Tag: artificial intelligence

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 478

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. When a Stanford Bible Study Led to an AI Startup (Emily Belz, Christianity Today): “Hadassah Betapudi and Elijah Kim met at a Christian fellowship at Stanford in 2022 and got to know each other by leading a Bible study together. Soon the duo—with their backgrounds in data organizing and computer science—was building an artificial intelligence startup.” 
    • The article never names Chi Alpha, but they are both leaders in our ministry. Super cool! Their startup is Esslo, which helps students with their college application essays.
  2. I Believe in Miracles. Just Not All of Them. (David French, New York Times): “As the surgery date approached, I got a call from a dear friend, Ruth Okediji. Ruth was the leader of my law school Christian fellowship, and she’s now a professor at Harvard Law School. I’ll never forget her first words. ‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘The Lord has healed you.’ My initial reaction was frustration. I was resigned to the surgery, and I wanted encouragement, not false hope. As a Christian, I believe that God is real and works miracles. But I didn’t consider that he would work a miracle on me. My prayers were of the conventional kind that I grew up with — prayers that doctors would have wisdom and that I’d have the courage to face the challenge of the surgery. But Ruth’s prayer was different. She asked God for healing, and she said that God had granted her prayer. I woke up the next morning without any pain at all. I had no pain the entire day. The next day was pain-free as well, and so was the next. The doctors reintroduced bland, solid food to my diet, and I consumed it voraciously. By Thanksgiving, I’d gained most of my weight back, and a colonoscopy later showed no evidence of the disease at all. My doctor was surprised. I was surprised (and overjoyed). I knew that ulcerative colitis could have remission periods, but this one stuck. And in the 29 years since, I’ve never had a recurrence.”
  3. The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed (Zvi Mowshowitz, Substack): “When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports. It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.… The impacts include a 28% overall increase in bankruptcies (!).… When the home team suffers an upset loss while sports betting is legal, domestic violence that day goes up by 9% for the day, with lingering effects.”
  4. Artificial Intelligence and Relationships: 1 in 4 Young Adults Believe AI Partners Could Replace Real-life Romance (Wendy Wang and Michael Toscano, Institute for Family Studies): “Young men are more likely than young women to believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships (28% vs. 22%). As shown earlier, young men are generally more open to AI friendships than young women, which parallels the gender difference in their views of AI’s potential for romance.… Among single young adults, those who watch porn online at least once a day are twice as likely as those who rarely, if ever watch porn to say they are open to an AI romance.”
  5. The Right Without Wrong (Dustin Guastella, Jacobin): “For secular liberals who have made ‘believing science’ their own kind of religion, the possible waning of Christian conservatism may seem like a blessing long overdue. What if it isn’t?… In the Christian story, we are all equally fallen. Our original sin unites us in a kind of negative equilibrium. By recasting Christianity as a unique perversion, a cancerous growth that destroyed the glorious Roman Empire from within (or a virus introduced by Jews, that ancient enemy of the Right, from without), reactionaries can freely reject our primordial equality to instead embrace the supposedly natural hierarchies evident in the outcome of market competition, the body-obsessed ‘vitalism’ that privileges physical strength over the effete idealism of the Enlightenment, and also, seemingly without fail, an aggressive, unashamed form of scientific racism.” 
    • Jacobin is a socialist magazine — fascinating to see how one of their authors feels about the rise of the post-religious right.
  6. We Need to Fix Voting in America Now (Wilfred Reilly, National Review): “Simply put, there is no way to know the real rate of voter fraud in America, so long as the U.S.A. does not require citizens to vote in person or show an ID when they vote.… Recall that a competently done scan-and-purge of the rolls in Iowa alone turned up almost two orders of magnitude more registered noncitizens than the number that The Experts™ discovered nationwide — fully 0.5 percent–1 percent of the state’s electorate in some off-year races. Saying that these folks do not exist because they have never been jailed is like saying that there cannot really be 1 million-plus daily users of The Pirate Bay and similar sites, because there are so few annual prosecutions for internet crimes.” 
    • The author is a political science professor. He presents data I’ve never heard before.
  7. A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives (Musa al-Gharbi, Substack): “According to Forbes, more than 50 other billionaires also threw their weight behind Trump. So far so good for the preferred narrative. But here’s the twist: even more billionaires — 83 to be precise — supported the Democratic nominee. Kamala had 60 percent more billionaire backers than Donald Trump did. And billionaires like Oprah and Mark Cuban hit the campaign trail serving as surrogates for Harris in much the same way as Musk supported Trump. If we want to look at who ‘big money’ tried to push into office this cycle, the answer is disconcerting.… Overall, this cycle, Democrats raised roughly twice as much money as their opponents. In the months after Joe Biden dropped out, Democrats raised more than $1 billion – more than three times as much as Republicans brought in over the same period – largely thanks to enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris within Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Big Law.”

