Tag: apologetically interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 428

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.

This is vol­ume 428 and I, being an eas­i­ly amused man, am pleased that 4*2=8.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot: How Rivals Became Friends (Joel J. Miller, Rab­bit Room): “Did Charles Williams know what would hap­pen when he invit­ed his mutu­als, C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, to tea? One sus­pects. Lewis had long reg­is­tered dis­ap­proval of Eliot’s work. But sure­ly they’d get on in per­son, no? No. It was 1945 and the trio con­vened at the Mitre Hotel in Oxford. The first words out of Eliot’s mouth? ‘Mr. Lewis,’ he exclaimed, ‘you are a much old­er man than you appear in pho­tographs!’ The meet­ing dete­ri­o­rat­ed from there.”
  2. Abun­dance: The Deep­est Real­i­ty (Bethany Lor­den, Stan­ford Review): “It is true, I have nev­er lacked food or shel­ter or any neces­si­ty; yet every day, I see the most priv­i­leged peo­ple in the world live as though they are impov­er­ished. As stu­dents, we hoard our time, fear our midterms, and dread the future. But what if the bless­ings that land­ed us at Stan­ford con­tin­ue into our future? What if our class­es were not a bur­den, but a gift of learn­ing? What if our lives and our soci­ety mir­ror nature, where alpine sun­flow­ers reemerge every spring on the harsh­est tun­dra, where a square foot of dry prairie nour­ish­es three dozen species of plants, where no tree or ani­mal dies with­out sus­tain­ing new life?”
    • Dis­claimer: Bethany is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha. Also, I espe­cial­ly liked this bit: “R&DE seems to assume that stu­dent sat­is­fac­tion is a zero-sum game: the web­site states that ‘Direct swaps between stu­dents are not per­mit­ted, as the hous­ing assign­ment process is meant to be equi­table, and not based on who you know.’ If a room­mate switch makes one stu­dent bet­ter off, then the trade must have exploit­ed anoth­er. Yet by deal­ing with rela­tion­ships as if they were a lim­it­ed resource, R&DE has made them so. Instead of cre­at­ing com­mu­ni­ty (by def­i­n­i­tion, a net­work ‘based on who you know’), R&DE has made every­one ‘equi­tably’ mis­er­able.”
  3. Why I Ran Away from Phi­los­o­phy Because of Sam Bankman-Fried (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “It’s true, of course, that a philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem is not dis­proved if its advo­cates are crim­i­nals and tyrants—but this link­age must be a cause for alarm and sus­pi­cion. The bur­den of proof is on those who want to sep­a­rate a person’s core prin­ci­ples from the results they pro­duce in actu­al life.”
    • I some­times bag on util­i­tar­i­an­ism gen­er­al­ly (and some­times specif­i­cal­ly the effec­tive altru­ism move­ment). This essay may help you see why. Utilitarian/consequentialist eth­i­cal sys­tems are just wrong. Not mere­ly wrong in the sense of being incor­rect, but also wrong in the sense of being immoral.
  4. Some Israel / Hamas war arti­cles:
    • Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gam­bit to Cre­ate a ‘Per­ma­nent’ State of War (Ben Hub­bard and Maria Abi-Habib, The New York Times): “Thou­sands have been killed in Gaza, with entire fam­i­lies wiped out. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Pales­tin­ian neigh­bor­hoods to expans­es of rub­ble, while doc­tors treat scream­ing chil­dren in dark­ened hos­pi­tals with no anes­the­sia. Across the Mid­dle East, fear has spread over the pos­si­ble out­break of a broad­er region­al war. But in the bloody arith­metic of Hamas’s lead­ers, the car­nage is not the regret­table out­come of a big mis­cal­cu­la­tion. Quite the oppo­site, they say: It is the nec­es­sary cost of a great accom­plish­ment — the shat­ter­ing of the sta­tus quo and the open­ing of a new, more volatile chap­ter in their fight against Israel.”
      • Unlocked and well worth read­ing.
    • “No par­ent is going to do that”: Shafai fam­i­ly from Mass­a­chu­setts trapped in Gaza told they can leave with­out their chil­dren (Christi­na Hager, CBS News): “They had the names of my broth­er and his wife on the list, but they did­n’t have the kids,” said Hani Shafai. His broth­er Hazem and his wife Sanaa were excit­ed to see their names on a list cus­toms author­i­ties put out nam­ing peo­ple who could cross into Egypt to safe­ty. The prob­lem was, there was no men­tion of their three chil­dren. “They were told they can cross, but they have to leave the kids behind. And, as you know, no par­ent is going to do that, and he said no,” said Hani Shafai.
      • Bro. Data­base errors hap­pen, I get it. But it seems to me this is the kind of sit­u­a­tion where instead of turn­ing them away you ask them to step to the side, offer them some water and snacks, and have some­one inves­ti­gate to fig­ure out what hap­pened so they can leave with their kids.
    • Inside a Gaza bed­room, sol­diers search­ing for tun­nels find how low Hamas can go (Emanuel Fabi­an, Times of Israel): “In terms of its size, where it led and what it was intend­ed for, the tun­nel was much like the oth­er 90 found in the area. What set it apart, though, was its loca­tion. The shaft had been uncov­ered by sol­diers of the Com­bat Engi­neer­ing Corps’ 614th Bat­tal­ion as they car­ried out a sec­ond round of sweeps in a sin­gle-fam­i­ly home — with an out­door swim­ming pool — in an upscale beach­side neigh­bor­hood. Inside a bed­room scat­tered with bright­ly col­ored clothes, under­neath one of three child-sized beds, sol­diers had found a por­tal to where mon­sters were hid­ing.”
    • The “Geno­cide” Canard Against Israel (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “…if Israel were inter­est­ed in the “geno­cide” of Pales­tin­ian Arabs, it has had the means to accom­plish it for a very long time. And yet, for some rea­son, the Arab pop­u­la­tion of Israel and the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries has explod­ed since 1948, and the Arabs in Israel prop­er have vot­ing rights, and a key pres­ence in the Knes­set.… And real geno­cide is hap­pen­ing else­where in the world right now as well, but it receives a frac­tion of the atten­tion. In Dar­fur, between 2003 and 2005, around 200,000 mem­bers of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa eth­nic groups were mur­dered in a clear case of geno­cide that has recent­ly revived. This year, some 180,000 civil­ians have fled to Chad, pur­sued by the Jan­jaweed — the Ein­satz­grup­pen of cen­tral Africa. If your view is derived from crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, you should be par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned about this geno­cide, since it is direct­ed at black Africans by Islamist Arabs. But the cam­pus left is unin­ter­est­ed.”
    • ‘I Feel a Human Dete­ri­o­ra­tion’ (Lulu Gar­cia-Navar­ro, New York Times): “And when I see peo­ple watch­ing the hor­ri­ble tragedy that is hap­pen­ing here as if it were a Super Bowl of vic­tim­hood, in which you sup­port one team and real­ly don’t care about the oth­er, empa­thy becomes very, very selec­tive. You see only some pain. You don’t want to see oth­er pain.”
  5. Died: Frank Bor­man, Apol­lo 8 Astro­naut Who Broad­cast Gen­e­sis from Space (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “On Decem­ber 24, as a cam­era showed the lunar sur­face pass­ing below a win­dow, the three astro­nauts read the Scrip­ture from a piece of paper. Bor­man went last, clos­ing with vers­es 9 and 10: ‘And God said, Let the waters under the heav­en be gath­ered togeth­er unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gath­er­ing togeth­er of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.’ Then he said, ‘From the crew of Apol­lo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Mer­ry Christ­mas and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.’ ”
  6. Crit­i­cal Grace The­o­ry (Carl True­man, First Things): “Isa­iah, Paul, and Augus­tine are far bet­ter sources of social crit­i­cism than Horkheimer, Mar­cuse, or Cren­shaw. Yes, the world is imper­fect and unjust and filled with strife. Sad­ly, such are the wages of sin. Acknowl­edg­ing the fall of man does not entail a pas­sive accep­tance of injus­tice or evil. The doc­trine of orig­i­nal sin does not entail the con­clu­sion that noth­ing can ever be improved and that efforts of social reform are point­less. But a recog­ni­tion that sin under­lies unjust social sys­tems means that our crit­i­cal the­o­riz­ing must be shaped by our belief in God’s grace and the heal­ing pow­er of for­give­ness, both for our­selves and for oth­ers. No crit­i­cal the­o­ry that fails to place these the­o­log­i­cal truths at the cen­ter of its analy­sis and pro­pos­als is com­pat­i­ble with Chris­tian­i­ty.”
  7. How Ear­ly Morn­ing Class­es Change Aca­d­e­m­ic Tra­jec­to­ries: Evi­dence from a Nat­ur­al Exper­i­ment (Antho­ny Lok­T­ing Yim, SSRN): “Using a nat­ur­al exper­i­ment which ran­dom­ized class times to stu­dents, this study reveals that enrolling in ear­ly morn­ing class­es low­ers stu­dents’ course grades and the like­li­hood of future STEM course enroll­ment. There is a 79% reduc­tion in pur­su­ing the cor­re­spond­ing major and a 26% rise in choos­ing a low­er-earn­ing major, pre­dom­i­nant­ly influ­enced by ear­ly morn­ing STEM class­es. To under­stand the mech­a­nism, I con­duct­ed a sur­vey of under­grad­u­ate stu­dents enrolled in an intro­duc­to­ry course, some of whom were assigned to a 7:30 AM sec­tion.”
    • Dis­clo­sure: I only skimmed the arti­cle. I find it plau­si­ble enough to pass on and am not skep­ti­cal enough of its claims to feel moti­vat­ed to read it thor­ough­ly. The author is an econ­o­mist at Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty, and the study is about stu­dents at Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Bot­tom line: avoid ear­ly morn­ing class­es.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • God vs Noth­ing (Pete Holmes, YouTube): one minute, lan­guage is a bit crude but this is bril­liant at points
  • Hard­ball Ques­tions For The Next Debate (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Hel­lo, and wel­come to the third Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry debate. To shore up declin­ing vot­er inter­est, we’ve decid­ed to make things more inter­est­ing tonight. In this first round, each can­di­date will have to avoid using a spe­cif­ic let­ter of the alpha­bet in their answer. If they slip up, they for­feit their remain­ing time, and the next can­di­date in line gets the floor. Our can­di­dates who have qual­i­fied today are Chris Christie, Nik­ki Haley, Ron DeSan­tis, and Don­ald Trump.”
    • This gets increas­ing­ly absurd and amus­ing and I actu­al­ly laughed out loud at the end.
  • “Octo­bunk” stacks up fun at Stan­ford (Anna Yang, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “In the ear­ly hours of Oct. 20, a group of around 20 fresh­men assem­bled on the Oval, ready to begin the con­struc­tion of the ‘Octo­bunk.’ Their plan was to stack eight dorm beds on top of each oth­er in the Oval, mak­ing a tow­er that cre­at­ed a large bunk bed. Near­ly 100 stu­dents showed up to observe the event at around 2 a.m. — a com­bi­na­tion of peo­ple who had heard of the tremen­dous feat by word-of-mouth, or peo­ple who had sim­ply been walk­ing past.”
    • This is glo­ri­ous and the stu­dents who orga­nized it should auto­mat­i­cal­ly be elect­ed to ASSU and only dis­placed by peo­ple who spark equal or greater joy.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 422

