Tech.samaritan

A Swedish minister having assembled the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians, made a sermon to them, acquainting them with the principal historical facts on which our religion is founded — such as the fall of our first parents by eating an apple, the coming of Christ to repair the mischief, his miracles and suffering, etc. When he had finished an Indian orator stood up to thank him.

‘What you have told us,’ says he, ‘is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider. We are much obliged by your kindness in coming so far to tell us those things which you have heard from your mothers. In return, I will tell you some of those we have heard from ours.

‘In the beginning, our fathers had only the flesh of animals to subsist on, and if their hunting was unsuccessful they were starving. Two of our young hunters, having killed a deer, made a fire in the woods to boil some parts of it. When they were about to satisfy their hunger, they beheld a beautiful young woman descend from the clouds and seat herself on that hill which you see yonder among the Blue Mountains.

‘They said to each other, “It is a spirit that perhaps has smelt our broiling venison and wishes to eat of it; let us offer some to her.” They presented her with the tongue; she was pleased with the taste of it and said: “Your kindness shall be rewarded; come to this place after thirteen moons, and you will find something that will be of great benefit in nourishing you and your children to the latest generations.” They did so, and to their surprise found plants they had never seen before, but which from that ancient time have been constantly cultivated among us to our great advantage. Where her right hand had touched the ground they found maize; where her left had touched it they found kidney-beans; and where her backside had sat on it they found tobacco.’

The good missionary, disgusted with this idle tale, said: ‘What I delivered to you were sacred truths; but what you tell me is mere fable, fiction, and falsehood.’

The Indian, offended, replied: ‘My brother, it seems your friends have not done you justice in your education; they have not well instructed you in the rules of common civility. You saw that we, who understand and practise those rules, believed all your stories; why do you refuse to believe ours?’

– Benjamin Franklin, “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” 1784

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, ‘Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,’ or ‘Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.’ They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.

– G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross, 1909

When James Harrison had chest surgery at age 13, he resolved to begin donating blood to help others in need. When he did so, doctors realized that he carries a rare immune globulin that can prevent unborn babies from suffering attacks by their mothers’ antibodies, a condition known as Rhesus disease.

In the 59 years since this was discovered, Harrison has given blood more than 1,000 times, an average of once every three weeks for five decades, and his donations have saved an estimated 2.4 million babies.

This has earned Harrison a spot in Guinness World Records. He calls this “the only record that I hope is broken.”

The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful.

The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.

Illustration by Brad Clark at http://www.plus3video.com

In New York City, in an apartment a few streets away from the center of Harlem, above trees reaching out over sidewalks and dogs pulling at leashes and conversations cut short to avoid parking tickets, a group of professional thinkers once gathered and completed equations that would both snuff and spare several hundred thousand human lives.

People walking by the apartment at the time had no idea that four stories above them some of the most important work in applied mathematics was tilting the scales of a global conflict as secret agents of the United States armed forces, arithmetical soldiers, engaged in statistical combat. Nor could people today know as they open umbrellas and twist heels on cigarettes, that nearby, in an apartment overlooking Morningside Heights, one of those soldiers once effortlessly prevented the United States military from doing something incredibly stupid, something that could have changed the flags now flying in capitals around the world had he not caught it, something you do every day.

These masters of math moved their families across the country, some across an ocean, so they could work together. As they unpacked, the theaters in their new hometowns replaced posters for Citizen Kane with those for Casablanca, and the newspapers they unwrapped from photo frames and plates featured stories still unravelling the events at Pearl Harbor. Many still held positions at universities. Others left those sorts of jobs to think deeply in one of the many groups that worked for the armed forces, free of any other obligations aside from checking in on their families at night and feeding their brains during the day. All paused their careers and rushed to enlist so they could help crush Hitler, not with guns and brawn, but with integers and exponents.

The official name for the people inside the apartment was the Statistical Research Group, a cabal of geniuses assembled at the request of the White House and made up of people who would go on to compete for and win Nobel Prizes. The SRG was an extension of Columbia University, and they dealt mainly with statistical analysis. The Philadelphia Computing Section, made up entirely of women mathematicians, worked six days a week at the University of Pennsylvania on ballistics tables. Other groups with different specialties were tied to Harvard, Princeton, Brown and others, 11 in all, each a leaf at the end of a new branch of the government created to help defeat the Axis – the Department of War Math.

Actually…no. They were never officially known by such a deliciously sexy title. They were instead called the Applied Mathematics Panel, but they operated as if they were a department of war math.

The Department, ahem, the Panel, was created because the United States needed help. A surge of new technology had flooded into daily life, and the same wonders that years earlier drove ticket sales to the World’s Fair were now cracking open cities. Numbers and variables now massed into scenarios far too complex to solve with maps and binoculars. The military realized it faced problems that no soldier had ever confronted. No best practices yet existed for things like rockets and radar stations and aircraft carriers. The most advanced computational devices available were clunky experiments made of telephone switches or vacuum tubes. A calculator still looked like the mutant child of an old-fashioned cash register and a mechanical typewriter. If you wanted solutions to the newly unfathomable problems of modern combat you needed powerful number crunchers, and in 1941 the world’s most powerful number crunchers ran on toast and coffee.

Here is how it worked: Somewhere inside the vast machinery of war a commander would stumble into a problem. That commander would then send a request to the head of the Panel who would then assign the task to the group he thought would best be able to resolve the issue. Scientists in that group would then travel to Washington and meet with with top military personnel and advisors and explain to them how they might go about solving the problem. It was like calling technical support, except you called a computational genius who then invented a new way of understanding the world through math in an effort to win a global conflict for control of the planet.

Illustration by Brad Clark at http://www.plus3video.com/

For instance, the Navy desperately needed to know what was the best possible pattern, or spread, of torpedoes to launch against large enemy ships. All they had to go on were a series of hastily taken, blurry, black-and-white photographs of turning Japanese war vessels. The Panel handed over the photos to one of its meat-based mainframes and asked it to report back when it had a solution. The warrior mathematicians solved the problem almost as soon as they saw it. Lord Kelvin, they told the Navy, had already worked out the calculations in 1887. Just look at the patterns in the waves, they explained, see how they fan out in curves like an unfurling fern? The spaces tell you everything; they give it all away. Work out the distance between the cusps of the bow waves and you’ll know how fast the ship is going. Lord Kelvin hadn’t worked out what to do if the ship was turning, but no problem, they said. The mathematicians scribbled on notepads and clacked on blackboards until they had both advanced the field and created a solution. They then measured wavelets on real ships and saw their math was sound. The Navy added a new weapon to its arsenal – the ability to accurately send a barrage of torpedoes into a turning ship based only on what you could divine from the patterns in the waves.

The devotion of the mathematical soldiers grew stronger as the war grew bloodier and they learned the things they etched on hidden blackboards and jotted on guarded scraps of paper determined who would and would not return home to their families once the war was over. Leading brains in every scientific discipline had eagerly joined the fight, and although textbooks would eventually devote chapters to the work of the codebreakers and the creators of the atomic bomb, there were many groups whose stories never made headlines that produced nothing more than weaponized equations. One story in particular was nearly lost forever. In it, a brilliant statistician named Abraham Wald saved countless lives by preventing a group of military commanders from committing a common human error, a mistake that you probably make every single day.

Colleagues described Wald as gentle and kind, and as a genius unsurpassed in his areas of expertise. His contributions, said one peer, had “produced a decisive turn in method and purpose” in the social sciences. Born in a Hungary in 1902 on a parcel of land later claimed by Romania, the son of a Jewish baker, Wald spent his childhood studying equations, eventually working his way up through academia to become a graduate student at the University of Vienna mentored by the great mathematician Karl Menger. He was the sort of student who offered suggestions on how to improve the books he was reading, and then saw to it those suggestions were incorporated into later editions. His mentor would introduce Wald to problems that made experts in the field rub their beards, the sort of things with names like “stochastic difference equations” and the “betweenness among the ternary relations in metric space.” Wald would not only return within a month or so with the solution to such a problem but politely ask for another to solve. As he advanced the science of probability and statistics, his name became familiar to mathematicians in the United States where he eventually fled in 1938, reluctantly, as the Nazi threat grew. His family, all but a single brother, would later die in the extermination camp known as Auschwitz.

Soon after Wald arrived in the United States he joined the Applied Mathematics Panel and went to work with the team at Columbia stuffed in the secret apartment overlooking Harlem. His group looked for patterns and applied statistics to problems and situations too large and unwieldy for commanders to get their arms around. They turned the geometry of air combat into graphs and charts and they plotted the success rates of bomb sights and various tactics. As the war progressed, their efforts became focused on the most pressing problem of the war – keeping airplanes in the sky. 

