Links to Consider, 10/4

Balaji Book Discussion; Samuel Hammond on Mormonism; Lawrence Newport prefers Quakerism; Jonathan Haidt balks at a diversity oath

Here is a recording of me leading a discussion of Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State. I recommend 1.5x speed, maybe faster when I am talking. I think that the discussion picks up around half way through, when John Nye makes comments.

Samuel Hammond writes,

In a series of posts, I plan to explore these aspects of the LDS church in historical context. My goals are twofold. First, as a student of “the economics of religion,” I have a personal interest in understanding the functional origin of religious institutions. And second, given the malaise of modernity, I see a growing need to reconcile the procedural efficacy of religion with our contemporary inability to accept its propositional contents.

He has a follow-up post.

Lawrence Newport prefers Quakerism.

Quakers believe that no individual has a privileged access to the word of God and thus everyone is to be listened to, heard and able to speak.

“There is that of God in everyone” is the way they put it at the Quaker high school where we enrolled our oldest daughter. She had a somewhat contrarian personality (wonder where that could have come from?), which the Quaker approach easily absorbed. Note that my other two daughters went all the way through in public school. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

J.D. Tuccille reports,

Jonathan Haidt. . .announced that he would resign at the end of the year from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, his primary professional association, because of a newly adopted requirement that everybody presenting research at the group's conferences explain how their submission advances "equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals." It was the sort of litmus test against which he has warned, and which he sees as corroding institutions of higher learning.