Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 318

First, a word to new stu­dents: wel­come! This might be your first email from Chi Alpha and if so you might be a lit­tle con­fused.

For the last sev­er­al years, I have been shar­ing articles/resources every Fri­day about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues.

I was inspired by the tribe of Issachar from the time of King David. They 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.

Be sure to see the dis­claimers at the bot­tom. Also, I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

All that hav­ing been said, here is 318^th roundup of things I have found inter­est­ing (318, I am told, is the num­ber of unla­beled par­tial­ly ordered sets of 6 ele­ments).

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. The Amer­i­can Cri­sis of Selec­tive Empa­thy (David French, The Dis­patch): “…Amer­i­ca is expe­ri­enc­ing an empa­thy cri­sis. But it’s not quite the cri­sis you might think. Our empa­thy can over­flow for the peo­ple we love, for the peo­ple with­in our tribe—even when they make grave errors. But what about our empa­thy for ‘them,’ the peo­ple we dis­trust? Then empa­thy is in short sup­ply. Indeed, in some cas­es, the very con­cept of empa­thy is under fire.”
   • Relat­ed: The Lim­its of My Empa­thy for Covid Deniers (Tressie McMil­lan Cot­tom, New York Times): “Because I val­ue being a think­ing per­son, I hon­or emo­tions like empa­thy, fear, joy and trust to guide me around the pit­falls of my ego. Ego makes for real­ly slop­py analy­sis and writ­ing. I am at a point where head­lines about ill and dying Covid deniers do not pull at my empa­thy strings the way I want them to.”
2. Norm Macdonald’s Spir­i­tu­al Jour­ney (Nic Rowan, First Things): “Mac­don­ald may have only been dab­bling in Chris­tian­i­ty, but his crit­i­cisms of the post-Chris­t­ian world were often inci­sive. He had no tol­er­ance for sci­en­tism and laughed at athe­ists. He fre­quent­ly lam­pooned the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Maher. And he wasn’t afraid to make dark pre­dic­tions about a future dom­i­nat­ed by their suc­ces­sors.”
   • Relat­ed: Did a reli­gious search help shape Norm Mac­don­ald’s haunt­ing humor? (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Mac­don­ald was also a self-iden­ti­fied Chris­t­ian, yet he made it clear that he didn’t con­sid­er him­self a very good one.” There are sev­er­al excel­lent YouTube clips in this one. Rec­om­mend­ed.
3. Fired After Get­ting Vaccinated—And Encour­ag­ing Oth­ers to Do So (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “I was try­ing to use my plat­form to share the truth. You’re right that Chris­tians should be peo­ple of the truth—not just that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, but also the truth about what is real. The ques­tion is: How do you get the truth to peo­ple? We live in a time where infor­ma­tion is com­ing at us from all over. It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly that peo­ple don’t want to believe the truth.” This is a sol­id inter­view. Dar­ling comes off very well.
4. Effect size is sig­nif­i­cant­ly more impor­tant than sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance. (Ben Recht, per­son­al blog): “In either case we are talk­ing about a dif­fer­ence of 15 cas­es between the treat­ment and con­trol vil­lages in a pop­u­la­tion of 32,000 indi­vid­u­als.… If the effect size is so small that we need sophis­ti­cat­ed sta­tis­tics, maybe that means the effect isn’t real. Using sophis­ti­cat­ed sta­tis­ti­cal scaf­fold­ing clouds our judge­ment. We end up using sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods as a crutch, not to dig sig­nals out of noise, but to con­vince our­selves of sig­nals when there are none.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of machine learn­ing and data analy­sis at Berke­ley.
5. Why Amer­i­ca needs the Black church for its own sur­vival (Char­lie Date, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The dif­fer­ence between the Black church and any oth­er Chris­t­ian insti­tu­tion in Amer­i­ca is that rather than aban­don­ing Scrip­ture as a tool of our oppres­sion, we apply Scrip­ture as God’s rule for our lib­er­ty and liv­ing. The dif­fer­ence is in how our social eth­ic is root­ed in both right­eous­ness and jus­tice, not either right­eous­ness or jus­tice. The dif­fer­ence is that we’ve come to see Jesus and his pow­er to sus­tain and flour­ish us from the mar­gins with­out the ben­e­fit of large donors, polit­i­cal cap­i­tal or own­er­ship of media out­lets.” The author is pas­tor of a promi­nent Black church in Chica­go as well as a sem­i­nary pro­fes­sor.
6. Roe Will Go (Robert P. George, First Things): “Let me offer a pre­dic­tion, free of any face-sav­ing hedge: Next year, the Supreme Court will hold that there is no con­sti­tu­tion­al right to elec­tive abor­tions. In Dobbs v. Jack­son Women’s Health Orga­ni­za­tion, a case pend­ing before the court, it will return the issue to the states for the first time in forty-nine years. It will do so explic­it­ly, call­ing out by name, and revers­ing in full, the two major cas­es that con­fect­ed and then entrenched a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to elec­tive abor­tion: Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Par­ent­hood v. Casey (1992). And the vote will be six to three.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Health Insur­ance (Pearls Before Swine)
• Nature’s Sub­tle Signs Of Dan­ger (Far Side)

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­fit­ting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more para­me­ters.” Researchers take note. The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well-written and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its. Obvi­ous once stat­ed, but I don’t know that it ever would have occurred to me. First shared in vol­ume 154.

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.