I served in the São Paulo South Mission, in cities including São Vicente, Ribeirao Pires, São Bernardo, and the Zona Sul of São Paulo itself, speaking Portuguese. I had previously studied Spanish and Latin and was actually enrolled in Russian when I received the call, but had no previous experience in Portuguese.

When I got back, I was so deep into Portuguese that I’d reflexively say “que?” to my mom instead of an English equivalent. I hadn’t had a laptop or a personal cell phone for the two year duration. I had put on a tie literally every day in the previous year. For two years, I hadn’t read the news, hadn’t read fiction, hadn’t read history, and instead read scripture forwards and backwards. (Backwards by chapters is actually an interesting way to read the Book of Mormon once you’ve read it forwards a dozen times.) In two years, I had spoken to my family about five times.

Looking back, the return almost feels like a second birth. It was a truly radical life change. I came from the southern summer to the northern winter, from poverty to wealth, from teaching scripture to learning engineering.

Since then, I’ve gotten married and had three kids. I’ve studied for and received two degrees. I have worked for Valero full-time for almost eight years, and I’ve driven towards refinery fires, painted cut lines, sketched for fabrication, ordered vessels to sail, and blended millions of barrels, not to mention pushed a small mountain of paperwork. I’ve read hundreds of books, run the Mormon Texts Project, written a bit here and there, and served in a variety of ways in the Church.

(I actually got back on February 9, 2012, flying into IAH and going home to my family in Houston. I intended to post something like this on the exact 10 year anniversary, February 9, 2022, but that was the day my moving truck arrived in Houston for my new Valero assignment. Sort of an odd life rhyme.)

So looking back, how does the mission look?

It’s hard to know where to start talking about such an all-encompassing experience, and one that must be so alien to those who haven’t experienced it. I’ll discuss day-in-the-life stuff, then things I miss (and don’t miss!), then some general reflections.

Broadly, mornings had a couple hours of gospel study, and the rest of the day was devoted to the missionary purpose – to “invite others to come unto Christ by helping them receive the restored gospel through faith in Jesus Christ and His Atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end.” In practice, this involved talking to people on the street and at their doors, and visiting any who were interested to teach lessons. A typical lesson would be around an hour long, starting and ending with a prayer.

There would be one day a week of preparation (laundry, shopping, errands, occasional recreation) with proselyting only in the evening. Training and mission meetings occupied one morning a week and occasional full days. Members generously fed us lunch (the main meal of the day) most days, and we shared spiritual messages with them. There were some opportunities to serve, notably by teaching weekly English classes. But the overwhelming majority of time ended up being proselyting.

I miss the core missionary work itself. Helping change a life for the better is wonderful. There are a couple of people I helped teach who then went on missions of their own, and have since married other members of the Church; their lives would be radically different if they had not ended up in the Church of Jesus Christ. Outside my influence on my family, I’m not sure anything I’ve done since my mission has had that much impact on an identifiable individual.

It is also bittersweet to know, with certainty, that you gave someone else a solid opportunity to change their life. Sometimes you can clearly see the roots striking out before the seed is choked (Matthew 13:1-9); that is less fun than seeing someone transform their life, but still gratifying in a way.

I miss the people. I served with some really good missionaries and taught some really nice people.

It is hard to miss many of the afternoons. In Brazil, many houses have gates facing the street, rather than accessible doors to the interior, and the cultural standard is to clap your hands, not knock. On a typical weekday, the people we’d most like to teach would be at work or school between lunch and dinner, but nevertheless we would be out clapping at doors. Odds of catching a breadwinner, a student, a head of household, etc. would be slim, but we were odds takers, not makers. So we’d clap, and clap, and clap.

I miss the freedom of not caring what people thought of me. In Brazil, every stranger on the street was a potential saint, and it was cheap to tell them what I believed. If they thought I was loony, I would almost certainly never see them again, and regardless of social opinion, I’d still get on a plane back to the Land of the Free at the end of my two years. In the U. S., my interpersonal relationships last longer, notably at work, so there’s a higher cost to voicing beliefs. I’m also “playing for keeps” whenever I write anything on the internet. In practice I think people are virtually never offended by a heartfelt religious invitation, but the potential cost still feels higher here than it did in Brazil.

I also miss talking to strangers. Brazilian culture is friendly turned up to 11, the folks willing to talk to a random gringo are even friendlier than average, and it’s just interesting to have serious small-group religious conversations with lots of random friendly people whose backgrounds are quite different from your own. This is not an experience that’s on the menu for me often in the U. S.

I miss how easy it was to know I was in the right place. The Holy Ghost tells me I’ve been making the right calls on major life decisions, so I’m in the right place now too. But it doesn’t take a lot of spiritual effort to know you’re in the right place when God’s prophet tells you “go to Brazil” and you go to Brazil.

It is harder to be a missionary now. Just getting to mediocrity as a member missionary feels harder than living most other gospel standards on a basic level. I try to be open about my beliefs, and I have some opportunities to talk about them at work. I’ve adopted a practice of often leaving pass-along cards (little missionary cards inviting the recipient to get a free copy of the Book of Mormon) with generous tips for waiters, hotel cleaning staff, etc. I’ve put a fair amount of work into disseminating already-extant gospel writing through the Mormon Texts Project. I try to write things that put my beliefs out in the world, and I hope to do more of this in the long-run. None of that is quite as direct as showing up on someone’s porch with a Book of Mormon and an invitation to Church.

I’ve directly invited a few friends from work to meet with the missionaries, which is as direct. It is a bit socially uncomfortable for me, although I’ve never had anything other than gracious responses and certainly need to do more of it. (If anyone reading this has any interest at all in learning more about the Church, help me help you by letting me know!) I guess I’m saying that member missionary work is harder to do well than full-time missionary work, I’m not fully satisfied with what I’ve done so far, and I miss easy mode!

I used to miss the food more. The Brazilian staple meal is rice, beans, and meat for lunch—almost every lunch, literally 5+ times/week, and often prepared extremely well (practice makes perfect!). I developed a taste for that meal. But Elissa now has an outstanding feijoada recipe, and I have recently got a pave recipe that is working for me (this one, with Maria cookies, raspberries instead of bananas, and a whole bag of mini chocolate chips on top). I also stock farofa from Amazon and occasionally get Guarana Antarctica. And quality American churrascarias are every bit as good as anything I had in Brazil, and the American diet has far more variety than I got in Brazil.

I don’t miss being considered a member of the racial category “alemão” (German). Mediterranean complexions are common and unremarkable in Brazil, but blue-eyed Nordics are not, at all. So regular Mediterranean people are “white” and weird pasty blue-eyed gringos are “German.” “German” missionaries presumptively know how to speak English, thus the common non sequitur request from kids on the street: “Hey German, speak English!” It’s nice not sticking out quite so much everywhere I go.

I do not miss social stress between missionaries. As a missionary, I worked with many other missionaries, some American and some Brazilian, often for relatively short time-frames. Working 80+ hour weeks side-by-side with someone who you’ve never before met, from a different culture and native language, is inherently difficult. I was also more compliant with rules & procedures than most missionaries, and pushing against a very flawed compliance culture carries its own stresses. Being married to Elissa, with a wealth of shared background and experience, and as long-term and stable of a relationship as we can possibly have, is incomparably better than being assigned a succession of missionaries to work with.

I emphatically do not miss the living standards. Every place I lived in São Paulo was worse than any place I have lived in the United States. I did not have air conditioning when I slept, and that was miserable. When I want to feel grotesquely wealthy, I sit in my Texas-sized air-conditioned house and convert my current monthly salary into a multiple of the Brazilian minimum wage (which currently works out to around $218/month).

So much for things I do and don’t miss.

Reflecting as I close, I am grateful for the impact serving a mission had on me. Inviting others to come unto Christ was my purpose, and no missionary should embark with his own benefit as a first-order concern, but Christ said “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt. 16:25). The first-order decision to give up two years (losing a part of my life, in a small way) resulted in second-order blessings (finding life) that have defined my life afterwards.

The level of comprehensive physical, mental, and spiritual effort involved opened me up to more-than-commensurate blessings. I knew the gospel before, and I knew it was true, but on my mission the truth of the Book of Mormon and the reality that Christ is my Savior got carved down into my soul, “written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Cor. 3:3). The Lord can do His own work; the people I worked with could have been taught other ways. But I certainly learned from the experience.

The mission was the foundation for everything I have done since, and I am grateful that the Lord called me and gave me the opportunity to serve.

The post Brazil São Paulo South: Ten Years Later first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

Long story short, pre-World War II, heavy industry was coasting along using a piping safety design philosophy that was well-proven but (as it turned out) excessively conservative, and therefore needlessly expensive. The resulting costs were passed to consumers, and no individual had an overwhelming incentive to rock the boat. Then,

In August 1942, the War Production Board requested a review of measures to conserve vital materials in piping components. A special War Committee of B16 was appointed and, operating under War Standard Procedure, developed revised pressure-temperature ratings for all materials and pressure classes.

Which is to say, America decided to man up and cut some of the fat out of pipe safety ratings. Pre-war, a nominal 300-pound pipe flange—the rim on the end of a pipe that allows it to be bolted up to something—was indeed considered good to 300psi, at 750 deg F. The wartime ratings increased that to 425 psi. Performance increased 42% at the stroke of a pen because society felt the urgency of the situation, executive authority in the form of the War Production Board threw down the gauntlet to the engineering community, and the engineers rose to the occasion. “Their goal was to make Carbon Steel flanges more acceptable for the defense industry projects during WWII without relying on alloy steel flanges,” freeing alloy elements for other war use.^[1]

This reduced the factor of safety in flange design. This is more or less the same thing we’re too terrified to do in nuclear engineering. But the original flanges were so over-designed that the reduction in safety factor made no difference – there was no rash of flange failures beyond the base rate. (There are many reasons that flanges tend to leak at some base rate, regardless of pressure rating, e.g. assembly-related issues.) And the few engineers who really understood flange design could have predicted this outcome. The new ratings were still asymptotically safe, close enough to the highest achievable standard of safety for any practical mortal purpose. So they were permanently adopted after the war, and similar ratings remain in use today.

To illustrate asymptotic safety, think of standing in front of a firing squad, inside a protective steel box. If a bullet penetrates the box, you die, but a little bit of steel box goes a long way. If you have a four-foot-thick steel box, and you reduce its thickness to one foot, you reduced the “safety factor” by 4x. But your risk remains asymptotically close to zero. The bullet simply will not make it through. In fact, you might be better off in the one-foot box, when the lid gets stuck. And anyone with industrial experience knows that the lid is probably going to get stuck—human nature bends events towards unexpected perversity, and lazy overdesign can create problems elegance would never dream of.

Also during WWII, the following was published in the 1943 ASME “Unfired Pressure Vessels” Code:

These rules in their present form do not include any consideration of casting quality factors, weld metal efficiencies, and relative effectiveness of design details. The proper application of these factors is being studied by the Committee and, in view of the war emergency, is left for the consideration of the designer for the time being.

This shows clear recognition that the nation faces a crisis, the de facto regulator^[2] doesn’t have all the answers, and so engineers ought to be free do something reasonable and keep things moving! If only our medical regulatory system took this approach! Instead, we have the Pointy-Haired Boss – “[PHB:] I’m afraid to make decisions because I might make the wrong ones. So instead, I tell my staff I need more data. [Catbert:] When really you need more brains and courage.”

So what could we “[leave] for the consideration of the designer” “in view of the [reported climate] emergency?”

In nuclear engineering the problem isn’t flange design or casting quality factors – it is the death-by-a-thousand-cuts regulatory framework built up over decades of a safety ratchet effect, where every bright idea anyone ever had for making a nuclear plant safer ended up mandatory, regardless of cost or future technological advances, for all subsequent construction. Thus nuclear has a wrong-direction learning curve: instead of getting cheaper as we build more, like solar panels, batteries, integrated circuits, etc., it has become more expensive (at least in the U.S.). There is no single number or requirement that can be changed to solve the problem; the bulk of the system needs to be thrown out and replaced. I refer the reader to the excellent “Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop” book by Jack Devanney, or this review and summary of it, for details of what’s wrong and some specific policy suggestions.

And if we want much cheaper or much cleaner power, slashing nuclear regulation is the low-hanging fruit. Natural gas and coal are already about as cheap as a relatively unregulated market can make them. Both likely cause far more deaths than nuclear. Hydro is limited by geography, and wind and solar need backup by base-load or (expensive) battery power. All of these avenues are already receiving billions in investment, while we basically dropped the ball on nuclear two generations ago and haven’t had the will to build a commercial-scale new-technology reactor since.

