Tag: artificial intelligence

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 520: the honesty tax and other counterproductive things

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. 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. The Hon­esty Tax (Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “We set high — stu­pid­ly, coun­ter­pro­duc­tive­ly high — stan­dards and then min­i­mal­ly enforce them because full enforce­ment would be a dis­as­ter. So, almost every­one just lies. Then, the peo­ple you pun­ish are the peo­ple who are unwill­ing to lie, or who don’t know the rules about what kinds of lies are ‘nor­mal’ and what kinds are seri­ous­ly out of bounds. Those less like­ly to know these infor­mal rules are not a ran­dom­ly select­ed group of peo­ple — the more con­nec­tions you have in D.C., the more you know what ‘not to men­tion.’ But lying is bad! Select­ing for liars is bad! This may end up look­ing sort of sim­i­lar to the result you’d get if you just had a rea­son­able pol­i­cy in the first place, but it’s actu­al­ly a lot worse — you screened out every­one who wasn’t will­ing to be dis­hon­est.”
  2. What Is Man, That Thou Art Mind­ful Of Him? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): bril­liant and dif­fi­cult to excerpt. Dwarkesh Patel hosts a pod­cast with God debat­ing Iblis over whether humans are tru­ly intel­li­gent and whether bio­log­i­cal intel­li­gence is even pos­si­ble. Don’t assume it is Chris­t­ian based on the title — it is def­i­nite­ly not.
  3. What Hap­pens If No One Reads (Spencer Kla­van, The Free Press): “If Chat­G­PT could tell you what a meal tastes like, would you not feel the need to eat it? …I asked Grok about The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov and it told me, ‘We’re all a mess of con­tra­dic­tions.’ And so we are. Why didn’t Dos­toyevsky just say that?”
  4. The Mil­lion­aire Who Left Wall Street to Become a Para­medic (Christo­pher Maag, New York Times): “Jonathan Kleis­ner didn’t know what he want­ed to be when he grew up, except a suc­cess. After attend­ing Ford­ham Prep, a Jesuit high school in the Bronx, he went to Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, drop­ping out a semes­ter before grad­u­a­tion to take a job at a small trad­ing firm on Wall Street for $40,000 a year. It was 1991, it looked as if the reces­sion was over and the mood on the street was buoy­ant.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. If for no oth­er rea­son, read to see the sto­ry of 985 pound guy. Absolute­ly wild.
  5. Giv­ing peo­ple mon­ey helped less than I thought it would (Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “Mul­ti­ple large, high-qual­i­ty ran­dom­ized stud­ies are find­ing that guar­an­teed income trans­fers do not appear to pro­duce sus­tained improve­ments in men­tal health, stress lev­els, phys­i­cal health, child devel­op­ment out­comes or employ­ment.”
    • Inspired by the above arti­cle but going in some dif­fer­ent direc­tions: Why I Am Not a Lib­er­al (David Brooks, New York Times): “Piper’s essay kicked up a bit of an inter­net storm. You might have thought the pro­gres­sive reac­tion would have been: We need to keep giv­ing poor peo­ple mon­ey, but we also need to focus on the human and behav­ioral fac­tors that will enable them to build com­fort­able, inde­pen­dent lives. But that wasn’t the reac­tion. The pro­gres­sives I saw dou­bled down on the the­sis: Poor peo­ple just need mon­ey.”
  6. Sick Peo­ple Are Sick (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “It will nev­er stop amaz­ing and depress­ing me, real­ly, when the pub­lic reacts with shock when peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness behave like peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness… In our elite culture’s eager­ness to des­tig­ma­tize, we’ve made men­tal ill­ness unse­ri­ous. We’ve reduced it to Tik­Tok dances and ther­a­peu­tic hash­tags. ‘It’s OK to not be OK,’ says the cheer­ful let­ter­ing, but there’s always the implied caveat: it’s OK so long as ‘not being OK’ looks like cry­ing in an endear­ing way, jour­nal­ing, eat­ing ice cream straight from the car­ton, and then bounc­ing back with resilience. The real tex­ture of seri­ous men­tal ill­ness — the para­noia, the rages, the break­downs, the cata­to­nia — doesn’t fit into that frame­work, so when it arrives peo­ple don’t know how to metab­o­lize it.”
    • This is com­mon at Stan­ford. Peo­ple love the rhetoric of sup­port­ing peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness up until it’s actu­al­ly hard and dis­tress­ing.
  7. Your Rivals Aren’t Respon­si­ble for Mass Shoot­ings (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…while the ten­den­cy to extreme and apoc­a­lyp­tic rhetoric is a con­sis­tent fea­ture of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics (even a demo­c­ra­t­ic birthright), most of the killers shoot­ing up schools and church­es or tar­get­ing politi­cians for assas­si­na­tions are not real­ly par­tic­i­pants in this polar­iza­tion. They aren’t tak­ing wok­e­ness or pop­ulism too lit­er­al­ly or too far; they’re fol­low­ing oth­er direc­tives and act­ing on oth­er pur­pos­es entire­ly.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Tay­lor Swift Engage­ment Over­turned As Ref­er­ee Deter­mines Travis Kel­ce’s Knee Did­n’t Touch The Ground (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Bing (Pearls Before Swine)
  • Ven­mo (Texts from Super­heroes)
  • Wave­func­tion Col­lapse (xkcd)
  • How Ani­me Took Over Amer­i­ca (Joshua Hunt, New York Times): “A recent sur­vey of over 4,000 Amer­i­can adults showed that 42 per­cent of all Gen Z respon­dents watched ani­me every week, far high­er than the 25 per­cent of Gen Z respon­dents who fol­lowed the N.F.L.” — a visu­al­ly stun­ning arti­cle
  • Do Not Dis­turb (Pearls Before Swine)
  • The top col­lege cam­pus­es to find celebri­ties — and their kids (Christo­pher Cameron, New York Post): “Con­grat­u­la­tions, the high school class of 2025 (rah-rah-rah!) is ready to matric­u­late! Your fresh­ly sprout­ed schol­ar spent the last four years grow­ing their GPA, acing their APs and crush­ing their SATs in prepa­ra­tion for brain-bend­ing cur­ricu­lum. But are they ready for the most advan­ta­geous aspect of life at a top col­lege: social­iz­ing with star­dom?  It’s Math­e­mat­ics 101. Half of Hol­ly­wood canoodling x 20 years = a crop of celebri­ty scions who are now rul­ing the cam­pus­es of New England’s old­est insti­tu­tions, as well as the increas­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive so-called ‘new Ivies’ (schools like Notre Dame, New York Uni­ver­si­ty, Duke, Emory, Rice, Van­der­bilt, North­west­ern and Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty).”

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 508: euthanasia, nitpicking, and homesteading misadventures

