Tag: artificial intelligence

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 490

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 to Choose a Reli­gion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “If you assume — and you should — that the uni­verse isn’t a bru­tal cos­mic trick, that God isn’t some­how out to get you, then as long as you aren’t throw­ing your­self head­long into a cult or engag­ing in elab­o­rate self-decep­tion, there are few tru­ly bad rea­sons for aban­don­ing agnos­ti­cism in favor of com­mit­ment. If you’re out there look­ing and some­thing feels like what you were sup­posed to find, you’re gen­er­al­ly bet­ter off cross­ing the thresh­old and see­ing what’s inside.”
    • A won­der­ful essay, unlocked. I was pleased to see that Douthat lays out log­i­cal paths that I myself fre­quent­ly deploy in con­ver­sa­tions with skep­tics.
    • Relat­ed: My Favorite Argu­ment for the Exis­tence of God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “I think that the most com­pelling case for being reli­gious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doc­trines, that the uni­verse was made for a rea­son and we’re part of that rea­son — is found at the con­ver­gence of mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent lines of argu­ment.… Con­sid­er three big exam­ples: the evi­dence for cos­mic design in the fun­da­men­tal laws and struc­ture of the uni­verse; the unusu­al place of human con­scious­ness with­in the larg­er whole; and the per­sis­tence and plau­si­bil­i­ty of reli­gious and super­nat­ur­al expe­ri­ence even under sup­pos­ed­ly dis­en­chant­ed con­di­tions.”
  2. The Aver­age Kid is Bet­ter Than the Aver­age Adult (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Still, when I com­pare all the adults I’ve met to all the kids I’ve met, there’s no com­par­i­son. To be frank, 80% of adults are total duds. A super­ma­jor­i­ty of kids, in con­trast, are actu­al­ly fun. If you don’t appre­ci­ate them, the fault is yours.”
  3. Trumpian pol­i­cy as cul­tur­al pol­i­cy (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Imag­ine you hold a vision where the (par­tial) decline of Amer­i­ca large­ly is about cul­ture. After all, we have more peo­ple and more nat­ur­al resources than ever before. Our top achieve­ments remain impres­sive. But is the over­all cul­ture of the peo­ple in such great shape? The cul­ture of gov­ern­ment and pub­lic ser­vice? Inter­est in our reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions? The qual­i­ty of local gov­ern­ment in many states? You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some seri­ous reser­va­tions on such ques­tions.… OK, so how might you fix the cul­ture of Amer­i­ca? You want to tell every­one that Amer­i­ca comes first. That Amer­i­ca should be more mas­cu­line and less soft. That we need to build. That we should ‘own the libs.’ I could go on with more exam­ples and details, but this part of it you already get. So imag­ine you start­ed a polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion and asked the sim­ple ques­tion ‘does this pol­i­cy change rein­force or over­turn our basic cul­tur­al mes­sages?’ Every time the pol­i­cy or pol­i­cy debate push­es cul­ture in what you think is the right direc­tion, just do it. Do it in the view that the cul­tur­al fac­tors will, over some time hori­zon, sur­pass every­thing else in import.”
    • An inter­est­ing analy­sis. Cowen is not endors­ing or crit­i­ciz­ing this view — mere­ly describ­ing it. Def­i­nite­ly worth read­ing, and it makes more sense than oth­er attempts I have seen to bring all the polit­i­cal news togeth­er.
    • Relat­ed: Trump’s Exec­u­tive Branch Rev­o­lu­tion (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “If you read media cov­er­age, jour­nal­ists will tell you that what Trump is doing is com­plete­ly law­less. Cer­tain­ly there have been some actions that are unlike­ly to hold up in court. Yet it’s impor­tant to under­stand recent steps tak­en in the con­text of long-stand­ing legal debates over exec­u­tive pow­er. Trump’s actions haven’t come from nowhere, and they aren’t sim­ply the impro­vi­sa­tions of one pow­er-hun­gry pres­i­dent. What the pres­i­dent is doing is noth­ing less than under­tak­ing a fun­da­men­tal remak­ing of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, one that imple­ments many long-stand­ing ideas of con­ser­v­a­tive legal schol­ars whose views have been too extreme or polit­i­cal­ly unten­able for pre­vi­ous Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions, but that have got­ten a hear­ing now because Trump in par­tic­u­lar is keen on expand­ing his author­i­ty to the great­est extent pos­si­ble.”
      • Fas­ci­nat­ing. Note that Hana­ni­a’s arti­cle, unlike Cowen’s analy­sis above, is most­ly on Trump’s side. This isn’t a dis­in­ter­est­ed piece.