If we were serious about either climate change or economic growth, surely we would resurrect nuclear progress by taking something like the World War II approach. The high political authorities concerned could confront the engineering community with the ultimatum: “We need more nuclear power, and we expect and require actual engineering progress—progress in elegance, simplification, and above all cost—even at the cost of an increase in perceived and perhaps even actual risk.” Brave and public-spirited engineers, with adequate backing, could take responsibility for a blank-slate safety regime and pushing the field beyond the stale, comfortable status quo. We would aggressively test (not just interminably model) new full-scale reactor designs—at remote sites initially, but nonetheless actually testing, so as to learn quickly and promote long-run safety. (If you have a hundred million dollars and/or political influence in Indonesia, Devanney’s Thorcon company is working along these lines and would likely appreciate your help.) We would also face and accept the irreducible risks of nuclear power, which are higher than the U. S. regulatory framework pretends, but lower than the public believes, and lower than the fossil fuel alternatives (see Devanney’s book again).

If I was emperor, my cartoon policy^[3] would be to appoint Elon Musk king and Jack Devanney’s team dukes of a remote pacific atoll, with exemption from all current nuclear and environmental regulation, ten billion dollars, and orders to go and achieve a continuous year of full-power operation on a gigawatt-scale molten salt reactor before coming back. I’d also give them a ten-pack of “get out of jail free” cards for melting down floating reactors and sinking them offshore—water is an excellent radiation sink, and indeed plenty of nuclear waste has already been safely disposed of in the ocean. Maybe Musk could just go back to Kwajalein, which is where, for similar reasons, SpaceX had to start orbital launches. (I would even be willing to give Jeff Bezos another atoll, and tell him to get to work too.)

Within a realistically constrained policy option space, I am not terribly optimistic for our odds of doing anything like this. Nuclear regulation is just one more way in which Our Regulatory State Is Failing Us, and if we can’t make reasonable risk-based decisions when we are in the midst of a global pandemic (e.g. we obviously should have had vaccine challenge trials during Spring 2020), I don’t like our odds of making wise tradeoffs, against possibly greater voter prejudice, for payoffs further in the future. We are so absurdly unserious that we can’t even build long distance transmission lines.

Nonetheless, I wish I could draw society towards a bold commitment to cheap nuclear power. I’ve lived in Brazil as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints^[4], at something like 1/8 the GDP per capita I’m used to, and I’m here to tell you that reducing energy use that much is miserable. I really, really value my air conditioning and my clothes dryer. Symmetrically, increasing energy access could yet make my spoiled American life better; energy costs are still too high for me to have an indoor ski hill nearby. And since energy is a major component of costs for food, steel, concrete, manufacturing, transportation, and thus practically every physical convenience of modernity, making it cheaper will improve the productivity of the entire economy. And I guess cheap nuclear power could also benefit countless people in the third world and dramatically reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions at an unsubsidized economic benefit by outcompeting coal and natural gas generation.

Nuclear engineering is currently limited by courage, political will, and the status quo, not by scientific knowledge. Like during World War II, political and thought leaders should give courageous engineers the cover they need to cut the fat, giving up some trappings of safety, in order to allow progress that can later be recognized as an unalloyed good.

Footnotes

1. This quote and these pressure ratings are from the March 13, 2017 agenda of the ASME B16 Subcommittee C on steel flanges.

2. ASME is a private organization, and much of the time, much of the code is written by industry volunteers. But most states (though not all) have come to legally require code compliance, and even in states (like Texas) where code compliance is not specifically required, common sense generally leads people to comply anyway. There is also a national regulatory requirement to use RAGAGEP (Recognized And Generally Accepted Good Engineering Practices) that would generally result in ASME code compliance even absent state mandates. 

3. A cartoon policy is like a cartoon mathematical model – more fun to work with than the full-blown version, and comparably illustrative. Certainly, though, a successful effort ought to have a strong, engineering-obsessed, unitary authority in charge (which Musk provides in his companies), and readiness to take risks and test real hardware, potentially to failure (ditto).

4. Which church, by the way, is underrated, worthy of your attention, and true. I served in São Paulo and environs 2010-12.  

Pipe flange featured image courtesy of Wikimedia user Kkmurray.

The post Nuclear regulation now should be more like pipe safety regulation during World War II first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

SpaceX is doing amazing things – I would argue they are making more progress in aerospace engineering than every other organization on earth combined. I saw Starbase when I took my family on a south Texas beach trip, and it was inspiring even before they got the launch tower to full height and stacked the most powerful rocket in history next to it (pictured).

Rome’s Basilica of San Clemente is built on the ruins of an older church, built on a Roman villa, built on the ruins of the Mint of the Roman Republic, with tunnels down to an ancient underground center of the Mithraic mystery cult. Fascinating history.

Culture wars are long wars – much ideological change is driven by generational turnover. Older people rarely adopt new ideas, but younger people frequently do, and the young always inherit power eventually. So to really change the culture, build a vision that can convince a generation of teenagers or college students, and then wait 40 years. (This is related to my previous post on persuasive art.) This blog, Scholar’s Stage, is consistently worth reading.

Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel – thought-provoking; it is easier for me to love the gospel as an intellectual system than to love the Church as an institution full of regular mortals, but both are true, and the institution is critical.

The nuclear flop explains why we can’t have cheap, clean baseload power. Radiation is not nearly as scary as most people think, and nuclear power plants are expensive primarily because they are over-regulated. This is a good review of a good book (which I also read); the book’s author Jack Devanney is working to build a next-generation nuclear plant in Indonesia, and if he succeeds it will change the world.

A great hit piece on U.S. COVID policy. It is is even worse than first appears, and ought to make you that much more skeptical about other government action.

Crazy Like Us – A book review discussing how concepts about mental illness significantly impact rates and experiences of mental illness.

Donor privacy matters for pluralism and religious freedom.

How Inevitable Is the Concept of Numbers? This article is interesting in itself, and also as a jumping-off point for Steven Wolfram’s work—he does interesting bottom-up thinking about math, physics, and the nature of the universe.

Many of these links came from Marginal Revolution, which is consistently thought-provoking.

The post Link Roundup #1 first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

The post My Ancestors’ Religious Freedom first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

This is a long post (4k words), and it links in enough material to make a book. Here goes.

What is cryptocurrency?

Here’s Wikipedia. Consider reading the Bitcoin Whitepaper; as the first cryptocurrency, bitcoin demonstrates and implements key concepts. It is system whereby a decentralized network of computers can achieve consensus on which anonymous users own how many tokens, which uses a cryptographic proof of work consensus mechanism to maintain security, and rewards those who operate the network by paying them in tokens. For the rest of this piece, I’m going to assume you have some basic concept of what a cryptocurrency is, and how bitcoin works.

What is Ethereum?

If bitcoin is like a currency based on adding machines, Ethereum is like a currency based on macro-enabled spreadsheets. The bitcoin network keeps track of balances, allows sending and receiving of funds, and has limited other capabilities. Ethereum does all that, and furthermore is Turing complete and can execute code (“smart contracts”) of more or less arbitrary complexity. There’s an explainer here, and again, consider reading the whitepaper. Activity on the Ethereum network is paid for in “gas fees” denominated in ether; simple transfers of ether will have relatively low fees, and arbitrarily complex code will have arbitrarily high fees. So Ethereum is a platform for doing all kinds of blockchain, currency, and contract-related stuff. Ether is both the Ethereum system’s currency, and the medium used to pay fees for all its other use cases.

What can I do with Ethereum?

Obviously you can send and receive ether, to buy stuff from any willing counterparty. But decentralized systems are where it gets fun; you can do some pretty fancy financial engineering using smart contracts. Applications include:

Prediction Markets. You can participate in decentralized prediction markets on topics like the 2020 election; Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin made $50K doing this (note that this link includes discussion of decentralized lending and automated market makers, other technologies described below). In my opinion, this is a very promising use case; for many uncertain events (i.e. absent prophecy or other special knowledge), forward or futures markets tell us just about as much about the future as we can reliably know. Last I checked, activity in this area had ground to a halt, as Ethereum fees have gotten prohibitively high, but fixes are in the works for that (keep reading).

Decentralized lending. The most interesting decentralized lending scheme is MakerDAO, which allows you to post collateral (e.g. ether, bitcoin), pay an interest rate, and receive in return a quantity of dai, a currency that is pegged to the U. S. dollar. Then you can use the dai as a low-volatility medium for transactions, such as in prediction markets, or with merchants who don’t want 10% daily fluctuations in their unit of account. If your collateral value drops, you face what’s basically a margin call; either repay the dai, or the smart contract will automatically do a fire sale of your collateral (auctioning it for dai on the open market) in order to maintain the peg. The peg has held pretty well over several years of experience, including the pandemic and various major crypto price moves. Holders of an underlying governance token, MKR, set the requirements around collateral and benefit from the interest charged—so they are incentivized to require decent collateral and charge market rates, lest they blow up the system (and their holding in it).

If you like, instead of using the dai as a stable currency, you can turn around and use it to buy more ether! Leverage! This makes cryptocurrency values prone to flash-crash type corrections; drops in the ether price can generate further selling pressure, as people either liquidate their holdings or get liquidated automatically for being under-collateralized.

On a more positive note, this type of mechanism could theoretically generate synthetic assets that track any price of interest. You could in principle have trustless, decentralized dai-euro or dai-gold or dai-TeslaStock or dai-inflation-adjusted-global-GDP, assuming non-trivially that you have a reliable index to track (the oracle problem). Of course using a volatile asset to collateralize a token tracking another volatile asset will only work if you accept very high collateral ratios or very high risk of liquidation…hopefully we all have a sort of natural intuition that tells us that using Bitcoin as collateral to do a leveraged purchase of synthetic Tesla stock on the Ethereum blockchain is not wise. But still, this is cool from a technical perspective.

Non-fungible tokens. Ethereum allows purchase or creation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), proving a verifiable right of ownership to…something (right now most NFTs do not actually convey a copyright). Spending millions of dollars on an NFT is roughly analagous to spending millions on an original painting: in either case, anyone can typically look at the art online, and probably even hang a realistic copy of it on their wall, but the buyer gets the mimetic satisfaction of possessing it in a way that others can’t. In both cases, not something I am likely to do anytime soon, but I’m perfectly content to see a new mechanism by which artists creating public output can take patronage from (possibly very silly) rich people.

Arbitrary tokens. You can create arbitrary fungible tokens, such as currencies or points. This means that yes, if you must, you can create YourNameDogeCoin, piggybacking on Ethereum’s security (and paying ether gas fees) to create your very own highly secure cryptocurrency, and trade it with your friends. And since you can, many people have. Thus stories like this, where a low-liquidity (but nominally high market-cap) coin was donated/thrown away away to the tune of several billion dollars.

Automated market makers. You can implement, supply liquidity to, or trade against automated market makers, notably including constant function market makers, for other crypto-related assets. Thus you can make it really easy for people to trade their bitcoin for YourNameDogeCoin, and earn small commissions when they do! Automated market makers can even be used to do things that aren’t obviously useless, like facilitating prediction market trading (previously linked prediction market story did this) or trading in governance tokens (like the MKR token underlying MakerDAO).

Insurance. You can in theory build smart contracts that pay out only if a hurricane hits a given area, or if rainfall is less than X, or if Donald Trump wins the presidency in 2024 AND there is an earthquake in San Francisco that year, or in the case of any event for which reliable data is available to feed an oracle. Mostly this is still hypothetical, but supposedly you can actually buy flight delay insurance, crop insurance is being sold in Kenya, and various other applications are in the works, so that’s something.

Is front-running trades a problem?

Suppose you see a great opportunity for a trade on Ethereum, so you submit it. What happens next? Very possibly, you get front-run, i.e. someone else sees the trading opportunity and grabs it (or at least part of the value of it) for themselves. This is obviously a problem in traditional markets too, but in Ethereum, with generalized code, it gets really weird.

What if you realize your smart contract has a bug, such that anyone who understands the exploit can drain all the currency from the contract? You might be tempted to just exploit the bug yourself, get the currency safely in your wallet, then fix the bug. But generalized front-runners lurk. These are programs that are listening to the market, automatically testing transactions they see—even complicated, obfuscated contract interactions that have never been done before—and front-running anything that gives an apparently desirable outcome. Thus the fascinating horror story of the Dark Forest.

This is avoidable, however, if you collaborate directly with Ethereum miners to get preferential treatment for your transaction (secret execution that cannot be front-run). Thus you can escape the dark forest.

But if miners can give preferential treatment to otherwise front-runnable transactions, they can equally give preferential treatment to frontrunners, or engage in front-running themselves, thus capturing miner-extractable value (or MEV). There’s an amazing paper “Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges” by Daian et al (link) that goes over the history of generalized front-running (including multiple bots programatically bidding against each other to front-run the same transactions) and the challenge of MEV.

Miners could theoretically band together to make sure that everything front-runnable is in fact optimally front-run, with value split between miners and those who identify the front-running opportunities. And in fact this has happened over the last six months, via Flashbots, which is now used by over 80% of the network’s hash rate (cryptographic processing power).

This is extremely fair, in a sort of inside-out way that mirrors other cryptocurrency phenomena: it is stable, rule-driven, transparent, logically predictable, and secure, with the cost & benefit of resulting in a hard-edged environment and zero forgiveness for mistakes.