A B-24 is shot down over an island in the Pacific – Source: http://www.britishpathe.com/

In some years of World War II, the chances of a member of a bomber crew making it through a tour of duty was about the same as calling heads in a coin toss and winning. As a member of a World War II bomber crew, you flew for hours above an entire nation hoping to murder you while suspended in the air, huge, visible from far away, and vulnerable from every direction above and below as bullets and flak streamed out to puncture you. “Ghosts already,” that’s how historian Kevin Wilson described World War II airmen. They expected to die because it always felt like the chances of surviving the next bombing run were about the same as running shirtless across a football field swarming with angry hornets and making it unharmed to the other side. You might make it across once, but if you kept running back and forth, eventually your luck would run out. Any advantage the mathematicians could provide, even a very small one, would make a big difference day after day, mission after mission.

As with the torpedo problem, the top brass explained what they knew, and the Panel presented the problem to Wald and his group. How, the Army Air Force asked, could they improve the odds of a bomber making it home? Military engineers explained to the statistician that they already knew the allied bombers needed more armor, but the ground crews couldn’t just cover the planes like tanks, not if they wanted them to take off. The operational commanders asked for help figuring out the best places to add what little protection they could. It was here that Wald prevented the military from falling prey to survivorship bias, an error in perception that could have turned the tide of the war if left unnoticed and uncorrected. See if you can spot it.

The military looked at the bombers that had returned from enemy territory. They recorded where those planes had taken the most damage. Over and over again, they saw the bullet holes tended to accumulate along the wings, around the tail gunner, and down the center of the body. Wings. Body. Tail gunner. Considering this information, where would you put the extra armor? Naturally, the commanders wanted to put the thicker protection where they could clearly see the most damage, where the holes clustered. But Wald said no, that would be precisely the wrong decision. Putting the armor there wouldn’t improve their chances at all. 

Do you understand why it was a foolish idea? The mistake, which Wald saw instantly, was that the holes showed where the planes were strongest. The holes showed where a bomber could be shot and still survive the flight home, Wald explained. After all, here they were, holes and all. It was the planes that weren’t there that needed extra protection, and they had needed it in places that these planes had not. The holes in the surviving planes actually revealed the locations that needed the least additional armor. Look at where the survivors are unharmed, he said, and that’s where these bombers are most vulnerable; that’s where the planes that didn’t make it back were hit.

Taking survivorship bias into account, Wald went ahead and worked out how much damage each individual part of an airplane could take before it was destroyed – engine, ailerons, pilot, stabilizers, etc. – and then through a tangle of complicated equations he showed the commanders how likely it was that the average plane would get shot in those places in any given bombing run depending on the amount of resistance it faced. Those calculations are still in use today.

1944 War Dept US Army Air Forces Training Film – Source: National Archives

The military had the best data available at the time, and the stakes could not have been higher, yet the top commanders still failed to see the flaws in their logic. Those planes would have been armored in vain had it not been for the intervention of a man trained to spot human error.

A question should be forming in the front of your brain at this point. If the top brass of the United States armed forces could make such a simple and dumb mistake while focused on avoiding simple and dumb mistakes, thanks to survivorship bias, does that mean survivorship bias is likely bungling many of your own day-to-day assumptions? The answer is, of course, yes. All the time.

Simply put, survivorship bias is your tendency to focus on survivors instead of whatever you would call a non-survivor depending on the situation. Sometimes that means you tend to focus on the living instead of the dead, or on winners instead of losers, or on successes instead of failures. In Wald’s problem, the military focused on the planes that made it home and almost made a terrible decision because they ignored the ones that got shot down.

It is easy to do. After any process that leaves behind survivors, the non-survivors are often destroyed or muted or removed from your view. If failures becomes invisible, then naturally you will pay more attention to successes. Not only do you fail to recognize that what is missing might have held important information, you fail to recognize that there is missing information at all.

You must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and losers, successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention to one side of that equation you are always neglecting the other. If you are thinking about opening a restaurant because there are so many successful restaurants in your hometown, you are ignoring the fact that only successful restaurants survive to become examples. Maybe on average 90 percent of restaurants in your city fail in the first year. You can’t see all those failures because when they fail they also disappear from view. As Nassim Taleb writes in his book The Black Swan, “The cemetery of failed restaurants is very silent.” Of course the few that don’t fail in that deadly of an environment are wildly successful because only the very best and the very lucky can survive. All you are left with are super successes, and looking at them day after day you might think it’s a great business to get into when you are actually seeing evidence that you should avoid it.

Google’s Larry Page – Source: Fortune Magazine

Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. It’s an unavoidable tick, the desire to deconstruct success like a thieving magpie and pull away the shimmering bits. You look to the successful for clues about the hidden, about how to better live your life, about how you too can survive similar forces against which you too struggle. Colleges and conferences prefer speakers who shine as examples of making it through adversity, of struggling against the odds and winning. The problem here is that you rarely take away from these inspirational figures advice on what not to do, on what you should avoid, and that’s because they don’t know. Information like that is lost along with the people who don’t make it out of bad situations or who don’t make it on the cover of business magazines – people who don’t get invited to speak at graduations and commencements and inaugurations. The actors who traveled from Louisiana to Los Angeles only to return to Louisiana after a few years don’t get to sit next to James Lipton and watch clips of their Oscar-winning performances as students eagerly gobble up their crumbs of wisdom. In short, the advice business is a monopoly run by survivors. As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.” The things a great company like Microsoft or Google or Apple did right are like the planes with bullet holes in the wings. The companies that burned all the way to the ground after taking massive damage fade from memory. Before you emulate the history of a famous company, Kahneman says, you should imagine going back in time when that company was just getting by and ask yourself if the outcome of its decisions were in any way predictable. If not, you are probably seeing patterns in hindsight where there was only chaos in the moment. He sums it up like so, “If you group successes together and look for what makes them similar, the only real answer will be luck.”

If you see your struggle this way, as partly a game of chance, then as Google Engineer Barnaby James writes on his blog, “skill will allow you to place more bets on the table, but it’s not a guarantee of success.” Thus, he warns, “beware advice from the successful.” Entrepreneur Jason Cohen, in writing about survivorship bias, points out that since we can’t go back in time and start 20 identical Starbucks across the planet, we can never know if that business model is the source of the chain’s immense popularity or if something completely random and out of the control of the decision makers led to a Starbucks on just about every street corner in North America. That means you should be skeptical of any book promising you the secrets of winning at the game of life through following any particular example.

It might seem disheartening, the fact that successful people probably owe more to luck than anything else, but only if you see luck as some sort of magic. Take off those superstitious goggles for a moment, and consider this: the latest psychological research indicates that luck is a long mislabeled phenomenon. It isn’t a force, or grace from the gods, or an enchantment from fairy folk, but the measurable output of a group of predictable behaviors. Randomness, chance, and the noisy chaos of reality may be mostly impossible to predict or tame, but luck is something else. According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck – bad or good – is just what you call the results of a human being consciously interacting with chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.

Over the course of 10 years, Wiseman followed the lives of 400 subjects of all ages and professions. He found them after he placed ads in newspapers asking for people who thought of themselves as very lucky or very unlucky. He had them keep diaries and perform tests in addition to checking in on their lives with interviews and observations. In one study, he asked subjects to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs inside. The people who labeled themselves as generally unlucky took about two minutes to complete the task. The people who considered themselves as generally lucky took an average of a few seconds. Wiseman had placed a block of text printed in giant, bold letters on the second page of the newspaper that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Deeper inside, he placed a second block of text just as big that read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The people who believed they were unlucky usually missed both.

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.

Wiseman told Skeptical Inquirer magazine that he likened it to setting loose two people inside an apple orchard, each tasked with filling up their baskets as many times as possible. The unlucky person tends to go to the same few spots over and over again, the basket holding fewer apples each visit. The lucky person never visits the same spot twice, and that person’s basket is always full. Change those apples to experiences, and imagine a small portion of those experiences lead to fame, fortune, riches, or some other form of happiness material or otherwise, and you can see that chance is not as terrifying as it first appears, you just need to learn how to approach it.

“The harder they looked, the less they saw. And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain type of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.” – Richard Wiseman in an article written for Skeptical Inquirer

Survivorship bias also flash-freezes your brain into a state of ignorance from which you believe success is more common than it truly is and therefore you leap to the conclusion that it also must be easier to obtain. You develop a completely inaccurate assessment of reality thanks to a prejudice that grants the tiny number of survivors the privilege of representing the much larger group to which they originally belonged.

Here is an easy example. Many people believe old things represent a higher level of craftsmanship than do new things. It’s sort of a “they don’t make them like they used to” kind of assumption. You’ve owned cars that only lasted a few years before you had to start replacing them piece by piece, and, would you look at that, there goes another Volkswagon Beetle buzzing along like it just rolled off an assembly line. It’s survivorship bias at work. The Beetle or the Mustang or the El Camino or the VW Minibus are among a handful of models that survived in large enough numbers to become iconic classics. The hundreds of shitty car designs and millions of automobile corpses in junkyards around the world far outnumber the popular, well-maintained, successful, beloved survivors. According to Josh Clark at HowStuffWorks, most experts say that cars from the last two decades are far more reliable and safer than the cars of the 1950s and ‘60s, but plenty of people believe otherwise because of a few high-profile survivors. The examples that would disprove such assumptions are rusting out of sight. Do you see how it’s the same as Wald’s bombers? The Beetle survived, like the bombers that made it home, and it becomes a representative of 1960s cars because it remains visible. All the other cars that weren’t made in the millions and weren’t easy to maintain or were poorly designed are left out of the analysis because they are now removed from view, like the bombers that didn’t return.

