A Spiritual Autobiography—Miles Kimball

Miles Kimball as a young man

I am a Unitarian-Universalist lay preacher. I gave 12 sermons—annually from 2005 to 2016—to the Community Unitarian Universalists in Brighton. This post is my April 3, 2011 sermon “A Spiritual Autobiography.” This brings to 11 those that are posted on this blog. The others are:

Below is the newly edited text. This sermon only gives my spiritual journey from my birth in 1960 to 2011.

At the bottom of this post are links to some of my other posts on religion. I began blogging in 2012; a large part of my spiritual journey since I gave this sermon is laid out here on my blog.

In line with the democratic spirit of Unitarian-Universalism, I believe that it would be a good thing for Unitarian-Universalist congregations to increase the number of opportunities, and the encouragement, for members of the congregation to speak to the congregation. In addition to giving everyone a chance to hear many viewpoints, this has the benefit of allowing everyone to get to know each other better. 

One problem with this idea of rotating speaking opportunities and assignments among congregation members is that many people are terrified of public speaking. So it is important to develop patterns for talks that are both reasonably interesting and easy to prepare and give. One example of an easy form of talk to give is the “spiritual autobiography”: a more or less chronological account of one’s religious quest that draws a few morals along the way. At least, as long as one’s memory is reasonably intact, a spiritual autobiography does not require a lot of outside research! And so many Unitarian-Universalists are refugees from some other religious tradition, or have faced deep soul-searching within this religious tradition, that there are many fascinating stories to be told.

In giving an account of my own spiritual journey, there are at least four thematic threads to follow along the way: us versus them, mystical experience, the spiritual affects of ambition, and the quest for hidden wisdom. 

I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, far from the center of the Mormon Church to which my family belonged. When I was young, I had only a dim awareness of any religious difference between my family and others in Madison—partly because, outside of church, people didn’t talk about religion very much.  I remember being surprised when listening to “Jesus Christ Superstar” at my friend’s house to learn that, as a Jew, he didn’t believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that not everyone believed that. 

One practical religious difference was that, as Mormons, we had more meetings than most other religions. I remember being embarrassed to explain to my friends about a weekday children’s meeting, not because it was religious, but because I felt I was almost too old to be going to that meeting. 

I would not make it very far on American Idol, but I was not very old when my mother got me to sing a solo in Church. The song was called “A Mormon Boy,” and it had the refrain “I might be envied by a King, for I am a Mormon boy.” Of course there was no reason for any king to envy a Mormon boy, since Mormons would welcome any king who wanted to convert to Mormonism. When I look back, the interesting thing about that song is the sense of social inferiority it hints at. Mormonism is considered a weird, fringe religion that most Americans look down on, however much they may like individual Mormons. The awareness, at some level, that others look down on Mormons causes Mormons to have an inferiority complex they are not fully aware of, and to be very proud of those Mormons who are successful in the world at large, especially celebrities. If you don’t believe me, you only have to Google the website famousmormons.net, which scratches this itch. 

When I was eight years old, my father, who like almost all Mormon men, had been ordained a Priest and Elder of the Mormon Church, baptized me by dunking me totally under the water off of Picnic Point, a thin peninsula in Madison’s Lake Mendota. Since that was my chance to get my sins washed away, I felt I could safely steal some cheese from our refrigerator before that, but not after. After I was baptized, my father laid his hands on my head along with several other men to confirm me a member of the Mormon Church and give me the Gift of the Holy Ghost. In Mormonism, all members of the Church can get personal messages from God through the Holy Ghost. Also, in the Mormon scriptures, it talks of one reward of righteousness as having the Holy Ghost as a constant companion. So I was brought up to believe, and did believe, that I had the moral equivalent of a personal genie following me around to answer my questions and give me guidance. Indeed, Mormon scriptures explain in some detail how to do this. With God speaking, they say “… you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.  But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong …”   In other words, as I understood it, if I prayed and asked God a question, all I had to do was to keep talking about different aspects of the question and asking the question in different ways until I either felt a warm sensation in my heart—which meant YES or felt a little stupid and confused, which meant NO.  Or if there were two possible courses of action I was thinking about, I could talk about each alternative in my prayer and notice which one left me feeling warm and good and which one left me feeling confused and not-so-good. 

A great deal of the first 40 years of my spiritual autobiography was determined by the fact that this procedure for asking God questions seemed to work very well for me.  Mormon teenagers are very strongly encouraged to “get a testimony,” which means to have a spiritual experience that confirms that Mormonism is the one true religion. For me, getting a testimony was a straightforward matter of reading the Book of Mormon and following its advice to pray and ask God if it was true.  Precisely as predicted, I felt a burning in my heart on cue. I interpreted that spiritual experience as telling me that the Book of Mormon and Mormonism in general were both true. Not only that, I could essentially reproduce that experience if I prayed and asked the question again. I didn’t just grow up in Mormonism. I believed it, through and through, because of my own spiritual experiences, of this type. 

When I was thirteen, my family moved from Madison Wisconsin to Provo, Utah.  Just a few months after we moved to Utah, my grandfather became the head of the Mormon Church—analogous to the Pope, except that there a lot fewer Mormons than there are Catholics. My grandfather became President of the Mormon Church by being appointed as one of the twelve apostles of the Mormon Church at a reasonably young age and then living a long time so that he became the most senior apostle. He had been appointed as an apostle when he was working as an unpaid local church leader while making a living selling insurance and real estate in southern Arizona. As President of the Mormon Church, often called “The Prophet,” millions of people would listen with rapt attention to his speeches at church conferences that occurred twice a year, looking up to him as God’s representative on the Earth. Without my fully realizing it, watching all of this happen to my grandfather nurtured an outsized ambition in my heart. Since my grandfather had been, I thought, chosen by God out of relative obscurity to be an apostle, I imagined God having some great task for me to do someday, and resolved to be prepared. Since any great religious task would have to wait on God’s appointment, I needed to do something else in the meantime and decided to be some sort of scientist like great uncle Henry Eyring, who was a world-renowned chemist and had an equation named after him, though he didn’t quite win a Nobel Prize. 

During my thirties, this outsized ambition caused me a lot of psychological pain, and a fair amount of anger, when my relatively successful career as an economist was not as successful as I thought it should be. As a result, I returned to psychotherapy, and have been in psychotherapy most of the time ever since.  (An earlier stint of psychotherapy had been occasioned by the death of one of our baby girls.) I think of psychotherapy as its own kind of religion and an important step on my religious quest.  More particularly, I think of helping people to get the right amount of ambition as a key service that religion should provide.  Too little ambition, and you don’t reach your potential. Too much ambition, and you are in great danger of either cutting ethical corners, ignoring your family and friends, or making yourself miserable. I don’t claim to be cured of my outsized ambition, but I am no longer in such great psychological pain on that front.

I encountered at least two other quasi-religions in my thirties. My sister got me into Transcendental Meditation, which I still try to find time to do at least once every day.  As a form of meditation, the great virtue of Transcendental Meditation is that it is easy—much easier, for example, than the Buddhist Insight Meditation that I later took a class in. The way I do it, all I need to do is to sit in a chair for twenty minutes and say a mantra—or not—as my mind wanders. I think of it as some combination of cleaning out the closets of my mind and just plain resting. 