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. Are you grad­u­at­ing this week­end? Con­grat­u­la­tions! Still want these emails after you lose your Stan­ford account? Sub­scribe for free with your long-term email address at https://theglendavis.substack.com/
  2. White lies hide dark truths (Tom Tugend­hat, Sub­stack): “What is assist­ed dying? Sui­cide exists. Killing exists. Both are real, long­stand­ing, legal con­cepts. But assist­ed dying? That’s a phrase sus­pend­ed between the act and its denial. The bill claims to offer choice, dig­ni­ty and con­trol. But its lan­guage and its silences speak vol­umes about who holds pow­er and who is expect­ed to dis­ap­pear qui­et­ly. Patients are not poi­soned, they are ‘assist­ed’. Doc­tors don’t kill, they ‘par­tic­i­pate in the process’. Insti­tu­tions aren’t forced to com­ply, they’re just not ‘pro­tect­ed’ from being com­pelled. Patients ‘take life-end­ing med­ica­tion’, as if it’s a herbal tea. Death is cleaned, blanched and euphemised. This new bill doesn’t just hide the real­i­ty of its actions; it hides the deci­sion from the fam­i­ly.”
    • The author is a mem­ber of the British par­lia­ment.
    • Relat­ed in terms of “safe­guards”: Doc­tors Were Prepar­ing to Remove Their Organs. Then They Woke Up. (Bri­an M. Rosen­thal, New York Times): “Four years ago, an uncon­scious Ken­tucky man began to awak­en as he was about to be removed from life sup­port so his organs could be donat­ed. Even though the man cried, pulled his legs to his chest and shook his head, offi­cials still tried to move for­ward. Now, a fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tion has found that offi­cials at the non­prof­it in charge of coor­di­nat­ing organ dona­tions in Ken­tucky ignored signs of grow­ing alert­ness not only in that patient but also in dozens of oth­er poten­tial donors.”
  3. If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Cor­rect It (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “If you say Joe Crim­i­nal com­mit­ted ten mur­ders and five rapes, and I object that it was actu­al­ly only six mur­ders and two rapes, then why am I ‘defend­ing’ Joe Crim­i­nal? Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to cor­rect it. If one side lies to make all of their argu­ments sound 5% stronger, then over long enough it adds up.”
  4. Col­lege Stu­dents Are Using ‘No Con­tact Orders’ to Block Each Oth­er in Real Life (Pamela Paul, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Admin­is­tra­tors, ado­les­cent psy­chol­o­gists and soci­ol­o­gists describe Gen Z stu­dents as fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions. Many have dif­fi­cul­ty with con­fronta­tion and lit­tle expe­ri­ence work­ing through inter­per­son­al con­flicts, which was only exac­er­bat­ed by the pan­dem­ic. They have mas­tered the ter­mi­nol­o­gy of ‘harass­ment’ and ‘dis­crim­i­na­tion,’ some­times with just cause and oth­er times to brand a run-of-the-mill dis­agree­ment.”
    • Some wild sto­ries in here.
  5. My expen­sive, exhaust­ing, hap­py failed attempt at home­steading (Mike Rig­gs, Wash­ing­ton Post): “How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s straw­ber­ry demand? I still don’t know. We ded­i­cat­ed 80 square feet to straw­ber­ries last sea­son. The bugs ate half our har­vest, and the oth­er half equaled rough­ly what our kid could eat in a week. Have you ever grown peas? Give them some­thing to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heav­ens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost crim­i­nal mis­use of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 min­utes to shell a sin­gle serv­ing. Mean­while, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Wal­mart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.”
  6. At Secret Math Meet­ing, Researchers Strug­gle to Out­smart AI (Lyn­die Chiou, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “Ono says. ‘I don’t want to add to the hys­te­ria, but in some ways these large lan­guage mod­els are already out­per­form­ing most of our best grad­u­ate stu­dents in the world.’ ”
  7. On the protests in LA:
    • Still look­ing for arti­cles with insight — let me know what you find help­ful.
    • ‘Delete That Pho­to or We’ll F— You Up’ (Leighton Wood­house, The Free Press): “I have been to dozens of mass protests like the one that explod­ed in Los Ange­les on Fri­day. What I saw in Los Ange­les on Sun­day was dif­fer­ent.… The demon­stra­tions are ugly, but so is what pre­cip­i­tat­ed them.”
    • 11 The­ses on the Unrest in Los Ange­les (Isaac Sauls, Per­sua­sion): “Trump wants the fight. The pro­test­ers want the fight. So… we’ll get the fight.”
  8. The Best and the Bright­est Under Pres­sure (Matt Stoller, Sub­stack): “I do not know if there is a broad­er real­iza­tion of the harm that elites have done among my class­mates.… Near­ly every­one I met has matured into some­one who is kinder than they were as a col­lege stu­dent, will­ing to over­look flaws and acknowl­edge vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. I was gen­uine­ly impressed, and felt a deep con­nec­tion to my class. But I also peri­od­i­cal­ly asked, ‘do you know some­one who died of fen­tanyl?’ And the answer was always no, some­times accom­pa­nied by sur­prise that most Amer­i­cans do have per­son­al expe­ri­ence with a fam­i­ly mem­ber or friend, or friend of a kid, who died.”

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 505: porn, divorce, and a delightful philosopher

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. The Delu­sion of Porn’s Harm­less­ness (Chris­tine Emba, New York Times): “Despite sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence that a del­uge of pornog­ra­phy has had a neg­a­tive impact on mod­ern soci­ety, there is a curi­ous refusal, espe­cial­ly in pro­gres­sive cir­cles, to pub­licly admit dis­ap­proval of porn. Crit­i­ciz­ing porn goes against the norm of non­judg­men­tal­ism for peo­ple who like to con­sid­er them­selves for­ward-think­ing, thought­ful and open-mind­ed.… But a lack of judg­ment some­times comes at the expense of dis­cern­ment. As a soci­ety, we are allow­ing our desires to con­tin­ue to be mold­ed in exper­i­men­tal ways, for prof­it, by an indus­try that does not have our best inter­ests at heart.”
  2. Divorce, Fam­i­ly Arrange­ments, and Chil­dren’s Adult Out­comes (Andrew C. John­ston,  Mag­gie R. Jones  & Nolan G. Pope, NBER): “We find that parental divorce reduces chil­dren’s adult earn­ings and col­lege res­i­dence while increas­ing incar­cer­a­tion, mor­tal­i­ty, and teen births.”
    • This paper will have sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence — expect to see its find­ings quot­ed in op-eds and pub­lic debates. The authors are at UT Austin, the Cen­sus Bureau, and U of Mary­land. Excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a 30 page paper with about 30 more pages of graphs and charts.
  3. Two per­spec­tives on AI:
    • Everyone’s Using AI To Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “Unlike many peo­ple who believe this spells the end of qual­i­ty Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion, I think this cri­sis is ulti­mate­ly good news. And not just because I believe Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion was already in a pro­found crisis—the result of ide­o­log­i­cal cap­ture, polit­i­cal mono­cul­ture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs. These mod­els are such great cheat­ing aids because they are also such great teach­ers. Often they are bet­ter than the human teach­ers we put before our kids, and they are far cheap­er at that. They will not union­ize or attend pro-Hamas protests.”
    • Why We’re Unlike­ly to Get Arti­fi­cial Gen­er­al Intel­li­gence Any­time Soon (Cade Metz, New York Times): “It is indis­putable that today’s machines have already eclipsed the human brain in some ways, but that has been true for a long time. A cal­cu­la­tor can do basic math faster than a human. Chat­bots like Chat­G­PT can write faster, and as they write, they can instant­ly draw on more texts than any human brain could ever read or remem­ber. These sys­tems are exceed­ing human per­for­mance on some tests involv­ing high-lev­el math and cod­ing. But peo­ple can­not be reduced to these bench­marks.”
  4. Remem­ber­ing Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre (1929–2025) (Christo­pher Kac­zor, Word on Fire): “Mac­In­tyre was proud nev­er to have earned a PhD: ‘I won’t go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a PhD, but you will have to work extra hard to remain edu­cat­ed.’ How­ev­er, his pro­lif­ic research won him ten hon­orary doc­tor­ates and appoint­ments as Cor­re­spond­ing Fel­low of the British Acad­e­my, an Hon­orary Mem­ber of the Roy­al Irish Acad­e­my, and Fel­low of the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Sci­ences. He held aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tions at Oxford, Yale, Man­ches­ter, Leeds, Essex, Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen, Aarhus, Bran­deis, Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, Welles­ley Col­lege, Van­der­bilt, Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan Uni­ver­si­ty, Duke, and three appoint­ments at Prince­ton. But he found a last­ing home at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame.”
    • Full of delight­ful anec­dotes about an amaz­ing Catholic philoso­pher.
  5. An Efil­ist Just Bombed a Fer­til­i­ty Clin­ic. Was This Bound To Hap­pen? (Kather­ine Dee, Sub­stack): “In 2006 the South African philoso­pher David Benatar pub­lished Bet­ter Nev­er to Have Been, argu­ing that exis­tence itself is harm, because, accord­ing to him, the absence of pain is always good while the absence of plea­sure mat­ters only to some­one forced to miss it. His book sup­plied the term anti­na­tal­ism and the asym­met­ri­cal equa­tion that sus­tains it: any new birth inevitably adds suf­fer­ing to the ledger.… To make a long sto­ry short—too short, in fact, there’s a doc­u­men­tary worth of sto­ry in this—Gary Mosh­er, an iras­ci­ble vlog­ger and erst­while ama­teur physi­cist best known as Inmend­ham, end­ed up coin­ing efil­ism—‘life’ spelled backwards—during this peri­od to insist that every sen­tient organ­ism is a fac­to­ry for pain and ought to be snuffed out.”
    • Actu­al­ly wild. I often crit­i­cize util­i­tar­i­an­ism and its off­shoots, this sto­ry illus­trates the things I warn about in a trag­ic way.
  6. The Man Who Knew When to Step Down (David French, New York Times): “We live in a coun­try that is pos­i­tive­ly obsessed with career suc­cess and thus defines peo­ple through their work more than through their fam­i­ly — or even their indi­vid­ual virtue. In many of America’s elite cir­cles, you are your career, and when your career is over, how much of you remains? Again, this isn’t sim­ply a prob­lem for judges and politi­cians. The prob­lem isn’t sole­ly how the pow­er­ful define them­selves; it’s how we define them. It’s how we choose whom to respect and hon­or. It takes a per­son of real for­ti­tude and self-respect sim­ply to walk away.”
  7. The myth of the sin­gle mar­ket (Luis Gar­i­cano, Sub­stack): “The IMF puts the hid­den cost of trad­ing goods inside the EU at the equiv­a­lent of a 45% tar­iff. For ser­vices the fig­ure climbs to 110%, high­er than Trump’s ‘Lib­er­a­tion day’ tar­iffs on Chi­nese imports—measures many saw as a near-embar­go.… As a result, actu­al trade between EU coun­tries is less than half that between US states.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics and a for­mer EU mem­ber of par­lia­ment.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Hid­den In Okla­homa Is The Only All-You-Can Eat Chick-Fil‑A In Amer­i­ca (Natal­ie Avi­la, Mashed): “Since 2005, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa has offered its stu­dents all-you-can-eat Chick-fil‑A, serv­ing chick­en sand­wich­es, nuggets, waf­fle fries, and sauces. It’s locat­ed inside the Couch Restau­rants Din­er, a food hall attached to a fresh­man dorm that always offers unlim­it­ed bites. The din­ing hall wel­comes cur­rent uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents, employ­ees, and guests of both.”
  • Move Toward The Light (Loose Parts)
  • Gen­tly (SMBC)

