The Only Time I Met Elder Scott it was Kind of a Disaster

In memory of Elder Richard G. Scott, I thought I would share my only personal interaction with him.

While attending BYU as an undergraduate I got a job at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) helping to provide audio/visual support for the various programs. Each week there was a Tuesday evening devotional which was produced by our team. The speakers ranged from leadership within the MTC to members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Usually the work was pretty straightforward: setting up equipment, doing the camera work, and so on. However, there were occasional special requests.

One week Elder Scott was the scheduled speaker and we got word he had some Powerpoint slides that he wanted us to project during his talk. Rather than send them ahead of time, Elder Scott was to personally deliver the file on a disk. At the appointed time I met him in the lobby to receive the disk. I asked him how he wanted to handle the presentation; did he want to advance the slides himself? He said no, he wanted us to take care of that and explained that he would tell us when it was time for the slides to be shown. He then showed me the signal he would use to indicate that the slide should be advanced. He held his right arm up in front of him, his elbow bent and palm down, then swung his hand out to the side--like a pianist running his fingers up the keyboard. I vaguely remember suggesting some alternatives, but that was the signal he wanted to use.

I dutifully took the disk to the control booth and loaded the file on the computer. Usually I liked to spend some time getting familiar with a speaker's presentation so that I could have a sense of what was in it and how it would flow. However, on this occasion I didn't have much of an opportunity to look it over. Elder Scott had arrived only a few minutes before the beginning of the devotional, and before long it was time to start the production.

The program progressed and eventually Elder Scott stood to speak. After some introductory remarks he got into the substance of his talk and eventually requested that we show the first slide. I was manning the computer in the control booth across the room, and brought the slide up to view. I soon discovered that, like most of us, Elder Scott made gestures with his arms and hands as he spoke, and it was not always clear whether he was giving his special signal or simply moving his arm while talking. This difficulty resulted in some bumps in the flow of the presentation. Even worse, as he continued his talk the slides were evidently not in the order he expected them, or perhaps some were missing. At a certain point he asked for the next slide, which I advanced to. But it wasn't the one he wanted. So I advanced to the one after that. After a few (eternal) moments of playing a game of bouncing around the slides, Elder Scott abandoned the slides altogether and we stopped showing them. I think it's a good bet that all the missionaries attending thought I was incompetent.

I didn't have an opportunity to speak with Elder Scott afterward, but what was I going to say anyway? That it was his fault I couldn't always discern his signal or that the slides weren't quite right? If memory serves, we later got word from our boss that someone up the chain wasn't happy with our performance that night. I explained what had happened and I think that was pretty much the end of the matter--at least as far as I was concerned.

I don't know if there's a moral to the story, it's just what happened [1]. Looking on the bright side, in a weird way I counted it a privilege to have looked foolish on behalf of an apostle (i.e. nobody was blaming him for the difficulty), and it turned the relatively routine experience into a story. But a smooth presentation would have been better.


Notes:
1. Standard caveats about memory.

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Vaccination is Not a Partisan Issue...Yet

During the last U.S. presidential election cycle, Michelle Bachmann was briefly seen as the Republican primary front-runner. Her downfall from that position was catalyzed when she claimed during a debate that the HPV vaccine could cause "mental retardation." Earlier this year a measles outbreak at Disneyland brought the issue of childhood vaccination to the public attention, resulting in California passing one of the strictest school vaccination laws in the country. Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the measles outbreak, a variety of politicians, including some (then) potential Republican candidates, expressed less than solid support for vaccination.

Donald Trump has believed, since at least 2007, that childhood vaccinations cause autism. The issue was raised in the second Republican primary debate earlier this week.



Ben Carson gently and correctly noted that studies have not found any connection between autism and vaccines. Unfortunately, he and Rand Paul, the other physician in the debate, ultimately indulged Trump's idea of spreading vaccinations out. This led the New Yorker's Jon Chait to complain,

It is depressing that a presidential field with two doctors cannot even produce sensible views on medicine, let alone anything else. The party’s decades-long flight from empiricism and reason shows no sign of abating.

But in the Washington Post two graduate students of political science write that CNN should not have raised the question at all.

We fear that if party elites continue to polarize, the cues present in the press could begin to undermine the societal consensus on childhood vaccinations. Why are we reasonably sure this is the case? Because we have seen this movie before, with global warming....

We fear we may begin to witness a similar dynamic on vaccines. Republican elites are increasingly voicing skepticism of the medical science consensus. The media sees this as fitting a pre-established narrative that Republicans are hostile to science, and thus CNN asked the GOP field a question about vaccines in front of a record breaking national audience of 23 million people.

It would not be surprising if Democratic elites leap at this opportunity to solidify their own science-based credentials and make it a campaign issue, particularly if someone like Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination. These cues are then communicated to the public through the press, and we may be off to the polarization races.

I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, the public ought to be informed that a leading contender for the U.S. presidency has crackpot views about vaccination. In normal times such views would bring a chorus of condemnation that would endanger presidential ambitions, as seen with Bachmann in the previous cycle. However, Donald Trump has shown himself to be impervious to shame. Apparently he cannot say anything ridiculous enough that would cause his supporters to abandon him, and attempts of the media--even Fox News(!)--to hold him accountable for his antics are, in the minds of supporters, more evidence that elitists are trying to manipulate the masses and keep a bold truth-teller from succeeding. Thus, whether they wanted to or not, Carson and Paul soft-peddled their criticism of Trump and ended up legitimizing his views.