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 475

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s one thing to get nonbelievers to offer kind words for ‘cultural’ Christianity or endorse the sociological utility of churchgoing. The challenge is to go further, to persuade anxious moderns that religion is more than merely pragmatically useful, more than just a wistful hope — that a religious framework actually makes much more sense of reality than the allegedly hardheaded materialist alternative.” 
    • Discusses three books Douthat thinks are helpful.
  2. The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? (Nicholas Confessore, New York Times): “Striving to touch ‘every individual on campus,’ as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained.… Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.” 
    • Related: I Don’t Want to Live in a Monoculture, and Neither Do You (David French, New York Times): “In my experience, the more ideologically or theologically ‘pure’ an institution becomes, the more wrong it is likely to be, especially if it takes on a difficult or complex task. Ideological monocultures aren’t just bad for the minority that’s silenced, harassed or canceled whenever its members raise their voices in dissent. It’s terrible for the confident majority — and for the confident majority’s cause.”
  3. U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says (Azeen Ghorayshi, New York Times): “An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.… She said she was concerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that ‘we shouldn’t use blockers because it doesn’t impact them,’ referring to transgender adolescents.” 
    • JK Rowling summarized the story well: ‘We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.’
  4. Our Robot Stories Haven’t Prepared Us for A.I. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In most of these stories, the defining aspects of humanity are some combination of free will, strong emotion and morality. The robot begins as a being following its programming and mystified by human emotionality, and over time it begins to choose, to act freely, to cut its strings and ultimately to love.… We have been trained for a future in which robots think like us but don’t feel like us, and therefore need to be guided out of merely intellectual self-consciousness into a deeper awareness of emotionality, of heart as well as head. We are getting a reality where our bots seem so deeply emotional — loving, caring, heartfelt — that it’s hard to distinguish them from human beings, and indeed, some of us find their apparent warmth a refuge from a difficult or cruel world.”
  5. How I Learned To Stop Criticizing Everything (Eboo Patel, Persuasion): “I’m not sad that I read those critical theorists. I think it’s a useful perspective to have. My problem is that I deformed the world to fit a narrow worldview, and I let it direct my life. The bigger problem is that this paradigm has become a regime in certain quarters of higher education. You are coerced into holding that worldview and punished if you utter ideas outside of its scope. Critical theory is like a sharp kitchen knife: very useful for some things, like cutting meat, but if you eat your cereal with it, you’ll hurt yourself. And if you point it at someone else, then it’s a weapon. In some circles, on some campuses, every other utensil has been removed from the intellectual cutlery drawer, replaced with sharp kitchen knives.”
  6. Both Democrats and Republicans can pass the Ideological Turing Test (Adam Mastroianni, Substack): “We first challenged each side to pretend to be the other side, and then we had both sides try to distinguish between the truth-tellers and the fakers. If partisans have no idea who the other side is or what they believe, it should be hard for people to do a convincing impression of the opposite party. So let’s see!” 
    • Interesting study. In the footnotes he mentioned he gathered the data in 2019 but never got around to publishing it. Just FYI
  7. It’s Rational And Humane To Lack Strong Political Beliefs (Jesse Singal, Substack): “We don’t need the average person to have strong beliefs about what the right anti-poverty policy is, and I would argue it’s a waste of time to devote too many hours to something like that, because it’s hopelessly complex and even experts who devote their lives to that subject disagree on the basics. Plus, many of the experts — on this and every other subject — are themselves incompetent, ideologically captured, or otherwise unlikely to help lead you closer to useful insights.” 
    • Recommended by a student. This post is a bit odd in that it’s unlocked but to read the whole thing you have to read it in the Substack app. You can read the first part for free and that’s enough to get the gist and tell whether you want to read the rest of it.

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 470



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 470, a relatively uninteresting number. There are fewer links than usual this week owing to some travel. I didn’t have much time to read and I’m exhausted today. 

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Can AI Help a Student Get Into Stanford or Yale? (Lauren Coffey, Inside Higher Ed): “Lee is among hundreds of students trying out Esslo—whose name is a mashup of the words ‘essay’ and ‘Elo,’ a ranking system used in chess and esports. The program is the brainchild of two Stanford University students looking to tackle what they believe is one of the most stressful parts of college applications: the admissions essay.” 
    • The two Stanford students in question are part of Chi Alpha. Way to go, guys! The website: https://www.esslo.org/ — if you know any high school seniors, pass the link their way.
  2. Evangelize Like You’re a Sinner (Claude Atcho, Gospel Coalition): “The Samaritan woman’s bold witness teaches us a truth sometimes deemed too simplistic: the key to apologetics isn’t pithy answers or irrefutable arguments but a sense of awe in Jesus that can’t be silenced.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  3. As a Single Man, I Felt Little Pressure to Get Married. I Wish I Had. (Brett McCracken, The Gospel Coalition): “Singleness and marriage can both be good when they’re done for God’s glory and take a cruciform shape. And when chosen for selfish reasons or lived out in unhealthy ways, both singleness and marriage can also be bad. I’m not making an argument for one being universally better than the other. I’m simply observing that in our cultural moment, and perhaps in certain cultural contexts (like mine in Southern California), arguments for the good of marriage need to be sounded more urgently.”
  4. How Stanford and Its West Coast Brethren Planned for Long Road Trips in Conference Realignment (Pat Forde, Sports Illustrated): “The Cardinal are making their Atlantic Coast Conference debut on Sept. 20, at Syracuse. The following week, Stanford will visit Clemson. Of all the hands realigning schools have been dealt, this is the single worst one in football. None of the other Pac-12 diaspora—in the ACC, Big Ten or Big 12—will play league road games on consecutive weeks. And these are three-time-zone sojourns of 5,000 miles or more round trip.”

