For my mom, on Mother's Day. She likes history.

Consider the Romanovs.
They did not toil or spin
but they were surely dressed better than old Solomon.

Why? Because they had a corner on the Romanov market
and for 300 years that was a hot commodity.
And who held the secrets of Romanov technology
so tightly that no one else could hope to steal it?
The mothers, of course.
Should’ve gotten patent.

So who can be surprised that, in honor of 301 years of Romanov ruleWoodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day an official holiday,and so coopted the tireless efforts of Anna Jarvis for his own political ends?

And who can be surprised that, in honor of the 402nd anniversaryof that very dynasty, Tony Stark implanted the Jarvis virus into Vision’s metal womb and spun us the savior humanity needed?

Coincidence?
I think not.
Truly, I think not.

So Happy Mother’s Day!

Media, 2015

When I started writing every day, more than two years ago, I encountered an enormous upwelling of words that I couldn't hope to contain. Here were words that didn't know if they were scholarship, philosophy, preaching or fire. There were, and are, more ideas than I could hope to parse on my own. I knew that I needed a community of people who would help me critique, refine and shape what was pouring out.

The Society of Vineyard Scholars has been that community for me. I'm profoundly grateful for this strange group of pastors and scholars, steeped in Pentecostalism, Catholicism, Anglicanism, Methodism, Calvinism, secularism, Orthodoxy, Evangelicalism and more, grafted together by some gentle, but very un-tame gardener.

So it's incredibly fitting that this year's Society of Vineyard Scholars began with Michael Raburn commemorating some old cassette tapes by Don Williams, in which Don sounded an awful lot like a scholar, and an awful lot like a preacher. In those tapes, he said things that burned and called us to repentance. Then, like a character in a book-on-tape come to life, Don stood up, prayed over us and called us to repentance.

And it is incredibly fitting that the conference ended with Bethany Joy Kim pouring out her heart about the paper on limnality that was too limnal to write. The scraps of a paper she had were scrapped the night before, at communion. As she sat in the hotel lobby that night, laboring over some kind of paper, she exuded a kind of peace that she couldn't have possibly been feeling. And then, in her presentation, scholarship erupted into preaching and tears. The Holy Spirit fell powerfully on all of us, gathered there. As anyone who was there can tell you, that is a certain, precise and irrefutable empirical statement...the only sort of language that can accurately describe the event.

So this is what I've been learning, through the Society of Vineyard Scholars: Pastor. Study. Burn...so gently, so untameably, so powerfully, as the Holy Spirit leads. And then study, and pastor, but in a way that has been transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Or I can put this less elegantly, but more densely still. At the beginning of the conference, I joked with Jon and Beth Stovell by tossing out some absurdly vacuous, theological academic nonsense: what really mattered was the epistemic ecclesiology of our chiastology. But yeah. You can say it like that, too.

Emmy Noether, moral theory, debt and atonement

I think that Noether's Theorem is worth thinking about, especially when it is understood that it means physics is actually a form of accounting in physical space, in a universe where infinite regresses are an invitation to endless exploration, rather than despair.

I'm particularly interested in the way Emmy's understanding of invariants, symmetry and conservation relate to moral theory (particularly our sense of fairness), debt (the root of money), the unity in difference of opposites, and atonement theology.

Wherever you see a certain kind of symmetry, something is being conserved.

Woohoo, thanks to an opinion blog over at the NY Times, the internet is talking about moral facts! But they're being awfully cranky and finger-pointy about it.

Well, I dream of a world where the Daniel Engber and the Justin McBrayer live together in peace, and a little child will lead them.

Robot Apocalypse Update: Robot Lawyers

Part of what fascinates me about the current wave of automation is that it targets a number of highly-trained professions. Living in Ohio, I grew up around neighborhoods that had been hollowed out by a combination of automation, international competition and intranational competition. These were good, union, blue-collar jobs that were lost, and the consistent narrative was that these workers just needed training ... as if manufacturing, itself, didn't require workers who were "really skilled." The implication that I, and I assume most people took, was that they should've had college degrees. Things like law degrees.

