TGFI, Volume 577: dumb people and fertility myths

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. UC Berke­ley math com­mu­ni­ty left at cross­roads in wake of Ope­nAI Navier-Stokes proof (Litong Deng, Dai­ly Cal­i­forn­ian): “Peo­ple are com­plain­ing that AI is push­ing out this 100,000-line for­mal proof of some major con­jec­ture. I don’t real­ly see what harm this does because you can always ignore this if you want, and then you’re no worse off than before,” Borcherds said. “I think what peo­ple are get­ting upset about is they’re slow­ly real­iz­ing that they are dumb and some­how blam­ing this on AI, even though it’s not real­ly AI’s fault.” Borcherds, who cur­rent­ly teach­es MATH 250A, a grad­u­ate-lev­el course on abstract alge­bra, also said AI would be much bet­ter than him at teach­ing the course. He said AI is more patient and much bet­ter at express­ing itself than he is and doesn’t get mad when stu­dents ask stu­pid ques­tions. Borcherds him­self said he has asked AI “deep math­e­mat­i­cal ques­tions” and gets “much bet­ter answers from it than (he gets) from any human math­e­mati­cian.”
    • Borcherds is a Fields medal­ist (1998).
  2. The Great Fer­til­i­ty Col­lapse (Russ Roberts inter­view­ing Jesus Fer­nan­dez-Villaverde, Econ­Talk): this pod­cast episode is inspired by a paper the guest co-authored, Ter­ra Incog­ni­ta: The Eco­nom­ics of a Shrink­ing World (NBER). This is an absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cus­sion, full of gems like why the UN pop­u­la­tion fore­casts are com­plete­ly untrust­wor­thy and very sur­pris­ing exam­ples of how a lot of what peo­ple assume they know about fer­til­i­ty and demo­graph­ics is exact­ly wrong.
  3. Why Evan­gel­i­cal­ism Is Win­ning (Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “But the basic test of any reli­gion, espe­cial­ly any mis­sion­ary reli­gion, is whether it actu­al­ly per­suades peo­ple to prac­tice and believe. And the evan­gel­i­cal model—the entre­pre­neur­ial pas­tor, the adapt­able church struc­tures, the empha­sis on wel­com­ing seek­ers and accom­mo­dat­ing fam­i­lies, even the sub­ur­ban and mid­dle­brow aesthetic—clearly works under 21st-cen­tu­ry con­di­tions in a way that requires respect and some form of imi­ta­tion. The vices of evan­gel­i­cal­ism need cor­rec­tion and cri­tique. But there will be no 21st-cen­tu­ry revival, for Catholi­cism or any oth­er kind of faith, that doesn’t reck­on with the sources of its unde­ni­able suc­cess.”
  4. What the Bible’s Most Polit­i­cal Book Can Teach Us (Michael J. Rhodes, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Bib­li­cal scholars—including me, in my book Reimag­in­ing Bib­li­cal Pol­i­tics—have argued Esther might be the most polit­i­cal book in the Bible. The sto­ry revolves around mat­ters of state, and in terms of polit­i­cal action, the book has it all. By the time cred­its roll, we’ve watched Vashti prac­tice civ­il dis­obe­di­ence by refus­ing to obey King Ahasuerus’s com­mand (1:12). We’ve seen Mordechai stage a pub­lic protest—lamenting in sack­cloth and ash­es at the very gate of the king (4:1–2)—and serve that same regime by snitch­ing on courtiers caught plan­ning an assas­si­na­tion (2:21–22). Esther’s polit­i­cal career begins when she makes the best of an awful sit­u­a­tion, hid­ing her eth­nic­i­ty and win­ning favor on the way to becom­ing queen. She acts sub­ver­sive­ly to ensure Haman gets what’s com­ing to him. By the end, Esther and Morde­cai effec­tive­ly hold pub­lic office, writ­ing law from with­in the empire itself (8:1–2; 7–8). If Esther is arguably the Bible’s most polit­i­cal book, it’s also the most ambigu­ous.”