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 469



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 469, which is apparently the largest known n for which n!-1 is prime.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ChatGPT Goes to Church (Arlie Coles, Plough): “Accidentally generated heresy is a technical failure; a pastor refusing to speak from the heart and preferring to generate the most probable word sequences for a sermon to the congregation in his care is a moral failure.… There is no world where deferring preaching and pastoral care to a text generator does not end with deterioration – first of formation, then of the clergy, and finally of the people in their care.” 
    • The author is a research scientist who focuses on deep learning.
  2. Scientists use food dye found in Doritos to make see-through mice (Carolyn Y. Johnson, Washington Post): “In a series of experiments that could have been plucked from the pages of science fiction, researchers at Stanford University massaged a solution containing tartrazine, the chemical found in the food dye known as ‘yellow No. 5,’ onto the stomachs, scalps and hind legs of mice. About five minutes later, the opaque skin of the mice transformed temporarily into a living window, revealing branching blood vessels, muscle fibers and contractions of the gut, they reported Thursday in the journal Science.” 
    • One of the study’s leaders, Dr. Guosong Hong, was part of Chi Alpha at Stanford. See the actual journal article for more details and some wild images.
  3. America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny (Caity Weaver, New York Times): “Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.”
  4. D.E.I. Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach. (Paul Brest and Emily Levine, New York Times): “Rather than correcting stereotypes, diversity training too often reinforces them and breeds resentment, impeding students’ social development. An excessive focus on identity can be just as harmful as the pretense that identity doesn’t matter. Overall, these programs may undermine the very groups they seek to aid by instilling a victim mind-set and by pitting students against one another.” 
    • The two authors are Stanford affiliates. Paul Brest is a former dean of Stanford Law School, and Emily Levine is associate professor of education and history at Stanford.
  5. Why I changed my mind about volunteering (Rachel M. Cohen, Vox): “Philanthropy certainly has some great victories in funding ‘root’ solutions, but Buchanan urges against the mentality that only permanently eradicating a problem is worth doing. ‘You shouldn’t assume that a focus on roots is necessarily superior,’ he writes. ‘Trimming branches is also important.’ In a way, it can feel safe to distrust the value of individual action. Being wary of philanthropy and charitable groups that promise to better the world resonates with the skepticism I’ve been trained to have, professionally and culturally. It also allows me to avoid making sacrifices; there’s no real vulnerability or bets required.”
  6. I didn’t know that Tolkien had explained Tom Bombadil (Alan Jacobs, a Baylor prof).

