Tag: artificial intelligence

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 455



On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 450

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 443

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, vol­ume 443, is a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Four Ways of Look­ing at Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…to chart the sup­posed reach of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, a sur­vey from the Pub­lic Reli­gion Research Insti­tute asks respon­dents whether they agree with the for­mu­la­tion ‘U.S. laws should be based on Chris­t­ian val­ues.’ But some­one who says yes might just be agree­ing with King’s ‘Let­ter From Birm­ing­ham Jail’ or the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, not endors­ing a legal code based on Deuteron­o­my.”
    • Unlocked.
  2. Relat­ed: If It Were Me, I’d Try Not Help­ing the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “A demo­c­ra­t­ic life is not the high­est thing or the best thing. But as a way of liv­ing amongst our neigh­bors and seek­ing to live a life of con­science under the law, it is a very good thing. The Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists, with their strong man pol­i­tics, sup­port for rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence, and obses­sion with racial sol­i­dar­i­ty would destroy all of that. What wor­ries me now, though, is not the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists them­selves. Frankly, many of them are too reck­less, undis­ci­plined, and reac­tive to be able to accom­plish the rev­o­lu­tion­ary change they seek. What wor­ries me is that there are a great many social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers who love the demo­c­ra­t­ic life who are con­stant­ly being called ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists’ by the likes of Hei­di Przy­by­la for believ­ing things that are utter­ly unre­mark­able in Chris­t­ian his­to­ry. If our sec­u­lar media out­lets con­tin­ue to tell them that ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism’ is the belief in things vir­tu­al­ly all Chris­tians across his­to­ry have believed, I fear they will lis­ten. And they will find these eth­no-nation­al­ist total­i­tar­i­an aspi­rants and, not real­iz­ing what they are doing, they will make com­mon cause with them.”
    • This is one of the most help­ful pieces I’ve seen on Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism. It’s a bit long, but eas­i­ly skim­ma­ble to zero in on the parts you find most inter­est­ing.
  3. What hap­pened after a man got 217 coro­n­avirus shots (Rachel Pan­nett, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Going into the study, the researchers had spec­u­lat­ed that hav­ing so many shots could cause his immune sys­tem to become fatigued. Vac­cines cre­ate immune mem­o­ry cells that are on stand­by, ready to rapid­ly acti­vate the body’s defens­es in the event of an infec­tion. But in fact, the researchers found that the man had more of these immune cells — known as T‑cells — than a con­trol group that had received the stan­dard three-dose vac­cine reg­i­men. They also did not detect any fatigue in these cells, which they said were just as effec­tive as those of peo­ple who had received a typ­i­cal num­ber of coro­n­avirus shots.”
  4. Alba­nia to speed up EU acces­sion using Chat­G­PT (Alice Tay­lor, Eurac­tiv): “The Alban­ian gov­ern­ment will use Chat­G­PT to trans­late thou­sands of pages of EU legal mea­sures and pro­vi­sions into shqip (Alban­ian lan­guage) and then inte­grate them into exist­ing legal struc­tures, fol­low­ing an agree­ment with the CEO of the par­ent com­pa­ny, Ope­nAI, Mira Murati, who was born in Alba­nia.… on 13 Decem­ber, at the EU sum­mit in Brus­sels, he will present the project and a suc­cess­ful test of ‘the Alban­ian mod­el of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence for the inter­po­si­tion of the leg­is­la­tion totalling 280,000 pages of legal mea­sures of the EU.’”
  5. I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train (Steve Charnok, Metro): “While the 17-year-old does indeed live on trains, he does so entire­ly legal­ly. And with a sur­pris­ing amount of com­fort. Lasse trav­els 600 miles a day through­out Ger­many aboard Deutsche Bahn trains. He trav­els first class, sleeps on night trains, has break­fast in DB lounges and takes show­ers in pub­lic swim­ming pools and leisure cen­tres, all using his unlim­it­ed annu­al rail­card.”

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 440

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 440, the sum of the first sev­en­teen prime num­bers. 440 = 2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 and that fact makes me hap­py.

