Akrasia vs. Arete

Aristotle is by general acceptance one of the greatest minds of all antiquity. From Aristotle we have the foundations of scientific reasoning and experimentation - the foundations of modern science. Sadly, virtually nothing he wrote himself has survived; all we have are translations of what we would now call class notes - translated from Greek into Arabic and then into Latin and Romance languages during the Enlightenment in Western Europe.

I'll address just two of Aristotle's words in this blog/chapter, words that clearly indicated an anticipation if not inspired glimpses of LDS Doctrine: Akrasia vs. Arete.

The conventional 19th Century English translation of Akrasia means something totally different in 21st Century English, so I don't even want to repeat it here. Fundamentally, Akrasia means lack of self-control. Someone may know what is right, but has a weak will and no sense of long-term goals (Telos). Aristotle generally accepted Socrates' belief that few people voluntarily do evil, but instead most who do fall into it out of lack of self-control - typically to give in to immediate pleasure. This was not vice - which is deliberate evil - but instead something a bit less "bad." It can nevertheless lead to immense and long-term damage to many other people as well as themselves. We see Akrasia afflict far too many otherwise demonstrably intelligent people in our world. The word sounds like 'crazy' - which would be a good description of some recent catastrophic falls from public esteem of certain American and French politicians lately. A few minutes of illicit sexual contact commonly leads to destroyed families and disfunctional children for a far longer period of time than the initial mistake involved. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation.

In my mind there has always been different kinds of intelligence, and political intelligence, or mathematical intelligence, or verbal intelligence do not equal Arete, do not equal moral intelligence.

I'm reminded of a former Director of the USGS, talking about Matrix Management, saying "WHAT could they possibly have been thinking?!??"

The other word is Arete, usually translated as "virtue." For Greeks, Arete included more than just moral and intellectual virtues, but covered a much wider range of things - including, for instance, the sharpness of a knife. Perhaps a partial translation would be "excellence." If someone or something is functioning properly, then it was exhibiting Arete. To function correctly as a human, of course, meant that you were behaving in a moral and rational way. A good person has the wisdom (Phronesis) to know how to act and comport her/himself in life as if they could see the consequences for more than a single day - and more than a single generation.  

This was an important point for Aristotle: a good person will feel pleasure in doing good things. A Latter-Day Saint might reword this to say that living in conformance with God's will is the only form of long-term personal satisfaction available. In a meeting this morning, my Bishop used these words: "...that we might align our will with Thine."