The other quasi-religion was the courses of the Landmark Educational Corporation.  My friend Kim Leavitt got me into those. The Landmark Educational Corporation has a set of personal growth workshops that use Existentialist philosophy and Deconstruction in a pragmatic way to teach how to let go of grudges, repair relationships, and envision and work toward a positive future for one’s life and for the world. I found those workshops quite powerful and valuable and persuaded many friends to do them as well. Most of them had a good experience. The Landmark courses I took have helped me to have a can-do attitude in my life, and gave me great models of how to be a good teacher and to be persuasive. But I have found most valuable the philosophy they taught about life as something that has the meaning we decide to give to it. 

[We tried to get a video of this sermon, but only got the last third, from about here on. See immediately below.]

My last thematic thread is hidden wisdom. Let me backtrack some.  For a young boy, Mormonism has a lot of cool ideas in it that sound like Science Fiction: other worlds, God living in the Kolob solar system, and God creating the world by scientific means. It is not an accident that Utah is a Mecca for Science Fiction.  I had the sense growing up that there were endless things to be learned and discovered in Mormonism. As a teenager, I was fascinated by the work of Hugh Nibley, who managed to read Mormonism into ancient documents, including Egyptian papyri. That was heady stuff. I later dated Hugh Nibley’s daughter Martha Nibley briefly but intensely before she went on to marry my friend John Beck, write several best-sellers and write a column in Oprah’s magazine, among many other adventures she has chronicled. She has the same kind of free-wheeling intellectual creativity that her father had. (Here is her Amazon page.)

When I arrived at college, I realized that my classmates knew so little about Mormonism that Mormonism to them was whatever I told them it was. So without stretching things too much, I tried hard to make my account of Mormonism as attractive and as consistent with scientific and historical facts as I could. Later on, in my thirties, every other week I got together with a group of Mormon men who were, by and large, quite skeptical of Mormonism. At first, I imagined myself to be a missionary to these skeptics, and continued my efforts to give an attractive account of Mormonism consistent with scientific and historical facts. Over time, we exhaustively discussed the relationship of Mormonism to every relevant scientific and historical fact we could think of. In order to continue to make sense of Mormonism, I had to gradually modify my idea of Mormonism, but I was still able to believe. During this same time, I was happily teaching an adult Sunday School class in the Mormon Church as well as periodically teaching some of the adult men in what was called a “Priesthood Meeting.” The modified version of Mormonism I had come up with crept into this teaching, but even more, I delighted in letting those who came to my Sunday School class talk freely about what they thought and their concerns, including Mormonism’s unequal treatment of women.  By the time I was almost forty, local Mormon leaders had stopped me from teaching Sunday school and finally stopped me from teaching in “Priesthood Meeting” as well. To put it bluntly, I felt I could defend Mormonism in the face of scientific and historical and social issues, but by the time I had modified Mormonism enough to feel good about defending it, many other Mormons didn’t recognize it as Mormonism anymore. 

One of the luckiest things in my life is that while very different in its details, my wife Gail’s religious journey and my religious journeys were synchronized well enough that we left Mormonism together in 2000. At that time I began my association with Unitarian Universalism. It is nice to be able to be myself and say what I think without any fear in Unitarian Universalism.    

Psychologically, leaving Mormonism was quite wrenching. I had to rethink a lot of things.  For one thing, without any need to try to make sense of Mormonism any more, I decided in fairly short order that I didn’t believe in God. That made it hard to believe in an afterlife either, which was a real blow. Like most Americans, I had assumed I would go to heaven, so nothingness after death was a great come-down.  I grieved the afterlife I now believed I would never have.

After the difficult adjustments of leaving Mormonism, my spiritual life has revolved around my men’s circle in the First Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, my annual visits to the Community Unitarian Universalists of Brighton, my study of happiness as an economist, my psychotherapy, and continuing to wrestle with the reality of death. 

Besides the double-edged sword of ambition, and the irrational sense I still have of a personal genie watching out for me, two big legacies of my experience in Mormonism are the desire for hidden wisdom and the love of talking about religion. At this point, I don’t think I know what religion is all about. Most of the time these days I think of religion as a grab-bag of many different things, some incredibly valuable and some utterly worthless or even harmful. But if we can sort through the items in the grab-bag carefully enough, we can keep the good and throw away the bad. I believe that if talk to one another about our views on each item in the grab-bag, we can do a better job of sorting than if we try to do our sorting alone. Each person’s spiritual autobiography can give us extra insight in that task. Thank you for giving me this chance to share mine.

Don't miss these posts on Mormonism:

Other Posts on Religion:

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass:

Helen Czerski: Behind the Spooky Eyes of Cats

I think the tweet above should get you past the paywall. Here is the paragraph I love in this article:

A cat—like its fellow nighttime predators—effectively has a narrow pupil in the horizontal direction but a wide pupil in the vertical direction. So anything along the horizontal plane is in beautiful sharp focus, and the image is more blurred in the vertical direction. But at the right focal length, the image will be perfectly in focus in both directions, and that gives the cat an extra way of judging distance.

Lying is Bad

The idea that lying is bad is surprisingly controversial these days. Many people now treat lying as if it were a bit of an ethical minus (easily overridden by other concerns), without serious practical consequences. But lying, even when it can be ethically justified, has serious practical consequences. I might or might not be OK with you misleading others, but I am unlikely to be OK with you misleading me. Exceptions to that rule do exist, but they are uncommon.

What that means is that, regardless of how well you think you can justify lying ethically, you might get only one or two shots at successfully deceiving people, so you had better carefully save up those very limited opportunities.

In line with the last paragraph, for those who bristle at my use of the word “lying” in this post, let me define “lying” for my purposes here as anything you say that—if a listener came to know the whole truth later on—would make them trust your words less thereafter.

What has happened in public affairs over my lifetime is that those in power have lied quite freely, leading people to trust them less and less. Fortunately, there are some people I still trust not to lie too much. For example, still to this day I think the typical rank-and-file economist and the typical rank-and-file lab scientist will tell me the truth about what they found scientifically about narrow questions, other than some statistical fudging that is predictable enough that I can adjust for it. (I inveigh against that statistical fudging in “Let's Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance” and “Adding a Variable Measured with Error to a Regression Only Partially Controls for that Variable.” Also see “Adam McCloskey and Pascal Michaillat: Calculating Incentive Compatible Critical Values Points to a t-Statistic of 3 as the 5% Critical Value after Accounting for p-Hacking.”)

However, when it comes to interpretations of data behind recommendations made to the general public, I have very little confidence that those in power will tell me what they actually believe as opposed to what was decided by some highly politicized committee as the particular way they should try to shade things to get me to do what they want me to do.

Before I get more specific, let me admit up front that I will focus my ire on those from whom I expect better behavior. There are others in public life who lie so often, in such varied ways, that I have gotten used to it, and my anger that once burned hot about their lying has to some degree burned itself out.

In the area of diet and health, those in power still won’t tell the hoi polloi forthrightly just how bad the evidence suggests sugar is.

In the area of fighting global warming, they won’t tell the hoi polloi forthrightly which policy measures will have a big effect and which will only have a token effect, and are eager to pretend there is a unanimity of evidence behind the appropriately governing mainstream view instead of the reality that the appropriately governing mainstream view (of magnitude of effects as well as direction) is only based on a preponderance of evidence.

In economic policy, rather than focusing on their cogent arguments that are politically less convenient, politicians are happy to call on voters’ economic misconceptions when it favors their policies. Paul Rubin’s October 5, 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Woke Left’s Primitive Economics” and letters responding to it give a decent rundown of some of these misconceptions.

From the op-ed itself, here is one aspect of people’s economic misconceptions:

Folk economics is the economics of people untrained in economics. It is the economic view of the world that evolved in our brains before the development of the modern economy. During this period of evolution the economy was simple, with little specialization except by age and sex, no economic growth, no technological change, limited trade, little capital, and warfare between neighboring tribes.

