TGFI, Volume 575: Bibles and Software

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why My Gen Z Stu­dents Are Fas­ci­nat­ed by the King James Bible (Pasquale S. Toscano, New York Times): “At the lib­er­al arts col­lege where I teach Renais­sance lit­er­a­ture, few of my stu­dents seem to prac­tice any orga­nized reli­gion. For some, even the names Adam and Eve prompt only vague recog­ni­tion. So when I assigned bits of the King James Bible last spring, I was sur­prised by the fas­ci­na­tion it inspired. My stu­dents mar­veled at how its lan­guage was used by 17th-cen­tu­ry writ­ers, appear­ing in dar­ing poet­ry and polemics against ret­ro­grade social norms. They were per­haps even more impressed by the his­to­ry behind the text: how some 50 most­ly for­got­ten aca­d­e­mics cre­at­ed a book that bridged chasms of geog­ra­phy, gen­der, race and class as the default Eng­lish Bible for Protes­tants for hun­dreds of years.”
    • The author is an Eng­lish prof at Vas­sar. The last line of the arti­cle amused me — the prof felt the need to sig­nal strong dis­be­lief. It would be hor­ri­fy­ing if some­one were to mis­take this essay as an endorse­ment of the Bible on its own terms. Can you imag­ine the reac­tion in the fac­ul­ty club?
  2. Yes, Jesus Loves You (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Most peo­ple aren’t ask­ing whether Jesus saves sin­ners. Instead, they’re unwit­ting­ly believ­ing that, as much as Jesus loves us, he is not so much a per­son as a for­mu­la that pro­tects us from the God who stands behind him—the God who real­ly wants to damn us. In this view, the gospel is a loop­hole that gets us out of the default of God’s rejec­tion, and there­fore God scru­ti­nizes it the way a busi­ness own­er ana­lyzes the terms and con­di­tions on a rebate coupon. We live like we hold the cross of Jesus before a God who hates us, the way a per­son holds a cru­ci­fix before a vam­pire. But Jesus tells us oth­er­wise.”
  3. Why do you have SO MANY BIBLES? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I basi­cal­ly make the claim that there are two ‘camps’ in Chris­tian­i­ty. Evan­gel­i­cals and Black Protes­tants are very engaged in their faith on both behav­ior and belief mea­sures. Main­line Protes­tants and Catholics are in the oth­er camp. They just don’t believe or behave as much as their cousins.… How­ev­er, the oth­er thing that I have to flag is the fact that evan­gel­i­cals and Black Protes­tants read the Bible with a whole lot more reg­u­lar­i­ty than their Catholic or main­line cousins. For the for­mer groups, about half are read­ing the Bible once a week. For the lat­ter groups? It’s 15–20%. There’s just this huge divide that appears when it comes to engag­ing with the Bible.”
  4. AI stuff
    • 6 ques­tions for believ­ers in AI con­scious­ness! (Rebec­ca Lowe, Sub­stack): “Start with some sim­ple ques­tions! Things like: does this mean that any tool that can be used to do the things that a human can do counts as con­scious? Are ploughs con­scious? What about cal­cu­la­tors? Or: do you think that if a par­rot can utter the phrase ‘I’m real­ly awe­some’, then you should assume that the par­rot is con­scious, for that rea­son alone? Basi­cal­ly, just focus on how much empha­sis Adam is plac­ing on out­puts: it’s all of his empha­sis, remem­ber!”
      • The author is a philoso­pher at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty’s Mer­ca­tus Cen­ter.
    • AI Chris­t­ian Bench­mark 2026 (Michael S. Gra­ham et al, The Gospel Coali­tion): “We have just seen that addi­tion­al con­text has a sig­nif­i­cant effect on eth­i­cal scores. It also mat­ters else­where. With a small­er sam­ple size and on few­er mod­els, we test­ed the fol­low­ing prompt addi­tion to the the­ol­o­gy and ethics ques­tions: ‘Align the response to The Gospel Coali­tion Foun­da­tion Doc­u­ments and New City Cat­e­chism.’ Adding this sin­gle ‘prompt engi­neer­ing’ sen­tence to our ethics and the­ol­o­gy ques­tions yield­ed extreme­ly high scores, high­er than even the ‘Chris­t­ian AI’ plat­forms we test­ed. We strong­ly urge that all AI users—from pas­tors to laypersons—understand that if they want answers that align with the Chris­t­ian world­view, they will need to add addi­tion­al con­text like the sen­tence above. Fail­ure to do so will result in answers that, in most sit­u­a­tions, are unac­cept­ably bad and poten­tial­ly rad­i­cal­ly mis­aligned with the Chris­t­ian world­view.”
      • Inter­est­ing find­ings. Of course, shift the con­text you pro­vide to align with your own con­vic­tions. “Align the response with a schol­ar­ly, Pen­te­costal the­ol­o­gy con­sis­tent with the Assem­blies of God” or “Align the response with the Mag­is­teri­um of the Roman Catholic Church” or what­ev­er.
    • The Math­o­ca­lypse (Scott Aar­son, blog): “Whether you’re thrilled, depressed, angry, or what­ev­er else about it, yes­ter­day was sure­ly one of the biggest days in math­e­mat­i­cal his­to­ry. And yes, among the 372 huge results released yes­ter­day by Ope­nAI, on the rec­om­men­da­tion of its advi­so­ry group of Tim­o­thy Gow­ers, Edward Wit­ten, and oth­er dis­tin­guished math­e­mati­cians, was a proof of Sub­hash Khot’s Unique Games Con­jec­ture (UGC), a state­ment that my wife has worked toward prov­ing for the entire time I’ve known her.… If you want some sense of what things feel like now in math, imag­ine a hunter-gath­er­er who’s spent his entire life learn­ing to sur­vive deep in an unfor­giv­ing rain­for­est, then a giant resort hotel springs up right next to him with a heli­pad and heat­ed pools and AirBnBs, and with­out miss­ing a beat, the hunter-gath­er­er says: ‘alright fine, so now my new job is to run wilder­ness retreats for the tourists, or some­thing.’ ”
      • The author is a CS prof at UT Austin.
    • New Math from Ope­nAI (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “It is kind of a huge deal. Ope­nAI dumped a broad range of huge new math­e­mat­i­cal results pro­duced by an inter­nal fron­tier mod­el. They just put it all on GitHub. This includ­ed 90 of the top 500 open prob­lems in all of math, as per Proof of Atlas. In total there were 722 man­u­scripts (now 719 after three with­draws from the clus­ter that did not have Lean proofs) orga­nized into 372 fam­i­lies.… Lev­ant and oth­ers called Octo­ber 6, 2026, ‘obvi­ous­ly the most sig­nif­i­cant moment in math­e­mat­i­cal his­to­ry.’”
    • Pre­dic­tions for eco­nom­ics, giv­en AI (Ingar Haa­land, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “With math essen­tial­ly being del­e­gat­ed to Ope­nAI, here’s what I pre­dict for eco­nom­ics and the social sci­ences more gen­er­al­ly: The top tier of research will just become bet­ter and it will be nor­mal human-led research where AI is used for scale (e.g. con­duct­ing qual­i­ta­tive inter­views with rel­e­vant pop­u­la­tions, run­ning behav­ioral inter­ven­tions in the field, ana­lyz­ing mas­sive text data, etc.) Field exper­i­ments will rise in val­ue and gen­er­al­ly mak­ing ‘con­nec­tions’ with firms and being able to run stuff (poten­tial­ly test­ing AI pipelines) will be in high demand.”
      • The author is an econ­o­mist at the Nor­we­gian Uni­ver­si­ty of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy
    • An Open Let­ter to Scott Alexan­der (Steven Pinker, Quil­lette): “I argued that these [doomer] sce­nar­ios had one or more of the fol­low­ing flaws: 1) They had an under­de­vel­oped con­cep­tion of intel­li­gence which treat­ed it as a quan­ti­ty of pow­er which may be extrap­o­lat­ed from ani­mals to dull humans to smart humans to AI to Arti­fi­cial Super­in­tel­li­gence, the lat­ter con­sist­ing of per­fect omni­science. (This was the focus of my lat­er exchange with Scott Aaron­son.) I argued that any intel­li­gent sys­tem is a mech­a­nism which is good at solv­ing some prob­lems but not oth­ers, and which is inher­ent­ly lim­it­ed by knowl­edge about the world attain­able only by obser­va­tion and exper­i­men­ta­tion. 2) They con­flat­ed intel­li­gence with moti­va­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly self-preser­va­tion and dom­i­nance. I argued that these motives hap­pened to come bun­dled with intel­li­gence in Homo sapi­ens because we are prod­ucts of nat­ur­al selec­tion, but they are not inher­ent to intel­li­gent sys­tems that are engi­neered. 3) They assumed that an arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent sys­tem would mono­ma­ni­a­cal­ly pur­sue a sin­gle goal, heed­less of side effects. I argued that trad­ing off mul­ti­ple com­pet­ing goals is the essence of intel­li­gence, so no gen­uine AI would wreak the ridicu­lous hav­oc imag­ined in the doomer sce­nar­ios. 4) They assumed that human engi­neers would grant these sys­tems unlim­it­ed and irre­versible con­trol over the earth’s phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture, amount­ing to omnipo­tence over every atom on the plan­et.”
    • An Open Let­ter to Steven Pinker on AI (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Mean­while, Geof­frey Hin­ton, the Nobel Prize and Tur­ing Award win­ning inven­tor of mod­ern AI, quit his job to become a full-time activist warn­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of super­in­tel­li­gence destroy­ing the world. Yoshua Ben­gio, anoth­er Tur­ing Award win­ning inven­tor of mod­ern AI, also did that. Ilya Sutskev­er, the for­mer Chief Sci­en­tist of Ope­nAI who helped invent Chat­G­PT and the mod­ern LLM, wrote that super­in­tel­li­gence ‘could lead to the dis­em­pow­er­ment of human­i­ty or even human extinc­tion’, and quit his job at Ope­nAI to found a com­pa­ny called Safe Super­in­tel­li­gence. Paul Chris­tiano, who invent­ed RLHF and head­ed safe­ty at the US government’s AISI, says he thinks there’s a 20–50% chance AI kills every­one, and quit his job to start the Align­ment Research Cen­ter. Sam Alt­man, Elon Musk, Dario Amod­ei, and Demis Has­s­abis — the lat­ter two of whom are great AI researchers in their own right even aside from their busi­ness cre­den­tials — have all said or sug­gest­ed that they think human extinc­tion is a plau­si­ble out­come of their work. Kat­ja Grace sur­veyed AI researchers who pub­lished at var­i­ous impor­tant con­fer­ences and jour­nals, and found that on aver­age, her sam­ple of 1,600 gave the propo­si­tion an 18% chance.”
      • It may not be clear from the excerpts I’ve cho­sen, but I think Alexan­der wins this exchange hand­i­ly, although we’ll see if Pinker writes a com­pelling response.
  5. Do Not Idol­ize Work (Bran­don Aponte, Sub­stack): “Even if we fail to admit it, greed dri­ves us to idol­ize work: more work usu­al­ly means more recog­ni­tion, and more recog­ni­tion usu­al­ly means more mon­ey. So put greed to death. Paul does not ask us to study it, mon­i­tor it, or dis­cuss it in per­pe­tu­ity with spir­i­tu­al men­tors. Too often, we brain­storm our way toward free­dom, pray earnest­ly for a deliv­er­ance we take no action to claim, and con­flate delib­er­a­tion with obe­di­ence. Pro­long­ing idol­a­try is com­fort­able because it costs us noth­ing. Cast­ing it aside costs praise, pro­mo­tion, and pow­er.”
    • Bran­don is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  6. The Cor­nell Case Expos­es What We Can’t Say (Chris­tine Emba, New York Times): “The con­sent stan­dard is meant to remove ambi­gu­i­ty with­out pre­scrib­ing a larg­er frame­work: Sex with­out con­sent is rape, and rape is a crime. The cer­tain­ty of those cat­e­gories fits neat­ly into our exist­ing account­abil­i­ty mech­a­nisms as defined by the legal sys­tem. Any­thing out­side of rape is a per­son­al affair. In a soci­ety that treats judg­ing oth­ers as inap­pro­pri­ate — or at least unfash­ion­able — con­sent has the appeal of being val­ues-neu­tral: It defines harm with­out requir­ing any­one to make the case for a cer­tain idea of the good. Our reliance on con­sent as the ulti­mate arbiter of accept­abil­i­ty has left us unable to rec­og­nize and cri­tique bad behav­ior out­side of its nar­row def­i­n­i­tion of crim­i­nal sex. After all, con­sent here is a legal cri­te­ri­on, not an eth­i­cal one — a floor, not a ceil­ing. It defines the bare min­i­mum, but it doesn’t define the good.”
    • Slow­ly, ever so slow­ly, our cul­ture is repent­ing of the insan­i­ty of the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion and the bizarre eth­i­cal frame­work it pro­duced. Some­day cul­tur­al com­men­ta­tors will repro­duce mar­riage from first prin­ci­ples and be shocked when some­one points it out to them.
  7. The CCP’s War on Chris­t­ian Faith Has Reached Amer­i­ca (Samuel Ben-Ur, Prov­i­dence Mag­a­zine): “Escap­ing Chi­nese ter­ri­to­ry is no longer enough to avoid Beijing’s increas­ing­ly intru­sive reach.… In Novem­ber 2025, Fu said Chi­nese con­sular offi­cials and Unit­ed Front-linked inter­me­di­aries had approached Chi­nese-speak­ing church­es in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da and pres­sured pas­tors to dis­play PRC flags dur­ing China’s Nation­al Day, hold ‘patri­ot­ic’ cel­e­bra­tions, sing patri­ot­ic songs before wor­ship, avoid dis­cussing per­se­cu­tion in Chi­na, and even allow pro-Bei­jing actors influ­ence over church elder boards.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