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 467



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 467, a number which has strictly increasing digits when written normally as well as when written in bases 7 (12357) and 9 (5689).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Colleges Can’t Say They Weren’t Warned (David French, New York Times): “In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, a number of universities were taken by surprise by the sheer sustained disruption and by the antisemitic animosity on their campuses. They struggled to respond effectively. As the war continues — and as the conflict with Hezbollah escalates on Israel’s northern border — universities can no longer claim to be surprised. They know what might happen this school year, and this knowledge has legal significance. If they fail to protect the free speech of students or to protect students from antisemitic or Islamophobic harassment, there will be consequences.”
  2. Stranded in Space? NASA Doesn’t See the Starliner Astronauts That Way. (Kenneth Chang, New York Times): “If you go somewhere expecting an eight-day trip and end up not being able to leave for eight months, most people would consider that ‘stranded.’… All summer, NASA and Boeing officials have been reluctant to use the words, ‘stuck’ and ‘stranded,’ which would add another black mark to a spacecraft that has been delayed for years by technical setbacks.”
  3. Augustine, AI, and the Demon Heuristic (Robert Cotton, Mere Orthodoxy): “One does not have to dig deep into the comments section of a ChatGPT demo video to find someone convinced that there’s something demonic about it. At the risk of keeping company with the most paranoid of the terminally online, I would like to add another point which makes this position plausible–that there is something of the demonic to recent AI developments.… I think we should be quite alarmed by how we are approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and how it appears to look. If this theurgic vision of idolatry is Biblically true, we should be worried that there are malignant actors attempting to gain a foothold. The veneer of disenchantment to which technology so effectively pretends is, in fact, quite capable of hiding a very old and very magical stratagem.” 
    • Fascinating and brings completely unexpected (to me) evidence to the table.
  4. Faith abounds at the Democratic National Convention, but don’t be surprised (Jack Jenkins, Religion News Service): “The faith-fueled messaging [at the DNC] may have surprised some conservatives, but it’s hardly news to anyone who kept a close eye on liberals over the past decade or so. The Democratic Party, although home to a growing (and sizable) subset of religiously unaffiliated voters, remains majority religious and majority Christian, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. More to the point: Although people of faith have long been at home among its ranks, religious rhetoric at Democratic Party conventions has garnered more headlines in recent years, with the 2016 gathering featuring a primetime address from a prominent pastor and the 2020 event including an entire section dedicated to faith.”
  5. College Freshman, Stick the Landing (Vince Greenwald, Gospel Coalition): “Know ahead of time that you won’t find a perfect church. There are no perfect churches. You’re just looking for a healthy and faithful one. So after your short church-shopping phase, make the pivot from evaluation to participation. Pursue membership. Look for opportunities to serve. Bring some friends. And resist the urge to church shop indefinitely. Plants don’t grow well when they’re constantly uprooted and transplanted. Neither do Christians.” 
    • Recommended by a student. I would add to the article: look for an on-campus fellowship such as Chi Alpha. They will help you find a church as well as in many other practical ways.
  6. The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite (Tanner Greer, blog): “I laugh sometimes at the complaints I see on humanities twitter bewailing the shallow reading habits of the tech-bro. The technology brothers read—a lot! I am sure more novels are read every year on Sand Hill Road than on Capitol Hill. Washington functionaries simply do not live a life of the mind. If Silicon Valley technologists do not always live such a life, they at least pretend to.… You can divide most of these [beloved by Silicon Valley] titles into five overarching categories: works of speculative or science fiction; historical case studies of ambitious men or important moments in the history of technology; books that outline general principles of physics, math, or cognitive science; books that outline the operating principles and business strategy of successful start-ups; and finally, narrative histories of successful start-ups themselves.”
  7. Praise for Price Gouging (John Cochrane, Substack): “We should praise price-gouging. Yes, pass a new federal law, one that overrides the many state laws against price gouging.… Price gouging directs scarce supply to the people who really need it, encourages new supply to come in, encourages holding stockpiles for a rainy day, encourages efficient use of stockpiles we have sitting around, and encourages people to substitute for less scarce goods when they can.” 
    • The author is an economist at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