Zero-sum thinking was well-adapted to this world. Since there was no economic growth, incomes and wealth didn’t grow. If one person had access to more food or other goods, or greater access to females, it was likely because of expropriation from others.

Paul Rubin also notes in the op-ed that “Frequent warfare encouraged xenophobia,” and then goes on to be very partisan in saying that our primitive xenophobia is called on in identity politics without making the obvious point that our primitive xenophobia is also called on in attacks on immigration.

(John Wight’s letter in response to Paul Rubin’s op-ed is fascinating, though somewhat off-topic for this post. He writes:

Paul Rubin writes about the zero-sum thinking of the left and primitive societies. I noticed this attitude while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in South America: If the pie is not equally divided, those with a bigger slice got theirs from someone else’s share.

…

… there are two negative aspects to this zero-sum, peasant attitude, beyond those identified by Mr. Rubin. First, there is enormous social pressure not to succeed, because if you do, you are taking some one else’s share. The corollary is that if you are successful, try to hide it …

Second, if you prosper, your neighbors will think you are a crook. So, why not be one? I can’t prove it, but I think this accounts for some of the corruption endemic to underdeveloped societies.

He also mentions that an upside is pro-equality attitudes.)

Finally for this post, in the area of pandemic policy, there has been a lot of shading of the reading of evidence in order to manipulate the public. To address this issue, let me draw first on Gary Saul Morson’s op-ed “Partisan Science in America.”

Early on, when masks were scarce, instead of saying “Masks are helpful but right now we need to save them for medical workers,” those in power talked as if it was unclear that masks were helpful. On that, Gary Saul Morson writes:

Dr. Fauci admitted that he first stated that masks were ineffective in part because there was a shortage of masks and he wanted to preserve them for medical workers, who needed them most. He doesn’t seem to have considered: Once he shades the truth for a reason of policy, why shouldn’t reasonable people assume his other statements are based on policy considerations rather than science?

Decisions about lockdowns were represented as being clear from natural science, when at a minimum they involved economics to evaluate tradeoffs, as well as values questions involving ethical philosophy to choose the objective function. Gary writes:

When President Biden, or a politician from any part of the political spectrum, claims he is only “following the science,” one can be sure that he isn’t. Should we lock down? Lockdowns, like any other policy, entail costs as well as benefits. How do we weigh them? Not by epidemiology, which has nothing to say about the costs to children, small businesses, performing artists and human enjoyment generally. Science can inform a policy decision, but whatever judgment one makes, it cannot be based wholly on the science.

On the issue of boosters, let me point you to one of my tweets:

And early on, for rankly political reasons, epidemiologists prematurely (and with substantial probability wrongly) rejected the idea that the coronavirus behind Covid-19 might have originated in a Chinese lab. Gary writes:

It is now regarded as an open question whether the Covid virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. But when the virus first appeared, dozens of scientists published a statement in the Lancet expressing “solidarity” with Chinese colleagues. “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumors and misinformation around its origins,” the statement declared. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

Gary Saul Morson also has these more general comments to make about how science works and why lying is bad. I add bullets to separate different passages:

  • Scientists don’t experience divine revelations, they propose hypotheses that they and others test. This rigorous process of testing gives science the persuasiveness that mere journalism lacks. If a scientific periodical expels editors or peer reviewers because they don’t accept some prevailing theory, that process has been short-circuited. Those who call for such expulsions have missed the whole point of how science works. They are the true deniers, far more dangerous to science than a religious fundamentalist who believes the world is 6,000 years old.

  • When researchers fear losing a grant or being subject to personal attack if they question a predominant belief, that belief no longer rests on scientific grounds.

  • By the end of the Soviet Union, almost no one trusted government statements about natural disasters or man-made catastrophes like Chernobyl. How will we handle the next crisis about which scientific understanding has something to contribute when scientists are known to base statements on policy preferences? That is part of the cost of the Lancet scientists’ accusation and of Dr. Fauci’s lack of candor.

In addition to people feeling OK in lying to further their preferred politics or policies, there is always the danger that politics will cloud people’s judgment in the first place. I worry that was the case for a “whistleblower” who significantly delayed our utilization of the very helpful anti-Covid drug molnupiravir. The story is in Alyssia Finley’s October 10, 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed “Who Slowed Merck’s Covid Remedy.”

Here is Alyssia’s account of what happened when Rick Bright was demoted for opposing a fast-tracking of this promising, though still unproven, anti-Covid drug:

Mr. Bright then filed a complaint accusing Trump officials of pressuring him to fast-track unsafe drugs and award contracts “based on political connections and cronyism.”

He claimed that even before the pandemic, they were inappropriately pressing Barda to fund clinical studies of molnupiravir, which had shown promise against other viruses in lab experiments at Emory University. Mr. Bright’s complaint alleged that George Painter, CEO of Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory, and Trump HHS official Robert Kadlec had urged Barda in November 2019 to “invest millions of dollars into their ‘miracle cure.’ ” It noted that “similar experimental drugs in this class had been shown to cause reproductive toxicity in animals, and offspring from treated animals had been born without teeth and without parts of their skulls.” But similar effects hadn’t occurred with molnupiravir.

If a Hillary Clinton administration had urged the fast-tracking of the same drug, with the same scientific evidence at the time of decision, would Rick Bright have opposed it? And to the extent that he had reason to expect skullduggery that an investigation concluded wasn’t there in this instance, was it because of frequent lies by high officials in other contexts, that were especially suspicious to Rick Bright in those who were politically other?

Andrew Sullivan: Dave Chappelle Is Right, Isn't He? →

There is controversy about Dave Chappelle’s recent Netflix special “The Closer.” I have watched “The Closer.” I think Andrew Sullivan has it right in his review: this is a comedy piece that will increase acceptance of transgender and transsexual folks. In the American population, Dave Chappelle sounds to me like he is at about the 75th percentile (or higher) in his acceptance of trans folks. What he says is likely to pull people who are at below his 75th percentile level in their acceptance of trans folks toward his 75th percentile level. And I don’t think folks at a higher percentile rank in their acceptance of trans folk are likely to be pulled down to a lower percentile by listening to Dave. Some people are upset that he is not at the 99th percentile in what he says. But he is moving people in the right direction. This shouldn’t be about ideology; it should be about getting people treated better.

Market Opportunities for Helping People Deal with Obesity-Causing Environmental Contaminants

Inspired by slimemoldtimemold’s blog series “A Chemical Hunger,” I have these four previous posts:

  1. Are Processed Food and Environmental Contaminants the Main Cause of the Rise of Obesity?

  2. Livestock Antibiotics, Lithium and PFAS as Leading Suspects for Environmental Causes of Obesity

  3. How Rising Anorexia Can Go Along with Rising Obesity: Both Can Be Caused By Environmental Contaminants

  4. How Lithium May Have Led to Serious Obesity for the Pima Beginning around 1937

Today I want to make the simple point that there are probably some market opportunities in helping people deal with these possibly obesity-causing environmental contaminants. First, people will be interested in tests for livestock antibiotics, lithium and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water. Second, people will be interested in knowing that uncontaminated water was used in food production. Third, people will be interested in bottled water or flavored sparkling water certified free of these contaminants. You can see what a fan I am of the latter from “In Praise of Flavored Sparkling Water.” (I would also like to know that the cans are BPA-free. Waterloo and La Croix brands are BPA-free, but information on this can be hard to find on other brands. Note that there are many other sources of BPA you should probably be worrying about more: liquids packaged in plastic and many types of processed food.)