But the automation of knowledge work, such as law, nicely shows up the absurd classism involved here. It also provides an object lesson in the ways automation can slowly squeeze people out of long-standing fields, instigating institutional crises along the entire chain of training and human skill transmission. It also illustrates the way automation can easily increase inequality: the lawyers who remain are increasingly becoming the wealthy masters of robotic slaves, rather than professionals passing on their skills to another generation. Hopefully, the fact that one of the most reliable and highest-paying professions has been, substantially, turned over to robots will disabuse us of the notion that automation is just a problem for the unskilled. Automation is actually an even bigger problem for the skilled, who require large investments of time and capital during unique windows of life to be shaped into appropriate cogs in our economic machine.

For all of the problems created by automation, I'm ultimately an optimist about it. Automation is the engine that has enabled rising living standards around the globe over the last couple of centuries, and this process is still progressing rapidly. The challenge created by automation is a good one: how do we make sure the increased wealth that it creates is shared? Still, we are currently failing to address this challenge, or even properly conceptualize it.

When we imagine that this is an issue of training alone, we completely miss out on one of the central dynamics of automation: it makes a lot of training useless and obsolete. Actually, I would argue that automation disincentivizes training more generally; instead of investing in skills that might well be automated within the next couple of decades, it probably makes more sense to just buy capital. Better to own the robots that will be taking peoples' jobs than learn how to do the jobs the robots will take. Currently, the field of law is poorly structured to share the wealth, and our tax code doesn't do enough to correct this on the back end...and automation is disincentivizing people to learn the field. How, exactly, is training supposed to address this problem? Really, the relevant training is awfully simple: stop learning skills, and focus on learning to live simply and buy capital with any surplus income you can generate. (Whether that is what people should be doing, or learning, is another matter entirely.) Still, I have hope that we will eventually correctly understand and directly address the problems created through automation, through policies like progressive income taxes, capital gains taxes and negative income taxes and/or basic income.

More fundamentally, automation gives me hope for another reason. Without it, it can seem that people are designed to work, and that is all. As humans become less and less necessary in a wide range of fields, we're forced to repeatedly ask: "What are people really for?" I think work is good, but people are for something other than work.

Poll: Fox News least trusted network

You might have seen a headline, proclaiming that Fox News is the most trusted news network. The media coverage of the poll was pretty consistent on this point.

However, if you look into the actual Quinnipiac poll, you'll realize that the headline could just as easily be: "Poll: Fox News the least trusted network." Both headlines are, technically, true, although more people strongly distrust Fox than trust it. To interpret this a bit, you could argue that a share of the population knows that Fox is a highly partisan station. Fox partisans trust it, while others distrust it.

Still, Fox has a great media business strategy, since the goal is to attract viewers, regardless of how many people distrust them. However, Rupert Mordoch's ambitions clearly go beyond making money; he wants to impact policy while also making boatloads of money. At first blush, it might look like Fox has a good business strategy and a bad political strategy, since it is giving itself higher negatives than positives. But is Foxification a bad political strategy? I don't think so.

First, it is a great strategy for impacting Republican primaries, which depend on mobilizing a highly motivated bloc of partisan voters.  It's also a pretty good legislative and political strategy, in a world of safe, gerrymandered districts, where a Republican primary is the main thing that an incumbent politician has to fear from voters. Just like the headlines that ignored the distrust of Fox, for the most part, our political system doesn't really care if more people distrust you. What matters is that some people really love you.

So the real story here is that Fox News is simultaneously the least trusted network and the most trusted one. And that is part of a good strategy for making money while also impacting American politics and the laws the govern us.

The White and Gold Dress That is Destroying Humanity

I'm ridiculously excited about this magical blue-black or gold-white dress that threatens to destroy humanity. What excites me are the insights that this dress can give us into moral perception and political disagreements. But first, let's just talk about plain old color perception, and this simple photo of a dress.

At this moment, 75% of the people answering Buzzfeed's on-site poll about the dress see it as gold and white. I'm pretty sure my blog's header will make you see it as blue and black.

So what is going on here? To cut straight to the chase: the dress is blue and black, but the lighting apparently makes most people see it as gold and white. For me, it has consistently flipped from one to the other.

