Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

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Tom
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

Post by Tom »

I found another copy of the essay, complete with a nice photo of the author (see p. 152).

I wonder if he tried out his German on Hayek.
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

Post by Doctor Scratch »

Gadianton wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 3:29 am
I think we all know the answer.
It's a great point, surely Milton Friedman was smart enough to understand Mopologetics, wasn't he?

But I think we do know the answer as it exists in a certain apologists head. These greats will accept the gospel in the spirit world, and he was the guy who planted the seed. Remember how he said that he'd played instrumental roles in the conversion of people? He probably views the deceased as good as converted, and largely thanks to him.
That's an interesting idea, Dr. Robbers. How would this work, though? Is the idea that mere "contact" between DCP and these luminaries would "plant the seed," as it were? Just chatting with them is all that it would take--with no mention whatsoever of Mormonism?
"If, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

Post by Doctor Scratch »

huckelberry wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 4:19 pm
Tom wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 3:41 pm

He was in his early 20s and a returned missionary. But I see your point.
I cannot imagine any person with elementary social courtesy in Peterson's spot running up to these folks and saying, would you like to know more about the Book of Mormon? (or would you like to know more about the book of Jeremiah? )
When you put it that way, sure. But he wasn't "running up to these folks." He's describing situations where he was spending *hours* in their company. Surely a smooth talker like Dr. Peterson, with his mission experience (even if he didn't successfully baptize anyone), would have given him the ability to skillfully drop in a mention or two of the Restored Gospel, right?

But therein lies the dilemma: What if they laughed at him? Or even if they politely dismissed his suggestions? Or, even worse, what if it turned out like the whole Philip Jenkins ordeal? DCP has said many times that he was "disappointed" in Jenkins's behavior (without elaborating). Is it reasonable to assume that something similar would have played out with Friedman et al.?
"If, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

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Doctor Scratch wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 5:44 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 4:19 pm

I cannot imagine any person with elementary social courtesy in Peterson's spot running up to these folks and saying, would you like to know more about the Book of Mormon? (or would you like to know more about the book of Jeremiah? )
When you put it that way, sure. But he wasn't "running up to these folks." He's describing situations where he was spending *hours* in their company. Surely a smooth talker like Dr. Peterson, with his mission experience (even if he didn't successfully baptize anyone), would have given him the ability to skillfully drop in a mention or two of the Restored Gospel, right?

But therein lies the dilemma: What if they laughed at him? Or even if they politely dismissed his suggestions? Or, even worse, what if it turned out like the whole Philip Jenkins ordeal? DCP has said many times that he was "disappointed" in Jenkins's behavior (without elaborating). Is it reasonable to assume that something similar would have played out with Friedman et al.?
Doctor Scratch, If I look at your observation as a sort of abstraction I can see and agree with your point, well at least to a degree. I have not been a missionary but I suspect that missionary experience might lead a person to realize that there are only certain times that any individual might be willing to open an ear to the Book of Mormon message. Most all of the time people of all sorts do not wish to hear or be pestered about some religious belief. I certainly would not blame someone in that circumstance for not making some irritating mention of the gospel restoration.
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

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That essay is some best Peterson that I have ever read. The only thing that comes close is his description of the trip. We can see already in Peterson the overuse of commas so characteristic of his pseudo-donnish style, reliant as it is on adverbial phrases and worthless subordinate clauses to paper over the utter lack of substantive thought in his writing.

I would be very surprised if he did bring up the Nephite monetary system, though, especially with Brother Friedman, the greatest monetary theorist of the second half of the last century. No less a scholar than Hugh Nibley has assured us of its incomparable brilliance on page 25 of the first volume of his Book of Mormon lectures:
Hugh Nibley wrote:We find out later that the Nephites designed their own monetary standards and set them up to suit their conditions from time to time. They ended up with an ideal monetary system which is described there. Professor Richard Smith of Harvard, who is a member of the Church, showed it was the most perfect monetary system that could possibly be devised—the most economical, requiring the least number of coins for the greatest number of exchanges and deals. It was a model; it was based on sevens and threes and things you would never expect of a monetary system. But it was a beautiful one.
Mining our memory a bit further, we find something relevant to Friedman's interest and influence on the Federal Reserve's monetary policy on page 251 of lecture 48 (downloadable here):
Hugh Nibley wrote:I should have brought an article by Richard Smith who is a chemistry professor at Harvard. He analyzed this money system and came up with surprising things. It tells us here that “they altered their reckoning and their measure, according to the minds and the circumstances of the people.” They were not frozen, rigid, unyielding, or unrealistic in their monetary system. It says they changed their money to suit the circumstances and the times. Every nation has different monetary units. The exchange makes possible a lot of shenanigans for money making in the market. But here he says “they altered their reckoning and their measure according to the minds and circumstances of the people, in every generation [ah ha, it’s the Fed they’re fiddling around with now, isn’t it? They change the value and designation of the money as they go], until the reign of the judges, they having been established by king Mosiah.” This was the system established by King Mosiah. Since the new constitution this is what they had done; they had adjusted the money. They had a system which ran in sevens instead of fives and tens; or sixes and twelves, as the English [system] does; or the decimal system as we use it. It ran in sevens, and Richard Smith pointed out it was the best possible system that could be devised. It used the least coins for any necessary transaction. If you want to figure out a system that will use a minimum amount of coins and save you a lot of trouble, this is the system. It’s an almost perfect system, which Joseph Smith devised for his Nephites here [laughter]
What an apologetic goldmine for your hosts, Peterson! Nibley even sarcastically alludes to it at the end of this passage. No society that we have record of before the modern period had attained a level of monetary understanding where the value of money was separated from the value of the metal in the coin. That was hard for policy makers to do even in the 1930s, as Friedman had studied (the reliance on the gold standard, he argued, was one of the drivers of the Great Depression). How could Joseph Smith have known about monetarism? My god, this is like NHM for economists.