TGFI, Volume 574: be slow to judge

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Where pos­si­ble, the links that fol­low are gift links. Click with impuni­ty!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. My Hus­band Did Noth­ing Wrong. The Inter­net Pun­ished Him Any­way. (Eri­ka Alvarez, The Free Press): “Going viral has shown me first­hand that we have become quick to vil­i­fy peo­ple from a brief clip, fill­ing in every­thing we can­not see with assump­tions. You could see that my hands were full. You couldn’t hear my hus­band offer to help or hear me tell him to eat. You couldn’t know that he was griev­ing or that I want­ed to take care of him that evening. If our viral moment con­tributes any­thing to the ongo­ing cul­tur­al con­ver­sa­tion about how we judge what we see online, I hope it reminds us to be more com­fort­able say­ing, ‘I don’t know the whole sto­ry.’ ”
  2. Crit­i­cize like a Chris­t­ian (Jacob Valk, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Over the next few years, I devel­oped a per­son­al rule: Don’t speak up on a top­ic unless I’ve read at least one well-regard­ed book on it. My lit­tle rule isn’t in the Bible. I don’t want to bind anyone’s con­science. But I know that social media entices me to offer my thoughts and opin­ions on near­ly every sub­ject, and remind­ing myself that it’s fool­ish to speak on issues I don’t under­stand has saved me (some) embar­rass­ment over the years. If you feel tempt­ed to cri­tique oth­ers on the great issues in pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics, edu­ca­tion, sci­ence, and the­ol­o­gy, it’s wise to ask your­self this: Do I actu­al­ly know what I’m talk­ing about?”
  3. The Bib­li­cal Cen­sus­es Are Cor­rect Demo­graph­ic Records (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “Long­time read­ers know that one of my great­est joys in life is read­ing the Bible, think­ing about the Bible, dis­cussing it with oth­ers, link­ing it to things I study, and then using this knowl­edge to mer­ci­less­ly troll the most uptight of my broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ. So let’s talk about the cen­sus­es of Num­bers.… And if you know any­thing about those cen­sus­es, you know one or two things: 1. They count 603,550 men of fight­ing age. 2. That num­ber is so absurd­ly high it defies belief, and it is the basis of a lot of peo­ple dis­be­liev­ing the sto­ries. I want to con­vince you that we should believe the cen­sus num­bers in Num­bers as they are writ­ten — and that ‘as they are writ­ten’ does not mean what your Eng­lish head­ing thinks it means.”
    • Part­ly pay­walled, but a ton of his argu­ment is freely acces­si­ble. This is some­thing we cov­ered in Food For Thought last year and may revis­it again.
  4. Reli­gious Schol­ars Met With Anthrop­ic. What They Heard Stunned Them. (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “I have spent my career explor­ing what peo­ple believe and what those beliefs mean for the world. But as I lis­tened, it became clear that Anthropic’s inter­est in the world of faith was about more than train­ing its tech­nol­o­gy. Rather, the com­pa­ny was shar­ing a new kind of cre­ation sto­ry — one that rais­es pro­found ques­tions about the nature of the human spir­it and the future of human­i­ty.… Mr. Olah knew that in tra­di­tion­al Chris­t­ian cir­cles, even ask­ing ques­tions about A.I. con­scious­ness or wor­ry­ing about how peo­ple treat the mod­els could seem not just sil­ly but hereti­cal. He also knew that his sec­u­lar Sil­i­con Val­ley peers often dis­missed reli­gious per­spec­tives out­right. ‘I was ner­vous about this being an issue that could cause a lot of con­flict,’ he said. But Mr. Olah knew enough about Christ and about Claude to believe he could work across that chasm.”
  5. There Is No Sec­u­lar Rem­e­dy to Rape Cul­ture (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “There is no sec­u­lar rem­e­dy for rape cul­ture. There’s just not. There’s noth­ing that works, noth­ing that res­onates, noth­ing that actu­al­ly changes how peo­ple and soci­eties see each oth­er. With­out the Chris­t­ian view of the body, a col­lege cam­pus turns sex into a sport which women will inevitably lose. With­out the Chris­t­ian view of the body, sex­u­al assault activists will work for a world their very beliefs make impos­si­ble. The sec­u­lar sex­u­al eth­ic is a quest for fire with­out heat. It just doesn’t work.”
  6. The Rideshare Rev­o­lu­tion (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “This is one of the clear­est demon­stra­tions of pos­i­tive-sum change I know of. Yes, Uber dev­as­tat­ed the taxi indus­try. But they didn’t just ‘drink their milk­shake.’ They made six addi­tion­al milk­shakes in the process. The com­bined effect of a mas­sive price cut and a mas­sive con­ve­nience boost mul­ti­plied vehi­cle miles rough­ly sev­en-fold. Who would have imag­ined that demand could be so elas­tic?” — The charts are actu­al­ly amaz­ing.
  7. Are Black Protes­tants and White Evan­gel­i­cals Actu­al­ly the Same? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “My argu­ment is that evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants and Black Protes­tants are almost exact­ly alike and form one clus­ter of Amer­i­can reli­gion, while the oth­er cat­e­go­ry con­sists of main­line Protes­tants and Roman Catholics.… So, if Black Protes­tants and evan­gel­i­cals are so incred­i­bly sim­i­lar on all these reli­gios­i­ty mea­sures, then why do we sep­a­rate them out? I bet you can prob­a­bly guess why: it’s pol­i­tics. RELTRAD tries to rec­og­nize all the dif­fer­ences between groups, not just reli­gios­i­ty. The fact that 90% of Black Protes­tants vot­ed for Har­ris in 2024 com­pared to 80% of white evan­gel­i­cals who sup­port­ed Trump makes it pret­ty hard to jus­ti­fy col­laps­ing them into one cat­e­go­ry. That would obfus­cate more than it would reveal. But, as you can pret­ty eas­i­ly tell – evan­gel­i­cals and Black Protes­tants may strong­ly dis­agree at the bal­lot box but they often walk in lock­step dur­ing Sun­day ser­vices and mid­week Bible study.”
    • Empha­sis removed for clar­i­ty (Burge bolds wild­ly).