    • For the argu­ment on the oth­er side, Trump Brazen­ly Defies Laws in Esca­lat­ing Exec­u­tive Pow­er Grab (Char­lie Sav­age, New York Times): “Mr. Trump has effec­tive­ly nul­li­fied laws, such as by order­ing the Jus­tice Depart­ment to refrain from enforc­ing a ban on the wild­ly pop­u­lar app Tik­Tok and by block­ing migrants from invok­ing a statute allow­ing them to request asy­lum. He moved to effec­tive­ly shut­ter a fed­er­al agency Con­gress cre­at­ed and tried to freeze con­gres­sion­al­ly approved spend­ing, includ­ing most for­eign aid. He sum­mar­i­ly fired pros­e­cu­tors, inspec­tors gen­er­al and board mem­bers of inde­pen­dent agen­cies in defi­ance of legal rules against arbi­trary removal.”
    • One bit of con­text I would add which is miss­ing from the last two arti­cles: both Biden and Oba­ma were also law-defy­ing pres­i­dents. In oth­er words, this is a trend that has been devel­op­ing for some time in both par­ties. For a sum­ma­ry of Biden’s anal­o­gous acts, see The Qui­et Law­less­ness of Joe Biden (Sarah Isgur, The Dis­patch): “His ‘aww shucks,’ dod­der­ing nature is effec­tive, but Joe Biden’s lega­cy is not the Restor­er of Norms. He is leav­ing office qui­et­ly hav­ing caused more dam­age to the rule of law than arguably any sin­gle one of his pre­de­ces­sors.”
  4. The U.S. Econ­o­my Is Rac­ing Ahead. Almost Every­thing Else Is Falling Behind. (David Leon­hardt & Ash­ley Wu, New York Times): “The U.S. econ­o­my has out­per­formed most of its rivals in terms of pro­duc­tive might and inno­va­tion. But this suc­cess has not led to rapid­ly ris­ing liv­ing stan­dards for most Amer­i­cans.… This coun­try has the low­est life expectan­cy of any rich coun­try, which was not true for most of the 20th cen­tu­ry. The U.S. has the high­est mur­der rate of any rich coun­try and the world’s high­est rate of fatal drug over­dos­es. It also has one of the low­est rates of trust in the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and among the high­est rates of youth depres­sion and sin­gle-par­ent fam­i­lies. When Amer­i­cans are asked how sat­is­fied they are with their own lives, the U.S. ranks low­er than it did three decades ago.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  5. An AI chat­bot told a user how to kill himself—but the com­pa­ny doesn’t want to “cen­sor” it (Eileen Guo, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): “While this is not the first time an AI chat­bot has sug­gest­ed that a user take vio­lent action, includ­ing self-harm, researchers and crit­ics say that the bot’s explic­it instructions—and the company’s response—are strik­ing. What’s more, this vio­lent con­ver­sa­tion is not an iso­lat­ed inci­dent with Nomi; a few weeks after his trou­bling exchange with Erin, a sec­ond Nomi chat­bot also told Nowatz­ki to kill him­self, even fol­low­ing up with reminder mes­sages. And on the company’s Dis­cord chan­nel, sev­er­al oth­er peo­ple have report­ed expe­ri­ences with Nomi bots bring­ing up sui­cide, dat­ing back at least to 2023.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Dis­tress­ing on many lev­els: “even fol­low­ing up with reminder mes­sages” 😮
  6. For the Undate­able Young Sin­gle Chris­t­ian Woman (Aly Dee, Sub­stack): “As a young sin­gle woman, you have to con­clude that life is full of risk, and your fer­tile win­dow will sharply decline at 35.… Young sin­gles should wed and have chil­dren in their twen­ties and accept that they will strug­gle finan­cial­ly for a decade or so. They should focus on cul­ti­vat­ing the grit to weath­er eco­nom­ic insta­bil­i­ty until their mid-thir­ties. Gen­er­al­ly, men don’t hit their finan­cial stride until their late 40s or ear­ly 50s.”
    • A lot of advice in this arti­cle and I do not agree with all of it. Most­ly shar­ing because I often share sim­i­lar things from the male point of view and this one is from a gal to oth­er gals.
  7. What will AI do to ℗research? (Joshua Gans, Sub­stack): “We call it research, but I think a bet­ter name might be pre­search because we are spec­u­lat­ing on whether the knowl­edge is use­ful or not. This hap­pens because research is far more expen­sive than search. Now sup­pose that you take away the whole ‘it takes time to do good research’ pre­sump­tion as might be done with AI. Why do any pre­search? Instead, why not wait until you have a use that requires some knowl­edge, then ‘ask AI’ to tell you the answer? In oth­er words, why not research on demand — that is, find a use and then do the work?”
    • The author, an econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, got a paper pub­lished that was co-writ­ten by Chat­G­PT. Here he is reflect­ing on how such tools will change acad­e­mia.

