An Early Resurrection - A. Miller

I have enjoyed having a few books going at a time, especially books that have quite different genres. This was my religious book that I was reading concurrently with The Coddling of the American Mind. It coincided well with many verses I was reading at the time in the Book of Mormon, so it was cool seeing an analysis of some insightful verses right as I was reading them.

The idea of this book stems from a verse in Mosiah 3 that reads

"thereby whosoever should believe that Christ should come, the same might receive remission of their sins, and rejoice with exceedingly great joy, even as though he had already come among them."

The idea in this verse is that though Christ was yet to come to earth, His followers could still experience the fruits of His perfect life and Atoning sacrifice as if it had already happened. This book expands that idea and talks about the fruits of the resurrection of Christ and how we can make that alive in our lives though we have not experienced the resurrection for ourselves yet.

Here are a few ideas that stood out to me from this book:

• There is symbolism in death. Let our old self die and become a new person in Christ. This means giving my life to Him and submitting my will to His. What is most important is no longer what I want but what He wants
• Make the Atonement alive in my life! Think of it frequently and draw on its powers often
• The Law of Moses was a type of Christ. We have laws and commandments in our day as well (especially those in the temple). I need to remember that those also point to Christ and aren't just given to us for the sake of a commandment. 
• Being alive in Christ increases our capacity to love: love ourselves, those close to us, those not close to us, and the Lord

The author of this book teaches philosophy at a university in Texas, and his style of writing is very much philosophical. I personally am not as big of a fan of this style of writing, and it is often hard for me to grasp what exactly is being described. I loved the ideas taught in this book, but feel like it was a little repetitive and was maybe better suited as a Sunday school comment rather than a full book. I would recommend this book to someone looking to learn more about the idea presented in that verse above (Mosiah 3:13) and to one more familiar with reading philosophical text. This is a short read (having chapters be 4-5 pages made it feel especially quick), but there are other religious books I would recommend to someone before I would recommend this one.

The Coddling of the American Mind - G. Lukianoff and J. Haidt

And here it is, the post that breaks the naming convention of posts heretofore written. Moving forward book report posts will feature the title and author of the book, while posts about whatever other random thoughts will continue to have the "Of ___" naming convention. Structure of book reports is likely to evolve with time, but for now I think I want to focus on things impactful to me or things I liked or disliked about the book or ways the book shaped the way I see the world around me rather than writing a summary of the book itself. 

This book is one that has been on my list of books to read since before I realized that reading was an enjoyable hobby again (thank you high school and college reading assignments for warping my concept of reading as a form of entertainment). I've had various family members read and recommend this book, so I was excited to finally dive into it. 

Premise

I loved this book! The premise of the book is that the rising generation of college students are soft: they have grown up in and have embraced a culture of safetyism, and thus are unable to navigate the world without safety guardrails. Three fundamental principles ("The Great Untruths") describe the new culture: 

• Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker
• Emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings
• Us vs them: life is a battle between good people and evil people

At first glance these "untruths" seemed reasonable and I was skeptical about their label of "untruth." The concept of antifragility (the opposite of fragility) is that opposition or stress is required for growth. For example, being exposed to peanuts is what helps many children develop an immunity for that allergy, and preventing children from being exposed at all to peanuts may result in them developing the allergy (because they were unable to develop the immunity through exposure). Likewise, exposure to different ideas or viewpoints is what strengthens our intellectual capacity. Removing any potential danger from a child leaves them woefully unprepared for real life. Creating safe spaces away from someone with a different set of opinions is more harmful than it is beneficial.

Emotional reasoning is letting your mind go to worst-case scenarios or be blinded by cognitive distortions. We see the rise of the culture of microaggressions, which is interpreting things in the worst way rather than giving the benefit of the doubt. The intended message has been replaced by the impact felt by the receiver, which was the way the receiver chose to interpret the message. Benefit of the doubt has been removed.

Us vs Them describes the culture of tribalism: if you are not one of us, you are the enemy. Example of this are mob culture of academics: a writing or saying of an academic (either taken out of context or not) is taken and used as a demand that the academic formally apologize or step down from a position. The mob grows as more people join the bandwagon, and other academics fear siding with the accused because then the mob will come after them as well.

