Tag: apologetically interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 432

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 432, a num­ber pleas­ant to look at because of the smooth­ly decreas­ing dig­its. Also, 432 = 4 · 33 · 22, which is kin­da cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Two Par­ents Are the Ulti­mate Priv­i­lege (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “Two par­ents com­bined have more resources than one. Two par­ents in a home bring in the earnings—or at least the earn­ings capac­i­ty—of two adults. And so, in a very straight­for­ward way, we see that kids grow­ing up in sin­gle-moth­er homes are five times more like­ly to live in pover­ty than kids grow­ing up in mar­ried par­ent homes. (Kids in sin­gle-father homes are three times as like­ly to live in pover­ty.) Some of that reflects the fact that peo­ple with low­er lev­els of edu­ca­tion or income are more like­ly to become sin­gle par­ents. But even if you com­pare across moms of the same edu­ca­tion group, you see that kids who grow up in a house­hold with two par­ents have house­hold incomes that are about twice as high. That means that those par­ents are pay­ing for things like a nicer house in a safe neigh­bor­hood with good school dis­tricts. But they also spend more time with their kids. We see that kids who grow up with mar­ried par­ents have more parental time invest­ed in them: read­ing to your kid, talk­ing to your kid, dri­ving your kids to activ­i­ties. If there are two par­ents in the house­hold, there’s just more time capac­i­ty.”
    • The inter­vie­wee, Melis­sa Kear­ney, is an econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land.
    • This part near the end also caught my atten­tion: “You write that you would speak to your fel­low schol­ars about your plans for writ­ing this book, and they would say things along the lines of, ‘I tend to agree about all of this, but are you sure you want to be out there say­ing this pub­licly?’ How many areas of research, inquiry, and basic curios­i­ty about the most impor­tant things in our lives and cul­ture are third rail now? If it’s taboo to write a book say­ing two par­ents in a house are bet­ter mate­ri­al­ly than one, what else is off-lim­its, and what can we do to com­bat that?”
  2. Some links relat­ed to acad­e­mia, con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny, and speech in gen­er­al:
    • You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a Col­lege Admin­is­tra­tor (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “Why are these hor­ri­ble, no-win posi­tions? Because the pri­ma­ry job of any col­lege dean or uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent is to deal with the most spoiled, enti­tled, pig-head­ed inter­est groups imag­in­able. First, there are the stu­dents…”
    • Free­dom of speech for uni­ver­si­ty staff? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Free­dom of speech for uni­ver­si­ty staff is a hard­er ques­tion than for stu­dents or fac­ul­ty. Stu­dents will move on, and a lot of fac­ul­ty hate each oth­er any­way, and don’t have to work togeth­er very much. Plus the pro­tec­tion of tenure was (sup­pos­ed­ly?) designed to sup­port free­dom of speech and opin­ion, even ‘per­ceived to be offen­sive’ opin­ions. As for stu­dents, we want them to be exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent opin­ions in their youth, even if some of those opin­ions are bad or stu­pid. Staff in these regards are dif­fer­ent.”
    • What the Uni­ver­si­ty Pres­i­dents Got Right and Wrong About Anti­se­mit­ic Speech (David French, New York Times): “I’m a for­mer lit­i­ga­tor who spent much of my legal career bat­tling cen­sor­ship on col­lege cam­pus­es, and the thing that struck me about the pres­i­dents’ answers wasn’t their legal insuf­fi­cien­cy but rather their stun­ning hypocrisy. And it’s that hypocrisy, not the pres­i­dents’ under­stand­ing of the law, that has cre­at­ed a cam­pus cri­sis.”
    • Penn’s Lead­er­ship Resigns Amid Con­tro­ver­sies Over Anti­semitism (Stephanie Saul and Alan Blind­er, New York Times): “The pres­i­dent of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, M. Eliz­a­beth Mag­ill, resigned on Sat­ur­day, four days after her tes­ti­mo­ny at a con­gres­sion­al hear­ing in which she seemed to evade the ques­tion of whether stu­dents who called for the geno­cide of Jews should be dis­ci­plined.… Ms. Mag­ill, a for­mer Stan­ford Law School dean and Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia provost, had come to the uni­ver­si­ty as part of a wave of women to lead Ivy League col­leges.”
  3. Some reflec­tions on the war between Israel and Hamas:
    • Who’s a ‘Col­o­niz­er’? How an Old Word Became a New Weapon (Roger Cohen, New York Times): “The clash over pur­port­ed Israeli colo­nial­ism is part of some­thing larg­er, a pro­found move­ment in people’s minds. The Pales­tin­ian nation­al strug­gle has become the cause of the jus­tice-seek­ing dis­pos­sessed through­out the world. At the same time, the quest of the Jews to find refuge in a nation­al home­land as the only answer to being the peren­ni­al out­cast has become a bat­tle to demon­strate that, far from being colo­nial­ist, Israel is a diverse nation large­ly formed by a gath­er­ing-in of the per­se­cut­ed.”