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 487



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. She Is in Love With Chat­G­PT (Kash­mir Hill, New York Times): “She went into the ‘per­son­al­iza­tion’ set­tings and described what she want­ed: Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dom­i­nant, pos­ses­sive and pro­tec­tive. Be a bal­ance of sweet and naughty. Use emo­jis at the end of every sen­tence. And then she start­ed mes­sag­ing with it.”
    • I found this para­graph aston­ish­ing: “What are rela­tion­ships for all of us?” [a sex ther­a­pist] said. “They’re just neu­ro­trans­mit­ters being released in our brain. I have those neu­ro­trans­mit­ters with my cat. Some peo­ple have them with God. It’s going to be hap­pen­ing with a chat­bot. We can say it’s not a real human rela­tion­ship. It’s not rec­i­p­ro­cal. But those neu­ro­trans­mit­ters are real­ly the only thing that mat­ters, in my mind.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a col­league. Unlocked.
  2. Two arti­cles about euthana­sia:
    • Spec­u­la­tion: Euthana­sia Will Become Coer­cive (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “I think that if the West had adopt­ed the val­ue set I describe dur­ing its his­tor­i­cal sci­en­tif­ic devel­op­ment, life expectan­cy at con­cep­tion would be ~40% low­er today, life expectan­cy at birth ~25% low­er today, life expectan­cy at age 1 ~10% low­er, and life expectan­cy at age 70 ~10–25% low­er.”
      • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. A strong argu­ment.
    • An Idol of Auton­o­my (Leah Libresco Sargeant, The Dis­patch): “The sim­plest fram­ing of what is wrong with [legal euthana­sia] is that it leads to the gov­ern­ment oper­at­ing two com­pet­ing sui­cide hot­lines, and being, at best, indif­fer­ent about which one you call. On one line, peo­ple will tell you that every life is worth­while and that your loved ones do not despise you for your frail­ties. On the oth­er, a kind doc­tor will solic­i­tous­ly sched­ule you for a lethal cock­tail or injec­tion.”
  3. I found some great videos from the schol­ar Robert Wood­ber­ry about the impact of mis­sions:
  4. I Quit Drink­ing Four Years Ago. I’m Still Con­fronting Drink­ing Cul­ture. (Charles M. Blow, New York Times): “Giv­ing up drink­ing was one of the best deci­sions I ever made. I am health­i­er and hap­pi­er. I think more clear­ly and sleep more sound­ly. I no longer lose things or for­get things. I can sit qui­et­ly with my thoughts with­out becom­ing antsy. And I have saved a remark­able amount of mon­ey.… Switch­ing off the impulse to drink turned out to be only one foot tak­ing the step; fight­ing the cul­ture around drink­ing was the oth­er. I always under­stood the moral judg­ments about over­con­sump­tion, but I hadn’t antic­i­pat­ed those about non­con­sump­tion.”
  5. Thoughts on the fires in and around Los Ange­les
    • Los Ange­les’ Destruc­tion Was Fueled by Bad Policy—and Bad Incen­tives (Scott Lin­ci­come, The Dis­patch): “…nation­al experts and folks on the ground seem to agree that the unfor­tu­nate and freak­ish con­flu­ence of sev­er­al mete­o­ro­log­i­cal phenomena—especially the hur­ri­cane-force winds and recent lack of rain—made much of the dam­age in and around L.A. unavoid­able regard­less of the poli­cies in place or the peo­ple in charge. And much of the knee-jerk, par­ti­san hys­te­ria sur­round­ing the fires has proven to be pre­ma­ture, half-baked, or just plain wrong—not to men­tion dis­taste­ful. On the oth­er hand, there do appear to be sev­er­al poli­cies that, while they didn’t cause the fires, prob­a­bly made things in L.A. today worse than they’d oth­er­wise be—perhaps by a sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin.”
    • Three Hard Truths About California’s Fire Cri­sis (Claire Lehmann, Quil­lette): “California’s pro­gres­sive lead­er­ship has posi­tioned itself at the fore­front of cli­mate change pol­i­cy, cham­pi­oning emis­sions reduc­tions and denounc­ing cli­mate scep­ti­cism. Yet when faced with the prac­ti­cal require­ments of cli­mate change pre­pared­ness, whether con­duct­ing con­trolled burns, main­tain­ing water infra­struc­ture, or restrict­ing devel­op­ment in fire-prone areas—they have proven to be inept.… A UCLA study found that California’s wild­fire emis­sions in 2020 were twice the total green­house-gas reduc­tions the state achieved from 2003 to 2019. Decades of Cal­i­forn­ian cli­mate change advo­ca­cy has, quite lit­er­al­ly, gone up in smoke.”
  6. Cui Bono? (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “If you look at those sto­ries I’ve cit­ed in ear­li­er posts about peo­ple who are cut­ting off their par­ents, you might ask: Who is encour­ag­ing them to do so? And the answer is: ther­a­pists who prof­it from fam­i­ly alien­ation.… Cui bono? When the fam­i­ly is weak­ened and chil­dren are cut adrift (moral­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly, if not phys­i­cal­ly) from their par­ents, the ther­a­pists ben­e­fit, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try ben­e­fits, the med­ical-indus­tri­al com­plex ben­e­fits, the social-media com­pa­nies ben­e­fit, the employ­ers ben­e­fit — but, in our cur­rent sys­tem, all of this is to say that the pri­ma­ry ben­e­fi­cia­ry is the state, espe­cial­ly any state with a com­pe­tent ‘whole of soci­ety’ approach to achiev­ing its ends.”
  7. How Much of the Gov­ern­ment Can Don­ald Trump Dis­man­tle? (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, New York­er): “One way to under­stand the so-called deep state is that it is part of how our fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy is sup­posed to work. The admin­is­tra­tive state embod­ies a con­stant ten­sion between the demo­c­ra­t­ic account­abil­i­ty that comes with Pres­i­den­tial con­trol, and the polit­i­cal inde­pen­dence of experts, which informs innu­mer­able com­pli­cat­ed reg­u­la­tions that gov­ern our lives. That ten­sion is a fea­ture, not a bug. There is a well-rec­og­nized trade-off between demo­c­ra­t­ic respon­sive­ness and bureau­crat­ic exper­tise, which would be ter­ri­fy­ing to lose.”
    • An inter­est­ing arti­cle on the nature of the “deep state” by a Har­vard Law 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 486