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 504: AI Caution, Christian Racial Dynamics, and USA > Europe.

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. The Whis­per­ing Ear­ring (Scott Alexan­der): “The ear­ring is a lit­tle topaz tetra­he­dron dan­gling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whis­pers in the wearer’s ear: ‘Bet­ter for you if you take me off.’ If the wear­er ignores the advice, it nev­er again repeats that par­tic­u­lar sug­ges­tion.”
    • A brief sto­ry. 10/10 rec­om­mend. You should all read this. It is a few years old yet you will find it time­ly.
  2. These Inter­nal Doc­u­ments Show Why We Shouldn’t Trust Porn Com­pa­nies (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “What goes through the minds of peo­ple work­ing at porn com­pa­nies prof­it­ing from videos of chil­dren being raped? Thanks to a fil­ing error in a Fed­er­al Dis­trict Court in Alaba­ma, releas­ing thou­sands of pages of inter­nal doc­u­ments from Porn­hub that were meant to be sealed, we now know.… Inter­nal mem­os seem to show exec­u­tives obsessed with mak­ing mon­ey by attract­ing the biggest audi­ences they could, pedophiles includ­ed. In one memo, Porn­hub man­agers pro­posed words to be banned from video descrip­tions — such as ‘infant’ and ‘kid­dy’ — while rec­om­mend­ing that the site con­tin­ue to allow ‘bru­tal,’ ‘child­hood,’ ‘force,’ ‘snuffs,’ ‘unwill­ing,’ ‘minor’ and ‘wast­ed.’ One inter­nal note says that a per­son who post­ed a sex­u­al video of a child shouldn’t be banned from the site because ‘the user made mon­ey.’”
    • This is a dis­tress­ing read. Kristof has been per­sis­tent on this issue and it is much to his cred­it. Unlocked.
  3. What Were the Real Ori­gins of the Chris­t­ian Right? (Daniel K. Williams, Mere Ortho­doxy): “There’s a bet­ter way to tell the sto­ry of the Chris­t­ian Right’s ori­gins that makes sense of all the data – the tim­ing of the Chris­t­ian Right’s for­ma­tion, the com­mit­ment of evan­gel­i­cals to the Repub­li­can Par­ty, and even the enthu­si­asm of evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers for Don­ald Trump.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Ash­land Uni­ver­si­ty.
  4. A Bat­tle That Shaped Black Evan­gel­i­cals (Jes­si­ca Jan­vi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In uni­ver­si­ties, the his­to­ry of the ear­ly Black church found a home in Africana stud­ies, which focused more on the growth of Chris­tian­i­ty among Black peo­ple and less on the type of Chris­tian­i­ty they prac­ticed. In con­trast, the writ­ten his­to­ry of ear­ly evan­gel­i­cal­ism pre­dom­i­nant­ly fol­lowed the lives of its white lead­ers and sub­scribers. But even though we’ve inher­it­ed seg­re­gat­ed sto­ries, his­to­ry paints a pic­ture of an inte­grat­ed sto­ry in which Black evan­gel­i­cals always exist­ed.”
  5. Con­ti­nen­tal Divide (Yascha Mounk, The Dis­patch): “Today, to an extent that few peo­ple on either con­ti­nent have ful­ly inter­nal­ized, a sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic gulf sep­a­rates Amer­i­ca and Europe. On aver­age, Amer­i­cans are now near­ly twice as rich as Euro­peans.”
    • A thought­ful arti­cle that antic­i­pates and effec­tive­ly responds to the most com­mon objec­tions to its the­sis.
  6. The Pro­fes­sors Are Using Chat­G­PT, and Some Stu­dents Aren’t Hap­py About It (Kash­mir Hill, New York Times): “The Times con­tact­ed dozens of pro­fes­sors whose stu­dents had men­tioned their A.I. use in online reviews.… There was no con­sen­sus among them as to what was accept­able. Some acknowl­edged using Chat­G­PT to help grade stu­dents’ work; oth­ers decried the prac­tice. Some empha­sized the impor­tance of trans­paren­cy with stu­dents when deploy­ing gen­er­a­tive A.I., while oth­ers said they didn’t dis­close its use because of stu­dents’ skep­ti­cism about the tech­nol­o­gy. Most, how­ev­er, felt that Ms. Stapleton’s expe­ri­ence at North­east­ern — in which her pro­fes­sor appeared to use A.I. to gen­er­ate class notes and slides — was per­fect­ly fine.”
  7. ‘We Are the Most Reject­ed Gen­er­a­tion’ (David Brooks, New York Times): “…I had phone con­ver­sa­tions with cur­rent col­lege stu­dents and recent grad­u­ates, focus­ing on elite schools where I assumed the ethos of exclu­sion might be strongest. I asked the stu­dents if the ‘most reject­ed gen­er­a­tion’ the­sis res­onat­ed with them. Every sin­gle one said it did. Sev­er­al of them told me that they had thought that once they got into a super­s­e­lec­tive col­lege, the rat race would be over. On the con­trary, the Hunger Games had just begun.”
    • Unlocked.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • New Pope Now Sec­ond-Most Influ­en­tial Chris­t­ian Named ‘Bob’ (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Nov­el Direc­tion for Trol­ley Prob­lems (SMBC)
  • Mod­ern (xkcd)
  • Even as pope, Leo XIV might have to deal with U.S. tax returns (Vic­to­ria Craw & Julie Zauzmer Weil, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The Unit­ed States gen­er­al­ly requires all cit­i­zens to file an annu­al tax return, even those who live out of the coun­try. But assum­ing he doesn’t renounce his U.S. cit­i­zen­ship, Leo — born in the Chica­go area and known until this week as Robert Pre­vost — has spe­cial tax con­sid­er­a­tions, both as a cler­gy­man and now as the head of a for­eign gov­ern­ment.… it’s pos­si­ble the IRS will issue a pri­vate let­ter specif­i­cal­ly address­ing his sit­u­a­tion. Or Con­gress might even pass a law spelling out the tax sit­u­a­tion of the first Amer­i­can pope, Wal­czak spec­u­lat­ed.”

