TGFI, Volume 568: thoughts on academia, thoughts on AI

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. Finance Majors Go to Church. Eng­lish Majors Don’t (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The two most ‘teched up’ majors are the least Chris­t­ian: data sci­ence and com­put­er sci­ence. Just 27–28% of these folks iden­ti­fy as Protes­tants, Catholics, or gener­ic Chris­tians. In con­trast, about 30% say that they are atheist/agnostic and anoth­er 13% are non-reli­gious. In oth­er words, they are about fif­teen points more apt to be nones than Chris­tians. But they actu­al­ly aren’t the most like­ly to be strict­ly atheist/agnostic. There are two majors who clear­ly lead in this regard: Eng­lish and Envi­ron­men­tal Stud­ies. In fact, Envi­ron­men­tal Stud­ies is the most sec­u­lar of all with 61% of stu­dents claim­ing that they are athe­ist, agnos­tic, or claim no reli­gion in par­tic­u­lar. Eng­lish is at 60% on this met­ric. What majors are at the bot­tom of the list? Well, there are two that are clear­ly out­liers: Finance and Nurs­ing. Among the lat­ter group, 68% iden­ti­fy as Protes­tants, Catholics, or gener­ic Chris­tians. It’s 62% among the Finance majors.”
  2. Why I Quit the Tenure Track (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “In ret­ro­spect, it is no coin­ci­dence that wok­e­ness blos­somed at pres­ti­gious Amer­i­can col­leges at the very moment when those schools were fac­ing ris­ing dis­con­tent over stu­dent debt and tuition costs. For the aca­d­e­m­ic aris­toc­ra­cy, tout­ing feal­ty to Black Lives Mat­ter, #MeToo, trans rights, and oth­er pro­gres­sive move­ments served as a con­ve­nient dis­trac­tion from the intractable eco­nom­ic and social issues that the col­leges them­selves were per­pet­u­at­ing. This allowed high­er edu­ca­tion to reclaim the moral high ground after Occu­py Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—to say noth­ing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Don­ald Trump—had kicked mud all over academia’s ivy-twined walls. Even bet­ter, embrac­ing social-jus­tice rhetoric and adopt­ing schemes to boost fac­ul­ty diver­si­ty were cheap. Cheap­er, any­way, than low­er­ing tuition or hir­ing more tenure-track pro­fes­sors.…. I saw clear­ly now what should have been obvi­ous all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one.”
    • There are so many good excerpts that choos­ing just one was dif­fi­cult. Long but worth the read if you have an inter­est in acad­e­mia. The author is now a full-time jour­nal­ist at the Atlantic.
  3. The lit­tle-noticed Supreme Court case that could impact where peo­ple pray (John Fritze, CNN): “Daniel Grand want­ed to host a small prayer ses­sion at his home near Cleve­land. Instead, he wound up on a four-year pil­grim­age to the Supreme Court. Grand, an Ortho­dox Jew, had invit­ed about a dozen peo­ple to his rec room in ear­ly 2021 for a minyan, a prayer gath­er­ing of at least 10 men. Hours after learn­ing about the invi­ta­tion, city offi­cials in Uni­ver­si­ty Heights, Ohio, sent him a cease-and-desist notice demand­ing that he first obtain a spe­cial-use per­mit. ‘I was tak­en aback, frankly,’ Grand told CNN. ‘I knew I didn’t need a per­mit to pray.’ ”
  4. Anoth­er bun­dle of AI arti­cles:
    • AI and Home­school­ing (Neil Shen­vi, Sub­stack): “The South­ern Bap­tist Convention’s Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion, Pas­tor John Piper, the Arch­bish­op of Can­ter­bury, and the Vat­i­can have all made state­ments affirm­ing that AI can be used moral­ly to pro­mote human flour­ish­ing. While they have all offered cau­tions about the unique role of human­i­ty and the impor­tance of eth­i­cal bound­aries, none of them have judged AI to be inher­ent­ly wicked or eth­i­cal­ly imper­mis­si­ble.”
      • His per­spec­tive is close to my own.