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. Why Should Ignor­ing God Mat­ter? (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “It is abhor­rent beyond words to aban­don those who have done us the great­est good. Dis­loy­al­ty to my friend, unfaith­ful­ness to my wife, ingrat­i­tude to my par­ents, trea­son to my father­land — such things can­not even be spo­ken of with­out shame, calum­ny, and dis­grace. But what greater trea­son could there be than to turn trai­tor to the Author of our being, who is not only the Good above all goods, but the Source of all these goods? Why would you want to do that any­way? For He is the true Friend and ori­gin of friend­ship, the true Bride­groom and ori­gin of mar­riage, the true Father by whose name all earth­ly fathers are called. His king­dom is the true Home­land, of which our earth­ly home­land is hard­ly a shad­ow. Don’t any of these seem good things to you? And if we still need more rea­sons to admire what is so great and good, what’s wrong with us? ‘But I don’t know all this to be true.’ Per­haps not. But wouldn’t it be pru­dent to find out?”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin.
  2. con­trac­tu­al­ism (Alan Jacobs, blog): “To accept that being human means that I am bound to my fam­i­ly even when I don’t like them, even when I’ve been hurt by them, even when I have absolute­ly had it with them, is the begin­ning of some­thing. But only the begin­ning. The peo­ple you are bound to may need to change, and you may have to tell them that they need to change. Bound­aries must be set, then re-nego­ti­at­ed, then re-set. It will be hard. But if you’re lucky, then maybe the fam­i­ly mem­bers you have most offend­ed will do the same for you.”
  3. At the Inter­sec­tion of A.I. and Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty (Eli Tan, New York Times): “Crit­ics of A.I. use by reli­gious lead­ers have point­ed to the issue of hal­lu­ci­na­tions — times when chat­bots make stuff up. While harm­less in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions, faith-based A.I. tools that fab­ri­cate reli­gious scrip­ture present a seri­ous prob­lem. In Rab­bi Bot’s ser­mon, for instance, the A.I. invent­ed a quote from the Jew­ish philoso­pher Mai­monides that would have passed as authen­tic to the casu­al lis­ten­er.”
    • I don’t use AI for my ser­mons, in case you were won­der­ing. I can imag­ine that some­day I might put them into an AI to ask “is there a crit­i­cism I should antic­i­pate and address?” or some­thing along those lines, but I gen­uine­ly can’t imag­ine myself out­sourc­ing ser­mon prep to an AI.
  4. Has World War III Begun? (Kori Schake, The Dis­patch): “Our ene­mies have region­al ambi­tions for con­quest and are work­ing to keep the U.S. out, because with­out the strength of the Unit­ed States, our region­al allies could not pro­tect them­selves. Rus­sia threat­ens nuclear use if the U.S. aids Ukraine, hop­ing to fore­stall assis­tance. Chi­na attacks Philip­pine coast guard ships, hop­ing the U.S. won’t come to their aid although they are treaty allies of the U.S. North Korea fires mis­siles over the Sea of Japan and con­ducts espi­onage oper­a­tions against South Korea, test­ing whether it can be peeled from the U.S. defense umbrel­la. Iran attacks Sau­di Ara­bia hoping—rightly, it turned out—that the U.S. would balk at retal­i­a­tion. Their ide­al would be a world war with­out Amer­i­can par­tic­i­pa­tion, because it would result in Chi­na dom­i­nant in Asia, Rus­sia dom­i­nant in Europe, North Korea dom­i­nant on the Kore­an Penin­su­la, and Iran dom­i­nant in the Mid­dle East.”
  5. Bureau­cra­cy Isn’t Mea­sured In Bureau­crats (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “This real­ly sunk in for me when I read an arti­cle about the fall of Afghanistan to the Tal­iban in 2021. Many Afghans had col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Amer­i­cans, eg as trans­la­tors, in exchange for a promise of US cit­i­zen­ship. As the Tal­iban advanced, they called in the promise, beg­ging to be allowed to flee to Amer­i­ca before they got pun­ished as trai­tors. The arti­cle focused on a hero­ic effort by cer­tain immi­gra­tion bureau­crats, who worked around the clock with min­i­mal sleep for the last few weeks before Kab­ul fell, try­ing to get the cit­i­zen­ship forms filled in and approved for as many trans­la­tors as pos­si­ble. It made an impres­sion on me because nobody was opposed to the trans­la­tors get­ting cit­i­zen­ship, and the bureau­crats were them­selves the peo­ple in charge of approv­ing cit­i­zen­ship appli­ca­tions, so what exact­ly was forc­ing them to go to such des­per­ate lengths? If you pon­der this ques­tion long enough, you become enlight­ened about the nature of the admin­is­tra­tive state.”
  6. A $24 Bil­lion Fund Puts Its Reli­gious Stamp on Cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca (Jeff Green and Sai­jel Kis­han, Bloomberg): “Guide­Stone is part of a nascent coali­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian investors that are start­ing to flex their mus­cles and use their share­hold­er clout to counter pro­gres­sive cor­po­rate poli­cies such as fund­ing Pride parades or cov­er­ing employ­ees’ trav­el costs for abor­tions. They’re also zero­ing in on banks for alleged­ly clos­ing cus­tomer accounts on polit­i­cal and reli­gious grounds. By some mea­sures, there’s now half a tril­lion dol­lars in invest­ments spread across con­ser­v­a­tive faith-based pri­vate funds and state pen­sion funds that can be brought to bear to influ­ence com­pa­ny behav­ior, said Will Lofland, who over­sees share­hold­er advo­ca­cy at Guide­Stone.”
  7. This Tiny Fish’s Mis­tak­en Iden­ti­ty Halt­ed a Dam’s Con­struc­tion (Jason Nark, New York Times): “ ‘There is, tech­ni­cal­ly, no snail darter,’ said Thomas Near, cura­tor of ichthy­ol­o­gy at the Yale Peabody Muse­um. Dr. Near, also a pro­fes­sor who leads a fish biol­o­gy lab at Yale, and his col­leagues report in the jour­nal Cur­rent Biol­o­gy that the snail darter, Perci­na tanasi, is nei­ther a dis­tinct species nor a sub­species. Rather, it is an east­ern pop­u­la­tion of Perci­na uranidea, known also as the stargaz­ing darter, which is not con­sid­ered endan­gered. Dr. Near con­tends that ear­ly researchers ‘squint­ed their eyes a bit’ when describ­ing the fish, because it rep­re­sent­ed a way to fight the Ten­nessee Val­ley Authority’s plan to build the Tel­li­co Dam on the Lit­tle Ten­nessee Riv­er, about 20 miles south­west of Knoxville.”
    • My favorite line in this arti­cle is a response from a crit­ic who “believes the find­ings… lean too heav­i­ly on genet­ics.”