To this I added a heartfelt Amen.

~~~~~

Death by Accountability

Accountability seems essential - even moral, right?  EVERYONE should be accountable for their acts.

However, moderation in all things - especially moderation.  For instance, most people agree that water is good. It's possible to drink too much water, however - this even has several names: water poisoning, hyper-hydration, etc. You can kill yourself with too much water, and I'm not even counting drowning here.

Before Ronald Reagan, government employees were known to be hard-working, not particularly well paid, and dedicated to their country. Well, Federal employees haven't actually changed. From Reagan onward, however, government has been described as not the solution to the problem, but that government is the problem.  He then proceeded to use government to build up a 600-ship Navy and double and triple our national debt. Go figure. Except for political leverage by unscrupulous politicians, I really can't see why government has been targeted. Why not Bear Sterns? Why not Bank of America? And except for people who have never seen a federal employee and what they do, I can't see why anyone would believe government was a bad thing. After all, who protects us from volcanic or earthquake crises? Provides us weather information and warnings? Delivers our mail? Guards our country? Cuts our Social Security checks? Chases down fraud (well, everywhere except Wall Street, anyway). 

The inevitable consequence of this broad and unjustified negative categorization has been to demand more accountability: prove to us that you aren't wasting taxpayers' dollars! One addresses this by demanding more and more reports, setting greater and more complex rules. Who actually does this?  Congress usually dumps at least 10 loony new regulations on Federal employees and businesses every year.  Who enforces these? People in cubicles.  We call them The Bean Counters.

I'll emphasize that it's not just happening in the Federal government. I've watched this trend towards ever-greater accountability expand from almost nothing 35 years ago to what we see today in many different domains.  Scientific journals now frenziedly game the rating system to increase an artificial number called a Citation Index or Impact Factor. My performance as a scientist is rated every 6 months. This is largely good, but also partly bad, because how do you rate someone doing a discovery process?  It's complicated and largely artificial, and the current process requires at least a person-day each time for each scientist. It's like the technology that counts how many times people click on an internet ad - it is artificial and leads to strange, illogical behavior, like Content Farms.  

Let me give an example I'm familiar with:

Before I moved with my family to Venezuela in 1987, the USGS National Center was a hustling, busy place crammed with scientists and technicians. The building is a series of stacked 8-sided stars nearly a third of a mile (half a kilometer) long. In 1987 it produced maps, energy and mineral resource assessments, and was a world leader in developing new geophysical technology. The "A" stack of the 3rd floor was Administration, the "B" stack was devoted to chem labs, the "C" stack geology, etc. 

When I got back from Saudi Arabia in 1995, all the chem labs had been gutted from the "B" stack - and it was now filled with cubicles for all the administrative assistants required by ever-growing additional rules, regulations, and reporting requirements. These people were not bad - but they were bean-counters, not contributing anything to the products of the USGS. They also cost money: salary, building space, etc., and this was taken at the expense of doing what the USGS was tasked to do: map our nation and its resources - and international resources that we are so critically and strategically dependent upon, such as the Rare Earth Elements now controlled (97% of world production) by China.  

This cancerous growth was all driven by Congress, which gives us several new bills each year that demanded ever-greater accountability, to make sure that taxpayer money wasn't misspent. Republicans and Democrats are equally well-intended - and equally guilty - for the accountability cancer. Never mind what banks and investment firms get away with (and still scream about too much oversight). The burden on the USGS Administrative Officers can be characterized in an amazing and very tangible way: 2 to 3 meters (10 feet!) of shelf-space were necessary to keep all the regulations in 5-cm/2-inch binders. The first time I saw this, it was mind-boggling. More boggling than this was the way that this reportage and accountability burden increased every single year since then. Now there are so many rules and regulations that they must be kept online. At least it saves cutting down another forest for the paper needed.

Accountability has had a huge effect on scientific productivity. Publications and maps - despite the availability of computers and plotters and The Cloud - is less than half what it was 10 years ago, and it is declining.

Bloated accountability has also had a huge effect on the people charged with managing it. As a chief scientist, fully 60% of my time was taken up with all the required reportage. My work-week was routinely about 55 hours long - because I felt I had to help the scientists get work done and product released. In a science team of ~120 people, we have an Administrative Officer who routinely works a 60-hour week - and she still can't keep up even though she works from dark til dark. She could not function without the 9 assistants to do all that reportage and accountability checking. That's an astounding overhead.

From one admin officer needed per 100 scientists and technicians in 1987, today it is now almost 9 per 100 people.  

~~~~~

When there is suspicion and distrust, the public demands accountability, and this is generally not a bad thing. However, it is possible to stifle research and business productivity almost to a halt with too many accountability demands - mandated reports and constantly-evolving rule-sets for how to do even basic things.

Death by accountability is possible, and I've been watching The Monster's growth actually accelerate in the past 10 years.  It's like a tumor: it demands greater and greater resources, and imposes its priorities on you no matter what else might be important. Already there is far too little Operating Expenses (OE) to get anything meaningful done in the USGS anymore.

Death by Accountability affects not just federal employees, but private businesses and university researchers, too.  We are all being nibbled to death by the flock of accountability geese.

