences (as I imagine they are) for things like equality, truth, respect for human life, and democracy are not universal.

I don’t think the big issue here is really the ordination of women. I would not find the document appalling if it said, “There would be more talent in the ministry if we ordained women, so I think we ought to change the rules and allow it.” I don’t agree with that myself, but I think it’s an open question, much like that of ordaining people without seminary training. But that’s not the Denver attitude. Here’s an excerpt that illustrates it.

These younger generations of PCA leaders and laypeople are not taking issue with the theology of the PCA as much as the culture of the PCA that goes beyond restricting women from holding church office to limiting a woman’s ability to use her spiritual gifts meaningfully in any way that even appears to be usurping male leadership.

One serious consequence of this is that the vast majority of PCA churches continue to be populated almost exclusively by politically conservative Anglos. Minorities and political liberals are noticeably absent. This is unfortunate, not only because a great many non-whites and political liberals need to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but also because there is a growing number of evangelical Christians who are politically moderate-to-liberal and are finding it increasingly difficult to find a church where they “fit.” Though the majority of these people would consider themselves egalitarians, most of them are not particularly interested in fighting over women’s ordination so long as the gifts and calling of women are taken seriously in the church and women are given meaningful opportunities to use their spiritual gifts….

…the culture of downtown Denver is very politically and socially liberal (as are the vast majority of U.S. cities. ) An additional factor that makes Denver hostile to “conservative” religion is its close proximity to Colorado Springs, which is home to many of the leading organizations and ministries on the Religious Right such as Focus on the Family. (A bumper sticker once popular around Denver read “Focus on your own damn family!”) This creates a very polarized environment and generates an extraordinary amount of skepticism and cynicism toward any church that would adhere to orthodox, theologically conservative Christianity. In other words, the demographic of downtown Denver is not at all conducive to planting a typical PCA church….

As we began to consider what job title to give Sara (obviously she was not going to be ordained as an Assistant or Associate Pastor) we realized we had a unique opportunity to reach out to our skeptical, liberal and egalitarian community by giving Sara a job title that was an accurate reflection of her responsibilities and was culturally appropriate to our context. Thus we gave her the title “Minister of Church Life.”…

The response to Sara’s title within our congregation was overwhelmingly positive. Those who considered themselves egalitarian saw this as evidence that we were “putting our money where out mouths were” and not treating Sara as a second-class staff member, even though she obviously was not going to be ordained. Furthermore, a number of women (and men) who were sitting on the fence about committing to our church made the decision to formally join. Also, visitors who were not from evangelical backgrounds reported that Sara’s title and position reassured them we were not a “narrow minded, fundamentalist church” despite being part of a conservative denomination. (One woman who was converted recently within our church reported that Sara’s position and role eliminated a significant barrier for her to the gospel.) In other words, we have effectively disarmed the women’s issue in our church, so much so in fact that no groups within the church are even discussing it, much less fighting over it.

I see three bad ideas here.

1. The beliefs of the Church ought to reflect the beliefs of the World–or at least each congregation should reflect the beliefs of the bit of the world in its locality. It is important to make unbelievers happy by moving closer to their positions on some issues.

2. If you are ashamed of one of your doctrines, the proper thing is to pretend to adhere to it while minimizing its importance and moving it out of public view. A church could pretend not to have women in leadership by not allowing them to be “elders” while delegating to them most or all decisions.

3. Ordinary people cannot be first-class Christians– the clergy are special. This is a Roman Catholic idea. Here, it takes the form of saying that we do not want to be “limiting a woman’s ability to use her spiritual gifts meaningfully”. She couldn’t use them outside of the formal church structure, it seems. Elsewhere in the document, we see that City Presbyterian calls its ordained staff “Reverend”, which means “to be revered”. There is also a hint of the idea that even if someone is not a priest, he is in better shape if he at least. In the present context, women are elevated if some woman is a priest, as their class representative before God.

The document also has a lot of silly talk about how to succeed as a city church. I know of a number of conservative central city churches that do quite well without the compromising attitude: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Manhattan, Christ the King Presbyterian Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Moody Church near Lincoln Park, Chicago. and Grace Presbyterian (Glenn Hoburg) in Washington, D.C.