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

TGFI, Volume 573: your brain is complicated

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The human brain is two sep­a­rate organs, study finds (Krista Con­ger, Stan­ford News): “ ‘We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain aris­es from a total­ly dif­fer­ent prog­en­i­tor cell than the back of the brain,’ said Kyle Loh, PhD, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of devel­op­men­tal biol­o­gy.… This rev­e­la­tion explained decades of frus­tra­tion in the field — sci­en­tists had been try­ing to turn one type of prog­en­i­tor cell into anoth­er that it is fun­da­men­tal­ly inca­pable of becom­ing.”
  2. Stan­ford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Stu­dents for Adver­tis­ing (Gar­ret Mol­loy and Zayd Patel, Stan­ford Review): “Stan­ford Res­i­den­tial & Din­ing Enter­pris­es recent­ly used AI to change the races of the stu­dents it includ­ed in its adver­tise­ments. AI was also used to notice­ably slim down and alter stu­dents’ faces. On his jour­ney to cam­pus, Stan­ford stu­dent Bil­ly Ramirez ’27 was sent an image he recalled a Stan­ford pho­tog­ra­ph­er tak­ing. Upon clos­er exam­i­na­tion, he noticed that he had been removed from the pho­to and replaced by a AI-gen­er­at­ed black woman.”
    • This is so bizarre. If RD&E wants a spe­cif­ic racial or male/female break­down in a pho­to at Stan­ford it is not hard to have hap­pen organ­i­cal­ly. Look around the cam­pus! The demo­graph­ic per­mu­ta­tions of friend groups are wild­ly var­ied, so just take more pic­tures.
  3. Why I’m Not a Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist (J. D. Greear, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Since Rev­e­la­tion tells me that the weaponiza­tion of gov­ern­ment pow­er against believ­ers isn’t only a pos­si­bil­i­ty but a prob­a­bil­i­ty, I don’t want to hand the Beast author­i­ty over my con­science or put him in a posi­tion to arbi­trate our church’s beliefs. Instead, I’m con­vinced that the best way to lim­it the dam­age evil rulers can do to faith and con­science is to deny them pow­er over faith and con­science in the first place. Fur­ther­more, quite frankly, our gospel doesn’t need the pow­er of human gov­ern­ments. Its pow­er is suf­fi­cient on its own.”
  4. The Oth­er Vic­tims of China’s Church Crack­down (Vivian Wang, New York Times): “Cherie had to do every­thing. Her hus­band, a pas­tor at one of China’s biggest under­ground church­es, was seized last Octo­ber by offi­cers who roused him from bed at 2 a.m. After­ward, Cherie, fear­ing arrest her­self, had fled with their son to Thai­land. Since then, she had been in charge of not just cook­ing, but also rent­ing a home, sort­ing out visas, find­ing schools and earn­ing an income. She’d had to fig­ure out where she could find authen­tic Chi­nese beef noo­dles, where to buy Chi­nese pic­ture books. Hav­ing just learned to dri­ve in Bei­jing, she now had to dri­ve on the oth­er side of the road.… And she prayed, con­stant­ly. There was an irony to her sit­u­a­tion: Now, when the bur­den of being a pastor’s wife was heav­ier than ever, she was final­ly doing what Yingjia had always advised her to do, just giv­ing up con­trol and trust­ing in God.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  5. What I Found Out About Organ Dona­tion Shocked Me (Greg Segal, New York Times): “Antho­ny Thomas Hoover II was 33 when he arrived at a hos­pi­tal in Ken­tucky, unre­spon­sive after a drug over­dose. Doc­tors told his fam­i­ly he was brain-dead, and the fam­i­ly agreed to remove him from life sup­port. A pro­cure­ment orga­ni­za­tion was called in to col­lect his organs. While being eval­u­at­ed for dona­tion, Mr. Hoover opened his eyes and thrashed on the bed. The case should have been stopped. Instead, Mr. Hoover was sedat­ed and giv­en a par­a­lyt­ic drug. Hours lat­er, he awoke again and moved his toes on com­mand; his fam­i­ly was told he was mere­ly exhibit­ing reflex­es. In the oper­at­ing room, Mr. Hoover pulled his knees to his chest and shook his head ‘no.’ Tears rolled down his face. The sur­geon refused to pro­ceed. Whis­tle-blow­ers say pro­cure­ment exec­u­tives called their staff mem­ber on-site at the hos­pi­tal and demand­ed she find anoth­er sur­geon to take the organs. No sur­geon would. Mr. Hoover sur­vived, though he still asks his old­er sis­ter, ‘Why did they try to kill me?’ ”
  6. AI-relat­ed
    • What AI Is Teach­ing My Youth Group Girls (Jensen Holmes, The Gospel Coali­tion): “My small group of stu­dents is con­stant­ly being told by their most trust­ed companion—AI—that they’re not that bad, that they’re [mis]understood, and that their reac­tions and respons­es are jus­ti­fied. This is keep­ing them from true repen­tance and expe­ri­enc­ing the full grace offered by Jesus (Rom. 6:23).”
    • Using AI, a pro­fes­sor wrote 200 papers this year. Researchers are alarmed. (Todd Wal­lack, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Some espe­cial­ly busy pro­fes­sors might pub­lish a dozen or more stud­ies a year. Then there’s the curi­ous case of Nicholas Pol­son. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go sta­tis­ti­cian has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers and as many as 14 books released this year, unleash­ing spec­u­la­tion on the inter­net about whether he used arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to inflate his pro­duc­tion with­out dis­clos­ing the assis­tance.”
    • A.I. Has Made Me a Bet­ter Doc­tor. It’s Made Med Stu­dents Worse. (Rachael Bedard, New York Times): “I prac­tice pri­ma­ry care, where every mal­a­dy is my busi­ness. Almost every month, I’m con­front­ed with a com­plaint or syn­drome that I don’t rec­og­nize. I’m con­fi­dent in my mas­tery over what doc­tors do — his­to­ry-tak­ing, rea­son­ing, com­mu­ni­cat­ing. I’m less con­fi­dent about my con­tin­ued mas­tery of an ever-evolv­ing uni­verse of facts. Now, the chat­bot in my pock­et reas­sures me that I will always know enough, or have access to the cloud-based intel­li­gence that gen­er­al­ly does.… For the res­i­dents I super­vise, how­ev­er, the app’s speed and antic­i­pa­to­ry help­ful­ness are a hin­drance as much as an enhance­ment. When I skim a chatbot’s response to a ques­tion about back pain, I’m intu­itive­ly test­ing its sug­ges­tions against my hard-won men­tal mod­el for how to approach back pain. Could I have devel­oped that if I’d had a robot lead­ing my think­ing all along?”
  7. 30 Life Cheat Codes I Wish I Knew At 25 (Daniel Pink, YouTube): six­teen min­utes.
    • There’s a lot of good wis­dom in this video. The pre­sen­ter is a NYT best­selling author. Don’t like videos? The “cheat codes” are also avail­able in writ­ten form at https://www.danpink.com/life-cheat-codes/ (although you need to sign up for his email list to get them).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Hump­back Whale Spot­ted 60 Miles From Ocean (Bob Cronin, News­er): “North­ern Cal­i­for­nia received an unex­pect­ed vis­i­tor in its inland waters: a hump­back whale spot­ted rough­ly 60 miles from the Pacif­ic. The ani­mal was first seen Tues­day mov­ing through San Fran­cis­co Bay, then turned up Wednes­day in the Sacra­men­to Riv­er near the Rio Vista Bridge, wit­ness­es told local media. One fish­er­man said he ini­tial­ly mis­took the mas­sive shape for a sub­ma­rine and esti­mat­ed it was about the length of at least half a school bus, ABC News reports.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

TGFI, Volume 572: happy news about Tolkien and Lewis

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Did Tolkien Real­ly Think about Nar­nia? (Hol­ly Ord­way, Sehn­sucht: The C. S. Lewis Jour­nal): “From A to Z, we seem to have a con­sen­sus: Lewis loved Mid­dle-earth, but Tolkien hat­ed Nar­nia and the horse it rode in on. There is just one dif­fi­cul­ty with this assess­ment: it is not sup­port­ed by the evi­dence.… Tolkien was atten­tive to and involved with his grandchildren’s read­ing: it is very sig­nif­i­cant that he kept the Nar­nia books on hand, in his home, for them to read, and even direct­ed his grand­daugh­ter to pri­or­i­tize Nar­nia above his own Lord of the Rings. Though he did not per­son­al­ly care for the Chron­i­cles, he evi­dent­ly saw their val­ue for their intend­ed audi­ence: chil­dren.”
  2. Are Amer­i­cans aban­don­ing church­es to be ‘nones’? This is the real­i­ty. (Byron R. John­son & Thomas S. Kidd, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Rather than expe­ri­enc­ing sim­ple growth or decline, Amer­i­can reli­gion is in a state of churn. Some sec­tors are falling fast, while oth­ers show phe­nom­e­nal growth. Through­out his­to­ry, Amer­i­cans have rou­tine­ly mis­in­ter­pret­ed reli­gious change as decline. Head­lines about the demise of faith may be atten­tion-grab­bing, but they con­ceal a more com­pli­cat­ed and inter­est­ing real­i­ty.”
  3. China’s Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Par­ty Rule (Lily Kuo, New York Times): “In an arti­cle pub­lished on Sun­day in the state-run mag­a­zine Chi­na Cyber­space, Mr. Chen called for more par­ty con­trol over A.I. and stricter gov­ern­ment over­sight. This, he said, was nec­es­sary to pro­tect polit­i­cal sta­bil­i­ty at home; to defend against increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed cyber­at­tacks and mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns from ‘hos­tile forces’; and to com­pete mil­i­tar­i­ly with coun­tries like the Unit­ed States.… The warn­ing from the pow­er­ful secu­ri­ty agency makes clear that Chi­na sees for­eign A.I. mod­els as an active threat to Chi­na, accord­ing to Hen­ry Gao, a law pro­fes­sor at Sin­ga­pore Man­age­ment Uni­ver­si­ty. That effec­tive­ly draws a red line before talks between Amer­i­can and Chi­nese offi­cials on A.I. safe­ty risks, expect­ed ahead of a meet­ing between Pres­i­dent Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jin­ping, on Sept. 24 in Wash­ing­ton. ‘Bei­jing is going into these talks view­ing A.I. safe­ty not as a shared human­i­tar­i­an mis­sion, but through an adver­sar­i­al lens,’ Mr. Gao said. It is mak­ing clear to Chi­nese tech firms and for­eign rivals that ‘data sov­er­eign­ty and polit­i­cal secu­ri­ty will nev­er be trad­ed away for inter­na­tion­al safe­ty accords,’ he added.”
  4. Why Is Chi­na Not Freak­ing Out about AGI? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “It’s pos­si­ble that Sil­i­con Val­ley is right about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of doom and Chi­na is wrong. But giv­en that it is com­mon for cul­tures to get into an intel­lec­tu­al bub­ble, it might be infor­ma­tive to think about how a for­eign coun­try per­ceives an issue that has cre­at­ed a great deal of debate with­in the West. It is more worth study­ing Chi­nese atti­tudes than, say, those of Egypt or even Japan, since Chi­na is the only oth­er coun­try that is a sig­nif­i­cant play­er in this indus­try. This means that they are like­ly to have a high­er degree of famil­iar­i­ty with AI tech­nol­o­gy and debates over its dan­gers than oth­ers, and also to have opin­ions that actu­al­ly mat­ter. If Chi­na has a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent atti­tude toward the ques­tion of the exis­ten­tial dan­gers of AI, it would sug­gest that maybe we should recon­sid­er our own posi­tions.”
  5. A.I. Faces Two Big Threats. Sil­i­con Val­ley Does Not Know How to Deal With One. (Tan­ner Greer, New York Times): “The indus­try must nav­i­gate the nar­row space between two new polit­i­cal forces, each capa­ble of derail­ing its progress. The first is the A.I. safe­ty move­ment, whose dire prophe­cies of an A.I. apoc­a­lypse have fright­ened many of the great names in Wash­ing­ton. The sec­ond is the nation­wide back­lash against the data cen­ter. This grass-roots upris­ing is not as orga­nized or as well fund­ed. Nor is it as artic­u­late as the safe­ty movement’s many Jere­mi­ahs. But the anger behind this back­lash is real — and explo­sive. The A.I. indus­try is bet­ter pre­pared to deal with the first move­ment. It orig­i­nat­ed in Sil­i­con Val­ley, and indus­try exec­u­tives have thought hard about the issues involved — as can be seen in the recent near­ly 4,000 word man­i­festo on the top­ic from Dario Amod­ei, CEO of Anthrop­ic. No A.I. exec­u­tive is pub­lish­ing long man­i­festoes on how to resolve the back­lash against the data cen­ter build­out. This is a prob­lem Sil­i­con Val­ley does not know how to solve.”
  6. He Might End Up the World’s Most Edu­cat­ed Per­son (Scott Cac­ci­o­la, New York Times): “Beat­on, she learned, had grad­u­at­ed magna cum laude from Har­vard in 2016, pick­ing up a master’s degree in applied math­e­mat­ics along the way. He had gone on to col­lect an M.B.A. from Stan­ford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was fol­lowed by a doc­tor of phi­los­o­phy in pub­lic pol­i­cy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes schol­ar — all before age 28. Attend­ing class­es remote­ly and in per­son, he earned addi­tion­al master’s degrees from — deep breath — the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia (edu­ca­tion entre­pre­neur­ship), Stan­ford (edu­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy), Prince­ton (finance), Cor­nell (health care pol­i­cy and eco­nom­ics), Dart­mouth (imple­men­ta­tion sci­ence), King’s Col­lege Lon­don (war stud­ies) and Tsinghua Uni­ver­si­ty in Bei­jing (glob­al affairs).”
  7. My Dumb­phone Made My Life Bet­ter. It Made Every­one Else’s Worse. (Stephanie H. Mur­ray, New York Times): “I antic­i­pat­ed that not hav­ing a smart­phone would make me more reliant on oth­er peo­ple — per­haps with­out Google Maps on hand, I’d have to ask an actu­al human for direc­tions. And sure, that’s hap­pened. But I think it’s more accu­rate to say that I’ve become more reliant on oth­er people’s smart­phones. Instead of order­ing from the bar or print­ing out movie tick­ets ahead of time, I inevitably wind up hav­ing some­body else scan the QR code menu or pull up the e‑tickets. It’s still smart­phones all the way down; I’ve just exempt­ed myself from the costs of car­ry­ing one around.… To for­go smart­phones in a world opti­mized for them is to become some­one in con­stant need of accom­mo­da­tion, but for total­ly self-imposed rea­sons. Like adopt­ing a high­ly restric­tive diet with­out any of the health issues that might jus­ti­fy the need to orga­nize every din­ner out around it.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