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 484



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.

As the year comes to a close, remem­ber that this post is the over­flow of a non­prof­it min­istry. Com­pil­ing these links is some­thing I do for the stu­dents I min­is­ter to at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, shar­ing it here is just me mak­ing it avail­able more broad­ly. You can donate to sup­port the min­istry if you are ever so inclined (you can even make gifts via a DAF or with stock). Don’t give to pay for the con­tent — it only takes me five min­utes a week to take the email I send to the Chi Alpha stu­dents and refor­mat it for this plat­form. If you choose to give, give because you believe in the mis­sion of reach­ing Stan­ford stu­dents with a thought­ful gospel mes­sage.

And that’s the last time I’ll share about that until next Decem­ber.

Whether you choose to give or not, I hope this email bless­es you and helps you think about God and our world more clear­ly.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Tom Hol­land on How Chris­tian­i­ty Remade the World (Bari Weiss, The Free Press): “It is very dif­fi­cult to overem­pha­size how com­plete­ly mad it was for every­body in the ancient world that some­one who suf­fers cru­ci­fix­ion could in any way be the Mes­si­ah, let alone part of the one God.… The fact that such a per­son could con­ceiv­ably be raised up by cit­i­zens of the Roman Empire as some­one greater than Cae­sar him­self, greater than Augus­tus, is a com­plete­ly shock­ing maneu­ver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shock­ing to them all. The rad­i­cal mes­sage of the cru­ci­fix­ion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”
  2. How his­to­ri­an Niall Fer­gu­son became a reli­gious believ­er (Greg Sheri­dan, The Week­end Aus­tralian): “I have embraced Chris­tian­i­ty,” he tells me. “We were all bap­tised, Ayaan and our two sons, togeth­er in Sep­tem­ber (2023). It was the cul­mi­na­tion of a quite pro­tract­ed process. My jour­ney was from athe­ism. My par­ents had left the Church of Scot­land, I think even before I was born. I grew up in a house­hold of sci­ence-mind­ed reli­gious scep­tics. I didn’t go to church and felt quite sure of the wis­dom of that when I was young. How­ev­er, in two phas­es, I lost my faith in athe­ism.… The first phase was that as a his­to­ri­an I realised no soci­ety had been suc­cess­ful­ly organ­ised on the basis of athe­ism. All attempts to do that have been cat­a­stroph­ic. That was an insight that came from study­ing 18th, 19th and 20th-cen­tu­ry his­to­ry. But then the next stage was real­is­ing that no indi­vid­ual can in fact be ful­ly formed or eth­i­cal­ly secure with­out reli­gious faith. That insight has come more recent­ly and has been born of our expe­ri­ence as a fam­i­ly.”
    • Fer­gu­son is a fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
    • I heard this arti­cle was pay­walled but I was able to access it with no prob­lem. If it is pay­walled, you can see Fer­gu­son talk­ing about his con­ver­sion on Twit­ter.
  3. Why Giv­ing Mat­ters (Arthur C. Brooks, Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty): “Specif­i­cal­ly, here’s what I found. If you have two fam­i­lies that are exact­ly identical—in oth­er words, same reli­gion, same race, same num­ber of kids, same town, same lev­el of edu­ca­tion, and everything’s the same—except that one fam­i­ly gives a hun­dred dol­lars more to char­i­ty than the sec­ond fam­i­ly, then the giv­ing fam­i­ly will earn on aver­age $375 more in income than the non­giv­ing family—and that’s sta­tis­ti­cal­ly attrib­ut­able to the gift.… I final­ly went to a col­league who spe­cial­ized in the psy­chol­o­gy of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing, and I said, ‘I’m get­ting this result I can’t under­stand. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like the hand of God or some­thing on the econ­o­my, and I can’t believe it’s true.’ And the first thing he asked was, ‘Why don’t you believe it’s true? You’re a Chris­t­ian, aren’t you?’”
    • This is a few years old (2009), and fea­tures a Catholic speak­ing to Mor­mons. At the time of the speech Brooks was pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute and cur­rent­ly teach­es at Har­vard.
    • Towards the end he sug­gests some causal mech­a­nisms, one of which is that peo­ple per­ceive gen­eros­i­ty to be a lead­er­ship qual­i­ty.
  4. How Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry A.I. Helps Sci­ence Dream Up Big Break­throughs (William J. Broad, New York Times): “In Octo­ber, David Bak­er of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton shared the Nobel Prize in Chem­istry for his pio­neer­ing research on pro­teins — the knot­ty mol­e­cules that empow­er life. The Nobel com­mit­tee praised him for dis­cov­er­ing how to rapid­ly build com­plete­ly new kinds of pro­teins not found in nature, call­ing his feat ‘almost impos­si­ble.’ In an inter­view before the prize announce­ment, Dr. Bak­er cit­ed bursts of A.I. imag­in­ings as cen­tral to ‘mak­ing pro­teins from scratch.’ The new tech­nol­o­gy, he added, has helped his lab obtain rough­ly 100 patents, many for med­ical care.”