      • Cov­ers a lot of ground, broad­ly help­ful.
    • What Jus­tice Requires in Gaza (Jack Omer-Jacka­man, Per­sua­sion): “How much injus­tice can a war con­tain before it is no longer a just war? His­to­ry is cer­tain­ly replete with wars we con­sid­er just on the whole, but which were lit­tered with gross vio­la­tions of human rights and decen­cy. What was true on Octo­ber 7th is true today: Hamas is a mass-rap­ing, civil­ian-slaugh­ter­ing, baby-kid­nap­ping evil, whose defeat should be sup­port­ed by all friends of Israel and all friends of Pales­tine. But I can­not be silent when my own rea­son and my own heart con­clude that Gazan civil­ians are not being suf­fi­cient­ly pro­tect­ed. In the fail­ure of Israeli strikes to dis­tin­guish between civil­ian and ter­ror­ist, and in the ham­per­ing of human­i­tar­i­an aid efforts, too much of this war is being fought unjust­ly.”
  4. In 2024, the Ten­sion Between Macro­cul­ture and Micro­cul­ture Will Turn into War (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “The clash has reached some kind of bru­tal tip­ping point. I believe it’s about to turn into war. The fact that 2024 is an elec­tion year will esca­late the con­flict. Just wait and see. But even right now you can feel the ground shak­ing.… [alter­na­tive plat­forms are out­per­form­ing Hol­ly­wood.] This seems impos­si­ble. A sin­gle indi­vid­ual liv­ing in Greenville, North Car­oli­na defeats enor­mous glob­al busi­ness­es with tens of thou­sands of employ­ees and decades of experience—and does it repeat­ed­ly every month. But that’s exact­ly what’s hap­pen­ing.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing stats in here.
    • Relat­ed (at least to me): When the New York Times lost its way (James Ben­net, The Econ­o­mist): “This is a bit of a para­dox. The new news­room ide­ol­o­gy seems ide­al­is­tic, yet it has grown from cyn­i­cal roots in acad­e­mia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objec­tive truth; that there is only nar­ra­tive, and that there­fore who­ev­er con­trols the nar­ra­tive – who­ev­er gets to tell the ver­sion of the sto­ry that the pub­lic hears – has the whip hand. What mat­ters, in oth­er words, is not truth and ideas in them­selves, but the pow­er to deter­mine both in the pub­lic mind. By con­trast, the old news­room ide­ol­o­gy seems cyn­i­cal on its sur­face. It used to bug me that my edi­tors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any per­son in pow­er was a lie. And the pur­suit of objec­tiv­i­ty can seem rep­til­ian, even nihilis­tic, in its abju­ra­tion of a fixed posi­tion in moral con­tests. But the basis of that old news­room approach was ide­al­is­tic: the notion that pow­er ulti­mate­ly lies in truth and ideas, and that the cit­i­zens of a plu­ral­is­tic democ­ra­cy, not lead­ers of any sort, must be trust­ed to judge both.”
    • This one is very long but I found it com­pelling.
  5. Con­ser­v­a­tives are suing law firms over diver­si­ty efforts. It’s work­ing. (Julian Mark and Tay­lor Telford, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Ken­ji Yoshi­no, a law pro­fes­sor and direc­tor of the Meltzer Cen­ter for Diver­si­ty, Inclu­sion and Belong­ing at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, said tar­get­ing law firms is effec­tive because it can serve as a warn­ing to oth­er indus­tries. ‘If you sue a law firm, then the law firm gets up to speed very, very quick­ly on what is per­mis­si­ble and what’s imper­mis­si­ble,’ Yoshi­no said, not­ing that many law firms advise For­tune 500 com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and non­prof­its. ‘It’s a way of get­ting the mes­sage out about peo­ple need­ing to flip over their poli­cies in a wide vari­ety of domains — not just fel­low­ships, but hir­ing, recruit­ing retreats and the like.’”
    • Inter­est­ing. I don’t remem­ber hav­ing seen this strat­e­gy (sue law firms to bring about broad­er cul­tur­al change) used by either the left or the right before. Is it an inno­va­tion or am I just not remem­ber­ing some­thing in his­to­ry?