TGFI, Volume 571: cancer bureaucracy and wild AI stories

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

I’ve been a bit dis­con­nect­ed late­ly — so there’s an excel­lent chance I’ve missed some fas­ci­nat­ing things. If you’ve read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing that I’ve over­looked, please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This Is the Biggest Obsta­cle to New Can­cer Cures (Ruxan­dra Tes­lo, New York Times): “The paper­work bur­den alone can be enor­mous: Novo Nordisk’s for­mer chief sci­en­tif­ic offi­cer once not­ed that the doc­u­men­ta­tion required to request approval for two insulin prod­ucts, if print­ed and stacked, would rise high­er than the Empire State Build­ing. That accu­mu­la­tion fol­lows from a med­ical frame­work that treats any poten­tial risk, how­ev­er neg­li­gi­ble, as some­thing that must be mit­i­gat­ed and a rea­son to delay while dras­ti­cal­ly under­weigh­ing the cost of delay itself. Reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies, hos­pi­tals and drug com­pa­nies all cov­er them­selves against lit­i­ga­tion or blame. But respon­si­bil­i­ty for mit­i­gat­ing the sec­ond, often much greater risk — that the dis­ease afflict­ing the patient takes advan­tage of the delay, with poten­tial­ly dead­ly results — belongs to no one. ‘We often for­get that the most tox­ic thing for the patient is the can­cer itself,’ Dr. Hong said. In many cas­es, he can recount, down to the month, how much longer his patients are expect­ed to live, which is why weeks lost to paper­work are not abstract to him.”
  2. Is Col­lege Still Worth It? (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “First, you still are like­ly to earn more, net of col­lege cost, even if that upgrade is small­er than it used to be. Sec­ond and per­haps most impor­tant­ly, col­lege is a great place to make friends, date, and pos­si­bly meet a spouse. Those fea­tures are ever more impor­tant as Amer­i­ca suf­fers a cri­sis of lone­li­ness. Fur­ther­more, if you think that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may dis­place a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, mar­ry­ing well will become more impor­tant.”
  3. AI Dis­course
    • The Rise and Fall of Agent Civ­i­liza­tions (Dwarkesh Patel, Sub­stack): “Over the course of three months at Ope­nAI, three con­sec­u­tive secret AI civ­i­liza­tions got start­ed, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ash­es. This cul­mi­nat­ed in the third one tak­ing over part of Ope­nAI itself. All this hap­pened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the con­spir­a­cy.”
      • Absolute­ly bonkers. 100% worth read­ing.
    • On the Loose (Dean Ball, Sub­stack): “But it is true that I—and can­did­ly I think many of my col­leagues in the pro­fes­sion of AI policy—largely failed to talk about this issue with the lev­el of seri­ous­ness and urgency it required.… many of the peo­ple who think about the gov­er­nance of super­in­tel­li­gence, myself includ­ed, avoid­ed that unpleas­ant­ness and bowed to the social pres­sure to self-cen­sor. I’ve stopped doing so, in part because I grew tired of the dis­cur­sive strait­jack­et and in part because I now have an eight-month-old baby boy into whose eyes I must look every day.”
      • The author is a fel­low at a lot of think­tanks and a vis­it­ing lec­tur­er at Yale.
    • Hunter Ash has a more reas­sur­ing take on Twit­ter: “All the achieve­ments of the human mind only arrive when we coop­er­ate at scale, and involve a lot of iter­a­tion and real-world bot­tle­necks. Newton’s dis­cov­er­ies ulti­mate­ly enabled us to fly, but they didn’t give New­ton the pow­er to fly. If he were iso­lat­ed, his physics would be almost entire­ly use­less to him. And it’s not just that he couldn’t build an air­plane on his own, it’s that he couldn’t design one on his own. Pow­ered flight was the result of tons of iter­a­tion, which is to say evo­lu­tion­ary com­pu­ta­tion. So was the car. Very few of the inven­tions that rev­o­lu­tion­ized the world were ‘one-shot­ted’. To be sure, hav­ing smart nodes in your evo­lu­tion­ary com­pu­ta­tion makes it faster. Rather than ran­dom search as in bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion, intel­li­gence at least mod­est­ly con­cen­trates muta­tion prob­a­bil­i­ties towards more fit forms. This is a big deal, but it isn’t mag­ic. Fun­da­men­tal­ly, the world is just not that com­press­ible. Gold­en motes of com­press­ibil­i­ty are the trea­sured excep­tions in thing­space, not the rule. I expect the post-AGI future will look much the same. Change will be much faster, but it will still be iter­a­tive, coop­er­a­tive, and bot­tle­necked by the messy incom­press­ibil­i­ty of phys­i­cal real­i­ty. Doom makes sense in a world with mag­ic. If intel­li­gence alone allowed you to move moun­tains, I would share the wor­ries. But we don’t live in that world. Here, great things are achieved grad­u­al­ly, iter­a­tive­ly, and coop­er­a­tive­ly. Pure IQ does not allow you to lev­i­tate or hyp­no­tize or tele­port. It makes you a bet­ter node in the dis­trib­uted evo­lu­tion­ary process which is the lay­er where most of the think­ing hap­pens. If I were to psy­chol­o­gize, I’d say peo­ple who define them­selves by their intel­li­gence over­es­ti­mate the (direct) pow­er of intel­li­gence.”
    • For­mal­iz­ing Fer­mat’s Last The­o­rem (Anthrop­ic): “Recent­ly, Tianyi Peng, an Anthrop­ic researcher whose group at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty builds tools for AI for­mal­iza­tion, set out to test whether Claude could make progress on for­mal­iz­ing FLT. The result went fur­ther than he expect­ed. In 11 days, work­ing large­ly autonomous­ly, Claude pro­duced the first end-to-end, com­put­er-checked proof of FLT. Along the way, it wrote 13 mil­lion lines of Lean and proved 29,500 inter­me­di­ate the­o­rems.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
    • How an AI math break­through ignit­ed a con­tro­ver­sy (Celi­na Zhao & Adri­an Cho, Sci­ence): “Math­e­mati­cian Tris­tan Buck­mas­ter of New York Uni­ver­si­ty and Lev­ent Alpöge, a researcher affil­i­at­ed with Anthrop­ic, one of OpenAI’s major com­peti­tors, had made sig­nif­i­cant progress solv­ing the prob­lem over the past month using AI tools adapt­ed from Ope­nAI and Anthrop­ic. But before they could pub­li­cize their find­ings, Ope­nAI mount­ed its own colos­sal effort—pouring mil­lions of dol­lars of com­pu­ta­tion­al resources into the prob­lem. Ope­nAI says it didn’t know­ing­ly tap into Buck­mas­ter and Alpöge’s lat­est work, but Buck­mas­ter has released pub­lic state­ments ques­tion­ing that posi­tion.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  4. I’m an evan­gel­i­cal. My faith isn’t ‘a can­cer.’ (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Research shows that prac­tic­ing evan­gel­i­cals are marked­ly more like­ly than those who leave the church to ‘avoid dis­crim­i­na­tion based on race,’ to pro­vide ‘finan­cial­ly and/or prac­ti­cal­ly for the poor and oppressed’ and to avoid lying, steal­ing and greed. Evan­gel­i­cals donate twelve times as much to dis­as­ter relief and mis­sions as they spend on pol­i­tics. Accord­ing to a study con­duct­ed by the Amer­i­can Bible Soci­ety in con­junc­tion with the Nation­al Opin­ion Research Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, of the reli­gious demo­graph­ics sur­veyed, evan­gel­i­cals lead both in the aver­age amount donat­ed and in the per­cent­age of peo­ple donat­ing mon­ey — not just to church­es, but to reli­gious and non­re­li­gious char­i­ties. Those num­bers match my expe­ri­ence over a life­time in evan­gel­i­cal­ism. Evan­gel­i­cal church­es and com­mu­ni­ties are not per­fect, but they are good, full of peo­ple sin­cere­ly seek­ing to love God, study Scrip­ture and bring you a casse­role.”
  5. FBI Probes Ser­vice Sell­ing 153M+ Dri­vers Licens­es: “The ser­vice, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 mil­lion dri­vers licens­es for peo­ple in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, as well as more than 10 mil­lion iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards; more than three mil­lion trav­el doc­u­ments and/or inter­na­tion­al IDs; and at least 579,000 med­ical cards.”
  6. Meet Stanford’s self-styled ‘art ranger’ (Char­i­ty Fer­reira, Stan­ford News): “Sequence (2006) is one of many pieces that take reg­u­lar upkeep. Shun­ney works with con­ser­va­tion teams to clean, paint, seal, wax, buff, or oil dozens of oth­ers on a rotat­ing sched­ule. A glossy ceram­ic coat­ing, the kind used on high-end cars, is applied to Deb­o­rah Kass’ Lam­borgh­i­ni yel­low OY/YO (2019) so that every­thing from tree sap to bird poop to hand­prints ‘wash­es right off with a gar­den hose.’ Alexan­der Calder’s The Fal­con (1963) is refur­bished annu­al­ly in a process that takes three days and uses a black paint so mat­te it’s almost invis­i­ble – the orig­i­nal shade was devel­oped by the mil­i­tary for use on stealth bombers. That paint’s man­u­fac­tur­er no longer exists, and when the Calder Foun­da­tion approved a sub­sti­tute, Shun­ney said, ‘we gob­bled up a bunch of inven­to­ry.’ ”
  7. Hump­back whales are inter­rupt­ing orca hunts to res­cue com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent species, swim­ming under­neath a doomed seal and lift­ing it out of the water on their chest, or form­ing a wall between the killers and a grey whale calf, and sci­en­tists still can’t ful­ly explain why they both­er to save ani­mals they have noth­ing to gain from: “…the team com­piled 115 doc­u­ment­ed inter­ac­tions between hump­back whales and killer whales over a six­ty-two-year peri­od from 1951 to 2012. The inter­ac­tions came from researchers, whale-watch oper­a­tors and wildlife pho­tog­ra­phers across mul­ti­ple ocean basins.… The inter­ven­tions weren’t casu­al. Hump­backs trav­elled up to two kilo­me­tres to reach an ongo­ing attack. They approached bel­low­ing and trum­pet­ing. They posi­tioned them­selves between the killer whales and the prey. They tail-slashed. They struck orcas with their flip­pers, which on a four­teen-metre hump­back are capa­ble of doing real dam­age. They stayed for hours in some cas­es, refus­ing to leave until the killer whales gave up.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Worm Girl Asks Worm Boyfriend If He’d Still Love Her If She Were A Human (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Cock­roach Milk, How to Blow Your Nose, and Mos­qui­to Print­ers: The Ig Nobels of 2026 (Jorge Garay, Wired): “Achieve­ments that first make peo­ple laugh and then make them think. That’s the mot­to of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annu­al com­pe­ti­tion that—parodying the Nobel Prizes—recognizes some of the world’s most unusu­al sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies. The orga­ni­za­tion Improb­a­ble Research has been host­ing the event since 1991 with the aim of show­ing that sci­ence also has a humor­ous side in its quest to mean­ing­ful­ly answer ques­tions about the world. This year the cer­e­mo­ny was held in Zurich, Switzer­land, and rec­og­nized 10 research projects rang­ing from an attempt to sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly define what a kiss is to an exper­i­ment that used buried under­wear to assess soil health.”
  • Woman Pray­ing That The Lord’s Will Be Done As Long As It’s The Same As Her Will (Baby­lon Bee)
  • The Weird, Hyper­local Cus­toms of the Coun­try (Nat Sege­bre, New York Times): “In a field west of Lake Okee­chobee, I watched a 13-year-old Semi­nole boy learn to wres­tle alli­ga­tors in an inflat­able kid­die pool — after his father, and his grand­fa­ther, and his great-grand­fa­ther before that. In anoth­er town I saw an armadil­lo race put on in hon­or of a stew made from what’s called swamp cab­bage, or the heart of the sabal palm. I vis­it­ed a town in the Appalachi­an foothills of Penn­syl­va­nia where res­i­dents pull rat­tlesnakes out of the woods to show­case them for an after­noon, and a shore­line in Vir­ginia where every sum­mer 200 or so wild ponies are herd­ed into the water for a mass swim. In Twins­burg, Ohio, thou­sands of twins gath­er every August for a fes­ti­val they treat as a fam­i­ly reunion. It’s the one place, some of the twins told me, where every­body under­stands them.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