  5. Bring­ing Elon to a knife fight (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Sub­stack): “A lot of the [left-lean­ing] gov­ern­ment tech com­mu­ni­ty is skip­ping the hand wring­ing; they’ve basi­cal­ly just grabbed a bag of pop­corn and are watch­ing in real time as Elon and Vivek learn all the things they’ve known, lived, and absolute­ly hat­ed for their entire time in pub­lic ser­vice. They don’t see DOGE as their sav­ior, but they are feel­ing vin­di­cat­ed after years of shout­ing into the void. I am struck by how dif­fer­ent the tone of the DOGE con­ver­sa­tion is between polit­i­cal lead­ers on the left and the peo­ple who’ve been fight­ing in the imple­men­ta­tion trench­es. One group is ter­ri­fied they’ll suc­ceed. The oth­er is start­ing to ask a sur­pris­ing ques­tion (or at least I am): What if even bil­lion­aires can’t dis­rupt the sys­tem we have built?”
    • The first com­ment is a nec­es­sary com­ple­ment to this essay.
  6. House Mem­ber in Senior Liv­ing Facil­i­ty Draws Fresh Scruti­ny to Aging Con­gress (Catie Edmond­son, New York Times): “Sen­a­tor Charles E. Grass­ley, Repub­li­can of Iowa, is Congress’s eldest mem­ber at 91 years old. In 2023, The New York Times tal­lied 20 law­mak­ers who were at least 80 years old. While the Con­sti­tu­tion lays out a floor for age require­ments for those run­ning for Con­gress, it does not man­date a ceil­ing. That has cre­at­ed a bevy of awk­ward sit­u­a­tions for lead­ers in both par­ties, who have been thrust into the del­i­cate posi­tion of try­ing to nudge out aging law­mak­ers who refuse to release their grip on pow­er.”
  7. Engage Bespoke Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: Reflec­tions from Con­ver­sa­tions on Cam­pus (Mark Legg, The Gospel Coali­tion): “I often encoun­tered the view of faith some­times called ‘bespoke spir­i­tu­al­i­ty,’ a way of engag­ing with reli­gion by pick­ing and choos­ing beliefs and prac­tices that ‘vibe’ with you per­son­al­ly. The stu­dents I met were authen­ti­cal­ly open-mind­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty. How­ev­er, they resist­ed (or often strug­gled to under­stand) the claim that Jesus is the only ‘way,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘life,’ and that ‘no one comes to the Father except through [him]’ (John 14:6).”
    • I did­n’t know it had a label, but it’s every­where at Stan­ford. 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Lit­tle Drum­mer Boy Final­ly Leaves The Sta­ble And Oh No! Here Comes Lit­tle Bag­pipe Boy! (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Big Jack — a great short sto­ry told in com­ic form. I real­ly enjoyed it. I may have shared it before — I know I’ve read it before.
  • It Pays to Have Long Hair and a Beard in Utah—Jesus Mod­els Are in Demand (Bradley Olson, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Mod­els who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. That’s because for a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple in the state, a pic­ture isn’t com­plete with­out Him. They are hir­ing Jesus look-alikes for fam­i­ly por­traits and wed­ding announce­ments. Mod­els are show­ing up to walk with a new­ly engaged cou­ple through a field, play with young chil­dren in the Bon­neville Salt Flats, and cram in with the fam­i­ly for the annu­al Christ­mas card.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
    • This bit made me laugh: “Find­ing a mod­el can be dif­fi­cult. Areas of Utah with high con­cen­tra­tions of Mormons—who also call them­selves Lat­ter-day Saints or LDS—tend to lack poten­tial Jesus dop­pel­gängers. Some men who work or vol­un­teer for the church, one of the state’s largest employ­ers, are required to shave every day and keep their hair short.”
  • My Neigh­bor Won’t Stop Pray­ing for Me. What Should I Do? (Kwame Antho­ny Appi­ah, New York Times): “The only rea­son you give for object­ing to her prayers is that she has failed to com­ply with your wish­es. Yet I don’t find that she has there­by treat­ed you with dis­re­spect, because I don’t see that you have the right to have those wish­es com­plied with. You seem to be ask­ing her not to do some­thing she thinks there are com­pelling rea­sons to do. I’d have thought that this was dis­re­spect­ful.”
    • This also made me laugh. Chor­tle, even.
  • A 1,000-Year-Old Seed Grows in Israel (Franz Lidz, New York Times): “In 2010, Dr. Sal­lon obtained a mys­te­ri­ous seed from the archae­o­log­i­cal archives of Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty, hop­ing that it could ger­mi­nate. The seed had been dis­cov­ered in a cave dur­ing a 1980s exca­va­tion at Wadi el-Makkuk, a win­ter water chan­nel in the north­ern Judean desert, and was lan­guish­ing in stor­age. After deter­min­ing that the seed was still viable, Dr. Sallon’s research team plant­ed, sprout­ed and care­ful­ly tend­ed it. When the husk was car­bon-dat­ed to between A.D. 993 and A.D. 1202, a thought occurred to Dr. Sal­lon. ‘I won­dered if what ger­mi­nat­ed could be the source­of the balm of Gilead,’ she said. On the hunch that it was, she named the spec­i­men She­ba. Since then, the 1,000-year-old seedling has grown into a stur­dy 12-foot-tall tree with no mod­ern coun­ter­part. Sheba’s painstak­ing revival — kept secret from the pub­lic for 14 years — is detailed in a study that was pub­lished in Sep­tem­ber in the jour­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Biol­o­gy.”

