Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 339

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

This is vol­ume 339, which is 3 · 113. I like num­bers with only two fac­tors (tech­ni­cal­ly four, but you know what I mean — two inter­est­ing fac­tors). They’re the sil­ver medal­ists of the prime olympics. They almost made it, but no.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Wom­en’s Tears Win in the Mar­ket­place of Ideas (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “…the ways in which pub­lic debate works when we take steps to make the most emo­tion­al and aggres­sive women com­fort­able have been over­looked. Things that we talk about as involv­ing ‘young peo­ple,’ ‘col­lege stu­dents,’ and ‘lib­er­als’ are often gen­dered issues.” Long, provoca­tive, and worth your time.
2. The Cana­di­an truck­ers:
   • Real­i­ty Honks Back (NS Lyons, Sub­stack): “For our pur­pos­es here, let’s call these two class­es the Phys­i­cals and the Vir­tu­als, respec­tive­ly.… That Trudeau’s gov­ern­ment would choose to jet­ti­son any remain­ing illu­sion of Cana­da still being a lib­er­al democ­ra­cy just to harm their polit­i­cal class ene­mies isn’t too sur­pris­ing. It’s their method of doing so that is par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing: con­trol over dig­i­tal finan­cial assets is pret­ty much the ulti­mate lever­age now avail­able to the Vir­tu­als. We should expect more use of this tool around the world any­where the Phys­i­cals con­tin­ue to revolt against their mas­ters. And here the Vir­tu­als have a sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage because they are free to use the max­i­mum lev­el of coer­cive force avail­able in their nat­ur­al domain, while the Phys­i­cals can­not – because, in the phys­i­cal world, that would mean vio­lence, which is some­thing the pro­tes­tors have right­ly for­sworn.”
     • Full of insight. The Vir­tu­al vs Phys­i­cal fram­ing is get­ting at some­thing I haven’t seen dis­cussed much else­where.
   • The plau­si­ble dystopia of a social cred­it sys­tem (Damon Link­er, The Week): “For a recent and espe­cial­ly vivid exam­ple from a neigh­bor­ing democ­ra­cy, this week’s dec­la­ra­tion of a nation­al emer­gency in Cana­da has empow­ered banks to freeze and sus­pend the accounts of ‘Free­dom Con­voy’ pro­test­ers with­out a court order and while enjoy­ing pro­tec­tion from civ­il lia­bil­i­ty. That is pre­cise­ly the kind of thing one would expect to see become nor­mal­ized with the impo­si­tion of a social cred­it sys­tem. Add in facial recog­ni­tion soft­ware that can iden­ti­fy indi­vid­u­als attend­ing ‘dan­ger­ous’ protests and oth­er pub­lic events and we’re left with a vision of the near-term future that can look pret­ty dystopi­an.”
3. Lots of Stud­ies Are Bad (Emi­ly Oster, Sub­stack): “My point isn’t that this paper is wrong in its con­clu­sions, just that it’s large­ly unin­for­ma­tive. The authors begin with an inter­est­ing graph show­ing a lim­it­ed rela­tion­ship between the strin­gency of COVID restric­tions and mor­tal­i­ty. That deserved more study, but this paper isn’t help­ing us under­stand it much.”
   • Emi­ly Oster, an econ­o­mist at Brown, is not impressed with the Johns Hop­kins study I shared ear­li­er (and offers a sim­i­lar cri­tique of a pro-mask study).
4. No, Amer­i­ca is not on the brink of a civ­il war (Musa al-Ghar­bi, The Guardian): “Of course, a far more obvi­ous and empir­i­cal­ly plau­si­ble expla­na­tion is that respon­dents knew per­fect­ly well what the cor­rect answer was. How­ev­er, they also had a sense of how that answer would be used in the media (‘Even Trump’s sup­port­ers don’t believe his non­sense!’), so they sim­ply declined to give poll­sters the response they seemed to be look­ing for. As a mat­ter of fact, respon­dents reg­u­lar­ly troll researchers in polling and sur­veys – espe­cial­ly when they are asked whether or not they sub­scribe to absurd or fringe beliefs, such as birtherism (a con­spir­a­cy that held that Barack Oba­ma was born out­side of the US and was legal­ly inel­i­gi­ble to serve as pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States).”
   • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia. The arti­cle is a few weeks old but quite good and not par­tic­u­lar­ly time-sen­si­tive.