You could also write your own bot to exploit any simplistic behavior by generalized frontrunner bots, and indeed this has been done; one Reddit reaction to generalized frontrunning bots losing a ton of money to this was the classic “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

What are the big challenges for Ethereum right now, and what’s to be done?

Ethereum’s transaction throughput capacity is fully utilized, fees for that capacity have been bid up to fairly expensive levels, its underlying mining algorithm is wasteful, and much of the network activity seems frivolous.

Mining currently consumes an immense amount of electricity and a significant fraction of global graphics card production capacity, mostly to do “proof of work” cryptographic calculations that are then immediately discarded. Hence the wastefulness problem. Some people worry about this from an environmental perspective; I care more about the economics—the cost of all that electricity must ultimately be getting extracted from Ethereum network users. The plan here is to transition to proof of stake, so that transactions are secured by validators who prove they own ether (the stake), rather than by miners who prove they own computing hardware (proof of work). Dishonest validators automatically lose the ether they staked, so they can’t stay dishonest for long, and you would need to buy a significant fraction of all ether in existence to attack the network.

Ethereum then has a roadmap for increasing throughput, principally via sharding (splitting the blockchain into a set of parallel, inter-referenced chains to expand capacity) and rollups (aggregating many off-chain actions into a single on-chain entry). I am optimistic about the Ethereum community’s ability to pull this off in the next few years.

I expect that the chain will return to full utilization pretty quickly after sharding is implemented; if it ends up with spare capacity and low fees someone will just use it to emulate Minecraft, in which they will then emulate a computer, in which they will then emulate an entire universe. (Conclusion: you yourself are probably just a simulation inside the computer-Ethereum-Minecraft-computer of a higher universe! Except not.) But in all seriousness, it does seem like available capacity will tend to be used. It feels like building a toll road in a high-demand area: as you expand it, you may end up with much higher throughput (and tolls) and stubbornly comparable congestion.

So much for wastefulness, fees, and throughput; solutions seem to be underway.

But what about frivolousness? Isn’t this all a bubble?

Much of current cryptocurrency activity does indeed appear to be frivolous and speculative. On one level, this is disturbing. If the hope is for blockchains to provide bank-like services worldwide in a censorship-resistant, decentralized, anonymous way, then CryptoKitties are not what success looks like. Arguably crypto activity is no more frivolous or speculative than Hollywood or Las Vegas, though it is younger and less widely understood. And Hollywood and Vegas are here to stay. But that’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

The early internet bubble makes for a slightly more sympathetic comparison. There were many deeply stupid businesses, many “why would anyone want that?” or “why would anyone trust that?” reactions, and many grossly inflated asset values. But meanwhile, Amazon, Google, and similar businesses were beginning to take over the world, via exponential growth from small base levels. Crypto may be at a similar point.

And there are some niches where the crypto dream really is happening. Nigerians are importing goods from China, using bitcoin to bypass a dysfunctional banking and regulatory environment. I mentioned insurance and prediction markets above. And organizations facing legal sanction (whether deserved or not) really can use crypto to anonymously transact. Admittedly some of these crypto users are ransomware organizations who absolutely do deserve legal sanction, especially the ones who make my job harder. But that’s sort of like saying some people who use guns are criminals—it’s even true, but I argue we’re still better off in a world where people have access to such things. It’s getting harder for tyrannies to control their citizens’ economic activity. In one sense ransomware is sort of the bug that proves the feature.

Undoubtedly, though, much crypto activity is pure speculation (e.g. Dogecoin knockoffs). So…

How can I think about ether’s value, vs. other cryptocurrencies or cash?

Most cryptocurrencies will likely be more or less worthless in the long run; they compete directly with each other, and there are winner-take-all network effects. Thus we might expect there will be only one general-purpose cryptocurrency in the same way there’s only one Google or only one Facebook. There might be any number of subsidiary tokens, like the MKR governance token for MakerDAO, but these behave more like equity securities, not currencies in their own right. And there will probably be a Yahoo-analogue, limping along for decades, sustained by a few niches long after it has lost the war. But which one will be dominant?

An obvious first question is “what’s dominant now?” Bitcoin and Ethereum are head-and-shoulders above the rest of the pack. So which of those two is feature-dominant? Obviously Ethereum.

Maybe Ethereum is the MySpace of crypto, and it will be taken down by Algorand or Cardano or some other “Ethereum killer”…but the very phrase “Ethereum killer” points out where the action currently is; Ethereum seems to have a formidable advantage in developer support and adoption. Thus arguments for Ethereum Maximalism (dated, but has aged well), and the view that Ethereum should overtake bitcoin in market cap. Those links lay out the case for Ethereum in more detail.

So assume Ethereum will be dominant. We can then value it based on projected profit from transaction costs and some assumed discount rate. Ethereum fees are currently order-of-magnitude $10B/year. After proof-of-stake operating costs will be low, so the system then looks kind of like a business generating $10B/year of profit. (There are a number of moving parts given pending updates, which will result in fees being burned and stakers receiving newly minted ether, but assume the total incentive to stays on the same order of magnitude.) At a current market cap around $300B, $10B in profit gives a price-to-earnings ratio of 30, which is not too crazy for a tech business experiencing meteoric growth that plausibly aspires to take over significant chunks of the banking, payments, insurance, and tech industries.

The sort of ultimate bull case is that Ethereum, along with its various fee-paying dependencies (including stablecoins), becomes widely used as a blockchain platform, supporting all the applications above and facilitating decentralized economic activity in ways we now struggle to imagine. AirBnB, now a pretty standard kind of internet business, was more or less inconceivable in the first decade of consumer internet; by analogy, there’s no reason to expect we can fully predict the economic consequences of smart blockchains. Maybe it turns out to be CryptoKitties all the way down, but there appears to be some open-ended upside. If it does turn out that Ethereum is comparable to a major currency (with money supply in the $trillions) plus a major tech business (market cap over a $trillion) then its current valuation is cheap.

What can go wrong for the network?

What if people break current cryptographic methods, e.g. by quantum computing? This has been considered; reportedly quantum-resistant cryptographic methods are available, and simply not in use because they are currently less efficient. (The author of that comment is an Ethereum cofounder and has around a billion dollars in value riding on himself being correct, so he should not be casually dismissed.)

What if huge bugs are uncovered in Ethereum? Fortunately the community is paranoid and key network components have multiple implementations, so hopefully they do not all suffer the same bug simultaneously, and those that remain functional hold up the network. There’s also a precedent from one “too big to fail” bug, the issue with “The DAO,” that resulted in a hard fork. This means that most of the network agreed to adopt a sort of arbitrary ex post facto fix (violating the normal logic of the system) that successfully resolved the issue, while the rest of the network split off and became Ethereum Classic, which has relatively little value or adoption.

What if there’s a successful proof-of-work attack attempting theft or denial-of-serice? It’d cost a lot to do – you’d have to either buy a significant portion of global GPU production for several months, or pay a whole set of miners (who already have been buying a significant portion of global GPU production) to kill the goose that lays their golden eggs. And the attacker would have to start soon in order to do it before the transition to proof-of-stake.

What if there’s a successful attack after proof-of-stake? An attacker could buy a significant portion of the ether market cap and then spin up enough validators to execute an attack, either stealing funds or locking up the network. As mentioned above, this would be expensive, and a fair amount of thought has gone into ways the balance of the network could penalize such an attacker (principally by taking their staked funds away) and recover.

What if crypto is declared super-illegal everywhere, and the full force of the law comes down on ISPs to make it impossible to use? Then we’re probably well on our way to a dystopian police state, but I think this is quite unlikely in the U. S., where significant portions of the tech industry and a good-size retail investor base would be howling if there was any indication of going down that road.

What if it’s technically legal and doesn’t get attacked out of existence or dominated by a competitor, but suffers some combination death by a thousand regulatory cuts, slow adoption, significant technical hurdles, delays to the development roadmap, and a continuing lack of non-frivolous use cases? This sort of thing is the most likely failure mechanism in my mind. However, I am optimistic that the forces of ingenuity will triumph over the technical obstacles, outrun effective regulation, and find value-generating ways to use such a powerful new tool.

How does this relate to your broader philosophy?

I would love to see people in dysfunctional countries have alternatives to using local currencies that suffer from inflation, capital controls, demonetization or expropriation risk, etc. I can imagine smartphone-based stablecoin usage becoming significant in much of Africa, which could be a very good thing. It could act like M-Pesa, but with potentially lower fees and/or reduced exposure to government interference.

I also broadly favor free trade and commerce, domestically and internationally, so to the extent cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology facilitate that, that’s a good thing.

Furthermore, I favor free citizens having access to tools that make them more or less ungovernable by an oppressive regime. Thus I think citizens of a free country should be able to own guns, communicate privately using strong cryptography, associate online or offline as they choose, transact without anyone’s permission using media of exchange of their choice (gold coins, cryptocurrency, tantalum bars, whatever floats your boat), and so on. Cryptocurrencies could be an important tool in the arsenal of future dissidents, and their existence thus tends to make freedom more secure—a good thing. The last few paragraphs are more or less the libertarian cypherpunk case for cryptocurrencies.

From a different angle, cryptocurrency is fascinating as an experiment in natural law and institutional design. I believe in natural law morality: there are some things that are inherently right or wrong, independent of any specific divine decree, and that God observes and promotes these laws rather than imposing them ex nihilo. Torturing people for fun is wrong, and God both will not and cannot change that. (The Book of Mormon talks about this sort of thing, in one case stating “Now the work of justice could not be destroyed; if so, God would cease to be God.”) So there are right and wrong ways to conduct human affairs, that need not depend on any central authority. Simultaneously, I am aware that men are fallen creatures, and that they are likely to reach the best outcomes within institutions that incorporate checks, balances, incentive design, etc. such that they can’t easily oppress each other.

The crypto community is working towards institutional arrangements that are cognizant of cheating, yet can nonetheless create common goods and implement natural law (Thou shalt not steal double-spend! Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy [blockchain]!), all without reference to any externally imposed law. In this view, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is potentially a sort of 21^st century Alexander Hamilton-as-hacker: a heroic figure driving forward groundbreaking institutional and economic developments that ultimately promote freedom and prosperity around the globe. I would watch that Lin-Manuel Miranda musical any day.

Or again, maybe it’ll just be cryptokitties all the way down, or fail (or languish) for regulatory or technical reasons. We shall see.

Are you invested, and how?

Yes; I have a small holding of Ether via Coinbase Pro.

My personal investment theory is that in general, I am not smarter than the market, so I should have most of my net worth in (1) home equity and (2) very broad, very low-cost stock index funds (e.g. VTI). And that is basically what I do. I hold a bit of company stock to be a good sport, and then allow myself discretionary investments with a small percentage of the cost basis of my non-checking, non-emergency-fund, non-retirement financial assets—whence my small Ether holding.

I expect to hold for perhaps 5-10 years (diamond hands? lazy hands?), to let the current development roadmap play out and see what people do with the resulting capabilities. Recent market turbulence doesn’t concern me too much; I bought before the peak, the investment thesis is that Ether could plausibly be an order of magnitude more valuable within 5-10 years, and nothing about that has changed.

I purchased (and hodl) in Coinbase Pro. There are many other exchanges, and some with lower fees, but Coinbase seems to be the dominant safe option. They have managed their business to a level where U. S. banks, auditors, regulators, and so forth seem to have some confidence that they aren’t just a ponzi scheme for absconding with client funds. They also allow withdrawals in either cash or Ethereum—so cryptographic keys can be had if I decide to use the Ether directly, which is good, but I don’t have to keep track of them myself, which is probably also good. Pro looks to have lower fees than the base version of Coinbase.

My investment is in part a self-conscious act of capital allocation; I think Ethereum is the sort of thing that is worth developing and funding, and I am willing to assume risk of total loss in order to (hopefully) help it along in some small way. Despite a significant risk of total loss, I do think it’s expected-value-positive, which is as close as I’ll come to assuming a distribution of probabilities for different Ethereum outcomes.

I want to go deeper…

I originally saw a bunch of these links via Marginal Revolution, my favorite economics blog (not crypto-specific, and worth following in general). I’ve also been getting the Week In Ethereum News, which gives a nice weekly cross section of what’s going on, particularly on the development side.

But what I really want are cryptocurrency rap videos.

Here you go: bitcoin and dogecoin.

If indeed you have figured something out here, why did it take you so long?

I think one factor was that I never wanted to transact with a sketchy exchange; finding out Coinbase was there, as an option to get exposure without obviously losing my shirt to fraud or fees, was a big deal. So thanks, Coinbase. I also (correctly) figured the ICO boom was pretty shady and (incorrectly) viewed bitcoin as a sort of silly curiosity in 2012-13, when I first recall becoming aware of it. (I spent 2010-11 mostly off-grid as a missionary in Brazil.) And frankly with my diversified investment strategy and limited means immediately after college (graduated 2014), I have not historically contemplated investing in such things. Coverage on Marginal Revolution this year got me interested enough to do the work to understand Ethereum, leading to my current opinions. We’ll see how I feel about it in ten years.