The Federalist Papers #41: James Madison on Tradeoffs—You Can't Have Everything You Want

In the Federalist Papers #41, James Madison expresses the essence of tradeoffs beautifully:

… the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT, good …

Applied to constitutional design, this becomes:

… in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused.

Not recognizing tradeoffs is a serious logical fallacy:

It cannot have escaped those who have attended with candor to the arguments employed against the extensive powers of the government, that the authors of them have very little considered how far these powers were necessary means of attaining a necessary end. They have chosen rather to dwell on the inconveniences which must be unavoidably blended with all political advantages; and on the possible abuses which must be incident to every power or trust, of which a beneficial use can be made.

That doesn’t mean that downsides of a given choice should be glossed over. They may outweight the upsides of that choice. And even if the upsides outweigh the downsides of the choice, the downsides need to be seen clearly so that they can be mitigated:

… in all cases where power is to be conferred, the point first to be decided is, whether such a power be necessary to the public good; as the next will be, in case of an affirmative decision, to guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the power to the public detriment.

In the Federalist Papers #41, James Madison turns in particular to the power to maintain an army and a navy:

… was it necessary to give an INDEFINITE POWER of raising TROOPS, as well as providing fleets; and of maintaining both in PEACE, as well as in war?

Without directly quoting it, James Madison riffs on something George Washington reportedly said at the Constitutional Convention. Joe Carter says this in his blog post “5 Facts About the U.S. Constitution”:

There was a proposal at the Constitutional Convention to limit the standing army for the country to 5,000 men. George Washington sarcastically agreed with this proposal as long as a stipulation was added that no invading army could number more than 3,000 troops.

James Madison’s version of this point is:

How could a readiness for war in time of peace be safely prohibited, unless we could prohibit, in like manner, the preparations and establishments of every hostile nation? The means of security can only be regulated by the means and the danger of attack. They will, in fact, be ever determined by these rules, and by no others. … If one nation maintains constantly a disciplined army, ready for the service of ambition or revenge, it obliges the most pacific nations who may be within the reach of its enterprises to take corresponding precautions.

In the same paragraph James Madison makes the telling point that fear of being conquered in war is such a strong motivation that leaders of a nation would be likely to disobey any constitution that, if obeyed, would doom them to being conquered. Thus, any constitution that tried to impose such limits would invite disrespect:

It is in vain to oppose constitutional barriers to the impulse of self-preservation. It is worse than in vain; because it plants in the Constitution itself necessary usurpations of power, every precedent of which is a germ of unnecessary and multiplied repetitions.

In the remainder of the Federalist Papers #41, James Madison suggests later numbers will deal with other issues besides national defense and makes a few other key points about national defense:

  • European powers present a great danger to the United States—as indeed they have presented to one another for a long time.

  • The states would present a great danger to one another if they each had their own army. Hence the total burden maintaining army and navy is likely to be much less if the main military force is a united one for the United States.

  • If the states are united, the wide Atlantic coupled with a strong navy can do a lot to keep them safe from European powers.

  • The navy is less dangerous to the liberty of the people than the army. Hence it is a good thing that a strong navy can go a long way in protecting the United States. (“The batteries most capable of repelling foreign enterprises on our safety, are happily such as can never be turned by a perfidious government against our liberties.”)

  • Though the proposed constitution allows Congress to authorize funds for army and navy for a two-year period, it does not prevent Congress from making such authorizations for only one year at a time.

  • The clause “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” is only talking about the power of taxation, while pointing generally to some of the appropriate purposes of taxation. It does not contain a separate unlimited power to “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” The most nearly relevant powers are detailed later on in that section of the proposed constitution and are all subject to limits.

Below is the full text of the Federalist Papers #41 to give context:

FEDERALIST NO. 41

General View of the Powers Conferred by the Constitution

For the Independent Journal.

Author: James Madison

To the People of the State of New York:

THE Constitution proposed by the convention may be considered under two general points of view. The FIRST relates to the sum or quantity of power which it vests in the government, including the restraints imposed on the States. The SECOND, to the particular structure of the government, and the distribution of this power among its several branches. Under the FIRST view of the subject, two important questions arise: 1. Whether any part of the powers transferred to the general government be unnecessary or improper? 2. Whether the entire mass of them be dangerous to the portion of jurisdiction left in the several States? Is the aggregate power of the general government greater than ought to have been vested in it? This is the FIRST question. It cannot have escaped those who have attended with candor to the arguments employed against the extensive powers of the government, that the authors of them have very little considered how far these powers were necessary means of attaining a necessary end. They have chosen rather to dwell on the inconveniences which must be unavoidably blended with all political advantages; and on the possible abuses which must be incident to every power or trust, of which a beneficial use can be made. This method of handling the subject cannot impose on the good sense of the people of America. It may display the subtlety of the writer; it may open a boundless field for rhetoric and declamation; it may inflame the passions of the unthinking, and may confirm the prejudices of the misthinking: but cool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT, good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused. They will see, therefore, that in all cases where power is to be conferred, the point first to be decided is, whether such a power be necessary to the public good; as the next will be, in case of an affirmative decision, to guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the power to the public detriment. That we may form a correct judgment on this subject, it will be proper to review the several powers conferred on the government of the Union; and that this may be the more conveniently done they may be reduced into different classes as they relate to the following different objects: 1. Security against foreign danger; 2. Regulation of the intercourse with foreign nations; 3. Maintenance of harmony and proper intercourse among the States; 4. Certain miscellaneous objects of general utility; 5. Restraint of the States from certain injurious acts; 6. Provisions for giving due efficacy to all these powers. The powers falling within the FIRST class are those of declaring war and granting letters of marque; of providing armies and fleets; of regulating and calling forth the militia; of levying and borrowing money. Security against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society. It is an avowed and essential object of the American Union. The powers requisite for attaining it must be effectually confided to the federal councils. Is the power of declaring war necessary? No man will answer this question in the negative. It would be superfluous, therefore, to enter into a proof of the affirmative. The existing Confederation establishes this power in the most ample form. Is the power of raising armies and equipping fleets necessary? This is involved in the foregoing power. It is involved in the power of self-defense. But was it necessary to give an INDEFINITE POWER of raising TROOPS, as well as providing fleets; and of maintaining both in PEACE, as well as in war? The answer to these questions has been too far anticipated in another place to admit an extensive discussion of them in this place. The answer indeed seems to be so obvious and conclusive as scarcely to justify such a discussion in any place. With what color of propriety could the force necessary for defense be limited by those who cannot limit the force of offense? If a federal Constitution could chain the ambition or set bounds to the exertions of all other nations, then indeed might it prudently chain the discretion of its own government, and set bounds to the exertions for its own safety.

How could a readiness for war in time of peace be safely prohibited, unless we could prohibit, in like manner, the preparations and establishments of every hostile nation? The means of security can only be regulated by the means and the danger of attack. They will, in fact, be ever determined by these rules, and by no others. It is in vain to oppose constitutional barriers to the impulse of self-preservation. It is worse than in vain; because it plants in the Constitution itself necessary usurpations of power, every precedent of which is a germ of unnecessary and multiplied repetitions. If one nation maintains constantly a disciplined army, ready for the service of ambition or revenge, it obliges the most pacific nations who may be within the reach of its enterprises to take corresponding precautions.