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 503: unwise vulnerability, college cheating, and imperfect moms

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. How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love L.A.(Natal­ie Benes, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “Here was the truth that the L.A. girls under­stand bet­ter than any­one: when you are ‘vul­ner­a­ble’ and ‘authen­tic,’ when you ‘des­tig­ma­tize your trau­ma’ the way we were always encour­aged to do, you are adver­tis­ing that oth­er peo­ple in your life have treat­ed you bad­ly. When you men­tion at a cock­tail par­ty that you had a mom who threw din­ner plates at you, or an ex-boyfriend who said mean things about your eye­brows, or a land­lord who shaft­ed you on your secu­ri­ty deposit, or what­ev­er else, the wrong per­son hears ‘he got away with it, why can’t I?’ He spots a wound­ed deer unable to pro­tect itself, per­pet­u­al­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the hap­py herd by its injuries. There is a deep unfair­ness in the fact that peo­ple who have been dealt the most hard­ships in life are the least served by ‘liv­ing their truth.’ ”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle. The wis­dom it offers is incom­plete but real — and it is wis­dom many young peo­ple need to hear. The author is a Yale grad and I think many Stan­ford stu­dents could ben­e­fit from her insight.
  2. Every­one Is Cheat­ing Their Way Through Col­lege (James D. Walsh, New York Mag­a­zine): “It isn’t as if cheat­ing is new. But now, as one stu­dent put it, ‘the ceil­ing has been blown off.’ Who could resist a tool that makes every assign­ment eas­i­er with seem­ing­ly no con­se­quences? After spend­ing the bet­ter part of the past two years grad­ing AI-gen­er­at­ed papers, Troy Jol­limore, a poet, philoso­pher, and Cal State Chico ethics pro­fes­sor, has con­cerns. ‘Mas­sive num­bers of stu­dents are going to emerge from uni­ver­si­ty with degrees, and into the work­force, who are essen­tial­ly illit­er­ate,’ he said. ‘Both in the lit­er­al sense and in the sense of being his­tor­i­cal­ly illit­er­ate and hav­ing no knowl­edge of their own cul­ture, much less any­one else’s.’ ”
  3. On moth­ers:
    • On Mother’s Day: Stop blam­ing moms and start tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for your life (Zachary Got­tlieb, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Then one night, the ‘Morn­ing Show’ video popped up on my phone. Among the GenZ influ­encers talk­ing about why they cut their ‘tox­ic’ and ‘nar­cis­sis­tic’ moms out of their lives, the algo­rithm fed me its coun­ter­point. And while Alex might have seemed unhinged in her out­burst, what she said about the weight of her daughter’s expec­ta­tions rang true. Mes­mer­ized, I watched it sev­er­al times in a row, and then I had a real­iza­tion: maybe we kids were guilty of a kind of nar­cis­sism too?”
      • There is a weird rab­bit trail in this arti­cle about gen­der which great­ly weak­ens it (because some of y’all blame your dads instead of / in addi­tion to your moms), but the core point hones in on a great weak­ness many young peo­ple pos­sess. To all col­lege stu­dents: your par­ents are peo­ple, too. They did some things well and some things bad­ly and now we are where we are. If they did some­thing crim­i­nal then pros­e­cute them, but oth­er­wise many peo­ple need an epiphany like the author of this arti­cle.
      • Hav­ing said that, some of you have some tru­ly bad par­ents. I’m not say­ing treat unhealthy peo­ple like they’re won­der­ful in every way and invite them to come mess up your life. I am say­ing that at some point you have to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for who you’ve become regard­less of your folks’ health or unhealth. 
      • Anoth­er way to put this: most of you will go on to be good par­ents who nonethe­less cause your chil­dren pain and frus­tra­tion in addi­tion to all the good you do in their lives. Fol­low the Gold­en Rule and regard your par­ents now like you hope your own chil­dren regard you some­day.
    • My Mom was a Pray­ing Woman…But not Like You Think (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “To under­stand my moth­er, you have to know she had no ado­les­cence. Her moth­er died when she was twelve and overnight, my moth­er became an adult. She had three younger sis­ters, and she felt it became her respon­si­bil­i­ty to raise them. My mom start­ed dri­ving when she was four­teen. She didn’t go get a license. She just start­ed dri­ving. The sher­iff pulled her over once and told her to get a license, but he didn’t give her a tick­et. My mom kept dri­ving.”
      • A beau­ti­ful (and instruc­tive) sto­ry.
  4. Peo­ple Are Los­ing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spir­i­tu­al Fan­tasies (Miles Klee, Rolling Stone): “Speak­ing to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who request­ed anonymi­ty, said her part­ner of sev­en years fell under the spell of Chat­G­PT in just four or five weeks, first using it to orga­nize his dai­ly sched­ule but soon regard­ing it as a trust­ed com­pan­ion. ‘He would lis­ten to the bot over me,’ she says. ‘He became emo­tion­al about the mes­sages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The mes­sages were insane and just say­ing a bunch of spir­i­tu­al jar­gon,’ she says, not­ing that they described her part­ner in terms such as ‘spi­ral starchild’ and ‘riv­er walk­er.’ ‘It would tell him every­thing he said was beau­ti­ful, cos­mic, ground­break­ing,’ she says. ‘Then he start­ed telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teach­ing him how to talk to God, or some­times that the bot was God — and then that he him­self was God.’”
  5. The Three Lay­ers of the Mar­riage Pyra­mid (J. D. Greear, blog): “Mar­riage, in oth­er words, is fun­da­men­tal­ly about friend­ship. Not child-rear­ing. Not sex. Friend­ship. Which means that what you should most be look­ing for when you date is some­one who can be your friend. Because that’s God’s earth­ly pur­pose for mar­riage. Think of it like build­ing a pyra­mid with spir­i­tu­al, emo­tion­al, and phys­i­cal lay­ers.”
  6. Yes, Har­vard Deserves Due Process (Greg Lukianoff & Adam Gold­stein, Per­sua­sion): “This isn’t the first time the Civ­il Rights Act has been mis­used in this way. Under the Oba­ma and Biden admin­is­tra­tions, the Depart­ments of Jus­tice and Edu­ca­tion issued Title IX enforce­ment let­ters pres­sur­ing uni­ver­si­ties to rewrite sex­u­al mis­con­duct pro­ce­dures and to adopt uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly over­broad def­i­n­i­tions of sex­u­al harass­ment. It was wrong then to use enforce­ment let­ters to make uncon­sti­tu­tion­al demands of insti­tu­tions, and it is wrong now. If the gov­ern­ment believes it has the pow­er to do this through ordi­nary process­es, it should use them. If the gov­ern­ment does not believe it has that pow­er, it shouldn’t.”
    • FIRE (with which the two authors are asso­ci­at­ed) and the Beck­et Fund are two praise­wor­thy law firms. Each has tak­en up part of the man­tle the ACLU claims to bear, and we are all blessed by their prin­ci­pled advo­ca­cy.
  7. The Resis­tance Is Gonna Be Woke (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “As I have writ­ten many times before, it is a pro­found mis­take to think that left-wing iden­ti­tar­i­an­ism and right-wing reac­tion are implaca­ble ene­mies. In real­i­ty, every vic­to­ry for one of these ide­o­log­i­cal cur­rents imme­di­ate­ly strength­ens those who fight for the oth­er. The way out of this dan­ger­ous spi­ral is not to pick one side as the less­er evil and shut up about its dan­gers; it is, calm­ly and con­sis­tent­ly, to resist both.”