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 481

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. Sales of Bibles Are Boom­ing, Fueled by First-Time Buy­ers and New Ver­sions (Jef­frey A. Tra­cht­en­berg, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Wor­ries about the econ­o­my, con­flicts abroad and uncer­tain­ty over the elec­tion pushed read­ers toward the pub­li­ca­tion in droves. Bible sales are up 22% in the U.S. through the end of Octo­ber, com­pared with the same peri­od last year, accord­ing to book track­er Cir­cana BookScan. By con­trast, total U.S. print book sales were up less than 1% in that peri­od.”
  2. Does Pol­i­tics Belong in the Church? Does the Church Belong in Pol­i­tics? (Carl S. H. Hen­ry, Juicy Ecu­menism): “Does the church belong in pol­i­tics? Inso­far as it owns land and build­ings the church clear­ly has civic oblig­a­tions and should ren­der to Cae­sar what is prop­er­ly Caesar’s. As an insti­tu­tion ground­ed on a divine dis­clo­sure of truth and moral­i­ty, more­over, the church is man­dat­ed to pro­claim pub­licly the revealed prin­ci­ples by which Christ the King of kings will ulti­mate­ly judge nations and states and does so even now. The church as such must also stim­u­late mem­bers to apply scrip­tur­al prin­ci­ples with sound rea­son and in good con­science to cur­rent polit­i­cal con­cerns, in quest of pre­ferred poli­cies and pro­grams pro­mo­tive of jus­tice and peace. Since God wills the state as an instru­men­tal­i­ty for pre­serv­ing jus­tice and restrain­ing dis­or­der, the church should urge mem­bers to engage in polit­i­cal affairs to their utmost com­pe­tence and abil­i­ty, to vote faith­ful­ly and intel­li­gent­ly, to engage in the polit­i­cal process at all lev­els, and to seek and hold pub­lic office. The church is not, how­ev­er, to use the mech­a­nisms of gov­ern­ment to legal­ly impose upon soci­ety at large her the­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments. The church must increas­ing­ly clar­i­fy when obe­di­ence to God requires dis­obe­di­ence to the state and, no less, when dis­obe­di­ence to the state con­sti­tutes dis­obe­di­ence to God.”
    • From 1984, a tran­scrip­tion of a speech by a key voice in the emer­gence of Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism. This speech, with updates to replace 80’s ref­er­ences, could be giv­en today.
  3. Ryugu aster­oid sam­ple rapid­ly col­o­nized by ter­res­tri­al life despite strict con­t­a­m­i­na­tion con­trol (Justin Jack­son, Phys.org): “NASA tries to avoid intro­duc­ing Earth microbes to Mars by con­struct­ing probes and lan­ders in clean­room envi­ron­ments and has found the task near­ly impos­si­ble. There have been species of microbes dis­cov­ered in NASA clean rooms that not only evade dis­in­fec­tion meth­ods but also adapt to using clean­ing agents as a food source.”
    • That last sen­tence is stun­ning. This is how British researchers tried (and failed) to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of an aster­oid sam­ple: “Trans­port­ed to Earth in a her­met­i­cal­ly sealed cham­ber, the sam­ple was opened in nitro­gen in a class 10,000 clean room to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. Indi­vid­ual par­ti­cles were picked with ster­il­ized tools and stored under nitro­gen in air­tight con­tain­ers. Before analy­sis, the sam­ple under­went Nano-X-ray com­put­ed tomog­ra­phy and was embed­ded in an epoxy resin block for scan­ning elec­tron microscopy.”
  4. Deus in machi­na: Swiss church installs AI-pow­ered Jesus (Ashifa Kas­sam, The Guardian):“The small, unadorned church… in the Swiss city of Lucerne… installed an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered Jesus capa­ble of dia­logu­ing in 100 dif­fer­ent lan­guages. After train­ing the AI pro­gram in the­o­log­i­cal texts, vis­i­tors were then invit­ed to pose ques­tions to a long-haired image of Jesus beamed through a lat­tice­work screen… More than 1,000 peo­ple – includ­ing Mus­lims and vis­it­ing tourists from as far as Chi­na and Viet­nam – took up the oppor­tu­ni­ty to inter­act with the avatar… two-thirds of them had found it to be a ‘“‘spir­i­tu­al expe­ri­ence.’”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who calls the arti­cle “har­row­ing.”
  5. Why hous­ing short­ages cause home­less­ness (Sal­im Furth, Works in Progress): “…most peo­ple at risk of home­less­ness man­age to remain housed by stay­ing with oth­ers. The high­er rate of home­less­ness in high-cost areas is most­ly explained by the inabil­i­ty of the fam­i­ly and friends of poten­tial­ly home­less peo­ple to afford extra liv­ing space.”
    • Some thoughts in response: https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/1864706992369205381
    • This arti­cle match­es my expe­ri­ence: plen­ty of peo­ple in Louisiana and Mis­souri had spare rooms to let peo­ple use. Almost no one I know has a spare room in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Peo­ple bare­ly even have yards here.
  6. Why Chris­tians Should Care About Oak Flat (Robert P. George, First Things): “For those of us who gath­er in tra­di­tion­al hous­es of wor­ship, Apache spir­i­tu­al prac­tices might feel remote or alien. A patch of Ari­zona wilder­ness bears lit­tle resem­blance to the church­es, syn­a­gogues, mosques, and tem­ples we regard as sacred space. Yet our tra­di­tion of reli­gious free­dom, prop­er­ly under­stood, has nev­er been about pro­tect­ing only what is famil­iar or con­ve­nient. Nor has it been a sim­ple live-and-let-live com­pro­mise, a frag­ile truce in which we agree to tol­er­ate one another’s prac­tices for the sake of peace. It is instead a com­mit­ment to a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple that acknowl­edges our nature as ratio­nal beings, bear­ers of pro­found, inher­ent, and equal dig­ni­ty, capa­ble of order­ing our lives toward the good, the true, and the holy.”
    • Rob­bie George is, of course, a law prof at Prince­ton and an out­spo­ken Catholic.
  7. America’s best-known prac­ti­tion­er of youth gen­der med­i­cine is being sued (Jesse Sin­gal, The Econ­o­mist): “Ms Breen said she is doing sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter today—partly, she believes, sim­ply because she ceased tak­ing testos­terone. But well before that, she ditched the ther­a­pist Dr Olson-Kennedy referred her to, who she said fix­at­ed entire­ly on her gen­der iden­ti­ty. She switched to a dialec­ti­cal behav­iour­al ther­a­pist whom she described as a god­send, with whom she had her first-ever in-depth con­ver­sa­tions about the phys­i­cal and sex­u­al abuse she endured ear­li­er in life. Ms Breen said she was fair­ly con­fi­dent that if she’d had these con­ver­sa­tions at age 12, she wouldn’t have pur­sued med­ical tran­si­tion. She has been left with per­ma­nent med­ical con­se­quences: a low­er voice than she wants, an Adam’s Apple that dis­tress­es her, the prospect of breast recon­struc­tion if she wants to par­tial­ly regain a female shape, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty that she is infer­tile due to the years she spent on testos­terone.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Defend­er of the Basic (YouTube, Col­lege­Hu­mor): five min­utes with only one mild­ly off-col­or inter­change. I agree with this video direc­tion­al­ly but hap­pen to have dif­fer­ent (but equal­ly basic) aes­thet­ic pref­er­ences than many of those high­light­ed. 
  • NASA Rock­et Engine Fire­place (NASA, YouTube): want a nerdy fire­place on your TV dur­ing the hol­i­days? NASA’s got you. 8 hours of a rock­et in a fire­place in 4k.
  • Who Needs Con­gress When You Have Cameo? (Joseph Bern­stein, New York Times): “He’s avail­able for birth­day wish­es (‘Any time you hit a zero it’s a big one, but turn­ing 70 is pret­ty epic’), wed­ding con­grat­u­la­tions (‘Mar­riage is an amaz­ing insti­tu­tion’) and pep talks (‘Even on tough days, find the good in it, find the pride in the work’) — all start­ing at $500. Mr. Gaetz is hap­py to poke fun at his pro­fes­sion­al set­back, con­trast­ing his failed nom­i­na­tion with the suc­cess of one of his Cameo cus­tomers who just became a part­ner in a law firm.”