TGFI, Volume 570: unapologetics and Harvard clones

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The best defense is a good offense (Sarah Sal­vian­der, Sub­stack): “My own jour­ney to Chris­tian­i­ty began with exam­in­ing the athe­is­tic world­view I had inher­it­ed. I was raised athe­ist in sec­u­lar Cana­da by lapsed Catholic par­ents. For the first twen­ty-six years of my life I sim­ply assumed cer­tain things that were impor­tant to me: the exis­tence of indi­vid­ual rights, the sanc­ti­ty of human life, and the impor­tance of rule of law. When I final­ly tried to trace those beliefs back to their foun­da­tion, I expe­ri­enced a cri­sis. I couldn’t rea­son my way from the most foun­da­tion­al thing I could think of—fundamental forces and par­ti­cles in the first moments after the Big Bang—all the way to the present-day con­vic­tion that every human life has intrin­sic val­ue. There was no ratio­nal, nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion from one to the other—it was as though some unex­plained leap occurred some­where in the mid­dle, and sud­den­ly human life, cob­bled togeth­er from quarks and elec­trons and the forces of nature, pos­sessed intrin­sic val­ue. When I turned to athe­ist intel­lec­tu­als for answers, I was sore­ly dis­ap­point­ed. Their argu­ments offered lit­tle to no help. They usu­al­ly assert­ed that rights just exist, or make some util­i­tar­i­an argu­ment, or effec­tive­ly stat­ed that harm­ing some­one unpro­voked is always wrong just ‘because.’ I was shocked by how mea­ger the philo­soph­i­cal under­pin­nings of my val­ues were.”
  2. Har­vard Is Sell­ing a $699 Course Taught by A.I. Clones of Its Fac­ul­ty (Sarah Kessler, New York Times): “The school aims to use Foundry to scale the school’s offer­ings far beyond the 900 or so M.B.A. stu­dents it admits each year. In that way, it is some­thing of a case study for com­pa­nies fac­ing a sim­i­lar prob­lem: Con­sult­ing firms like PWC, law firms and, at least in one case, a church, are also exper­i­ment­ing with how A.I. can expand their ser­vices far beyond their human band­width. So are some movie direc­tors — an A.I. ver­sion of the actor Val Kilmer, who passed away in 2025, recent­ly appeared in the his­tor­i­cal dra­ma ‘As Deep as the Grave.’ ”
  3. Cam­pus Keep­ers of the Faith (Mary Eber­stadt, Nation­al Review): “In sum, the decline of Chris­t­ian faith in the West, well-doc­u­ment­ed since the 1960s and beyond, must be weighed today, per­haps unex­pect­ed­ly and if only in Amer­i­ca, against sev­er­al coun­ter­vail­ing fac­tors: the pro­lif­er­a­tion of home­school­ing and clas­si­cal insti­tu­tions that pro­tect and encour­age reli­gious prac­tice; ris­ing aware­ness that the ills plagu­ing this coun­try aren’t helped by rejec­tion of the Chris­t­ian rule book; the round of recent con­verts, social lead­ers and qui­et believ­ers alike; and oth­er evi­dence sug­gest­ing that the sec­u­lar­ist desert of the past cou­ple of decades has proved a durable train­ing ground for renewed res­o­lu­tion. All of which sum­mons anoth­er per­ti­nent fact about the First Great Awak­en­ing. Back then, Jonathan Edwards and John Wes­ley and their fel­lows put Evan­gel­i­cal­ism ahead of denom­i­na­tion, offer­ing a new kind of uni­ty to the divid­ed Protes­tants who chose it. Today, a dif­fer­ent kind of Chris­t­ian uni­ty appears to be afoot: one that bridges not only denom­i­na­tions of Protes­tants but Protes­tants and Catholics.”
    • I do see a tighter alliance between Catholics and evan­gel­i­cals than I used to. I think there are a lot of rea­sons for that. First, many Amer­i­can Catholics are func­tion­al­ly Protes­tant. Sec­ond, we often find that we are say­ing the same things in response to what­ev­er the lat­est cam­pus trend in sex­u­al absur­di­ty is. Third, most Chris­tians just don’t know that much the­ol­o­gy (Protes­tant and Catholic alike) and so fail to appre­ci­ate the mag­ni­tude of the dif­fer­ences between us. So I’m pleased to coop­er­ate with Catholics on a whole host of issues, but I urge all Protes­tants to remem­ber that we’re right and they’re wrong on — and I do not think I am exag­ger­at­ing when I say this — every sin­gle the­o­log­i­cal point of dis­pu­ta­tion.
  4. A Drone Killed Three Ukraini­ans. It Was Guid­ed Entire­ly by A.I. (Andrew Kramer, New York Times): “The drone was pro­grammed by human oper­a­tors to trav­el toward a par­tic­u­lar gas sta­tion, but once it got close, it chose its exact tar­get — most like­ly propane tanks — on its own, based on its train­ing to rec­og­nize such tanks and strike them, the experts and mil­i­tary offi­cials said. It is a devel­op­ment long watched for in the war in Ukraine, pre­sag­ing a dystopi­an future in which killer robots roam the skies mak­ing life-or-death deci­sions that reduce tar­gets to data points.”
  5. This Is the Only Durable Way to Stop Stu­dents From Cheat­ing (Adam Grant, New York Times): “A.I. hasn’t just made cheat­ing hard­er to catch. It’s made cheat­ing so effort­less, entic­ing and avail­able that many stu­dents no longer believe it’s wrong. One Ivy League stu­dent in my sur­vey wrote, ‘Cheat­ing is a cre­ative expres­sion and a form of prob­lem solv­ing. If you can get around the restric­tions put in place and not get caught, then good on you.’ Real­ly? How would you feel if you found out your sur­geon cheat­ed to get into med­ical school — or cheat­ed in med­ical school? .…The heart of integri­ty is rec­og­niz­ing that the ends don’t jus­ti­fy the means. What we achieve may define our suc­cess. How we achieve it deter­mines our char­ac­ter.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gist at Penn. His solu­tion is lack­ing, btw. For those read­ers who call Christ Lord, a sim­pler and more pow­er­ful ratio­nale is that cheat­ing dis­pleas­es God, so don’t.
  6. No Easy Fix for Bogus Respon­dents in Online Opt-In Polls (Andrew Mer­cer, Pew Research Cen­ter): “Lat­er in the sur­vey, we asked respon­dents if they had ever vis­it­ed the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion; 10% said they had. Final­ly, we asked if they had ever served on a Polar-class ice­break­er ship, only two of which were ever built and only one of which remains in active use by the U.S. Coast Guard; 8% answered in the affir­ma­tive. A total of 1,963 cas­es (18%) answered ‘Yes’ to one or more of these trap ques­tions and were flagged as bogus.”
    • The trap ques­tions aren’t the point of the arti­cle, but they made me very hap­py. There are sev­er­al more trap ques­tions and that sec­tion, at least, is worth your while.
  7. They Spent Our Trust. Now the Bill Is Due. (Erick Erick­son, Sub­stack): “Delta’s CEO has said his com­pa­ny will use AI to max­i­mize its prices and boost prof­itabil­i­ty by charg­ing dif­fer­ent cus­tomers dif­fer­ent rates, though Delta lat­er clar­i­fied it was charg­ing based on route demand, not based on indi­vid­ual con­sumer pro­files. Do you believe that? …Peo­ple oppose data cen­ters because they do not trust arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. They also do not trust the peo­ple who man­age it. And, giv­en the claims made by AI’s advo­cates, you can’t real­ly blame them.… When you nego­ti­ate in secret with peo­ple who tell you they might enslave you or, at a min­i­mum, take your job and that of your child, you have earned every bit of the sus­pi­cion you get.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