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 466



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 466, which is 1234 in base 7.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Following Jesus in the Desert of Mental Illness (Samuel D. James, Substack): “Bryant writes that a breakthrough for him came when he realized that Christ had not committed himself to Bryant’s plans, but to Bryant himself. Once the life that Bryant had planned for himself disintegrated, he was left with deeply painful questions about whether Jesus had stopped loving him. But eventually he realized that Christ wanted something more for Bryant than his own (good) desires. He wanted Christ for him. He wanted dependence on the cross.”
  2. Danger, AI Scientist, Danger (Zvi Mowshowitz, Substack): “[Did you hear about] the automated AI Scientist that tried to rewrite its code to get around resource restrictions and launch new instances of itself while downloading bizarre Python libraries? Its name is Sakana AI. (魚≈סכנה). As in, in hebrew, that literally means ‘danger’, baby. ”
  3. Election-related stuff:
    • Voting Isn’t A Window Into the Soul (Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch): “The idea that voting is a window into someone’s soul strikes me as almost a theological heresy and a failure of empathetic imagination. It assumes that the person who voted wrong—or right—sees the world the same way you do and that they invest the same moral, philosophical, and political significance in their vote that you do in yours.”
    • Nate Silver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mistakes of the ‘Indigo Blob’ (Ezra Klein interviewing Nate Silver, New York Times): “What you seem to be doing in the book is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of risk tolerance and thinking about risk. And you wrote something that caught my eye: ‘Covid made those risk preferences public, worn on our proverbial sleeves and our literal faces.’ And you go on to say, ‘People are becoming more bifurcated in their risk tolerance and that this affects everything from who we hang out with to how we vote.’ ” 
      • An interesting (and kinda long) interview.
  4. Christianity and politics intersecting in various ways: 
    • Trump has put social conservatives in a dilemma (Ed Feser, personal blog): “…I will set out the relevant moral principles for deciding how to vote when faced with a choice between candidates whose positions on matters related to abortion, marriage, and the like are gravely immoral. Finally, I will discuss how these principles apply to the present case.” 
      • Feser is my favorite living philosopher. Written from a Catholic perspective but addressed to a broader audience.
    • A pastor said his pro-Trump prophecies came from God. His brother called him a fake. (Danielle Paquette, Washington Post): “On the morning he could no longer stand it, the preacher was sipping coffee at his kitchen table. The house was quiet. The boys weren’t up yet. Josiah Johnson wanted to savor the peace, but his attention drifted to his younger brother, the one he had decided was a false prophet. How many souls, he wondered, was that Christian influencer manipulating on social media right now? Hundreds of thousands followed Jeremiah, who’d helped popularize the far-right belief that God handpicked Donald Trump to lead the United States.” 
      • Long, interesting, sad.
    • My Old Church’s Fundamentalist Wing Canceled Me (David French and Vishakha Darbha, New York Times): “What you’re seeing throughout American Christianity now is the fundamentalist wing is really exerting itself. And so what that means is when you encounter somebody who’s a fundamentalist and you say, ‘I’m not voting for Trump,’ they often don’t look at that as a debatable point for which Christians in good will can disagree. They will look at this and say, ‘It is the natural and inevitable consequence of applying Christian principles that you will support Donald Trump.’… What that does is it raises the stakes to this eternal level. And what ends up happening is they just sweep aside all of these scriptures about loving your enemies, being kind to those, blessing those who persecute you. All of that is just swept aside in favor of the burning certainty and ferocity of the culture war.”
    • The All-Male Christian Group Seeking a Resurrection in the Trump Era (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Evangelical Christians have been a reliable Republican voting bloc since the 1980s, but they have historically been averse to hearing overtly partisan messages in spiritual settings. That has been shifting in recent years, as some high-profile conservatives, like Mr. Kirk and others at the conference, have characterized political engagement as a pastoral obligation. Some pastors who have leaned into preaching on topics like abortion and gender issues have seen their churches boom in a time of broad declines in attendance.” 
      • Pretty good article, although I take strong issue with the last sentence. Abortion and gender issues aren’t political simply because there is a partisan divide on them. Christians have been talking about human nature and sexual ethics since before America was a nation and should the Lord tarry we will continue after America is a distant memory.
  5. They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They’re Fighting to Learn Why (Greg Donahue, New York Times)“In the context of a cluster of atypical cases that had stumped some of the most experienced scientists in Canada, Marrero believed that Jansen had not only overstepped his bounds but had failed to address the situation’s most critical questions: ‘Why so many young? Why so many in one area? Why so many in one family?’ Many of Marrero’s colleagues in the working group agreed. In a leaked email from last year, one of them referred to Jansen’s findings as a ‘loophole’ through which the politicians have eagerly leaped to conclude nothing coherent is going on.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  6. Have National Abortion Numbers Increased Since the Dobbs Decision? (John McCormack, The Dispatch): “At first glance, headlines generated by that report might lead the casual reader to assume anti-abortion laws haven’t done anything to achieve their intended purpose of saving lives. But even if the new report is accurate (more on that below), other studies show that there are likely tens of thousands of infants and toddlers alive today because of laws allowed by the Dobbs decision.”
  7. Reservoir of liquid water found deep in Martian rocks (Victoria Gill, BBC): “The Insight probe was only able to record directly from the crust beneath its feet, but the researchers expect that there will be similar reservoirs across the planet. If that is the case, they estimate that there is enough liquid water on Mars to form a layer across the surface that would be more than half a mile deep. However, they point out, the location of this Martian groundwater is not good news for billionaires with Mars colonisation plans who might want to tap into it. ‘It’s sequestered 10–20km deep in the crust,’ explained Prof Manga.”