Similarly, photographer Mike Johnston explains on his blog that the artwork that leaps from memory when someone mentions a decade like the 1920s or a movement like Baroque is usually made up of things that do not suck. Your sense of a past era tends to be informed by paintings and literature and drama that are not crap, even though at any given moment pop culture is filled with more crap than masterpieces. Why? It isn’t because people were better artists back in the day. It is because the good stuff survives, and the bad stuff is forgotten. So over time, you end up with skewed ideas of past eras. You think the artists of antiquity were amazing in the same way you associate the music of past decades with the songs that survived long enough to get into your ears. The movies about Vietnam never seem include in their soundtracks the songs that sucked.

“I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it’s just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn’t mean all of them were.” – Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer

You succumb to survivorship bias because you are innately terrible with statistics. For instance, if you seek advice from a very old person about how to become very old, the only person who can provide you an answer is a person who is not dead. The people who made the poor health choices you should avoid are now resting in the earth and can’t tell you about those bad choices anymore. That’s why it’s difficult not to furrow your brow and wonder why you keep paying for a gym membership when Willard Scott showcases the birthday of a 110-year-old woman who claims the source of her longevity is a daily regimen of cigarillos, cheese sticks, and Wild Turkey cut with maple syrup and Robitussin. You miss that people like her represent a very small number of the living. They are on the thin end of a bell curve. There is a much larger pool of people who basically drank bacon grease for breakfast and didn’t live long enough to appear on television. Most people can’t chug bourbon and gravy for a lifetime and expect to become an octogenarian, but the unusually lucky handful who can tend to stand out precisely because they are alive and talking.

The mentalist Derren Brown once predicted he could flip a coin 10 times in a row and have it come up heads every time. He then dazzled UK television audiences by doing exactly that, flipping the coin into a bowl with only one cutaway shot for flair. How did he do it? He filmed himself flipping coins for nine hours until he got the result he wanted. He then edited out all the failures and presented the single success.

Advertisements for weight loss products and fitness regimens operate just like Derren Brown’s magic trick, by hiding the failures and letting your survivorship bias do the rest. “Those always use the most positive claims, the most outrageous examples to sell a product,” Phil Plait, an astronomer and leading voice in the skeptical movement, explained to me. “When these things don’t work for the vast majority of customers, you never hear about it, at least not from the seller.” The people who use the diet, or the product, or the pill, and fail to lose weight don’t get trotted out for photo shoots – only the successes do. That same phenomenon has become a problem in science publications, especially among the younger sciences like psychology, but it is now under repair. For far too long, studies that fizzled out or showed insignificant results have not been submitted for publication at the same level as studies that end up with positive results, or even worse, they’ve been rejected by prominent journals. Left unchecked, over time you end up with science journals that only present the survivors of the journal process – studies showing significance. Psychologists are calling it the File Drawer Effect. The studies that disprove or weaken the hypotheses of high-profile studies seem to get stuffed in the file drawer, so to speak. Many scientists are pushing for the widespread publication of replication, failure, and insignificance. Only then, they argue, will the science journals and the journalism that reports on them accurately describe the world being explored. Science above all will need to root out survivorship, but it won’t be easy. This particular bias is especially pernicious, said Plait, because it is almost invisible by definition. ”The only way you can spot it is to always ask: what am I missing? Is what I’m seeing all there is? What am I not seeing? Those are incredibly difficult questions to answer, and not always answerable. But if you don’t ask them, then by definition you can’t answer them.” He added. “It’s a pain, but reality can be a tough nut to crack.”

Failure to look for what is missing is a common shortcoming, not just within yourself but also within the institutions that surround you. A commenter at an Internet watering hole for introverts called the INTJForum explained it with this example: when a company performs a survey about job satisfaction the only people who can fill out that survey are people who still work at the company. Everyone who might have quit out of dissatisfaction is no longer around to explain why. Such data mining fails to capture the only thing it is designed to measure, but unless management is aware of survivorship bias things will continue to seem peachy on paper. In finance, this is a common pitfall. The economist Mark Klinedinst explained to me that mutual funds, companies that offer stock portfolios, routinely prune out underperforming investments. “When a mutual fund tells you, ‘The last five years we had 10 percent on average return,’ well, the companies that didn’t have high returns folded or were taken over by companies that were more lucky.” The health of the companies they offer isn’t an indication of the mutual fund’s skill at picking stocks, said Klinedinst, because they’ve deleted failures from their offerings. All you ever see are the successes. That’s true for many, many elements of life. Money experts who made great guesses in the past are considered soothsayers because their counterparts who made equally risky moves that failed nosedived into obscurity and are now no longer playing the game. Whole nations left standing after wars and economic struggles pump fists of nationalism assuming that their good outcomes resulted from wise decisions, but they can never know for sure.

“Let us suppose that a commander orders 20 men to invade an enemy bunker. This invasion leads to a complete destruction of the bunker and only one dead soldier from the 20 person team. An amazingly successful endeavor. Unless you are the one soldier who was shot through the head running up the hill. From his standpoint, rapidly ascending to the spirit world, it seems like a gigantic waste and a terrible order, but we will never hear his side of things. We will only hear from the guys who survived, how it was tough going until they made it over the rise. How it was sad to lose one guy, but they knew that they would make it. They just had a feeling. Of course, that one guy had that feeling to, until he felt nothing.” – Unknown author at spacetravelsacrime.blogspot.com

If you spend your life only learning from survivors, buying books about successful people and poring over the history of companies that shook the planet, your knowledge of the world will be strongly biased and enormously incomplete. As best I can tell, here is the trick: When looking for advice, you should look for what not to do, for what is missing as Phil Plait suggested, but don’t expect to find it among the quotes and biographical records of people whose signals rose above the noise. They may have no idea how or if they lucked up. What you can’t see, and what they can’t see, is that the successful tend to make it more probable that unlikely events will happen to them while trying to steer themselves into the positive side of randomness. They stick with it, remaining open to better opportunities that may require abandoning their current paths, and that’s something you can start doing right now without reading a single self-help proverb, maxim, or aphorism. Also, keep in mind that those who fail rarely get paid for advice on how not to fail, which is too bad because despite how it may seem, success boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage.

Abraham Wald – Source: Prof. Konrad Jacobs

Before we depart, I’d like to mention Wald one more time. Like many of the others who joined the armed services to fight Hitler with numbers, Abraham Wald went down in history, but not for the bombers and bullet holes story. He is best remembered as the inventor of sequential analysis, another achievement he earned while working in the department of war math. He married Lucille Land in 1941. Two years later they had their first child, Betty, followed four years later by another they named Robert. Three years after that, at the top of his career and enjoying an exotic speaking tour, after saving the lives of thousands of people he would never meet, he and Lucille died in an airplane that crashed against the side of the Nilgiri mountains in India. Perhaps there is an irony to that, something about airplanes and odds and chance and luck, but it isn’t the interesting part of Wald’s story. His contributions to science are what survives his time on Earth and the parts of his tale that will endure.

In 1968, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report saying the application of mathematics in World War II “became recognized as an art,” and the lessons learned by the mathematicians were later applied to business, science, industry, and management. They saved the world and then rebuilt it using the same tools each time – calculators and chalk.

In 1978, Allen Wallis, Director of SRG said of his team, “This was surely the most extraordinary group of statisticians ever organized.” The bomber problem was just a side story for them, a funny anecdote that only surfaced in the 1980s as they all began to reminisce full time. When you think of how fascinating the story is, it makes you wonder about the stories we’ll never hear about those numerical soldiers because they never made it out of the war and into a journal, magazine, or book, and how that’s true of so much that’s important in life. All we know of the past passes through a million, million filters, and a great deal is never recorded or is tossed aside to make room for something more interesting or beautiful or audacious. All we will learn from history reaches us from the stories that, for whatever reason, survived.

I wrote a whole book full of articles like this one: You Are Now Less Dumb – Get it now!

Amazon | B&N | BAM | Indiebound | iTunes

Go deeper into understanding just how deluded you really are and learn how you can use that knowledge to be more humble, better connected, and less dumb in the sequel to the internationally bestselling You Are Not So Smart. Watch the beautiful new trailer here. 

Sources

• Ask HN: Survivor Bias. Why don’t we focus more on startups that fail? 21 November 2012. 15 January 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4812480

• Association, The American Statistical. “Resolution in Honor of Abraham Wald.” The American Statistician February 1951: 19.

• Bodanis, David. E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation. Penguin, 2004.