Also, I’ve had a busy trav­el sched­ule late­ly and haven’t kept us with as much stuff as I nor­mal­ly do, so this is a short­er com­pi­la­tion than usu­al.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Chris­t­ian Super Bowl Ad They SHOULD Have Made | He Saves Us (Jamie Bam­brick, YouTube): one com­pelling minute. I don’t have any­thing against the He Gets Us ads, but this is pret­ty great.
  2. Chris­tians Are Not Ready for the Age of “Adult AI” (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “All vari­ables being equal, it is like­ly that with­in twen­ty years, most online pornog­ra­phy will not fea­ture real human beings. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tems are already sophis­ti­cat­ed enough to fab­ri­cate entire bod­ies con­vinc­ing­ly.… It sim­ply won’t do any­more to try to elic­it post-Chris­t­ian out­rage against porn by empha­siz­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of sex traf­fick­ing or exploita­tion. In the era of dig­i­tal­ly-gen­er­at­ed con­tent, the ques­tion will no longer be, ‘Who was hurt in the mak­ing of this’ (for the prac­ti­cal answer to that ques­tion will be, ‘No one’). Rather, the ques­tion will be, ‘How am I hurt by con­sum­ing this,’ and, ‘Why is this objec­tive­ly wrong for me to enjoy?’ ”
  3. How Chi­na Mis­cal­cu­lat­ed Its Way to a Baby Bust (Liyan Qi, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Fol­low­ing the data release, researchers from Vic­to­ria Uni­ver­si­ty in Aus­tralia and the Shang­hai Acad­e­my of Social Sci­ences pre­dict­ed that Chi­na will have just 525 mil­lion peo­ple by the end of the cen­tu­ry. That’s down from their pre­vi­ous fore­cast of 597 mil­lion and a pre­cip­i­tous drop from 1.4 bil­lion now.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Mar­ry Young (Kasen Stephen­son, Stan­ford Review): “Although I’m now twen­ty-four, I got mar­ried as a twen­ty-two year old under­grad. I then bid farewell to my dorm in Roble and moved into a cozy apart­ment beyond EVGR with my wife. I have found that most of my class­mates are con­vinced that mar­riage is in their future, yet they are quite sur­prised that I mar­ried so young. While it’s dif­fi­cult to exer­cise con­trol over any time­line, I’m a strong advo­cate for get­ting mar­ried young, espe­cial­ly at Stan­ford where young mar­riages are most uncom­mon.”
  5. The Lure of Divorce (Emi­ly Gould, The Cut): “It began to seem like I only ever talked to friends who had been through divorces or were con­tem­plat­ing them. One friend who didn’t know whether to split up with her hus­band thought open­ing their mar­riage might be the answer. Anoth­er friend described the ease of shar­ing cus­tody of his young daugh­ter, then admit­ted that he and his ex-wife still had sex most week­ends. In my chron­i­cal­ly unde­cid­ed state, I admired both of these friends who had found, or might have found, a way to split the dif­fer­ence.”
    • A wild and illu­mi­nat­ing sto­ry, although I sus­pect I am tak­ing away some dif­fer­ent lessons than the author intend­ed.