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.

This is vol­ume 422, a num­ber which feels like it should have a lot of prime fac­tors but which only has two: 422 = 2·211.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why reli­gious belief pro­vides a real buffer against sui­cide risk (David H Ros­marin, Psy­che): “The sci­en­tif­ic world in gen­er­al, and the dis­ci­plines of behav­iour­al health in par­tic­u­lar, tend to be biased against mat­ters of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and reli­gion. The exist­ing lit­er­a­ture is enough to show that these fac­tors have large pro­tec­tive effects against sui­cide. If anoth­er vari­able had even half the val­ue for any major pub­lic health con­cern, I sus­pect it would receive sub­stan­tial­ly more atten­tion.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Med­ical School.
  2. Being There (David French, New York Times): “I’ve nev­er met a per­son who wants to lose friends. But I’ve met many, many peo­ple who suf­fer from lone­li­ness and say that they just ‘lost touch.’ What hap­pened? I ask. ‘Life hap­pened,’ they say. At each new stage of life it was eas­i­er to say no to a friend than to say no to work, to a spouse, to one’s kids. And while each indi­vid­ual no can be under­stand­able and even jus­ti­fi­able, the accu­mu­la­tion of noes suf­fo­cates friend­ships, even with­out an argu­ment, a breach or a betray­al.”
  3. Unable to Find Ulti­mate Truth in Zen Bud­dhism, I Turned to Jesus (Sita Slavov, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In Zen, I often felt alone in the trench­es with my dark­est thoughts and feel­ings. And even the most beau­ti­ful moments I expe­ri­enced dur­ing meditation—those moments of delight in God’s creation—were use­less with­out a com­pelling frame­work to process and inte­grate them into my life. In con­trast, when I med­i­tate on God’s Word and pres­ence, the Holy Spir­it sus­tains me in the trench­es, and Scrip­ture pro­vides the frame­work to under­stand my expe­ri­ence.”
    • Unlocked.
  4. Win­ners don’t do irony (Janan Ganesh, Finan­cial Times): “Peo­ple who deal in high­er stakes have to insu­late them­selves from the arch­ness and cyn­i­cism of the wider cul­ture. Irony gets noth­ing done. It is the creed of the pas­sive observ­er. Not every­one who is inca­pable of irony is a win­ner, no. But lots of win­ners are inca­pable of irony.”
  5. New athe­ism has col­lapsed. The tide is turn­ing on belief in God (Justin Brier­ly, Pre­miere Chris­tian­i­ty): “Sci­ence and rea­son alone won’t buy you mean­ing, pur­pose and val­ue. Apart from its inter­nal squab­bles, the real rea­son that New Athe­ism stalled as a cul­tur­al move­ment was that it failed to give peo­ple a sto­ry to live their life by, so peo­ple went look­ing for a sto­ry else­where.”
  6. A green card pro­cess­ing change means US could lose thou­sands of faith lead­ers from abroad (Gio­van­na Dell’Orto, AP News): “A sud­den pro­ce­dur­al change in how the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment process­es green cards for for­eign-born reli­gious work­ers, togeth­er with his­toric highs in num­bers of ille­gal bor­der crossers, means that thou­sands of cler­gy like him are los­ing the abil­i­ty to remain in this coun­try.”
    • This obser­va­tion was inter­est­ing to me: “Those from reli­gious orders with vows of pover­ty, like Catholic nuns and Bud­dhist monks, are espe­cial­ly hard hit, because most oth­er employ­ment visa cat­e­gories require employ­ers to show they’re pay­ing for­eign work­ers pre­vail­ing wages. Since they’re get­ting no wages, they don’t qual­i­fy.”
    • Sen­tences like that are pre­cise­ly why reli­gious exemp­tions are need­ed for some laws — the law on its face seems rea­son­able and is designed to pro­tect work­ers, but it has the effect of harm­ing reli­gious work­ers of mul­ti­ple faiths because the total­ly fine way they do things does­n’t map onto the way most of soci­ety works.
  7. Drones Every­where: How the Tech­no­log­i­cal Rev­o­lu­tion on Ukraine Bat­tle­fields Is Reshap­ing Mod­ern War­fare (Yaroslav Trofi­mov, Wall Street Jour­nal): “ ‘It’s a ques­tion of cost,’ said Phillips O’Brien, a pro­fes­sor of strate­gic stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews in Scot­land. ‘If you can destroy an expen­sive, heavy sys­tem for some­thing that costs much much less, then actu­al­ly the pow­er dif­fer­en­tial between the two coun­tries doesn’t mat­ter as much.’… When it comes to tanks, in par­tic­u­lar, the les­son of the Ukrain­ian war is that tank-on-tank bat­tles have become a rarity—which means that the rel­a­tive sophis­ti­ca­tion of a tank is no longer as impor­tant. Few­er than 5% of tanks destroyed since the war began had been hit by oth­er tanks, accord­ing to Ukrain­ian offi­cials, with the rest suc­cumb­ing to mines, artillery, anti­tank mis­siles and drones.”

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 420

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.