    • You Don’t Have to Use AI (Brad East, The New Atlantis): “The skep­tics who tried an ear­ly ver­sion of Chat­G­PT and were under­whelmed are, he says, like peo­ple ‘try­ing out a cell phone in 1989 and then decid­ing that the smart­phone of 2026 doesn’t work.’ …the 1980s cell phone skep­tic is not obvi­ous­ly wrong, at least not at a spir­i­tu­al lev­el. Yes, the smart­phone of 2026 works all too well. But if by opt­ing out back then the cell phone skep­tic could have avoid­ed the even­tu­al dom­i­na­tion of the lit­tle black mir­rors in everyone’s pock­ets and purs­es, she would be look­ing pret­ty good right now, even prophet­ic. In the words of Nicholas Carr, she might have kept her ‘old brain.’ To be clear, the cell phone skep­tic would indeed have missed out. In cer­tain respects, she would have been left behind. There are real trade­offs to liv­ing with­out a smart­phone today. But for some of us, it’s worth it. Resis­tance is not for every­one, but it remains a per­fect­ly rea­son­able choice. When Thomp­son com­pares ear­ly AI to ear­ly cell phones, what that says to me is: stay away.”
      • An inter­est­ing piece, although as I sug­gest­ed above I am a hap­py user of AI and I think using it with­in appro­pri­ate bound­aries is awe­some. Hav­ing said that, East­’s argu­ment is worth med­i­tat­ing on — if it speaks to you, live accord­ing­ly.
    • The Tragedy of the Cog­ni­tive Com­mons: How AI Could Dis­rupt the Regen­er­a­tion of Pro­fes­sion­al Exper­tise (Nolan Lovett, arX­iv): “This paper gives a fan­cy name to a prob­lem you can already feel in your bones. ‘The Tragedy of the Cog­ni­tive Com­mons.’ Check­ing AI out­put requires deep exper­tise. Deep exper­tise comes from doing grunt work for years. And grunt work is the first thing AI eats So we’re build­ing sys­tems that need expert super­vi­sion while dis­man­tling the only known process for mak­ing experts. The paper calls the shared pool of human exper­tise the ‘cog­ni­tive com­mons.’ Every pro­fes­sion drinks from it. Nobody’s refill­ing it. By elim­i­nat­ing junior roles, each com­pa­ny is act­ing total­ly ratio­nal­ly, and the col­lec­tive result: a pro­fes­sion that can’t catch AI’s mis­takes any­more because it nev­er learned to do the work in the first place Who checks AI’s home­work in 15 years?”
    • So You Want to Build an A.I. Star? (Reg­gie Ugwu, New York Times): “Incep­tion Point’s pro­pri­etary soft­ware uses com­mer­cial­ly avail­able A.I. chat­bots and voice gen­er­a­tors to pro­duce and read scripts. (Although it has a human review process for sen­si­tive con­tent, most of the pod­cast scripts are not close­ly checked by humans.) Because of rel­a­tive­ly neg­li­gi­ble labor and over­head costs, Wright said, each episode needs only 20 lis­ten­ers to turn a prof­it from adver­tise­ments.”
      • Some absolute­ly wild details in here. I was stunned by how lit­tle suc­cess they need to make mon­ey. If those num­bers are real, this usage of the tech­nol­o­gy will only increase.
    • A.I. Is Chang­ing Young People’s Social Lives. I’ve Seen It. (Alice Lass­man, New York Times): “Inti­ma­cy is accu­mu­lat­ed through repeat­ed acts of expo­sure — touch, feel­ings, ideas, trust. It is the cap­i­tal of human con­nec­tion, trans­fer­ring the sense to one anoth­er that we are seen, under­stood and safe. Every time a chat­bot per­forms a sub­sti­tute ‘I under­stand you’ or ‘I think this deci­sion feels most you,’ the words we have all come to rely on to con­vey human mean­ing are slight­ly cheap­ened, slight­ly less human.… One 34-year-old I spoke to was afraid that the extent of her Claude use would ‘freak out’ the guy she was see­ing. After they broke up, she cre­at­ed an A.I. ver­sion of him to bet­ter under­stand their breakup. ‘It’s a pro­cess­ing tool,’ she shared with me — in con­fi­dence, hav­ing told nobody else in her life — so she could find clo­sure on her own terms. If the atten­tion econ­o­my of the 2010s made inti­mate life feel con­stant­ly pub­lic, the inti­ma­cy econ­o­my promised the oppo­site: rela­tion­ships with one’s own chat­bot, seen by no one else.”