The post Down the Ethereum rabbit hole first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

The post Leisurely Consecration first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

Opportunities to spend money constantly confront a refinery engineer. This valve doesn’t shut very tightly; we could get a new one. We could repair this heat exchanger less frequently if we bought one made of stainless steel. This sixty-year-old pump is not designed to modern standards, and its mean-time-between-repairs suffers for it. That pipe could use a paint job. Maybe we should tear down that pressure vessel that has been sitting there unused for longer than I’ve been alive. This refinery would be easier to manage if we just built a new one made entirely from indestructible nickel-moly-chrome alloys right beside it, and then abandoned the old one. All of these ideas have some degree of aesthetic appeal, would be desirable if free, and would in some sense result in a “better” refinery.

But the plant manager cannot possibly fund every pleasant engineering idea. He operates with a basically fixed budget, so ideas compete for funds. And even if there is slack in the budget, the plant manager also wants the refinery to achieve its broader purposes, notably making net cash so the company can pay the dividend to its owners, the Benevolent Ladies’ Association Retirement Fund (BLARF, for short) and other stockholders.

An engineer could just say “Well, I will just throw out as many nice ideas as I can, and management can pick which ones they want!” Then management has to wade through a flood of half-baked proposals, most of which are not aligned with their priorities. The pattern will quickly become clear, as will a corresponding pattern where the engineer’s requests meet with skepticism. His batting average will be low. And since only 20% of his past ideas got funded, his future ideas are assumed to have only a 20% chance of meriting funding.

Alternately, the engineer can triage ideas himself. He must develop a sense of what management is likely to approve and critically evaluate, in light of this, whether a given idea is worth developing further. Each idea he chooses to develop should become completed staff work, a fully developed concept and justification such that predictable questions are answered and difficulties resolved before presentation to management. This engineer will have a high batting average, and managers will quickly recognize that when he asks for money, they are usually going to say yes.

Now, an engineer should be willing to pursue non-obvious ideas, rather than just parroting management. Sometimes it takes significant development to see whether an idea is good, and it’s often worth doing the work even when you know there’s a 75% chance that you yourself will later kill the idea. And it would be a mistake to target a 100% batting average; it’s hard to be perfectly calibrated on what management will want, and management does want to see options and make choices. But an 80% batting average may be achievable and desirable—so if you have twenty ideas and you expect management can only fund four, give them the top five. Maybe your #5 idea is better than you think, and you’re missing key information that disqualifies your #3. (And in any case, managers need to say “no” occasionally just so everyone can feel like they are doing their jobs, themselves included.)

A good engineer will focus efforts and requests on things management is likely to be interested in. You want this kind of engineer working for you. You want to promote this kind of engineer to management, given that they are demonstrating an ability to do management prioritization and drive towards the organization’s goals.

There are parallels between well-done funding requests and effective prayer. So think about a prayer batting average, [number of approvals] over [number of requests].

You could pray and ask for any number of things. Please bless me with perpetual health and beauty. Please bless me to know if a parenting idea I’ve been thinking through is on the right track. Please bless this double-chocolate brownie to “strengthen and nourish my body,” by some miraculous violation of all known nutritional science. Please guide me with thy Spirit in a situation I’m about to face. Please give me specific needed blessings me as I work to fulfill this worthy goal. Please bless that I can get lots of Lego for Christmas, and also win the lottery. Please bless me with spiritual strength to “submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon [me], even as a child doth submit to his father” (Mosiah 3:19).

God isn’t constrained by a budget; His interest in the pensioners of BLARF goes beyond the fiduciary. But He is still constrained – constrained by His goals. He does not wish to eliminate free will, remove all of life’s challenges, or produce spectacular miracles on demand. He’s been pretty clear about this, too.

Thus I don’t think God is particularly impressed by desire-vomit prayers. You can look in the mirror and pretty well intuit that perpetual beauty is not a part of God’s plan for you (except for you, wife). If lottery wealth was actually going to be good for you in the eternal long run, you’d think God would have created the world to have more of it. And so forth ad nauseam. Asking for this sort of thing results in a low prayer batting average. It could result in frustration with prayer.

The scriptures gently point us away from simply throwing out low-quality requests. Thus in Doctrine and Covenants 9:7-8 the Lord said “Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me. But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right…”

Spiritually mature prayers will involve well-considered requests, and the supplicant should have a reasonable expectation that the request will be granted. Getting to know the approver and his plans, and triaging requests accordingly, is a worthwhile effort. Nephi (the son of Helaman) was outstanding at this, to the point that Christ said to him “I will make thee mighty in word and in deed, in faith and in works; yea, even that all things shall be done unto thee according to thy word, for thou shalt not ask that which is contrary to my will” (Helaman 10:5). This is like blank-check spending authority—I approve everything you ask for anyways, so you can just go ahead.

Similarly, he told the Twelve that “whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13). Speaking to a general audience, Christ made a slightly different promise: “And whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, which is right, believing that ye shall receive, behold it shall be given unto you” (3 Nephi 18:20). So we need to make sure we are asking for that “which is right,” and for things that we believe we “shall receive.”

Like in the engineering case, it is sometimes hard to know beforehand exactly which requests will align with the approver’s goals, so we shouldn’t be excessively cautious about bringing up ideas. God wants to know what we are going through, prayer should have a conversational element, and we should not be too fearful – as Paul teaches “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). And we have Christ’s example of praying “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39). This shows both a willingness to be open with God and make a request that may not be approved, and a recognition and acceptance that it likely will not be.

We can and should let our prayers benefit from experience, make sure we are thinking them through, and target a relatively high batting average.

Don’t ask for stupid stuff!

The post The Request Batting Average first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

I’ve participated in career fairs and job interviews various times on each side of the table, hiring and searching. I have been in the room making decisions on who to interview. I’ve been in the room making decisions on who to hire. I’ve offered people internships. I’ve managed interns, and recommended them (or not) as permanent hires. So I have some understanding of how all of this works, and a whole series of stock rants about it.

Often, I interview awesome people who probably have very high potential, but have not optimally developed that potential, or haven’t done what is necessary to communicate their potential clearly. I want engineers to do better—especially BYU engineers. Thus I share my compiled rant/wisdom, such as it is.

(This should go without saying, but this is on my personal site, and it reflects my personal opinions—I do not speak for my employer, Valero.)

Goal: a traditional engineering job

There are various career paths open to an engineer. In this post I’m assuming your goal is to get a traditional engineering job after graduating with a bachelor’s degree. I have an oil & gas perspective, but the principles seem to be similar for engineering jobs in aerospace, automotive, etc. Some engineers instead want to do consulting, patent law, academic research, etc., in which case some principles from this post may apply, but you also ought to find more specialized advice.

If you want a job after graduation, you need to try to get an internship before graduation—ideally several internships, one every summer for the length of your degree. The best way to get an internship is to have had a previous internship. So the perennial question is: how can I get my first real engineering internship? In this post I lay out advice for getting there. Then for future internships and jobs, the same general principles apply.

Focus on developing your resume

You need an attractive resume to get a good engineering job. There are many components to having an attractive resume; it’s nice if you can hit “all of the above” and be a trilingual champion athlete with a stratospheric GPA, a demonstrated commitment to community service, and prior internships in your field. Employers will talk about valuing various thing, and they even do. And you should not base your whole life on employers’ opinions.

But cut through all of that, and you really, really need to keep adequate focus on two key things:

• Maintain a good GPA

• Get engineering work experience

It is going to be awfully tough to get a desirable internship if you don’t bring a good GPA and some kind of engineering experience to the table. So prioritize these things over other work!

Engineering students are typically hard workers, and often have non-engineering employable skills. In the short run, they can often make more in other opportunities (random hourly jobs, skilled trade work, running a small business, pest control, whatever) than they can doing anything engineering-related. Engineering homework has a wage of zero. Doing engineering in a club has a wage of zero. Starting out in an engineering research lab often has a wage of zero.

Nonetheless, you may well be better off in the long run doing engineering work for free and focusing on holding/raising your GPA (and taking on student debt as needed), instead of working even a $25+/hr non-engineering job. The difference between getting a top engineering job opportunity and an average opportunity is potentially tens of thousands of dollars a year for your entire career, so play the long game. If you are smart enough to hack it as an engineer, you’re probably better off the sooner you commit.

(Aside: I never actually found out the hourly rate for my first engineering job. Dr. Thomas Knotts, who is great, hired me saying something like “I will pay you whatever the department standard rate is” and I said “ok” and got to work, in the full knowledge that the real pay was the knowledge I was gaining and the experience on my resume. And without telling my whole life story, skills and stories from that job directly helped me get all my other jobs I’ve had since.)

Maintain a strong GPA

As far as GPA is concerned, students often ask “what is a good GPA?” Depends on the company and the individual recruiter. I am familiar with at least two companies that have flirted with a 3.5 cutoff. In my mind, anything in the 3.8-3.9 range is great, and anything above 3.5 is good. Holding a near-perfect GPA can smack of perfectionism, and may not be optimal vs. slacking off a bit more in school and reallocating your efforts to something else (like gaining non-classroom experience). The 3.2 to 3.5 range is OK; it’s not setting you apart from the crowd, but great experience and other factors may be able to counterbalance that. Anything under 3.0 is getting into resume-killer territory. Normally sophomore-level engineers have higher GPAs than junior-level engineers; a 3.8 is a lot less impressive when few of the constituent grades came from hard engineering classes.

It is good to take hard classes early, so that you can take some easy classes later too. Do enough practice problems, spend time on the homework, etc. Avoid overextending yourself.

So enough about academics. Let’s talk about the other pillar of your resume: getting some experience.

Get a real engineering job

It can be challenging to get your foot in the door with engineering experiences, and as mentioned, it can feel like you need to have experience to get experience. My standard advice is to make a list of all the professors in your department, in order of how interesting their research is (use Google, department website, etc.). Take the professor whose research you like the best, read the last couple of academic papers he has published (Google again), and then go talk to him. “Professor X, I am [name]. Here’s my resume. I’ve read your last couple of papers on [whatever] and I think you are doing the coolest research in the department because [flattering comments]. I’m looking to get some engineering work experience. Is there any possibility of getting a research job working for you? I’d be willing to work for free for a while to prove that I can make a real contribution.” If he doesn’t have anything for you, go down the list. This was more or less my process for getting my first MechE job. I can all but guarantee that someone will hire you.

If no one in the department responds to this, then do the same thing with engineering extracurricular activities (Mars Rover, super-mileage car, whatever)—work down the list until you find somewhere you can get some experience solving engineering problems.

These experiences are not a substitute for getting an internship (don’t just do research and assume that is as good as an internship—it is not) but they can help you get your first one. In terms of resume value, paid engineering internship > paid engineering work on-campus > unpaid engineering work > paid non-engineering work, so act accordingly. Also note that teaching assistant jobs are not really engineering work; I don’t think I have ever heard a good engineering problem-solving interview story from a teaching assistant job.

Work hard at writing your resume, and get help

So now you’ve got a good GPA and some engineering work experience, and you need to communicate that to the world using your resume.

I’m going to gloss over this quickly, because resume principles are simple. Emphasize your achievements (I made the company $100K by going above and beyond!), not your responsibilities (responsible for pushing papers around!). Use action verbs. Quantify things. Maximize space spent on your unique achievements, particularly on-the-job achievements. Minimize space spent on the obvious—yes, every student thinks they can use Excel, engineers take engineering classes, etc. Put your GPA and your intended graduation date front and center; the recruiter is looking for this info and will just be annoyed if it’s not prominent, even if it isn’t great. Use standard resume formatting. Stick to one page; engineering students with multiple publications, multiple internships, and multiple scholarships can fit it all on one page, and you can too. Read the top Google results for something like “engineering resume advice” and consider their advice. When you have done all of this, get a few knowledgeable people to mark up your draft. Student organizations sometimes do workshops for this sort of thing, your department may be able to help, parents or family friends may have good input, etc.

Now, with your resume in hand and great engineering stories to tell, you’re ready for the career fair?

NO! There is much more work to do before the career fair!

Do sophisticated research on companies of interest

There is a stupid idea out there in the world that “the career fair exists so that students can learn about companies.” But if you want a job, the career fair is not a place to learn—it is a place to perform. So you need to prepare.

Prepare for the career fair like it will determine the course of your entire career, which is very possible. Read the list of employers, so that you know in advance who is hiring. Pick your target companies. If employers are taking 4 resumes per interview, and doing 4 interviews per hiring slot, you’d better be having quality discussions with at least 16 target employers to get your 1 job. (Or better yet, more, because 1 expected-value-probability job is not the same as 1 actual signed job offer.) Research each target company.

(Please, please, never, ever utter the career fair suicide-phrase “so what does your company do?”)

Base-level research consists of Googling the company, finding out what industry they are in, and scanning through some of their stock HR-speak about “exciting opportunities to develop yourself, while working with a team of the best and greatest people, in the context of the best and greatest HR organization.” This is good. If you have not done this, you will likely disqualify yourself from getting an interview. But every other credible candidate has already done at least this level of research.