  5. Con­cern­ing Chris­tian­i­ty Today (to which I am a sub­scriber):
    • Chris­tian­i­ty Today, a Voice of Cen­trist Evan­gel­i­cal­ism, Is in Tur­moil (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Chris­tian­i­ty Today need­ed to be less like Wheaton and more like Tik­Tok, Mr. Adding­ton told his staff, accord­ing to sev­er­al peo­ple who attend­ed the meet­ing. Warn­ing that lay­offs were com­ing, he end­ed his pre­sen­ta­tion with a prayer. A senior edi­tor left the room in tears. Four­teen months lat­er, more than half of the 79 employ­ees at that time have either been laid off or resigned, includ­ing an edi­tor in chief and four of the company’s longest-tenured jour­nal­ists.”
    • Why I left Chris­tian­i­ty Today (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Sub­stack): “The last pre-pan­dem­ic meet­ing I took end­ed with an offer to become a colum­nist for Chris­tian­i­ty Today. I hap­pi­ly accept­ed and wrote for CT in that capac­i­ty for three and a half years, then came on staff as a senior edi­tor in the sum­mer of 2023. In late Sep­tem­ber, I gave notice. Fri­day was my last day, and this post is about why I left. If you’re new here, fresh from googling me after read­ing Ruth Graham’s New York Times sto­ry about CT, hel­lo! You’ve come to the right place.”
  6. Roman love (Samuel Hugh­es, Works in Progress): “Pop­u­lar mythol­o­gy holds that a tol­er­ant and affir­ma­tive view of human sex­u­al­i­ty pre­vailed in clas­si­cal Antiq­ui­ty until it was crushed by puri­tan­i­cal and repres­sive Chris­tian­i­ty. I pas­sive­ly accept­ed this view until I read Kyle Harper’s cel­e­brat­ed book, From Shame to Sin: The Chris­t­ian Trans­for­ma­tion of Sex­u­al Moral­i­ty in Late Antiq­ui­ty. Harp­er shows that, although the stan­dard pic­ture is not entire­ly wrong, it is so incom­plete as to be fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­lead­ing.… By putting togeth­er the Jew­ish pro­hi­bi­tion of extra­mar­i­tal sex with Roman monogamy, the ear­ly Chris­tians arrived at the idea that each man should be faith­ful to one woman, just as each woman should be faith­ful to one man. The nov­el­ty of this inno­va­tion is hard to over­state: it is not clear that the ide­al of exclu­sive mutu­al fideli­ty has ever been invent­ed inde­pen­dent­ly in any oth­er major civ­i­liza­tions, though it was even­tu­al­ly to spread to many non-Chris­t­ian cul­tures.”
  7. How to Sur­vive the Robot Apoc­a­lypse (Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “In dep­re­cat­ing the chances of the true robot apoc­a­lypse, I’m describ­ing a poten­tial future in which the gravest dan­gers are held at bay by a per­va­sive human para­noia, where pol­i­tics is a strug­gle between effi­cien­cy-max­i­miz­ers embrac­ing human obso­les­cence and techno­pho­bic pop­ulist rebel­lions, and where civ­i­liza­tion­al safe­ty requires us to rely on inscrutable intel­li­gences to police oth­er inscrutable intel­li­gences into the dis­tant future. A rea­son­able per­son might sim­ply pre­fer a world with­out super­in­tel­li­gent AI. But in a world with super­in­tel­li­gence, none of the doom sce­nar­ios quite per­suade me that humans will be eas­i­ly steam­rolled or go naive­ly into the sil­i­con night.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Jacob Assures New Bride ‘Rachel’ He Was­n’t That Drunk At Wed­ding Last Night — UPDATE: Oh No — (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Explain­ing Col­lege Foot­ball Con­fer­ences (John Crist, YouTube): two min­utes
  • 50 Years In, What’s the Point of U2? Bono and the Edge Have Answers (David March­ese, New York Times): “What you just said about com­ing up with the fic­tion­al names — this always killed me about the band. Bono! Edge! And then … Adam and Lar­ry. Was there any dis­cus­sion that they should have names too? The Edge: We need to explain the whole name thing. We laughed a lot at that age. We would laugh at each oth­er and our­selves and that was the deal. So the names were not nec­es­sar­i­ly designed for their hero­ic aspect. Bono’s very first name was in fact Stein­rich Van Hait­ian Bang Bang Bang, and then I was Inchicore for a while before I became the Edge. Adam for a while was known as Mrs. Byrnes, and Lar­ry for some rea­son was the Jam Jar. We were bor­row­ing a lot from Mon­ty Python.”