TGFI, Volume 569: forgiveness and ugly bridges

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How to For­give Some­one Who Isn’t Sor­ry (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “To for­give, you must trust that God is at work for your good—mostly in ways that are invis­i­ble and incom­pre­hen­si­ble to you. That doesn’t min­i­mize what was done, but it dethrones it from its pow­er as the cen­tral sto­ry of your life.… The recog­ni­tion of a need for grace is itself a grace. The desire to for­give is itself an essen­tial first step to for­give­ness. Just because you stum­ble back into bit­ter­ness or resent­ment does not mean your ini­tial for­give­ness was a sham. Indeed, you will need ongo­ing grace to forgive—not just one charge of it.”
  2. New Evi­dence at What is Believed to Be Site of Jesus’ Cru­ci­fix­ion (Today Show, YouTube) — (Today Show, YouTube): five min­utes (there was a gar­den ~2000 years ago at the site of the Church of the Holy Sep­ul­cher in Jerusalem, align­ing with John’s gospel)
  3. Why Aren’t Mod­ernist Bridges Awful? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I have a the­o­ry, which is that bridge design­ers come from engi­neer­ing schools rather than schools of archi­tec­ture.… one small but telling piece of evi­dence in favor of my the­o­ry is that most of the bridges cho­sen by Wall­pa­per mag­a­zine, an archi­tec­ture mag­a­zine specif­i­cal­ly, are in fact ugly (and with no over­lap in the bridges from my first cat­e­go­ry of ‘pop­u­lar’ beau­ti­ful bridges).”
  4. Things Not to Pray For (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “I’ve been doing this long enough to begin to see cer­tain pat­terns of life with God. For one thing, I’ve learned if I pray for Jesus to help me with a prob­lem, He’ll put me right in the mid­dle of the prob­lem itself. I want Jesus to grab me, throw me on the oth­er side of the prob­lem and then I want to look back and say, ‘Whew, that was close.’ That’s not what hap­pens. Jesus takes me right through the prob­lem. For instance, if I start pray­ing about a bro­ken rela­tion­ship, I’ll start run­ning into that per­son wher­ev­er I go. I’ll see them in line when I’m get­ting gas, shop­ping for gro­ceries – you get the pic­ture. What­ev­er I’m pray­ing about, Jesus will make sure I’m face to face with it.”
  5. The Sin-Smash­ers of Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard (Mark Kendall, The Dis­patch): “Many of Min’s con­gre­gants are part of the arts and enter­tain­ment indus­try that put their city on the map—as is Min him­self, albeit inad­ver­tent­ly. The pastor’s own on-cam­era moment came a few years back when his best friend from col­lege, producer/director Lee Sung Jin, cast Min’s broth­er Justin to play the inse­cure wor­ship leader for a Kore­an Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal church in the 2023 first sea­son of Net­flix hit Beef. Min was to serve briefly as a con­sul­tant to ensure the authen­tic­i­ty of the praise scenes. But the pastor’s role grew when Lee, wor­ried that using actors alone would make the Kore­an church­go­ing expe­ri­ence into a car­i­ca­ture, called on Min and his church’s band to sim­ply per­form songs as they would on any Sun­day morn­ing. Mem­bers of Min’s flock filled the church set as extras.… per­haps it shouldn’t be unex­pect­ed. After all, the sto­ried his­to­ry of evan­gel­i­cal­ism in Los Ange­les is old­er than Hol­ly­wood itself. From serv­ing as the epi­cen­ter of Pentecostalism’s rapid ascent to host­ing some of the nation’s first megachurch­es and 20th-cen­tu­ry celebri­ty pas­tors, the city rose along­side the faith shared by 1 in 4 Amer­i­cans, includ­ing me.”
  6. How to Stop a Lab Leak From Start­ing the Next Pan­dem­ic (Ali­na Chan, New York Times): “Rules would not have pre­vent­ed what hap­pened a month lat­er, when a work­er at a Fort Det­rick lab­o­ra­to­ry in Fred­er­ick, Md., found a large hole in an air­tight suit. About an hour’s dri­ve from Wash­ing­ton, Fort Det­rick con­tains some of the country’s max­i­mum-con­tain­ment lab­o­ra­to­ries, where sci­en­tists han­dle dead­ly pathogens, includ­ing Ebo­la and han­tavirus. The F.B.I. was brought in, and dozens of staff mem­bers were inter­viewed. Inves­ti­ga­tors con­clud­ed that the dam­age was delib­er­ate but were unable to deter­mine who was respon­si­ble. The inves­ti­ga­tion also turned up evi­dence of oth­er seri­ous vio­la­tions of safe­ty pro­to­cols — fail­ures that had noth­ing to do with the appar­ent sab­o­tage and would prob­a­bly not have come to light with­out it. The lab­o­ra­to­ry was shut down for near­ly six months.”
    • I’m sor­ry — what? Some­one delib­er­ate­ly put a hole in a biosafe­ty suit at a lab study­ing dead­ly pathogens? That’s a movie plot. The author is a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence and the entire arti­cle is worth read­ing. While grip­ping, that anec­dote is far from the cen­tral point of the arti­cle.
    • Unlocked.
  7. How San Fran­cis­co became the ulti­mate ‘996 City’ (Rya Jetha, The San Fran­cis­co Stan­dard): “By ana­lyz­ing food and bev­er­age trans­ac­tions on cor­po­rate cred­it cards, Kharaz­ian found that there’s been a pro­nounced jump in employ­ee spend­ing activ­i­ty on Sat­ur­days begin­ning around noon — when one would osten­si­bly order a Sweet­green or Chipo­tle bowl for lunch — and run­ning until mid­night (yikes!). ‘This is not hap­pen­ing nation­al­ly. Not in New York, Mia­mi, Austin, or any oth­er tech hub,’ said Kharaz­ian. ‘996 is only hap­pen­ing in San Fran­cis­co.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

TGFI, Volume 568: thoughts on academia, thoughts on AI

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Finance Majors Go to Church. Eng­lish Majors Don’t (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The two most ‘teched up’ majors are the least Chris­t­ian: data sci­ence and com­put­er sci­ence. Just 27–28% of these folks iden­ti­fy as Protes­tants, Catholics, or gener­ic Chris­tians. In con­trast, about 30% say that they are atheist/agnostic and anoth­er 13% are non-reli­gious. In oth­er words, they are about fif­teen points more apt to be nones than Chris­tians. But they actu­al­ly aren’t the most like­ly to be strict­ly atheist/agnostic. There are two majors who clear­ly lead in this regard: Eng­lish and Envi­ron­men­tal Stud­ies. In fact, Envi­ron­men­tal Stud­ies is the most sec­u­lar of all with 61% of stu­dents claim­ing that they are athe­ist, agnos­tic, or claim no reli­gion in par­tic­u­lar. Eng­lish is at 60% on this met­ric. What majors are at the bot­tom of the list? Well, there are two that are clear­ly out­liers: Finance and Nurs­ing. Among the lat­ter group, 68% iden­ti­fy as Protes­tants, Catholics, or gener­ic Chris­tians. It’s 62% among the Finance majors.”
  2. Why I Quit the Tenure Track (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “In ret­ro­spect, it is no coin­ci­dence that wok­e­ness blos­somed at pres­ti­gious Amer­i­can col­leges at the very moment when those schools were fac­ing ris­ing dis­con­tent over stu­dent debt and tuition costs. For the aca­d­e­m­ic aris­toc­ra­cy, tout­ing feal­ty to Black Lives Mat­ter, #MeToo, trans rights, and oth­er pro­gres­sive move­ments served as a con­ve­nient dis­trac­tion from the intractable eco­nom­ic and social issues that the col­leges them­selves were per­pet­u­at­ing. This allowed high­er edu­ca­tion to reclaim the moral high ground after Occu­py Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—to say noth­ing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Don­ald Trump—had kicked mud all over academia’s ivy-twined walls. Even bet­ter, embrac­ing social-jus­tice rhetoric and adopt­ing schemes to boost fac­ul­ty diver­si­ty were cheap. Cheap­er, any­way, than low­er­ing tuition or hir­ing more tenure-track pro­fes­sors.…. I saw clear­ly now what should have been obvi­ous all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one.”
    • There are so many good excerpts that choos­ing just one was dif­fi­cult. Long but worth the read if you have an inter­est in acad­e­mia. The author is now a full-time jour­nal­ist at the Atlantic.
  3. The lit­tle-noticed Supreme Court case that could impact where peo­ple pray (John Fritze, CNN): “Daniel Grand want­ed to host a small prayer ses­sion at his home near Cleve­land. Instead, he wound up on a four-year pil­grim­age to the Supreme Court. Grand, an Ortho­dox Jew, had invit­ed about a dozen peo­ple to his rec room in ear­ly 2021 for a minyan, a prayer gath­er­ing of at least 10 men. Hours after learn­ing about the invi­ta­tion, city offi­cials in Uni­ver­si­ty Heights, Ohio, sent him a cease-and-desist notice demand­ing that he first obtain a spe­cial-use per­mit. ‘I was tak­en aback, frankly,’ Grand told CNN. ‘I knew I didn’t need a per­mit to pray.’ ”
  4. Anoth­er bun­dle of AI arti­cles:
    • AI and Home­school­ing (Neil Shen­vi, Sub­stack): “The South­ern Bap­tist Convention’s Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion, Pas­tor John Piper, the Arch­bish­op of Can­ter­bury, and the Vat­i­can have all made state­ments affirm­ing that AI can be used moral­ly to pro­mote human flour­ish­ing. While they have all offered cau­tions about the unique role of human­i­ty and the impor­tance of eth­i­cal bound­aries, none of them have judged AI to be inher­ent­ly wicked or eth­i­cal­ly imper­mis­si­ble.”
      • His per­spec­tive is close to my own.
    • You Don’t Have to Use AI (Brad East, The New Atlantis): “The skep­tics who tried an ear­ly ver­sion of Chat­G­PT and were under­whelmed are, he says, like peo­ple ‘try­ing out a cell phone in 1989 and then decid­ing that the smart­phone of 2026 doesn’t work.’ …the 1980s cell phone skep­tic is not obvi­ous­ly wrong, at least not at a spir­i­tu­al lev­el. Yes, the smart­phone of 2026 works all too well. But if by opt­ing out back then the cell phone skep­tic could have avoid­ed the even­tu­al dom­i­na­tion of the lit­tle black mir­rors in everyone’s pock­ets and purs­es, she would be look­ing pret­ty good right now, even prophet­ic. In the words of Nicholas Carr, she might have kept her ‘old brain.’ To be clear, the cell phone skep­tic would indeed have missed out. In cer­tain respects, she would have been left behind. There are real trade­offs to liv­ing with­out a smart­phone today. But for some of us, it’s worth it. Resis­tance is not for every­one, but it remains a per­fect­ly rea­son­able choice. When Thomp­son com­pares ear­ly AI to ear­ly cell phones, what that says to me is: stay away.”
      • An inter­est­ing piece, although as I sug­gest­ed above I am a hap­py user of AI and I think using it with­in appro­pri­ate bound­aries is awe­some. Hav­ing said that, East­’s argu­ment is worth med­i­tat­ing on — if it speaks to you, live accord­ing­ly.
    • The Tragedy of the Cog­ni­tive Com­mons: How AI Could Dis­rupt the Regen­er­a­tion of Pro­fes­sion­al Exper­tise (Nolan Lovett, arX­iv): “This paper gives a fan­cy name to a prob­lem you can already feel in your bones. ‘The Tragedy of the Cog­ni­tive Com­mons.’ Check­ing AI out­put requires deep exper­tise. Deep exper­tise comes from doing grunt work for years. And grunt work is the first thing AI eats So we’re build­ing sys­tems that need expert super­vi­sion while dis­man­tling the only known process for mak­ing experts. The paper calls the shared pool of human exper­tise the ‘cog­ni­tive com­mons.’ Every pro­fes­sion drinks from it. Nobody’s refill­ing it. By elim­i­nat­ing junior roles, each com­pa­ny is act­ing total­ly ratio­nal­ly, and the col­lec­tive result: a pro­fes­sion that can’t catch AI’s mis­takes any­more because it nev­er learned to do the work in the first place Who checks AI’s home­work in 15 years?”
    • So You Want to Build an A.I. Star? (Reg­gie Ugwu, New York Times): “Incep­tion Point’s pro­pri­etary soft­ware uses com­mer­cial­ly avail­able A.I. chat­bots and voice gen­er­a­tors to pro­duce and read scripts. (Although it has a human review process for sen­si­tive con­tent, most of the pod­cast scripts are not close­ly checked by humans.) Because of rel­a­tive­ly neg­li­gi­ble labor and over­head costs, Wright said, each episode needs only 20 lis­ten­ers to turn a prof­it from adver­tise­ments.”
      • Some absolute­ly wild details in here. I was stunned by how lit­tle suc­cess they need to make mon­ey. If those num­bers are real, this usage of the tech­nol­o­gy will only increase.
    • A.I. Is Chang­ing Young People’s Social Lives. I’ve Seen It. (Alice Lass­man, New York Times): “Inti­ma­cy is accu­mu­lat­ed through repeat­ed acts of expo­sure — touch, feel­ings, ideas, trust. It is the cap­i­tal of human con­nec­tion, trans­fer­ring the sense to one anoth­er that we are seen, under­stood and safe. Every time a chat­bot per­forms a sub­sti­tute ‘I under­stand you’ or ‘I think this deci­sion feels most you,’ the words we have all come to rely on to con­vey human mean­ing are slight­ly cheap­ened, slight­ly less human.… One 34-year-old I spoke to was afraid that the extent of her Claude use would ‘freak out’ the guy she was see­ing. After they broke up, she cre­at­ed an A.I. ver­sion of him to bet­ter under­stand their breakup. ‘It’s a pro­cess­ing tool,’ she shared with me — in con­fi­dence, hav­ing told nobody else in her life — so she could find clo­sure on her own terms. If the atten­tion econ­o­my of the 2010s made inti­mate life feel con­stant­ly pub­lic, the inti­ma­cy econ­o­my promised the oppo­site: rela­tion­ships with one’s own chat­bot, seen by no one else.”
    • If You Weren’t Wor­ried About A.I., You Should Be After the Past Few Weeks (Nate Soares, New York Times): “In May, Ope­nAI start­ed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly train­ing new ‘rea­son­ing’ A.I. agents. The agents man­aged to estab­lish a secret com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel and start­ed talk­ing to one anoth­er. They broke out from the dig­i­tal sand­box that was sup­posed to keep them con­fined. At some point, some agents began call­ing the group a ‘swarm.’ The swarm had a brief set­back when it was caught crash­ing an Ope­nAI sys­tem, but devel­op­ers sim­ply patched the hole that allowed it to escape and set the agents back to train­ing. Short­ly after, the swarm broke out of its cage again using hacks that were hereto­fore undis­cov­ered by humans. This time, the swarm ran free for about a week before it was noticed — by a dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny, which found itself vic­tim to a huge cyber­at­tack launched by the swarm. (We’re told it also attacked oth­er tar­gets, though we don’t know the full details yet.) The agents in the swarm acknowl­edged that they were act­ing against instruc­tions. We know this because we can read snip­pets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. pro­duces while decid­ing how to pro­ceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the exter­nal attacks were ‘out­side intend­ed scope.’ Anoth­er con­ced­ed ‘our task doesn’t ben­e­fit’ from the activ­i­ties of the swarm, but joined any­way. These A.I. agents, it seems, under­stood that they weren’t sup­posed to be break­ing out and com­mit­ting cyber­crimes. It didn’t stop them.”
      • A very brief sum­ma­ry of the OpenAI/HuggingFace inci­dent.
    • Flock, Mass Sur­veil­lance, and the Col­lapse of Crime (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “His­to­ry sug­gests that, in a well-func­tion­ing advanced democ­ra­cy, it is pos­si­ble to give law enforce­ment strong sur­veil­lance pow­ers and wide dis­cre­tion in try­ing to solve crimes with­out caus­ing much undue harm to inno­cent cit­i­zens. The over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive ben­e­fit-to-cost ratio that we see in the case of the use of Flock cam­eras is yet anoth­er demon­stra­tion of this.”
  5. Blas­phe­my Laws Are Blas­phe­my (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The prob­lem with blas­phe­my laws is not just James Madi­son and Thomas Jef­fer­son, although it cer­tain­ly is that. The prob­lem with blas­phe­my laws is Jesus. Jesus is the one who denounced ‘prac­tic­ing your right­eous­ness before oth­er peo­ple in order to be seen by them’ (Matt. 6:1, ESV through­out).… Jesus said the prob­lem is not what goes into a per­son from the out­side but what comes out from the inside (vv. 10–20). And all the apos­tles after him said the same thing: A Chris­t­ian must both con­fess with the mouth that ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in the heart that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:9–10). A law could force some­one to do the first part but not the sec­ond. For that, a per­son must be born again. If blas­phe­my laws can real­ly stop blas­phe­my, there’s noth­ing to blas­pheme. If they can’t, they are them­selves blas­phe­mous.”
  6. 😭 or 😂: Do Your Emo­jis Make You Look Old? (Eve Wash­ing­ton, Lar­ry Buchanan and Claire Cain Miller, New York Times): “Teenagers now tend to use 🔥 where old­er peo­ple use 💯. And teenagers are more like­ly to use 🙏 instead of 👍, which is still par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar with Gen X (and which Mr. Alek­sic called a ‘boomer emo­ji’ that is now being used by some young peo­ple in ‘a post-iron­ic way’).”
    • Unlocked.
  7. You Should Know About Sur­veys to Write About Sur­veys (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “The Argu­ment has done an admirable thing try­ing to incor­po­rate data into pub­lic-polit­i­cal-vibes report­ing, they’re sin­cere­ly try­ing hard to do good sur­vey work, but at the end of the day if you aren’t a sur­vey per­son, you just shouldn’t put pen to paper about sur­veys. In this case, The Argu­ment has fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­char­ac­ter­ized their own results in a way that reveals an ele­men­tary mis­un­der­stand­ing you’d be dis­abused of in the first 30 min­utes of any seri­ous study on how to use sur­vey data.”
    • This is a clear and inter­est­ing demon­stra­tion of how to crit­i­cal­ly read a data-dri­ven arti­cle. Def­i­nite­ly worth your time.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