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 439

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 439, which is not only a prime num­ber and the sum of three con­sec­u­tive primes (139 + 149 + 151), but also the sum of nine con­sec­u­tive primes (31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67). Which is, you know, a lot­ta primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Dig­i­tal Apps Are Chang­ing How We Read the Bible (John Dyer, Text & Canon): “I asked both groups to read the book of Jude and then tell me (1) what the point of the book was, and (2) how it made them feel. Inter­est­ing­ly, two oppo­site trends emerged. The print read­ers said they felt Jude was about God’s judg­ment while the phone read­ers tend­ed to empha­size God’s faith­ful­ness. But then, on the sec­ond ques­tion, their answers seemed to split. The print read­ers, who felt the book was about God’s judg­ment, said they were encour­aged by the read­ing. The phone read­ers on the oth­er hand who said Jude was about God’s faith­ful­ness, said after read­ing it that they felt dis­cour­aged and con­fused. So what can account for that dif­fer­ence? Why is a judg­men­tal God encour­ag­ing and a faith­ful God dis­cour­ag­ing?”
  2. The Grand Canyon-Sized Chasm Between Elites and Ordi­nary Amer­i­cans (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Per­haps the most strik­ing diver­gence between elite and non-elite opin­ion: Although the major­i­ty of ordi­nary vot­ers oppose the strict rationing of meat, elec­tric­i­ty, and gas to fight cli­mate change, 89% of Ivy grad­u­ates and 77% of elites over­all are in favor of it.”
  3. What Hap­pened When My Church Encoun­tered Neg­a­tive World (Patrick Miller, Mere Ortho­doxy): “You can tell our church’s sto­ry in a way that makes us the vic­tims of the pro­gres­sives, but that’s not our full sto­ry. Nor is it the sto­ry of most non-coastal church­es that refused to go pro-Trump or pro-Biden in 2020. Pas­tors at such church­es will tell you the same sto­ry: The neg­a­tive world bows before gold­en don­keys and ele­phants.”
  4. Sarah Isgur’s Major­i­ty Report (Kele­fah San­neh, The New York­er): “Through the eyes of Isgur and French, the Amer­i­can legal sys­tem gen­er­al­ly appears to be a place where smart peo­ple assess good-faith argu­ments and com­pose thought­ful essays explain­ing their deci­sions. Their under­ly­ing con­tention is that the Supreme Court is good, even, or per­haps espe­cial­ly, in its cur­rent incar­na­tion.… In an era of aggriev­ed polit­i­cal dis­course, Isgur is some­thing unusu­al: a com­men­ta­tor who tru­ly seems to love the gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tion she cov­ers.”
    • Advi­so­ry Opin­ions is one of my favorite pod­casts and I’m not remote­ly a lawyer. Isgur and French are amaz­ing.
  5. The Devil’s Face in Gaza (Ger­ald McDer­mott, First Things): “The min­is­ter of tourism, a rab­bi, told an Israeli Chris­t­ian leader, ‘We hope you send mis­sion­ar­ies to the Arabs here.’ The Chris­t­ian was shocked: ‘Don’t you hate mis­sion­ar­ies?’ The gov­ern­ment min­is­ter replied, ‘If you teach them what you believe, we will have peace in the Mid­dle East.’”
  6. Some Stan­ford news:
    • Sit-in on Islam­o­pho­bia replaces pro-Israel tent in White Plaza (Dilan Gohill, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Orga­niz­ers set up the Sit-in to Stop Islam­o­pho­bia on the White Plaza lawn — a space pre­vi­ous­ly occu­pied by the Blue and White Tent. Tent orga­niz­ers told The Dai­ly they made an indef­i­nite reser­va­tion through Car­di­nal Engage. Accord­ing to Feige­lis, Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tion told the Sit-In to Stop Islam­o­pho­bia that the space was reserved for the Blue and White Tent. He said as long as the sit-in refus­es to relo­cate, the tent can­not reassem­ble. The Dai­ly has reached out to the Uni­ver­si­ty for com­ment. ‘We did not move your stuff — the wind destroyed it, you cleaned it up. We saw an open space, we set up here, we’re hap­py to coex­ist.’ El Boudali said. He added that orga­niz­ers set up in White Plaza due to its high traf­fic.”
    • Stan­ford stu­dents protest new ban on overnight sit-in camp­ing (Lau­ren Irwin, The Hill): “Stan­ford said its lev­el of con­cern has risen to a point that it can no longer sup­port overnight activ­i­ties.”
    • Read the offi­cial Stan­ford state­ment: Pre­serv­ing free speech and safe­ty on White Plaza (Stan­ford News): “Mov­ing for­ward, any tents, tables, chairs, or oth­er sim­i­lar items will need to be removed from White Plaza between the hours of 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Any overnight dis­plays and/or camp­ing items left unoc­cu­pied are sub­ject to removal for health and safe­ty rea­sons. Stu­dents who vio­late the no-camp­ing pol­i­cy will be sub­ject to a dis­ci­pli­nary refer­ral to the Office of Com­mu­ni­ty Stan­dards and may also be cit­ed for tres­pass for fail­ing to com­ply with a uni­ver­si­ty direc­tive.”
    • And not exact­ly Stan­ford news, but not not Stan­ford news: Law schools must adopt free speech poli­cies to main­tain ABA accred­i­ta­tion (Lexi Lonas, The Hill): “The new stan­dard requires schools to adopt a pol­i­cy that would allow fac­ul­ty, stu­dents and staff ‘to com­mu­ni­cate ideas that may be con­tro­ver­sial or unpop­u­lar, includ­ing through robust debate, demon­stra­tions or protests,’ and would for­bid activ­i­ties that dis­rupt or impinge on free speech. But it wouldn’t impose spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy lan­guage,’”’ the state­ment added.”
  7. The Polit­i­cal Pref­er­ences of LLMs (David Roza­do, Sub­stack): “When probed with questions/statements with polit­i­cal con­no­ta­tions most con­ver­sa­tion­al LLMs tend to gen­er­ate respons­es that are diag­nosed by most polit­i­cal test instru­ments as man­i­fest­ing pref­er­ences for left-of-cen­ter view­points. This does not appear to be the case for base (i.e. foun­da­tion) mod­els upon which LLMs opti­mized for con­ver­sa­tion with humans are built. Though not con­clu­sive, our results pro­vide sup­port­ing evi­dence for the intrigu­ing hypoth­e­sis that the embed­ding of polit­i­cal pref­er­ences into LLMs might be hap­pen­ing most­ly post-pre­train­ing. Name­ly, dur­ing the super­vised fine-tun­ing (SFT) and/or Rein­force­ment Learn­ing (RL) stages of the con­ver­sa­tion­al LLMs train­ing pipeline.”
    • In oth­er words, the AI tools we see appear to have polit­i­cal pref­er­ences trained into them by the com­pa­nies that are cre­at­ing them, although it is not clear to what extent this is delib­er­ate­ly being done.
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of data sci­ence in New Zealand — https://drozado.github.io/