With just a bit of effort, Peterson could have made Friedman the first Mormon to win a Nobel (and the only believing Mormon to win one to date). The whole economics department at Chicago and half of that at Princeton could have been LDS by now! My word, with a bit of help from a freshly converted Friedman and Eisenhower's old Secretary of Agriculture, they might have brought Reagan into the Church.

A golden opportunity missed. God gave him a talent, and he buried it.

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The Lord's Anointed Mouthpiece on Earth meeting the President of the LDS Church in the 1980s
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

Post by Gadianton »

Tom wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 4:53 pm
I found another copy of the essay, complete with a nice photo of the author (see p. 152).

I wonder if he tried out his German on Hayek.
Hayek may not have recognized such pure German.

I followed Symmachus' lead and read some of the paper. I have to give him credit, it's far better than anything I ever wrote in High School. There is a question of substance, as Symmachus points out, but I don't think econ has ever been taught in High School. He may have had good reason to think that economics was just ideological blustering.

As an example:
a young DCP wrote: Perhaps it will be valuable, therefore, to isolate some of the characteristics of government action. First, we must admit the validity of Mao's rather starkly expressed dictum 'that 'political power flows from the barrel of a gun.
A little extreme? The first thing that comes to mind in the general notion of government is the absolute abuse of power? And from there, it devolves into a paranoid fantasy about corruption and warring factions and terrorism. Again, these are the basic building blocks of government action.

Shouldn't a fundamental assessment of government action at least consider public goods, externalities and securing property rights?
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

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Doctor Scratch wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 3:06 am
I wound up reading an entry of “SeN” today, mainly due to Consig linking to the post where DCP seems to support a practice whereby sex offenders are left alone provided that they confess to their bishop.

Bad as that is, the bulk of Dr. Peterson’s post was a reminiscence about his time as a youth in Scotland, where he spent time amongst a bunch of luminaries, including several Nobel laureates. He wound up scoring such a trip via his essay-writing skills, as he explains:
I immediately decided to seek the prize and, curiously, I was always serenely confident that I would win it. I simply knew that I would. One of the principal approach paths to LAX passed far above my parents’ house in California and, as I sat out in their backyard writing my essay over the 1975 summer break, every plane that passed overhead reminded me of my upcoming trip to Great Britain.

Winning the essay contest — and I did, in fact, win it –allowed me to mingle socially with such figures as Friedrich von Hayek, who had won the first-ever Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, as well as with Milton Friedman, who would win the 1976 prize just a few months later. I met future laureates like James Buchanan (1986) and Ronald Coase (1991), and spent a long afternoon exploring the superb used bookshops of St. Andrews with George Stigler, who would win the 1982 prize. One afternoon, I walked around the Royal and Ancient with the journalist and business historian John. Chamberlain, whom I greatly admired.
Great! Right? Except that DCP tells stories like this quite a bit: here he is, hobnobbing with some luminary, and yet… something seems “off.” What I realized in reading this is that Mormonism is 100% absent from these anecdotes. He *never* mentions the Church. Remember: this is someone who was tasked in his patriarchal blessing to defend and support the Gospel, and yet whenever he’s around some of the most influential people on planet earth, suddenly the Church seems…I dunno, like a “backwater” embarrassment? Seriously, why didn’t he bear his testimony to Milton Friedman, or give a Book of Mormon to John Chamberlain, who no doubt would have admired the ancient Nephites’ system of currency? What, one wonders, would von Hayek have thought about young Peterson’s literal belief in Jaredite barges? DCP’s story is all about how exciting it was for him to hang out with some of the “best and brightest” in the world and yet I’m struck by how his commitment to the Church seems to completely vanish. I mean, if these Nobel laureates are so smart, why would they wise up to what all the PhDs at MST have realized?

