TGFI, Volume 563: tongues-speaking weirdos and more

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Amer­i­can age was the human age (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Much of the coun­try has eased into a com­fort­able equi­lib­ri­um of scle­ro­sis; local veto pow­er either pre­vents the con­struc­tion of fac­to­ries, hous­ing, ener­gy, trans­porta­tion, and oth­er infra­struc­ture, or delays it by decades, or rais­es the cost to mul­ti­ples of what oth­er rich coun­tries pay. The past has become more valu­able than the future to many Amer­i­cans; they cling des­per­ate­ly to the pow­er to enforce sta­sis, pre­serv­ing a facade of the coun­try they grew up in at the expense of the very dynamism that made that coun­try great. That scle­ro­sis seeps into every­thing else. Immi­gra­tion, and even migra­tion from city to city, becomes a vicious zero-sum fight over a fixed hous­ing sup­ply. Cities decay into muse­ums of them­selves. The indus­tries of the future can only be built in Amer­i­ca if they take up near­ly no land, use near­ly no ener­gy, require very lit­tle bank financ­ing, and are able to pro­cure skilled labor as need­ed from abroad. Some­how the inter­net indus­try sat­is­fied all of those con­di­tions for three decades, but that time is done.”
  2. Why Do Only Weird Peo­ple Speak in Tongues? (Daniel Kunkel, Sub­stack): “I’ve nev­er spo­ken in tongues. And, in all sin­cer­i­ty, I’d pre­fer not to. They weird me out. In the few times I’ve heard some­one bab­bling, my mind imme­di­ate­ly runs to ‘They are mak­ing it up.’ And over the years, I’ve flirt­ed with, and even defend­ed, ces­sa­tion­ism (Rest in Pow­er, John­ny Mac). And yet, recent­ly, I’ve come to terms with the fact that most of my gripes about these var­i­ous gifts (tongues, prophe­cy, heal­ings) have more to do with human rea­son and pref­er­ence than scrip­tur­al con­vic­tion.… I still have nev­er spo­ken in glos­so­lalia. And if I am being sin­cere, I still do not want to, but I want to want to (: Thus, if I think 1 Cor 12–14 is pre­scrip­tive, and I do, then the plea for my own heart is to desire the gift.”
  3. You May Not Need Eight Hours of Sleep (Ryan McCormick, New York Times): “A con­sis­tent find­ing in sleep epi­demi­ol­o­gy stud­ies is that there is not a mag­ic num­ber below which health sud­den­ly falls off a cliff. Rather, stud­ies that show an asso­ci­a­tion between sleep dura­tion and mor­tal­i­ty often find that the low­est risk clus­ters around sev­en hours.… Sleep improves per­for­mance on tasks, makes dri­ving safer and buoys our men­tal health. Ade­quate sleep leads to a stronger immune sys­tem, bet­ter meta­bol­ic and car­dio­vas­cu­lar health, and more reli­able phys­i­cal ener­gy through­out the day.”
  4. Some AI-adja­cent thoughts:
    • “I see what Tyler Cowen is get­ting at. If you want info about the Bible, AI already out­per­forms at some mar­gin (speed, if noth­ing else). But in an equal­ly impor­tant sense he’s also wrong, and there’s an easy way to see this. Just ask the AI what, say, David’s sto­ry means. 🧵(see the full thread on twit­ter)
    • We Are Los­ing the Abil­i­ty to Dis­cov­er What We Didn’t Know to Ask (Anne-Lau­re Le Cunff, New York Times): “More than 60 per­cent of Google search­es in the Unit­ed States now end with­out the user click­ing on a link. We type a ques­tion, read an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-gen­er­at­ed sum­ma­ry of the results and leave with our answer.… The space between a ques­tion and an answer has val­ue, and that val­ue should not be engi­neered away. The most impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that deliv­ers only what is asked for, we will lose the capac­i­ty to dis­cov­er what we didn’t know to ask.”
      • The author is a neu­ro­sci­en­tist at King’s Col­lege in Lon­don.
    • A Chris­t­ian Vision for the Future of AI (Wal­ter Kim, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Trans­for­ma­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ment are before us, thanks to AI. But a pro-human worldview—the philo­soph­i­cal ground­ing to aim those oppor­tu­ni­ties at the moral end of human flourishing—won’t emerge spon­ta­neous­ly. We must shape AI before it shapes us.”
      • The author is the pres­i­dent of the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Evan­gel­i­cals.
  5. Min­istry After the Boomer Apoc­a­lypse (Derek Rish­mawy, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Remem­ber, when Jesus was preach­ing and min­is­ter­ing, what did he do? As an RUF bud­dy of mine point­ed out, he spent three years walk­ing around with the equiv­a­lent of 12 teenage to young adult interns. And in Paul’s cor­pus, near­ly 1/6 of his writ­ten mate­r­i­al is direct­ed to guid­ing the young pas­tors Tim­o­thy and Titus, whom he had trained. This has always been the way and it must be again.”
    • Inter­est­ing reflec­tions root­ed in cam­pus min­istry in a dif­fer­ent con­text. Maybe not for every­one, but I real­ly liked it.
  6. Decline of Ph.D. Admis­sions Could Imper­il a ‘Gen­er­a­tion of New Tal­ent’ (Vimal Patel, New York Times): “The num­ber of stu­dents admit­ted to Ph.D. pro­grams this fall dropped 15 per­cent from the pre­vi­ous year, accord­ing to data from over 50 top research uni­ver­si­ties, rais­ing fears that the nation’s capac­i­ty to pro­duce new sci­ence could be dimin­ished… The data show­ing the decrease comes from 55 uni­ver­si­ties, all of them mem­bers of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ties, an invi­ta­tion-only orga­ni­za­tion that includes 69 of the most pres­ti­gious research insti­tu­tions in the Unit­ed States.”
  7. Report­ed sex­u­al assault of jog­ger did not occur, inves­ti­ga­tion finds (Alu­la Alder­son, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stanford’s Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safe­ty (DPS) con­duct­ed a ‘thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion’ into the assault, which alleged­ly took place on March 29 by the inter­sec­tion of San­ta Ynez Street and May­field Avenue. Inves­ti­ga­tors deter­mined the report was fab­ri­cat­ed, accord­ing to Stan­ford PR Direc­tor Char­lene Gage.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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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