I have a hard time seeing why CNN is responsible for that...other than the way the debate questions were constantly framed around Trump's views. If the media avoided this and other topics for fear of politicization, well wouldn't that just be interpreted as another manifestation of media elitism (i.e. that the simpletons of America are too dumb to risk discussing an issue in a political context)?

I do not think that vaccination will ever be as polarizing as climate change. Whereas addressing climate change is perceived by many as a threat to prosperity, vaccination is generally viewed as an enabler of prosperity. And whereas the consequences of error in judgment for climate change are delayed or almost imperceptibly gradual, the consequences for error in vaccination are more immediate and severe. However, vaccination is more sensitive to dissent; successful vaccination policies require a high degree of compliance.

Ultimately, if vaccination becomes a politicized issue Republicans will have nobody else to truly blame but themselves. If they and their outlets will give full support to vaccination, then by definition it won't be a political issue--at least between Republicans and Democrats. But if they voice skepticism, I don't think you can blame CNN for reporting it.

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Observing the Past to Refute Cranks in the Present

No one seems to care about the difference between observations (or 'facts') and inferences like creationist-types do. That's not to say that the distinction is unimportant or that scientists don't pay any attention to it, but creationists really care about it. That's because in order to make the world fit within their scriptural boundaries they have to discount large amounts of science from a variety of fields. However, they can't just dismiss science without looking like medieval relics, so they take upon themselves the task of separating 'true science' from 'false science' so that they can appear to be sophisticated lovers of science. One of the simplest ways to make that separation is to insist that the unacceptable parts of science are actually stacks of unreliable and/or un-provable inferences. Thus any statement about the ancient past or processes that occur over long periods of time can be met with the simple question: Were you there?

Before getting to my main point, I can't help but comment on how radically skeptical such people would be in general if they were more consistent in their pedantry, because inference is everywhere. Nor, I think, do they realize how many unobjectionable 'facts' are actually built on inference. Pick up any molecular biology journal, for example, and you will find lots of measurements. But those measurements are often done using indirect methods (because nobody can directly observe a molecule) [1], and the phenomena they measure are often correlates or indicators of broader phenomena. However, today's inferences become tomorrow's facts as they are demonstrated to be reliable and useful in advancing knowledge. As Stephen J. Gould put it, "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'" Occasionally accepted facts are revised as their underpinnings are probed in more detail--often because of advancements in technology. It's just the nature of the beast. Or life in general, really.

That brings me to my main point. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) advocates and provides support for teaching evolution and, more recently, climate science in schools. Their most recent Reports periodical has a fun article, Yes, We Were There, by a physicist (and Christian) named Antoine Bret. After setting up the 'Were you there?' issue, Bret describes several interlocking observations that show that the laws of physics have been constant for over 30,000 years--less than a drop in the bucket of the accepted age of the universe, but more than the Biblical age of the Earth.

The progression of his argument is as follows:

1. Stars have been measured to be 30,000 light years from Earth by the parallax method, which is based on trigonometry. Approximately 30,000 light years away is the limit of detection for this method, but he chose it because it is the most direct method in terms of observation.

2. We can measure the spectra emitted by the elements in those stars, which match those of the elements on Earth. The signature spectra are explained by quantum mechanics, in which the speed of light is a key component. This shows that the speed of light has not changed in the last 30,000 years. So unless you want to say that God created the universe with light already in transit (something hardcore creationists believe), these observations show that the universe is at least (!) 30,000 years old.

3. Various types of supernova beyond 30,000 light years away have been observed, and the nuclear decay of their elements tracked. The rates of radioactive decay match those on Earth.

Bret concludes:

Physicists do not hold that the laws of physics haven’t changed over the last 30000+ years because of a uniformitarian prejudice. They hold it because this is what they observe....for all practical purposes, “we were there” to see it.

I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that physicists had no reason to think that the law of physics had changed, but that these observations simply add direct support to their confidence.

So does this argument prove that the laws of physics haven't changed? I'm sure there are counter-arguments to be made. For example, I guess you could argue that the Earth was in a special bubble where the laws of physics were different from those of the stars. But where are the observations that would substantiate that?

Notes:

1. I'm thinking of things like western blots, ELISA, or especially flow cytometry. We run various controls to be confident in the results, but the end result is technically an inference. Similarly, blood cholesterol is measured via a series of chemical reactions that result in a color change, which is measured by light absorbance. Is your LDL number really a fact? You can see how this game can be played to the nth degree.

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Pro-Evolution Article in Interpreter

Last week the LDS journal Interpreter published a pro-evolution article, The Theory of Evolution is Compatible with Both Belief and Unbelief in a Supreme Being, by David M. Belnap. As I read the article I was waiting for the 'but' moment, but I was pleasantly surprised that it never really came. Belnap made no apologies for evolution, and even used some of his own research in constructing 3D models of viruses from 2D images to make a point that randomness, coupled with selection, and be constructive.

The article covers a lot of ground quickly, which limits its persuasive power, in my opinion. Anti-evolutionists will think he is making empty assertions. And I thought the weakest part of the essay was when he tried to show that the Genesis 1 account isn't that different from what we know from paleontology and geological history. That's not an exercise that I think is needed, because Genesis was written for a pre-scientific people. Nevertheless, I applaud his overall effort and Interpreter for publishing it.

P.S. Several days passed from when I read the article to when I looked at the comments after it. As you might expect, it was off to the races with doctrinaires and cranks sounding off. Wade into it if you wish, but I don't have time for trying to clean up that kind of garbage anymore.

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