At the end of the day, I think that’s why I find DCP’s name-dropping so obnoxious. It’s not that he seems pathetic because wants to show that he hangs out with “important” people. It’s that he’s all “gaga” over these famous people while simultaneously seeming to know that they would think he was ridiculous if they knew what he was truly all about. If these Econ Nobel laureates are truly so bright, then why haven’t they joined the Church? How/why are they any better than the Brethren? And why, at the end of the day, does DCP never try to convert any of them?

I think we all know the answer.
How many stayed in contact with Peterson?
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

Post by Symmachus »

Gadianton wrote:
Tue Aug 23, 2022 5:17 am
Tom wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 4:53 pm
I found another copy of the essay, complete with a nice photo of the author (see p. 152).

I wonder if he tried out his German on Hayek.
Hayek may not have recognized such pure German.
:lol: :lol: Perhaps Peterson was afraid of being mistaken for a Nazi.

I have to give him credit, it's far better than anything I ever wrote in High School. There is a question of substance, as Symmachus points out, but I don't think econ has ever been taught in High School. He may have had good reason to think that economics was just ideological blustering.
It was submitted, according to The Freeman's note, in the college division, and young Peterson is listed as a college senior. In any case, economics has been a high school subject for a long time. We must assume it was written in response to a prompt—presumably, "what is the future of capitalism?" or something like that. The idea of the essay is, "there is a lot of government intervention in the economy now, and there probably will be in the future because the mass of people are easily bought off by government largess and because they lack the understanding needed to appreciate that a less regulated market offers them a better economic system." This was written a few years before Reagan came to power, so its predictions are a little off, but wrong predictions are what economics essays are all about, so that is actually a compliment to his grasp of the genre.

Yet one wonders what the other essays that scored lower were like if this was the winner, because if young Peterson's sub-erudite pessimism is justified, then it suggests a paradox resulting from one of the core ideas in classical economics: the free market functions on the assumption that individuals are best able to determine their own interest, so why have individuals seen it in their best interest to vote in statist politicians to regulate and over-regulate the market? Does Daniel Peterson understand their best interest better than they do? Answers to a question like that are way beyond my ability, but I would have expected an essay winning a prize associated with such eminent political economists would attain at least that level of self-awareness. The main strengths of the essay are the correct use of the word "sybaritic," the presence of the Latin phrase "ipso facto"—italicized no less—references to all the right people, and lots of commas to give you a rest through all those needlessly long sentences. These remains the hallmarks of that Petersonian style so beloved by us all.
a young DCP wrote: Perhaps it will be valuable, therefore, to isolate some of the characteristics of government action. First, we must admit the validity of Mao's rather starkly expressed dictum 'that 'political power flows from the barrel of a gun.
A little extreme? The first thing that comes to mind in the general notion of government is the absolute abuse of power? And from there, it devolves into a paranoid fantasy about corruption and warring factions and terrorism. Again, these are the basic building blocks of government action.

Shouldn't a fundamental assessment of government action at least consider public goods, externalities and securing property rights?
Oh this was my favorite part! Classic Peterson, and just brilliant! "Although Adam Smith blippity blop and Milton Friedman no regulation gizimity goppgopp, Mao is correct that..." And I love "starkly expressed." Yes, a bit stark I must say. Quite stark indeed, my boy.


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A valid dictum in the process of being starkly expressed
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

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Symmachus wrote:It was submitted, according to The Freeman's note, in the college division, and young Peterson is listed as a college senior.
I stand corrected, though I maintain that it's better than anything I wrote in High School.
Symmachus wrote:then it suggests a paradox resulting from one of the core ideas in classical economics: the free market functions on the assumption that individuals are best able to determine their own interest, so why have individuals seen it in their best interest to vote in statist politicians to regulate and over-regulate the market?
An astute observation, professor. I don't know the answer, but I can tell you the theorists at George Mason University have explored this topic many times. Why voting on prices brings efficiency but voting in politics doesn't. I've seen links to the papers when browsing around, but was never inclined to read them.
Symmachus wrote: and lots of commas to give you a rest through all those needlessly long sentences. These remains the hallmarks of that Petersonian style so beloved by us all.
Yeah, you know, I'm amazed he doesn't write for American Thinker or Breitbart. He should consider it. He'd be a hit; probably their main guy.
And I love "starkly expressed." Yes, a bit stark I must say. Quite stark indeed, my boy.
I appreciate you pointing these things out. In hindsight I can see it and get a smile out of it. I think I've adopted a filter over the years that only catches his words that are necessary to put the gist of the idea together. Now that you've got me going back to appreciate the details, I'm not sure I'm really understanding his points.
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Re: Mopologetics and Converting “Great Men”

Post by sock puppet »

huckelberry wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 4:19 pm
Tom wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 3:41 pm

He was in his early 20s and a returned missionary. But I see your point.
I cannot imagine any person with elementary social courtesy in Peterson's spot running up to these folks and saying, would you like to know more about the Book of Mormon? (or would you like to know more about the book of Jeremiah? )
Indeed, but then...every member a missionary, right?
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