The fifteenth century was the unhappy epoch of military establishments in the time of peace. They were introduced by Charles VII. of France. All Europe has followed, or been forced into, the example. Had the example not been followed by other nations, all Europe must long ago have worn the chains of a universal monarch. Were every nation except France now to disband its peace establishments, the same event might follow. The veteran legions of Rome were an overmatch for the undisciplined valor of all other nations and rendered her the mistress of the world. Not the less true is it, that the liberties of Rome proved the final victim to her military triumphs; and that the liberties of Europe, as far as they ever existed, have, with few exceptions, been the price of her military establishments. A standing force, therefore, is a dangerous, at the same time that it may be a necessary, provision. On the smallest scale it has its inconveniences. On an extensive scale its consequences may be fatal. On any scale it is an object of laudable circumspection and precaution. A wise nation will combine all these considerations; and, whilst it does not rashly preclude itself from any resource which may become essential to its safety, will exert all its prudence in diminishing both the necessity and the danger of resorting to one which may be inauspicious to its liberties. The clearest marks of this prudence are stamped on the proposed Constitution. The Union itself, which it cements and secures, destroys every pretext for a military establishment which could be dangerous. America united, with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat. It was remarked, on a former occasion, that the want of this pretext had saved the liberties of one nation in Europe. Being rendered by her insular situation and her maritime resources impregnable to the armies of her neighbors, the rulers of Great Britain have never been able, by real or artificial dangers, to cheat the public into an extensive peace establishment. The distance of the United States from the powerful nations of the world gives them the same happy security. A dangerous establishment can never be necessary or plausible, so long as they continue a united people. But let it never, for a moment, be forgotten that they are indebted for this advantage to the Union alone. The moment of its dissolution will be the date of a new order of things. The fears of the weaker, or the ambition of the stronger States, or Confederacies, will set the same example in the New, as Charles VII. did in the Old World. The example will be followed here from the same motives which produced universal imitation there. Instead of deriving from our situation the precious advantage which Great Britain has derived from hers, the face of America will be but a copy of that of the continent of Europe. It will present liberty everywhere crushed between standing armies and perpetual taxes. The fortunes of disunited America will be even more disastrous than those of Europe. The sources of evil in the latter are confined to her own limits. No superior powers of another quarter of the globe intrigue among her rival nations, inflame their mutual animosities, and render them the instruments of foreign ambition, jealousy, and revenge. In America the miseries springing from her internal jealousies, contentions, and wars, would form a part only of her lot. A plentiful addition of evils would have their source in that relation in which Europe stands to this quarter of the earth, and which no other quarter of the earth bears to Europe. This picture of the consequences of disunion cannot be too highly colored, or too often exhibited. Every man who loves peace, every man who loves his country, every man who loves liberty, ought to have it ever before his eyes, that he may cherish in his heart a due attachment to the Union of America, and be able to set a due value on the means of preserving it.

Next to the effectual establishment of the Union, the best possible precaution against danger from standing armies is a limitation of the term for which revenue may be appropriated to their support. This precaution the Constitution has prudently added. I will not repeat here the observations which I flatter myself have placed this subject in a just and satisfactory light. But it may not be improper to take notice of an argument against this part of the Constitution, which has been drawn from the policy and practice of Great Britain. It is said that the continuance of an army in that kingdom requires an annual vote of the legislature; whereas the American Constitution has lengthened this critical period to two years. This is the form in which the comparison is usually stated to the public: but is it a just form? Is it a fair comparison? Does the British Constitution restrain the parliamentary discretion to one year? Does the American impose on the Congress appropriations for two years? On the contrary, it cannot be unknown to the authors of the fallacy themselves, that the British Constitution fixes no limit whatever to the discretion of the legislature, and that the American ties down the legislature to two years, as the longest admissible term. Had the argument from the British example been truly stated, it would have stood thus: The term for which supplies may be appropriated to the army establishment, though unlimited by the British Constitution, has nevertheless, in practice, been limited by parliamentary discretion to a single year. Now, if in Great Britain, where the House of Commons is elected for seven years; where so great a proportion of the members are elected by so small a proportion of the people; where the electors are so corrupted by the representatives, and the representatives so corrupted by the Crown, the representative body can possess a power to make appropriations to the army for an indefinite term, without desiring, or without daring, to extend the term beyond a single year, ought not suspicion herself to blush, in pretending that the representatives of the United States, elected FREELY by the WHOLE BODY of the people, every SECOND YEAR, cannot be safely intrusted with the discretion over such appropriations, expressly limited to the short period of TWO YEARS? A bad cause seldom fails to betray itself. Of this truth, the management of the opposition to the federal government is an unvaried exemplification. But among all the blunders which have been committed, none is more striking than the attempt to enlist on that side the prudent jealousy entertained by the people, of standing armies. The attempt has awakened fully the public attention to that important subject; and has led to investigations which must terminate in a thorough and universal conviction, not only that the constitution has provided the most effectual guards against danger from that quarter, but that nothing short of a Constitution fully adequate to the national defense and the preservation of the Union, can save America from as many standing armies as it may be split into States or Confederacies, and from such a progressive augmentation, of these establishments in each, as will render them as burdensome to the properties and ominous to the liberties of the people, as any establishment that can become necessary, under a united and efficient government, must be tolerable to the former and safe to the latter. The palpable necessity of the power to provide and maintain a navy has protected that part of the Constitution against a spirit of censure, which has spared few other parts. It must, indeed, be numbered among the greatest blessings of America, that as her Union will be the only source of her maritime strength, so this will be a principal source of her security against danger from abroad. In this respect our situation bears another likeness to the insular advantage of Great Britain. The batteries most capable of repelling foreign enterprises on our safety, are happily such as can never be turned by a perfidious government against our liberties. The inhabitants of the Atlantic frontier are all of them deeply interested in this provision for naval protection, and if they have hitherto been suffered to sleep quietly in their beds; if their property has remained safe against the predatory spirit of licentious adventurers; if their maritime towns have not yet been compelled to ransom themselves from the terrors of a conflagration, by yielding to the exactions of daring and sudden invaders, these instances of good fortune are not to be ascribed to the capacity of the existing government for the protection of those from whom it claims allegiance, but to causes that are fugitive and fallacious. If we except perhaps Virginia and Maryland, which are peculiarly vulnerable on their eastern frontiers, no part of the Union ought to feel more anxiety on this subject than New York. Her seacoast is extensive. A very important district of the State is an island. The State itself is penetrated by a large navigable river for more than fifty leagues. The great emporium of its commerce, the great reservoir of its wealth, lies every moment at the mercy of events, and may almost be regarded as a hostage for ignominious compliances with the dictates of a foreign enemy, or even with the rapacious demands of pirates and barbarians. Should a war be the result of the precarious situation of European affairs, and all the unruly passions attending it be let loose on the ocean, our escape from insults and depredations, not only on that element, but every part of the other bordering on it, will be truly miraculous. In the present condition of America, the States more immediately exposed to these calamities have nothing to hope from the phantom of a general government which now exists; and if their single resources were equal to the task of fortifying themselves against the danger, the object to be protected would be almost consumed by the means of protecting them. The power of regulating and calling forth the militia has been already sufficiently vindicated and explained. The power of levying and borrowing money, being the sinew of that which is to be exerted in the national defense, is properly thrown into the same class with it. This power, also, has been examined already with much attention, and has, I trust, been clearly shown to be necessary, both in the extent and form given to it by the Constitution. I will address one additional reflection only to those who contend that the power ought to have been restrained to external taxation by which they mean, taxes on articles imported from other countries. It cannot be doubted that this will always be a valuable source of revenue; that for a considerable time it must be a principal source; that at this moment it is an essential one. But we may form very mistaken ideas on this subject, if we do not call to mind in our calculations, that the extent of revenue drawn from foreign commerce must vary with the variations, both in the extent and the kind of imports; and that these variations do not correspond with the progress of population, which must be the general measure of the public wants. As long as agriculture continues the sole field of labor, the importation of manufactures must increase as the consumers multiply. As soon as domestic manufactures are begun by the hands not called for by agriculture, the imported manufactures will decrease as the numbers of people increase. In a more remote stage, the imports may consist in a considerable part of raw materials, which will be wrought into articles for exportation, and will, therefore, require rather the encouragement of bounties, than to be loaded with discouraging duties. A system of government, meant for duration, ought to contemplate these revolutions, and be able to accommodate itself to them. Some, who have not denied the necessity of the power of taxation, have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language in which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed, that the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States," amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction. Had no other enumeration or definition of the powers of the Congress been found in the Constitution, than the general expressions just cited, the authors of the objection might have had some color for it; though it would have been difficult to find a reason for so awkward a form of describing an authority to legislate in all possible cases. A power to destroy the freedom of the press, the trial by jury, or even to regulate the course of descents, or the forms of conveyances, must be very singularly expressed by the terms "to raise money for the general welfare. "But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon? If the different parts of the same instrument ought to be so expounded, as to give meaning to every part which will bear it, shall one part of the same sentence be excluded altogether from a share in the meaning; and shall the more doubtful and indefinite terms be retained in their full extent, and the clear and precise expressions be denied any signification whatsoever? For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity, which, as we are reduced to the dilemma of charging either on the authors of the objection or on the authors of the Constitution, we must take the liberty of supposing, had not its origin with the latter. The objection here is the more extraordinary, as it appears that the language used by the convention is a copy from the articles of Confederation. The objects of the Union among the States, as described in article third, are "their common defense, security of their liberties, and mutual and general welfare. " The terms of article eighth are still more identical: "All charges of war and all other expenses that shall be incurred for the common defense or general welfare, and allowed by the United States in Congress, shall be defrayed out of a common treasury," etc. A similar language again occurs in article ninth. Construe either of these articles by the rules which would justify the construction put on the new Constitution, and they vest in the existing Congress a power to legislate in all cases whatsoever.

