Really loved this, thanks for sharing! I'm excited to read the book. I've been interested in roughly this territory since reading Ismael's "How Physics Makes Us Free," and I'm intrigued to see an approach to the question based in neuroscience.

Thinking about it more, I'm more interested in the immune response than theorizing about what god/s hate/s. Feels like it could yield grounds for differentiating good and bad hate, but my intuition is that it's something like "judging x to have negative moral value," which seems all bad re:people.

I'm skeptical that it can be good to hate *people,* but there might be interesting work in philosophy of religion/Abrahamic theology trying to make sense of scriptural claims about what God hates? Maybe also parallels from social systems to functions in other systems? e.g. hate as immune response?

Yeah, since it wasn’t the same people opting out of putting football in a conference and *also* opting out of the bowl game, it’s just annoying, not problematic. And as irritating as it is that the ACC makes sense for everything but football…the new playoff guarantee seems to fix the problem.

Vancouver, Philly, and San Diego all being improbably good. Minnesota doing a nifty anti-football. Son and Mueller settling in.

A question that’s been interesting me: in Columbus, at least, it feels like the NextPro>first team pipeline has slowed down. Is that true/a broader effect?

As Al pointed out, it seems to have been the players who wanted to decline the invitation. So I stand corrected: it seems like what both the players and fans want. I still don’t love it, but my original criticism is clearly wrong.

To clarify: I agree that ND got robbed. When I said they could have avoided this, I was referring to the decision not to join a conference, which leaves ND with incredibly thin margins. I don’t think ACC champs ND get left out. But: my thesis assumed this was coaches/admin choosing, not players.

Fair enough. If the student athletes didn’t want to play, then I support the school supporting them, and I stand corrected.

As Mike points out, players don’t have to play and fans don’t have to watch. This adds nothing on that front. To me, bowl games are fun to watch, they seem fun to play in and attend. It seems like ND is trading that for being in a snit over a situation *they* could have avoided.

Okay, so fair play to them, maybe it is what their fans and athletes want. But rather than guessing, I'm going to be a little obtuse and ask: how does this benefit you, and how does this benefit the Notre Dame players?

Yeah, and in the snow no less.

Should've kept my mouth shut.

Neither am I, but for different reasons.