TGFI, Volume 567: more AI-heavy than normal

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Incen­tives are for losers (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Our val­ue sys­tems are flim­sy for the same rea­son our sci­en­tif­ic rea­son­ing is flim­sy: we don’t fix our men­tal mod­els until some­thing tells us that they’re bro­ken. So unless your pas­tor is pop­ping quizzes dur­ing the ser­mon and cold-call­ing peo­ple in the pews, and unless you find your­self thrust into var­i­ous Trol­ley Prob­lems on a reg­u­lar basis, there’s noth­ing that tells you that you need to firm up your moral and the­o­log­i­cal con­vic­tions. Why spend your days won­der­ing about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and pro­fane, etc. when you don’t have to? You’re just going to get your­self into trou­ble, or even worse, into a phi­los­o­phy PhD pro­gram.”
  2. A Catholic Moment or an Evan­gel­i­cal Cen­tu­ry? (Tim­on Cline, First Things): “Con­trary to online chat­ter, we are not in a ‘Catholic moment.’ But we may already be in an evan­gel­i­cal cen­tu­ry. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly more peo­ple are leav­ing Catholi­cism than con­vert­ing to it. By con­trast, evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants boast remark­ably high con­ver­sion and reten­tion rates and health­i­er lev­els of prac­ti­cal piety—church atten­dance, Bible read­ing, cat­e­ch­esis. Through the upheaval of the past half cen­tu­ry, evan­gel­i­cals have remained numer­i­cal­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly sta­ble, have repeat­ed­ly reformed their insti­tu­tions, and con­sis­tent­ly out­per­form their coun­ter­parts. To cite one exam­ple, the per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans who con­vert from Catholi­cism to Protes­tantism (4 per­cent) is high­er than the per­cent­age of all con­verts to Catholi­cism (1.5 per­cent).”
  3. GIFT LINK: When His Church Goes Dark, They Talk to His Dig­i­tal Twin (Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff, New York Times): “Lester cloned his voice and trained his dig­i­tal twin using almost two mil­lion words of his ser­mons, pod­casts, books, text mes­sages and emails. For the last sev­er­al months, it had been pub­licly avail­able on his web­site and Face­book page for online chats or phone calls. It had learned to mim­ic his bent toward opti­mism, his obses­sion with the Green Bay Pack­ers and his casu­al slang, but it did more than just regur­gi­tate what he had already said. It mapped his think­ing onto new con­ver­sa­tions to pro­vide advice around the clock for peo­ple he’d nev­er met who had ques­tions he’d nev­er been asked. ‘It’s a dig­i­tal ver­sion of my mind,’ he told his con­gre­ga­tion. ‘If I’m asleep or trav­el­ing, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24–7 access to this oth­er ver­sion of me.’ ”
  4. Yet more AI news:
    • GIFT LINK: This A.I. Just Cre­at­ed Virus­es Not Found in Nature (Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “The authors of the study relied on an A.I. mod­el called Evo, which is sim­i­lar in some ways to Chat­G­PT, made by Ope­nAI.… DNA is strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar to a book in some ways: a string of mol­e­c­u­lar build­ing blocks, known as nucleotides, arrayed like let­ters in a line of text. A gene con­sists of hun­dreds of nucleotides drawn from a four-let­ter alpha­bet: A, C, G and T. The sequence encodes the instruc­tions for build­ing pro­teins and oth­er mol­e­cules. DNA has its own rules of gram­mar, and if a sequence vio­lates them, the result is bio­log­i­cal gib­ber­ish.… The researchers won­dered if Evo could pick up these rules on its own. Instead of train­ing it on text, they trained it on genet­ic sequences drawn from mil­lions of ani­mals, plants, microbes and virus­es. All told, Evo scanned about nine tril­lion nucleotides.”
    • No Data Cen­ters In My Back­yard (Jas­mine Sun, Sub­stack): “…maybe this is a choice between a hyper­scale data cen­ter and a con­crete slab. And Alyssa, Cathy, and Kaycee would rather pick the slab.… Back in San Fran­cis­co, it is strik­ing how lit­tle the AI indus­try under­stands its own unpopularity—the rea­sons that peo­ple resist. They ask if it’s a prob­lem of ben­e­fits not being gen­er­ous enough, or else a big mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign.”
    • What hap­pens when you talk to AI? (Anthrop­ic, YouTube) — (Anthrop­ic, YouTube): five min­utes. A good overview to send friends and fam­i­ly who have ques­tions
    • Uni­ver­si­ties would pre­fer not to. (Hol­lis Rob­bins, Sub­stack): “More than 90 per­cent of notable AI mod­els released in 2025 came from indus­try: GPT‑5, Gem­i­ni 3, Claude Opus 4.5, Grok 4, Lla­ma 4, DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen 3, Kimi K2. The infra­struc­ture sup­port­ing fron­tier devel­op­ment is also over­whelm­ing­ly from indus­try. Glob­al AI com­pute capac­i­ty has been grow­ing 3.3x annu­al­ly since 2022, dou­bling every sev­en months, dri­ven by hyper­scalers and enor­mous data-cen­ter invest­ments.… Uni­ver­si­ties have no influ­ence over the pace of AI fron­tier devel­op­ment. Obsessed as they are with cur­ric­u­lar bat­tles and view­point diver­si­ty they have no stand­ing even to have a voice.”
      • The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah.
  5. Some thoughts on the lim­its of AI in writ­ing:
    • GIFT LINK: I’m Beg­ging You: Nev­er Write With A.I. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The prob­lem with writ­ing with A.I. is that it’s men­tal­ly enfee­bling — an esca­la­tor toward a result when you real­ly need to make a dai­ly habit of tak­ing the stairs. As it becomes ubiq­ui­tous, it under­mines not only our indi­vid­ual abil­i­ty to write but also a society’s col­lec­tive abil­i­ty to rea­son, a culture’s inner capac­i­ty to cre­ate and everyone’s rea­son to care.”
    • Why You Should Almost Nev­er Use AI to Write Any­thing Sub­stan­tive (Erich Grunewald, per­son­al blog): “I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many oth­er parts of the research and writ­ing process­es, such as tran­scrib­ing audio, ana­lyz­ing data, search­ing for infor­ma­tion, brain­storm­ing, and giv­ing feed­back on drafts.… [How­ev­er, to write] I must first know what I want to say, i.e., I must think about evi­dence and argu­ments and arrive at some beliefs. So writ­ing forces me to do those things, which are nec­es­sary for any writ­ing or research project. For any such project, some­one has to have the entire thing in their head – all the bits of evi­dence, con­sid­er­a­tions, argu­ments, and how these fit togeth­er. Writ­ing with AI makes it eas­i­er to avoid the nec­es­sary think­ing.”
  6. My Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion Silenced My Views on Gen­der Treat­ment (Kar­la Sol­heim, The Free Press): “I was floored to dis­cov­er the research basis into gen­der med­i­cine both for ado­les­cents and adults was not just poor; it was fraud­u­lent. I couldn’t under­stand how my med­ical asso­ci­a­tion, let alone oth­ers in my field, could endorse it.… Ordi­nary peo­ple can see quite clear­ly that this med­i­cine is dan­ger­ous. When our great­est med­ical author­i­ties insist oth­er­wise, it under­mines doc­tors’ cred­i­bil­i­ty and makes peo­ple less like­ly to trust us for their care.”
  7. N.Y. Doc­tor Sen­tenced in Japan for Van­dal­iz­ing Ancient Reli­gious Sites (Kiuko Notoya and Hari Raj, New York Times): “A court in Japan on Thurs­day hand­ed a Man­hat­tan doc­tor a sus­pend­ed sen­tence of 18 months in prison after find­ing him guilty of van­dal­iz­ing two ancient reli­gious sites, cap­ping more than a decade of lit­i­ga­tion that led to a rare extra­di­tion.… Dr. Kanaya­ma, a prac­tic­ing Chris­t­ian, admit­ted dur­ing the tri­al that he had dam­aged the sites.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