But what would have been thought of that assembly, if, attaching themselves to these general expressions, and disregarding the specifications which ascertain and limit their import, they had exercised an unlimited power of providing for the common defense and general welfare? I appeal to the objectors themselves, whether they would in that case have employed the same reasoning in justification of Congress as they now make use of against the convention. How difficult it is for error to escape its own condemnation!

PUBLIUS.

Links to my other posts on The Federalist Papers so far:

Another Kind of Police Brutality

One of the most severe forms of police brutality is inaction: when police don’t protect people from criminals. Recently, police have been committing this form of brutal inaction because of their pique at being criticized for the more direct and active forms of police brutality. This shouldn’t be. It is possible for the police to do their job effectively without mistreating people.

In the perhaps overpoliticized op-ed shown above (from which the next several quotations below are taken) Jason Riley makes some good points about what has happened in the wake of efforts to reduce active police brutality. Police are retaliating against criticism by shirking their jobs. The excuse is that they will be persecuted if they do their jobs. But that is acting as if rules for not mistreating people make it impossible to do effective policing. In any case, the police reaction to criticism has likely had an effect on crime rates. Jason gives some statistics:

Murders spiked by close to 30% in 2020, the biggest one-year increase since 1960. Aggravated assaults rose by 12%, and violent crime overall increased by 5.6% from 2019 levels. The left blames Covid-19, but the trend predates the pandemic. Violent crime, which more or less had been steadily declining since the early 1990s, began reversing course in 2015, not 2020. “Violent crime and homicide rates rose in the U.S. in 2016 for the second consecutive year, driven in part by a spike in murders in large cities,” the Journal reported in 2017, citing FBI data.

… Murders in Atlanta rose 62% from 2019 to 2020 …

… The Seattle Police Department investigated 73% more homicides in 2020 than it did a year earlier …

The link to police shirking to protest the protests against police can be seen in research by Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi that Jason describes as follows:

A 2020 study by Harvard economist Roland Fryer and co-author Tanaya Devi assessed the impact of these “viral” incidents and noticed a disturbing pattern: police become less proactive, their contacts with civilians decline, and violent crime spikes. That’s what happened in Ferguson after Brown was shot by an officer, in Chicago when the same thing happened to Laquan McDonald, in Baltimore after Freddie Gray died in police custody, and in Minneapolis after a cop murdered George Floyd.

Backing up the idea that there is an impulse among police to protest the protests against police behavior by shirking is the fact that many police are implicitly protesting the protests against police by retiring:

300 police officers have retired or resigned from SPD [Seattle Police Department] in the past 18 months, offset by about 90 new hires …

While I think it is important to take seriously the possibility I am emphasizing that beat cops are pulling back to show their displeasure at being criticized rather than because they rationally fear punishment for diligently doing their jobs in an appropriate way, incentives to follow bad criminological theories probably operate among the higher ranks of those who lead policing. Jason points to these areas where what might be reasonable reforms directionally have badly overshot:

In addition to vilifying police, many states and cities have passed “bail reform” laws that limit the ability of judges to hold defendants until trial. Local prosecutors now brag about how few crimes they prosecute. California has effectively decriminalized shoplifting.

There is a long history of terrible discrimination by police in doing little when crimes are committed against Black people. In Jason Willick’s writeup of his interview with Robert Woodson, he quote Robert as follows:

“whenever a black created a crime against another black, it was ignored and minimized, right?” Similarly, “if a white committed a crime against a black, it was ignored. But if a black committed a crime against a white, it was harshly treated.” That, Mr. Woodson says, is “what we fought against” in the civil-rights movement.

To this day, lack of sufficient policing in Black areas is one of the most important types of structural racism in our country. This is, indeed, a much larger and more important element of structural racism in our nation than active police brutality against Blacks. But there is no reason police can’t both do a lot more stringent and active policing of Black areas to protect Black people from crime without mistreating innocent people in those areas. A lot of it is about attitude. It is even possible to do a form of “stop and frisk” and still treat people with great dignity.

Of course, it takes something extra in order to expect police to be better. I think one of the most straightforward mechanisms is to require bachelor’s degrees for police. There may be areas of American life where there is too much wokeness, but I’ll bet it is would lead to better policing if rank-and-file police were somewhat more woke than they are. And spending a little more time on woke college campuses could help accomplish that.

But wokeness is not enough. Religious and Enlightenment beliefs about the inherent dignity of each human being are also important to inculcate into the hearts of those who will implement the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Personal psychological development is also important, so inner demons don’t get taken out on others that police deal with in the course of their jobs.

All of this takes time, hence the important I see in a 4-year college degree for those who would be police. Of course, this will cost more in police salaries. If we want better police, we’d better not be defunding the police. If we are going to expect more from them than we have in the past, we need to give them more.

Why Do Almost All Diets Fail?

A friend asked me recently why almost all diets fail. The most basic answer is that I don’t know. But I do have some possible reasons:

First, we have what is now called a “lipostat” which has a gravitational pull bringing us back to a steady-state weight. As I write and quote in “How Rising Anorexia Can Go Along with Rising Obesity: Both Can Be Caused By Environmental Contaminants”:

In addition to arguing for environmental contaminants contributing to the rise in obesity—and anorexia—the “A Chemical Hunger” series of blog posts is also important in making the case for the powerful influence of a “lipostat.” A lipostat is a fat-regulating mechanism in your body that pulls us strongly toward a particular weight—a weight that can get pushed around by chemicals. Our lipostats invalidate the naive version of “calories in/calories out” that treats calories in and calories out as if they were entirely under our conscious control. One of the reasons this is wrong is fidgeting. Here is the relevant passage from the “Paradoxical Reactions” blog post:

… avoiding food and collecting cookbooks isn’t the lipostat’s only method for controlling body weight. It has a number of other tricks up its sleeve.