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • His­to­ry of Japan (Bill Wurz, YouTube): nine amaz­ing min­utes — gen­uine­ly worth your time if you have any inter­est in Japan at all. Or in how to teach his­to­ry using video. He leaves a bunch out and def­i­nite­ly throws his opin­ion around, but it’s hard to see how he could have done any­thing else in nine min­utes. Real­ly good.

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 433

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 433, a prime num­ber.

A reminder as the year draws to a close: this week­ly roundup of links is an over­flow of the donor-fund­ed min­istry I do with Chi Alpha at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. If you’re so inclined, con­sid­er an end-of-year dona­tion.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Some Christ­mas con­tent:
    • Los­ing Our Grip on Christ­mas (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “In Amer­i­ca, Chris­tian­i­ty isn’t attacked as much as it is usurped. When Chris­tians say, ‘We’d like to cel­e­brate Christ­mas,’ the world says, ‘That’s a great idea. Would you like for us to stay open late so you can buy every­one you love a gift?’ Sud­den­ly, there’s no time to wor­ship. There’s no time to pray. We’re too busy shop­ping.”
    • A Har­mo­ny of the Birth of Jesus: Matthew and Luke (Justin Tay­lor, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Here is a sim­ple chronol­o­gy to show how the events of Matthew 1–2 and Luke 1–2 fit togeth­er and what each of the gospel authors empha­size. Matthew tells things more through the eyes of Joseph and Luke (who per­haps inter­viewed Mary) tells the events large­ly through her eyes.”
    • Beth­le­hem Can­cels Christ­mas, But Local Pas­tors Still Expect a Holy Night (Sophia Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The words peo­ple once asso­ci­at­ed with Christ­mas were San­ta, tree, gifts, car­ols—all ‘roman­ti­cized’ tra­di­tions from the West, Isaac said. Today, he thinks of words from the Christ­mas sto­ry of the Bible: Cae­sar, cen­sus, mas­sacre, and refugee in Egypt—rel­e­vant to Pales­tini­ans who have to reg­is­ter to trav­el out­side the West Bank and who seek safe­ty in Egypt.”
    • There’s No Christ­mas Lunch Like a Kore­an Amer­i­can Church Lunch (Eric Kim, New York Times): “…59 per­cent of Kore­an Amer­i­cans iden­ti­fy as Chris­t­ian. But that num­ber used to be even high­er. For decades, church lunch­es have been piv­otal spaces for Kore­an immi­grants as they estab­lished them­selves in the Unit­ed States, and these meals con­tin­ue to flour­ish as hubs of com­mu­ni­ty bond­ing for many who are the first gen­er­a­tion to arrive here. More than just a meal, they are a key oppor­tu­ni­ty for con­ver­sa­tion, gos­sip and fel­low­ship.”
      • I liked a lot about this arti­cle, but I found it very New-York-Timesy to say that most Kore­an-Amer­i­cans are Chris­t­ian and then to tell sto­ries about how those who have left the church nonethe­less remem­ber it and its food fond­ly.
  2. The Prob­lem With Every­thing Being Porni­fied (Freya India, Sub­stack): “…I find it so frus­trat­ing to see some pro­gres­sives down­play the dan­gers of all this. Those that dis­miss any­one con­cerned about the porni­fi­ca­tion of every­thing as a stuffy con­ser­v­a­tive. And some­how can’t see how the con­tin­u­al loos­en­ing of sex­u­al norms might actu­al­ly empow­er preda­to­ry men, and put pres­sure on vul­ner­a­ble girls? That seems delu­sion­al to me. Let’s just say I have lit­tle patience for those on the left who loud­ly cel­e­brate women sex­u­al­is­ing them­selves online, sell­ing it as fun, fem­i­nist and risk-free, but are then hor­ri­fied to hear about 12 year-olds doing the same thing. C’mon. No won­der they want to. But I also find it frus­trat­ing to see some on the right approach this with what seems like a com­plete lack of com­pas­sion. I don’t think it helps to relent­less­ly ridicule and blame young women for sex­u­al­is­ing them­selves online. I don’t think it’s fair either. We can’t give girls Insta­gram at 12 and then be sur­prised when as young women they base their self-worth on the approval of strangers.”
