Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 476

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 a short­er-than-nor­mal edi­tion because I’ve had a busy week and haven’t read as much as I nor­mal­ly do.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. There’s more herd­ing in swing state polls than at a sheep farm in the Scot­tish High­lands (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “How many [recent polls] showed the race in either direc­tion with­in 2.5 per­cent­age points, close enough that you could basi­cal­ly call it a tie? Well, 193 of them did, or 78 per­cent. That’s way more than you should get in the­o­ry — even if the can­di­dates are actu­al­ly exact­ly tied in all sev­en states, which they almost cer­tain­ly aren’t.… Based on a bino­mi­al dis­tri­b­u­tion — which assumes that all polls are inde­pen­dent of one anoth­er, which the­o­ret­i­cal­ly they should be — it’s real­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­ly unlike­ly. Specif­i­cal­ly, the odds are 1 in 9.5 tril­lion against at least this many polls show­ing such a close mar­gin.”
2. Chris­tian­i­ty Today’s pod­cast The Bul­letin ran inter­views with three Chris­tians vot­ing dif­fer­ent ways. Pre­sent­ed in the order in which they aired:
   • Vot­ing Third Par­ty (Matt Martens): “He’s a tri­al lawyer, a for­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor, a sem­i­nary grad­u­ate, a legal ethics pro­fes­sor, and an award-win­ning author. Martens’s writ­ing has appeared in The Wall Street Jour­nal, The Wash­ing­ton Post, and oth­er out­lets, and he has spo­ken at numer­ous uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try.”
   • Vot­ing Demo­c­rat (David French): “He’s a colum­nist for The New York Times and a for­mer senior edi­tor of The Dis­patch. He’s the author most recent­ly of Divid­ed We Fall: Amer­i­ca’s Seces­sion Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”
   • Vot­ing Repub­li­can (Eric Teet­sel): “Teet­sel was vice pres­i­dent of gov­ern­ment rela­tions at The Her­itage Foun­da­tion, was chief of staff to US sen­a­tor Josh Haw­ley of Mis­souri, and served as pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Pol­i­cy Alliance of Kansas.”
3. What econ­o­mists don’t know (Scott Sum­n­er, Sub­stack): “I am not impressed when some­one tells me that a small homo­ge­neous coun­try has less inequal­i­ty than the US. I am impressed by the fact that almost every sin­gle eth­nic group in Amer­i­ca is more suc­cess­ful than the equiv­a­lent eth­nic group in their home coun­try.… Right now, the US econ­o­my is the envy of the world. Before we replace free mar­kets with an indus­tri­al pol­i­cy, we might wish to com­pare upside and down­side risks from inter­ven­tion­ism. Giv­en that our liv­ing stan­dards are cur­rent­ly the high­est in the world (at least for coun­tries of more than 10 mil­lion), in which direc­tion are the risks the great­est?”
   • The author is an econ pro­fes­sor at Bent­ley.
4. How Many Con­ti­nents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers. (Matt Kaplan, New York Times): “The dis­pute aris­es in part because there are real­ly two types of con­ti­nents: Those rec­og­nized by cul­tures around the world, and those rec­og­nized by geol­o­gists. Cul­tures can define a con­ti­nent any way they want, while geol­o­gists have to use a def­i­n­i­tion. And geo­log­i­cal research in recent years has made defin­ing con­ti­nen­tal bound­aries less sim­ple than it might have once seemed as researchers find evi­dence of unex­pect­ed con­ti­nen­tal mate­r­i­al.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Side Effects (Pearls Before Swine)
• In Order To Vote (Pearls Before Swine)
• Social Media (Pearls Before Swine)
• Con­scious­ness (SMBC) — amus­ing with a point worth pon­der­ing
• Ratio­nal Addic­tion (SMBC)

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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.