Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 399

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 399, a Har­shad num­ber. That means it is divis­i­ble by the sum of its dig­its. 3+9+9=21 and 399÷21 = 19.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sci­ence is a strong-link prob­lem (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “There are two kinds of prob­lems in the world: strong-link prob­lems and weak-link prob­lems. Weak-link prob­lems are prob­lems where the over­all qual­i­ty depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link prob­lems by mak­ing the weak­est links stronger, or by elim­i­nat­ing them entire­ly.… Sci­ence is a strong-link prob­lem. In the long run, the best stuff is basi­cal­ly all that mat­ters, and the bad stuff doesn’t mat­ter at all.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed, has appli­ca­tion to mul­ti­ple domains.
  2. The Myth of Sex­u­al Expe­ri­ence (Jason S. Car­roll & Bri­an J. Willough­by, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “…we review a series of recent stud­ies using dif­fer­ent nation­al datasets that show that hav­ing mul­ti­ple sex­u­al part­ners dur­ing the dat­ing years leads to high­er divorce rates in future mar­riages. We also report the find­ings of a new study that exam­ined how sex­u­al expe­ri­ence his­to­ries are asso­ci­at­ed with the qual­i­ty of cur­rent mar­riage rela­tion­ships. Over­all, we found that ‘sex­u­al­ly inex­pe­ri­enced’ indi­vid­u­als, or the ones who have only had sex with their spouse, are the one’s most­ly like­ly to be flour­ish­ing in marriage.  These ‘sex­u­al­ly inex­pe­ri­enced’ indi­vid­u­als report the high­est lev­els of rela­tion­ship sat­is­fac­tion, rela­tion­ship sta­bil­i­ty, sex­u­al sat­is­fac­tion, and emo­tion­al close­ness with their spous­es.”
    • The arti­cle ends with this won­der­ful line: “While the ben­e­fit of expe­ri­ence can be seen in many aspects of life, sex­u­al inexpe­ri­ence appears to still be the best path­way to mar­i­tal flour­ish­ing.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors at BYU.
  3. The Tox­ic Real­i­ty of a Post-Famil­ial Soci­ety (Aaron M. Renn, Sub­stack): “South Korea is a par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing case study. It has the world’s low­est fer­til­i­ty rate, with a total fer­til­i­ty rate or TFR of 0.78 (2.1 is need­ed just to keep pop­u­la­tion con­stant). It has also devel­oped par­tic­u­lar­ly unhealthy gen­der rela­tions, ele­ments of which we see echoed in our own coun­try. As here, these have even start­ed to car­ry over into pol­i­tics. What we see in South Korea is that post-famil­ial­ism can pro­duce unhap­pi­ness and dys­func­tion­al social and polit­i­cal dynam­ics.”
    • Relat­ed: Stop Treat­ing Women Like Men (Sophie Fuji­wara, Stan­ford Review): “In col­lege, we don’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between men and women when advis­ing stu­dents about their careers, as if their life arcs will fol­low the same tra­jec­to­ry. The great­est priv­i­lege that high-earn­ing, edu­cat­ed women have is the priv­i­lege of choice, but this notion of per­fect­ly equal career tra­jec­to­ries dis­ad­van­tages women.”
  4. When Ide­ol­o­gy Dri­ves Social Sci­ence (Michael Jin­dra & Arthur Sakamo­to, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “In com­plex areas like the study of racial inequal­i­ty, a fun­da­men­tal­ism has tak­en hold that dis­cour­ages sound method­ol­o­gy and the use of reli­able evi­dence about the roots of social prob­lems. We are not talk­ing about mere dif­fer­ences in inter­pre­ta­tion of results, which are com­mon. We are talk­ing about mis­takes so clear that they should cause research to be seri­ous­ly ques­tioned or even dis­re­gard­ed. A great deal of research… rigs its sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods in order to arrive at ide­o­log­i­cal­ly pre­ferred con­clu­sions.”
    • The authors are a cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gist at BU and a soci­ol­o­gist at Hong Kong Bap­tist Uni­ver­si­ty, respec­tive­ly.
  5. I was a teenage evan­gel­i­cal mis­sion­ary (Jon Ward, Yahoo News): “These lead­ers want­ed a mus­cu­lar faith that didn’t shrink back from a fight. They want­ed a dra­mat­ic faith too, full of spec­ta­cle. They were all big per­son­al­i­ties, which they used to com­pen­sate for their lack of train­ing, exper­tise, and expe­ri­ence. Faith, for them, was not the act of extend­ing one’s self beyond the realm of what could be known to trust in what one hoped could be true. They had more cer­tain­ty than any­thing. Chris­tian­i­ty was true, no ques­tions asked. For them, faith was a belief that they could call down mir­a­cles from heav­en to heal the sick or pre­dict the future or change world events. Lead­ers like Engle and Ahn didn’t come across as char­la­tans. They were very sin­cere. But ear­ly on in their lives, they got locked into a par­tic­u­lar type of faith min­istry, and they built audi­ences and fol­low­ings based on that brand and that kind of faith. At that point, their liveli­hoods and incomes became depen­dent on cater­ing to those same types of Chris­tians. Per­son­al evo­lu­tion or growth became con­strained by their busi­ness mod­el.”
  6. Some­thing inter­est­ing is hap­pen­ing in Tul­sa (Trevor Klee, Sub­stack): “I vis­it­ed Tul­sa through Tul­sa Tomor­row, a pro­gram that flies out young Jews to Tul­sa for a week­end to try to get them to live there. So far, from their own num­bers, they’ve flown out about 150 Jews over the last 6 years and about 70–80 have moved.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry, not very long.
  7. A Rad­i­cal Exper­i­ment in Men­tal Health Care, Test­ed Over Cen­turies (Mati­na Ste­vis-Grid­neff and Koba Ryck­e­waert, New York Times): “By the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry, near­ly 2,000 [peo­ple with men­tal health prob­lems] lived among the Geel­ians, as the locals call them­selves.… That has made Geel both some­thing of a mod­el for a par­tic­u­lar par­a­digm of psy­chi­atric care and an out­lier, often regard­ed over the cen­turies with sus­pi­cion (includ­ing by The New York Times, which, in a head­line from March 23, 1891, called Geel ‘a colony where lunatics live with peas­ants’ that had been ‘pro­duc­tive of mis­ery and evil results’).”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

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 Q: What Is a Hole? A: We’re Not Sure! (Jason Kot­tke, per­son­al web­site): “As for straws — rea­son tells me they only have one hole but I know in my heart they have two.”  From vol­ume 276.

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.

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