• —. Einstein the Nobody. 11 October 2005. 15 January 2013 &http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/einstein-the-nobody.html

• Clark, Josh. Are modern cars less problematic? 22 March 2013 http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/diagnosing-car-problems/mechanical/cars-less-problematic.htm

• Cohen, Jason. Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias. 17 August 2009. 15 January 2013 http://blog.asmartbear.com/business-advice-plagued-by-survivor-bias.html

• Dickersin, K.; Chan, S.; Chalmers, T. C.; et al. (1987). “Publication bias and clinical trials”. Controlled Clin Trials 8 (4): 343–353.

• Erickson, L. (2010). Top Secret Rosies. Retrieved May 2013, from: http://www.topsecretrosies.com/Top_Secret_Rosies/Home.html

• Edmunds.com. Volkswagen New Beetle History. 22 March 2013 http://www.edmunds.com/volkswagen/new-beetle/history.html

• Gould, Stephen Jay. “Wide Hats and Narrow Minds.” New Scientist 8 Match 1979: 776-777.

• INTJoe. How often do you consider the “Survivorship Bias”? 2009 November 2011. 22 March 2013 http://intjforum.com/showthread.php?t=26327

• James, Barnaby. Spolsky on Survivor Bias. 8 February 2009. 15 January 2013 http://www.survivorbias.com/2009/02/spolsky-on-survivor-bias.html

• Johnston, Mike. The Trough of No Value. 6 February 2009. 15 January 2013 http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/02/the-trough-of-no-value.html

• Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

• Klinedinst, Mark. Interview in person David McRaney. 21 May 2013.

• Menger, Karl. “The Formative Years of Abraham Wald and His Work in Geometry.” The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23.1 (1952): 14-20.

• Morgenstern, Oskar. “Abraham Wald, 1902-1950.” Econometrica 19.4 (1951): 361-367.

• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: Kindle Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House , 2011.

• Pettie, Andrew. Derren Brown: The System. 26 Jan 2008. 15 January 2013 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3670756/Derron-Brown-The-System.html

• Plait, Phil. Interview via email exchange David McRaney. 2013 March.

• Psych File Drawer. http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/TheFiledrawerProblem.php

• Rees, Mina. “The Mathematical Sciences and World War II.” The American Mathematical Monthly October 1980: 607-621.

• Samaniego, Marc Mangel and Francisco J. “Wald’s Work on Aircraft Survivability.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 79.386 (1984): 259-267.

• ScepticaTV. Derren Brown – The System (Full). February 2011. 9 May 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4

• Scherer, Sina. Bias in psychology: Bring in all significant results. 1 June 2012. 15 2013 January http://jeps.efpsa.org/blog/2012/06/01/falsification-of-previous-results/

• Skinner, D. (2006). The Age of Female Computers. Retrieved May 2013, from http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-age-of-female-computers

• Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R. & Harris, P. (2000). The relationship between ‘luck’ and psi. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 94, 25-36.

• Smith, M. D., Wiseman, R., Harris, P. & Joiner, R. (1996). On being lucky: The psychology and parapsychology of luck. European Journal of Parapsychology, 12, 35-43.

• Tête, Annie. SciTech Tuesday: Abraham Wald, Seeing the Unseen. 13 November 2012. 15 January 2013 http://www.nww2m.com/2012/11/scitech-tuesday-abraham-wald-seeing-the-unseen/

• Unknown. Our National Survivor Bias. 13 December 2010. 15 January 2013 http://spacetravelsacrime.blogspot.com/2010/12/our-national-survivor-bias.html

• Wallis, W. Allen. “The Statistical Research Group, 1942-1945.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 75.370 (1980): 320-330.

• —. “The Statistical Research Group, 1942-1945: Rejoinder.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 75.370 (1980): 334-335.

• West, Walt. Examining Your Failures Can Lead to More Success: Beware Survivor Bias Mistakes. 7 April 2011. 15 January 2013 http://www.practicemanagementacademy.com/2011/04/survivor-bias

• Wilson, Kevin. Men of Air: The Doomed Youth of Bomber Command. Orion, 2007.

• Wiseman, Richard. “The Luck Factor.” The Magazine For Science And Reason May 2003. http://richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf

• Wolfowitz, J. “Abraham Wald, 1902-150.” The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 23.1 (1952): 1-13.

• Wolverton, M. (2011). Girl Computers. Retrieved May 2013, from http://www.americanheritage.com/content/girl-computers

I am excited by the opportunity to have this conversation with Kevin Allen on Ancient Faith Radio. He does a masterful job of researching and guiding a conversation within the world of Orthodox thought. This is a topic that has been greatly on my heart and in my thoughts lately (no surprise to readers). “Tune in” on Sunday, May 26, at 8 pm Eastern Time (New York time). The program is also recorded for those who cannot listen live. There are also “callers” – the most unpredictable and often the most interesting part of the conversation. Let others know and join the conversation!

There’s a museum on the moon. As Apollo 12 prepared to depart in 1969, New York sculptor Forrest Myers commissioned drawings from six prominent artists and had them engraved on a ceramic wafer, then arranged for a Grumman engineer to smuggle it onto the lunar lander.

Two days before launch he received a telegram confirming that the engineer had been successful. If he was, then the tiny museum is still up there, bearing drawings by Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Forrest Myers, and Andy Warhol. Perhaps they’ll attract some patrons.

It’s only Tuesday, yet it’s already shaping into a rough week for OPEC. Yesterday we heard that the American shale boom was hurting the petrochemicals industries of OPEC’s Middle Eastern members. Today a new International Energy Agency report suggests that the US may soon steal OPEC’s thunder in conventional energy as well. The report predicts that rising production in the US, mixed with falling demand for OPEC energy, could cause oil prices to fall dramatically. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The latest forecast marks a shift in the IEA’s previous thinking, which saw supply growth split between OPEC and non-OPEC countries in the medium term. The fast U.S. supply growth has diminished U.S. demand for oil from OPEC members like Nigeria, and in the long term, growing U.S. exports of oil and natural gas could further weaken OPEC, says Amy Myers Jaffe, who studies energy and the oil industry at the University of California at Davis but didn’t know the contents of the IEA report. [...]

As of this year, the IEA expects demand for OPEC oil to fall below 30 million barrels a day—the organization’s self-imposed production ceiling. IEA expects that trend to endure until 2018.

The continuing dynamic is “a recipe for crashing prices unless OPEC countries can coordinate in restricting their production in a way they haven’t in a long time,” said Michael Levi, who studies the effects of growth in U.S. energy production for the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations but didn’t know the contents of the IEA report.

Cheap oil is obviously bad news for the OPEC countries, as well as states like Russia which are heavily reliant on their energy industry. But what’s most shocking is just how quickly these changes are occurring. If these countries were hoping for a long transition period in which they could gradually diversify their economies and get used to the new energy landscape, they’re probably going to be disappointed. If nothing else, this report serves as a reminder of how rapidly the shale boom is transforming the geopolitics of energy.

[Oil rig image courtesy of Shutterstock]

Irony is probably too much to ask of youth. If I can remember myself in my college years, the most I could muster was sarcasm. Irony required more insight.

There is a deep need for the appreciation of irony to sustain a Christian life. Our world is filled with contradiction. Hypocrisy is ever present even within our own heart. The failures of Church and those who are most closely associated with it can easily crush the hearts of the young and break the hearts of those who are older.

I can think of at least two times in my life that the failures of Church, or its hierarchy, drove me from the ranks of the Church, or what passed for Church at the time. As years have gone by I haven’t seen less that would disappoint or break the heart – indeed the things that troubled me as a young man barely compare with revelations we all have seen in recent years.

No hands are clean. Evangelical, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, the failures and coverups are in no way the special province of any. The question of truth remains – but in a contest of the pure, everyone loses. Irony remains. Our failures would not be so poignant if the Kingdom were not so pure. Judas’ betrayal is darkened all the more by the fact that his victim is God Himself.

All of which brings us back to the irony that remains. The greatest irony of all is the God who forgives and remains ever faithful to us despite the contradictions.

When speaking with seekers – those who are asking questions about the Orthodox faith – it’s important early on to be sure that they are not in search of the perfect Church. The One, True Church means something quite distinct from perfect. A good read through Orthodox history (which for a thousand years is just “Church history”) refuses to give up an ideal century – the mark and measure for reform. Any student of the New Testament has to admit that there are no Letters to the Perfect. I find it ironic (in another sense) that there are those who search for the “New Testament Church” as though it were an ideal.

This applies equally to those who seek the flawless argument, the reasonable and logical God. That search will also end in contradiction, to be resolved only by irony, for those who can bear it. It is thought by many of the fathers that the very creation is an ironic act – the gift of existence that will require the gift of forgiveness – such is the irony of freedom and the mercy of Divine Love.

From the moment of the resurrection, Christ continues to gather scattered sheep. Betrayal, denial and cowardice were the hallmark of the Church on Good Friday. But from Christ we hear no blame – if only because He never thought us to be other than we are.

Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs which he did; but Jesus did not trust himself to them, because he knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man; for he himself knew what was in man (John 2:23-25).