Is there a solution? YES - and it's surprisingly simple.  All new regulations and reporting requirements should have a maximum time-limit - a Sunset Clause. After five or six or even 10 years, they should expire. If they are still necessary, they will inevitably be renewed. But we most stop the permanent add-on increase and growth of The Monster.

~~~~~

Fundamental Science Practices

How DO you do good science?  When I first joined the US Geological Survey (USGS) I was introduced into a powerful culture of high integrity science.  It came with an unusually stringent ethical code; I had to divest myself of some worthless mining stock that had been given to me.  As my branch chief told me, the only thing we have is our reputation as purveyors of extremely high-quality, unbiased science. Fail in that and we are nothing.

Since it came into existence with the Organic Act of 1879, the USGS has maintained comprehensive internal and external policy and procedures to ensure the quality, utility, and integrity of data, analyses, and scientific conclusions to maintain the reputation of USGS science for excellence and objectivity. In other words, certain specific high standards on how we must do science - from gathering data all the way to publishing it with an interpretation, and all the steps in between.  

In 2003, the USGS formalized these standards to ensure that the incoming biologists (yes, the USGS has a large biological discipline) as well as the geologists, hydrologists, and geophysicists all adhered to the same high standards.  A concept document was developed that outlined a set of science practices, philosophical premises, and operational principles that would serve as the foundation for USGS research and monitoring activities. Using the concept document and the best of our longstanding policy and procedures as the basis, in 2006, the USGS Fundamental Science Practices (FSP) policies were established.  Procedures related to applying these policies were developed, with the overall intent to ensure the quality and integrity of all future USGS science activities.

The FSP focuses on the operational principles related to planning and conducting data collection and research: how USGS science is carried out and how the resulting information products are reviewed, approved, edited, and released. The FSP are not designed to address the question of what work the USGS should do—this is addressed in many documents related to Bureau science planning.

A crucial part of the FSP is peer review of every science report or document: a minimum of two other disinterested scientists with expertise in the area of the report must do a critical review: did the authors think of this?  Did they follow a recognized valid procedure for that?  

Most important: will the final product - which must have both editing clean-up and Director's Sign-Off -  cause embarrassment to the USGS?  Director's Sign-Off is a read done by about 10 designated senior experts (not managers) who ensure that if there are political implications in a report - for instance a forecast of undiscovered hydrocarbon resources - that the USGS management gets a heads-up. Some have complained that this is in effect political interference, but in my experience this has never happened - at least in the USGS.

It seems like an admirable goal: nothing ever produced can be less than the very best, completely defensible - to maintain the reputation of the USGS. Historically this has been taken to such extremes that scientists have sat on a report, reworking the maps and the data, for years. The Best has sometimes become the enemy of the Good. Another potential problem is that risks are not often taken - there is a bias against going out into some completely new research direction.

For someone with an ego, finding all sorts of critical notes in red ink on your manuscript may be hard to take - until you see that what has been done by your peers is designed to protect you from embarrassment. 

The result is two-fold:

1. Every publication with the USGS logo on it is well-written, in impeccable English, and free of errors.  No fundamental assumptions have been missed, no logic bombs have slipped through.

2. If you are a USGS scientist, you can be justifiably proud of the scientific league you belong to.  

~~~~~

Selective Evidence

Out of the blue this morning I received a phone-call from a man in Mississippi.  Months ago I had tried hard to answer a question from him, submitted to the USGS "Ask a Geologist" web-link.  He took my sincere effort to answer his question as sympathy, tracked me down, and talked long and loud over the phone to get me to agree with his theory:

That the Great Comet of 1811 was the cause of the 1811-12 New Madrid earthquakes.

Some background: 
1. The Comet of 1811 was a real humdinger, visible longer (March 1811 til Summer 1812) than any other comet until Hale-Bopp.  It came nowhere near the Earth.
2. The New Madrid earthquakes took place in the Mississippi valley where Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas touch. This point is apparently in the center of an ancient failed continental rift, where North America started to split apart (like the Red Sea), but then stopped after partially opening up the Mississippi valley. The first two New Madrid earthquakes were BIG: estimates from ground evidence (sand-boils, reversal of the river, etc.) put them in the Magnitude 8 range. That's comparable to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake but these were felt far more distantly. Two large aftershocks hit the following January and February of 1812. Eye-witness reports indicate that the Mississippi River flowed backwards for about an hour, creating and filling Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee, before returning to its normal course.

Basic fault physics, and the fact that the Great Comet never came within 10's of millions of miles of Earth, make anyone who spends 5 minutes following those links above discard any possible connection.

However, the individual on the phone told me that he has seen a sunken rim near his home, had found "thousands" of meteorites, and even "encased pieces of human bodies" on his property.  He also said a USGS seismologist agreed with him, but wouldn't return samples he sent her.

She was someone I knew, so I called her - and you probably would not be surprised to hear she had a very different story.  The sunken rim was an ox-bow of a tributary river to the Mississippi - something common with rivers in flat land.  The "meteorites" were a well-known regional sandstone formation.

