Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 490

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How to Choose a Reli­gion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “If you assume — and you should — that the uni­verse isn’t a bru­tal cos­mic trick, that God isn’t some­how out to get you, then as long as you aren’t throw­ing your­self head­long into a cult or engag­ing in elab­o­rate self-decep­tion, there are few tru­ly bad rea­sons for aban­don­ing agnos­ti­cism in favor of com­mit­ment. If you’re out there look­ing and some­thing feels like what you were sup­posed to find, you’re gen­er­al­ly bet­ter off cross­ing the thresh­old and see­ing what’s inside.”
    • A won­der­ful essay, unlocked. I was pleased to see that Douthat lays out log­i­cal paths that I myself fre­quent­ly deploy in con­ver­sa­tions with skep­tics.
    • Relat­ed: My Favorite Argu­ment for the Exis­tence of God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “I think that the most com­pelling case for being reli­gious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doc­trines, that the uni­verse was made for a rea­son and we’re part of that rea­son — is found at the con­ver­gence of mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent lines of argu­ment.… Con­sid­er three big exam­ples: the evi­dence for cos­mic design in the fun­da­men­tal laws and struc­ture of the uni­verse; the unusu­al place of human con­scious­ness with­in the larg­er whole; and the per­sis­tence and plau­si­bil­i­ty of reli­gious and super­nat­ur­al expe­ri­ence even under sup­pos­ed­ly dis­en­chant­ed con­di­tions.”
  2. The Aver­age Kid is Bet­ter Than the Aver­age Adult (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Still, when I com­pare all the adults I’ve met to all the kids I’ve met, there’s no com­par­i­son. To be frank, 80% of adults are total duds. A super­ma­jor­i­ty of kids, in con­trast, are actu­al­ly fun. If you don’t appre­ci­ate them, the fault is yours.”
  3. Trumpian pol­i­cy as cul­tur­al pol­i­cy (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Imag­ine you hold a vision where the (par­tial) decline of Amer­i­ca large­ly is about cul­ture. After all, we have more peo­ple and more nat­ur­al resources than ever before. Our top achieve­ments remain impres­sive. But is the over­all cul­ture of the peo­ple in such great shape? The cul­ture of gov­ern­ment and pub­lic ser­vice? Inter­est in our reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions? The qual­i­ty of local gov­ern­ment in many states? You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some seri­ous reser­va­tions on such ques­tions.… OK, so how might you fix the cul­ture of Amer­i­ca? You want to tell every­one that Amer­i­ca comes first. That Amer­i­ca should be more mas­cu­line and less soft. That we need to build. That we should ‘own the libs.’ I could go on with more exam­ples and details, but this part of it you already get. So imag­ine you start­ed a polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion and asked the sim­ple ques­tion ‘does this pol­i­cy change rein­force or over­turn our basic cul­tur­al mes­sages?’ Every time the pol­i­cy or pol­i­cy debate push­es cul­ture in what you think is the right direc­tion, just do it. Do it in the view that the cul­tur­al fac­tors will, over some time hori­zon, sur­pass every­thing else in import.”
    • An inter­est­ing analy­sis. Cowen is not endors­ing or crit­i­ciz­ing this view — mere­ly describ­ing it. Def­i­nite­ly worth read­ing, and it makes more sense than oth­er attempts I have seen to bring all the polit­i­cal news togeth­er.
    • Relat­ed: Trump’s Exec­u­tive Branch Rev­o­lu­tion (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “If you read media cov­er­age, jour­nal­ists will tell you that what Trump is doing is com­plete­ly law­less. Cer­tain­ly there have been some actions that are unlike­ly to hold up in court. Yet it’s impor­tant to under­stand recent steps tak­en in the con­text of long-stand­ing legal debates over exec­u­tive pow­er. Trump’s actions haven’t come from nowhere, and they aren’t sim­ply the impro­vi­sa­tions of one pow­er-hun­gry pres­i­dent. What the pres­i­dent is doing is noth­ing less than under­tak­ing a fun­da­men­tal remak­ing of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, one that imple­ments many long-stand­ing ideas of con­ser­v­a­tive legal schol­ars whose views have been too extreme or polit­i­cal­ly unten­able for pre­vi­ous Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions, but that have got­ten a hear­ing now because Trump in par­tic­u­lar is keen on expand­ing his author­i­ty to the great­est extent pos­si­ble.”
      • Fas­ci­nat­ing. Note that Hana­ni­a’s arti­cle, unlike Cowen’s analy­sis above, is most­ly on Trump’s side. This isn’t a dis­in­ter­est­ed piece.