      Ultimately, the Court admits that “moral concerns” are at work, concerns that could yield prohibitions on any abortion. See ante, at 28 (“Congress could … conclude that the type of abortion proscribed by the Act requires specific regulation because it implicates additional ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition.”). Notably, the concerns expressed are untethered to any ground genuinely serving the Government’s interest in preserving life. By allowing such concerns to carry the day and case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our precedent. See, e.g., Casey, 505 U. S., at 850 (“Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that cannot control our decision. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558, 571 (2003) (Though “[f]or many persons [objections to homosexual conduct] are not trivial concerns but profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles,” the power of the State may not be used “to enforce these views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law.” (citing Casey, 505 U. S., at 850)).

“Ethical and moral concerns” are seen as trivial and completely different from “interest in preserving life” or “fundamental rights”. But what justifies calling preserving life a fundamental right? That is perhaps the liberal’s first principle— dishonor before death, bondage before death, anything before death— but how is this different from a moral concern? The liberal’s priority in moral concerns is simply different from humanity’s usual ones.

But I’m on shaky ground here. Of course, we know from the abortion cases that the life of a viable fetus is trivial in the eyes of liberal judges, not worth a few days’ inconvenience to the mother. This is in sharp contrast with how the life of a sick old drug addict would be more highly valued than the the tens of thousands of dollars an insurance company would have to spend to preserve it. But I don’t have time to delve deeper into what could resolve this difference. I don’t think it’s mere inconsistency– I think there may be something deeper as a principle, something involving a person’s right to do things to reduce the risk of death.

There is an old Jewish joke: During Yom Kippur, the rabbi is seized by a sudden wave of guilt, and prostrates himself and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” The cantor is likewise seized by guilt, and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” Seeing this, the janitor at the back of the synagogue prostrates himself and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” And the rabbi nudges the cantor and whispers, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.”

Take no pride in your confession that you too are biased; do not glory in your self-awareness of your flaws… [W]e should not gloat over how self-aware we are for confessing them; the occasion for rejoicing is when we have a little less to confess….

Never confess to me that you are just as flawed as I am unless you can tell me what you plan to do about it. Afterward you will still have plenty of flaws left, but that’s not the point; the important thing is to do better, to keep moving ahead, to take one more step forward.

The first answer was to do an experiment, having some people drink
wine and some not and seeing what happens. That was a good answer.

I went on to ask what I should do if I didn’t have enough money to do
a large-sample experiment changing people’s behavior and all I
could do was to use a survey to
ask them about their normal behavior. The answer was that I could
see if drinking was associated with heart attacks.

My next question was about a problem with the survey approach. Maybe
rich people drink more wine and have fewer heart attacks, but it’s
because they are rich, not because wine reduces heart attacks. How
could I deal with that problem?

After some thought, a student suggested that I could construct my
sample so I had equal numbers of rich and poor people, and another
suggested that I could look at the two groups separately. I said that
medical studies often were of only men or only women for the same sort
of reason, but that income was hard to deal with because it varies
continuously from low to high, not as a binary variable. I asked them
to keep thinking, and I used words such as “correlation coefficient”
and “variables” in the hopes of stimulating their subconscious minds.
I told them that this was an occasion for making a link with other
classes.

Finally, after a long time, one student did come up with the word
“regression”. I didn’t ask him to explain– I just put up on the board
that a regression could estimate the separate effects of income and
wine drinking using the formula:

Heart Attack Probability = alpha + beta*WineDrinking + gamma*Income

We then discussed what that meant, whether it would separate out the
two effects, how difficult it is to include all relevant variables,
and so forth.

The point of the story is that regression analysis is something all
these students had learned in their business statistics class and many
of them had learned in a bus econ econometrics class that in
essence studies nothing *but* regression analysis. Yet they couldn’t
make the connection. And if they don’t know when to use regression
analysis, what use is learning how to do it?

Teaching students how to recognize when a given techique is useful
is hard. First, there is the problem that students do not expect ideas
from one class to be used in another class, much less in real life.
Second, while it is easy to describe when a technique is useful, what
the student needs to learn is how to extract that technique from the
myriad of ideas in his memory when he encounters a problem outside
the context of the class. If I had reminded the students of how to
do regression analysis at the start of the class, they would (I hope)
have been able to think of it at the end of the class, because that’s
the pattern of instruction that they are used to.

Having a teacher who is wonderful at teaching students how to do
regression analysis may be much inferior to having a teacher who can
teach them how to remember to use it. How can we measure this?

Student
evaluations are of little use even in discovering how well a teacher
teaches the technique, and are entirely useless in discovering how
well the student can apply the technique during the next semester.
Regression analysis itself might do better for looking at technique-
teaching, if we are allowed to
require two teachers to use the same test and we compare performance
using enough semesters to get statistical significance. But to do
that for technique-choice teaching would require a surprise test
enough time after the class finished that the students would not know
what technique was being tested.