5. The Seeds of Polit­i­cal Vio­lence Are Being Sown in Church (David French, The Dis­patch): “Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty, despite its immense size, is about as far from elite Amer­i­can cul­ture as Mer­cury is from Mars. And this means it’s quite dis­tant from elite Evan­gel­i­cal cul­ture as well. Right-wing blue-check the­olo­gians and pas­tors who speak dis­dain­ful­ly of warn­ings about Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism because it’s not some­thing they see in their church­es nev­er dark­en the door of a Pen­te­costal church.” I think French gets it a lit­tle wrong here (there is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion between Pen­te­costal and charis­mat­ic church­es, and even more sig­nif­i­cant­ly between denom­i­na­tion­al and non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al ones). Still, French used to be an Assem­blies of God youth pas­tor(!) and so he is not speak­ing of some­thing he does­n’t under­stand. Rec­om­mend­ed.
6. Why Amer­i­ca Has So Few Doc­tors (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “Imag­ine you were plan­ning a con­spir­a­cy to lim­it the num­ber of doc­tors in Amer­i­ca. Cer­tain­ly, you’d make sure to have a cost­ly, lengthy cre­den­tial­ing sys­tem. You would also tell politi­cians that Amer­i­ca has too many doc­tors already. That way, you could pur­pose­ful­ly con­strain the num­ber of med­ical-school stu­dents. You might freeze or slash fund­ing for res­i­den­cies and med­ical schol­ar­ships. You’d fight pro­pos­als to allow nurs­es to do the work of physi­cians. And because none of this would stop for­eign-trained doc­tors from slip­ping into the coun­try and com­mit­ting the crime of help­ing sick peo­ple get bet­ter, you’d throw in some rules that made it oner­ous for immi­grant doc­tors, espe­cial­ly from neigh­bor­ing coun­tries Mex­i­co and Cana­da, to do their job.” The orig­i­nal title was bet­ter: Why Does the US Make it so Hard to be a Doc­tor?
7. What do stu­dents’ beliefs about God have to do with grades and going to col­lege? (Ilana Hor­witz, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “In inter­views, reli­gious teens over and over men­tion life goals of par­ent­hood, altru­ism and serv­ing God – pri­or­i­ties that I argue make them less intent on attend­ing as high­ly selec­tive a col­lege as they could. This aligns with pre­vi­ous research show­ing that con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tant women attend col­leges that less selec­tive than oth­er women do because they do not tend to view college’s main pur­pose as career advance­ment.”
   • The author is a pro­fes­sor of Jew­ish stud­ies at Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty. Over­all inter­est­ing, although she does­n’t com­ment on two fac­tors which I think are quite sig­nif­i­cant: reli­gious stu­dents often view selec­tive col­leges as inim­i­cal to faith, and stu­dents are often torn between pres­ti­gious col­leges and less selec­tive reli­gious col­leges (I have per­son­al­ly spo­ken to sev­er­al Stan­ford stu­dents who were torn between Stan­ford and Wheaton).
   • Relat­ed? Mar­riage Made Me Let Go of My Dreams. Good. (Esau McCaul­ley, New York Times): “Many believe that the pur­pose of mar­riage is self-actu­al­iza­tion. We find the part­ner who will come along­side us and help us become what we have always dreamed we would be. Con­verse­ly, we may think that a poten­tial spouse who would get in the way of our dreams is the wrong per­son for us. What if mar­riage is meant to be some­thing else?” This is very good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Pret­ty Much (Pearls Before Swine)
• NRA: “Only thing that stops a bad Cupid with a bow is a good Cupid with a bow” (Om Jaha­gir­dar, Stan­ford Dai­ly)
• Super Bowl Con­fet­ti Made Entire­ly From Shred­ded Con­cus­sion Stud­ies (The Onion)

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Mag­i­cal Think­ing (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Build­ing a com­put­er is pre­cise­ly anal­o­gous to putting togeth­er a bit of mag­i­cal sleight of hand. It is a clever exer­cise in sim­u­la­tion, noth­ing more. And the con­vinc­ing­ness of the sim­u­la­tion is as com­plete­ly irrel­e­vant in the one case as it is in the oth­er. Say­ing ‘Gee, AI pro­grams can do such amaz­ing things. Maybe it real­ly is intel­li­gence!’ is like say­ing ‘Gee, Penn and Teller do such amaz­ing things. Maybe it real­ly is mag­ic!’” Fes­er is one of my favorite philoso­phers. First shared in vol­ume 197. I remem­ber one CS grad stu­dent strong­ly dis­lik­ing this arti­cle when I first shared. I share it again regard­less

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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.