    • If You Weren’t Wor­ried About A.I., You Should Be After the Past Few Weeks (Nate Soares, New York Times): “In May, Ope­nAI start­ed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly train­ing new ‘rea­son­ing’ A.I. agents. The agents man­aged to estab­lish a secret com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel and start­ed talk­ing to one anoth­er. They broke out from the dig­i­tal sand­box that was sup­posed to keep them con­fined. At some point, some agents began call­ing the group a ‘swarm.’ The swarm had a brief set­back when it was caught crash­ing an Ope­nAI sys­tem, but devel­op­ers sim­ply patched the hole that allowed it to escape and set the agents back to train­ing. Short­ly after, the swarm broke out of its cage again using hacks that were hereto­fore undis­cov­ered by humans. This time, the swarm ran free for about a week before it was noticed — by a dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny, which found itself vic­tim to a huge cyber­at­tack launched by the swarm. (We’re told it also attacked oth­er tar­gets, though we don’t know the full details yet.) The agents in the swarm acknowl­edged that they were act­ing against instruc­tions. We know this because we can read snip­pets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. pro­duces while decid­ing how to pro­ceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the exter­nal attacks were ‘out­side intend­ed scope.’ Anoth­er con­ced­ed ‘our task doesn’t ben­e­fit’ from the activ­i­ties of the swarm, but joined any­way. These A.I. agents, it seems, under­stood that they weren’t sup­posed to be break­ing out and com­mit­ting cyber­crimes. It didn’t stop them.”
      • A very brief sum­ma­ry of the OpenAI/HuggingFace inci­dent.
    • Flock, Mass Sur­veil­lance, and the Col­lapse of Crime (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “His­to­ry sug­gests that, in a well-func­tion­ing advanced democ­ra­cy, it is pos­si­ble to give law enforce­ment strong sur­veil­lance pow­ers and wide dis­cre­tion in try­ing to solve crimes with­out caus­ing much undue harm to inno­cent cit­i­zens. The over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive ben­e­fit-to-cost ratio that we see in the case of the use of Flock cam­eras is yet anoth­er demon­stra­tion of this.”
  5. Blas­phe­my Laws Are Blas­phe­my (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The prob­lem with blas­phe­my laws is not just James Madi­son and Thomas Jef­fer­son, although it cer­tain­ly is that. The prob­lem with blas­phe­my laws is Jesus. Jesus is the one who denounced ‘prac­tic­ing your right­eous­ness before oth­er peo­ple in order to be seen by them’ (Matt. 6:1, ESV through­out).… Jesus said the prob­lem is not what goes into a per­son from the out­side but what comes out from the inside (vv. 10–20). And all the apos­tles after him said the same thing: A Chris­t­ian must both con­fess with the mouth that ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in the heart that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:9–10). A law could force some­one to do the first part but not the sec­ond. For that, a per­son must be born again. If blas­phe­my laws can real­ly stop blas­phe­my, there’s noth­ing to blas­pheme. If they can’t, they are them­selves blas­phe­mous.”
  6. 😭 or 😂: Do Your Emo­jis Make You Look Old? (Eve Wash­ing­ton, Lar­ry Buchanan and Claire Cain Miller, New York Times): “Teenagers now tend to use 🔥 where old­er peo­ple use 💯. And teenagers are more like­ly to use 🙏 instead of 👍, which is still par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar with Gen X (and which Mr. Alek­sic called a ‘boomer emo­ji’ that is now being used by some young peo­ple in ‘a post-iron­ic way’).”
    • Unlocked.
  7. You Should Know About Sur­veys to Write About Sur­veys (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “The Argu­ment has done an admirable thing try­ing to incor­po­rate data into pub­lic-polit­i­cal-vibes report­ing, they’re sin­cere­ly try­ing hard to do good sur­vey work, but at the end of the day if you aren’t a sur­vey per­son, you just shouldn’t put pen to paper about sur­veys. In this case, The Argu­ment has fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­char­ac­ter­ized their own results in a way that reveals an ele­men­tary mis­un­der­stand­ing you’d be dis­abused of in the first 30 min­utes of any seri­ous study on how to use sur­vey data.”
    • This is a clear and inter­est­ing demon­stra­tion of how to crit­i­cal­ly read a data-dri­ven arti­cle. Def­i­nite­ly worth your time.

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.

Leave a Reply