And if we are honest with ourselves and know what is in man, then we can only give thanks for the wondrous irony that, knowing all that, Christ gave Himself for us anyway. It is the very character of love.

I have been asked a few times over the years the meaning of St. Paul’s statement that “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). There is either almost nothing to say about it or far too much to say about it. But it is the irony of the Cross: Love enduring all things. If you know the Cross and the Love that is crucified there, then the verse likely needs no explanation. Christ is His own exegesis.

And when I turn myself to the Church (or myself), I can only reach for Christ and the assurance that the contradictions we offer Him will be forgiven. And this is a thought to cling to even in the best of times. For any who would be His disciples, the Cross and its irony is the only path that is ever offered. Glory to His grace!

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

– G.K. Chesterton, Robert Browning, 1903

By now everyone has heard the statistic that American students and graduates owe more than $1 trillion on student loans. But while everyone knows what these students did with their loans, it’s far less clear what the colleges are doing with all this money.

In his new book College (Un)bound, Jeffrey Selingo took a closer look at college spending and found that while some of the money is being spent on academics, a good deal of it goes toward massively expensive yet completely unnecessary facilities meant to lure students. In an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, he said:

“College now, today, has many jobs, right, and one of the jobs is maturing students and giving them kind of a comfortable place to live while they’re going to school for four years. And so now we see, you know, these palatial dorms that have been built on many campuses — they have their own private bedroom and they share a kitchen and, you know, you go into a dining hall now and you have sushi in the dining hall. You have climbing walls, which I think everybody has, but now you even have these lazy rivers where you can get in an inner tube and go down. [...]

“Well, they … [improved facilities] in the last decade when enrollment was going up, when money was free-flowing, you know. Most parents were using their homes as ATMs to pay for college, because of the housing market. And now suddenly those bills are coming due, and the problem is that the students are either not there or they’re unwilling to pay the money to fund those things.”

This is a problem we’ve seen before. Due to the abundance of easily-available governmet loans, colleges have had little reason to compete on price, instead choosing to lure students through expensive projects like those seen in the video above. But we’re starting to see early signs that students are becoming more sensitive to price, which could spell trouble for schools that invested heavily in white elephant projects like these.

In addition to the points about frivolous college spending, the interview hits on a number of other themes we’ve discussed here at length, including the rise of MOOCs, the challenges facing many liberal arts colleges, and the appeal of programs that reward students for what they learn rather than how long they spend sitting in classrooms:

“This idea of competency-based education, which I think is perhaps the most disruptive force potentially entering higher education — so, right now we measure learning by time spent in a seat. They test you on the way in, they see what you know, and you basically focus on what you don’t know. What I think the disruption will be is that some students could finish in 2 1/2 years. There’s nothing really magic about 120 credits in four years. It’s just tradition.”

The interview is filled with interesting observations like this, and is worth listening to in its entirety. Listen to the full broadcast here.

Enstitute, a new alternative to college, may be bringing higher education back to the Middle Ages. Rather than college degrees, Enstitute offers a two-year program that aims to give college students real-world job experience, akin to the venerable apprenticeship model. The New York Times reports:

[Enstitute] teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.”

As part of the program, students “train with a master” for two years, while companies receive the benefit of cheap long-term labor. Essentially, they play the same role that interns do in the normal job market. Interns, however, generally stay in their roles for only a few months, giving employers little incentive to invest in their training. The two-year length of the Ensitute program, by contrast, makes it worthwhile for companies to take the time and energy to train students. In turn, these roles may eventually turn into permanent paid positions.

Vocational programs like these seem like a worthy experiment to us. Employers constantly complain that college grads lack even a basic understanding of the professional world. There should be no reason why students who want to learn specific skills or trades should be prevented from or stigmatized for doing so; a liberal arts education is a good and valuable thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for every young student.

[Mortar boards image courtesy of Shutterstock]

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Swords in the ancient Middle East were made of a substance called Damascus steel, which was noted for its distinctive wavy pattern and famed for producing light, strong, and flexible blades. No one knows how it was made.

In defending Constantinople against the Muslims, the Byzantine Empire used something called “Greek fire,” an incendiary substance that was flung at the enemy’s ships and that burned all the more fiercely when wet. But precisely what it was, and how it was made, have been forgotten.

(Thanks, Mike.)

The federal government has just released new data about Medicare reimbursement rates showing that the price of treatments vary widely from hospital to hospital. The data, drawn from 3,300 hospitals across the country, looked at how much each facility charged for the hundred most common treatments.

The variations in price were incredible. For example, two different Florida hospitals charged $40,000 and $91,000, respectively, for a gallbladder removal. One hospital in the District of Columbia charged $69,000 for a lower joint replacement, while another charged just $30,000. And these were only a few of the hundreds upon hundreds of examples of staggering price ranges.

The most alarming thing about this data is that nobody has any idea why this is happening. NYT:

Mr. Blum, the Medicare official, said he would have anticipated variations of two- to threefold at the most in the difference between what hospitals charge.

However, hospitals submitted bills to Medicare that were, on average, about three to five times what the agency typically pays to treat a condition, an analysis of the data by The New York Times indicates. And variations between what hospitals charge may be even greater.

Mr. Blum said he could not explain the reasons for that large difference [...]

“There’s very little transparency out there about what doctors and hospitals are charging for services,” Mr. Zirkelbach said. “Much of the public policy focus has been on health insurance premiums and has largely ignored what hospitals and doctors are charging.”

We’ve known for awhile now that hospitals vary prices widely. Stephen Brill’s piece in Time delved into some of these numbers on a small-scale basis. A systematic study like this lets us know exactly how widespread the problem is, however. What’s becoming clearer and clearer is that the US health care system is more distorted, less transparent, more dysfunctional, and packed with more perverse incentives than most people realized. Right now, it’s about as far from a functioning market as it can be.

If we fix health care, all our other policy problems get easier. If we don’t, we’re going to go totally broke in a few decades. As this study plainly shows, the problem is hellishly complicated, and bound to get more so with time. All the more reason we should get started now.

[Glove image courtesy of Shutterstock]

“Tuition discounts” (grants and scholarships) at private colleges have been steadily rising for the past seven years, reports the WSJ. In 2012, the average discount rate hit 45 percent off of the total tuition bill—the highest it’s ever been.

The downward pressure on prices comes because colleges have been finding it difficult to hit their enrollment targets. Desperate to lure in more students, they are hoping that smaller tuition hikes and financial aid boosts will entice increasingly cost-conscious education consumers:

The jump in aid shows that many colleges are losing pricing power as more families focus on cost and value, with about 65% increasing their discount rate in the fall of 2012. Except for the most exclusive schools, private colleges increasingly are vulnerable to the stagnant wages of many families, deepening student debt, the uncertain job market, growing questions about the value of costly four-year degrees and unfavorable demographics. [...]

Because of economic factors and political pressure on colleges to hold the line on tuition, “we have hit a tipping point on price,” said John Nelson, managing director at Moody’s Investors Service. Last year, the median sticker price at about 280 private colleges and universities tracked by the debt-rating firm rose 3.9%, the smallest increase in at least 12 years.

For too long, colleges haven’t really felt the need to compete with one another on price, choosing instead to attract students with state-of-the athletic facilities and other flashy but nonessential projects. These days, fear of indebtedness and cost-consciousness on the part of students and parents are focusing the pressure on colleges where it needs to be: providing a quality education for less money.

This is an encouraging sign, but we’ll know colleges are really getting serious about cutting costs when they start paring down their bloated administrative staffs.

[College quad image courtesy of Shutterstock]

Spring is the time of year when many parents turn to the least enjoyable part of the process of sending children off to college: taking out loans. If you want to contribute to your child’s education by taking out a government loan, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a few words of warning:

 Borrowing programs designed to help parents raise money for their children’s education—such as PLUS loans—could potentially hurt the families they are intended to help. The loans are remarkably easy to get, yet nearly impossible to get out from under when families bite off more debt than they can chew.

Unlike federal student loans, PLUS loans—which also are provided by the federal government—have no limit on borrowing. Parents can borrow as much as they need to cover their child’s education up to the full cost.

In order to qualify for a PLUS loan, parents need only have a fairly clean credit history. Lenders make no attempt to assess the income or employment status of their borrowers when determining how much to lend. This makes it much easier for parents to get in over their heads, and there is little recourse once they do: Much like regular student loans, these cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

The good news, for parents at least, is that students are starting to foot more of the college bills themselves. A recent study by Sallie Mae found that students now pay 30 percent of college costs, while parents pay 37 percent; four years ago, those numbers were at 24 percent and 45 percent respectively. And students are beginning to contribute through their own savings and income, paying an average of $2,555 last year (as compared to $1,944 in 2009).

As you arrange your financial plan for the next four years, make sure it doesn’t chain you to a never-ending cycle of debt.

“Seeing they do not see and hearing they do not hear…” (Matt. 13:13)

This is Jesus’ description of those who encountered Him but did not understand. Just because we see something doesn’t mean we see it. Just because we hear something doesn’t mean we’ve heard it. This is particularly true of Holy Scripture. Just because we read it doesn’t mean we’ve read it.