I tried to ask this guy how he had dated the individual features to connect them - especially the meteorites and the "encased pieces of human bodies"?  He brushed past this and said that I must Google a topic - it would lead me to his website. He had built a website to support this theory of his.

[Early take away: treat everything you find on the internet with caution - even those Wikipedia links above - if it hasn't been vetted with a scientific peer-review process required by all reputable scientific journals. If as a scientist you based your hypothesis and subsequent scientific research on something pulled out of someone's ear, you can bet it won't get you very far - certainly not to the Truth.]

I work for the US Geological Survey, and have specific tasks I am charged with doing.  I'm not paid by the US Taxpayer to have fun and pursue what I might like to do, so responding to Ask-a-Geologist queries is something I do on my own time as a volunteer.  To stop the high-speed chatter from this man on the phone, I asked him to send me his important points in an email message.

The main take-away: as Federal scientists, these sorts of things are all too common.  We run into these all the time. There are two common denominators:

1. An individual has formed a strong opinion about something, and is frustrated that no one will agree with him.  They frequently say things like 'scientists are set in their ways', and 'scientists won't listen to an average guy if he's not educated.'
2. They do selective evidence-shopping: if something doesn't support their theory, they discard the evidence.

The first issue is understandable. They didn't work and starve for 10 years to get a PhD, and resent that someone with one asks inconvenient questions, or perhaps just blows them off. There are issues of kindness and respect here, and we all know brusque and impatient people, whether they have a PhD or not. It's probably understandable that someone who is busy on a project will have little patience with someone who didn't do their homework, and says things that make no sense to someone who has studied physics, or astronomy, or geology, or whatever.

The second issue is far more serious: selective evidence-shopping is the antithesis of science. It will never lead you to the Truth. That selective evidence-shopping in this case included mis-representing what a fellow scientist had said - he twisted his encounter with her to serve his needs. As you might imagine, neither she nor I wish to ever talk with this individual again, for fear that he will mis-represent what we way to someone else - that he will allege to someone else that TWO USGS scientists agree with him now.

It all boils down to integrity: if you're not honest, you will fail as a scientist. It may happen before or after you earn your degree(s), but you will fail. When people learn that you have been dishonest, they will never trust you, and won't waste precious time on you. Sadly, I've known people with enough brains to earn a PhD who can't seem to understand this simple principle. They never seem to understand why their careers dead-end.