Many people burn off extra calories through a behavior called “non-exercise activity thermogenesis” (NEAT). This is basically a fancy term for fidgeting. When a person has consumed more calories than they need, their lipostat can boost calorie expenditure by making them fidget, make small movements, and change posture frequently. It’s largely involuntary, and most people aren’t aware that they’re burning off extra calories in this way. Even so, NEAT can burn off nearly 700 calories per day.

… people with anorexia fidget like crazy. A classic symptom of anorexia is excessive physical activity, even in the most severe stages of the illness. When one group measured fidgeting with a highly accurate shoe-based accelerometer, they found that anorexics fidget almost twice as much as healthy controls.

This kind of fidgeting is the classic response in people whose bodies are fatter than they want to be. In studies where people were overfed until they were 10% heavier than their baseline, NEAT increased dramatically. All of this is strong evidence that people with anorexia have lipostats that mistakenly think they desperately need to lose weight.

For some people, the lipostat is set too low; they are prone to anorexia. For many more people, the lipostat is set too high; they are prone to obesity. There is wide agreement that misregulation of the lipostat has something to do with our modern environment: the type of food available and now customarily eaten, patterns of activity or lack thereof, environmental contaminants, other social or environmental causes. It isn’t easy to change one’s lipostat—after all, for most people it got misregulated gradually over the course of many years, and short of doing something quite dramatic, one could expect it to take a long time to get back on track, even if you knew how. I’ll save the discussion of the dramatic until last. Until then, let me talk as if the lipostat is stuck.

Fortunately, lipostatic gravity doesn’t always win, just as the earth’s gravity still hasn’t brought the moon down. But just as the moon avoids coming down to earth by always staying in motion around the earth, (short of accomplishing the difficult task of getting at the root of lipostatic misregulation) counteracting lipostatic gravity requires a permanent change in behavior. As I write in “Kevin D. Hall and Juen Guo: Why it is So Hard to Lose Weight and So Hard to Keep it Off”: “permanent weight loss requires permanent changes in behavior.”

So, the second reason many diets fail is because many people conceive of a “diet” as something you do for a while to lose weight, in the expectation that the weight will then stay off even after return to the pattern of eating that prevailed before the “diet.” That doesn’t work very well. Go back to the old behavior and you are likely to go back to the old weight.

Third, the way many people do diets, they are quite painful. For one thing, many people try to cut back on calories while still eating high on the insulin index. If you do that, you will be hungry and miserable. The Minnesota starvation experiment proved that. But if you eat low on the insulin index, you will be much, much less hungry physically, and it won’t be so bad. (See “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.”) Exactly how difficult differs from person to person, but it will be much, much less difficult.

To add to the physical misery of cutting back on calories while eating things that keep one’s insulin high, many people ramp up their internal self-criticism when they are on a diet. That makes them even more miserable than the physical discomfort alone would. (I’ve put a set of links on positive mental health at the bottom of this post that are relevant to avoiding this sort of thing.)

Being miserable physically and psychologically is likely to make you feel sorry for yourself. When you are done with your “diet” you might well compensate by eating bad stuff—perhaps even worse things than before you started the diet. And psychological misery might have other more direct hormonal effects on weight—more likely in the direction your lipostat is misregulated than in the opposite direction.

The fourth reason almost all diets “fail” is because people expect an unrealistically high dose-response. Many diets have been shown to bring people’s average weight down by a few pounds. But if people think it is only worth it keeping a new way of eating up if it brings their weight down a lot, then they might well give up.

So, what can work? Fasting. Fasting is a big dose. Done right, it isn’t that painful. (See “Fasting Tips.”) You can modify it to make it easier and it will still work. (See “My Modified Fast.”) It can be done periodically on an ongoing basis. It can be motivated as not just a way to reliably lose weight, but also as something that improves your health quite a bit even if you do little enough that your weight stays about the same.

Evidence is currently rolling in from many experimental trials showing the benefits of fasting. This is one area where I don’t have to make my usual complaint about crucial things being underresearched. Fasting is getting researched a lot these days.

As I prefigured early in this post, fasting might even be able to undo some of the misregulation of your lipostat. In particular, a fair bit of obesity is caused by diabetes and prediabetes. Fasting is a powerful treatment for diabetes and prediabetes. On that, take a look at the books of Jason Fung. (I list Jason Fung’s book The Obesity Code as one of “Five Books That Have Changed My Life.”)

For organized links to other posts on diet and health, see:

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass:


Open Skepticism and Closed Skepticism

I am a believer. I am also a skeptic—an open skeptic. For almost 40 years, I believed Mormonism. Toward the end of that time I also believed critics of Mormonism and believed in evolution as something so important, it should play a more central role in my vision of life and the universe than it did in Mormonism. Now I have come to a good place as a nonsupernaturalist who appreciates the important truths that traditional religions—including Mormonism—have to offer.

My spiritual journey taught me something valuable for every domain of life, not just for religion: that there are two sides of skepticism as different as day and night.

Open skepticism listens to everyone it comes across, expecting to find at least 10% truth in what almost anyone says, as well as expecting at least 10% falsehood. That expectation of 10% falsehood in most everything it encounters makes it eager to hear what the next person will have to say.

Closed skepticism shuts out ideas that come from the wrong source, are expressed using the wrong terminology, contain an obvious error along with useful insights, or bear the trappings of an alien worldview.

Open skepticism feels like curiosity. Closed skepticism feels like an intellectual version of self-righteousness.

As I touch on in “The Unavoidability of Faith,” we are forced to live by faith simply because there is so much that is unknown, yet we must make decisions. It is much better to face the unknown with the reward for having been an open skeptic—a mind full of the ideas from many sources—than with the intellectual impoverishment that is the comeuppance of a closed skeptic.

Don’t miss my Unitarian-Universalist sermons on my blog

Also, don’t miss Noah Smith’s religion posts:

  1. God and SuperGod

  2. You Are Already in the Afterlife

  3. Go Ahead and Believe in God

  4. Mom in Hell

  5. Buddha Was Wrong About Desire

  6. Noah Smith: Judaism Needs to Get Off the Shtetl

  7. Why Do Americans Like Jews and Dislike Mormons?

  8. Render Unto Ceasar

  9. Original Sin

  10. Islam Needs To Separate Church and State

  11. Noah Smith—Jews: The Parting of the Ways

  12. Noah Smith: You With the Fro

  13. The Fight of the Ages: Pain and Death

  14. Noah Smith: Sunni Islam is Failing

Other Posts on Religion:

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass:

What the Typical Rate of Improvement in Various Technologies Means for the Future—Christopher Mims

Christopher Mims is one of my favorite technology writers. He reported on a fascinating paper by Anuraag Sing, Giorgio Triulzi and Christopher Magee, “Technological improvement rate predictions for all technologies: Use of patent data and an extended domain description” a few weeks ago. (This paper is ungated.)

It turns out that different detailed areas of technology have had very different rates of technological progress in the recent past, which provide useful information for predicting their rates of progress in the future. Quoting from his September 18, 2021 Wall Street Journal article, “New Research Busts Popular Myths About Innovation,” here are some of the tidbits that Christopher Mims extracts from the paper and related research (bullets added to separate passages):

  • Robotics, for example, is improving at the rate of 18.5% a year, which sounds like a lot, except that the average rate of improvement for the more than 1,700 technologies the researchers studied is 19% a year.