Why do we read the Scriptures?

I assume that anyone who is “reading the Scriptures” is, in fact, a believing Christian, otherwise they would just be reading a collection of ancient writings held in esteem by Christians. For the books of the Bible to be “Scripture” is to say that they are considered somehow inspired and somehow authoritative. But to read them as Scripture also asks the question: “Whose Scripture?” The answer is, “The Christian Community’s – the Church’s.”

Some point famously to Paul’s admonition to Timothy:

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Tim. 3:16-17).

However, this is the admonition of an Apostle to a Bishop. “Doctrine” (“teaching”) is not the task of every Christian. Instead we are told that not many of us should be teachers (James 3:1). St. Paul urges believers at various times to give heed to the “doctrine” that they have received (Romans 16:17; 1 Timothy 1:3; 1 Timothy 4:6; etc.).

In our modern culture, many Christians act as though they have a major task in life to learn doctrine, meaning to once again study the Scriptures and come to their own conclusions about everything under the sun. It is as though Martin Luther was reincarnated multiple times in every generation.

Doctrine, sound teaching, is the “pattern” of teaching which has been delivered (traditioned) to us. We find witnesses to this teaching in the Fathers from the first century forward. The reading of Scripture is not the means whereby we arrive at sound doctrine – sound doctrine is the means whereby we rightly read the Scriptures. The Christian reading of Holy Scripture is a “doctrinally-ruled” reading. We do not come to the Scriptures to decide whether the Nicene Council “got it right.” Without a knowledge of doctrine, much of Scripture will remain closed to the reader.

But there are ways of reading Scripture that are appropriate and generally essential to the Christian life. “Search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life, and these are they which testify of me,” Christ says (John 5:39).

The most appropriate and life-giving manner of reading the Scriptures is to read them as a means of communion (koinonia) with God. Communion with God, sharing in His Life even as He shares in ours, is the means and the goal of salvation. Everything in the Christian life – indeed, the whole purpose of human life – is communion with God. Sin is the breaking of this communion, while salvation is its restoration. All of the sacraments have the one purpose of communion with God, whether manifest as Eucharist, Healing, Ordination, Baptism, etc. The only purpose of prayer is communion with God, for we do not speak to God to inform Him of what He already knows nor to convince of what He is already going to do. We are taught to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), because communion “without ceasing” is the very definition of the Christian life.

So how do we read for the purpose of communion? St. Isaac of Syria says this:

The course of your reading should be parallel to the aim of your way of life…. Most books that contain instructions in doctrine are not useful for purification. The reading of many diverse books brings distraction of mind down on you. Know, then, that not every book that teaches about religion is useful for the purification of the consciousness and the concentration of the thoughts.

In our democratic culture, we find it offensive that anyone should be forbidden to read anything. I would only point to the spiritual abuse found on any number of “Orthodox” websites in which serious matters, originally written for monastics or for the guidance of clergy are tossed about for even the non-Orthodox to read. As if the canons of the Church were meant for mass consumption!

Parents who care about the health of their children usually follow some regimen in the course of their young lives when it comes to feeding them. “Milk and not stong meat” is the Scriptural admonition for those who are young in the faith. St. James offers this warning:

Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness(3:1).

And St. Peter’s Second Epistle offers this:

So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures (3:15-16).

It’s not that Scripture or Canons or books of doctrine are to be avoided or forbidden – rather, that we should learn to read with wisdom in an effort to grow spiritually and not in an effort simply to gain knowledge of a questionable sort.

St. Isaac’s observation is that we give attention first to “purification of the consciousness and concentration of thoughts.” By such phrases he refers primarily to the daily regimen of what we read and how we pray (as well as fasting and repentance) towards the goal of overcoming the passions. Only someone who is not himself ruled by the passions is ready to safely guide someone else beyond those same rocks. Anger and condemnation, pride and superiority are marks of the passions. The passions cannot read the Scriptures and the Traditions rightly, nor offer them to others without doing harm. The same can be said about most argumentation. Reading for the sake of feeding our opinions is actually spiritually harmful.

So, to follow St. Isaac’s guidance, we are reading rightly when our reading is an integral part of a life whose single goal is communion with God. Obviously, “single goal” is the end of the game. On a daily basis we build towards that goal.

Reading with communion as a goal does not mean we avoid information (when we read), but that gathering information is not our primary purpose. Before the Divine Liturgy, as I enter the altar, I recite the portion of Psalm 5 appointed for priests:

I will enter Thy house, I will worship toward Thy holy temple in the fear of Thee. Lead me, O Lord, in Thy righteousness because of my enemies; make my way straight before Thee. For there is no truth in their mouth; their heart is destruction, their throat is an open sepulcher, they flatter with their tongue. Judge them, O God, let them fall by their own counsels; because of their many transgressions cast them out, for they have rebelled against Thee. But let all who take refuge in Thee rejoice, let them always sing for joy; and do Thou dwell in them, that those who love Thy name my exult in Thee. For Thou blessest the righteous, O Lord, Thou coverest us with good will as with a shield.

How can I read this as communion? About whom am I speaking? This is roughly how I read this in my heart:

I will enter my heart [that place where God dwells], I will acknowledge that it is You who dwell in me. Lead me rightly, O Lord, because of the wicked thoughts within me [my enemies]….My thoughts [logismoi] have no truth in them – they think only of destruction. They are like an open grave….Let me sing with joy in my heart – where You dwell. Let me exult in Your name. For those who rejoice in the Name of Jesus will exult and be blessed. You protect them with Your good will.

And I follow these thoughts into my heart. There I find communion with God – distractions flee away. There have been other times in my priesthood when I recited this Psalm as though it were a meditation of God protecting me from other people – particularly those about whom I felt anxious, or whom, in my neurosis, I imagined to be enemies. Such a reading (close to a literal reading) was not only useless, but left me deeper in darkness than I had been before I began my day.

Devotional reading tends to be slow, and often of short duration. For many books that I read – I can only take in a few pages a day.

Contrary to our popular self-conception, we are not a culture that values learning. We are a culture that values opinion, and opinion as entertainment (God save us from the pundits!). Dilettantism plagues us. If we want to be Christians, we must start with the small things and the practices that make for proper discipleship and “let not many of us become teachers.” Let many of us become those who pray, who fast, who repent, who forgive even their enemies and through the grace of God come to know the stillness within which God may be known.

As Congress and student advocates debate the failings of federal student loans, one grad student may have discovered the fastest way to drive down student debt: living in a van.

Newly liberated from his undergraduate debt and faced with paying over $10,000 for living expenses at grad school, Ken Ilgunas chose instead to turn his van into a home. He writes in the New York Times:

I was nearly broke, and the prospect of taking out loans was unthinkable. Going back into debt made about as much sense as running out of a burning building just to run into another.

The van-dwelling lifestyle, I figured, would eliminate many of the costs. For Internet and electricity, I’d use the library. For showers, I’d buy a cheap campus gym membership. For food, I’d cook my own meals. For rent, well, I wouldn’t have any rent. For dates, well, I probably wouldn’t have any of them, either.

Ilgunas touches on an important point. Though tuition costs have skyrocketed in recent years, much of the financial burden of college actually comes from the other “costs of attending”: housing, meal plans, fees, and so on. Often this is by design, as schools look to disguise price hikes by calling them ”fees.” This is borne out in the data: While average in-state tuition at a public university is $8,655, the average cost of attending is $22,261. The jump is similar for private universities.

We certainly hope most students don’t follow Ilgunas’ example (if only to prevent the odors he describes as a result of that lifestyle), but an average student loan debt of more than $24,000 is enough to make one or two young scholars consider it.

The student debt crisis isn’t just a problem for students; it could depress the whole economy. That’s the upshot of the new comments the Center for American Progress submitted to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Student debt has risen to a frightening $1 trillion, and New York’s Federal Reserve Bank has reported that almost 30 percent of all student loans are delinquent, excluding borrowers not in repayment. The ripple effects of all this debt could be very ugly. In the first place, rising student debt combined with wage stagnation is delaying household formation:

 Two million more adults ages 18 to 34 live in a household headed by their parents than before the recession, an increase from 28.2 percent in 2007 to 31 percent in 2011. Moody’s Analytics estimates that each new household leads to $145,000 of economic activity, suggesting that this delay in household formation could be slowing broader economic growth.

The CAP argues, moreover, that even young adults who want to take on mortgage debt could be prevented from doing so by new regulations on mortgage lending and debt:

Due to the implementation of new mortgage regulations under the Dodd-Frank Act, lenders are often requiring that homeowners have a 43 percent “back end” debt-to-income ratio to get a loan. In other words, combined monthly housing costs and monthly debt payments must not exceed 43 percent of one’s monthly income in order to qualify for a loan. For those with significant student debt, this debt-to-income ratio cap may well put homeownership out of reach.