This is vol­ume 420, a num­ber with cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance and also two inter­est­ing math­e­mat­i­cal prop­er­ties. 420 = 101 + 103 + 107 + 109 = 20 x 21. In oth­er words, it is both the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes and also the prod­uct of two con­sec­u­tive num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. We Are Repa­ganiz­ing (Louise Per­ry, First Things): “The supreme­ly strange thing about Chris­tian­i­ty in anthro­po­log­i­cal terms is that it takes a top­sy-turvy atti­tude toward weak­ness and strength. To put it crude­ly, most cul­tures look at the pow­er­ful and the wealthy and assume that they must be doing some­thing right to have attained such might. The poor are poor because of some fail­ing of their own, whether in this life or the last. The small­ness and fee­ble­ness of women and chil­dren is a sign that they must be com­mand­ed by men. The suf­fer­ing of slaves is not an argu­ment against slav­ery, but an argu­ment against allow­ing one­self to be enslaved. Most cultures—perfectly logically—glorify war­riors and kings, not those at the bot­tom of the heap. But Chris­tian­i­ty takes a per­verse atti­tude toward sta­tus and puts that per­ver­si­ty at the heart of the the­ol­o­gy. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong’ is a baf­fling and alarm­ing claim to any­one from a soci­ety untouched by the strange­ness of the Jesus move­ment.”
    • This is a remark­able essay about Chris­tian­i­ty by a non-Chris­t­ian. 10/10 rec­om­mend.
  2. Ross Douthat’s The­o­ries of Per­sua­sion (Isaac Chotin­er, The New York­er): “This is not con­spir­a­cy-adja­cent, but I think that nice sec­u­lar peo­ple like you and Sam are sort of blind to some obvi­ous super­nat­ur­al real­i­ties about the world. I think lots of peo­ple have good rea­sons to end up in that kind of ter­ri­to­ry. And the ques­tion I don’t know the answer to is: Why is it so nat­ur­al once you’re in that ter­ri­to­ry to go all the way to where R.F.K. is?” He con­tin­ued, “I spend a lot of my own intel­lec­tu­al ener­gy try­ing not to let my sort of eccen­tric views blind me to the fact that the estab­lish­ment still gets a lot of bor­ing, obvi­ous things right.”
    • I found this interview/profile of Douthat charm­ing.
  3. Sin­gle­ness Is Not a Sin (Lyman Stone, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Mar­riage is insti­tut­ed for mutu­al ser­vice by spous­es and joint ser­vice to the next gen­er­a­tion. Celiba­cy is insti­tut­ed for ser­vice to the church (not as a require­ment for church ser­vice but as a pos­si­ble aid to it). Wid­ows like­wise are com­mand­ed to be hos­pitable and help­ful to younger peo­ple. Unless sin­gle­ness is clear­ly defined as a state that has some pur­pose ori­ent­ed toward the good of the neigh­bor (not just inci­den­tal­ly ben­e­fi­cial but pur­po­sive­ly so), it is dif­fi­cult to under­stand what pos­si­ble endorse­ment the sta­tus can be giv­en. It is not sin­ful, but it is not good.”
  4. Let’s Have a Talk About Edu­ca­tion and Reli­gious Atten­dance (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I just don’t know how you look at all this data that I’ve brought to bear and con­clude that there’s not a pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship between edu­ca­tion and reli­gious atten­dance. You most cer­tain­ly can­not con­clude that it’s a neg­a­tive rela­tion­ship. That finds basi­cal­ly no sup­port in this data at all. There’s some evi­dence that the rela­tion­ship may not be sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant, but for me, the regres­sion clears that up. Peo­ple who are more edu­cat­ed are more like­ly to be attend­ing a reli­gious ser­vice in the local house of wor­ship this week­end than those with a high school diplo­ma or less. That’s what the pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence tells me.”
    • A deep­er dive than you often find on this top­ic. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. ‘O Slay the Wicked’: How Chris­tians Sing Curs­es (Greg Morse, Desir­ing God): “Do we ever say any­thing uncom­fort­able in the pres­ence of evil — or worse, do we even care? The psalmists did. We accuse them of cru­el­ty; they accuse us of a twist­ed sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. We accuse them of not con­sid­er­ing man; they accuse us of not con­sid­er­ing God.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Before You Share Your Faith! How to Be ‘Evan­ge­lism Ready’ (Matt Smethurst, The Gospel Coali­tion): a 16 minute pod­cast rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I liked the con­tent, the deliv­ery was less grip­ping than I expect­ed. Worth­while.
  7. Book Review: Elon Musk (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I think Elon Musk is 1‑in‑1,000 lev­el intel­li­gent — which is great, but means there are still 300,000 peo­ple in Amer­i­ca smarter than he is. I think he wins by being 1‑in-10,000,000 intense.”
    • This review is full of fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ries. 10/10 rec­om­mend if you have any inter­est what­so­ev­er in Elon Musk.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 410

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.

This is vol­ume 410, which hap­pens to be the HTTP sta­tus code for a resource being per­ma­nent­ly gone.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How elite schools like Stan­ford became fix­at­ed on the AI apoc­a­lypse (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Stu­dents who join the AI safe­ty com­mu­ni­ty some­times get more than free boba. Just as EA con­fer­ences once meant trav­el­ing the world and hav­ing one-on-one meet­ings with wealthy, influ­en­tial donors, Open Philanthropy’s new uni­ver­si­ty fel­low­ship offers a hefty direct deposit: under­grad­u­ate lead­ers receive as much as $80,000 a year, plus $14,500 for health insur­ance, and up to $100,000 a year to cov­er group expens­es.”
    • Bro — what? Stan­ford won’t even let us pay for a guest speak­er with out­side funds. It’s not clear that the under­grad stu­dents lead­ers at Stan­ford are mak­ing $80k a year, but it’s not clear that they’re not, either. Some stu­dent some­where is, and that’s wild.
  2. Where’s Wal­do? How to Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Prove You Found Him With­out Reveal­ing Where He Is (Jack Murtagh, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can):  “Amaz­ing­ly, every claim that I can prove to you with a tra­di­tion­al math­e­mat­i­cal proof can also be proved in zero knowl­edge. Take your favorite result in math, and you could in prin­ci­ple prove it to a friend while show­ing them bup­kes about how it works. This is a pro­found dis­cov­ery about the nature of proof itself. Cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing.”
    • Zero-knowl­edge proofs are wild. That last sen­tence “cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing” helped me real­ize that there are inter­est­ing par­al­lels to how peo­ple come to faith.
      • It is usu­al­ly an inter­ac­tive process. God begins to draw some­one repeat­ed­ly.
      • It is a prob­a­bilis­tic process. Things keep hap­pen­ing to the soon-to-be con­vert that don’t make sense. I mean, sure they could have hap­pened by chance because any­thing can hap­pen by chance. But they keep hap­pen­ing in a way that is exceed­ing­ly improb­a­ble.
      • The new con­vert’s con­fi­dence in God far exceeds their under­stand­ing of God.
    • God — the orig­i­nal zero-knowl­edge prover. To wax Aris­totelian, He is the unproved prover.
  3. Pas­tor Douša’s case shows the U.S. is not immune to author­i­tar­i­an crack­downs on dis­sent (Scott Welder, Pro­tect Democ­ra­cy): “…DHS retal­i­at­ed against Pas­tor Douša for min­is­ter­ing to migrants and refugees in Mex­i­co in Decem­ber 2018 by restrict­ing her Trust­ed Trav­el­er priv­i­leges; sub­ject­ing her to extra screen­ing at the south­ern bor­der; and telling Mex­i­can author­i­ties, false­ly, that there was ‘a great pos­si­bil­i­ty’ that she did not have ‘ade­quate doc­u­men­ta­tion to be in Mex­i­co’ and sug­gest­ing that the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment ‘deny [her] entry to Mex­i­co’ and ‘send [her] back to the Unit­ed States.’ A CBP offi­cial lat­er admit­ted that the request to Mex­i­can author­i­ties was ‘cre­ative writ­ing,’ ‘with­out any basis.’ But DHS’s actions made it more dif­fi­cult for Pas­tor Douša to con­tin­ue her min­istry, even­tu­al­ly caus­ing her to lim­it her activ­i­ties in the Unit­ed States and to end her min­istry in Mex­i­co alto­geth­er.”
  4. On some of the recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • Why the Cham­pi­ons of Affir­ma­tive Action Had to Leave Asian Amer­i­cans Behind (Jay Caspi­an Kang, The New York­er): “Asian Amer­i­cans, the group whom the suit was sup­pos­ed­ly about, have been odd­ly absent from the con­ver­sa­tions that have fol­lowed the rul­ing. The repet­i­tive­ness of the affir­ma­tive-action debate has come about, in large part, because both the courts and the media have most­ly ignored the Asian Amer­i­can plain­tiffs and cho­sen, instead, to relit­i­gate the same argu­ments about mer­it, white suprema­cy, and priv­i­lege. Dur­ing the five years I spent cov­er­ing this case, the com­men­ta­tors defend­ing affir­ma­tive action almost nev­er dis­proved the cen­tral claim that dis­crim­i­na­tion was tak­ing place against Asian Amer­i­cans, even as they dis­missed the plain­tiffs as pawns who had been duped by a con­ser­v­a­tive legal activist. They almost always redi­rect­ed the con­ver­sa­tion to some­thing else—often lega­cy admis­sions.”
    • On Race and Acad­e­mia (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “As an aca­d­e­m­ic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these expe­ri­ences in inter­views and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve nev­er shared them in an arti­cle like this one. The respons­es I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s deci­sion move me to ven­ture it. The cul­ture that a pol­i­cy helps put into place can be as impor­tant as the pol­i­cy itself. And in my life­time, racial pref­er­ences in acad­e­mia — not mere­ly when it comes to under­grad­u­ate admis­sions but also mov­ing on to grad school and job appli­ca­tions and teach­ing careers — have been not only a set of for­mal and infor­mal poli­cies but also the grounds for a cul­ture of per­cep­tions and assump­tions.”
      • This is a very raw and vul­ner­a­ble piece. Rec­om­mend­ed. His Ph.D. is from Stan­ford.
    • Cov­er­ing the 303 Cre­ative deci­sion: Why do reporters keep ignor­ing the fine print? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “I wish reporters would be hon­est in admit­ting that much of the anger expressed over the ver­dict stems from how Lorie Smith out­wit­ted her oppo­nents by fil­ing suit first, rather than endur­ing  a string of law­suits like what Jack Phillips is hav­ing to endure. I’m look­ing for that inves­tiga­tive piece on the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion that, after hav­ing been reproved twice now by the Supreme Court, hasn’t changed its ways at all. Where is that New York­er take-out on Autumn Scar­di­na, the trans­gen­der attor­ney whose per­son­al vendet­ta against Phillips just nev­er ends because the courts have giv­en her a free pass? I’m wait­ing.”
    • My Win at the Supreme Court Is a Win for All Amer­i­cans (Lorie Smith, Real Clear Reli­gion): “I can’t say every­thing every­one wants me to. I can’t pre­tend to agree with every idea pre­sent­ed to me. None of us can. None of us should have to. Each of us should be free to pur­sue truth, hold to our faith, respect­ful­ly speak our beliefs, and thought­ful­ly live them out day by day, with­out the gov­ern­ment telling us what to believe or say. If that’s the free­dom you want – for your­self, for your fam­i­ly and friends, for all of those who share your ideas and con­vic­tions – then my vic­to­ry is a vic­to­ry for you. What­ev­er you may think of me and my beliefs, we’re all freer today than we were yes­ter­day. I hope you find that cause for cel­e­bra­tion.”
      • The author is the vic­to­ri­ous plain­tiff in the gay wed­ding web­site case.
    • The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind (Kris­ten Wag­goner, World): “The deci­sion means that gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not mis­use the law to com­pel speech or exclude from the mar­ket­place peo­ple whose beliefs it dislikes.That’s a win for all Americans—whether one shares Lorie’s beliefs or holds dif­fer­ent beliefs. Each of us has the right to decide for our­selves what mes­sages we will communicate—in our words, in our art, in our voice—without inter­fer­ence from the gov­ern­ment. The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind.”
      • The author is the lawyer who argued this case before the Supreme Court. She is an Assem­blies of God layper­son, btw.
  5. Chris­tians: More Like Jesus or Phar­isees? (Bar­na Research Group): “In this nation­wide study of self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians, the goal was to deter­mine whether Chris­tians have the actions and atti­tude of Jesus as they inter­act with oth­ers or if they are more akin to the beliefs and behav­iors of Phar­isees, the self-right­eous sect of reli­gious lead­ers described in the New Tes­ta­ment.… The find­ings reveal that most self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians in the U.S. are char­ac­ter­ized by hav­ing the atti­tudes and actions researchers iden­ti­fied as Phar­i­saical. Just over half of the nation’s Christians—using the broad­est def­i­n­i­tion of those who call them­selves Christians—qualify for this cat­e­go­ry (51%). They tend to have atti­tudes and actions that are char­ac­ter­ized by self-right­eous­ness.”
    • This research is a decade old, but quite inter­est­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • I do have some reser­va­tions about the method­ol­o­gy. Some of the ques­tions are just wrong. For exam­ple, cat­e­go­riz­ing “I lis­ten to oth­ers to learn their sto­ry before telling them about my faith” being Christ­like rather than Phar­i­saical isn’t real­ly a Bib­li­cal stance, it’s just a per­son­al opin­ion. It may be a shrewd strat­e­gy and over­all com­mend­able, but I don’t see Jesus lis­ten­ing to a lot of sto­ries in the Bible. It’s a poor­ly cho­sen ques­tion for this scale. Quib­bles like that aside, I think the over­all vibe prob­a­bly sol­id.
  6. Liv­ing on a prayer? How attend­ing wor­ship can improve your phys­i­cal and men­tal health. (Phil McGraw and John White, USA Today): “Despite the proven health ben­e­fits, reli­gios­i­ty is on the decline in Amer­i­ca. The fastest-grow­ing reli­gious seg­ment of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion is now ‘nones’ − those who pro­fess no reli­gion. We’re not here to evan­ge­lize, but as a doc­tor and a men­tal health pro­fes­sion­al, it’s impor­tant to note that a decline of reli­gion and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty seems to be asso­ci­at­ed with poten­tial­ly neg­a­tive health effects.”
    • I love that the authors are Dr. Phil and the chief med­ical offi­cer at Web­MD. To the aver­age Amer­i­can they’ve prob­a­bly got more cred­i­bil­i­ty than any med­ical asso­ci­a­tion or even the NIH, FDA, and CDC.
  7. How to Do Great Work (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the fron­tier, notice gaps, explore promis­ing ones. This is how prac­ti­cal­ly every­one who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physi­cists.… What should you do if you’re young and ambi­tious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along pas­sive­ly, assum­ing the prob­lem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no sys­tem­at­ic pro­ce­dure you can fol­low. When you read biogra­phies of peo­ple who’ve done great work, it’s remark­able how much luck is involved. They dis­cov­er what to work on as a result of a chance meet­ing, or by read­ing a book they hap­pen to pick up. So you need to make your­self a big tar­get for luck, and the way to do that is to be curi­ous. Try lots of things, meet lots of peo­ple, read lots of books, ask lots of ques­tions.”
    • This is super-long but worth­while. He ram­bles and is mis­tak­en at points, but his core insights are sol­id and impor­tant.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What Thomas Jef­fer­son Could Nev­er Under­stand About Jesus (Vin­son Cun­ning­ham, New York­er): “In the years before eman­ci­pa­tion, the best argu­ments against slav­ery were also argu­ments about God.… Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bed­time read­ing for seek­ers of wis­dom. But those who were weak, or suf­fer­ing, or in urgent trou­ble, would have to look else­where.” This is quite an arti­cle. From vol­ume 286.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 407