  • … the MIT researchers have found through the patent literature that a principal driver of the steady shrinking of microchip circuitry has been improvements in laser technology.

  • In research yet to be published, Dr. Farmer and other members of his group compared the rates of improvement in solar photovoltaic technology and nuclear power, and found that while the cost per watt of solar power is now 0.1% what it was 70 years ago, the cost of nuclear power actually went up.

    “So if you’re talking about the future, it isn’t nuclear; and if you’re an investor, you should know that, and if you’re a student, becoming a nuclear engineer isn’t something I would recommend to anybody,” says Dr. Farmer.

The paper's method is to fit rates of productivity growth in 30 technological domains to details of patent data as the right-hand-side variables and then extrapolate that function of patent data to many, many more technological domains. As Anuraag Sing, Giorgio Triulzi and Christopher Magee write:

As shown in Benson and Magee (2015b) and, more recently, by Triulzi et al. (2020), once a patent set for a technology domain has been identified, it is possible to estimate the yearly rate of performance improvement for that domain. In these two papers the authors tested several different patent-based measures as predictors of the yearly performance improvement rate for 30 different technologies for which observed performance time series were available. By far, the most accurate and reliable indicator is a measure of the centrality of a technology's patents in the overall US patent citation network, as shown in Triulzi et al. (2020). More precisely, technologies whose patents cite very central patents tend to also have faster improvement rates, possibly as a result of enjoying more spillovers from advances in other technologies and/or because of a wider use of fast improving technologies by other technologies, proxied by patent citations.

This should all be taken with a grain of salt, but it provides interesting predictions for the rate of progress in finely-sliced (“granular”) technological domains that will be testable in the future—say by choosing a random sample to do a detailed study of productivity for.

Some of the key tables in the paper give very interesting detail. First, how narrow the domains are is clear from this list of the ten predicted to have the highest rate of technological improvement:

These ten all seem in fairly closely related domains. The list of the twenty predicted to have the slowest rate of technological improvement is more variegated:

The table that gives the most comprehensive sense is that for the 50 biggest domains. Unfortunately, it is ordered by size of domain rather than by growth rate, but there is a lot of useful information in it:

The claim that rates of progress in particular domains are fairly constant raises the issue of why there are noticeable technology shocks at the macro level. Here is how I see things:

  • Technologies improve in narrow domains at different rates; several narrow domains can often be reasonably close substitutes.

  • At some point one technology overtakes a status-quo technology by enough that the insurgent technology goes through an S-shaped logistic curve to widespread adoption.

  • Because of transition costs, the insurgent technology has to be significantly better at that point.

  • The technology shock seen in aggregate data corresponds to the steep part of the S-curve, when adoptions are happening fast (or rather, completions of the transition due to adoptions are happening fast).

  • The exact time when an insurgent technology will overtake a status-quo technology could be predicted much better than it is by macroeconomists—after all, there is warning in the early-adoption part of the S-curve before the steep part of the S-curve.

  • Though there is little doubt that the method will be debated, papers like this are are start toward what we need in order to better predict macroeconomic technology shocks.

Christopher Mims’s Wall Street Journal article has a hint of the kind of thing I am arguing. Christopher writes:

Bill Buxton, a researcher at Microsoft Research and one of the creators of the interface on which modern touch computing is based, articulated in 2008 a theory that distills some of the insights of this research into a simple concept. He calls it the “long nose of innovation,” and it describes a graph plotting the rate of improvement, and often adoption, of a technology: a period of apparently negligible gains, followed by exponential growth.

How Lithium May Have Led to Serious Obesity for the Pima Beginning around 1937

The slimemoldtimemold.com series “A Chemical Hunger” has been a mother lode for things worth talking about in understanding the rise of obesity. I have written three posts in reaction already:

  1. Are Processed Food and Environmental Contaminants the Main Cause of the Rise of Obesity?

  2. Livestock Antibiotics, Lithium and PFAS as Leading Suspects for Environmental Causes of Obesity

  3. How Rising Anorexia Can Go Along with Rising Obesity: Both Can Be Caused By Environmental Contaminants

Overall, I find the argument persuasive that there is some role for environmental contaminants (such as livestock antibiotics, lithium and PFAS) in the rapid rise of obesity since 1980. Sometimes the author goes too far by suggesting that another thing is not contributing because it doesn’t explain part of the observed pattern. But there is every likelihood that environmental contaminants and other causes are contributing to the rise in obesity in general. It may be that the facts can’t be explained without environmental contaminants as part of the picture, but it is easy for other factors to contribute to an overall upward trend both before and after 1980.

A good example of this is that obesity rose across the board for Native Americans as their diets and other aspects of their lives modernized, but obesity rose especially sharply for the Pima, beginning in 1937. The slimemoldtimemold blog focuses on this issue in response to the following comment to that blog:

In another comment, u/evocomp raises a number of points, the most interesting being:

The famous Pima Indians of Arizona had a tenfold increase in diabetes from 1937 to the 1950s, and then became the most obese population of the world at that time, long before 1980s. Mexican Pimas followed the trend when they modernized too.

Slimemoldtimemold fully agrees that there is a mystery to be explained:

The Pima people, sometimes called Pima Indians, are a group of Native Americans from the area that is now southern Arizona and northwestern Mexico. In the United States, they are particularly associated with the Gila River Valley.

What evocamp describes is well-documented. The Pima seem to have had normal rates of diabetes and obesity in 1937, but both increased enormously by 1950, and by 1965 the Arizona Pima Indians had “the highest prevalence of diabetes ever recorded.” By 1970 the diabetes rate was around 40%, and by 2016, around 50%. The numbers on obesity are less specific, but it was also increasing and also very high by the 1970s.

The timeline here is very surprising — before 1970, obesity rates worldwide were almost always 10% or less. This is clearly a mystery that needs to be accounted for, so we really appreciate evocamp pointing us to this example.

Moreover, this was a pattern not seen at that level for other Native American groups:

There were many other groups of Native Americans living in largely similar conditions all over the country, but none of these groups were around 40% obese by 1970. It can’t be food or shelter or oppression by the US government because these things were more or less common to all groups …

Why then? Here is the proposed explanation:

… the difference between the Pima and other Native Americans is that the Pima were being exposed to huge doses of lithium in their food and water and other groups weren’t.

The Pima did seem to be exposed to a substantial dose of lithium in their groundwater:

The report also notes that “lithium is found in the groundwater of the Gila Valley near Safford.” There’s also this USGS report which says a Wolfberry plant (genus Lycium) “was sampled on lands inhabited by the Pima Indians in Arizona; it contained 1,120 ppm lithium in the dry weight of the plant.” To give that number some context, “an average of 150 ppm lithium in the ash and 25.8 ppm in the dry weight of all plants that were collected in both closed and open arid basins is considerably higher than the average of 1.3 ppm in dry weight reported for plants growing in a nonarid climate.” There was serious lithium contamination in this valley as early as 1974!

Also regarding the 1974 source, another USGS report says, “Sievers and Cannon (1974) expressed concern for the health problem of Pima Indians living on the Gila River Indian Reservation in central Arizona because of the anomalously high lithium content in water and in certain of their homegrown foods.”

We couldn’t have cherry-picked this example, because u/evocomp proposed it.

Overall, this is a very interesting piece of evidence that we should be worrying about lithium in our water supply—both in drinking water and in water used on farms.

For organized links to other posts on diet and health, see: