TGFI, Volume 578: coral restoration and a new dwarf planet?

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. Stan­ford sci­en­tists find solu­tion to reverse coral bleach­ing (Abi­gail Chan, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The team, led by third-year Ph.D. can­di­date Dan­ny Collins, dis­cov­ered that bleached corals could make a com­plete recov­ery when paired with a healthy coun­ter­part. The team pub­lished their recent find­ings in ‘Sci­ence Advances.’ ” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  2. ‘I’m just a car­pen­ter from Bend’: Father who killed Sil­ver Rail school shoot­er grap­ples with the after­math (Emi­ly Cure­ton Cook & Jen Baires, Ore­gon Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing): “That’s when I start­ed hear­ing chil­dren plead­ing for their lives and then I start­ed hear­ing gun­fire and I just start­ed army crawl­ing faster and faster and I told myself this is prob­a­bly the last thing that I’m ever going to do.” — This sto­ry is wild.
  3. New Dwarf Plan­et Hid­ing in Our Solar Sys­tem? (NOVA, PBS) — sev­en min­utes of absolute cool­ness.
  4. My Cal­i­for­nia Bal­lot, 2026 (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “As effec­tive altru­ists, we are called to care for all crea­tures, from slimy shrimp to bod­i­less AIs, and so we may — per­haps — try to cul­ti­vate a tiny mea­sure of com­pas­sion for Cal­i­for­nia politi­cians. They face the near-impos­si­ble task of gov­ern­ing a state whose res­i­dents are allowed to kneecap them how­ev­er they want through a bonkers bal­lot propo­si­tion sys­tem. If they try to build hous­es, a thou­sand local NIMBY groups will rise up to thwart them; if they don’t, the vot­ers will kick them out for let­ting hous­ing become unaf­ford­able. If they tol­er­ate home­less peo­ple and crim­i­nals, the vot­ers will remove them for fail­ing to pri­or­i­tize pub­lic order; if they don’t tol­er­ate them, the vot­ers will remove them for cru­el­ty and unfair­ness. Hav­ing giv­en them this small mea­sure of sym­pa­thy, we can admit that Cal­i­forn­ian politi­cians most­ly fail to live up to even the very low base­line we can fair­ly expect from them.”
    • I always find Scot­t’s bal­lot analy­sis posts help­ful even when I dis­agree with him. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed if you want to see what it looks like to thought­ful­ly eval­u­ate your options before cast­ing a bal­lot. Insert your own val­ues over Scot­t’s wher­ev­er there is diver­gence, obvi­ous­ly.
  5. AI Relat­ed
    • Benchma®king (James Bri­dle, Emer­gence Mag­a­zine): “What we have here is, quite lit­er­al­ly, a chair designed by some­one who has read a lot about chairs but nev­er actu­al­ly sat in one. They know what a chair should look like, what it should do, the mechan­ics of how one is put togeth­er, the physics of hold­ing you up. But they have no embod­ied expe­ri­ence of the world, no his­to­ry with chairs or any oth­er object, no phys­i­cal mem­o­ry. They don’t know how it feels, not mere­ly to sit in a chair, but to encounter one in the world, to place it among oth­er things in a home, to live with it, to be around it every day as one goes about the mun­dane busi­ness of life. This is the idea of a chair brought to life; but things—objects, beings, relationships—are not mere ideas, and you cer­tain­ly can’t get every aspect of them from books. The chair is low stakes, but, once again, you wouldn’t want to run a soci­ety, or a cul­ture, or a plan­et this way.”
      • Fair­ly fas­ci­nat­ing in bits, but I con­fess to skim­ming parts of it. The author is wordy!
    • AI dom­i­nates human peer reviews (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “ ‘We show that AI-gen­er­at­ed arti­cle reviews are now bet­ter, by every mea­sure we could con­struct, than reviews writ­ten by well-com­pen­sat­ed human experts and judged to be of unusu­al­ly high qual­i­ty by jour­nal edi­tors and authors. We then dis­cuss how this result may inform jour­nal pol­i­cy choic­es, with con­cern­ing down­sides as well as poten­tial paths to increase pub­li­ca­tion speed and qual­i­ty; reduce adver­sar­i­al inter­ac­tions; improve the expe­ri­ence of edi­tors, review­ers, authors, and read­ers; and advance sci­ence.’ By Gary King and Steven Wor­thing­ton, not even using what are now the very best mod­els, rather based on Claude Opus 4.8. The details of the dom­i­nance, as out­lined in the paper, are strik­ing. It is not close.”
  6. How the Main­stream Recruits for the Manos­phere (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “[Women blame men for their prob­lems far more than men blame women for theirs.] One of the sig­na­ture appeals of the manos­phere is pro­vid­ing true sta­tis­tics like this rarely men­tioned in main­stream dis­cus­sion. The canon­i­cal case here is the fact that women ini­ti­ate the vast major­i­ty of divorces. But this is anoth­er good exam­ple. Harvard’s Steven Pinker has not­ed that encoun­ter­ing true facts that aren’t said in main­stream soci­ety is a prime vec­tor of online rad­i­cal­iza­tion.”
  7. Notes on a Burn­ing Flag­ship (Daniel Sil­li­man, Sub­stack): “Ruth Gra­ham reports—accurately, I was there, though I’m not the source for this information—that a new leader at Chris­tian­i­ty Today said, a year ago, that CT need­ed to be less like Wheaton Col­lege and more like Tik­Tok.… Two younger staffers had been exper­i­ment­ing with the plat­form, see­ing what it could do, how it con­nect­ed. They were fig­ur­ing out how to take, e.g., news reports about evan­gel­i­cals in the UK giv­ing up their banks for lent, and turn them into short­form video. What they were doing seemed to have the poten­tial to reach and build new audi­ences. It was excit­ing. Until sud­den­ly word came down from the top that it was shut down. No expla­na­tion. Just end­ed. The per­son mak­ing Tik­Tok videos was laid off right after lead­er­ship said CT needs to be more like Tik­Tok. So the mes­sage, some­how, was less like Wheaton, more like Tik­Tok, but also no Tik­Tok.”

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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