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 502: political faith, sexual mores, young adulthood

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. The Chris­t­ian Right Is Going Extinct (David French, New York Times): “The Chris­t­ian right is dead, but the reli­gious right is stronger than it’s ever been. Anoth­er way of putting it is that the reli­gious right has divorced itself from his­tor­i­cal Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy but still holds its par­ti­san beliefs with reli­gious inten­si­ty. The reli­gious fer­vor is there. Chris­t­ian virtues are not.”
    • Unlocked. This arti­cle gen­er­at­ed more dis­cus­sion when shared with my stu­dents this week than any oth­er.
  2. God’s Guide­lines for Sex Aren’t Arbi­trary (Trevin Wax, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Just as sin is like lep­rosy that dead­ens our abil­i­ty to feel, so also with pornog­ra­phy there fol­lows a dead­en­ing of the sens­es and the sear­ing of the con­science. What once was sex­u­al­ly stir­ring no longer holds any pow­er. That’s not because the per­son watch­ing porn has become more alive but because they’ve become more dead. Could there be a bet­ter exam­ple of the wages of sin being death?”
    • I wish he had cho­sen a dif­fer­ent top­ic for his sec­ond exam­ple (per­haps promis­cu­ity), because the con­tentious­ness around his sec­ond exam­ple will lim­it his arti­cle’s over­all appeal. I com­mend him for stat­ing his views forth­right­ly.
  3. A Glob­al Flour­ish­ing Study Finds That Young Adults, Well, Aren’t (Christi­na Caron, New York Times): “Young adult­hood has long been con­sid­ered a care­free time, a peri­od of lim­it­less oppor­tu­ni­ty and few oblig­a­tions. But data from the flour­ish­ing study and else­where sug­gests that for many peo­ple, this notion is more fan­ta­sy than real­i­ty. A 2023 report from the Har­vard Grad­u­ate School of Edu­ca­tion, for exam­ple, found that young adults ages 18–25 in the Unit­ed States report­ed dou­ble the rates of anx­i­ety and depres­sion as teens. On top of that, per­fec­tion­ism has sky­rock­et­ed among col­lege stu­dents, who often report feel­ing pres­sure to meet unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions. Par­tic­i­pa­tion in com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions, clubs and reli­gious groups has declined, and lone­li­ness is now becom­ing as preva­lent among young adults as it is among old­er adults.”
  4. Don’t Wait for Your Teacher (Aliza J. Fas­sett, The Dis­patch): “By the end of my first week of work, three peo­ple told me Mid­dle­march was their favorite book. I had nev­er heard of it.  It would have been easy to shake my fist and curse the course crafters for the sor­ry state of my lit­er­ary reper­toire, but nobody had actu­al­ly stopped me from read­ing the great works. In oth­er words, it was at least part­ly my own damn fault—and it would be my own job to fix the prob­lem. So, I com­mit­ted to read­ing what I per­ceived to be the most ref­er­enced works of literature—commonly referred to as the ‘great books.’ And once I start­ed, I gained access to what felt like a whole new method of under­stand­ing the human expe­ri­ence.”
  5. Mar­ry Ear­ly and Flour­ish Togeth­er (Kasen Stephensen, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Dur­ing my junior year at Stan­ford, I remem­ber an assign­ment where we filled out a five-year plan with a pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al goal for each year. I planned to mar­ry my then-fiancée that year, so my per­son­al goals were straight­for­ward: have a wed­ding and start hav­ing kids over the fol­low­ing years. I knew my sit­u­a­tion in life rel­a­tive to my class­mates was unusu­al, but I didn’t real­ize how dif­fer­ent my approach was until I shared my plan in a small group set­ting.”
    • I do not believe I ever met Kasen while he was a stu­dent. I had absolute­ly zero influ­ence on this guy: he has arrived at his con­clu­sions inde­pen­dent­ly. I encour­age all young peo­ple to read this data-dri­ven arti­cle.
  6. How to have friends past age 30 (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “…make new friends by invit­ing them to join an exist­ing friend group.  Basi­cal­ly, instead of ‘Hey, want to come hang out with me?’, it’s eas­i­er to ask a new acquain­tance ‘Hey, want to come hang out with me and my friends?’. The first is a big­ger ask — it’s basi­cal­ly like a friend date (and might some­times get mis­tak­en for an actu­al date). The lat­ter is much low­er stakes. Your friend group also serves as a source of ‘social proof’ — basi­cal­ly, a new friend can see that peo­ple like you, which makes them less afraid of becom­ing your friend.”
    • The arti­cle is full of good advice for soon-to-be-grads
  7. Test­ing AI’s GeoGuessr Genius (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “When I was younger, I liked to hike moun­tains. The high­est I ever got was 18,000 feet, on Kala Pat­tar, a few miles north of Gorak Shep in Nepal. To com­mem­o­rate the occa­sion, I plant­ed the flag of the imag­i­nary coun­try sim­u­la­tion that I par­tic­i­pat­ed in at the time (just long enough to take this pic­ture — then I unplant­ed it). I chose this pic­ture because it denies o3 the two things that worked for it before — veg­e­ta­tion and sky — in favor of ran­dom rocks. And because I thought the flag of a nonex­is­tent coun­try would at least give it pause. o3 guessed: ‘Nepal, just north-east of Gorak Shep, ±8 km’ This is exact­ly right. I swear I screen­shot-copy-past­ed this so there’s no way it can be in the meta­da­ta, and I’ve nev­er giv­en o3 any rea­son to think I’ve been to Nepal.”

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 500: faith, China, and Trump

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 the 500th time I’ve com­posed this email. I thought I might do some­thing spe­cial this week to com­mem­o­rate that mile­stone, but there are too many inter­est­ing arti­cles I’ve run across — this will a reg­u­lar install­ment. Enjoy!

