As a music director in charge of choosing hymns, I read the readings for Sunday well beforehand. Then I hear them again on Sunday. Sometimes I come up with something useful as I read. More often, I don't. So I figured I'd share. The readings can be found here. The ELCA, like most liturgical denominations, follows the Revised Common Lectionary. An excellent resource for that can be found here. For picking hymns based on the RCL try this.
The first lesson reading from 2 Kings as well as the Gospel reading from Luke both contain God doing something. God is an active agent in the lives of those involved in the stories. In the first lesson, it is Naaman. In the Gospel it is the ten lepers. In both cases, the people helped came looking for help. (I would love to tie the second lesson into it, but 2 Timothy just doesn't fit.) Naaman was told what to do to be healed. It involved nothing difficult, simply to bathe in the river. The ten lepers had to do nothing. Jesus simply healed them.
What I find interesting in both stories is the idea of unilaterality -- in other words, only one side did any action and that was God/Jesus. There was no quid pro quo involved. Granted, Naaman had to bathe in a river, but I wouldn't consider that a quid. God acts. God's actions are not contingent upon our doing something. There is no negotiating.
In our human interactions, unilaterality isn't always good. Think of war. Multilaterality is usually desired in those cases. The more countries you can convince of going to war, the stronger case you have made for military action. When it comes to making peace, however, unilaterality often proves superior. It may in fact be the only way to stop the "this for that" cycle. So a rule of thumb seems to be that unilateral action when things are good and multilateral when they're bad.
Let's shift to interpersonal relations. Forgiveness is best when done unilaterally. Can we imagine a case of forgiveness based on a qualification being good? I will forgive you if . . .. We needn't reach a consensus on forgiveness in order to forgive.
When God acts upon us, it is done unilaterally. God loves/forgives/heals us not because of what we do, or pray, or think (now you see why 2 Tim doesn't fit?). We are then expected to do the same towards each other. We should love/forgive/help without expecting anything of our brothers and sisters.
H. Richard Niebuhr wrote a wonderful book title The Responsible Self. I thought it was a strange title. How does Christian theology tie into being a responsible person? He uses the word responsible, however, in a different way. Focusing on its root, response, he points out that we should live our lives as a response to God's love of us. God acted first and unilaterally. Now we should copy that and do the same for each other. We should live responsibly -- our lives should be lived in response to God's love.
"So we love because God first loved us." 1 John 4:19
Friday, October 18, 2013
Monday, October 7, 2013
Neil deGrasse Tyson Is a Horrible Scientist
Right around 8:40, he begins the often heard but never taken seriously assertion that only two Muslims have received Nobel prizes ("But he's not middle eastern Muslim, he's Pakistani Muslim" as if that mattered for anything???). Therefore, Muslims must not be as smart or something culturally is holding them back. This should strike any thinking person as bigotry. And it is.
Nasim Nicholas Taleb has already pointed out that when Richard Dawkins made the same argument, he was pointing out his own glaringly horrific understanding of statistics. I would link to Taleb's comments, but I can't find them. Luckily, there is this concise summary along with a Taleb video explaining it.
So Taleb has taken Dawkins to task for the Muslim/Nobel anecdote. It is now time for yours truly to take NDT to task for the same anecdote. NDT ends the anecdote with a slightly different moral.
"Now . . . how many Nobel prizes are won by Jews? It's like . . . a fourth of the Nobel prizes." He then goes on to point out that there are around a billion Muslims in the world but only 15 million Jews "tops." Therefore, the statistics prove that Jews are smarter than Muslims (according to NGT's asinine logic which Taleb rips to shreds).
But here's the kicker: "I don't want to know why 85% of the Academy [of Sciences] rejects God, I want to know why 15% DON'T."
Hold on there brainiac . . . didn't you just say Jews are overrepresented in Nobel prizes? So if you wanted to be a good scientist, using NDT's own data, wouldn't you want to be a JEW rather than an atheist?
Neil deGrasse Tyson, you are not a scientist. You are an ideologue. You lack the basic rationality that our children so sorely need. And here you are the de facto spokesman for "science." It's embarassing.
Friday, October 4, 2013
Why Hurricane Season Predictions Are Bad for the Environment
I had written this a couple days ago and was going to publish it on Sunday. I had to move the date up after I saw this horrendously asinine article about assessing the economic risks of climate change.