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.

This is vol­ume 407, which is the sum of the cubes of its dig­its: 43 + 03 + 73

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Reli­gion Good for Your Health? (David DeSteno, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Ongo­ing sur­veys like these, as well as more tar­get­ed stud­ies, show a strong link between reli­gion and bet­ter phys­i­cal and men­tal health. Of course, this doesn’t mean that reli­gion should be pre­scribed as a med­i­cine, either in addi­tion to or in place of oth­er estab­lished treat­ments. The choice to be spir­i­tu­al­ly active is a per­son­al one, and reli­gion is only one of many fac­tors that affect health. Nonethe­less, it’s time for health sci­ences to take reli­gion seri­ous­ly and con­sid­er what it offers the body and mind.”
    • The author is a psych prof at North­east­ern. In this essay he alludes to Tyler Van­der­Weele’s research which I have spot­light­ed on many occa­sions.
  2. Richard Dawkins’ Ex-Right-Hand Man Comes to Christ! (Liv­ing Waters, YouTube): fifty-five min­utes long (near­ly an hour!). Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. The tes­ti­mo­ny itself kicks in at 37 min­utes in.
  3. Trump’s Jus­tices Didn’t Doom Affir­ma­tive Action. Demog­ra­phy Did. (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “The arrival of large num­bers of immi­grants over the past half-cen­tu­ry has upset the log­ic of affir­ma­tive action in sev­er­al ways. For one thing, white Amer­i­cans no longer dom­i­nate the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem. (They make up only 22 per­cent of the Stan­ford class of 2026, for instance.) Ear­ly on, affir­ma­tive action was also extend­ed to Lati­nos, whose num­bers con­tin­ue to grow. In addi­tion, African and Caribbean immi­grants and their chil­dren now account for more than 40 per­cent of the Black enroll­ment in the Ivy League, which risks crowd­ing out the peo­ple that affir­ma­tive action was orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to help.” 
    • Pay­wall is unlocked.
  4. Should Women Preach? Huge Majori­ties of Evan­gel­i­cal Think They Should (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I don’t know how many ways I can show this: the sup­port for women preach­ing on Sun­day morn­ing from behind the pul­pit is strong among evan­gel­i­cals. Even among those who say that the Bible is lit­er­al­ly true and attend church every week, 74% are in favor of women preach­ing.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. Uni­ver­si­ties Shouldn’t Be Ide­o­log­i­cal Church­es (Robert P. George, The Atlantic): “If aca­d­e­m­ic units are per­mit­ted to make state­ments on polit­i­cal issues, then the fol­low­ing will be the case: When con­sid­er­ing a job or tenure can­di­date, vot­ing fac­ul­ty mem­bers will antic­i­pate that he or she, if appoint­ed, will vote on future polit­i­cal state­ments. So they will per­fect­ly rea­son­ably want to know, and will take into account, the candidate’s ide­o­log­i­cal lean­ings and polit­i­cal views and affil­i­a­tions in decid­ing whether to sup­port or oppose the appoint­ment.… After all, vot­ing on polit­i­cal statements—if depart­ments were to be autho­rized to do so and chose to act on that authorization—would be one of the things a fac­ul­ty mem­ber is, as a prac­ti­cal mat­ter, hired to do.”
    • Rob­bie George is a gem.
    • I would post more con­tent from The Atlantic but I don’t have a sub­scrip­tion and their pay­wall is pret­ty lim­it­ing.
  6. How Assist­ed Sui­cide Destroys the Loved Ones Left Behind (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “The sim­ple, cen­tral argu­ment of the sui­cide activists is that the right to bod­i­ly auton­o­my includes the right to sui­cide, and that legal­iza­tion is nec­es­sary in order to reduce suf­fer­ing in soci­ety. The real­i­ty we see unfold­ing tells a very dif­fer­ent sto­ry. Far from reduc­ing suf­fer­ing, assist­ed sui­cide has become the cat­a­lyst for spread­ing it. In many if not most cas­es, a death by lethal injec­tion trans­fers tem­po­ral suf­fer­ing to heart­bro­ken loved ones who strug­gle to process what has tak­en place.”
  7. The illu­sion of moral decline (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “…two well-known psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na can com­bine to pro­duce an illu­sion of moral decline.… Biased expo­sure means that things always look out­ra­geous: mur­der and arson and fraud, oh my! Biased mem­o­ry means the out­rages of yes­ter­day don’t seem so out­ra­geous today. When things always look bad today but brighter yes­ter­day, con­grat­u­la­tions pal, you got your­self an illu­sion of moral decline. We call this mech­a­nism BEAM (Biased Expo­sure and Mem­o­ry), and it fits with some of our more sur­pris­ing results.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What Chris­t­ian Cit­i­zens Owe Gov­ern­ment Lead­ers (George P. Wood, Influ­ence Mag­a­zine): “In this new year, with a new pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion, let us renew our com­mit­ment to pray­ing for our gov­ern­ment offi­cials, to shar­ing the gospel with them, to obey­ing the law and respect­ing the law­givers, and to hold­ing them account­able while giv­ing them our good exam­ple! These are the basic duties of Chris­t­ian cit­i­zen­ship.” This is an excel­lent sum­ma­ry. Dis­claimer: the author is an acquain­tance of mine. From vol­ume 285.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 393

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.