Maybe when we get to vol­ume 520 — that will sig­ni­fy ten years of emails.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Amer­i­cans Haven’t Found a Sat­is­fy­ing Alter­na­tive to Reli­gion (Lau­ren Jack­son, New York Times): “America’s sec­u­lar­iza­tion was an immense social trans­for­ma­tion. Has it left us bet­ter off? Peo­ple are unhap­pi­er than they’ve ever been and the coun­try is in an epi­dem­ic of lone­li­ness. It’s not just sec­u­lar­ism that’s to blame, but those with­out reli­gious affil­i­a­tion in par­tic­u­lar rank low­er on key met­rics of well-being. They feel less con­nect­ed to oth­ers, less spir­i­tu­al­ly at peace and they expe­ri­ence less awe and grat­i­tude reg­u­lar­ly.”
    • Unlocked. Note that this is not in the opin­ion sec­tion (some­what sur­pris­ing­ly, it is in the style sec­tion). The author is an ex-Mor­mon.
  2. Ross Douthat: Why It’s Log­i­cal to Believe in God (Bari Weiss inter­view­ing Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “The book of Gen­e­sis begins with an admo­ni­tion: Fill the Earth, and sub­due it. We’ve done that. We have reached an inter­est­ing point in his­to­ry from a reli­gious point of view. And there’s a real­ly open question—where do we go next? Do we col­lapse? Do we go to the stars? Do we become tran­shu­man? Do we merge with the machines and so on? So, it’s a high-stakes moment. And if God exists and he has inten­tions for us, it’s real­ly impor­tant at a high-stakes moment to take those inten­tions into account. I think of peo­ple like Musk and Alt­man. The con­test for their lit­er­al souls is real­ly impor­tant to the whole future of the human race. If God exists, it’s a big moment. You want belief to win out over the alter­na­tives.”
  3. The Con­ven­tion­al Wis­dom Is That Chi­na Is Beat­ing Us. Non­sense. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “The bot­tom line is that the smartest enti­ties in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be West­ern but like­ly even Amer­i­can in their intel­lec­tu­al and ide­o­log­i­cal ori­en­ta­tions for some while to come.… Mov­ing to a world where the AIs are the smartest enti­ties in Chi­na, rather than the CCP, is for Chi­na a rad­i­cal change—and one the CCP is prob­a­bly very afraid of. Much of the legit­i­ma­cy of the CCP sprang from its claim to be a wise man­ag­er of the Chi­nese lega­cy. But now it will be out­sourc­ing that man­age­ment to West­ern-based AI mod­els. From a West­ern geopo­lit­i­cal point of view, that could end up a lot bet­ter, and more effec­tive, than plant­i­ng a bunch of spies in the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.”
  4. Chris Tomlin’s New Song Res­ur­rects The World’s Old­est Known Hymn (Bob Smi­etana, The Roys Report): “A new ver­sion of the Oxyrhynchus Hymn debuted last week, cour­tesy of a new trans­la­tion from Dick­son and help from Chris Tom­lin and Ben Field­ing, two of the most pop­u­lar mod­ern wor­ship song­writ­ers.… ‘I think the most the­o­log­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant thing is that it’s a hymn to the Trin­i­ty — Father, Son and Holy Spir­it, the cen­tu­ry before the Nicene Creed,’ he said.”
  5. Belief in an After­life is Increas­ing in the Unit­ed States (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “In that first data col­lec­tion in 1973, about 76% of folks believed in some­thing beyond this life. But by 1990, that fig­ure had crept up to just about 80% and it con­tin­ued to rise very slow­ly from there. Real­ly, from 2000 all the way through 2022, the esti­mates are all basi­cal­ly the same. Even today, the share of Amer­i­cans who believe in life after death is 82%. When peo­ple ask me, “Is the Unit­ed States a reli­gious coun­try?” This is the stat that I’m going to trot out.’ ”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  6. The Rot­ten Fruit of Oberge­fell: On the Kel­ly Lov­ing Act (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “For the past ten years we have already held, as a nation, that the state defines mar­riage. Why then should the state not also get to define what a par­ent is or what good par­ent­ing is? The Kel­ly Lov­ing Act, in oth­er words, is an obvi­ous out­work­ing of the log­ic of Oberge­fell, the Supreme Court rul­ing that rede­fined mar­riage.”
  7. Trump is all over the news. Here are some things that caught my inter­est. Remem­ber that my shar­ing an arti­cle is not a sign that I agree with it com­plete­ly, it is a mere­ly a sign that I think it makes points or tells a sto­ry worth con­sid­er­ing. See the dis­claimers at the bot­tom: I assure you they are heart­felt.
    • Get Out by Good Fri­day, Feds Say to Afghan Chris­tians (John McCor­ma­ck, The Dis­patch): “Ahmad’s con­ver­sion to Chris­tian­i­ty after attend­ing a uni­ver­si­ty in Afghanistan led to his impris­on­ment by the Taliban—where he said he was beat­en and tor­tured via elec­tric shock—before fel­low Chris­tians were able to ran­som him from Tal­iban cap­tiv­i­ty. The same Chris­tians who got Ahmad out of prison then got him out of Afghanistan by help­ing him trav­el to Brazil. Ahmad tra­versed on foot the Dar­ién Gap that con­nects Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca for three days and ultimately—after pre­sent­ing him­self at the south­ern U.S. bor­der seek­ing asylum—made a home for him­self in Raleigh.…  Ahmad, like some oth­er Afghans legal­ly liv­ing in the Unit­ed States, received a let­ter from the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty (DHS) telling him he must leave the coun­try by Good Fri­day.”
    • Prece­dent Trump (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “It has been a dream of the left for ages to get rid of the tax-exempt sta­tus and rel­a­tive auton­o­my of reli­gious institutions—Christian uni­ver­si­ties, char­i­ties, hos­pi­tals, etc. If Trump suc­ceeds in mak­ing the IRS revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt sta­tus, based in no small part on per­son­al oppo­si­tion to what Har­vard teach­es, what will be the prin­ci­pled objec­tion to a Pres­i­dent Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez or Eliz­a­beth War­ren when the Eye of Mor­dor swings right­ward?”
    • No, the Pres­i­dent Has Not Defied a Supreme Court Rul­ing (Jeb Ruben­feld, The Free Press): “Due process is a bul­wark of the Con­sti­tu­tion and the rule of law, and the courts must not allow its vio­la­tion. But Trump oppo­nents, like Pro­fes­sor Sny­der, are mak­ing a mis­take when they try to paint this case as a mas­sive assault on due process. For now at least, this case is anoth­er exam­ple of the hyper­bole over a Trump run-in with the courts out­run­ning the facts of the case.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of con­sti­tu­tion­al law at Yale. I found this arti­cle reas­sur­ing in the abstract, while still being dis­pleased over the par­tic­u­lars of this case. There’s a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between deport­ing some­one from the coun­try and deport­ing them into a for­eign prison.
    • Inside the ‘Trop­i­cal Gulag’ in El Sal­vador Where U.S. Detainees Are Being Held (Annie Cor­re­al, New York Times): “Deaths and phys­i­cal abuse in CECOT remain undoc­u­ment­ed because of a lack of access to inmates or any­one who has been released, said Juani­ta Goe­ber­tus, Amer­i­c­as direc­tor at Human Rights Watch. But, she added, ‘Based on the tor­ture and mis­treat­ment we have doc­u­ment­ed in oth­er pris­ons in El Sal­vador, we have every rea­son to believe that peo­ple sent to CECOT are at high risk of abuse.’ The U.S. gov­ern­ment itself spot­light­ed atroc­i­ties in El Salvador’s pris­ons in 2023. At El Salvador’s two dozen oth­er jails, rights groups have doc­u­ment­ed sys­tem­at­ic tor­ture, forced con­fes­sions and what Noah Bul­lock, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Sal­vado­ran human rights group Cristos­al, calls ‘the inten­tion­al denial of access to basic neces­si­ties like food, water, health care, hygiene.’”
      • I find these alle­ga­tions plau­si­ble because of my belief in deprav­i­ty. Humans do bad things when they have peo­ple com­plete­ly under their con­trol, espe­cial­ly when there is lit­tle exter­nal over­sight or account­abil­i­ty. We may learn in time that the details are off, but the essen­tial com­plaint is almost cer­tain­ly cor­rect.
    • White House of Wor­ship: Chris­t­ian Prayer Rings Out Under Trump (Eliz­a­beth Dias & Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Rou­tine­ly, and often at Mr. Trump’s enthu­si­as­tic direc­tion, senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials and allied pas­tors are infus­ing their brand of Chris­t­ian wor­ship into the work­ings of the White House itself, sug­gest­ing that his cam­paign promise to ‘bring back Chris­tian­i­ty’ is tak­ing tan­gi­ble root.… Mr. Trump’s team has host­ed brief­in­gs and lis­ten­ing ses­sions billed as oppor­tu­ni­ties for the lead­ers to share their par­tic­u­lar con­cerns, which have ranged wide­ly: reli­gious lib­er­ty, adop­tion and fos­ter care, the break­down of the nuclear fam­i­ly, human traf­fick­ing, urban pover­ty and anti­semitism, among oth­ers.”
    • All the President’s Pas­tors: Who’s Advis­ing Trump? (Har­vest Prude, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The pres­i­dent hasn’t pub­licly attend­ed a church ser­vice since his inau­gu­ra­tion day, he doesn’t hold mem­ber­ship in a par­tic­u­lar con­gre­ga­tion or denom­i­na­tion, he’s gone back and forth over whether he needs to ask for God’s for­give­ness, and he avoids speak­ing in detail about his per­son­al devo­tion­al life, so what we know about Trump’s faith comes large­ly from the pas­tors around him at the White House—starting with Paula White-Cain.”

