Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 506: isms, nonsense responders, and tap water

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. ismism (J. Budziszewski, blog): “Ismism – four syllables, ‘izzum izzum’ — is the bad mental habit of criticizing a proposition not on its own terms, but in terms of the ‘ism’ which one takes it to express. For example, suppose Sheila is concerned that young people who marry are tying the knot later and later in life. Brian snorts, ‘You’re one of those conjugalists.’ Then he criticizes Sheila for other beliefs which he himself associates with so-called conjugalism. For instance, he protests ‘I don’t think everyone has to marry.’ But Sheila didn’t say that everyone has to marry. She may not even think so, and it doesn’t follow as a conclusion from her premise. Ismism is guilt by association: ‘Your belief must be wrong, because I, personally, group it with other beliefs I consider wrong.’ ” 
    • The author is a philosophy prof at UT Austin.
  2. Fascinating: “nonsense responders” significantly affect survey data https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1926128833947738321
    • The entire thread is worth reading. Bottom line from a tweet near the end of the thread: “Mentally adjust survey results in your head if you don’t see the authors rigorously working to remove nonsense responders.”
  3. How to Find Ancient Assyrian Cities Using Economics (Max Tabarrok, Substack): “In ancient Kaneš, court transcripts, trading contracts, and merchant accounting were all recorded on clay tablets. Clay tablets preserve well, so this period is in some ways better known then the next several thousand years of history. The authors claim that ‘the closest comparable corpora of ancient trade data are almost 3,000 years later, coming, for example, from the medieval Italian merchant archives and the Cairo Genizah’.… The cherry on top: the entire city burned in a fire, preserving the clay records to be recovered forty centuries later. The authors use some natural language processing and manual inspection to narrow down from tens of thousands of tablets to several hundred unambiguous mentions of trade between two of 25 Anatolian cities that have enough trade connections with each other to be identified in a gravity model.”
  4. Star Harvard business professor stripped of tenure, fired for manipulating data in studies on dishonesty (Richard Pollina, New York Post): “A renowned Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an investigation found she fabricated data on multiple studies focused on dishonesty.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  5. Doug Wilson Has Spent Decades Pushing for a Christian Theocracy. In Trump’s DC, the New Right Is Listening. (Ian Ward, Politico): “In Moscow, Wilson explained that his political philosophy is not theocratic in the commonly understood sense of a government run exclusively by the church. To the contrary, he maintains that God ordains earthly authority in three separate spheres of life: the church, the family and the civil government. Within each of these spheres, the relevant authorities must abide by scriptural commandments. In the familial sphere, for instance, parents must educate their children according to Biblical principles, and wives must subordinate themselves to their husbands in accordance with a covenantal view of the family. In the sphere of civil government, officials should strive to bring the law in line with Biblical commandments, although those principles don’t have to be applied ‘woodenly,’ as Wilson put it: Governments do not have to enforce the Biblical mandate that households build balustrades on their roofs, but they should enforce the principle that homeowners are liable for risks incurred on their property. Above all, Wilson believes, the three spheres of earthly authority must remain separate.” 
    • This is a far more informed article than I expected it to be. The journalist (Ian Ward) and the subject (Doug Wilson) have both been featured in these emails before. I highly recommend this article as an example of what fair reporting of a religious person looks like.
    • For a taste of Wilson’s style, check out his response to this and a few other articles about him: Pete Hegseth, Me, and Meeting with Important Jews (Doug Wilson, personal blog).
    • My quick take on Wilson: when he is right he is very right and when he is wrong he is very wrong, and whether he is right or wrong he is almost always confident and entertaining.
  6. The Unparalleled Daily Miracle of Tap Water (A. Cerisse Cohen, New York Times): “During a two-year stint in Montana, I went on long hikes and sipped stream water, shockingly cold and straight from the glaciers, but other than that, I drank from the tap. And then I landed in Los Angeles, where everyone I met used a filter.… Thanks to warnings from seemingly everyone around me in the city, I began to worry about things I never before considered threatening, like dust (could cause cancer), anything with seeds (could cause cancer) or certain planetary configurations (responsible for all other misfortunes). If I put my purse on the floor, or oriented my bed the wrong way, it was endangering my energy! Maybe I’d been lulled into a false sense of security about everyday life.” 
    • Drink tap water. It’s awesome.
  7. U.S. Will ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas of Chinese Students, Rubio Says (Edward Wong, New York Times): “Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday evening that the Trump administration would work to ‘aggressively revoke’ visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in ‘critical fields.’.… In 2020, officials in the first Trump administration canceled the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers after announcing they were banning from campuses Chinese citizens with direct ties to military universities in their country. It was the first time the U.S. government had moved to bar a category of Chinese students from getting access to American universities, a ban the Biden administration kept in place.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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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.

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