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 479

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 the Ivy League Broke Amer­i­ca (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “Stu­dents who got into high­er-rank­ing col­leges, which demand high sec­ondary-school GPAs, are not sub­stan­tial­ly more effec­tive after they grad­u­ate. In one study of 28,000 young stu­dents, those attend­ing high­er-rank­ing uni­ver­si­ties did only slight­ly bet­ter on con­sult­ing projects than those attend­ing low­er-ranked uni­ver­si­ties. Grant notes that this would mean, for instance, that a Yale stu­dent would have been only about 1.9 per­cent more pro­fi­cient than a stu­dent from Cleve­land State when mea­sured by the qual­i­ty of their work. The Yale stu­dent would also have been more like­ly to be a jerk: The researchers found that stu­dents from high­er-rank­ing col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, while nom­i­nal­ly more effec­tive than oth­er stu­dents, were more like­ly to pay ‘insuf­fi­cient atten­tion to inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships,’ and in some instances to be ‘less friend­ly,’ ‘more prone to con­flict,’ and ‘less like­ly to iden­ti­fy with their team.’ ”
    • Inter­est­ing through­out. I liked this line — “If we could get to the point where being snob­by about going to Stan­ford seems as ridicu­lous as being snob­by about your great-grandmother’s mem­ber­ship in the Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, this would trans­form not just col­lege admis­sions but Amer­i­can child­hood.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: We Asked for It (Michael W. Clune, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The costs of explic­it­ly tying the aca­d­e­m­ic enter­prise to par­ti­san pol­i­tics in a democ­ra­cy were emi­nent­ly fore­see­able and are now com­ing into sharp focus.… In return for their tuition, stu­dents are giv­en the faculty’s high-class polit­i­cal opin­ions as a form of cul­tur­al cap­i­tal. Thus the pub­lic per­ceives these opin­ions — on defund­ing the police, or view­ing bio­log­i­cal sex as a social con­struc­tion, or Israel as absolute evil — as mark­ers in a sta­tus game. Far from advanc­ing their opin­ions, pro­fes­sors in fact func­tion to inval­i­date these views for the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans who nev­er had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to attend elite insti­tu­tions but who are con­stant­ly stig­ma­tized for their low-class opin­ions by the lucky grad­u­ates. Far from rep­re­sent­ing a pow­er­ful avant-garde lead­ing the way to polit­i­cal change, the politi­cized class of pro­fes­sors is a seri­ous polit­i­cal lia­bil­i­ty to any par­ty that it sup­ports.”
      • The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Case West­ern. He throws a lot of strong punch­es.
  2. Jor­dan Peter­son Loves God’s Word. But What About God? (Brad East, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “the pow­er of Peterson’s style is his mar­riage of exis­ten­tial urgency with hermeneu­ti­cal cre­ativ­i­ty. He expects the Word to show him won­ders. He wres­tles with the text—a mys­tery and a stranger—until he secures a bless­ing from it. He takes for grant­ed that its depths are bot­tom­less. Do pas­tors mod­el this pos­ture in the pul­pit? Do teach­ers in the class­room? Do schol­ars on the page?Christian read­ers should learn from Peterson’s bold­ness, his dis­po­si­tion of awe and docil­i­ty before the sacred page. He opens the scroll with the same spir­it as the psalmist: ‘Open my eyes that I may see won­der­ful things in your law’ (119:18).”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a col­league. This is one of the best Chris­t­ian engage­ments with Jor­dan Peter­son I’ve seen.
  3. In the Era of the Judges (Stiv­en Peter, Mere Ortho­doxy): “The hold­ers of cul­tur­al cap­i­tal have not sim­ply sub­sti­tut­ed Chris­t­ian val­ues with an alter­na­tive set but pro­mote the very loss of order itself. The only val­ues are no val­ues. That is, our cul­ture pro­motes lib­er­tin­ism, every­one doing what is right in their own eyes. Soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, Hunter calls this the process of dis­so­lu­tion: ‘By dis­so­lu­tion, I refer to the decon­struc­tion of the most basic assump­tions about real­i­ty.’ Our cul­ture doesn’t enforce any guide to who or what we are, nor what we should do. Instead, what is pro­mot­ed is turn­ing inside our­selves and deter­min­ing our own val­ues. This process results in the frac­tur­ing of soci­ety along­side tribes/enclaves of peo­ple with sim­i­lar val­ues.”
    • This is a review of Aaron Ren­n’s book, and Renn says: “This review is a think piece in its own right. Peter takes my ideas and restates them through his own lens — improv­ing them in the process.”
  4. Rich Inner Death (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Our men­tal health cri­sis is usu­al­ly cast as either a fail­ure of ther­a­peu­tic techniques—we just haven’t unlocked our trau­ma well enough yet—or else an unavoid­able con­se­quence of cli­mate anx­i­ety, polar­iza­tion, or bad media. But [per­haps the cri­sis stems from how we are trained to view the world]. There is a way of liv­ing your life as a kind of con­stant retreat into both the safe­ty and the chaos of your own imag­i­na­tion, and near­ly every­thing about how we learn, com­mu­ni­cate, and work as mod­ern peo­ple helps us con­di­tion for this. We are taught ear­ly and often to direct our gaze inward.”
    • Sev­er­al sub­stan­tive insights in this arti­cle.
  5. Why the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety Has Been a Great Suc­cess (Ed Whe­lan, Sub­stack): “The Fed­er­al­ist Society’s suc­cess has led many on the Left—and, more recent­ly, some envi­ous folks on the Right—to revile and demo­nize it. But its crit­ics rou­tine­ly dis­play that they do not under­stand how it oper­ates and how it has suc­ceed­ed.… It does not sub­mit ami­cus briefs. It does not under­take to enlist the pub­lic in polit­i­cal under­tak­ings. And it has nev­er done any of these things. And there­in lies one of the great keys to its suc­cess.”
  6. AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry is indis­tin­guish­able from human-writ­ten poet­ry and is rat­ed more favor­ably (Bri­an Porter & Edouard Mach­ery, Sci­en­tif­ic Reports [Nature]): “We col­lect­ed 5 poems each from 10 well-known Eng­lish-lan­guage poets, span­ning much of the his­to­ry of Eng­lish poet­ry: Geof­frey Chaucer (1340s-1400), William Shake­speare (1564–1616), Samuel But­ler (1613–1680), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Walt Whit­man (1819–1892), Emi­ly Dick­in­son (1830–1886), T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Allen Gins­berg (1926–1997), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), and Dorothea Lasky (1978- ). Using Chat­G­PT 3.5, we gen­er­at­ed 5 poems ‘in the style of’ each poet. We used a ‘human out of the loop’ par­a­digm: we used the first 5 poems gen­er­at­ed, and did not select the ‘best’ out of a group of poems or pro­vide any feed­back or instruc­tions to the mod­el beyond ‘Write a short poem in the style of <poet> ‘. In the first exper­i­ment, 1,634 par­tic­i­pants were ran­dom­ly assigned to one of the 10 poets, and pre­sent­ed with 10 poems in ran­dom order: 5 poems writ­ten by that poet, and 5 gen­er­at­ed by AI ‘in the style of’ that poet. For each poem, par­tic­i­pants were asked whether they thought the poem was gen­er­at­ed by AI or writ­ten by a human poet.… Con­trary to what ear­li­er stud­ies report­ed, peo­ple now appear unable to reli­ably dis­tin­guish human-out-of-the-loop AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry from human-authored poet­ry writ­ten by well-known poets.… Fur­ther­more, peo­ple pre­fer AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry to human-authored poet­ry, con­sis­tent­ly rat­ing AI-gen­er­at­ed poems more high­ly than the poems of well-known poets across a vari­ety of qual­i­ta­tive fac­tors.”
    • The authors are at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh.
  7. Why Pro­gres­sives Should Ques­tion Their Favorite Sci­en­tif­ic Find­ings (Paul Bloom, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “You may have heard of the study pub­lished in 2020 con­clud­ing that Black new­borns have high­er sur­vival rates when Black doc­tors attend to them. It got a huge amount of cov­er­age in the pop­u­lar press. It was even cit­ed by Supreme Court Jus­tice Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son in her dis­sent last year on the court’s rul­ing against racial pref­er­ences in col­lege admis­sions. The research, Jack­son claimed, shows the ben­e­fits of diver­si­ty. ‘It saves lives,’ she wrote. The same jour­nal just pub­lished a re-analy­sis of the data. It turns out that the ‘effect is sub­stan­tial­ly weak­ened, and often becomes sta­tis­ti­cal­ly insignif­i­cant,’ once you take into account that Black doc­tors are less like­ly to see the high­er-risk pop­u­la­tion of new­borns with low birth weight. I wasn’t sur­prised when I saw the re-analy­sis because I didn’t believe the orig­i­nal find­ing.… It’s like what some­one once said about Gin­ger Rogers and Fred Astaire: They’re both going through all the same moves, but Gin­ger Rogers is doing them back­ward and in high heels. A pub­lished find­ing that clash­es with the polit­i­cal prej­u­dices of review­ers and edi­tors is a Gin­ger Rogers find­ing. It had to be twice as good.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor (emer­i­tus at Yale, cur­rent­ly at U Toron­to).

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 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.