This is vol­ume 393, which I find inter­est­ing because it only has two fac­tors: 131 and 3.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Some AI thoughts
    • The Walui­gi Effect (mega-post) (Cleo Nar­do, Less Wrong): “Here’s an exam­ple — in 101 Dal­ma­tions, we meet a pair of pro­tag­o­nists (Roger and Ani­ta) who love dogs, show com­pas­sion, seek sim­ple plea­sures, and want a fam­i­ly. Can you guess who will turn up in Act One? Yep, at 13:00 we meet Cruel­la De Vil — she hates dogs, shows cru­el­ty, seeks mon­ey and fur, is a child­less spin­ster, etc. Cruel­la is the com­plete inver­sion of Roger and Ani­ta. She is the walui­gi of Roger and Ani­ta. Recall that you expect­ed to meet a char­ac­ter with these traits more­so after meet­ing the pro­tag­o­nists. Cruel­la De Vil is not a char­ac­ter you would expect to find out­side of the con­text of a Dis­ney dog sto­ry, but once you meet the pro­tag­o­nists you will have that con­text and then the Cruel­la becomes a nat­ur­al and pre­dictable con­tin­u­a­tion. [And since LLMs are all about con­tin­u­a­tion, sim­u­lat­ed Cruel­las emerge pre­dictably.]”
      • This was eas­i­ly the most inter­est­ing thing I read this week. A very clever argu­ment.
    • Why am I not ter­ri­fied of AI? (Scott Aaron­son, per­son­al blog): “In the Ortho­dox AI-doomers’ own account, the paper­clip-max­i­miz­ing AI would’ve mas­tered the nuances of human moral phi­los­o­phy far more com­plete­ly than any human—the bet­ter to deceive the humans, en route to extract­ing the iron from their bod­ies to make more paper­clips. And yet the AI would nev­er once use all that learn­ing to ques­tion its paper­clip direc­tive. I acknowl­edge that this is pos­si­ble. I deny that it’s triv­ial.”
      • The author is a CS prof from UT who works at Ope­nAI
  2. Why the Men­tal Health of Lib­er­al Girls Sank First and Fastest (Jonathan Haidt, Sub­stack): “We are now 11 years into the largest epi­dem­ic of ado­les­cent men­tal ill­ness ever record­ed. I know so many fam­i­lies that have been thrown into fear and tur­moil by a child’s sui­cide attempt. You prob­a­bly do too, giv­en that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten ado­les­cents now say they have made an attempt to kill them­selves. It is hit­ting all polit­i­cal and demo­graph­ic groups. The evi­dence is abun­dant that social media is a major cause of the epi­dem­ic, and per­haps the major cause. It’s time we start­ed treat­ing social media and oth­er apps designed for ‘engage­ment’ (i.e., addic­tion) like alco­hol, tobac­co, and gam­bling, or, because they can harm soci­ety as well as their users, per­haps like auto­mo­biles and firearms.”
    • A well-writ­ten and dis­tress­ing sum­ma­ry of the cur­rent state of ado­les­cent and young adult men­tal health. The author is a social psy­chol­o­gist at NYU.
    • Relat­ed: Review of 1,039 stud­ies indi­cates exer­cise can be more effec­tive than coun­selling or med­ica­tion for depres­sion (Ben Singh, Car­ol Maher, & Jac­in­ta Brins­ley, Psy­Post): “When com­par­ing the size of the ben­e­fits of exer­cise to oth­er com­mon treat­ments for men­tal health con­di­tions from pre­vi­ous sys­tem­at­ic reviews, our find­ings sug­gest exer­cise is around 1.5 times more effec­tive than either med­ica­tion or cog­ni­tive behav­iour ther­a­py.”
      • I expect this will be con­test­ed in future stud­ies. Fas­ci­nat­ing, though. The authors are all at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Aus­tralia. The lead author seems to be the Aus­tralian equiv­a­lent of a MD/PhD.
    • Relat­ed: Lynch­ing the Deplorables (Chris Hedges, Sub­stack): “The Jan. 6 pro­tes­tors were not the first to occu­py Con­gres­sion­al offices, includ­ing Nan­cy Pelosi’s office. Young envi­ron­men­tal activists from the Sun­rise Move­ment, anti-war activists from Code Pink and even con­gres­sion­al staffers have engaged in numer­ous occu­pa­tions of con­gres­sion­al offices and inter­rupt­ed con­gres­sion­al hear­ings. What will hap­pen to groups such as Code Pink if they occu­py con­gres­sion­al offices with Repub­li­cans in con­trol of the White House, the Con­gress and the courts? Will they be held for years in pre­tri­al deten­tion? Will they be giv­en lengthy prison terms based on dubi­ous inter­pre­ta­tions of the law? Will they be con­sid­ered domes­tic ter­ror­ists? Will protests and civ­il dis­obe­di­ence become impos­si­ble?”
      • This is a sane and sober­ing essay.
  3. Test­ing Com­mon The­o­ries on the Rela­tion­ship Between Pre­mar­i­tal Sex and Mar­i­tal Sta­bil­i­ty (Jesse Smith and Nicholas H. Wolfin­ger): “The table below shows the wide range of vari­ables we used to try to explain the rela­tion­ship between pre­mar­i­tal sex part­ners and divorce. Do any of them mat­ter? The answer is a clear no. With­out con­trols, peo­ple with pre­mar­i­tal part­ners are 161% more like­ly to dis­solve their mar­riages com­pared to peo­ple who tie the knot as vir­gins. In oth­er words, pre­mar­i­tal sex increas­es the chances of divorce between twofold and three­fold. After includ­ing the laun­dry list of covari­ates shown in the table, the odds of divorce remain 151% higher—in oth­er words, a sta­tis­ti­cal arti­fact away from being iden­ti­cal.”
    • This falls into the cat­e­go­ry of “research which is obvi­ous­ly true but which many peo­ple wish to dis­be­lieve”
  4. Some COVID thoughts:
    • Covid back­lash hob­bles pub­lic health and future pan­dem­ic response (Lau­ren Weber and Joel Achen­bach, Wash­ing­ton Post): “When the next pan­dem­ic sweeps the Unit­ed States, health offi­cials in Ohio won’t be able to shut­ter busi­ness­es or schools, even if they become epi­cen­ters of out­breaks. Nor will they be empow­ered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quar­an­tine. State offi­cials in North Dako­ta are barred from direct­ing peo­ple to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the pres­i­dent can force fed­er­al agen­cies tois­sue­vac­ci­na­tion or test­ing man­dates to thwart its march.”
      • Amer­i­ca usu­al­ly comes through in the end. The arti­cle is super-angsty about all this, but I view it as an inevitable response to admin­is­tra­tive over­reach and also a fun­da­men­tal­ly good thing. Dis­trib­uted pow­er is safer pow­er.
    • Relat­ed: When a Rene­gade Church and a Zeal­ous Coun­ty Health Depart­ment Col­lide (David Zweig, Sub­stack): “…exten­sive legal doc­u­ments, total­ing more than a thou­sand pages, reveal a coun­ty, and its health depart­ment, that went to extra­or­di­nary, and poten­tial­ly unlaw­ful, lengths to enforce its decrees. These efforts include levy­ing more than $2 mil­lion in fines against Cal­vary, and a mul­ti-faceted sur­veil­lance pro­gram of the church and its mem­bers, breath­tak­ing in scope and rem­i­nis­cent of total­i­tar­i­an regimes, rather than an Amer­i­can coun­ty health depart­ment — the spy oper­a­tion includ­ed stake­outs, forced in-per­son mon­i­tor­ing of prayer groups and oth­er inti­mate activ­i­ties, and track­ing the cel­lu­lar mobil­i­ty data of church­go­ers.”
      • The details in here are pret­ty wild. The com­ments are inter­est­ing — one of the pas­tors of a neigh­bor­ing church dis­putes part of the account, but the author is like, “I’ve read sworn affi­davits tes­ti­fy­ing to the con­trary.”
      • So much going on — my main take­away is that it real­ly was worse in San­ta Clara Coun­ty than almost any­where else in Amer­i­ca. The tech­nocrats felt empow­ered to an absurd degree.
    • Hav­ing said that: Here’s Why the Sci­ence Is Clear That Masks Work (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “Brown, who led the Cochrane review’s approval process, told me that mask man­dates may not be ten­able now, but he has a stark­ly dif­fer­ent feel­ing about their effects in the first year of a pan­dem­ic. ‘Mask man­dates, social dis­tanc­ing, the oth­er shut­downs we had in terms of even restau­rants and things like that — if places like New York City didn’t do that, the num­ber of deaths would have been much high­er,” he told me. “I’m very con­fi­dent of that state­ment.’ So the evi­dence is rel­a­tive­ly straight­for­ward: Con­sis­tent­ly wear­ing a mask, prefer­ably a high-qual­i­ty, well-fit­ting one, pro­vides pro­tec­tion against the coro­n­avirus.”
  5. Earn­ings Are Greater and Increas­ing in Occu­pa­tions That Require Intel­lec­tu­al Tenac­i­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, Louis Hick­man & Ben­jamin Man­ning, SSRN): “…we iden­ti­fy two broad occu­pa­tion­al per­son­al­i­ty require­ments, which we label intel­lec­tu­al tenac­i­ty and social adjust­ment. Intel­lec­tu­al tenac­i­ty encom­pass­es achievement/effort, per­sis­tence, ini­tia­tive, ana­lyt­i­cal think­ing, inno­va­tion, and inde­pen­dence. Social adjust­ment encom­pass­es emo­tion reg­u­la­tion, con­cern for oth­ers, social ori­en­ta­tion, coop­er­a­tion, and stress tol­er­ance. Both occu­pa­tion­al per­son­al­i­ty require­ments relate sim­i­lar­ly to occu­pa­tion­al employ­ment growth between 2007 and 2019. How­ev­er, among over 10 mil­lion respon­dents to the Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Sur­vey, jobs requir­ing intel­lec­tu­al tenac­i­ty pay high­er wages…”
    • Chris­tos is one of our alum­ni.
  6. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest at Stan­ford. Stu­dents are obsessed. (Lisa Bonos, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The uni­ver­si­ty seems keen to play down his pres­ence. Offi­cial­ly, the uni­ver­si­ty doesn’t talk about Bankman-Fried. Stan­ford Law School didn’t respond to requests for com­ment. When asked whether they could con­firm a rumor that a near­by stu­dent co-op had attacked the Bankman-Fried home with eggs, Stan­ford cam­pus police did not respond.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall for this arti­cle.
  7. Drop­ping the SAT Require­ment Is a Lux­u­ry Belief (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, has just become the first Ivy League school to per­ma­nent­ly aban­don the SAT/ACT require­ment for col­lege admis­sion. Elite col­leges are elim­i­nat­ing stan­dard­ized tests before they elim­i­nate lega­cy admis­sions. Tells you all you need to know.…  Stan­dard­ized test­ing should be freely avail­able and com­pul­so­ry for all high school stu­dents.”
    • This is 100% true.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Stop Being Shocked (Bari Weiss, Tablet): “The hatred we expe­ri­ence on cam­pus has noth­ing to do with the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ide­ol­o­gy sim­ply by exist­ing. So it’s not so much that Zion­ism is racism. It’s that Jew­ish­ness is.“ From vol­ume 272.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 386

