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’ve been a bit disconnected lately — so there’s an excellent chance I’ve missed some fascinating things. If you’ve read something fascinating that I’ve overlooked, please pass it my way.
Things Glen Found Interesting
- This Is the Biggest Obstacle to New Cancer Cures (Ruxandra Teslo, New York Times): “The paperwork burden alone can be enormous: Novo Nordisk’s former chief scientific officer once noted that the documentation required to request approval for two insulin products, if printed and stacked, would rise higher than the Empire State Building. That accumulation follows from a medical framework that treats any potential risk, however negligible, as something that must be mitigated and a reason to delay while drastically underweighing the cost of delay itself. Regulatory agencies, hospitals and drug companies all cover themselves against litigation or blame. But responsibility for mitigating the second, often much greater risk — that the disease afflicting the patient takes advantage of the delay, with potentially deadly results — belongs to no one. ‘We often forget that the most toxic thing for the patient is the cancer itself,’ Dr. Hong said. In many cases, he can recount, down to the month, how much longer his patients are expected to live, which is why weeks lost to paperwork are not abstract to him.”
- Is College Still Worth It? (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “First, you still are likely to earn more, net of college cost, even if that upgrade is smaller than it used to be. Second and perhaps most importantly, college is a great place to make friends, date, and possibly meet a spouse. Those features are ever more important as America suffers a crisis of loneliness. Furthermore, if you think that artificial intelligence may displace a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, marrying well will become more important.”
- AI Discourse
- The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations (Dwarkesh Patel, Substack): “Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.”
- Absolutely bonkers. 100% worth reading.
- On the Loose (Dean Ball, Substack): “But it is true that I—and candidly I think many of my colleagues in the profession of AI policy—largely failed to talk about this issue with the level of seriousness and urgency it required.… many of the people who think about the governance of superintelligence, myself included, avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor. I’ve stopped doing so, in part because I grew tired of the discursive straitjacket and in part because I now have an eight-month-old baby boy into whose eyes I must look every day.”
- The author is a fellow at a lot of thinktanks and a visiting lecturer at Yale.
- Hunter Ash has a more reassuring take on Twitter: “All the achievements of the human mind only arrive when we cooperate at scale, and involve a lot of iteration and real-world bottlenecks. Newton’s discoveries ultimately enabled us to fly, but they didn’t give Newton the power to fly. If he were isolated, his physics would be almost entirely useless to him. And it’s not just that he couldn’t build an airplane on his own, it’s that he couldn’t design one on his own. Powered flight was the result of tons of iteration, which is to say evolutionary computation. So was the car. Very few of the inventions that revolutionized the world were ‘one-shotted’. To be sure, having smart nodes in your evolutionary computation makes it faster. Rather than random search as in biological evolution, intelligence at least modestly concentrates mutation probabilities towards more fit forms. This is a big deal, but it isn’t magic. Fundamentally, the world is just not that compressible. Golden motes of compressibility are the treasured exceptions in thingspace, not the rule. I expect the post-AGI future will look much the same. Change will be much faster, but it will still be iterative, cooperative, and bottlenecked by the messy incompressibility of physical reality. Doom makes sense in a world with magic. If intelligence alone allowed you to move mountains, I would share the worries. But we don’t live in that world. Here, great things are achieved gradually, iteratively, and cooperatively. Pure IQ does not allow you to levitate or hypnotize or teleport. It makes you a better node in the distributed evolutionary process which is the layer where most of the thinking happens. If I were to psychologize, I’d say people who define themselves by their intelligence overestimate the (direct) power of intelligence.”
- Formalizing Fermat’s Last Theorem (Anthropic): “Recently, Tianyi Peng, an Anthropic researcher whose group at Columbia University builds tools for AI formalization, set out to test whether Claude could make progress on formalizing FLT. The result went further than he expected. In 11 days, working largely autonomously, Claude produced the first end-to-end, computer-checked proof of FLT. Along the way, it wrote 13 million lines of Lean and proved 29,500 intermediate theorems.” (recommended by a student)
- How an AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy (Celina Zhao & Adrian Cho, Science): “Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster of New York University and Levent Alpöge, a researcher affiliated with Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s major competitors, had made significant progress solving the problem over the past month using AI tools adapted from OpenAI and Anthropic. But before they could publicize their findings, OpenAI mounted its own colossal effort—pouring millions of dollars of computational resources into the problem. OpenAI says it didn’t knowingly tap into Buckmaster and Alpöge’s latest work, but Buckmaster has released public statements questioning that position.” (recommended by a student)
- The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations (Dwarkesh Patel, Substack): “Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.”