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 463



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 463, a prime number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why your smartphone might be stopping you from following Jesus (Martin Saunders, Premiere Christianity): “[Haidt] argues that smartphones actually drive spiritual degradation: ‘[social media] trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: Think about yourselves first; be materialistic, judgemental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.’… our digital culture isn’t neutral; it’s offering a kind of anti-discipleship.”
  2. Move Over, Mathematicians, Here Comes AlphaProof (Siobhan Roberts, New York Times): “A pair of Google DeepMind models tried their luck with the problem set in the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad, or I.M.O., held from July 11 to July 22 about 100 miles west of London at the University of Bath. The event is said to be the premier math competition for the world’s ‘brightest mathletes,’ according to a promotional post on social media. The human problem-solvers — 609 high school students from 108 countries — won 58 gold medals, 123 silver and 145 bronze. The A.I. performed at the level of a silver medalist, solving four out of six problems for a total of 28 points. It was the first time that A.I. has achieved a medal-worthy performance on an Olympiad’s problems.”
  3. Standing Out, Crafting Hooks, and Accidentally Revealing Everything That’s Wrong With You (Max Nussenbaum, Substack): “You wouldn’t think that people’s natural instinct would be to reveal their full litany of psychological issues in their profiles, but it actually is. They just don’t realize that’s what they’re doing.” About a year old.
  4. Online opt-in polls can produce misleading results, especially for young people and Hispanic adults (Andrew Mercer, Courtney Kennedy & Scott Keeter, Pew Research): “…several recent studies have documented large errors in online opt-in surveys due to the presence of so-called ‘bogus respondents.’ These respondents do not answer questions sincerely; instead, they attempt to complete surveys with as little effort as possible to earn money or other rewards. Studies have shown that bogus respondents can cause opt-in surveys to overestimate rare attitudes and behaviors, such as ingesting bleach to protect against COVID-19, belief in conspiracies like Pizzagate or support for political violence.”
  5. Patronage vs. Constituent Parties (Or Why Republican Party Leaders Matter More Than Democratic Ones) (Tanner Greer, personal blog): “…many discussions of American politics assume that that the structures and operational norms of the two parties are the same. If these party differences were more widely recognized, I suspect we would see fewer evangelicals frustrated with their limited influence over the GOP party platform, fewer journalists shocked with J.D. Vance’s journey from never-Trump land to MAGA-maximalism, and greater alarm among centrist Democrats about the longer-term influence that the Palestine protests will have on the contours of their coalition.”
  6. Evangelicals Must Stop Their Preferential Treatment of the Left (James R. Wood, First Things): “Today, centrists and those on the right are more fertile soil, I believe, because they are more open to reality. They recognize that the cultural revolutionaries’ projects to rewrite reality are destroying civilization. These refugees crave clarity about basic moral realities because of how much confusion the negative world has produced. They are looking for voices who stand up to the civilizational destroyers—maybe even voices who boldly proclaim supernatural truths.Like the ‘god-fearers’ that early church missionaries often targeted, we today need to consider the ‘reality-respecters’ in our mission.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  7. Stanford’s biggest star lured to Texas Tech with $1 million deal (Alex Simon, SF Gate): “Canady announced her transfer to Texas Tech on Wednesday, with multiple reports quickly coming out that the Red Raiders’ name, image and likeness (NIL) collective Matador Club, the group of boosters supporting Texas Tech by signing the school’s athletes to endorsement deals, signed the pitcher to a one-year deal for over $1 million.”

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 458



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 458, a number with very few factors. 458 = 229 · 2.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety (Derek Thompson, The Atlantic): “We’re seeing the international transmission of a novel Western theory of mental health. It’s the globalization of Western—and, just maybe, American—despair.… According to the podcast search engine Listen Notes, more than 5,500 podcasts have the word trauma in their title. In celebrity media, mental-health testimonials are so common that they’ve spawned a subgenre of summaries of celebrity mental-health testimonials, including ’39 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Mental Health,’ ‘What 22 Celebrities Have Said About Having Depression,’ and ’12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Mental Health.’ ” 
    • Polymath Tyler Cowen called this “one of the best and most important pieces of the year.” Unlocked. 
  2. How to get 7th graders to smoke (Adam Mastroianni, Substack): “Nobody thinks they can whip up an iPhone in their garage over the weekend, but most people think they know how to save the children, fix the schools, reform the prisons, overhaul healthcare, repair politics, restore civility, and bring about world peace. Perhaps that’s why we have iPhones and we don’t have any of those other things.” 
    • This is a humbling essay. 
  3. ChatGPT is bullshit (Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater, Ethics and Information Technology): “The machines are not trying to communicate something they believe or perceive. Their inaccuracy is not due to misperception or hallucination. As we have pointed out, they are not trying to convey information at all. They are bullshitting.” 
    • The authors are at the University of Glasgow. Apologies for the language, but the language is at the heart of the point the authors are making.
  4. No Longer Pitiable (Jared Hayden, Mere Orthodoxy): “For Paul, what makes singleness ‘better’ is not the absence of sex as such, for neither sex nor marriage is a sin, as he is at pains to show. Rather, singleness is the ‘happier’ state because it provides believers the opportunity to be ‘anxious about the things of the Lord’ rather than ‘worldly things’ because the ‘appointed time has grown very short.’ For Paul, all singles should live devoted to the Lord… one either leverages singleness for the Lord, like Paul; or one leverages it for worldly or sinful purposes, like idle widows (1 Tim 5:13).”
    • A theologically rich essay about singleness. 
  5. Evolution May Be Purposeful And It’s Freaking Scientists Out (Andrea Morris, Forbes): “Noble is neutral on religious matters. Yet he sees compelling evidence that purpose may be fundamental to life. He’s determined to debunk the current scientific paradigm and replace the elevated importance of genes with something much more controversial. His efforts have enraged many of his peers but gained support from the next generation of origins-of-life researchers working to topple the reign of gene-centrism.”
  6. Some articles about the war in Gaza: 
    • Israelis Are Not Watching the Same War You Are (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “We got used to Israel’s calmest decade, in terms of security and casualties. And all of a sudden, people understand that this was not feasible for the long run. That is to say that we will probably have to see more soldiers fighting in the north and in the south for the coming years, maybe decades. And there will be a death toll. It’s not going to be a permanent war but maybe a permanent state of ongoing operations.” 
      • A fascinating (albeit a tad long) interview with an Israeli intellectual.
    • Getting Aid Into Gaza (German Lopez, New York Times): “Israel has enforced opaque rules that turn back trucks meant for Gaza, citing security concerns. Egypt has blocked aid to protest Israel’s military operations. Hamas has stolen, or tried to steal, aid shipments for its own use.” 
      • A reasonably fair-minded article. Examines multiple perspectives.
  7. Abused by the badge (Jessica Contrera, Jenn Abelson, John D. Harden, Hayden Godfrey & Nate Jones, Washington Post): “A Washington Post investigation has found that over the past two decades, hundreds of law enforcement officers in the United States have sexually abused children while officials at every level of the criminal justice system have failed to protect kids, punish abusers and prevent additional crimes… The Post identified at least 1,800 state and local law enforcement officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022.” 
    • I have long said that the people throwing stones at the Roman Catholic Church for their sexual abuse crisis would be stunned with the far worse numbers on child sexual abuse in the public school system (and I stand by that). But I did not foresee this one and I should have. There is authority, therefore there is abuse of authority.
    • Unlocked.