This article is asinine because: (1) You cannot assess the risk of climate change. This would require economic models based on climate models. Neither one of the two lends itself to model making; (2) Economics/Finance has talked a lot about risk assessment and risk avoidance. They suck at both. What was the Great Recession if not proof that these eggheads either can't assess risk or they can't do anything about what they know?; (3) We know the climate is changing. We know that is bad. We know why it's changing. We know how to stop it from changing. Why do we need to assess the economic risks of it? Are the human risks not enough to spur action?
The following was not written as a response to this article, but it addresses it well.
Now onto the main event:
Here in Miami there are three seasons, not four. There is summer. There is not-summer. Then there is hurricane season -- the dates of which are ingrained in our minds: June 1 to November 30. Every year before hurricane season starts, someone decides to predict how active it will be. They include the number of named storms and the number of major hurricanes. This year's prediction was horrendous. See here, here, and a ton of other places. But why is predicting how active a hurricane season will be bad for the environment? It all comes down to models.
Models abound in science. They can be simple or complex. They are found in both the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.) and the soft sciences (economics, sociology, psychology, etc.). They are often helpful. They are sometimes damaging. The degree to which they either help or hurt is related to how accurately they can predict an outcome. Usually, the more complex a system, the less likely its model will be accurate in predicting outcomes. Hurricanes are a perfect example. The region of the earth's atmosphere that influences the formation of ONE hurricane is huge (one could argue it's the entire earth). Current models for predicting whether ONE hurricane will develop, its track, its size, and its strength are definitely important for those who may be affected. They definitely save lives. At the same time, they are only accurate to an extent. Hence the "cone of error." I am in no way saying we should stop tracking hurricanes or shut down the National Hurricane Center. Tracking individual storms is necessary and the accuracy of it is high enough to merit its funding.
The problem is trying to model an entire SEASON of storms. It's ridiculous. If someone claims they have an accurate model to predict an entire hurricane season accurately, they deserve nothing more than to be ignored. Yet every year they make headlines. This year they made two: the first was the initial prediction; the second was how wrong they were. Some things do not allow models to be made. At least accurate ones. Included in this group is also global climate. If ONE season of hurricanes in ONE ocean's tropical basin is too complex to model, then an entire planet's climate is even more so. Yet we try to do it.
It is hard to read an article, let alone a book, on climate change that doesn't make predictions. Whether it is average temperature in 2050 or the amount of sea level rise by 2100, experts seem to think that making predictions is their job. It's not. Now, certainly there is a range of average temperatures or sea level rise that one could predict within a certain probability, but this is never how it's presented. It's usually presented as a fact. I recently saw a link to a site where you enter your birthdate and it will tell you what how much higher sea level will be on your xth birthday. As if it were a simple input/output calculation. There are simply too many feedback loops that all affect each other, some of which we surely don't even know about, to pretend we can predict anything about future climate change with any certainly. This is important to admit, but it doesn't mean science is useless when it comes to climate change.
Unfortunately, when some hack tries to predict the hurricane season and fails miserably, another hack climate change denier or skeptic will seize on that and say "look, we can't even predict this year's hurricane season, how on earth can we predict the climate 50 years from now?" And that is the link that makes hurricane predictions so dangerous. One group makes assertions about science that go beyond what it can actually do. Another group takes that to mean that science can't do anything. The loser in this whole thing is the environment, of which humans are a part.
So if science cannot produce models to accurately predict the climate 50 years from now, what good is it? My answer would be that we should consider what science has accomplished concerning climate change not by looking into the future, but by looking into the past. Science has connected the dots that allow us to know that global temperatures are increasing. That CO2 concentrations are rising. That much of this is because of human actions. That seems like plenty to me. Why look to the future when the past is so certain?
On a recent EconTalk podcast, Robert Pindyck boils it down nicely. When it comes to predicting the future, science is able to tell us fairly accurately some broad generalizations.
This article is asinine because: (1) You cannot assess the risk of climate change. This would require economic models based on climate models. Neither one of the two lends itself to model making; (2) Economics/Finance has talked a lot about risk assessment and risk avoidance. They suck at both. What was the Great Recession if not proof that these eggheads either can't assess risk or they can't do anything about what they know?; (3) We know the climate is changing. We know that is bad. We know why it's changing. We know how to stop it from changing. Why do we need to assess the economic risks of it? Are the human risks not enough to spur action?