The instructor himself cannot do much better. It’s hard even to tell
how well students are learning a technique if you don’t talk one-on-
one and they don’t ask questions in class. (Usually the only way you
know the bottom students aren’t understanding something is if one of
the top students asks a question that shows he doesn’t understand.)
When it comes to knowing how well students are learning to recall the
ideas you are teaching, it is even harder.

What should we conclude from all this? Perhaps that we shouldn’t
devote much time to trying to evaluate teaching quality, because we
can’t. Perhaps even evaluating learning quality is not all that
useful, because all we are measuring is IQ and effort. But mostly,
this underscores the important of teaching critical thinking as
opposed to technique.

1. The Left won the Culture War in the Western World.

2. The Left’s immorality is now spreading worldwide, including to Islamic countries.

3. Mainstream Moslems are therefore now turning to the leadership of radical Islamists to fight back against infectious western decadence.

Thus, the Left caused 9-11. This is not moral causation, because it was not the intent of the Left to cause 9-11; it is just “efficient causation”, to use Aristotle’s classification. Or, if you like, it is somewhere in between: the Left wanted to spread its ideas around the World, and it sparked a war that it didn’t intend to cause.

The comments say that the Left is not to blame, which may be right (causing something bad doesn’t mean you are to blame for it), and that the Islamists are a bigger threat than the Left (which any conservative should think is false, as I have posted on before). Perhaps the problem is that many people categorized under “conservative” today are not conservative at all. They are foreign policy realists, or libertarians, or neoconservatives who approve of homosexuality, divorce, and pornography, and thus do not see the Left as a threat except to national security and to their pocketbooks. Naturally, such a person would not agree with D’Souza, and might even have trouble understanding his point, and why the Islamists are so angry.

George Stigler began his banquet speech at the Glasgow University bicentennial of the publication of the Wealth of Nations with the now frequently quoted salutation, “I bring you greetings from Adam Smith, who is alive and well and living in Chicago.” (quoted in Meek, p. 3) Thirty odd years later the remark remains true, though ironically not in the Economics Department. Of the fourteen young scholars whose work is published in this book, five earned their Ph.D.s at the University of Chicago, none in economics. Indeed of the fifteen only four are economists, despite the book’s placement in Routledge’s Studies in the History of Economics series. This is reflective of the fact that Smith scholarship has largely moved away from seeing WN and its seminal role in the nineteenth century development of economics as a discipline as Smith’s crowning achievement. The focus today is largely on seeing Smith’s system as a whole, of which The Theory of Moral Sentiments is the foundational work….

As an historian of economics, though, I was particularly interested
to see what the younger generation is doing with Smith’s economics.
The answer is “not much,” although I do not mean this in a negative
way at all.

My comment at the blog:

Here’s another possibility: Wealth of Nations is “talked out”. Economists have finished up the topic of the history of thought– at least, pre-1940 thought— and gone on to other things. People in history-of-thought fields, e.g. history of science, history of philosophy, intellectual history, etc. have nowhere to go, so they look for less-analyzed books by classic philosophers instead.

…the immense human entity called France, of which even from a purely material point of view one can only feel the tremendous beauty …if one perceives the cohesion of millions of individuals who, like cellules of various forms fill it like so many little interior polygons up to the extreme limit of its perimeter, and if one saw it on the same scale as infusoria or cellules see a human body, that is to say, as big as Mont Blanc, was facing a tremendous collective battle with that other immense conglomerate of individuals which is Germany.

…in the same way as there are bodies of animals, human bodies, that is to say, assemblages of cellules, which, in relation to one of them alone, are as great as a mountain, so there exist enormous organised groupings of individuals which we call nations; their life only repeats and amplifies the life of the composing cellules and he who is not capable of understanding the mystery, the reactions and the laws of those cellules, will only utter empty words when he talks about struggles between nations.

“But the biggest reason I find these Bennett articles so troublesome is what they reveal about the kind of society we ‘re building. Hypocrisy is bad, but it’s not the worst vice in the world. If I declared “murder is wrong” and then killed somebody, I would hope that the top count against me would be homicide, not hypocrisy. Liberal elites — particularly in Hollywood — believe that hypocrisy is the gravest sin in the world, which is why they advocate their own lifestyles for the entire world: Sleep with whomever you want, listen to your own instincts, be true to yourself, blah, blah, blah. Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.”

The rest of the article is well worth reading too.