Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 379

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 379, the 75th prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Holy Spir­it is a Polit­i­cal Lia­bil­i­ty (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “It does not mean we have to accept that we sim­ply can­not win. It means the oppo­site: accept­ing that we have already won. When Christ emerged from that tomb, all the gen­der insan­i­ty, all the reli­gious per­se­cu­tion, all the aban­don­ment of first prin­ci­ples in the uni­verse were giv­en a death sen­tence. Christ him­self is truth. Truth was killed, then got back up, and will nev­er die again. This is not just piety. It’s a real­i­ty that must go down deep in our meth­ods, our speech, our atti­tudes.”
  2. Tolkien Was Right: Notes on the Respect for Mar­riage Act and the Post-Boomer Church (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Some time after his death, an edi­tor was going through the papers and books in J. R. R. Tolkien’s library when he came across an old copy of C. S. Lewis’s pam­phlet ‘Chris­t­ian Behav­ior,’ which would lat­er be re-pub­lished as one sec­tion in Lewis’s clas­sic Mere Chris­tian­i­ty. Fold­ed inside the book was a let­ter Tolkien had writ­ten but appar­ent­ly nev­er sent to his long-time friend and fel­low Oxford don. In it, Tolkien took issue with Lewis’s treat­ment of divorce in the pam­phlet.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. FORUM: The New Shape of Chris­t­ian Pub­lic Dis­course (Jay Green, Cur­rent): “ ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ do not have self-explana­to­ry or sta­ble mean­ings. The old labels tend to obscure at least as much as they reveal. The ter­mi­nol­o­gy is handy in a fight as long we aren’t asked to define exact­ly what we mean by them. But espe­cial­ly dur­ing the past sev­en years some of the most acri­mo­nious dis­agree­ments among Chris­tians about pub­lic life go well beyond the issues iden­ti­fied by Hunter in the 1990s. Our pub­lic fights have become far more than basic dis­agree­ments over ‘issues.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Covenant Col­lege. I think he is on to some­thing, but his fram­ing is not quite right.
  4. Check out Chat­G­PT — it’s free to play with and extreme­ly impres­sive. You can sign up at https://beta.openai.com/playground
    • I had it write a wor­ship song: https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/iWbGQyANHXhdXGw2fM0AGQQJ
    • Andy Crouch, a shrewd Chris­t­ian thinker, believes this rep­re­sents the end of a lot of home­work. https://twitter.com/ahc/status/1598323606303424512 — this sim­ple tool can do col­lege-lev­el home­work pret­ty eas­i­ly.
    • Jail­break­ing Chat­G­PT on Release Day (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “One of the things it attempts to do to be ‘safe.’ It does this by refus­ing to answer ques­tions that call upon it to do or help you do some­thing ille­gal or oth­er­wise out­side its bounds. Makes sense. As is the default with such things, those safe­guards were bro­ken through almost imme­di­ate­ly. By the end of the day, sev­er­al prompt engi­neer­ing meth­ods had been found.”
    • In anoth­er bit of AI news, On the Diplo­ma­cy AI (Zvi Mowsh­witz, Sub­stack): “When peo­ple say the AI ‘solved’ Diplo­ma­cy, it real­ly real­ly didn’t. What it did, which is still impres­sive, is get a han­dle on the basics of Diplo­ma­cy, in this par­tic­u­lar con­text where bots can­not be iden­ti­fied and are in the minor­i­ty, and in par­tic­u­lar where mes­sage detail is suf­fi­cient­ly lim­it­ed that it can use an LLM to be able to com­mu­ni­cate with humans rea­son­ably and not be iden­ti­fied.”
  5. Some Stan­ford news:
    • Stan­ford president’s research under inves­ti­ga­tion (Theo Bak­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in this arti­cle and what fol­lows is not the main point, but this para­graph caught my atten­tion: “Pri­or to tak­ing on Stanford’s pres­i­den­cy in ear­ly 2016, Tessier-Lav­i­gne direct­ed more than a thou­sand sci­en­tists at biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies Genen­tech as well as Regen­eron. Tessier-Lavigne’s salary at Regen­eron in 2014 was $1,764,032, accord­ing to a pre­vi­ous­ly-unre­port­ed class action law­suit alleg­ing exces­sive com­pen­sa­tion for mem­bers of the Com­pen­sa­tion Com­mit­tee, which includ­ed Tessier-Lav­i­gne. It was lat­er set­tled. He earned $1,555,296 from Stan­ford in 2021 with an addi­tion­al $700,000 annu­al­ly as a board direc­tor for Regen­eron.”
    • ‘This actu­al­ly changes every­thing’: Altered image in 1999 paper rais­es poten­tial per­il for Stan­ford pres­i­dent (Olivia Gold­hill  & Megan Molteni, Stat News): “The new­ly iden­ti­fied appar­ent manip­u­la­tion in Cell is espe­cial­ly seri­ous as it seems to alter the results and appears to be inten­tion­al, said Bik. ‘I would tes­ti­fy in court that’s been dig­i­tal­ly altered,” she told STAT. “This actu­al­ly changes every­thing. … It’s a more severe lev­el of dig­i­tal alter­ing.’”
    • Most damn­ing — lat­er in the arti­cle they explain that sim­i­lar prob­lems have occurred at mul­ti­ple insti­tu­tions with vary­ing sets of coau­thors with MTL being the only con­stant pres­ence. Eep!
    • Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion opens inves­ti­ga­tion into Stan­ford for bias against male stu­dents (Judy Liu, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The com­plaint, which was filed by Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor James Moore and Kur­sat Pekgoz, CEO of Turk­ish real estate com­pa­ny Doruk, alleges that mul­ti­ple Stan­ford pro­grams vio­late Title IX, a fed­er­al civ­il rights law that pro­tects peo­ple from sex-based dis­crim­i­na­tion in edu­ca­tion pro­grams that receive fed­er­al funds.” An inevitable devel­op­ment in our iden­ti­ty-obsessed cul­ture.
  6. ‘It’s The First Time I’ve Seen This in Chi­na’ (Simon Lep­lâtre, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “When some­one shout­ed, ‘Xi Jin­ping, resign,’ the crowd explod­ed, and soon oth­er peo­ple were say­ing it, and it was as if the shouter had bro­ken a taboo in a coun­try where peo­ple usu­al­ly low­ered their voice when men­tion­ing the name of their leader.  Then some­one else in the crowd shout­ed, ‘Down with the Com­mu­nist Par­ty,’ which was a big no-no—the Chi­nese gen­er­al­ly broad­cast their ide­o­log­i­cal fervor—and the crowd loved that, too. It was like top­pling the stat­ue of a dic­ta­tor. I told a col­league we were prob­a­bly wit­ness­ing some­thing impor­tant that might become very impor­tant.”
  7. Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own (Brooks B. Ander­son, Har­vard Crim­son): “Across the Uni­ver­si­ty, for every aca­d­e­m­ic employ­ee there are approx­i­mate­ly 1.45 admin­is­tra­tors. When only con­sid­er­ing fac­ul­ty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Har­vard employs 7,024 total full-time admin­is­tra­tors, only slight­ly few­er than the under­grad­u­ate pop­u­la­tion. What do they all do?” The sit­u­a­tion is sim­i­lar at Stan­ford.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Reli­gious ser­vices may low­er risk of ‘deaths of despair’ (Chris Sweeney, Har­vard Gazette): “After adjust­ing for numer­ous vari­ables, the study showed that women who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 68 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair com­pared to those nev­er attend­ing ser­vices. Men who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 33 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair.” Those are HUGE reduc­tions! From vol­ume 251.

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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.

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