If that’s basic research, what does sophisticated research look like? For any public company, you should look at the company’s annual report and investor slides. Let me repeat, look at the company’s annual report and investor slides. Every publicly traded company will produce an annual report and investor slides that contain information like:

• What is this company’s leadership most proud of? If you think it’s cool, tell the recruiters! They probably agree, and will be flattered.

• What are the company’s main strategic projects and priorities? More flattery-fodder! Also, these supply ready-made questions for the recruiters. “Has your department had any involvement with [strategic project]?” can start an interesting conversation.

• How does this company view its relationships with competitors? Is it trying to be a technology leader? A low-cost producer? The biggest? The best in a narrow niche? This can help you talk intelligently about the company itself, rather than just the company’s industry.

• What parts of the company are the most profitable? How do the parts of the company relate to each other? Having a concept of this can help you understand how your recruiters fit into the business, and what you might do if hired, again contributing to intelligent conversations.

To really take it up a notch, could also read the most recent quarterly earnings press release, or even listen to their earnings call (or better yet, read a transcript), where company high-ups reviewed the quarterly results with the investment community.

You can also learn about the company by talking to employees. Prepare for this appropriately, by reading all of the above stuff. Then ask recruiters, alumni from your school, friends of friends, etc. who work for the company if you can quiz them about it for twenty minutes sometime. Many people are pretty open to chatting about their jobs, even with random strangers. This can be a more frank and lower-stakes discussion than the moment when a recruiter says “any questions for us?” (That actually means “prove to me that you are actually interested in my company by asking me insightful, well-researched questions” and is not the best time to ask any question that could imply less than starry-eyed enthusiasm about the company.) One caveat: recruiters are busy during career fair week, and you should already be interacting with them at the career fair and info session. So plan ahead and do networking calls early, or find people other than recruiters to talk to.

Even for your 16^th-favorite company, you should still spend a half hour looking at their investor slides. You need them to feel like you are seriously interested, and you will be if you have no other job opportunities! Doing half an hour of research on 16 companies is only one day worth of work. Not that hard.

Do sophisticated research!

Make the most of career fair week

So now you’ve got your resume tuned up and printed, you’ve done your research, and it’s time for career fair week.

The career fair is almost 100% about getting an interview. Hiring decisions are made based on interview performance, and interview decisions are based largely on resume and career fair performance.

Make sure you attend the info sessions for your target companies, which are often before the career fair! Participate during the info session. Stay after the info session, introduce yourself personally to the recruiter, give them a resume, and ask them one or two intelligent questions. Listen to their answers to other students’ questions.

At the career fair, work down your previously selected list of target companies. I’ve only been involved in one virtual career fair (which didn’t seem to be very effective), and I’m hopeful that we will have in-person career fairs within a year or two. So I’ll give advice on for in-person events, although similar principles apply to virtual career fairs too.

Walk up to the recruiter with a smile on your face and a resume in your hand. Introduce yourself and hand them your resume before they ask (they are expecting it—no need to even say “here is my resume”). Express interest in their company for a specific reason, ideally “I am interested in your company because of [unique capabilities and positioning within industry]” rather than “I like [industry, including you and all of your competitors].” Show you have done your homework and actually care. Draw their attention to a few key points of your resume—maybe give a twenty-second summary of your best work experience. Answer any questions they have; some recruiters treat the career fair like a mini-interview, and/or will want more detail on certain experiences on your resume. Ask one or two intelligent questions about the company. Express your desire to have an interview. Say thank you for their time. Don’t rush, but do avoid monopolizing the recruiter’s time if there’s a line to talk to them; a two or three minute conversation is often about right. Do talk to other recruiters from the same company.

Consider practicing your personal introduction with your roommate or the mirror or whoever until you can do it smoothly. If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear. Watch other students, and imitate the better ones. Ideally you should attend the career fair as a freshman, when stakes are low, just to see how these interactions go.

Hopefully all of this effort impresses recruiters and gets you some interviews.

Study for interviews like they are tests

A job interview is like a final exam on your professional life up to that point. Study for it like an exam! (Maybe more than for an exam…I know how some students approach exams.) Practice for it!

Most engineering employers will use behavioral interviews. The theory of a behavior interview is that past performance is a good predictor of future performance, so if you tell an employer how you have acted in the past, they can predict how you will act in the future. Or if you have never acted in the past, they will wonder if you will ever act in the future—this is why you need relevant job experience, as discussed above.

There are only so many ways to ask someone “were you a good engineer at the last place you did engineering,” so most behavioral interviews end up being pretty similar. To prepare, Google “behavioral interview” questions/techniques/etc. and read the top 5 or 10 articles to get a sense of what the questions are likely to be, and the standard advice for giving a clear answer (e.g. STAR, talk about Situation, Task, your Action, and the Result). Make a list of common questions from those articles, write out your answers to them, and literally practice telling your story/answer out loud until you can do it smoothly. Seriously, practice!

Since many of the questions are variations on themes, if you have a dozen really good behavioral interview answers, chances are at least one of them will fit almost any question. Your answers should probably be 3-5 minutes long, with a focus on concrete details (no hypotheticals) and things you personally did (no “we”). Some interviewees fell the need to tell me what they learned from an experience; I would generally prefer more detail about what they did.

Also think about whether the company in question has any specific values or needs that might come up in questions other than those on the standard list, and what stories you might tell related to those. For example, safety is very important to Valero (this is obvious from our website, info session, etc.), and thus our engineering job interviews pretty much always include a question about safety. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to ask older students what kinds of interview questions they have received…the types of questions you get will probably be similar, and even the exact wording of a given company’s questions might go unchanged for years.

Classwork-related answers can be OK, but are often weak. I think one day, more than half of the people I interviewed used the same group project as one of their stories; hard to stand out from the field with class-related stories when everyone else has taken the same classes. This is a huge part of why you should put so much effort into gaining engineering work experience: so you can have good, unique interview stories about actual engineering work. When looking for a job, you should ask: “is this a job where I will be able to get good engineering interview stories?” (Or will I basically be doing rote tasks?) And on the job, remember that being an outstanding employee will often result in a good story, and similarly, thinking “what would I want to tell an interviewer that I did” can help you act like a great employee. So get and use non-classroom engineering stories.

Anticipate a question about your geographic preferences. Remember that companies do not have a lot of flexibility; they are usually trying to fill specific positions in specific locations, not create a job just for you. Consider the long run; employers may be looking to get interns who they can then hire long-term in the same location, so going somewhere you hate “just for an internship” may be silly for both you and the employer. At the same time, you can and should be open-minded. Good job experience in a dubious location beats homeless unemployment in your first-choice location. Be and act as geographically flexible as you honestly can be. Less is more: “I am very flexible” is music to a recruiter’s ears, and whatever you say is probably going to be condensed into a yes/no or single sentence summary anyway, so don’t load them up with a lot of ambiguous information. “I am very flexible, and I’d be especially enthusiastic about [location] because I have [family/connection/interest/etc] there” could also be appropriate, or “I am very open to all of your locations except California.”

An interview will generally end with a chance for you to ask the recruiter questions. Prepare two or three smart questions in advance, based on your sophisticated research (see above). Do yourself a favor and do not ask “what are you looking for in an intern?” One of the number one qualities most employers want in an intern is literally the ability to understand requirements without having them explicitly stated in great detail.

Do ask the recruiters for their contact information. Send them a short email thank you note, ideally within a few hours of your interview. They may be making hiring decisions before they leave campus, so to the extent you want to impress them, a paper thank you note will likely be too late.

I got an internship—now what?

Purchase and read the book “The Unwritten Laws of Engineering.” You maybe also be able to find some or all of the content online. I was given a copy as an intern, I’ve since have read it multiple times, and I made it standard-issue for my new engineering hires. I do not expect to write a blog post on how to be a successful engineer, because this book, published in 1944, is still the authoritative word on the subject; the principles are timeless.

Wow, this is great advice, thank you!

You’re welcome! Feel free to share this post; some of this is zero-sum (if everyone formats their resume better…) but a lot of it is not. If every engineer ends up better-prepared, notably by seeking engineering experience early, that should actually improve the world’s standard of living. If engineers did better research into companies, they could end up better-matched with their employers, again resulting in welfare gains.

Congrats on making it to the end. Rant over.

The post My Stock Advice for Engineering Students first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

This is what I came up with as I took President Russell M. Nelson’s challenge to study what the Lord has promised Israel, in light of my prior reading and interest in how civilizations and institutions develop over the centuries.

The editors were great to work with.

The post “Building Israel” piece in Public Square Magazine first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

(This is a book that is near and dear to my heart, hence I’ve distilled my stock rant about it into this post.)

Dan came to reading with some advantages; his mom has read to him regularly since birth, he sees his parents reading all the time, our house contains something like forty linear feet of books working their osmotic magic, I’d like to think his genetics are favorable, etc. But starting him very early, on this specific phonics program, has been a huge component of his success.

The book takes a pretty regimented, common-sense approach to reading instruction. It assumes the child starts knowing nothing but how to talk, not even the alphabet. It assumes the parent knows how to read, how to make their child sit down and pay attention, and not much else.

With those prerequisites fulfilled, it provides completely scripted phonics lessons. The parents’ lines are in red. Stage directions and the desired learner responses are in black. Material the child will read or interact with is in a larger font.

Did I mention it is completely scripted? The book starts by directing the parent to read the child a paragraph-long prepared speech that starts with “I’m going to teach you how to read.” Then Lesson 1 starts off:

And so on. Thus it requires essentially no lesson planning – it’s worth looking over the lesson in advance, especially for the first few, but no originality or creativity is required.

The book relies on building up skills in little chunks, in the Isaiah-approved “precept upon precept, line upon line” manner, with a great deal of review. First the child learns a few individual sounds. Separately, they learn to repeat words slowly, and how to speed up words after saying or hearing them slowly, e.g. “mmmooommm” vs. “mom.” They separately learn how to string sounds together, e.g. “mmmooommm” not “mmm [pause] ooo [pause] mmm.” They separately learn how to move their finger under letters and say the sounds the letters make as they do. Then all these skills are combined to let them sound out simple words.

The sequencing of concepts has obviously received a lot of thought. There are no capital letters until near the end of the book—after all, this sentence contains only one capital letter. Early in the book, all of the letters are continuant sounds (mmm, sss, rrr, etc.), where the child can hold the sound indefinitely while they think about the next letter. Stop sounds (p, t, k, etc.) are harder to sound out without pausing or introducing extra vowels, so they show up later. The names of the letters are taught as an afterthought, well after the sounds, since the child doesn’t really need to know letter names. You can easily read well without ever knowing the name of the letter “h.”

The book goes to great lengths to avoid generating confusion from special cases. Initially, each vowel has a single pronunciation; an “a” is always soft, as in “apple.” The hard “a” as in “able” is introduced later, initially with a line above it so that it’s clearly distinguished. The early examples avoid words with silent letters. Then silent letters appear, but in miniature to make clear they are silent. Then by the end of the book, the silent letters get bigger and the diacritical marks disappear.

The book says it’s for “bright three-and-a-half-year-olds, average four-and-five-year-olds.” Based on my experience, that is about right. I figured Dan is every bit of “bright,” and I was happy to challenge him, so I periodically tried going through some lessons him, starting perhaps a little before his third birthday. The first two or three times, we could get through six or ten days of lessons, but his attention span was a major challenge, and he struggled with certain concepts, notably stringing together sounds and rhyming. In August, when he was about 3 years and 4 months old, we made another attempt, and that time we ran through the program to completion. Elissa and I each did some of the lessons.

The hardest thing about the “learn to read” program was keeping Dan on task. (Somehow we ended up referring to both the process and book as “learn to read,” as in “I don’t want to do learn to read!”) He’s a pretty active, energetic kid. Sometimes I literally had to hold him down, to keep him from running off or squirming into a position where he couldn’t read. There was a lot of “Sit! Point! Read!” – and this is actually an effective pedagogical technique, relying on short reminders and directions rather than lecturing on misbehavior in a way that distracts from the lesson. When that failed, there was a fair amount of “learn to read” becoming “learn to time out.” We’d normally do a lesson right when I came home from work, and sometimes the nominally 20-minute-long lessons stretched to more like an hour.

But it was clear that Dan could do it, and that he’d be happy once he could, so I was willing to fight the battle of wills and make it happen. After all, a parent ought to be able to outlast a three-year-old. We finished up in early December, and he could read Dr. Seuss with Grandma that Christmas. And he was proud that, as a good reader, he would not end up “living in a box under a bridge in Beaumont,” one regularly reiterated purpose of the whole endeavor.

Our one modification of the program was that we ignored all the writing practice; we didn’t think Dan’s fine motor skills or attention span were going to make that a success. Elissa has since taught him to write.

Obviously finishing the “100 Easy Lessons” wasn’t the end of the effort; we continued to practice reading with him—notably by having him help read scripture stories every night—and encouraged him to read on his own. By sometime around four and a half, he was regularly reading for fun under his own power. Now, I just have to get him new books periodically.