  6. How 1 in 4 Coun­tries Restrict Reli­gious Con­ver­sion (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The USCIRF report grouped the laws into four cat­e­gories. First, anti-pros­e­ly­tiz­ing laws restrict wit­ness­ing of one’s faith in 29 nations, includ­ing in Indone­sia, Israel, and Rus­sia. In Moroc­co, for exam­ple, it is ille­gal to cause a Mus­lim to ques­tion his or her reli­gion. The sec­ond cat­e­go­ry of inter­faith mar­riage is restrict­ed in 25 nations, includ­ing in Jor­dan, the Philip­pines, and Sin­ga­pore. In Qatar, for exam­ple, if a wife con­verts to Islam but the hus­band does not, a judge may annul their mar­riage. Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment laws—the third category—in 7 nations restrict the right of an indi­vid­ual to for­mal­ly con­vert to anoth­er reli­gion, includ­ing in Iraq, Malaysia, and Turkey. Myan­mar, for exam­ple, requires con­verts to sub­mit an appli­ca­tion and be sub­ject to ques­tion­ing about the gen­uine­ness of the con­ver­sion. And final­ly, apos­ta­sy laws in 7 nations make con­ver­sion ille­gal, includ­ing in Brunei, Mau­ri­ta­nia, and Sau­di Ara­bia. In Yemen, for exam­ple, the pun­ish­ment is death.”
  7. A Kore­an Sect Tar­get­ed New Zealand Chris­tians. Did Church­es Respond Effec­tive­ly? (Will­liam Chong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Shin­cheon­ji instruc­tors even­tu­al­ly con­vinced their recruits that God per­mits lying if it is done for ‘God’s will.’ Before Josh’s ses­sions com­menced in Jan­u­ary 2019, his men­tor warned him to keep them a secret, point­ing to Abraham’s silence before head­ing out to sac­ri­fice Isaac in Gen­e­sis 22. Josh con­coct­ed a sto­ry about teach­ing pri­vate gui­tar lessons three morn­ings a week, a lie he told his par­ents, his girl­friend, and Stu­dent Life col­leagues. When church lead­ers and a cam­pus staff work­er con­front­ed Josh with evi­dence that he was attend­ing Shin­cheon­ji class­es, his Shin­cheon­ji instruc­tors gave him step-by-step instruc­tions on how to deny his involve­ment. They even gave Josh pre-writ­ten let­ters express­ing ‘inex­plic­a­ble hurt and con­fu­sion’ about his fam­i­ly and friends’ accu­sa­tions and claim­ing that he was no longer involved in Shin­cheon­ji activ­i­ties. Josh sent the let­ter to the church yet con­tin­ued his class­es, and in May 2019 he ‘passed over’ into the group.”
    • Relat­ed: Escap­ing High-Con­trol Reli­gious Groups (William Chong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[If a friend is in a cult,] try to main­tain the rela­tion­ship and com­mu­ni­ca­tion at all costs. Mak­ing direct state­ments like ‘You’re in a cult!’ or ‘You’re deceived!’ are not help­ful. Cult mem­bers have often been warned that ‘a man’s ene­mies will be the mem­bers of his own house­hold’ (Matt. 10:36), so to con­front their group will be to ful­fill prophe­cies giv­en to them by their lead­ers and fur­ther prove the group to be cor­rect. It’s impor­tant not to dri­ve them fur­ther into the group. Ask your­self what need the group is ful­fill­ing in your loved one’s life.”

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 430

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. That’s espe­cial­ly true this week: I skipped last week because of Thanks­giv­ing, and I still feel behind on my read­ing.

This is vol­ume 430, a sphenic num­ber. That means it is the prod­uct of three primes, name­ly 2 · 5 · 43.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stan­ford neu­ro­sci­en­tist Andrew Huber­man recent­ly men­tioned that he believes in God. Here’s a 13 minute video of him explain­ing why (YouTube) or you can just watch this two minute excerpt which con­tains the essence of his point (Twit­ter).
    • For the record, I’ve nev­er met Huber­man and do not know what his spe­cif­ic reli­gious beliefs are. I just find it inter­est­ing that a promi­nent pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al affil­i­at­ed with Stan­ford is a believ­er.
  2. This Is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers (Darbe Saxbe, New York Times): “[Pro­grams designed to help young peo­ple instead] made their men­tal-health prob­lems worse. Under­stand­ing why these efforts back­fired can shed light on how soci­ety can — and can’t — help teenagers who are suf­fer­ing from depres­sion and anx­i­ety.… Teenagers, who are still devel­op­ing their iden­ti­ties, are espe­cial­ly prone to take psy­cho­log­i­cal labels to heart. Instead of ‘I am ner­vous about X,’ a teenag­er might say, ‘I can’t do X because I have anx­i­ety’ — a refram­ing that research shows under­mines resilience by encour­ag­ing peo­ple to view every­day chal­lenges as insur­mount­able.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gy prof at USC.