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.

386 is inter­est­ing because it feels like it ought to have lots of divi­sors, but it’s just 2 · 193. Of course you can dou­ble any prime, but it still sur­pris­es me when I run across it. Primes dou­bled are, by def­i­n­i­tion, exact­ly as rare as primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I am a Chris­t­ian (James Choi, Yale Fac­ul­ty Web­site): “There are things about Chris­tian­i­ty that are con­fus­ing or hard to accept as true. But in math, if we start with axioms that are sol­id, then we can prove easy the­o­rems based on those axioms, and then use those easy the­o­rems to prove coun­ter­in­tu­itive, seem­ing­ly false the­o­rems. We can believe the hard the­o­rems because we have con­fi­dence in the axioms and the easy the­o­rems. To me, the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ is the fun­da­men­tal the­o­rem of Chris­tian­i­ty. If we can gain con­fi­dence in this, then this pro­vides a foun­da­tion for us to have faith in the rest of the claims of Chris­tian­i­ty.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of finance at Yale. He’s had a ver­sion of this page on his offi­cial web­site ever since he was a sopho­more at Har­vard. He kept it up while apply­ing to grad school and while going on the job mar­ket. Respect.
  2. Why the Media is Hon­est and Good (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “My advice is to read the main­stream media, and trust the facts they present, while ques­tion­ing the nar­ra­tives. Under­stand where the bias­es are and cor­rect for them. Read some of their crit­ics too, but under­stand that those crit­ics are almost more biased and less intel­li­gent and hon­est than those that they attack. The few media crit­ics who are bet­ter than the press are rare and deserve your sup­port. The excep­tion here is any­thing hav­ing to do with race, gen­der, or sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, where you should under­stand that estab­lish­ment jour­nal­ists are try­ing their best but can’t be trust­ed because they’ve lost their minds, or are scared of those that have, and you’d be bet­ter off lis­ten­ing to peo­ple with can­ce­lable views.”
  3. The bat­tle of the stan­dards: why the US and UK can’t stop fight­ing the met­ric sys­tem (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “It all went back to Nim­rod, he was say­ing. Nim­rod, great-grand­son of Noah and the ‘mighty hunter before the Lord,’ who had attempt­ed to unite the world’s pop­u­la­tion by build­ing the Tow­er of Babel so that human­i­ty might climb up to Heav­en itself. ‘And God inter­vened, stop­ping him from build­ing the tow­er,’ said Tony. God then spread human­i­ty across the globe, divid­ing us up into dif­fer­ent nations with their own lan­guages and tra­di­tions. As Tony under­stood the mes­sage of the Tow­er of Babel, it was that ‘Peo­ple should live in dis­tinct nations because it pro­vides a uni­fy­ing force in their lives. It gives them a sense of pur­pose.’”
  4. What if Diver­si­ty Train­ings Are Doing More Harm Than Good? (Jesse Sin­gal, New York Times): “Over the years, social sci­en­tists who have con­duct­ed care­ful reviews of the evi­dence base for diver­si­ty train­ings have fre­quent­ly come to dis­cour­ag­ing con­clu­sions. Though diver­si­ty train­ings have been around in one form or anoth­er since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever sub­ject­ed to rig­or­ous eval­u­a­tion, and those that are most­ly appear to have lit­tle or no pos­i­tive long-term effects… Some diver­si­ty ini­tia­tives might actu­al­ly wors­en the D.E.I. cli­mates of the orga­ni­za­tions that pay for them.”
  5. If Affir­ma­tive Action Ends, Col­lege Admis­sions May Be Changed For­ev­er (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Col­leges are plan­ning behind the scenes for the court rul­ing, though they are reluc­tant to release plans, wor­ried about poten­tial­ly open­ing them­selves up to legal action. ‘“‘We don’t want to get ahead of the court, and we don’t want to give the court any ideas,’”’ Dr. Pérez said.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Who is includ­ed by “inclu­sive” lan­guage? (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “…one thing you’d learn in a fan­cy Amer­i­can school is why you shouldn’t talk about the eco­nom­ic under­de­vel­op­ment of Africa like this. You’d learn bet­ter eti­quette. Or at least dif­fer­ent eti­quette — eti­quette that will dif­fer­en­ti­ate you from less sophis­ti­cat­ed peo­ple who might run around say­ing offen­sive things about pover­ty in the Glob­al South. For instance, a per­son with­out a prop­er edu­ca­tion might refer to the coun­tries in ques­tion as ‘the third world’ with­out hav­ing read Marc Silver’s Jan­u­ary 2021 NPR piece about why this is offen­sive. But to Bright’s point, speak­ing dif­fer­ent­ly doesn’t actu­al­ly change any­thing.  And that, per­haps, is a big part of the appeal.”
  7. NHL play­er refus­es to wear Pride Night jer­sey dur­ing warm-ups, cit­ing reli­gious beliefs (Jared Gans, The Hill): “I respect every­body, and I respect everybody’s choic­es. My choice is to stay true to myself and my reli­gion,” he said while tak­ing ques­tions in the Fly­ers’ lock­er room after the team’s 5–2 vic­to­ry over the Ana­heim Ducks. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
    • Sim­ple faith­ful­ness is a beau­ti­ful thing.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A Bib­li­cal Cri­tique of Sec­u­lar Jus­tice and Crit­i­cal The­o­ry (Tim Keller, Gospel In Life): “In the Bible Chris­tians have an ancient, rich, strong, com­pre­hen­sive, com­plex, and attrac­tive under­stand­ing of jus­tice. Bib­li­cal jus­tice dif­fers in sig­nif­i­cant ways from all the sec­u­lar alter­na­tives, with­out ignor­ing the con­cerns of any of them. Yet Chris­tians know lit­tle about bib­li­cal jus­tice, despite its promi­nence in the Scrip­tures.” The read of the week. From vol­ume 262

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 385

On Fri­days (this did go to my Sub­stack on Fri­day, but my web­site crashed and I only just got it back up) 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.