  • Kid Rock Talks Eminem Col­lab ‘Heal My Faith’ & Killing ‘Divi­sion’ (Gary Graff, Bill­board):  “This (album) is about for­give­ness and sec­ond chances,” Rock said, “try­ing to heal some of the divi­sion in our coun­try. I’m just putting a pos­i­tive mes­sage out there in the world…showing a lit­tle more grace, try­ing to kill some of the divi­sion. I am not with­out sin, and I can’t say I ever will be. But I’m mak­ing a con­scious effort to spread this bet­ter mes­sage — and I’m also still Kid motherf–king Rock. At the end of the day, I’m both of those guys. I’m not fun­da­men­tal­ly changed, you know? I’m still Kid Rock; I’m gonna drink a beer, smoke a cig­ar… I’m just on the jour­ney. I feel halfway to Jesus; I hope to be all the way there, but I’m not sure. I don’t know where it all leads. It’s almost as new as me as it is to every­one else.”

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 576: hell considered politically

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 Polit­i­cal Case for Hell (Matthew Kaem­ingk & Sha­di Hamid, Com­ment): “Hell in both Islam and Chris­tian­i­ty is pro­found­ly egal­i­tar­i­an. Sim­ply said, any­body can go there. It doesn’t mat­ter if you are rich or poor, black or white—all peo­ple will receive a judg­ment. There is no way to buy, manip­u­late, or threat­en your way out. All stand before the throne vul­ner­a­ble. In this way, the doc­trine of hell cre­ates a lev­el play­ing field based on an individual’s char­ac­ter rather than their wealth or pow­er. Here on earth, the wealthy can buy their way out of con­se­quences; the pow­er­ful can shield them­selves from jus­tice. When pow­er­ful fig­ures escape justice—whether dic­ta­tors dying peace­ful­ly in exile or cor­po­rate crim­i­nals receiv­ing minor fines for major crimes—it cor­rodes pub­lic faith in demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. The appar­ent lack of just deserts for the pow­er­ful has polit­i­cal con­se­quences. It feeds pop­ulist rage and demo­c­ra­t­ic cyn­i­cism. In this con­text, the con­cept of ulti­mate jus­tice, of a future hell, serves as a cru­cial safe­ty valve. But hell’s demo­c­ra­t­ic func­tion goes beyond mere deter­rence or con­so­la­tion. Tra­di­tion­al reli­gious con­cep­tions of hell actu­al­ly embody prin­ci­ples that mod­ern democ­ra­cies strive to imple­ment: pro­por­tion­al pun­ish­ment, equal treat­ment for equal crimes, con­sid­er­a­tion of both actions and inten­tions.” — Kaem­ingk is a pro­fes­sor at Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, and Hamid is a senior fel­low at Brook­ings.