- I’m an evangelical. My faith isn’t ‘a cancer.’ (Bonnie Kristian, Washington Post): “Research shows that practicing evangelicals are markedly more likely than those who leave the church to ‘avoid discrimination based on race,’ to provide ‘financially and/or practically for the poor and oppressed’ and to avoid lying, stealing and greed. Evangelicals donate twelve times as much to disaster relief and missions as they spend on politics. According to a study conducted by the American Bible Society in conjunction with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, of the religious demographics surveyed, evangelicals lead both in the average amount donated and in the percentage of people donating money — not just to churches, but to religious and nonreligious charities. Those numbers match my experience over a lifetime in evangelicalism. Evangelical churches and communities are not perfect, but they are good, full of people sincerely seeking to love God, study Scripture and bring you a casserole.”
- FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses: “The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.”
- Meet Stanford’s self-styled ‘art ranger’ (Charity Ferreira, Stanford News): “Sequence (2006) is one of many pieces that take regular upkeep. Shunney works with conservation teams to clean, paint, seal, wax, buff, or oil dozens of others on a rotating schedule. A glossy ceramic coating, the kind used on high-end cars, is applied to Deborah Kass’ Lamborghini yellow OY/YO (2019) so that everything from tree sap to bird poop to handprints ‘washes right off with a garden hose.’ Alexander Calder’s The Falcon (1963) is refurbished annually in a process that takes three days and uses a black paint so matte it’s almost invisible – the original shade was developed by the military for use on stealth bombers. That paint’s manufacturer no longer exists, and when the Calder Foundation approved a substitute, Shunney said, ‘we gobbled up a bunch of inventory.’ ”
- Humpback whales are interrupting orca hunts to rescue completely different species, swimming underneath a doomed seal and lifting it out of the water on their chest, or forming a wall between the killers and a grey whale calf, and scientists still can’t fully explain why they bother to save animals they have nothing to gain from: “…the team compiled 115 documented interactions between humpback whales and killer whales over a sixty-two-year period from 1951 to 2012. The interactions came from researchers, whale-watch operators and wildlife photographers across multiple ocean basins.… The interventions weren’t casual. Humpbacks travelled up to two kilometres to reach an ongoing attack. They approached bellowing and trumpeting. They positioned themselves between the killer whales and the prey. They tail-slashed. They struck orcas with their flippers, which on a fourteen-metre humpback are capable of doing real damage. They stayed for hours in some cases, refusing to leave until the killer whales gave up.”
Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen
- Worm Girl Asks Worm Boyfriend If He’d Still Love Her If She Were A Human (Babylon Bee)
- Cockroach Milk, How to Blow Your Nose, and Mosquito Printers: The Ig Nobels of 2026 (Jorge Garay, Wired): “Achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. That’s the motto of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annual competition that—parodying the Nobel Prizes—recognizes some of the world’s most unusual scientific studies. The organization Improbable Research has been hosting the event since 1991 with the aim of showing that science also has a humorous side in its quest to meaningfully answer questions about the world. This year the ceremony was held in Zurich, Switzerland, and recognized 10 research projects ranging from an attempt to scientifically define what a kiss is to an experiment that used buried underwear to assess soil health.”
- The Ig Nobel site with the full citations of the studies: improbable.com/ig/winners
- Woman Praying That The Lord’s Will Be Done As Long As It’s The Same As Her Will (Babylon Bee)
- The Weird, Hyperlocal Customs of the Country (Nat Segebre, New York Times): “In a field west of Lake Okeechobee, I watched a 13-year-old Seminole boy learn to wrestle alligators in an inflatable kiddie pool — after his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before that. In another town I saw an armadillo race put on in honor of a stew made from what’s called swamp cabbage, or the heart of the sabal palm. I visited a town in the Appalachian foothills of Pennsylvania where residents pull rattlesnakes out of the woods to showcase them for an afternoon, and a shoreline in Virginia where every summer 200 or so wild ponies are herded into the water for a mass swim. In Twinsburg, Ohio, thousands of twins gather every August for a festival they treat as a family reunion. It’s the one place, some of the twins told me, where everybody understands them.”
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.