Real Life Applications

Here are some ways I have seen the world differently already since reading this book:

• In teaching the reader CBT, I realized I often fell into those thought patterns as well, and have caught myself avoiding mental pitfalls since reading this book. My mind will often jump to worst case scenarios ("this client thinks I am too inexperienced and unhelpful" or "I'm sensing something is off in this relationship. I think the end is nigh", etc)
• BYU had a career fair last month where hundreds of employers come to recruit students for jobs. Many of these employers are present at this fair every year, including the US Department of Homeland Security. With recent events involving ICE, I saw several IG stories urging BYU to ban them from recruiting students and that their presence presented a threat to students. 
• My brother has an undeveloped hill in his back yard. The last few weeks, the neighborhood boys have assembled on the hill each day to build "houses" from scraps of wood or sticks or whatever other materials they've somehow come in contact with. There is no adult present on the hill and the boys somehow obtained a full-sized sledgehammer to work with. I love this example of free play where yes, there is the potential risk for injury and no, there is no set of rules the boys have to play under or create under (just their imagination!) and no, there is no adult overseeing every act to make sure safety regulations are followed. These are boys who will grow up more resilient and capable of encountering real life events
  

Takeaways

I like how the authors used these truths as the background to describe recent events driving the culture of safetyism in iGen. These events (and honestly the premise of the book) certainly have political ties and this book certainly could have drifted towards a certain political stance quickly. I really appreciated the way the facts and research was presented in an objective, non-partisan way. I read the first half of the book thinking that the authors leaned right and that this book may be poorly received by left leaners, but then the authors revealed that they each leaned left. 

I want to reread this book when I start having kids. The last third of the book is sort of the "ok now what" section where parenting strategies are discussed to teach kids to be antifragile. It was also useful for me to learn these skills.  It was fascinating seeing facts on depression rates between screens and sports. Another reason to have kids play sports!

Books Read Previous to 2026

Here lies a list of books read in the last few years that I may circle back and record thoughts on at some point but will not at this time:

• The Bug Book - P. Weamer
• Morality - J. Sacks
• Getting to Yes - R. Fisher and W. Ury
• Seekers Wanted - A. Sweat
• Range - D. Epstein
• Praise to the Man - Various Authors
• Atomic Habits - J. Clear

Of Time Capsules

I'm sitting here staring at an empty blog post for the first time in nearly five years. Same blog, different purpose. Same human, different person. Same operating system, newer MacBook Pro. I never thought this blog would be resurrected, but here we are! It's good to be back composing sentences and paragraphs after the hiatus.

The original purpose of this blog was to fulfill an assignment for M. Shayne Clarke's MCom 320 class that required a blog post every week. The purpose of that class was to stretch our creative writing muscles by forcing us to write something with no prompt or no rubric or specific subject matter. The purpose of this blog now is to continue to stretch the creative thinking and writing muscles that lie dormant in my day-to-day work. Sure, there is a lot of communication in the marketing data science consulting world, but there isn't quite the same freedom to write about critters or wind or french-type fries or music. I also want to have this space to record thoughts and learnings from books I've read, taking after the example of my mother. While the purpose of the blog has changed, the blog name will remain the same in an effort to stay true to my roots.

Coming back to this blog is like opening a time capsule; these posts are snapshots into my life during that chapter of my life, and I have not gone back and looked at these posts in quite a long time. I'm grateful for the good times as well as the challenges that shaped me during this time. I'm grateful for good friends and good wholesome recreational activities pursued in H1 2021. I no longer play competitive ultimate and instead run trail ultramarathons, I no longer am mired in the world of homework and midterms and instead have a salary and a (soon-to-be vested) 401k, and I no longer drive the iconic Kia Soul with the roof rack and instead drive a matching dark grey RAV4 with Vonda's daughter (although I still have the roof rack and have been slothful in selling it on Marketplace).

So here we go! Here's the first post in five years with a bunch of words and no pictures. I never thought I'd say this, but it feels good to be back

Of the Divergence Theorem

I am minutes removed from submitting my final assignment of the semester. It's a good feeling, and now I can dedicate all my time and effort to a some projects and a couple finals. Unlike most semesters where I have a final in every single one of my classes, I don't have the stress of remembering formulas, theorems, and dates looming over my head. Instead I get to take my time making sure I'm satisfied with a project. It's a new thing for me (and likely won't happen in future semesters), but I'm enjoying it.

On this reading day, I'd like to take this blog post to write a few random thoughts I have:

• I enjoyed today's calc 3 homework on the Divergence Theorem much more than yesterday's on
  Stokes' Theorem. I'm more comfortable working with triple integrals for volumes than I am with flux integrals and oriented surfaces
• I have never been as excited about R programming as I have been the last few days when I've had hours to really dive into this volleyball project and learn a lot more about R's little tricks
• A quote I must agree with by my brother is, "Sometimes after a long day, seeing a few people get punched in the head is exactly what you want to see." 
• Here are the videos he was referring to:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3agHc02aPo
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUIg27pvBrc
• Falling asleep to a thunderstorm is one of the most relaxing things of all time
• Steph Curry is still Steph Curry but the Warriors' bench is garbage
• Nothing beats a classic Bic 0.7 mechanical pencil
• Actually a good TA who is willing to help and knows the subject matter incredibly well beats the mechanical pencil. Shoutout to Adam Ott and Jacob Miller this semester for being those clutch TAs

It's been a fun exercise maintaining this weekly blog and entertaining all my readers (aka myself) by taking whatever is floating around in my head and slapping it down into actual words on a screen. I'd love to say I'll keep this blog up after the semester, but honestly it's probably very unlikely that actually happens. 