SCIENCE REQUIRES HONESTY.  If personal integrity isn't important to you, don't bother to apply.

~~~~~

College?

On the face of it, the need for a college education may be vastly overstated. We've all heard of the infamous Party Schools. There is an active grant system already in place today to encourage brilliant young people to by-pass college altogether and strike out to develop their own dreams. Everyone knows of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as iconic examples of fabulous financial success - by guys who never completed college.

The truth of the matter is: these success stories are incredibly rare. Really? Try this: how many people can you personally name who dropped out of college and became a big success? Do you need more than one hand to count that high? One finger?

Most of us make our way in this world by hard work.  Luck occasionally helps, but luck never lasts.  Brains help... but if you don't work hard brains will fail you 100% of the time.  Most of us in the real world need jobs.  If you want someone to take a risk and hire you - let's assume for the moment that you do not have a wealthy parent to invest in you - then you have to present some evidence that they can use to make the bet on you.  Make no mistake: hiring someone is a very risky bet.

How would you prove to someone that you were worth taking that risk? Being an Eagle Scout is good enough for Marriott Corporation - they will hire Eagle Scouts who need work because they have already proven that they can (a) work hard, and (b) stick to a task to completion. It may be entry-level, but it's a job. A college degree is pretty much the same thing, but brings with it evidence that you have some sort of advanced level of knowledge: you have proven that you can write, or you can design, or you can build, or you can market. Two or more is an added bonus to the person hiring you.

There is another reason for a college education: if you lose your job, you have both the degree and your previous experience to lay out as evidence to people who would potentially hire you.  In the current job market, it's not unusual to have 6 to 1,000+ people applying for a single job.  Put yourself in the shoes of the hiring agent: how can you sweeten the deal for her?  What evidence can you show that puts your head above all the others?  If most of them have college degrees and you don't, then you are starting on your knees.

Finally, here is something many people don't think about: with a general college education you acquire other things that a hiring agent probably won't care about. I took a class once just on the plays of Henrik Ibsen. I took another on Shakespeare and one on art history. I took a class in far eastern religion and philosophy. I also took an archery class (I still have the bow-snap scar to prove it), and several other odd-ball classes... just because they seemed interesting. I am so much the richer for these.

The result is that I can appreciate watercolors in a movie like Totoro, I can appreciate good writing in a movie  like Camila. I can pick up on - they make me smile - the subtle external references in movies like Avatar, Inception, Hero, Serenity, and Master and Commander that would just fly over the heads of people looking for cool CGI and a lot of blood and gore. Those people are easily bored; I'm not.  I can watch some movies multiple times and see new things each time. Because of college.

I'm saying this: a general college education means that your eyes are open to appreciate things you would not have appreciated otherwise. You are no longer a two-dimensional person, but someone who can live in a three-dimensional world and love it.

Sue, it's not cheap, and sure it takes some sweat and work. In this world, however, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If someone paid $1,500 for a black belt in a martial art (I've seen schools offering rank for a fee), how much do you really think people will respect you for that? Would you even really respect yourself?

Get that college degree. I'll go out on a ledge here and say that I don't really care what you get that degree in, or where; certainly a Harvard degree means little to anyone who are not Harvard grads. Ask around if you doubt me here; I've hired people, and someone who is full of themselves for where they came from is not what I'm looking for. But most of all, get that degree for yourself: become a greater person, a more enriched person. The carpenter who repaired my house in Virginia had a college degree; he picked it up on the side, and it wasn't easy. He had enough experience that he eventually built up a small company, and even ran for (and was elected) Chairman of the County Board of Supervisors. He was leading people in making huge, life-effecting, big-ticket funding decisions in infrastructure and education. His impact on people in that county will never end. He's also a Mormon bishop, helping people in yet another level.

Why do you think he was able to advance to where he is? He studied at night and stuck with it. Everyone admires and appreciates Scott.

~~~~~

Climate Change

You don't need to believe in climate change.  It's pretty much a done deal - no belief is necessary. It's been going on since the beginning of time, and there is a huge trove of evidence supporting the fact that our world is always changing. This evidence comes from isotopic evidence in lake bottoms, it comes from fossil evidence - warm-blooded fresh water animals whose remains have been found in Antarctica. There is even evidence from packrat middens (ancient packrat nests that can be dated using C14), and tree-rings. I have visited building sites while surveying in the southwestern US that show a huge population existed in the region that today could no longer support even a fraction of the evident population. I could fill my house with all the evidence that has been accumulating that shows our climate has changed and is changing.

What most people are hollering about these days is a slightly more specific question: how much of the recent climate change is anthropogenic - that is, human caused?  It's no surprise to anyone that we are using more fossil fuels today than are being replenished - by many orders of magnitude. Records kept since the 1950's at an atmospheric observatory on Mauna Loa volcano's north flank in Hawai'i show a steady rise in CO2 in our atmosphere. Recently, scientists have made enough measurements to quantify what is contributing to this CO2 increase in our atmosphere. A brilliant scientist who used to work for me (now retired) named Terry Gerlach recently published a paper in EOS, the weekly newsletter of the American Geophysical Union (14 June 2011 issue).

Some nay-sayers have argued that volcanoes contribute most of the CO2 to our atmosphere. Here are the final measured numbers:

Volcanoes: 0.26 Gigatons of CO2 per year
Humans:   35 Gigatons of CO2 per year

And it's accelerating: there has been a 550% increase in atmospheric CO2 emissions just since 1950. It's a known Greenhouse Gas - high-school kids prove this in physics classes.

How could this be? Well, for starts, China is bringing one new coal-fired power plant online every week.

Until recently, geologists broke up prehistory into several categories:
The Precambrian Era ended about 542 million years ago (we start seeing fossils).
The Paleozoic Era ended about 250 million years ago - and 95% of all living things died.
The Mesozoic Era (the age of Dinosaurs) ended about 65 million years ago when a 10-km/6-mile diameter asteroid crashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula.