    • For the argu­ment on the oth­er side, Trump Brazen­ly Defies Laws in Esca­lat­ing Exec­u­tive Pow­er Grab (Char­lie Sav­age, New York Times): “Mr. Trump has effec­tive­ly nul­li­fied laws, such as by order­ing the Jus­tice Depart­ment to refrain from enforc­ing a ban on the wild­ly pop­u­lar app Tik­Tok and by block­ing migrants from invok­ing a statute allow­ing them to request asy­lum. He moved to effec­tive­ly shut­ter a fed­er­al agency Con­gress cre­at­ed and tried to freeze con­gres­sion­al­ly approved spend­ing, includ­ing most for­eign aid. He sum­mar­i­ly fired pros­e­cu­tors, inspec­tors gen­er­al and board mem­bers of inde­pen­dent agen­cies in defi­ance of legal rules against arbi­trary removal.”
    • One bit of con­text I would add which is miss­ing from the last two arti­cles: both Biden and Oba­ma were also law-defy­ing pres­i­dents. In oth­er words, this is a trend that has been devel­op­ing for some time in both par­ties. For a sum­ma­ry of Biden’s anal­o­gous acts, see The Qui­et Law­less­ness of Joe Biden (Sarah Isgur, The Dis­patch): “His ‘aww shucks,’ dod­der­ing nature is effec­tive, but Joe Biden’s lega­cy is not the Restor­er of Norms. He is leav­ing office qui­et­ly hav­ing caused more dam­age to the rule of law than arguably any sin­gle one of his pre­de­ces­sors.”
  4. The U.S. Econ­o­my Is Rac­ing Ahead. Almost Every­thing Else Is Falling Behind. (David Leon­hardt & Ash­ley Wu, New York Times): “The U.S. econ­o­my has out­per­formed most of its rivals in terms of pro­duc­tive might and inno­va­tion. But this suc­cess has not led to rapid­ly ris­ing liv­ing stan­dards for most Amer­i­cans.… This coun­try has the low­est life expectan­cy of any rich coun­try, which was not true for most of the 20th cen­tu­ry. The U.S. has the high­est mur­der rate of any rich coun­try and the world’s high­est rate of fatal drug over­dos­es. It also has one of the low­est rates of trust in the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and among the high­est rates of youth depres­sion and sin­gle-par­ent fam­i­lies. When Amer­i­cans are asked how sat­is­fied they are with their own lives, the U.S. ranks low­er than it did three decades ago.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  5. An AI chat­bot told a user how to kill himself—but the com­pa­ny doesn’t want to “cen­sor” it (Eileen Guo, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): “While this is not the first time an AI chat­bot has sug­gest­ed that a user take vio­lent action, includ­ing self-harm, researchers and crit­ics say that the bot’s explic­it instructions—and the company’s response—are strik­ing. What’s more, this vio­lent con­ver­sa­tion is not an iso­lat­ed inci­dent with Nomi; a few weeks after his trou­bling exchange with Erin, a sec­ond Nomi chat­bot also told Nowatz­ki to kill him­self, even fol­low­ing up with reminder mes­sages. And on the company’s Dis­cord chan­nel, sev­er­al oth­er peo­ple have report­ed expe­ri­ences with Nomi bots bring­ing up sui­cide, dat­ing back at least to 2023.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Dis­tress­ing on many lev­els: “even fol­low­ing up with reminder mes­sages” 😮
  6. For the Undate­able Young Sin­gle Chris­t­ian Woman (Aly Dee, Sub­stack): “As a young sin­gle woman, you have to con­clude that life is full of risk, and your fer­tile win­dow will sharply decline at 35.… Young sin­gles should wed and have chil­dren in their twen­ties and accept that they will strug­gle finan­cial­ly for a decade or so. They should focus on cul­ti­vat­ing the grit to weath­er eco­nom­ic insta­bil­i­ty until their mid-thir­ties. Gen­er­al­ly, men don’t hit their finan­cial stride until their late 40s or ear­ly 50s.”
    • A lot of advice in this arti­cle and I do not agree with all of it. Most­ly shar­ing because I often share sim­i­lar things from the male point of view and this one is from a gal to oth­er gals.
  7. What will AI do to ℗research? (Joshua Gans, Sub­stack): “We call it research, but I think a bet­ter name might be pre­search because we are spec­u­lat­ing on whether the knowl­edge is use­ful or not. This hap­pens because research is far more expen­sive than search. Now sup­pose that you take away the whole ‘it takes time to do good research’ pre­sump­tion as might be done with AI. Why do any pre­search? Instead, why not wait until you have a use that requires some knowl­edge, then ‘ask AI’ to tell you the answer? In oth­er words, why not research on demand — that is, find a use and then do the work?”
    • The author, an econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, got a paper pub­lished that was co-writ­ten by Chat­G­PT. Here he is reflect­ing on how such tools will change acad­e­mia.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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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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