Signing out for the last time,

Log

Of Networking

I never really know what to write about on this blog, and this early afternoon was certainly no exception. I thought about writing about water monitors because this morning I saw a cool video of a massive one climbing shelves in a 7-Eleven in Thailand (see image). I also considered writing about our nearby planetary neighbor the moon (inspired by Kid Cudi's "Man On The Moon" album we're currently listening to). Today I guess I will embrace the business school culture and talk about the golden subject of networking. 

As one who feels like an imposter strolling through the Tanner as a stats major, I have always looked at the term "networking" with some level of contempt. My fellow stats major, blogger, and frisbee teammate and I have had several conversations (full of unfounded generalizations) about how the business school doesn't focus on hard skills but instead on building forced friendships they call "networking." These last couple months, however, I've had a change of heart, and have really learned the value of networking. More than anything I'm just grateful for people with more experience than me who are willing to share their knowledge, time, and advice.

The path of an accountant is very clearly defined: you get an internship at the big four, work there basically as a slave for several years hating your life, and slowly move up the ranks towards partner level or leave at some point to join or start a smaller firm. I guess you have two options: enjoy the thrilling life of an auditor or mix it up and go the tax route. Those are your only options. The path for a statistics major is much more broad and less-defined. You can go the actuary route, the data science route, the business intelligence route, the sports analytics route, the marketing analytics route, or some other random application you conceive. I love having all these options, but I'm getting to the point where I need to narrow down exactly how I will focus my last year of undergrad education, grad school education, and career path. 

There have been so many fascinating people I've learned from of various job types all with a similar background of data/statistics. All of them have provided me with a lot of insight about what my options are, what I'm most interested in, what skills would be useful to develop, and other people who would be useful to talk to. The people whose jobs most fascinate me are connections I never would have found without– yes, I'll say it– networking. My brother referred me to someone who used to be in his ward in San Francisco who currently works for the Cavs. That guy referred me to a guy who used to work at the Pistons and now works for another sports analytics industry. I told that guy I was probably more interested in the business/marketing side of the sports industry and he referred me to his brother-in-law who did marketing for the Wizards. That guy was very encouraging, insightful, optimistic, and willing to make lots of useful connections for me, including connecting me with a guy who does business analytics for the Arizona Coyotes and a guy at BYU who worked for the Utah Warriors rugby team.

Basically my point in this is that people are awesome, full of extremely useful knowledge, and willing to sacrifice a half hour of their precious time to talk to some random kid who is very distantly connected to them. I am grateful for the knowledge gained in the last few months from these 15-20 people who've been willing to talk to me. I have a much better idea of what I want to do with my stats background and know the tools to help me get to that position in the workplace. I hope I can be as willing and able to help students when I am further along in my career.

Of Fries, Revisited

A while ago we discussed together a stirring debate about french fry preferences and doubts about the validity of the public opinion. Today we revisit this theme. I'm not a big fan of Wendy's fries, and I had in my mind that McDonald's had absolutely fantastic fries. A couple weeks ago I had them and I regretfully admit that they were not nearly as good as I had remembered. Are they still better than Wendy's fries? Probably so. But it sparked the question of which restaurant truly has the best french fries. 

With it being March and thus having invested quite a bit of time in college basketball's March Madness (as good as the Christmas season, almost), I thought the best way to determine which restaurant truly has the best fries was to build a bracket and have people vote on the two choices on my Instagram story. I asked people for submissions of their favorite fry places and was hoping for enough to fill a classic 64 team bracket, but I didn't have enough so we went with 32 teams. Seeding was determined by how many people had submitted the particular (more submissions roughly equates to more popularity). 

Here are a couple hypotheses and notes about the structure of this endeavor:

• 
  The goal with this was to narrow down the field enough to go try maybe the top eight and decide for myself
• I predicted that Chick Fil A, McDonald's, and Wendy's would all be in the final game and win despite not actually being that good
• This is obviously a biased study as people see a name and associate it with having good fries
• To standardize this, I only included original fries (no Arby's curly fries or sweet potato fries from Cubby's, or Cajun fries from Five Guys, etc)
  

Much to my disappointment (although not to my surprise), the final was Wendy's and Chick Fil A. Chick Fil A won. A common consensus was that the elite 8 matchup of Five Guys and Red Robin should have been the actual championship. Now I have a much better idea of what restaurants to go to to try their fries. Attached is the completed bracket with the seeding and vote totals for all 2 of my readers if they happen to have interest in this.

On an unrelated note, the "A Rush of Blood to the Head" album by Coldplay is absolutely fantastic. So good,