When I first looked at the dress, I could only see it as gold and white. It was almost impossible for me to imagine how anyone could possibly get blue and black out of it. I tried hard, staring at different parts of the picture hoping to change it. But to no avail. Then, I looked through some other images, including a color-corrected one. When I looked back at the image, it was undeniably blue and black. It was kind of terrifying. At that point, I couldn't make myself see it any other way. I worried that I had lost, forever, those innocent days of gold and white. Then I woke up this morning, and miraculously, the dress was white and gold again. For a bit. But then it started to change colors in front of my eyes. Now, it has reliably settled into blue and black for me.

So is that why I can confidently say that it is "really blue and black"? No, not at all. If anything, the experience of looking at this dress powerfully illustrates the limits of my own perception. Specifically, color perception depends heavily on context, which means a lot more than the conscious assumptions I bring to the picture. Even before I think about it, my brain has used the context to "present" the image to my consciousness in a definitive way. It is impossible for me to directly alter what my brain is doing by simply willing it to change.

So have I concluded that it is "really blue and black" because of people drawing out swatches of color and isolating them, to demonstrate that it really is that color? Nope. I've looked at these color swatches both ways. When the dress was white and gold for me, the swatches of color looked white and gold. The triumphant claims that this demonstrated the dress's blue and blackness looked like a joke to me. Now, the swatches are blue and black. Isolating parts of the picture and clearly presenting them had no effect on my perception.

So then why do I say it is "really blue and black"? Well, because I've seen other pictures of the dress that I trust, in other lighting, and it consistently looks blue and black. I'm confident that, outside of the very rare visual context of this photo, almost anyone would agree that it is blue and black. Of course, that has a lot to do with the range of lighting we normally experience here on Earth and a lot of broader questions about human limitations and color perception. Those are good things to keep in mind. But when I say that it is "really blue and black," the main thing I mean is that almost any person under almost any normal circumstances will perceive the dress as blue and black. When we talk about reality, that's what I think we're actually doing, most of the time...we are trying to use shared words to express shared and persistent experiences.

By looking and thinking together, I think we can arrive at more reliable descriptions of the world. And we can see through "illusions," like the illusion that the dress is white and gold. So what makes this an illusion? The fact that the perception won't persist across contexts and across people. It isn't robust. If you manipulate the environment in just the right way, the illusion can be extremely powerful, but "white and gold" provides you with an inaccurate guide to how most people (including you!) will see the dress under most conditions.

So what does this have to do with moral perception and disagreements? A great deal. When we assess the morality of a situation, it is also "presented" to our consciousness before we think about it. We just experience something as wrong, or right. And in the same way, just willing yourself to experience someone else's perspective doesn't enable you to experience it. What's more, analyzing the situation and breaking it into little parts doesn't really help either...the same context that shapes moral perception in the first place also shapes our perception of each of the individual parts. Just like the dress and color swatches. And so people fight, become frightened and experience a profound sense of dislocation when confronted with differing moral perceptions. Sometimes, our perceptions flip, but this is often a surprising, strange and unsettling phenomenon...and it is difficult, if not impossible, to explain how it really happened.

Additionally, we experience moral disagreements as simple disagreements about matters of fact, just like two people looking at the dress. The most natural response is to simply assume that someone who sees it differently is obviously wrong. They are either being dishonest, disingenuous or have lost their minds. However, if we get past this "naively objective" phase, people will sometimes arrive at a kind of practical relativism. We toss up our hands and say that people just see things differently, and that's the end of it. One of the mysteries of the universe. This shift can represent a kind of progress, but I don't think it is quite right, either...and it certainly doesn't feel satisfying.

When it comes to dress or moral disagreement, I think we can actually resolve both, in much the same way that we can resolve disagreements about the dress. It is a matter of looking at a range of peoples' perspectives, but it is also much more than that. After all, it seems that most people see the dress in an illusory way, at first look. So in addition to looking at a range of perspectives, we also have to understand how various people see things across a range of contexts, over time. That is how we can find out what color the dress "really is." I think it works for the dress. And I think it can work for other fraught issues as well.