This is vol­ume 385, which is 5 x 7 x 11. That feels cool to me and I don’t know exact­ly why.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Tall Would a Stack of New Tes­ta­ment Man­u­scripts Be? (Daniel B. Wal­lace, per­son­al blog): “If you could stack up all hand­writ­ten man­u­scripts of the New Testament—Greek, Syr­i­ac, Latin, Cop­tic, all languages—how tall would the stack be? I  was recent­ly chal­lenged on my num­bers in a Face­book dis­cus­sion in the group ‘New Tes­ta­ment Tex­tu­al Crit­i­cism.’ I have said in many lec­tures that it would be the equiv­a­lent of c. 4 & 1/2 Empire State Build­ings stacked on top of each oth­er. How did I come up with that num­ber?”
  2. A Poet for ‘Bruised Evan­gel­i­cals’ (Kara Bet­tis, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “My pub­lish­er was very reluc­tant to take on my book, because ‘Nobody’s writ­ing son­nets now, and young peo­ple won’t like that,’ ” Gui­te told me at a sand­wich shop in Van­cou­ver. “But actu­al­ly, it turns out that’s exact­ly what they like, because it’s pre­cise­ly not a tweet.”
  3. What’s Up with Weird Bible Sex? (Dru John­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Any­one who reads the Bible today may be tempt­ed to skip over the sex. It can seem too crude, too impo­lite, or at least not spir­i­tu­al­ly edi­fy­ing for our morn­ing devo­tions. But I want to argue that we should read the Bible that we have and take it seri­ous­ly. Even the R‑rated bits. When you read Gen­e­sis, pay atten­tion to the details of the sex. They are try­ing to teach us about the nature of our bod­ies and com­mu­ni­ties before God.”
  4. How Stan­ford Failed the Aca­d­e­m­ic Free­dom Test (Jay Bat­tacharya, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Fac­ul­ty at Stan­ford should right­ly wor­ry whether their pro­fes­sion­al work will lead to deplat­form­ing, excom­mu­ni­ca­tion, and polit­i­cal tar­get­ing. In this envi­ron­ment, pro­fes­sors and stu­dents alike would be wise to look over their shoul­ders at all times, in the knowl­edge that the uni­ver­si­ty no longer has your back. And mem­bers of the pub­lic should under­stand that many of those urg­ing them to ‘trust the sci­ence’ on com­pli­cat­ed mat­ters of pub­lic con­cern are also those work­ing to ensure that ‘the sci­ence’ nev­er turns up answers that they don’t like.” Dr. Bat­tacharya is both a believ­er and a pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford.
    • Kin­da relat­ed: How DEI Is Sup­plant­i­ng Truth as the Mis­sion of Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ties (John Sail­er, The Free Press): “One med­ical researcher at an elite insti­tu­tion who request­ed anonymi­ty told me that grants for med­ical research increas­ing­ly use veiled ide­o­log­i­cal lan­guage that focus­es on issues such as health equi­ty and racial dis­par­i­ties. ‘The answer is pre­or­dained: The cause of dis­par­i­ties is racism,’ he told me. ‘If you find some oth­er expla­na­tion, even if it’s tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect, that’s prob­lem­at­ic.’  This fix­a­tion can have a stul­ti­fy­ing effect on med­ical research, and even­tu­al­ly med­ical care, the researcher told me. ‘We’re abdi­cat­ing our respon­si­bil­i­ty. We’re cre­at­ing fake research and fake stan­dards, align­ing ide­ol­o­gy with med­i­cine, and under­min­ing our basic abil­i­ty to engage in mean­ing­ful sense­mak­ing.’”
  5. Why is progress in biol­o­gy so slow? (Sam Rodriques, per­son­al blog): “The bio­med­ical lit­er­a­ture is vast and suf­fers from three prob­lems: it does not lend itself to sum­ma­riza­tion in text­books; it is unre­li­able by com­mis­sion; and it is unre­li­able by omis­sion. The first prob­lem is sim­ple: biol­o­gy is too diverse. Every dis­ease, every gene, every organ­ism, and every cell type is its own grand chal­lenge. The sec­ond prob­lem is trick­i­er — some things in the lit­er­a­ture are sim­ply wrong, made up by trainees or pro­fes­sors who were des­per­ate to pub­lish rather than per­ish. But it is the third prob­lem that is real­ly per­ni­cious: many things in the lit­er­a­ture are unin­ter­pretable or mis­lead­ing due to the omis­sion of key details by the authors, inten­tion­al or oth­er­wise. Authors may report a new, gen­er­al strat­e­gy for tar­get­ing nanopar­ti­cles to cells express­ing spe­cif­ic recep­tor pro­teins and show that it works for HER2 and EGFR, while declin­ing to men­tion that it does not work for any one of the 20 oth­er recep­tors they tried.“Excellent reflec­tions on how AI will and will not help with medical/etc research. The author holds a PhD from MIT and is  biotech researcher and entre­pre­neur.
  6. I’m home­less in Cal­i­for­nia. And I have an easy, cost-free solu­tion to home­less­ness (Lydia Blum­berg, Sacra­men­to Bee): “One thing that would dra­mat­i­cal­ly improve the lives of unhoused peo­ple in Cal­i­for­nia could be done today, wouldn’t cost tax­pay­ers any mon­ey and would require no effort by politi­cians or city work­ers. It’s as sim­ple as a gov­er­nor or may­or utter­ing three words: Stop sweeps now. Each time a home­less camp is dis­man­tled, people’s lives are destroyed. All the effort we put into cre­at­ing a home — we do not actu­al­ly con­sid­er our­selves home­less because our camp is our home — is wiped away. Our world­ly pos­ses­sions, includ­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, med­ical records, fam­i­ly heir­looms, cloth­ing, elec­tron­ics, fur­ni­ture, instru­ments, bed­ding, tents, tools and oth­er items that we use to earn income, are lit­er­al­ly thrown into garbage trucks. Our hand­made shel­ters are smashed by giant machines as we watch.”
  7. Yes, Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry Is Being Taught in Schools (Zach Gold­berg &  Eric Kauf­mann, City Jour­nal): “We began by ask­ing our 18- to 20-year-old respon­dents (82.4 per­cent of whom report­ed attend­ing pub­lic schools) whether they had ever been taught in class or heard about from an adult at school each of six concepts—four of which are cen­tral to crit­i­cal race the­o­ry. The chart below, which dis­plays the dis­tri­b­u­tion of respons­es for each con­cept, shows that ‘been taught’ is the modal response for all but one of the six con­cepts. For the CRT-relat­ed con­cepts, 62 per­cent report­ed either being taught in class or hear­ing from an adult in school that ‘Amer­i­ca is a sys­tem­i­cal­ly racist coun­try,’ 69 per­cent report­ed being taught or hear­ing that ‘white peo­ple have white priv­i­lege,’ 57 per­cent report­ed being taught or hear­ing that ‘white peo­ple have uncon­scious bias­es that neg­a­tive­ly affect non-white peo­ple,’ and 67 per­cent report­ed being taught or hear­ing that ‘Amer­i­ca is built on stolen land.’ ”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How I Redis­cov­ered Faith (Mal­colm Glad­well, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “I have always believed in God. I have grasped the log­ic of Chris­t­ian faith. What I have had a hard time see­ing is God’s pow­er. I put that sen­tence in the past tense because some­thing hap­pened to me…” From vol­ume 261. It’s been pay­walled since I first shared it. There is a sub­stan­tive excerpt at https://aleteia.org/2020/08/02/author-malcolm-gladwell-relates-how-he-re-found-christianity/

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 383

On Fri­days (Sat­ur­days when I offi­ci­ate a wed­ding on Fri­day — con­grats Alex & Andrea!) 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.

Hap­py New Year! Most of my read­ers know this, but this bun­dle of links is an over­flow from a min­istry called Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. Today is Decem­ber 31st, which is the biggest giv­ing day of the year. If you are inclined toward gen­eros­i­ty on New Year’s Eve, con­sid­er mak­ing a year-end dona­tion to sup­port the min­istry.