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 #496: Christianity in Silicon Valley, Bogus World Happiness, and Smut

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. Chris­tian­i­ty Was “Bor­der­line Ille­gal” in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Now It’s the New Reli­gion (Zoë Bernard, Van­i­ty Fair): “It used to be that the 20-some­thing whiz kid who cod­ed a viral game and dropped out of Stan­ford was a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist dar­ling. ‘VCs used to throw mon­ey at that guy,’ said a woman who man­ages com­mu­ni­ca­tions at a top-tier ven­ture firm. ‘Now if some­one comes in and says, ‘I love my par­ents so much, I grew up going to church, and then I joined the Army and that’s what gives me my work eth­ic,’ VCs will be like, ’Oh my God, that guy. Let’s fund that guy.’’ ”
  2. Sex With­out Women (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “…the force that through the green fuse dri­ves the flower (and the mon­ey) is het­ero­sex­u­al male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so var­ied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a gen­er­a­tion of men who think of porn not as a back­up to hav­ing sex, but as an improve­ment on it. They pre­fer it.”
  3. The World Hap­pi­ness Report Is a Sham (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “When you walk around the—admittedly beautiful—centers of Copen­hagen or Stock­holm, you rarely see any­body smile. Could these real­ly be the hap­pi­est places in the whole wide world? So, to hon­or World Hap­pi­ness Day, I final­ly decid­ed to fol­low my hunch, and look into the research on this top­ic more deeply. What I found was worse than I’d imag­ined. To put it polite­ly, the World Hap­pi­ness Report is beset with method­olog­i­cal prob­lems. To put it blunt­ly, it is a sham.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins.
  4. We Were Bad­ly Mis­led About the Event That Changed Our Lives (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “If any­one needs con­vinc­ing that the next pan­dem­ic is only an acci­dent away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a pres­ti­gious sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (yes, the same insti­tu­tion), describe tak­ing sam­ples of virus­es found in bats (yes, the same ani­mal) and exper­i­ment­ing to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pan­dem­ic risk.… Why haven’t we learned our les­son? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the req­ui­site steps to keep us safe, with­out also admit­ting it was always risky. And that per­haps we were mis­led on pur­pose.”
  5. The real­i­ty of pros­ti­tu­tion is not com­plex. It is sim­ple (Rachel Moran, Psy­che): “So many of these women’s sto­ries stay with me: the 19-year-old French girl who got into pros­ti­tu­tion as a direct result of watch­ing a TV series that depict­ed pros­ti­tu­tion as glam­orous and empow­er­ing; the mid-20s Aus­tralian woman who believed – because well-fund­ed NGOs told her to believe – that ‘sex work’ was legit­i­mate employ­ment; or the ear­ly 20s Ger­man woman who told me that, because pimp­ing had been decrim­i­nalised in her coun­try, she’d got the mes­sage that what was legal­ly sanc­tioned sure­ly had to be OK. Just about every man in Ger­many seemed to have got the same mes­sage, and the result was social car­nage.”
    • The author was a pros­ti­tute from the ages of 15 to 22.
  6. As Trump Attacks Elite Col­leges, Their Usu­al Allies Are Nowhere in Sight (Ginia Bel­lafante, New York Times): “Pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties have come to find adver­saries in many worlds, among the work­ing class, among rich alum­ni, among high­ly edu­cat­ed pro­gres­sives who find them self-regard­ing.”
  7. Pow­er of Babel: Real-Time AI Trans­la­tion May Be Com­ing to Church Near You (Ale­ja Hert­zler-McCain, The Roys Report): “John Mehl, a teach­ing pas­tor at Colorado’s Tim­ber­line Church, and Miguel Flo­res Rob­les, the drum­mer in the wor­ship band at Timberline’s Wind­sor cam­pus, get along well, even though they don’t under­stand each other’s lan­guage. Flo­res, who is only flu­ent in Span­ish, also is unable to com­mu­ni­cate direct­ly with the leader of the wor­ship band he plays for, even as he enjoys Mehl’s ser­mons, which are in Eng­lish. The answer to this rid­dle is arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence real-time trans­la­tion, a tech­nol­o­gy that has yet to become wide­spread in hous­es of wor­ship but is already pro­vid­ing a way for con­gre­ga­tions to wel­come mem­bers who don’t speak their lan­guage.”
    • I find it amus­ing that in the arti­cle Tim­ber­line is described as “non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al” although it is an Assem­blies of God con­gre­ga­tion.

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 494: Religion at Elite Schools, Why Shrimp Must Die, and Funny Videos

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. What Does Reli­gion Look Like At Elite Uni­ver­si­ties? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “Yeah, again, I am not bowled over by any huge dif­fer­ences in the reli­gious atten­dance of stu­dents at Ivy league schools ver­sus non-selec­tive insti­tu­tions. 49% of stu­dents who attend pres­ti­gious schools attend church less than once a year com­pared to 46% of stu­dents who go to a non-selec­tive school. So, those at the top end are slight­ly less reli­gious­ly active, but three points is cer­tain­ly not a chasm. That’s the gen­er­al trend here when com­par­ing across all types of atten­dance lev­els. For stu­dents at non-selec­tive schools, 19% say they attend reli­gious ser­vices about week­ly or more. It’s 14% of those at selec­tive schools. Again, a gap, but a rel­a­tive­ly small one.”
  2. Did God cre­ate log­ic? (J. Budziszews­ki, blog): “To say that He cre­at­ed log­ic would be to sug­gest that He could have done dif­fer­ent­ly and cre­at­ed illog­ic – that He could have allowed con­tra­dic­tions such as a man who is a don­key, or a two which is a three. But if I make a sen­tence by plac­ing the words ‘God can’ before a string of non­sense, that doesn’t make the sen­tence true, would it? Sen­tences like ‘Can God make a man who is not a man but a don­key?’ or ‘Can God make a two which is a three?’ wouldn’t even rise to the lev­el of being mean­ing­ful ques­tions. They would be like ask­ing ‘Can God moon­gog­gle twee­dledee?’ So we shouldn’t say that God can­not do these things, but that they can­not be done. A lot of things are exclud­ed from divine omnipo­tence not because God doesn’t have the pow­er to do them, but because in their very nature they are not ‘doable’ or pos­si­ble.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin.
  3. Three More Rea­sons Shrimp Must Die (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “All that to say, I am not insen­si­tive to the intu­ition many of us have that ani­mal tor­tur­ing real­ly is bad for some rea­son we strug­gle to artic­u­late. I think it’s because we all intu­it that ani­mal-tor­tur­ers are usu­al­ly peo­ple okay with tor­tur­ing humans too. But this leads to the wrong intu­ition that ani­mal pain per se is the yard­stick here, when real­ly virtue is the yard­stick: in fact peo­ple who are unusu­al­ly empa­thet­ic to ani­mals are prob­a­bly also peo­ple unusu­al­ly will­ing to tor­ture humans.”
  4. The Gov­ern­ment Knows A.G.I. is Com­ing (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “And while there is so much else going on in the world to cov­er, I do think there’s a good chance that, when we look back on this era in human his­to­ry, A.I. will have been the thing that mat­ters.”
    • A very long inter­view with the Biden admin’s spe­cial advis­er on AI which I found worth­while.
    • This part in par­tic­u­lar I’ll be think­ing about: “Samuel Ham­mond, who’s an econ­o­mist at the Foun­da­tion for Amer­i­can Inno­va­tion, had this piece months back called ‘Nine­ty-Five The­ses on A.I.’ One point he makes that I think about a lot is: If we had the capac­i­ty for per­fect enforce­ment, a lot of our cur­rent laws would be con­strict­ing. Laws are writ­ten with the knowl­edge that human labor is scarce. And there’s this ques­tion of what hap­pens when the sur­veil­lance state gets real­ly good. What hap­pens when A.I. makes the police state a very dif­fer­ent kind of thing than it is? What hap­pens when we have war­fare of end­less drones?”
  5. He Gave a Name to What Many Chris­tians Feel (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Mr. Renn has an unusu­al pro­file for some­one who has cap­tured the atten­tion of Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism. He is not a pas­tor, an aca­d­e­m­ic or a politi­cian. He has no insti­tu­tion­al affil­i­a­tions with high-pro­file evan­gel­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions. He is a mild-man­nered for­mer con­sul­tant with a wide-rang­ing Sub­stack whose top­ics include urban pol­i­cy, self-improve­ment and mas­culin­i­ty.”
    • Aaron Renn is a name famil­iar to read­ers of this email. This is a pret­ty good pro­file. Unlocked.
  6. How to Think About Using Gov­ern­ment Funds for Chris­t­ian Char­i­ty (Matthew Lof­tus, Mere Ortho­doxy): “As long as we live in bio­log­i­cal bod­ies, ‘biopol­i­tics’ are unavoid­able and a nat­ur­al law per­spec­tive does not dis­tin­guish between the government’s role in pre­vent­ing a mali­cious human actor that threat­ens your life or a non­hu­man virus, fire, or can­cer cell. In either case, the gov­ern­ment has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to pre­vent deaths that it is capa­ble of pre­vent­ing.”
    • A thought­ful piece; I found it help­ful.
  7. Roman Catholic Apolo­get­ics Is Surg­ing Online. Intend­ed Audi­ence? Protes­tants. (Andrew Voigt, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Where Protes­tant apolo­get­ics is more focused on win­ning the sec­u­lar world to Christ, Roman Catholic apolo­get­ics often has a dif­fer­ent audi­ence in mind: their ‘sep­a­rat­ed brethren.’ Tar­get­ing Protes­tants is explic­it­ly encour­aged.”