  2. Bible Fam­i­ly Tree — (John Dyer, per­son­al web­site): this is kind of cool
  3. Some Cor­nell-adja­cent thoughts:
    • Four Hours and Three Min­utes in Itha­ca (David French, New York Times): “Last week, Chris­tine Emba wrote a beau­ti­ful and com­pelling guest essay in our pages about the inad­e­qua­cy of con­sent as the pri­ma­ry moral basis for sex­u­al inti­ma­cy. It’s the legal base line, not a moral thresh­old. But what is the moral thresh­old? Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians like me often respond with a pat answer: mar­riage. But even that’s inad­e­quate and incom­plete. Mar­i­tal sex can be every bit as abu­sive and exploita­tive as an encounter in a frat house. Instead of con­sent, I’d sug­gest a dif­fer­ent stan­dard, one that applies not just to sex in mar­riage — and not just to sex alone — but to all of our human inter­ac­tions. Let’s talk about care. In oth­er words, we should con­stant­ly ask our­selves, ‘If I cared for this per­son, what would I do?’ Even if an obvi­ous­ly drunk or high per­son is ask­ing you for sex (though whether that hap­pened in this case is dis­put­ed, espe­cial­ly as events unfold­ed lat­er in the evening) — and even if you’re pow­er­ful­ly attract­ed to that per­son — if you tru­ly cared for the per­son would you ini­ti­ate or engage in an encounter that any sen­tient per­son knows might be deeply regret­ted the next morn­ing, the next day or the next week? Is an orgasm so sacred to you that you can’t wait until sobri­ety to have sex?”
    • A Stan­ford Jane Doe: ‘With­out a head­line, sur­vivors like me will nev­er mat­ter to Stan­ford’ (Anony­mous, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “For two years, I skipped class­es I shared with the per­son who raped me, lived in fear of run­ning into him on cam­pus and missed out on oppor­tu­ni­ties like study abroad due to Stanford’s con­stant resched­ul­ing and delay­ing of pro­ceed­ings. The process swal­lowed half of my time at Stan­ford, only for it to cul­mi­nate in a two year sus­pen­sion, despite Stan­ford find­ing the oth­er stu­dent respon­si­ble for vagi­nal­ly, dig­i­tal­ly and oral­ly rap­ing me. Per this sanc­tion, the per­son who raped me is eli­gi­ble to return to cam­pus and grad­u­ate with his degree as of this fall.… The year I entered Stan­ford, incom­ing fresh­men were assigned Chanel Miller’s mem­oir, Know My Name. The San­ta Clara Coun­ty DA’s Office is the same office that pros­e­cut­ed Brock Turn­er. How do we rec­on­cile the val­ues these insti­tu­tions pub­licly cham­pi­on with the way they han­dled my case?”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I would add this aligns with my obser­va­tions of Stan­ford. On a few occa­sions I have min­is­tered to a stu­dent deal­ing with the after­math of being raped and what this author describes match­es their expe­ri­ences.
  4. A Tik­Tok Tarot Card Read­er Accused Me of Mur­der. My Life Turned Upside Down. (Rebec­ca Scofield, New York Times): “I was stand­ing in a park lis­ten­ing to my kids play when I opened a Tik­Tok video of a woman I had nev­er met. She showed my fac­ul­ty pro­file pic­ture and con­tact infor­ma­tion, and said that I had orches­trat­ed the mur­ders of four stu­dents at the col­lege where I work, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ida­ho. She claimed I was cov­er­ing up an inap­pro­pri­ate roman­tic rela­tion­ship with one of the vic­tims. I didn’t know any of the stu­dents, who had been killed only 11 days before I saw the video. The accuser knew noth­ing about me, lived in Texas and used tarot card read­ings as the only basis for her claims. Over the next sev­er­al weeks, while I was griev­ing with the rest of my com­mu­ni­ty, this Tik­Tok influ­encer uploaded over a hun­dred videos declar­ing that I had com­mit­ted a quadru­ple homi­cide.… So, before you, too, are accused of mur­der on the inter­net, ques­tion the con­tent you are con­sum­ing or cre­at­ing.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ida­ho. An absolute­ly wild sto­ry.