  3. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can find your loca­tion in pho­tos, wor­ry­ing pri­va­cy experts (Geoff Brum­fiel, NPR): “The project, known as Pre­dict­ing Image Geolo­ca­tions (or PIGEON, for short) was designed by three Stan­ford grad­u­ate stu­dents in order to iden­ti­fy loca­tions on Google Street View.… [ACLU’s] Stan­ley wor­ries that com­pa­nies might soon use AI to track where you’ve trav­eled, or that gov­ern­ments might check your pho­tos to see if you’ve vis­it­ed a coun­try on a watch­list. Stalk­ing and abuse are also obvi­ous threats, he says. In the past, Stan­ley says, peo­ple have been able to remove GPS loca­tion tag­ging from pho­tos they post online. That may not work any­more.”
  4. In Gaza, Israelis Dis­play Tun­nel Wide Enough to Han­dle Cars (Ronen Bergman, New York Times): “Two mil­i­tary offi­cials inter­viewed after the tour say that recent­ly gath­ered intel­li­gence indi­cat­ed that Israel has gross­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed the size of the under­ground net­work. The sys­tem, which the army pre­vi­ous­ly esti­mat­ed was about 60 miles long, is now believed to be clos­er to 250 miles long, they said.”
  5. William Wilber­force: Abo­li­tion­ist, Reformer, Evan­gel­i­cal (Richard Turn­bull, Reli­gion & Lib­er­ty Online): “What unites these dis­parate indi­vid­u­als? Per­haps three things. First, a pas­sion for a true and live­ly faith that trans­forms the heart. Sec­ond­ly, a holis­tic view of God’s love for the world that saw no con­tra­dic­tion between per­son­al faith and a trans­formed soci­ety. Third­ly, a tenac­i­ty that drove these indi­vid­u­als nev­er to give up, nev­er to give up for Christ.”
    • A sol­id sum­ma­ry of a con­se­quen­tial Chris­tian’s impact. The author is the for­mer prin­ci­pal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.
  6. A Tik-Tok-ing Time­bomb: How Tik­Tok’s Glob­al Plat­form Anom­alies Align with the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty’s Geostrate­gic Objec­tives (Nation­al Con­ta­gion Research Insti­tute): “We then expand­ed our research into top­ics rel­e­vant to the Chi­nese Government’s geopo­lit­i­cal inter­ests: 1) Ukraine-Rus­sia War; 2) Kash­mir Inde­pen­dence; 3) Israel-Hamas War. The con­clu­sions of our research are clear: Whether con­tent is pro­mot­ed or mut­ed on Tik­Tok appears to depend on whether it is aligned or opposed to the inter­ests of the Chi­nese Gov­ern­ment. As the sum­ma­ry data graph below illus­trates, the per­cent­ages of Tik­Tok posts out of Insta­gram posts are con­sis­tent­ly range-bound for gen­er­al polit­i­cal and pop-cul­ture top­ics, but com­plete­ly out-of-bounds for top­ics sen­si­tive to the Chi­nese Gov­ern­ment.”
    • The link is to a 18 page PDF. The research was con­duct­ed in con­junc­tion with Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty. I, for one, am shocked. Who could have pre­dict­ed such a thing from a coun­try oth­er­wise devot­ed to free speech and free mar­kets?
  7. Why Anti­semitism Sprout­ed So Quick­ly on Cam­pus (Jonathan Haidt, Sub­stack): “Com­mon ene­my iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics is arguably the worst way of think­ing one could pos­si­bly teach to young peo­ple in a mul­ti-eth­nic democ­ra­cy such as the Unit­ed States. It is, of course, the ide­o­log­i­cal dri­ve behind most geno­cides. On a more mun­dane lev­el, it can in the­o­ry be used to cre­ate group cohe­sion on teams and in orga­ni­za­tions, and yet the cur­rent aca­d­e­m­ic ver­sion of it plunges orga­ni­za­tions into eter­nal con­flict and dys­func­tion. As long as this way of think­ing is taught any­where on cam­pus, iden­ti­ty-based hatred will find fer­tile ground.”
    • Haidt is a social psy­chol­o­gist at NYU.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 430