We are now in the Cenozoic Era, which has several sub-sets:
  - The Paleocene lasted until 56 million years ago
  - The Eocene (when horses first appeared) lasted until 34 million years ago
  - The Oligocene lasted until 23 million years ago
  - The Miocene lasted until about 5 million years ago
  - The Pliocene lasted until about 1.8 million years ago
  - The Pleistocene (Saber-Tooth Cats, Mastodons, etc.) lasted until about 10,000 years ago.

Until recently, the last 10,000 years have been just called the Holocene. Now it is broken up to add a more recent epoch: the Anthropocene:  The time when Man started changing things. When mass-extinctions have accelerated so fast that it's comparable now to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Latter-Day Saints understand that the Earth is a living thing.  Implicit with that understanding is a responsibility to take care of her.

Abundant recent evidence suggests that politicians aren't up to doing anything about this.

But 65 million years ago, everything changed in just a few hours with the Chicxulub Event, with an explosion equivalent to about 100 million megatons of TNT.  About 30% of all life-forms were destroyed.

Are you ready for a very short-notice change?  Does the Abomination of Desolation ring a bell?


Somehow, I think that's in His Toolkit.

~~~~~

He gave us the TRUTH

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm an utter pragmatist.  In college I found math difficult to focus on - unless I could see a practical point to it.  Group theory?  Not much.  Complex variables?  YES.  Fast Fourier Transforms?  DEFINITELY YES.  It works - and will allow me to map rare earth elements (REE's) on the Atlantic Continental Shelf.

This is why I teach and study Jujitsu: as my oldest son said when he introduced me to it, "Dad, I finally found it!  This is a Martial Art, not a martial business, and Dad - it works."  I know I can stop a fight, I've watched a 5'1" grandmother take down a Navy SEAL Trainer not once but three times.  I'm not wasting my time swatting air or flailing around at people wearing heavy pads and helmets.  Jujitsu works.

This is also why I'm a geophysicist, and not a string theorist.  Math is fine if it's beautiful, but unless there is a point to it, I'm not interested in wasting time on it.  I successfully used an airborne EM system to map the groundwater beneath the 1,000-sq-km San Pedro Basin in 3D.  It works.

That's also why I'm a Latter-Day Saint: it makes sense, it answers all my questions, and puts everything in a rational, systematic framework that I can use to process life experiences.

Question for you: What do the following have in common?
Malachi 4: 5-6
1 Corinthians 15: 29
1 Corinthians 15: 40-42
Jeremiah 1: 5

There are quite a few more like this, but these are some of the more obvious parts of the Bible that no other Christian faith understands.  No other Christian faith has Temples, either.  Christ taught in Temples.  Israel was instructed to BUILD Temples.  However, only Latter-Day Temples exist on this Earth - at my last count, at least 136 of them all over the world.

I find it both irritating and amusing at the same time that a small number of "christians" take it upon themselves to excoriate Latter-Day Saints for not being Christian.  Yet they don't practice - nor even understand - simple and clear elements in the Bible like those verses, nor apparently how to be Christ-like. They also apparently never spent any time studying what happened at Nicaea in 325 AD, when a political decision was made to adopt a consensus understanding of who God the Father and Jesus Christ were.  Whited wall, indeed.

I've seen old stories about Joseph Smith, written by excommunicated bitter men and long since disproved, dredged back up again and again.  Why the animosity?  Why would anyone care?

To me, it's a back-handed compliment: someone is motivating a small number of susceptible people to attack a man who managed to explain those and many other obscure scriptures, who gave us the TRUTH.  There must be something to this.  Something must be working that bothers some people.

As far as I can tell, the Book of Mormon (521 pages dictated start-to-finish in just 60 days without corrections or editing), is exactly what it claims to be.  There are too many things in it - both content and structural - that were unavailable to anyone on Earth in 1828, but have since then been discovered.  I feel good when I read from it, while I do NOT feel good when reading the Song of Solomon.

This Gospel has opened my mind to continuing personal revelation, something unavailable in every other religion I studied when I was searching, and that by itself is a gift beyond measure.  My wife and I have received such amazing peace from it, and Joseph Smith is the reason I have this.  Joseph Smith also gave his life and blood rather than deny what he had seen and learned.  This Gospel works.

And I honor him for providing it, at great personal expense.

~~~~~