One key technique for maintaining this is starving him of electronic entertainment—he gets to watch some movies and TV, but he absolutely does not get to play games on phones or tablets, ever. If he’s bored, he is pretty much boxed into reading or playing creatively with toys. Or whining, but you can only get sent to time out so many times before that loses its luster for a given afternoon.

The other keys are that he has quiet time in the afternoon, and a firm bedtime at night. For quiet time, which normally runs for a couple hours, he has the option to nap, play quietly (and alone) with non-electronic toys, or read. Whatever adults are home are unavailable to him except in emergencies, often themselves reading or writing. He often chooses to read. If you can hear him laughing maniacally, he’s probably reading “Calvin and Hobbes,” which we’ve had to remind him is humor, not a source of role models. Then at night, we have held his nominal bedtime at 7:00 since he was weaned. He’s old enough that he doesn’t truly need that much sleep, but we let him read his Kindle in bed, and he enjoys it. So the post-bedtime period provides another hour or so of time where he doesn’t have to read, but normally does.

But it all started with Teach Your Child to Read, which I thought was extraordinarily well-done. (I promise, they are not paying me to write this review; it’s just that good.) Unlike many professional teachers, I have no desire to be unique or be creative or encourage creativity or have fun while teaching my kid to read. I want efficiency. Teaching a child to read is fundamentally a rote task, and I just want to get it done! And the child also just wants to get it done! I don’t want to develop my own lessons or find some niche method to use; I want to deliver lessons that have been painstakingly optimized for efficiency, by professionals, across years of testing. As legendary refinery operations manager Kelly McKeehan says, “all we like is finishing!” The book is 100% aligned with this. Indeed, that’s why it’s Direct Instruction—a pedagogical philosophy sympathetic to the idea that the best way to teach students is to directly tell them things!

This has some common-sense appeal. Beyond that, Project Follow Through, one of the largest educational studies ever performed, found that Direct Instruction beats a variety of alternatives—it even helps kids’ self-esteem more than self-esteem-centric methods do. Of course, it has been pretty obvious since at least the fifties that phonics-based methods are optimal, as this book (written 1983) notes in the preface, but here we are. The Amazon reviews are also pretty compelling—as of this writing, 4.5 stars on over 8,000 reviews—and I think that’s actually how I found the book initially.

So go forth and wreak phonics on your unsuspecting three-year-olds! They will thank you in a year or two, and also as grown adults when they don’t have to live in a box under a bridge in Beaumont.

Will is coming up on three-and-a-half, so his turn starts next week.

The post Review: “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

This is a pretty well-done attempt at selecting a short set of Book of Mormon readings. There’s a bit of intro and context for each of the selections, but it mostly lets the text speak for itself. It consists primarily of complete verses, generally in less-than-chapter-length sequences, often with digressing or amplifying verses removed. Verse numbers are provided, so it is clear when this has occurred, and it’s generally done in a way that keeps the reading experience relatively smooth. The result is a reasonable introduction to the Book of Mormon. I would love for thousands of people to read it.

However, there are a lot of possible cuts of the Book of Mormon where the above statements are true. So what type of cut is this?

The Book of Mormon contains some accessible material that would strengthen whatever faith contemporary readers already have, and also contains material that would challenge many contemporary readers’ assumptions. This set of selections consists primarily of what I’d consider to be accessible material. This cut also focuses primarily on doctrine, much of it the relatively straightforward doctrine of Christ. It isn’t a random sample or a fully representative sample.

This is both good and bad.

A casual reader with vaguely Protestant beliefs might get the incorrect impression that there isn’t much to distinguish the Book of Mormon from what they already know. Specifically, the Book of Mormon identifies some contemporary sins and false doctrines that many new readers of the book are likely to share in, despite their avowed Christianity, but those passages were not selected for this book (e.g. 2 Nephi 25-30 discussion of apostasy).

The cut also preserves little plot material (as distinct from doctrinal material) or dialogue. Few of the significant miracles make it. None of the anti-Christ figures (Sherem, Nehor, Korihor) or related doctrinal discussion make it in. Nothing of military or political interest makes it: no Captain Moroni, no Anti-Nephi-Lehi pacifism, no rejection of monarchy by King Mosiah, etc. Nephi’s experiences are trimmed; for example, Laban and the related moral dilemma do not appear. Chastisement and calls to repentance are possibly under-represented relative to the Book of Mormon as a whole.

So it’s sort of like a cut of the Gospels that gets part of the sermon on the mount, excerpts from John’s account of the last supper and intercessory prayer, and trimmed-down nativity and crucifixion stories. That would not be an unreasonable approach to take, and it would be an extremely valuable thing for people to read. But no one ought to read it and feel they truly got the full experience of reading the work of scripture.

So by all means, read this for a sampling of Book of Mormon doctrine; there is great stuff here. And then go read the full book, which is available for free in a variety of formats (audiobook, ebook, hard copy, etc.). “The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text” is a great reading edition (and a beautifully bound hardcover), or the standard issue version is heavily footnoted for study.

Disclosure – I received a $5 Amazon gift card from the author, to buy myself a copy with.

The post Review of “The Book of Mormon in One Hour” first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

In the last few years, I’ve developed some very mediocre family history methods, which I now share. (If you’re already a good genealogist, it might be best if you just stop reading here.)

My main, almost exclusive activity is to log in to FamilySearch.org and use the “Record Hints” function. My family tree, like those of many Church members, is already pretty well populated thanks to work by others in my family. I can trace my genealogy back to England, Scotland, Wales, Sweden, Norway, France, Italy, pilgrims, pioneers, and Pocahontas (really). Going back further there are various royal lines. Hugh Capet, King of the Franks, is my great^33 grandfather, if I just counted correctly, not to mention my link to King Merfyn “the Oppressor” of Gywnned, in Wales. Then at least one of the royal lines bleeds back into fabrication that then lashes back into Biblical genealogy all the way to Adam. I can’t readily find that one right now.

I’m just saying…there’s a lot there.

However, many of the individuals are not well cited/linked to their substantiating records. “Record Hints” will point this out, often uncovering records that can be linked to an individual but are not currently cited on that individual’s page. There seems to be a pretty decent search algorithm underlying this function.

These records then often have some extra information—a previously unknown child, parent, child’s spouse, child’s family, etc. Or they will be partially attached to a duplicate person or family, which can then be merged. And as long as you’re attaching new records to the person and getting a basic sense for them, you can click “possible duplicates” and merge any that do not have distinguishing information.

This is made easier by my policy of trying not to over-think things. Two family search entities with the same name, who lack any other distinguishing information or differentiating records, are presumptively the same person. People with the same name, birth date, and birth place are presumptively the same. I try to avoid generating new confusion, but if it’s really unclear from the records what is going on, I am ok with the idea of leaving some pre-existing confusion or inconsistency behind and moving on to the next issue. More records and more time will eventually be available to resolve such things. At least in my tree, there is enough scope for resolving obvious issues (duplication, lacking record links) that I haven’t needed to get bogged down in subtleties.

This is like a computer science breadth-first search—rather than diving to the bottom of each rabbit hole in series, I’m first going to survey the whole breadth of the pasture. I think the number of direct ancestors currently identified in my tree almost certainly exceeds 2^10 (=1024), and adding their identifiable descendants (other than my direct ancestors), aunts, etc. for a couple generations off the main line increases that by perhaps two orders of magnitude. So the most basic level of effort—fix obvious duplicates, attach obvious record citations—has given me plenty of work for the last year or three, with no end in sight. As new records keep getting indexed, the work expands.

The final ingredient in my program of family history mediocrity is to spend a limited amount of time on it, not very often. I have an evergreen Google Task to “Poke at family search at least once on even months – every month until temple reopens.” The technical term “poke” means to open the website, open up the record hints function, and try to do something with at least one or two of the hints. Often I’ll get into it, and spend an hour or two at it, but sometimes it’s pretty quick.

So I do a deliberately mediocre job of applying the easiest family history tool, for a limited amount of time, not that frequently – once a month (or pre-pandemic, every other month). And it makes me happy! It’s interesting and fun, and I do think it’s good for my soul. Burnout has not been an issue; smolder is the name of the game. If I get to where I have more free time or a spiritual need to do more, I’ve got a good base habit to build upon. In the meantime, while I have young children and so forth, I feel like I’m making a good faith effort to comply with the exhortation to do some genealogy.

I recommend these practices if you don’t have something better. You, too, can rise up and become a family history mediocrity!

The post Low-Key Family History: A Call to Mediocrity first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

Good Afternoon! I’m Tom Nysetvold, and I just moved to the area for a new Valero assignment around September 1, with my wife Elissa and our kids. They are Dan, who’s 5; Will, who’s 3; and Marie, who just passed the 6 month mark. We like reading, writing, hiking, and making food. Will likes Dr. Seuss, Dan likes reading Roald Dahl, and Elissa and I are both big fans of Tolkien and Brandon Sanderson. I only have about 5 minutes, so that’s enough about us.

I was asked to speak today about Elder Scott D. Whiting’s October 2020 talk “Becoming Like Him,” which I’ll occasionally paraphrase. Elder Whiting references 3 Nephi 27:27, where Christ asked the people “What manner of men ought ye to be?” and answered “Verily I say unto you, even as I am.” We are commanded to become like Christ. Elder Whiting likened this to climbing Mount Fuji, a challenge that has to be approached one step at a time.

There’s a quote from President Oaks on this idea of becoming, which I like a lot. He said:

“…the Final Judgment is not just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts—what we have done. It is an acknowledgment of the final effect of our acts and thoughts—what we have become. It is not enough for anyone just to go through the motions. The commandments, ordinances, and covenants of the gospel are not a list of deposits required to be made in some heavenly account. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a plan that shows us how to become what our Heavenly Father desires us to become.” [Oaks, “The Challenge to Become,” October 2010]

The core recommendation of Elder Whiting’s talk on “becoming” is to pick a specific attribute of Christ to work on. I think a vague commitment to “be Christ-like” can end up reducing to “be nice” or “be a decent person.” It’s can be a kind of squishy concept. It’s the grown-up version of telling a toddler to “be good.” There are lots of ways to “be good.” There’s only one way to “obediently and quietly stay in your room after bedtime.” The specificity has value.

A narrower commitment to develop a specific Christ-like attribute, with harder lines around it, can help us precisely because it is narrower and better-defined. The attribute can remind us that the bar is high and firm. In a footnote, Elder Whiting shares an observation from minister Charles Sheldon:

If our definition of being a Christian is simply to enjoy the privileges of worship, be generous at no expense to ourselves, have a good, easy time surrounded by pleasant friends and by comfortable things, live respectably and at the same time avoid the world’s great stress of sin and trouble because it is too much pain to bear it—if this is our definition of Christianity, surely we are a long way from following [in] the steps of Him who trod the way with groans and tears and sobs of anguish for a lost humanity; who sweat, as it were, great drops of blood, who cried out on the upreared cross, ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?

So to truly follow the challenging path marked out by Christ, we need to do more than be decent – we need to become like him, in a specific attribute-by-attribute way. Elder Whiting explains the value of choosing one specific attribute to focus on:

“By focusing deeply on one needed attribute, as you progress in obtaining that attribute, other attributes begin to accrue to you. Can someone who is focusing deeply on charity not increase in love and humility? Can someone who is focusing on obedience not gain greater diligence and hope? Your significant efforts to gain one attribute become the tide that raises all boats in the harbor.”

Introspection and discussion with family or close friends can help determine an attribute to focus on. Elder Whiting also says “it is vital that we also ask our loving Heavenly Father what we are in need of and where we should focus our efforts. He has a perfect view of us and will lovingly show us our weakness. Perhaps you will learn that you need greater patience, humility, charity, love, hope, diligence, or obedience, to name a few.”

This makes sense to me – I’ve chosen an attribute to work on myself, and I think the specificity will help me. I invite you to do the same.

As we focus on a specific attribute, we will be able to see examples of it in others and in the scriptures. It can provide a lens to view the world, sharpening our vision.

We really can make progress. Elder Whiting references the scripture mastery classic, Ether 12:27:

And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.

As always, we need not run faster than we have strength, but we must be diligent. Elder Whiting warns us that:

The commandment to be like Him is not intended to make you feel guilty, unworthy, or unloved. Our entire mortal experience is about progression, trying, failing, and succeeding. As much as my wife and I may have wished that we could close our eyes and magically transport ourselves to the summit, that is not what life is about.

You are good enough, you are loved, but that does not mean that you are yet complete. There is work to be done in this life and the next. Only with His divine help can we all progress toward becoming like Him.

I know that focusing on a specific attribute can help us learn of Christ and become more like him. I know that as we strive to become like Christ, we can know that we’re heading in the right direction, and we can feel the peace he has promised to his disciples. I know the Book of Mormon is the word of God and that President Nelson is God’s prophet today, and that they will help us as we work to gain Christ’s attributes. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

I thought this went all right. Five or six minutes is a shorter window than I’m historically used to, with the service shortened for the pandemic, but I think I did a reasonable job of explaining something that is both true and important. Hard to gauge crowd reaction when everyone is wearing a mask, but if anyone keeled over dead from boredom, they did it discreetly. The “talk on a talk” prompt is always a bit constraining–this is not my most original writing–but in this case I really did like the source talk, and I thought the key recommendation to pick an attribute of Christ and work on developing it was a worthy topic.