The following was not written as a response to this article, but it addresses it well.
Now onto the main event:
Here in Miami there are three seasons, not four. There is summer. There is not-summer. Then there is hurricane season -- the dates of which are ingrained in our minds: June 1 to November 30. Every year before hurricane season starts, someone decides to predict how active it will be. They include the number of named storms and the number of major hurricanes. This year's prediction was horrendous. See here, here, and a ton of other places. But why is predicting how active a hurricane season will be bad for the environment? It all comes down to models.
Models abound in science. They can be simple or complex. They are found in both the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.) and the soft sciences (economics, sociology, psychology, etc.). They are often helpful. They are sometimes damaging. The degree to which they either help or hurt is related to how accurately they can predict an outcome. Usually, the more complex a system, the less likely its model will be accurate in predicting outcomes. Hurricanes are a perfect example. The region of the earth's atmosphere that influences the formation of ONE hurricane is huge (one could argue it's the entire earth). Current models for predicting whether ONE hurricane will develop, its track, its size, and its strength are definitely important for those who may be affected. They definitely save lives. At the same time, they are only accurate to an extent. Hence the "cone of error." I am in no way saying we should stop tracking hurricanes or shut down the National Hurricane Center. Tracking individual storms is necessary and the accuracy of it is high enough to merit its funding.
The problem is trying to model an entire SEASON of storms. It's ridiculous. If someone claims they have an accurate model to predict an entire hurricane season accurately, they deserve nothing more than to be ignored. Yet every year they make headlines. This year they made two: the first was the initial prediction; the second was how wrong they were. Some things do not allow models to be made. At least accurate ones. Included in this group is also global climate. If ONE season of hurricanes in ONE ocean's tropical basin is too complex to model, then an entire planet's climate is even more so. Yet we try to do it.
It is hard to read an article, let alone a book, on climate change that doesn't make predictions. Whether it is average temperature in 2050 or the amount of sea level rise by 2100, experts seem to think that making predictions is their job. It's not. Now, certainly there is a range of average temperatures or sea level rise that one could predict within a certain probability, but this is never how it's presented. It's usually presented as a fact. I recently saw a link to a site where you enter your birthdate and it will tell you what how much higher sea level will be on your xth birthday. As if it were a simple input/output calculation. There are simply too many feedback loops that all affect each other, some of which we surely don't even know about, to pretend we can predict anything about future climate change with any certainly. This is important to admit, but it doesn't mean science is useless when it comes to climate change.
Unfortunately, when some hack tries to predict the hurricane season and fails miserably, another hack climate change denier or skeptic will seize on that and say "look, we can't even predict this year's hurricane season, how on earth can we predict the climate 50 years from now?" And that is the link that makes hurricane predictions so dangerous. One group makes assertions about science that go beyond what it can actually do. Another group takes that to mean that science can't do anything. The loser in this whole thing is the environment, of which humans are a part.
So if science cannot produce models to accurately predict the climate 50 years from now, what good is it? My answer would be that we should consider what science has accomplished concerning climate change not by looking into the future, but by looking into the past. Science has connected the dots that allow us to know that global temperatures are increasing. That CO2 concentrations are rising. That much of this is because of human actions. That seems like plenty to me. Why look to the future when the past is so certain?
On a recent EconTalk podcast, Robert Pindyck boils it down nicely. When it comes to predicting the future, science is able to tell us fairly accurately some broad generalizations.
- Temperatures will continue to rise. This is mostly due to humans.
- This is not a good thing. Rising temperatures will change geographic features. While some areas we see desertification, others will see greening. So we may be able to move from one area to another, but the changes will happen too quickly to adapt easily. Communicable diseases will increase. Sea level rise is highly likely. Etc.
- We should do something about this. (1) Cut carbon emissions so that CO2 concentrations fall below at least 1990 levels (Kyoto Protocol). (2) Devise and implement ways to mitigate climate change. This is not so that we can skip doing (1), but because the rate of change of the climate, even if we cut ALL carbon emissions TOMORROW, will be decades in the making. So either way, we will need to deal with higher temperatures and what go with them.
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