  3. Reli­gion isn’t sex­u­al­ly repres­sive. Just read the data. (Stephen Cran­ney, Deseret News): “…con­trary to wide­ly held belief, reli­gious peo­ple report bet­ter sex lives, and mar­ried reli­gious cou­ples have more fre­quent and bet­ter sex than oth­ers (non-mar­ried reli­gious peo­ple, intu­itive­ly, have less sex). These results were sup­port­ed by one study that found reli­gious British peo­ple report­ed more sat­is­fy­ing sex lives. A sep­a­rate BYU study, pub­lished by Psy­chol­o­gy of Reli­gion and Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, found sim­i­lar results for mar­ried cou­ples in the U.S. while anoth­er found that high­ly reli­gious peo­ple had high­er sex­u­al ‘pas­sion’ than more mod­er­ate­ly reli­gious peo­ple (non­re­li­gious peo­ple also reflect­ed high­er ‘pas­sion’ lev­els).”
    • This sen­tence made me chuck­le: “It may well be that the most sex­u­al­ly active cam­pus­es in the U.S. aren’t the famous par­ty schools, but rather the more reli­gious­ly con­ser­v­a­tive schools with more mar­ried stu­dents.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist and a demog­ra­ph­er with appoint­ments at Bay­lor’s Insti­tute for the Study of Reli­gion and at the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca
  4. Solomon Fried­man is on a mis­sion to save Porn­hub (Andrew Duffy, Ottowa Citzen): “Solomon Fried­man is not some­one read­i­ly defined: He’s a defence lawyer and an organ donor; a firearms advo­cate and an ordained rab­bi; an investor, phil­an­thropist, and pornog­ra­phy mag­nate. If the 37-year-old father of three is not the most inter­est­ing man in Ottawa, then the licensed pilot and part-time law pro­fes­sor is cer­tain­ly one of the busiest.”
    • This is actu­al­ly insane.
  5. Why I No Longer Sup­port the Death Penal­ty (Matthew T. Martens, Cross­way): “8,790 peo­ple have been sen­tenced to death in the Unit­ed States since 1973. One hun­dred and eighty-four of those men and women were exon­er­at­ed as of the end of 2022.11 They were inno­cent of the crimes of which they were con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to die. In oth­er words, we know that at least 2 per­cent of peo­ple sen­tenced to death since 1973 were wrong­ly con­demned. Even if we have iden­ti­fied all of those wrong­ly con­vict­ed and the error rate is ‘only’ 2 per­cent, that is an error rate high­er than I am will­ing to tol­er­ate.… I am unwill­ing to wager anoth­er man’s life. I would not wager my own under those con­di­tions.”
    • The author has recent­ly writ­ten a book about a Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on crim­i­nal jus­tice. He is a defend­er of the death penal­ty as a con­cept yet opposed to it as prac­ticed in Amer­i­ca today.
  6. Tik­Tok par­ent com­pa­ny used AI to opti­mize Lin­ux ker­nel, boost­ing per­for­mance and effi­cien­cy (Matthew Con­natser, Tom’s Hard­ware): “The gen­er­al gist of the pre­sen­ta­tion: ByteDance used AI to make the Lin­ux ker­nel (the core of the oper­at­ing sys­tem) much more effi­cient and per­for­mant across all kinds of hard­ware.… AI opti­miza­tions were able to reduce mem­o­ry usage by 30% — and that was using exist­ing Lin­ux tools, just more effi­cient­ly. Net­work laten­cy was also improved by up to 12% with AI that has pri­or knowl­edge (which would­n’t be hard to obtain on a com­put­er used reg­u­lar­ly).”
  7. On Cul­ture War, Doug Wil­son, and the Moscow Mood (Kevin DeY­oung, per­son­al blog): “My con­cerns are not so much with one or two con­clu­sions that Chris­tians may reach if Wil­son becomes their intel­lec­tu­al men­tor. My big­ger con­cern is with the long-term spir­i­tu­al effects of admir­ing and imi­tat­ing the Moscow mood. For the mood that attracts peo­ple to Moscow is too often incom­pat­i­ble with Chris­t­ian virtue, incon­sid­er­ate of oth­er Chris­tians, and ulti­mate­ly incon­sis­tent with the stat­ed aims of Wilson’s Chris­ten­dom project.”
    • Broad­ly cor­rect, although I think DeY­oung over­states his case a few times. Wil­son does present the gospel more than DeY­oung acknowl­edges and that is one of his appeals. Still, as I said, broad­ly cor­rect.

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 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.