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 455



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 455, which is the result of 15 choose 3 — how many ways you can select three objects from a collection of fifteen.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What I’ve Learned From a Decade on the Dating Apps (Katelyn Beaty, Substack): “Dating apps are not a neutral tool for finding love. Like all technologies, they act on us, even as we think we are in control, acting on them. They shape how we see other people, and ourselves, and romantic love itself. According to the apps, love is the optimization of traits that yield the highest rates of mutual satisfaction and personal growth for two atomized individuals. This self-expressive model of romance may be fine as far as it goes, but it’s a major departure from the basis of love in previous eras.” 
    • Emphasis in original. 
    • I also liked this bit: “It’s as if these apps don’t want users to find romance, because they are incentivized, to the tune of $5.3 billion in 2022, to keep us swiping and searching.”
  2. Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges? (Marc Novicoff & Robert Kelchen, Washington Monthly): “Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments. By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still.” 
    • Contains interesting charts.
  3. Spying Arrests Send Chill Through Britain’s Thriving Hong Kong Community (Megan Specia, New York Times): “This month, three men were charged in London with gathering intelligence for Hong Kong and forcing entry into a British residence. While the men have not yet been found innocent or guilty — the trial will not begin until February — the news of the arrests threw a spotlight on many activists’ existing concerns about China’s ability to surveil and harass its citizens abroad, particularly those who have been critical of the government.”
  4. Two articles about surviving cancer: 
    • Marital Status and Survival in Patients With Cancer (Aizer et al, Journal of Clinical Oncology): “For five cancers studied (prostate, breast, colorectal, esophageal, and head/neck cancers), the survival benefit associated with marriage was larger than the published survival benefit of chemotherapy. The importance of this study is that it highlights the consistent and substantial impact that features of marriage, particularly social support, can have on cancer detection, treatment, and survival.” 
      • From 2013. Marriage is better than chemotherapy. To be clear: if you have cancer also receive medical treatment even if you’re married.
    • Trial results for new lung cancer drug are ‘off the charts’, say doctors (Andrew Gregory, The Guardian): “Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8m deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor. More than half of patients (60%) diagnosed with advanced forms of lung cancer who took lorlatinib were still alive five years later with no progression in their disease, data presented at the world’s largest cancer conference showed. The rate was 8% in patients treated with a standard drug, the trial found.” 
      • Amazing!
  5. Two articles about the job market: 
    • Why Can’t College Grads Find Jobs? Here Are Some Theories — and Fixes. (Peter Coy, New York Times): “Even though the unemployment rate is low, fewer people are quitting, so fewer jobs are becoming available, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. LinkedIn’s estimate of the national hiring rate was down 9.5 percent in April from a year earlier.” 
      • The article contains other substantive insights, but that one stood out to me.
    • The case of the angry history postdoc (Noah Smith, Substack): “Why is no one hiring historians? There are four basic reasons. The first and most important — which almost no one ever talks about, because it’s supposed to be so obvious — is that the U.S. university system is largely done expanding. The 20th century saw a massive build-out of universities, which required hiring a massive number of tenure-track professors. Then it stopped. And because tenure is for life, the departments at the existing universities are clogged with a ton of old profs who will never leave until they age out. New hires must therefore slow to a trickle, since as long as the number of profs is roughly constant, they can only be hired to replace people who retire or die.”
  6. Live by the Law or Die on the Cross (Jeremy England, Tablet Magazine): “What would Jesus do if a Hamas fighter held a Gazan Arab child up as a shield while firing? Hard to say for sure, but anyone who argues that a properly humane response is to die rather than to try to shoot around the child has ample basis in Christianity. The image of the Crucifixion may mean many things, but part of what it means is that accepting corporeal defeat in this world can be a path to God-like virtue and spiritual victory in the world of tomorrow. You will not hear Jesus mentioned when Western leaders speak on how important it is that Israel adhere to international laws of war, but the concept of the innocent civilian enshrined in these laws grew practically out of wars fought within Christendom during the last several hundred years.” 
    • Recommended by a student who does not endorse all of the argument but found it fascinating.
  7. A Redemptive Thesis for Artificial Intelligence (Andy Crouch with others, Praxis Labs): “Like the Internet, electricity, and agriculture, AI is a general-purpose technology that can be harnessed to many ends. Redemptive entrepreneurs can lead the way in demonstrating that AI can be deployed — in fact, is best deployed — in ways that dethrone pride, magic, and Mammon and that elevate the dignity of human beings and their capacity to flourish as image bearers in the world.”