  5. AI-relat­ed
    • When AI Is Bet­ter Than Humans (Kather­ine Dee, The Dis­patch): “For many tasks—tasks that should be the exclu­sive province of human beings, like talk ther­a­py or roman­tic intimacy—an astute AI user will quick­ly real­ize that nei­ther embod­i­ment nor expe­ri­ence appear to be pre­req­ui­sites for valu­able respons­es. I have per­son­al expe­ri­ence with this. Late last year, my father passed away sud­den­ly. In my grief, I turned to Anthropic’s Claude. Claude helped me work through my grief much more effec­tive­ly than the grief counselor—and even­tu­al­ly, grief coun­selors—who came high­ly rec­om­mend­ed, includ­ing by peo­ple who I knew and trust­ed.… What do we do if Claude is a bet­ter ther­a­pist in some sit­u­a­tions? And how do we explain to peo­ple that even if it is bet­ter, we should choose a per­son any­way?”
      • A thought­ful essay that ven­tures into unex­pect­ed ter­ri­to­ry.
    • Astra Held Its Ground (Truth) (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “But here is the most remark­able part from one of the authors, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Suvrat Raju: ‘Our ini­tial eval­u­a­tion sug­gest­ed that GPT-6-Astra’s score was in the late eight­ies fol­lowed close­ly by Opus 5.5 But, as we start­ed to inves­ti­gate the mis­takes that the mod­els might have made, the mod­els, espe­cial­ly Astra, insist­ed that they were right and that it was the expert-sup­plied answers that were erro­neous. When we went back to the experts it turned out, in mul­ti­ple instances, that the experts found some sub­tle errors buried deep inside their cal­cu­la­tions. As they revised their answers, Astra’s score start­ed to inch up and it final­ly end­ed up with 98% (49/50).’ In oth­er words, instead, as orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed, of the human answers serv­ing as ground truth to test the AI, the AI answers were ground truth for test­ing the experts.”
  6. As a Child Evan­ge­list, He Roused the Faith­ful. Lat­er He Exposed the Con. (Pene­lope Green, New York Times): “He was good at his job, and he enjoyed being onstage, but he nev­er believed in God. And he cer­tain­ly didn’t believe in hell. By the time he was 14, the nov­el­ty of preach­ing had worn off, for him and his con­gre­gants. His voice was chang­ing, and his father had aban­doned the fam­i­ly and abscond­ed with Marjoe’s earn­ings — some $3 mil­lion, he lat­er esti­mat­ed. Mar­joe decid­ed to leave, too. He drift­ed a bit through his native Cal­i­for­nia, liv­ing first with an old­er woman and then, at 16, mar­ry­ing a girl­friend. He worked as a shoe sales­man, as a bark­er on the San­ta Cruz Wharf and as a door­man at a dance club in Los Ange­les before start­ing a rock band and melt­ing into the nascent hip­pie scene there. Yet by his 20s, he had returned to preach­ing. He need­ed the mon­ey, and missed the lime­light. At first, he thought he might intro­duce his paci­fist beliefs into his ser­mons, skip­ping the sin-and-hell part. That didn’t go over so well — he was not invit­ed back to the church­es where he tried it. So he returned to his revival­ist tech­niques, adding some vocal moves he bor­rowed from Black preach­ers and some phys­i­cal ones from Mick Jag­ger.”
    • A heart­break­ing obit­u­ary, and a reminder that the world still has peo­ple like those Paul warned Tim­o­thy about, preach­ers “who have been robbed of the truth and who think that god­li­ness is a means to finan­cial gain” (1 Tim 6:5).
  7. Amer­i­cans who go to church and trust sci­ence are also more like­ly to believe in ghosts and curs­es, new research shows (Ruiqian Li, Sci­ence News): “Amer­i­cans who trust sci­ence and rea­son more than their church­es’ teach­ings, but still believe in God or attend ser­vices, are also more like­ly to believe in mag­ic than those who pri­or­i­tize reli­gious teach­ings.… What our study adds is a clear­er pic­ture of when trust in sci­ence goes hand in hand with mag­ic: among peo­ple who stay reli­gious but no longer let their church decide what is true.”

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 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.