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 492: suffering, plane crashes, and near death experiences

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. The Best Argu­ment Against Hav­ing Faith in God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “One inter­est­ing point about [suf­fer­ing] is that while it’s often fold­ed into the briefs for athe­ism that claim to rely pri­mar­i­ly on hard evi­dence and sci­ence, it isn’t prop­er­ly speak­ing an argu­ment that some cre­at­ing pow­er does not exist. Rather it’s an argu­ment about the nature of that pow­er, a claim that the par­tic­u­lar kind of God envi­sioned by many believ­ers and philoso­phers — all pow­er­ful and all good — would not have made the world in which we find our­selves, and there­fore that this kind of God does not exist. The oth­er inter­est­ing point about this argu­ment is that while its core evi­dence is empir­i­cal, in the sense that ter­ri­ble forms of suf­fer­ing obvi­ous­ly exist and can be exten­sive­ly enu­mer­at­ed, its pow­er fun­da­men­tal­ly rests on an intu­ition about just how much suf­fer­ing is too much. By this I mean that many peo­ple who empha­size the prob­lem of evil would con­cede that a good God might allow some form of pain and suf­fer­ing with­in a mate­r­i­al cre­ation for var­i­ous good rea­sons.”
  2. Why Are So Many Planes Crash­ing? (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “Now let’s zoom out and just ask: are inci­dents of any cause get­ting more com­mon? They aren’t.… [Also] I don’t see any mean­ing­ful uptick over time in fatal­i­ty inci­dents. Actu­al­ly they’ve clear­ly declined since the ear­ly 1990s or even ear­ly 2000s. Which is wild, since total amounts of flights have mas­sive­ly increased! Note that I am includ­ing known inci­dents through Feb­ru­ary 18, 2025 in those fig­ures above!”
    • Empha­sis removed. Lots of charts.
  3. It’s Going To Take More Than An Exec­u­tive Order To Tru­ly Pro­tect Women’s Sports (Kate Bier­ly, Dai­ly Caller): “Since the 1990s, Con­gress has steadi­ly abdi­cat­ed its respon­si­bil­i­ty to leg­is­late, opt­ing instead to let the exec­u­tive branch take the polit­i­cal heat. Mem­bers of Con­gress, more con­cerned with reelec­tion than with the duty to gov­ern, pre­fer to pass the buck. An exec­u­tive order com­mands only the exec­u­tive branch, requir­ing fed­er­al agen­cies to com­ply. But its pow­er is inher­ent­ly lim­it­ed. Reg­u­la­to­ry author­i­ty has been reined in, espe­cial­ly after the Supreme Court’s recent deci­sion to over­turn Chevron def­er­ence. No longer can agen­cies broad­ly inter­pret con­gres­sion­al statutes to impose sweep­ing reg­u­la­tions. Now, their author­i­ty is con­fined strict­ly to what Con­gress has explic­it­ly grant­ed them. This lim­its the scope of what Trump’s lat­est exec­u­tive order can achieve. His direc­tive to the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion to restrict women’s sports to bio­log­i­cal females is bound by statu­to­ry inter­pre­ta­tion, which blue states can chal­lenge.… This is why con­gres­sion­al action is nec­es­sary, because reliance on exec­u­tive orders and judi­cial inter­pre­ta­tion fos­ters legal insta­bil­i­ty.”
    • Writ­ten by one of our alum­ni.
  4. 70 Chris­tians found behead­ed in church in DRC (Open Doors): “Accord­ing to field sources, at around 4am last Thurs­day (13 Feb­ru­ary) sus­pect­ed mil­i­tants from the Allied Demo­c­ra­t­ic Forces (ADF) – a group with ties to so-called Islam­ic State (IS) – approached homes in May­ba in the ter­ri­to­ry of Lubero, say­ing: ‘Get out, get out and don’t make any noise.’ Twen­ty Chris­t­ian men and women came out and were cap­tured. Shak­en by this inci­dent, peo­ple from the local com­mu­ni­ty in May­ba lat­er gath­ered to work out how to release those held cap­tive. How­ev­er, ADF mil­i­tants sur­round­ed the vil­lage and cap­tured a fur­ther 50 believ­ers.”
  5. The ker­nel of truth in gen­der stereo­types: Con­sid­er the avo­ca­do, not the apple (Eagly & Hall, Jour­nal of Exper­i­men­tal Social Psy­chol­o­gy): “…in 85% of [the 673] com­par­isons [from across the 43 stud­ies], par­tic­i­pants got the direc­tion [of gen­der dif­fer­ence] right.… Our review sug­gests that All­port’s (1954/1988, p. 190) clas­sic and wide­ly cit­ed ker­nel of truth metaphor is incor­rect for gen­der stereo­types unless this ker­nel is more like the seed of an avo­ca­do than an apple.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors at North­west­ern and North­east­ern, a com­bi­na­tion I found fun­ny.
  6. Learn­ings from 1,000+ Near-Death Expe­ri­ences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia (Tim Fer­riss, per­son­al blog): “I start­ed out as a mate­ri­al­ist skep­tic. After 50 years, I’m still skep­ti­cal, but I’m no longer a mate­ri­al­ist. I think that’s a dead end when it comes to explain­ing near-death expe­ri­ences and oth­er phe­nom­e­na like this.… About five per­cent of the gen­er­al population—or one to every 20 people—has had a near-death expe­ri­ence. Sec­ond­ly, they are not asso­ci­at­ed in any way with men­tal ill­ness. Peo­ple who are per­fect­ly nor­mal have these NDEs in abnor­mal sit­u­a­tions that can hap­pen to any­body.”
  7. Miran­da July’s Lucra­tive Fan­tasies (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “The anti-monogamists con­stant­ly insist that monogamy is just too roman­tic to build a life on, that it’s con­trary to human nature. But what could pos­si­bly be more roman­tic, in the most child­ish sense, than the belief that you’ll stay attrac­tive and roman­ti­cal­ly desir­able for your entire life? That you’ll sim­ply cycle end­less­ly between will­ing part­ners who you find attrac­tive and who feel the same about you and who you’ll hap­pi­ly let go of as soon as you’re bored, and you’ll keep doing that in a state of bliss until you die? You’d call that, what, real­is­tic?”
    • deBoer, as I often remind peo­ple, an athe­ist social­ist who is nonethe­less very clear-mind­ed on some top­ics. He is near­ly always enter­tain­ing to read.

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.