The post Talk: “Becoming Like Christ” first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

One of my new year’s resolutions this year was to read a Harvard Classics volume after every few other books. As part of this, I read “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” a 1794 piece by German literary figure Friedrich Schiller. Aesthetics has always struck me as a pie-in-the-sky area of philosophy—yes, I’m an engineer—but Schiller made it fascinating by convincingly relating aesthetic experience to persuasion. In getting me to think about how art can persuade, he raised my relative value for fiction vs. nonfiction (reading and writing).

Schiller posits a dichotomy between sensory pleasures and rational imperatives. Some things (think chocolate) appeal primarily to the senses, in a pretty direct way, without much rational engagement. And some things (think mathematical proofs or moral imperatives) appeal to logic, without much sensory engagement. Neither sphere involves freedom; you don’t really make a conscious choice of whether to enjoy chocolate or not, nor can you choose whether a logical proof is valid or not. So working purely in either sphere doesn’t give scope for human freedom. It also isn’t likely to lead to lasting change, as sensory responses are fickle, and people tend to resist or ignore cold logical argument. As he says (full book free on PG here),

This medium situation in which the soul is neither physically nor morally constrained, and yet is in both ways active, merits essentially the name of a free situation, and if we call the state of sensuous determination physical, and the state of rational determination logical or moral, that state of real and active determination should be called the aesthetic.

So art, in Schiller’s telling, operates at the intersection of the two spheres. The viewer (reader, listener) is not bludgeoned into submission by the argument, nor are they just passively consuming a sensory experience. The art blends sensory appeal and rational messaging in a way that results in something greater. When confronted with a work of art, someone can simultaneously appreciate the sensory experience, think about the rational argument, and freely react to both. So great art tends to be thought-provoking and ultimately persuasive. Thus Schiller:

In vain will you combat their maxims, in vain will you condemn their actions; but you can try your moulding hand on their leisure. Drive away caprice, frivolity and coarseness from their pleasures, and you will banish them from their acts, and at length from their feelings. Everywhere that you meet them, surround them with great, noble, and ingenious forms; multiply around them the symbols of perfection, till appearance triumphs over reality, and art over nature.

This is one answer to the question: how can you persuade someone to change their world view—actually change their mind on questions of basic importance? Obviously this question is of interest to anyone who thinks they have knowledge or insight worth sharing with the world. Many people proceed as if logical or empirical argument is the trick, but that rarely seems to work (even a little bit) for deep issues like views of human nature, belief in God, core political beliefs, etc.

Schiller’s answer is that you change someone’s view by appealing to them on multiple levels, without compelling them on any. You can open their mind with beauty while also suggesting something to their logical faculties.

To come at this from a different angle, the movie “Inception” (which is art in my book) discusses how to durably implant an idea in someone’s head: basically the question we are talking about here.

The protagonist’s key trick is doing it in such a way that the subject thinks they came up with the idea. This happens in the context of an experience, the multi-layer dream, that combines sensory and argumentative elements. The target wouldn’t buy a purely argumentative appeal (dismantle your father’s business empire because it would probably be better for you, not to mention for the world) or a purely sensory appeal (step 1: trippy dream, step 2: …, step 3: dismantle father’s empire/profit). But when the subject doesn’t realize he is being persuaded, the argument wrapped in a sensory experience works, like Schiller says.

Going deeper, consider that the movie “Inception,” as a work of art, is also itself an act of inception that durably spreads Christopher Nolan’s thinking, using exactly the technique the protagonist in the movie uses. It’s a movie where YOU are meant to dream about a reality where people have dreams within dreams within dreams, and just like Leonardo DiCaprio is planting ideas partway down that stack without his target noticing, Christopher Nolan is slipping in ideas all along the stack without you noticing. This works, again, because of the blended sensory and logical information. And so millions of people came away from the movie with a slightly deeper subliminal theory of how people change their minds. And of course Christopher Nolan’s answer is much the same as Schiller’s.

But does artistic inception work? Artists think they are influencing people, and people think they are being influenced by artists, but it’s hard to nail down. In principle you could do a study where a bunch of undergraduates’ positions on various philosophical questions are evaluated before and after experiencing various works of art, and thus hack your way to p=0.05, a PhD in psychology, and a haunting suspicion that your findings will not replicate. But what I’m really interested in are long-term subconscious effects from freely encountered artistic experiences, on a margin where quality (production value) is held constant but philosophical orientation varies. That’s not really a scientifically accessible question. However, I humbly assert that Schiller is right, and art does influence people.

I offer The Lord of the Rings as a classic example. (Obviously the book, not the movies.) I recently read Catholic scholar Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind the Lord of the Rings. Kreeft marshals a book’s worth of examples to show that LotR is shot through with Christian themes: its heroes are Christian heroes, its events follow Christian patterns, and so forth. And thus without ever preaching, it has relevance to a host of topics. Kreeft quotes C. S. Lewis: “It is a master key; use it on what door you like.” Few readers will explicitly consider the underlying philosophy, but nonetheless, they’re subliminally absorbing it.

And if the artist has philosophical depth, that tends to leak into the story regardless of authorial intent. Kreeft gives one example:

If the reader at first does not realize the centrality of death to the story, and then later, upon reflection, does, Tolkien himself seems to have gone through the same two stages of awareness. He writes that “it is only in reading the work myself . . . that I become aware of the dominance of the theme of Death” (Letters, no. 208, p. 267). Aware not only of death but of immortality, and the contrast between true and false immortality, “the hideous peril of confusing true ‘immortality’ with limitless serial longevity” (ibid.).

There is subliminal philosophy leaking all over: from the writer into the book, and from the book into the reader. This may also be how “Inception” ended up with the themes I discussed above. I don’t suppose that Christopher Nolan sat down and wrote on his notepad “todo: communicate my philosophy of aesthetics and cognition via a blockbuster movie,” but I do imagine that he is more thoughtful than your average guy, and that his musings about all sorts of things are working their way into his movies.

The whole idea of subliminally absorbing a worldview from art feels a little bit squishy. But where else do worldviews come from? Obvious suspects include physical environment, genetics, family environment, school, peers, and the broader cultural environment. If we’re thinking about how to convince people, a genetic component (however large or small) can be set aside. Wholesale modification of others’ physical environment has been tried, but I don’t think many individuals wield great influence through that channel, and those who do very often generate adverse side-effects (think Robert Moses). There are impersonal aggregate factors like demography and economic change, but again, tough to influence others by changing them, at least in any predictable, specific, positive way.

The other cultural and interpersonal factors largely reduce to “people get their worldviews from other people,” so where did those people get them? Ultimately from some combination of art and direct argument. So now you’re back to picking between direct argument and art, and it isn’t so hard to imagine that art has a great deal of influence.

I also believe that God influences human affairs. From the not-yet-struck-down status of various humans, I conclude that God does not intend to dispense cold, logical proof of his own existence. His methods are more along the lines Schiller proposes. Beauty in the world, in scripture, and in art opens souls to the influence of the Holy Spirit, and related truths (true knowledge of the world, true scripture, truth expressed in art) then suggest His existence. Thus we read that “all things denote there is a God,” and that the word of the Lord is given “line upon line; here a little, and there a little.” Without compelling anyone to believe, he draws people in. Great religious art works the same way; I have felt God’s influence through the work of Jorge Cocco, for instance. I view all this as further support for the idea that art and beauty are powerful influences.

Obviously this is not just a descriptive theory; it has implications for how we ought to try to influence. Thought experiment: consider person 1, who engages with the Bible almost wholly on a logical or imperative level, and person 2, who engages with it almost wholly on an aesthetic level—mentally playing around with the stories. Who would be more influential? Person 2 is Jordan Peterson. Person 1 is the pedantic missionary who expects to convert someone by argument, one Biblical verse at a time.

And of course to really convince in Schiller’s method, art really has to be art. Browbeating allegory doesn’t work for this purpose; a certain degree of playfulness is required. And the artist need not necessarily insert any particular theme; if he has interesting knowledge in his soul, it will tend to end up in his work. Aiming at influence is not necessarily a good way to make art, but aiming at art can be a good way to influence.

Internalizing all of this, I have become more interested in reading fiction relative to nonfiction. I’m also more interested in maintaining high standards for the fiction I read, as I increasingly recognize that reading a work of fiction lets its author pull on you in all sorts of ways. Since the most important influence could be exactly the one I don’t realize is happening, picking worthy authors also gains importance. I’ve also become even more enthusiastic about my wife’s writing, and more tempted to try my own hand at writing fiction. Finally, this experience helps validate my original Harvard Classics goal; I would not have picked up Schiller’s work if it hadn’t been part of the Harvard Classics bundle, but I’m glad I did.

The post Persuasive Art and Schiller’s Aesthetics first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

Once upon a time, there was a refinery desalter. It was a fairly good-size pressure vessel, perhaps 15’ in diameter and 100’ long, in which water and salt settled out from crude oil before it went through its first distillation. This isn’t a spot in the refinery you would normally expect to see a lot of corrosion; it isn’t particularly hot (so immune to various mechanisms that require a lot of temperature/activation energy), everything is liquid (no possibility of preferentially condensing nasty stuff out of a vapor), the contents are relatively benign, and so forth. And on top of its required minimum thickness—something more than an inch of steel—the vessel was built with a healthy corrosion allowance, or so its documentation claimed.

One day, after this vessel had been in service for some years, a contract inspector was tasked with using an ultrasonic thickness probe to measure its thickness. He turned in a written report stating the thickness of the vessel was X. Unfortunately, on comparison with the vessel documentation, X was not just less than the expected thickness based on any plausible fabrication error or subsequent corrosion rate. It was also less than the required safe thickness for the vessel.

Fortunately, me the company engineer and especially Dustin Loden the company inspector had not been born the preceding day. So they told the inspector his result didn’t make sense and sent him back out to look again. Lo and behold, the vessel (reportedly) got thicker! But still not thick enough to be quite reasonable. The inspector was sent back out again, with his supervisor, to check. On the third try, the thickness turned out to be consistent with the vessel having minimal corrosion, as expected. Subsequent internal and ultrasonic inspections also found minimal corrosion.

One thing that isn’t part of the story is what the contract inspector did to get the numbers he reported. Perhaps the first time he wrote in what he thought was a plausible thickness while sitting in his truck; it’s comfier there! Then the second time he actually tried to measure it but failed to adjust for the temperature of the vessel, and the third time his supervisor did it for him. Perhaps he accidentally measuring the thickness of the wrong vessel. Perhaps he fat-fingered the wrong number when entering his original report. Perhaps the first time he did his level best but had an equipment bug, the second time he recalibrated his equipment, and the third time he better interpreted his machine’s readout.

It is surprisingly hard to establish the exact truth, even on relatively simple questions. The story above is just one example; reporting maintenance progress is fraught with related issues. The foreman tells his company superintendent that the welding is 90% done, an hour or so before shift change. Then the superintendent tells the refinery coordinator it ought to be done at shift change. Then the coordinator tells the project manager at the shift change meeting that “it’s done about now,” and the manager tells the world “it’s done.” Meanwhile a problem arose half an hour before shift change and now there’s still a shift of work to go. Then the night shift spends all night trying to get to where the day shift said they already were, and in the morning, it’s clear that the schedule has slipped and we’re six figures behind where we thought we were.

Then there are other inspection problems. One great thing about radiography (think X-rays, although in practice gamma rays are used) is that other people can look at the film an inspector generates and see for themselves whether a weld looks good, although expert interpretation is still required. Some of the fancy ultrasonic methods (shear wave, phased array, etc.) suffer by comparison because the operator can’t always readily show others the basis for his assertions. Some of the ultrasonic outputs can be hard to interpret, and the interpretation may rely on how the image changes as the inspector moves the probe, which is hard to document. So any time a shear wave tech sees a high-consequence problem (you need to spend $100K repairing this), the first response is likely to get a second opinion, ideally from “the guy we trust.” (There may only be one.)

Even when an inspector looks at a vessel, says “it’s bad,” and brings back a picture that looks bad, the case is not closed. Lighting and other aspects of the photography make a huge difference to the final image, and “bad” is relative.

In all these cases, it takes work to get your arms around the truth. (As good economists know, information is costly.) The dynamic is like the fog of war. Whether you’re working against men, their creations, or nature, a novel problem with time pressure is going to involve a struggle for truth and understanding. Novelty means you can’t run a pre-planned response and don’t have complete information, and the time pressure demands immediate action despite this. In such situations, lots of information is conveyed man to man, and its quality is uneven.

It’s the sort of thing that can make a man skeptical. And in fact it does generate a premium for firsthand knowledge. People qualify reports about field conditions or field progress by stating whether or not they have “put their eyes on it.” Good engineers and company inspectors are constantly going out to see progress or problems for themselves. “Trust, but verify” is the order of the day.