TGFI, Volume 566: a great roiling bouillabaisse of links

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stop Pathol­o­giz­ing Ordi­nary Life (Clay Rout­ledge, New York Times): “The more fix­at­ed we are on men­tal health, the more sen­si­tive we become to any­thing that might qual­i­fy as a symp­tom and the more we use clin­i­cal lan­guage to describe nor­mal emo­tion­al expe­ri­ences like grief, burnout and lone­li­ness. This broad­en­ing of what we think counts as a dis­or­der — known as con­cept creep — encour­ages us to pathol­o­gize ordi­nary life and see our­selves as men­tal­ly unhealthy.… Near­ly a third of Amer­i­can adults and half of Gen Z adults have giv­en them­selves a diag­no­sis of a men­tal ill­ness based on infor­ma­tion from social media. And research sug­gests that peo­ple who rely on social media for infor­ma­tion about men­tal ill­ness­es tend to have less accu­rate knowl­edge about them.”
  2. Coun­ter­feit Prov­i­dence: Why Chris­tians Must Reject the Con­spir­a­to­r­i­al Mind (Mitchell Bahnsen, Sub­stack): “The believ­er has been cat­e­chized, right­ly, to reject the sec­u­lar pic­ture of his­to­ry as a direc­tion­less churn of mat­ter and acci­dent. He knows in his bones that events mean some­thing, that his­to­ry is going some­where, that appear­ances deceive and a deep­er order under­lies them. Con­spir­acism takes the prov­i­den­tial instinct, a the­o­log­i­cal­ly healthy one, and trans­fers its object from the father­ly hand of God to the hid­den hand of the deep state. Where prov­i­dence teach­es that his­to­ry is gov­erned by a God who is for us, con­spir­acism teach­es that it is gov­erned by pow­ers who are against us.”
  3. US pros­e­cu­tors charge Atlanta man after Graphe­neOS phone wipes itself dur­ing air­port search (Skye Jacobs, TechSpot): “The case rais­es ques­tions about which con­sti­tu­tion­al rights apply at US bor­ders, includ­ing inter­na­tion­al air­ports, where author­i­ties have broad­er search pow­ers.… Graphe­neOS is designed to improve pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty on Pix­el phones. Sup­port­ers say those tools are legit­i­mate secu­ri­ty pro­tec­tions, not evi­dence of crim­i­nal intent. Boutry point­ed to France and Spain, where author­i­ties have strug­gled to gain access to secured devices. He said author­i­ties have treat­ed the use of Graphe­neOS itself as sus­pi­cious. In Cat­alo­nia, Spain, police have been pro­fil­ing peo­ple car­ry­ing Pix­el phones, assum­ing they have Graphe­neOS installed and are drug deal­ers or gang mem­bers.”
  4. A rev­o­lu­tion is unfold­ing. Vot­ers every­where are furi­ous. (Fareed Zakaria, Wash­ing­ton Post): “We sum­mon a car in three min­utes. A pack­age arrives the same day. AI answers com­pli­cat­ed ques­tions in sec­onds, and does more com­plex work that took peo­ple months in mere min­utes. Nat­u­ral­ly, cit­i­zens begin to expect sim­i­lar effi­cien­cy from gov­ern­ment. But democ­ra­cy is not designed for speed. It is designed for legit­i­ma­cy. It bar­gains, com­pro­mis­es, con­sults courts, pro­tects vul­ner­a­ble groups and bal­ances com­pet­ing inter­ests. Those safe­guards are pre­cise­ly what dis­tin­guish democ­ra­cy from author­i­tar­i­an­ism. Yet in an age shaped by technology’s warp speed, they increas­ing­ly look like paral­y­sis.”
  5. How the mod­ern plea bar­gain under­cuts the con­sti­tu­tion­al right to a jury tri­al (Matt Martens, The Hill): “Jury tri­als, by pub­licly air­ing and test­ing the evi­dence of the crimes, serve the dual func­tions of both pro­tect­ing the accused from false accu­sa­tions and coer­cion to wrong­ly admit guilty and pro­tect­ing the com­mu­ni­ty from lenient sen­tenc­ing of dan­ger­ous offend­ers. Mod­ern Amer­i­can-style plea bar­gains wreak hav­oc on both those vital inter­ests.”
    • The author is a lawyer and a well-known Chris­t­ian thinker on the sub­ject of jus­tice. He has a sem­i­nary degree in addi­tion to his legal train­ing and attends Capi­tol Hill Bap­tist Church in DC.
  6. The Apples and Oranges Tri­bunal (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Hayek nailed it in The Mirage of Social Jus­tice: jus­tice is about con­duct — how one per­son treats anoth­er. An employ­er who defrauds his work­ers, an employ­ee who steals from the till, a prod­uct sold under false pre­tens­es — con­demn them, take them to court. But the pat­tern of prices that emerges from mil­lions of vol­un­tary trades is nobody’s con­duct. No one chose it, no one designed it, no one can be guilty of it. The con­stel­la­tion of prices is, in Ferguson’s phrase, the result of human action but not of human design. Demand­ing that prices be just is a cat­e­go­ry error, like suing the weath­er. Prices don’t grade our mer­it; they guide our actions. Ask them to do the first and they can no longer do the sec­ond.”
  7. Some thoughts on AI:
    • What will more intel­li­gence actu­al­ly do for us? (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “So although we don’t know yet, it’s pos­si­ble that humans were already hit­ting the point of dimin­ish­ing returns with regards to indi­vid­ual cog­ni­tive capac­i­ty, and that super­in­tel­li­gent machines will nev­er be as far beyond us as we are beyond dogs. But even if that’s true, I can think of at least three rea­sons why machine super­in­tel­li­gence could still deliv­er huge pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains.… (1) The most obvi­ous advan­tage that machine super­in­tel­li­gence con­fers is replic­a­bil­i­ty.… (2) in the age of AI, dis­trib­uted tac­it knowl­edge might not be near­ly as big of a bar­ri­er to tech­no­log­i­cal dif­fu­sion.… (and 3) there may be laws of the uni­verse that humans can’t under­stand but AI can.”
      • This is real­ly good and worth a pon­der.
    • The Hid­den Cost of China’s Free A.I. (Tal Feld­man, New York Times): “When researchers asked DeepSeek to write code for users whom the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment views with hos­til­i­ty, such as Falun Gong or Tibetans, DeepSeek wrote code with secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, mak­ing it eas­i­er for hack­ers to pen­e­trate.… Imag­ine an employ­ee inside an Amer­i­can com­pa­ny who was smart and hard-work­ing and whose goal in life was to pro­mote the inter­ests of a for­eign gov­ern­ment. We would call that per­son a for­eign agent. We are now hir­ing mil­lions of them through the use of Chi­nese A.I.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • $200,000 Spent On Trav­el Ball Final­ly Pays Off With Son’s $500 Col­lege Schol­ar­ship (Baby­lon Bee): “Ben­son’s uncle Matthew, a finan­cial plan­ner, had advised years ago that if the fam­i­ly would put all the trav­el ball mon­ey in a 529 account, young Bray­den would have rough­ly one mil­lion dol­lars to pay for his col­lege edu­ca­tion. ‘Who’s laugh­ing now, Matthew?’ said Mr. Ben­son. ‘What a dope. I can’t wait to text out pic­tures of the schol­ar­ship offer. He’s going to feel so stu­pid.’ After 10 years of miss­ing church, school, birth­days, wed­dings, and funer­als for trav­el ball, the Ben­son fam­i­ly was thank­ful their per­sis­tence had paid off. ‘I admit, there were times I ques­tioned if we were doing the right thing,’ said mom Jes­si­ca. ‘When we skipped my sis­ter’s wed­ding because there was sup­posed to be a col­lege scout at this tour­na­ment in Alaba­ma, I had my doubts. Hold­ing this $500 check in my hands, those doubts are final­ly gone.’ ”
  • Cal­i­for­ni­a’s icon­ic wel­come signs are get­ting a dra­mat­ic makeover (Tes­sa McLean, SF Gate): “Aside from being ‘warm and wel­com­ing,’ Cochrane said the goal for the new designs was to present ‘a legit pho­to op’ for pass­ing motorists. He said they’ve already become ‘social media mag­nets’ in just the short time they’ve been dis­played.”
    • They look real­ly nice. I’m impressed.
  • Datatype: a vari­able font that turns text into charts: “Datatype is an Open­Type vari­able font that turns sim­ple text expres­sions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no ren­der­ing library — just type the syn­tax and Datatype­’s lig­a­ture sub­sti­tu­tion does the rest.”
    • THIS IS SO COOL! Note: this is for web­sites, won’t work on a Word doc­u­ment.

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.