And even those Millennials who qualify for a loan may still delay homebuying, or pass on it entirely. It takes twenty years for an average family to save enough for a 10 percent down-payment on an average house. If students are still indebted well into adulthood, this may lengthen the saving period dramatically. Given that experts elsewhere argue that our housing market is already overbuilt for our demographics, underbuying youth could put the whole industry and the whole country in a world of hurt.

[Ball and chain image courtesy of Shutterstock]

Total student loan debt is now more than $1 trillion and rising, and parents of students, many of whom are a decade or less from retirement, are finding themselves on the hook for an increasingly large portion of that total. The Deseret News:

Borrowers who are age 60 or older are the fastest-growing age group for student debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Their numbers have tripled since 2005, and 12.5 percent of their student loans are delinquent. For these borrowers, retirement can mean fielding creditors’ insistent phone calls while living on a fixed income that won’t ever cover the bills. It can mean having Social Security payments garnished to service student loan debt.

As the Financial Times notes, the problem has gotten so bad that parents are beginning to take out life insurance policies on their adult children to protect themselves in case their children die before they pay off their loans.

An even better option than life insurance would be to do a little more bargain hunting. The Guardian reports that 41 percent of Americans are considering attending less selective but cheaper schools to minimize their debt. This number should be higher. There are plenty of less-selective schools that still offer a quality education, and graduating with low or zero debt may be at least as important as a name-brand degree.

[Ball and chain image courtesy of Shutterstock]

A small college in Missouri has come up with a surprisingly simple solution to the student loan crisis: it will no longer accept students who take out loans to pay for tuition. Instead, for the 90 percent of its students who require some form of financial aid, the college offers students a number of on-campus work opportunities. Rather than cash, students earn credits for tuition. Reuters has more:

“This college has a very low percentage of students graduating with debt, but it has come up a little and we just don’t think that is a good idea,” Davis said. “This a work college, not a debt college.” The school years ago stopped taking students who wanted to get public loans.

At College of the Ozarks, nicknamed Hard Work U, students work across campus in cafeteria, housing, maintenance, landscaping, agricultural and other jobs. The school has working hog and cattle farms, gardens, lodging and a restaurant.

Davis said the school will create more work opportunities for students who have depended on loans. They can also get jobs off-campus in summer to save up money, he said. The school will waive its $25 weekly summer dorm fee for students who work in Branson, he said.

The hope is that this will be enough for most students to forgo student loans. For those who still need more help, the school will accept scholarships and direct aid from the state.

This is certainly a radical move, but there are a number of things to praise here. With the student loan crisis escalating, it’s good to see a college considering students’ long-term interests. They’ll have to work hard for their education, but won’t graduate under a crushing debt burden like many of their peers. Plus, they’re not just staffing libraries in a typical work-study program; they’re getting something closer to the real-world work experience that so many college grads lack.

Student loans are not always a bad thing, but a trillion dollars in outstanding student debt, much of it in arrears, suggests that the pendulum needs to swing back toward something more pay-as-you-go. Ultimately costs at many colleges need to come down, but higher ed needs more experiments like this one to figure out what changes are needed in the years to come.

Things I Learned as a Field Biologist #57

As it turns out, there are many things in this world that can make you roll down a hill, immediately rip off your pants, and frantically begin slapping yourself.

Most of them are ants.

I’ve been following, with a little bemusement, Eddie’s recent series of posts reflecting on Onesimus’ post about dependence and toxicity in mission. Bemusement for two reasons: first, because the mission community has had exactly this discussion, up to and including the calls for moratorium, many times before; (“Whither Mission?”, in Bosch chapter 13, lists a number of them.) it may be that we need these old discussions again because the problems have not been solved, but that leads my to my second reason for bemusement: because—and maybe I am particularly blessed here—I simply don’t recognise Onesimus’ concerns in my own experience of mission. Just as I am sure there are some broken and crooked mission paradigms out there, I am equally sure there are mission agencies which do work in genuine, healthy partnership of mutual challenge and support with local believers, where managerial and business ideas are not swallowed wholesale, and where decisions are made locally to their consequences and not at some global head office; I know, because I’m part of one. But there is something in the old debate which has been tugging at my brain; it’s a very practical one, and it’s probably going to get me into trouble.

A question that seems to be coming up a lot in the mission circles I’m part of in Japan is, “how do we meet people?” On the face of it, this is a sensible question, especially for men; Japanese men work very long hours and then spend a little time with their family, so opportunities for points of contact are limited. But in another respect, it just reminds me that missionaries make the worst missionaries. What I mean by that is that to become a missionary, you generally have to have been a Christian for a considerable time, generally extremely involved with churchy stuff, often with teaching or other responsibilities within the local church—in fact, giving almost all of your non-work time to the church, which often means that you forget how to socialize outside of a church context. Making new friends isn’t particularly easy; all of your friends are Christians, because what your whole social sphere is the church. Talking to people outside the church just doesn’t come naturally any more. In fact, surveys have shown that the majority of missionaries are introverts, so maybe it never came naturally in the first place.

So you have to do it in an unnatural way. You take hold of the two things you have in your favour: first, you’re used to getting up in front of people and being in the role of a teacher; and second, you’re a foreigner. Great. You can teach English, you can teach Korean, you can teach cookery, culture, you can teach lots of things, none of which are even faintly related to what you’re here for which is presumably to teach the Bible, but hey, if that’s the only way you can think of to actually get to know new people then, well, whatever floats your boat. I mean this from the bottom of my heart: if it works for you, do it. I won’t be doing it, because I have certain reservations about it, but if it’s the only thing that works for you, do it.

Most of my reservations have so far come from the strategic angle: it doesn’t actually work particularly well. It might feel like you’re doing something useful, which is a very important feeling to find in a country where mission activity can be slow and tiresome, but in reality you end up spending most of your working life preparing lessons which barely mention your religion, for the benefit of people who aren’t particularly interested in your religion, and once you’ve started, you can’t easily stop. Meanwhile Jesus says that you should lift up your eyes because the fields are ripe for harvest, but every week you’re inside teaching an English conversation class to people who couldn’t care less. So that’s kind of why I don’t do that.

But reading the discussion between Eddie and Onesimus has suggested two more angles from which to critique cultural-teaching-as-mission: the postmodern aspect and the postcolonial aspect.

Postmodernism began, at least for Foucault, with an investigation into the nature of power; any message that someone gives is also a statement about who has power over whom. And while we love to talk about leadership in churches and in mission, we really don’t like to talk about power. Jesus’ whole life and death was a demonstration that the power of God is made perfect in weakness. The Devil tempted him to accomplish his mission through asserting power, and he resisted. And yet how often in mission do we succumb to the same temptation. So we teach, because it puts us in a position of control, where we can determine the curriculum and decide when we whip out the Bibles, because that way we can ask the questions and decide the correct answers and the students have no choice in the matter. Oh, we might do it very gently at the time, because power often doesn’t look like power. But if I’m the teacher and you’re the student, you bet that in many ways I’m the one with the power.

Would it kill us, just once in a while, to do mission from a position of weakness? You know, like Jesus did? To walk into a room and not be the one in charge? Would that be OK? Could we give it a try?

And then of course there is the postcolonial aspect. We are recovering from an era, say in Africa, where missionaries came to spread “Christianity and civilization”—English civilization, of course. Is that something that we want to do again? That may sound like I’m overstating the problem a bit, but let’s put it another way: is it really a smart idea to use our cultural identity to spread the Gospel? OK, sure, use every means necessarily and become all things to all people so that you may save some. I get that. But once again, do we really want to muddle the Gospel and our cultural advantage? Especially if we’re linking that cultural advantage to attaining a position of power? It may just be me, but many things seem wrong with this.

To start with, it confuses our identity. What are we actually doing here? A friend of mine is a pastor in a rural church in Japan. He told me once of a conversation with a neighbour. “What do you do in that church?” his neighbour asked. “I mean, obviously I know you do English lessons, but what else?” What did this man, who had lived next to the church for many years but had never been inside, know about what Christians do? Not that they worshiped or read the Bible, not that they loved God or loved one another, but that they taught English! Is that what we want our missionary legacy to be?

Second it implies that we believe that the Gospel is not enough and so we need to bring it in via the side door, and I believe that the Gospel is enough. I think the Gospel has stuff to say directly to Japanese society such that we don’t need to introduce it via irrelevant and unconnected gimmicks. But even worse, I don’t think those gimmicks are neutral, I think they’re actively harmful. They reinforce the stereotype that Christianity is a foreign religion; they relate Christianity to academic learning; they confuse the appeal of the Gospel with the appeal of a (perceived) cultural superiority, which is precisely what was happening in 19th Century Africa; and they make us hitch our wagon to national forces which are beyond our control. The lessons of history teach us that this is a strategy which has never worked well.

I can think of lots of good reasons why it’s not particularly wise to slip into the teacher role as a missionary, and I avoid it as much as I can. For others, it seems like becoming a teacher is the only way that they can find to make friends. I don’t think that reflects well on them; I don’t think it reflects well on the Gospel; but hey, if it works, do it.

Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.

Thou hast made us for thyself and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee. Augustine’s Confessions, 1.1

St. Augustine speaks of a restlessness within the human heart – an apparently timeless hunger of the soul. The story of his own life marks a wandering and a search. He did not think or reason his way into the Kingdom of God. Despite his wandering, God found him.

There is a saying from the Lives of the Desert Fathers: “Stay in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”

The restless heart is carried even into the desert. Unless it learns to remain in one place it will not find the One Place within itself. The restless heart now finds itself in a restless culture. Change is a mantra recited as a key to success, whether personally, politically or economically. How does the restless heart stay put in such a world?

In the monastic life there are four traditional vows: poverty, chastity, obedience and stability. The first three are familiar to many. The fourth is not. The form it takes in the Eastern Church is a vow to remain in the monastery you enter until your last breath. With an abbot’s blessing this last vow is often relaxed. Even monks have to change from time to time.

The monastic vow of stability offers important insight, however. It posits the idea that we are more likely to find salvation by staying put than traveling. The journey is therefore inward more than outward. Outward movement can prove to be a positive distraction.

Of course, instability, as a vice, is ubiquitous today. It is possible to stay in one place and still be witness to unceasing change. To make matters worse, in American culture, our rounds of change do not produce greater variety. The process of change in mass-culture is homogenization. The more things change, the more they become the same – and the more they become the same – the less real, permanent and truly existent they become. Our culture has a vision of hell as a franchise operation.

Among the most unstable aspects of our civilization is our individual self-identity. The “false self” or “ego” (as some current Orthodox writers are naming the self-generated inner sense of identity) floats like a point on the edge of a bubble. The anxiety that surrounds the modern identity is manifest everywhere. Mass culture, particularly those segments aimed at youth, markets identities as though they were items on a shelf. Modern Evangelicalism often assists the culture with the same market strategies, conforming the gospel to the ever-changing fashions of the world.

Augustine’s observation remains as true today as it was 1500 years ago. The heart of modern man remains as restless as ever in a sea of change. But stillness of the heart is possible.

The discipline and teaching concerning the heart in Eastern Orthodoxy go under the name of Hesychia (“quiet” or “stillness”). It is a recognition that there can be no growth in the spiritual life without a change within the heart, or a change of relationship to the heart, and that this can only come with stillness. An inner stability and sobriety are essential in our life in Christ.

Much that passes for Christianity today runs little deeper than slogan and opinion. As such, it fits neatly within a lifestyle of change. The latest book on spirituality will soon be replaced by the next latest book on spirituality. Most Orthodox bookshelves are filled with un-read or half-read books through which the answer has not quite arrived.

The Christian life is a very serious, difficult way of living. It is made possible by grace – but just as that grace was gifted to us on the hard wood of the Cross, so its reception is through grace-filled crucifixions. “I am crucified with Christ,” is worth repeating – often.

At the very least, the restless heart needs to find some measure of rest. Here are some suggestions for being at rest:

For [however long], I will not -

-use my phone (turn the ringer off)
-use my computer
-read a book (or anything else)
-engage in conversation

For [however long], I will not -

-think about what I have done wrong
-think about whom I have hurt
-think about problems or difficulties
-think about physical pain

For [however long], I will

-sit (stand if you must) before an icon of Christ
-not talk to Christ or think about what I should say
-not think about what I am doing
-will not think about another person
-will not think about God or imagine Him
-will breathe

Perhaps the list could be longer. The simple goal of such an exercise is to be still. It is quite difficult. This, too, is prayer. If we manage to actually do (or not do) this small laundry list, it will be very good prayer. In such quiet rest, thoughts do come to us. For the most part, dismiss them. You can think later. When I do this I sometimes fall asleep. It’s an indicator that I’m not getting enough sleep!

Learning to be quiet, to be still, not to think or feel, not to judge or worry – all of this is surprisingly difficult. The level of difficulty is a sign of just how unquiet our lives truly are. When the noise ceases and our awareness comes back to the simple presence of the moment, the heart at rest becomes possible. It may seem surprising to some that I suggest not thinking about God or imagining Him in any way. The icon takes care of that need – it is not our job. It will seem surprising to many precisely because they believe prayer includes thinking about God and spiritual things. It does not.

Prayer is communion with God. Communion does not require ideas or feelings because it is real. I do not need to imagine my cup of coffee or even think about it in the morning. The coffee just is. And that is fine.

This exercise in stillness that I have suggested is a beginning. I practice something like this whenever I pray. It is essential to quiet the noise and distraction if we are to know God. Strangely, in time, the ability to enter into such quiet becomes possible in places and settings that are quite noisy and busy (like Church). The discipline is about discovering the place of the heart and the rest that can only be found in God.

“Would would happen if…?” is a question that I ask constantly – not just in food, but in all areas of life. In July, I was in the midst of exploring obsessions for coffee and for vinegar. It was at that point when I wondered “What would happen if coffee could be fermented?” Now, knowing basic chemistry, I knew that coffee all by its lonesome would likely never ferment. It was hot water extracting flavors and oils from beans. There was no sugar to convert in coffee, at least in my coffee there was not. When I made coffee for my mother-in-law, whose coffee resembles a toaster strudel more than coffee, I realized that coffee dissolves sugar and that the resulting compound could be fermented.

At that point, I had done some research to see if coffee vinegar had been tried before to results, but I did see that people were making coffee kombucha in the same way that I was planning on trying coffee vinegar. It seemed almost natural to try them side-by-side to determine which would work better.

I had vinegar mothers galore at this point, so I brewed a pot of the Kenya from Alterra took a pint of it, added a tablespoon of sugar and allowed it to cool and dissolve. Once it was at room temperature, I added an active mother, covered the jar with cheesecloth and put it up. Two weeks later, I added the same amount of sugared coffee (still Kenya) and let the mixture ferment for three months. For Kombucha, I had no starter, so I made one using live Kombucha off the shelf, tea and sugar.

The method is quick. Simply brew a pot of tea, make a cup of tea sweetened with a tablespoon of sugar, and add it to the bottle of unflavored live kombucha. Two weeks later, I had something that looked like a vinegar mother. I added this mother-like blob to a pint of sweetened coffee. I allowed the coffee kombucha to ferment for a month – tasting periodically.

As I tasted the vinegar and kombucha, I noticed an evolution. In the beginning, the flavors were simply the same as the coffee. As the fermentation began to occur, aromas of leather and significant earthiness were really prevalent. Once I bottled the fizzy, fermented coffee kombucha, I tasted again and it was sour from the fermentation, the bitterness in the coffee was still there, but was muted and left were the secondary flavors of the coffee. It was delicious over ice.

The vinegar took much longer to ferment to a point where it was sour enough to qualify, but similar aromas and flavors happened during fermentation. As I bottled the vinegar, I tasted it and it ended up being substantially different than the kombucha. The coffee flavors were concentrated, but the whole mixture had developed a wild, fermented flavor that was more complex than regular vinegar. It was bitter and sour, and while to some, that may sound disgusting, to me, it opened up a lot of avenues.

Personally, I think that balsamic vinegar, or what is sold as balsamic vinegar, is overused – especially in the fall. This vinegar seems to be the polar opposite. There is no sweetness to it, but the complexity and bitterness would go equally well with many of the foods – pumpkin, squash, carrots – typically paired with the syrupy vinegar in the fall. I had my eye from early in the process when I acquired a fair bit of country ham on a first use and that would be a modification of red-eye gravy.

Early on Sunday morning, I sliced two thin rashers of Benton’s ham and let the fat render in a pan. When the ham was sufficiently cooked, I removed it and poured a fair bit of the coffee vinegar in with the rendered country ham fat. The globules of fat were beautifully set off from the acidic, sour coffee vinegar. After reducing and whisking, I poured the new red-eye gravy over steel cut oats, raw apple, and the Benton’s ham for a hot, delicious breakfast outside on a cold day.

The sour and bitter flavors were great with the saltiness of the ham and the sweetness of the apple. It was the answer of my initial question, “What would happen if…?” The answer is that, first, it can be done and, second, if you do it right and find a good use for it, it will be delicious.

The U.S. is about to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest oil producer:

Driven by high prices and new drilling methods, U.S. production of crude and other liquid hydrocarbons is on track to rise 7 percent this year to an average of 10.9 million barrels per day. This will be the fourth straight year of crude increases and the biggest single-year gain since 1951. . . .

The Energy Department forecasts that U.S. production of crude and other liquid hydrocarbons, which includes biofuels, will average 11.4 million barrels per day next year. That would be a record for the U.S. and just below Saudi Arabia’s output of 11.6 million barrels. Citibank forecasts U.S. production could reach 13 million to 15 million barrels per day by 2020, helping to make North America “the new Middle East.”

The energy world is changing fast. New producers are taking the place of the countries that have historically dominated the energy field. The United States has long been a top producer, but because of new technologies and newly-available reserves, we’re climbing the ladder, along with countries like Brazil, Canada, and Israel.