So now, shifting gears, consider: where else are these dynamics at work?

Well, this is also how your life works. Life is a novel problem (YOLO) with high stakes (your soul, if any) and time pressure (death has likely come a few minutes closer since you started reading this, although lifestyle changes from taking my later claims seriously will hopefully offset that).

You will probably be all right whether you decide on cookie dough ice cream or mint chocolate chip; life’s stakes are not always high. But they often are. Marriage is high-stakes; having a happy 60^th wedding anniversary (congrats to my grandparents) is quite a bit different from divorce as a lifestyle (shed a tear for Nicolas Cage). Likewise for your basic attitudes toward life; despair and spiritual confidence lead very different places. If you have even the tiniest suspicion that God might exist, or even expect something out of you, that’s another good high stakes question to figure out.

In all of these cases it doesn’t take a genius to identify the goal: fix the refinery and profit, have a happy existence. But you need a lot more information to get there from here. The default pathway is to stay where you’re sitting, complacently accept some kind of lowest-common-denominator view, and see how things turn out. Your couch has all the spiritual answers you need to somehow muddle through to old age. This leaves spiritual ‘“profit” on the table, but some people seem to be fine with that.

If you want to really influence things for the better, though, you will have to do some work and find out for yourself how things really are. Then you’re left deciding who and what to trust. It may be a lot of work to go “put your eyes on” the truth, figuring it out for yourself, to your own satisfaction. But a good faith effort to dig into an issue goes a long way. Not only can you discover the truth; you can learn who already had it—who you can trust in the future.

So enough with hypotheticals, and on to conclusions where I have personally made the effort and I’m satisfied that I have the truth—I have “put my [spiritual] eyes on it,” as it were. There is a God and he expects things from us. He has said “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matt. 7:7) and this is true; truth is there for the getting and will be revealed by the Holy Spirit to those who faithfully, sincerely look for it. Jesus Christ is the savior of the world, and the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Book of Mormon are his word. I’ve studied all of these many times, and I have felt peaceful assurance from the Holy Ghost that they are true. Based on that, I know that Christ loves us, understands us, and provides guidance for us, not least through his authorized church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And thus I have pretty clear guard-rails for my high-stakes life decisions, and I can get further knowledge through prayer and study as I need it.

I have spent two years preaching this (as a missionary) and 10% of my lifetime income (tithing) on supporting its spread. Consider, further, that I voluntarily sit in meetings (for free!) in support of teaching this. But unfortunately, spiritual knowledge is not like X-ray film—no one else can look directly at my mind and see whether the Holy Ghost has confirmed the truth of the Book of Mormon, for instance. That is my report, but if you really want to know for sure, you would need to “put your eyes on it” by reading and praying about it yourself. Please do. This would be a good place to start. Or better yet, talk to me; I enjoy answering questions (yes, work folks, I’m not just that way about refinery stuff). I can also put you in touch with your friendly social-distanced local missionaries, who I think are now on every video chat system known to man.

All of which is to say: never trust anything anyone in a refinery says, except for me, this one time, about religion.

The post Refinery Inspection, Putting Your Eyes On It, and Your Eternal Soul first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

There are some self-evident general principles here, that apply to both individuals and institutions. For example, this is not a good time to have debt or rental payments. It is not a good time for a high-trust, just-in-time, dispersed supply chain. It is not a good time to be operating on the too-clever-by-half razor’s edge.

It is a great time to have equity funding, a cash cushion, and outright ownership of your key assets (house, real estate required for your organization to function). It’s a great time to have been holding some strategic inventory. It’s great to be in a position to avoid contributing to panics, whether by selling securities or purchasing essentials.

For bonus points, it’s nice to be in a position to not just maintain continuity, but actually help other people. Would also be good to have taught other people preparedness while it could still make a difference. Finally, points for having taken some kind of reasonable approach to social distancing, without panicking, but towards the leading edge of the response.

So there are some report card categories. And sitting somewhere right around the top of the class is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

The Church avoids debt and saves against a rainy day. It owns its real estate; making rent is not a concern. It has a century-long tradition of storing grain; stockpiles many other essentials (including medical supplies); and also maintains some in-country production of many key food items. And it budgets in a way that allows it to maintain a substantial cushion for disruptive times. (Ensign Peak Advisors, anyone?)

The Church teaches this stuff to its members by precept, not just example. Any member of the Church who is about to be foreclosed on in a TP-less McMansion had plenty of over-the-pulpit warning; members are taught to have a three-month emergency supply and minimize debt.

Meanwhile the Church has economic stabilization baked in. Members who do face a liquidity crunch can benefit from the Church welfare program, drawing on those stockpiled essentials and financial resources. Job search? There’s help there too. Affordable online education? Yep.

For a cherry on top, the Church seems to have been ahead of the curve throughout the response. Medical equipment previously stored at multiple locations (not just panic-bought stuff!) was sent to China in January, before the WHO “public health emergency” announcement hit (timeline for government actions). On Feb. 27 international travel in April from any location was being discouraged by the Church, a couple days before the initial U.S. travel restriction announcement that applied to only a few locations. Home centered church is old news, and all worship services were suspended worldwide effective March 12, shortly before the CDC recommended no gatherings of 50 or more people.  Beating the government to the draw on this sort of thing isn’t necessarily that high of a bar, but still, it has been cleared.

“Latter-Day Saints” is to KJV English as “Apocalypse Bros” is to the vernacular, so none of this should really be a shock. And it might be nicer to live in a world that wasn’t an object lesson in the Church’s wisdom. But as long as I’m stuck at home I can at least take some pride in being part of an institution so well-suited for our times.

The post Church Pandemic Preparedness, or the Apocalypse Bros first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

This book may not be for you.

But I really liked it!

So let’s talk about it. This tightly written, brief book sits at the intersection of economics and philosophy. It will be very interesting to a very specific set of readers: people who have a decent grounding in rational choice and behavioral economics, and are troubled by those fields’ implied imperative to optimize life in a utilitarian, mechanistic way. I believed in the great importance of personal agency before this book, and I also believed that rational choice economics has very broad applicability, and this helped me mesh those ideas together and relieve some dissonance between them.

The book picks a few key cracks in the utilitarian model and wedges them open to show that even a perfectly rational, optimizing, calculating homo economicus will necessarily exercise personal agency. He will tend to choose “for-itself” (author’s term) to e.g. take on challenges for their own sake, show uncalculated mercy, occasionally act out of character, and so forth. The book also explores practical implications for policy: situations where a standard economic approach explains a lot, but recognizing people’s agency does more.

One centerpiece is an interesting, difficult to summarize discussion of optimizing utility over time. Unlike in an economics model, we don’t sit outside time and make a single strategy that then executes. As we continuously make strategies, our time horizon is constantly shifting, and our strategy is constantly being evaluated against the new horizon. Given this, you need implausible assumptions in order to build a model where people will both adopt, and then maintain upon future re-evaluation, a single fixed strategy to maximize expected utility. At the end of the day, the justification for doing any given thing will contain an element of personal choice—not just choice to optimize based on preferences, but choice to do it “just because” or “for-itself.”

Another interesting discussion centers on the parable of the Good Samaritan, who doesn’t necessarily succeed at being an “effective altruist” along the rational economic lines: potentially a lesser degree of care for a greater number of people might have resulted in a higher benefit measured in quality-adjusted life years. Did he have to pay the innkeeper so much, with an open-ended commitment to pay more? And obviously the Samaritan can’t lavish this degree of care on every beggar he meets; he would never have made it out of town onto his journey. But he chose “for-itself” to care for the man, and it seems obvious that this was a good thing to do.

I think this book has some fascinating implications for theology as well. (Not explored in the text, but here goes.) God, as an omniscient being with a perfect ability to calculate utilitarian courses of action, might seem to be in a very tight box: since he can determine the optimal course, he would execute it; end of story. Reasoning along those lines you tend to end up with a Deist clockmaker god, who initializes the system and then lets it run, without a lot of room for e.g. answering specific prayers. But God, acting as a personal being, is within scope for many of the book’s arguments, which tend towards the conclusion that he not only can but must exercise agency. So then you end up with a God who can act in a “for-itself” manner, showing mercy for its own sake, as in Isaiah 48:11—“For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it: for how should my name be polluted? and I will not give my glory unto another.”

Similarly the Holy Ghost typically inspires people to for-itself action, as in John 3:8—“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” (I have not heard many reports of the spirit inspiring people to re-parameterize their utilitarian calculations.) And Christ originated the parable of the Good Samaritan and lived accordingly. At the same time, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost obviously smile on institutions that help people (e.g. consider your favorite faith-sponsored charity—mine being Latter-Day Saint Charities) and it seems hard to deny that all else equal, they would like these to be administered in a cost-effective way. So their actions fit well within Robb’s framework that respects rational choice, while limiting its scope. End of theological aside.

I guess most of this seems sort of obvious (of course people just do stuff sometimes!); it takes a special kind of economics education to get to where it isn’t. But this book sketches out a nice synthesis where the importance of “for-itself” choice is still clear on the far side, after broadly accepting rational choice economics, not just on the near side.

I heard about the book on EconTalk and felt sort of inspired (in a for-itself way, retrospectively) to pick it up. Glad I did.

The post Book Review – “Willful: How We Choose What We Do” first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.

Say one hundred people each play Russian roulette one time, with a billion dollar prize for survivors; you get about 83 billionaires and 17 deaths. This is ensemble probability. Some people might choose to play.

Now say one person plays the same game a hundred times. They are 99.99999879% likely to end up dead. This is time probability. Sounds a bit worse. They may have billions of dollars when they die; in a quick few thousand simulations in Excel, average person got $5B or so before dying, and there were at least a couple people who made it into the $40Bs. But then they end up ruined, out of the game.

Assume you are an eternal being, because you are, so you get to live indefinitely with your decisions. Repentance and lasting positive change are possible, but lasting negative change is also out there. There are some deep holes, with sides that are as slippery on the way back up as they are on the way down. Since you are repeating choices many times, you need to think in terms of time probability, not ensemble probability.

In this environment you should be extremely wary of any choice that brings with it a chance of ruin. Put your spiritual pennies in the Vanguard index fund,^[1] rather than playing the game of Russian roulette, even if the odds of ruin are one in a thousand instead of one in six. Steady accumulation works better the longer you have—it is positively great over eternity. But if you play Russian roulette occasionally, over the long run of eternity, you will eventually find ruin. And Taleb would probably observe that the long run is shorter than you think, you don’t really know the odds, and they will often be worse than supposed.

There are lot of ways to spin the cylinder. Many vices will not be disastrous for many people much of the time, but any activity that is addictive to a substantial portion of the population and can lead to bad spiritual outcomes^[2] ought to be suspect. Some people seem to get away with a lot of questionable choices (e.g. regarding friends, interactions with the opposite sex, entertainment, substance abuse) without obvious immediate consequences. Most people can drink without becoming alcoholics, or gamble without creating problems for their families. But taking the first step down any of these roads makes you fragile.

On the other hand, the strait and narrow way calls for you to accumulate experiences and attributes that will inevitably pay off in the long run. Building a family that will last forever requires some slow, grinding work at times, but you won’t regret it. Missionary and other service to others, such as will tend to your own spiritual development, also tends to be slow, quiet, and rewarding in the end. I’m reminded of Isaiah’s line that “In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15).

So rather than evaluating a single decision, you can ask “would a long series of decisions like this create a possibility of ruin?” Because if there is a possibility, and you play with it for eternity, it is going to be realized.

If you strive to avoid all possibility of spiritual ruin, you sort of arrive in reverse gear at a complete commitment to Christ, because anything else could (and therefore eventually will) lead you astray. Thus “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37).

My personal conclusion from all this is that I ought to beware of careerism and videogames, each of which has ruined people and has a certain appeal to me. (I distinguish careerism from work—work consistent with supporting a family is praiseworthy; work in pursuit of self-validation and career advancement is where people can go off the rails.) I also want to approach parenting with a duly precautionary mindset.

Finally, if you have made it this far, welcome to the blog. We shall see what happens with it.

Footnotes

1. Taleb would not really recommend the spiritual Vanguard S&P 500 index fund; if I recall his Black Swan book, his recommendation would be more along the lines of 85% spiritual T-bills and 15% exotic spiritual derivatives designed to generate fixed downside but open-ended (and undervalued) upside. And perhaps this does have its spiritual analogy. Missionary work is like Taleb’s derivatives in that it translates fixed-ish costs (hours of effort) into uncertain but potentially gigantic returns: “And if it so be that you should labor all your days in crying repentance unto this people, and bring, save it be one soul unto me, how great shall be your joy with him in the kingdom of my Father!” (Doctrine and Covenants 18:15.) But I digress.

2. Chocolate is addictive to part of the population, as anyone ought to be able to see by browsing the cereal aisle, but fortunately it seems to be spiritually benign. (And I can stop anytime that I want.)

The post Justifying moral principles by analogy with Russian roulette first appeared on Tom Nysetvold.