This is vol­ume 383, which is both a prime num­ber and a palin­drome. Not too shab­by, 383. Hold your head up high among the num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Rea­sons to believe, Christ­mas edi­tion:
    • How Would You Prove That God Per­formed a Mir­a­cle? (Mol­ly Worthen, New York Times): “Josh Brown directs the pro­gram in neu­ro­science at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Bloom­ing­ton. He has pub­lished dozens of arti­cles on top­ics like the neur­al basis of deci­sion mak­ing in the brain. He has wire-rimmed glass­es and a calm, method­i­cal way of speak­ing. And after almost two decades of keep­ing rel­a­tive­ly qui­et, he is now speak­ing open­ly about his most sur­pris­ing research find­ing: He believes that God mirac­u­lous­ly healed him of a brain tumor.”
      • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is a his­to­ri­an at UNC.
    • When Mary Met the Angel (Rebec­ca McLaugh­lin, Wall Street Jour­nal): “ ‘Sci­ence is the descrip­tion of how God choos­es to work most of the time,’ writes Rus­sell Cow­burn, a pro­fes­sor of physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge. ‘We know dead bod­ies don’t come back to life accord­ing to sci­ence. And yet Chris­tian­i­ty is built on the obser­va­tion that Jesus came back to life. I am very hap­py to say that at that spe­cial moment, God was act­ing dif­fer­ent­ly.’ Like many oth­er world-class sci­en­tists I’ve interviewed—including Fran­cis Collins, for­mer direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health—Prof. Cow­burn came to faith in Jesus as an adult. He is not just try­ing to make sci­en­tif­ic sense of a child­hood faith that he can­not shed.”
      • Dis­claimer: I know the author and am thrilled she was invit­ed to write about faith for the WSJ.
    • A Christ­mas Con­ver­sa­tion About Christ (Nico­las Kristof inter­view­ing Rus­sell Moore, New York Times): “The most impor­tant blind spot is per­haps miss­ing why so many of us are drawn to faith in the first place. We real­ly do believe the Gospel is Good News that answers the deep­est long­ings of the human heart. I would just rec­om­mend that peo­ple read one of the Gospels with an open mind. Jesus loves New York Times read­ers, too.”
  2. A Dark­ness Revealed (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…the great chal­lenge here, as ever, is to strive to see our ances­tors and our con­tem­po­raries with moral clar­i­ty, not white­wash­ing their sins and fail­ings with poet­ic mem­o­ry, while also rec­og­niz­ing their virtues — and in all cas­es, nev­er, ever allow­ing their full human­i­ty, the good and the bad alike, to be assim­i­lat­ed into the realm of ideas.”
    • I found this grip­ping. A man wres­tles with the not-entire­ly-sur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion that his father was in the KKK.
  3. Urbana Mis­sions Con­fer­ence That Once Drew 20,000 Expect­ed to Fall Far Short (Bob Smi­etana, Min­istry Watch): “Jao said that lin­ger­ing con­cerns over COVID-19 and the country’s eco­nom­ic woes are help­ing to dri­ve pro­ject­ed atten­dance down for the con­fer­ence, usu­al­ly held every three years, but delayed until this year by the pan­dem­ic. Like many church­es, he said, Inter­Var­si­ty and oth­er cam­pus min­istries are still rebuild­ing their atten­dance.”
  4. Our First Close­up Image of Mars Was a Paint-By-Num­bers Pas­tel Draw­ing (Jason Kot­tke, per­son­al blog): “On July 15, 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe flew with­in 6,118 miles of the sur­face of Mars, cap­tur­ing images as it passed over the plan­et. The image data was trans­mit­ted back to sci­en­tists on Earth, but they didn’t have a good way to quick­ly ren­der a pho­to­graph from it. They deter­mined that the fastest way to see what Mariner 4 had seen was to print out the imag­ing data as a series of num­bers, paste them into a grid, buy a set of pas­tels from a near­by art store, and do a paint-by-num­bers job with the pas­tels on the data grid.”
    • This is actu­al­ly beau­ti­ful.
  5. Amer­i­cans Have Found Their Hap­py Place (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “Two econ­o­mists, David G. Blanch­flower of Dart­mouth and Alex Bryson of Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, have come up with a new and more intu­itive way to mea­sure well-being. The results are strik­ing. If you con­sid­er US states as com­pa­ra­ble to coun­tries, 16 of the top 20 polit­i­cal units in the world for well-being are in the US — includ­ing the top sev­en.”
  6. The Media Very Rarely Lies (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “The point is: the media rarely lies explic­it­ly and direct­ly. Reporters rarely say spe­cif­ic things they know to be false. When the media mis­in­forms peo­ple, it does so by mis­in­ter­pret­ing things, exclud­ing con­text, or sig­nal-boost­ing some events while ignor­ing oth­ers, not by par­tic­i­pat­ing in some bright-line cat­e­go­ry called ‘mis­in­for­ma­tion’.”
    • Fol­low-up: Sor­ry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…I find it real­ly inter­est­ing that so many com­menters were so resis­tant to the idea that the worst and dumb­est con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries of our time don’t involve out­right lies. I think all of us — not just cen­sors — want to main­tain the com­fort­ing illu­sion that the bad peo­ple are doing some­thing fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent than the good peo­ple, some­thing that marks them as Obvi­ous­ly Bad in bright neon paint.”
  7. Is the right win­ning the com­e­dy wars? (Con­stance Grady, Vox): “It’s as though there’s some sort of fun­da­men­tal dis­con­nect between right and left on the issue of com­e­dy. On a very basic lev­el, the two sides seem to dis­agree on the ques­tion of what a joke should look like, what it’s okay to joke about, and what is so under threat that to joke about it would be unthink­able. No one seems sure how to talk about the dif­fer­ence, exact­ly. They just know that they want to be the fun­ny ones.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Fer­til­i­ty rate: ‘Jaw-drop­ping’ glob­al crash in chil­dren being born (James Gal­lagher, BBC): “Chi­na, cur­rent­ly the most pop­u­lous nation in the world, is expect­ed to peak at 1.4 bil­lion in four years’ time before near­ly halv­ing to 732 mil­lion by 2100. India will take its place.” From a long-term per­spec­tive, this is pos­si­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant news you will read this year. Some of you will still be alive when China’s pop­u­la­tion is half what it is now. And it’s not just Chi­na — many nations are on the same path (with only a few siz­able ones head­ed in the oppo­site direc­tion). From vol­ume 259

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 377

things which grabbed my atten­tion

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.

This is vol­ume 377, the 14th Fibonac­ci num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. sprawl­ing along the way: a polemic and an exhor­ta­tion (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “When­ev­er Chris­tians decide that they need a strat­e­gy, they’re writ­ing a recipe for dis­obe­di­ence to the Lord Jesus. As Stan­ley Hauer­was has always said in response to peo­ple who say that the Church needs a social strat­e­gy, ‘the Church is a social strat­e­gy.…’ The Church’s job is to be the Church, and the Christian’s task is to be like Christ, and strate­gies invari­ably get in the way of both.”
    • This is insight­ful.
  2. How Should Chris­tians Speak in Pub­lic? (Tim Keller, Mere Ortho­doxy): “The fruit of the Spir­it includes love, joy and peace, patience and kind­ness, and humil­i­ty. These must be evi­dent as we speak about the gospel pub­licly. Right now, the most pop­u­lar pub­lic fig­ures show con­fi­dence and fear­less­ness but not love and humil­i­ty. We can­not fol­low in that train.”
    • Dif­fi­cult to excerpt fair­ly.
  3. Does edu­ca­tion ‘cure’ peo­ple of faith? The data says no (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion News): “Those who are the most like­ly to be reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed are those with the low­est lev­els of for­mal edu­ca­tion. The group that is the most like­ly to align with a faith tra­di­tion? Those who have earned a col­lege degree or more.”
    • This is one of those true things that peo­ple have a hard time believ­ing.
  4. Iran and Chi­na Use Pri­vate Detec­tives to Spy on Dis­si­dents in Amer­i­ca (Ben­jamin Weis­er and & William K. Rash­baum, New York Times): “Across Amer­i­ca, inves­ti­ga­tors are increas­ing­ly being hired by a new kind of client — author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments like Iran and Chi­na attempt­ing to sur­veil, harass, threat­en and even repa­tri­ate dis­si­dents liv­ing law­ful­ly in the Unit­ed States, law enforce­ment offi­cials said.”
  5. Ael­la & The Futil­i­ty Of ‘Con­sent’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I’ve heard that ‘but ani­mals can’t con­sent!’ argu­ment from peo­ple before, as a defense against nor­mal­iz­ing bes­tial­i­ty, and it has nev­er made sense. You think ani­mals can con­sent to being eat­en?”
    • I remem­ber when I first talked with a stu­dent who seri­ous­ly claimed that con­sent was the only moral rule applic­a­ble to sex. I was so stunned I don’t think I had the where­with­al to laugh. It’s such an absurd claim.
  6. Lep­rosy: Ancient dis­ease able to regen­er­ate organs (James Gal­lagher, BBC): “Ani­mal exper­i­ments have uncov­ered the bac­te­ri­a’s remark­able abil­i­ty to almost dou­ble the size of liv­ers by stim­u­lat­ing healthy growth. It is a sneak­i­ly self­ish act that gives the bac­te­ria more tis­sue to infect. But work­ing out how they do it could lead to new age-defy­ing ther­a­pies, the sci­en­tists say.”
    • This is super cool! I hope it pans out.
  7. The top 10 most-regret­ted col­lege majors — and the degrees grad­u­ates wish they had pur­sued instead (Jes­si­ca Dick­ler, CNBC): “Com­put­er sci­ence majors, with an aver­age annu­al start­ing salary of almost $100,000, were the hap­pi­est over­all, accord­ing to ZipRecruiter. Stu­dents who majored in crim­i­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, nurs­ing, busi­ness and finance also felt very good about their choic­es.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Reli­gious Lib­er­ty and the Com­mon Good (Nation­al Affairs, William Haun): “Many of today’s pro­gres­sives, con­ser­v­a­tives, and lib­er­tar­i­ans [can­not] explain why reli­gion in par­tic­u­lar and reli­gious exer­cise in par­tic­u­lar should shape the com­mon good, even when they go against the grain of sec­u­lar visions adopt­ed in law.” Not light read­ing but worth­while. The author is a lawyer for the Beck­et Fund. From vol­ume 248

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.