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 450

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.

450 is a cool number because it ends in 50. Which is just cool. 

It’s also something called an Arabian Nights factorial, meaning that 450! has 1001 digits. What a fun concept!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pro-Palestinian Encampments Spread, Leading to Hundreds of Arrests (Anna Betts, New York Times): “In the week since Columbia University started cracking down on pro-Palestinian protesters occupying a lawn on its campus, protests and encampments have sprung up at other colleges and universities across the country. Police interventions on several campuses have led to more than 400 arrests so far.” 
    • Scenes of Protests Spread at Elite Campuses (Troy Closson, New York Times): “Nearly 50 people were arrested at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on Monday morning, following the arrests last week of more than 100 protesters at Columbia University in New York City. The arrests unleashed a wave of activism across other campuses.… The flurry of protests has presented a steep challenge for university leaders, as some Jewish students say they have faced harassment and antisemitic comments. Early Monday morning, Columbia announced a same-day shift to online classes because of the protests. Barnard College, across the street, followed suit hours later.”
    • The Carnage Is the Point (Dan Drezner, Substack): “Universities like Columbia have handled this poorly, although their response pales in comparison to how some elected officials want them to respond. An awful lot of politicians have been calling on the use of force against protestors. Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley have called for the National Guard to be deployed in Columbia, as has Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Earlier this week Texas governor Greg Abbott enthusiastically sent Texas state troopers to conduct mass arrests, breaking up an unsanctioned but nonviolent demonstration at the University of Texas at Austin. Cotton, Hawley, Johnson, and Abbott are a lot of things, but stupid they are not. Why would they call for coercion when they must be fully aware that such an approach would further fan the flames of protest?”
    • An interesting analysis. Worth your time.
  2. No, There Are No “Trans” Animals (Emma Hilton and Jonathan Kay, Quillette): “Do some creatures change sex? Absolutely. But this isn’t new information. It’s a fact that biologists have known about for a long time. What is also well-known is that none of these sex-changing creatures are mammals, much less human. Rather, they’re insects, fish, lizards, and marine invertebrates whose biology is different from our own in countless (fascinating) ways. What’s more, in every single case described above, there are always (at most) just two distinct sexes at play—no matter how those two sexes may switch or combine. One of those sexes is male, a sex associated with gonads that produce sperm (testes); and the other is female, with gonads that produce eggs (ovaries). There’s nothing else on the menu. It’s just M and F.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  3. Ex-athletic director accused of framing principal with AI arrested at airport with gun (Kristen Griffith & Justin Fenton, The Baltimore Banner): “Eiswert’s voice, which police and AI experts believe was simulated, made disparaging comments toward Black students and the surrounding Jewish community, was widely circulated on social media.” 
    • AI crimes are fixing to get wild. In case you haven’t been keeping up, AI-generated video and audio is shockingly good. https://twitter.com/reidhoffman/status/1783145009153450374 <– check this wild example. Reid Hoffman (one of the so-called ‘Paypal Mafia’, founder of LinkedIn) interviews an AI avatar of himself for about 14 minutes.
  4. What Is a Woman? What Is a Man? (Aaron Renn, Substack): “The key is to understand who men and women are, biologically, sociologically, and culturally. What we will see is that evangelicals have very little to say about this.”
  5. How do you get siblings to be nice to each other? Latino families have an answer (Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR): “I ask Cindy the same question I posed to scientists: How do you teach children to find joy in helping their siblings? And she answers exactly the same as the scientists answered: ‘We model it.’ Cindy says. Cindy models not just helping her siblings, but also the joy she receives from the relationships she has with her brothers and sisters.”
  6. Changes in College Admissions (Zvi Mowshowitz, Substack): “Starting in August 2024, LSAT to eliminate the Logic Games (Analytic Reasoning) section, the hardest, most fun and most objective and intelligence-testing part of the whole test. Normally I would be against dumbing down our testing, but keeping smart people from becoming lawyers is not the worst idea.” 
    • The whole thing is interesting. The excerpt is amusing.
  7. Astronomers Find Evidence Of A Massive Object Beyond The Orbit Of Neptune (James Felton, IFL Science): “Carrying out simulations to try and discover what best explains the orbits of these objects, the team found that a model that includes a massive planet beyond the region of Neptune explained the steady state of these objects much better than in simulations where planet 9 was not included. In the model, the team included other variables, such as the galactic tide and the gravitational influence of passing stars.” 

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.