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way. That’s espe­cial­ly true this week: I skipped last week because of Thanks­giv­ing, and I still feel behind on my read­ing.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 419

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 419, a twin prime num­ber (paired with 421).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Cli­mate Change Paper Pub­lished (Patrick T Brown, The Free Press): “In the­o­ry, sci­en­tif­ic research should prize curios­i­ty, dis­pas­sion­ate objec­tiv­i­ty, and a com­mit­ment to uncov­er­ing the truth. Sure­ly those are the qual­i­ties that edi­tors of sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals should val­ue. In real­i­ty, though, the bias­es of the edi­tors (and the review­ers they call upon to eval­u­ate sub­mis­sions) exert a major influ­ence on the col­lec­tive out­put of entire fields. They select what gets pub­lished from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is con­duct­ed more broad­ly. Savvy researchers tai­lor their stud­ies to max­i­mize the like­li­hood that their work is accept­ed. I know this because I am one of them.”
  2. Tex­ting With AI Jesus (Casey Chalk, First Things): “Text With Jesus rep­re­sents the age-old human vice of pride. Through our cre­ativ­i­ty and bril­liance, we seek to ascend to God’s lev­el, to be like him, and even to dic­tate terms to the divine. Or rather, the app is a dia­bol­i­cal inver­sion of this: Instead of being trans­formed into God’s image, we aim to make him into our own.”
  3. Bap­tized Bronze Age Per­vert (Bri­an Matt­son, Sub­stack): “So-called ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism’ is a renais­sance of 19th cen­tu­ry ‘blood and soil’ nation­al­ism with some ‘Chris­tiany’ lan­guage sprin­kled on top.… They are bap­tiz­ing the lan­guage, ethos, and ethics of a Niet­zschean pagan—a lit­er­al antichrist. An awful lot of ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism’ sounds to me like Bap­tized Bronze Age Per­vert. Per­verse, is right.”
  4. Who Has The Best Food? (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “It is a fun ques­tion going around the inter­net this past week, so here we go. In par­tic­u­lar, peo­ple focused on the ques­tion of France vs. Amer­i­ca. As one would expect, those on the French side think those on the Amer­i­can side are crazy, it is insult­ing to even con­sid­er this a ques­tion. Those on the Amer­i­can side like food.… What I love most about Amer­i­can food, and eat­ing in Amer­i­ca in gen­er­al, is that it is the oppo­site of the French mis­take of try­ing to impress you or waste your time. Amer­i­can food wants you to be hap­py, it wants to give you the expe­ri­ence you want and not hold back, it val­ues your time and it does not much care how it looks doing it.”
  5. Burn­ing Man is a cap­i­tal­ist lie (Mary Har­ring­ton, UnHerd): “Some­times described as an exper­i­ment in ‘rad­i­cal self-suf­fi­cien­cy’, Burn­ing Man is per­haps more accu­rate­ly an exper­i­ment in cre­at­ing a rad­i­cal post-scarci­ty soci­ety by hav­ing done all your shop­ping ahead of time.”
  6. How to actu­al­ly win back trust in news. (Isaac Saul, Tan­gle): “Now, there are a few things worth not­ing here. One is that a reporter who is lib­er­al is not defin­i­tive­ly a biased lib­er­al reporter. There are fair jour­nal­ists and there are hacks. I know a lot of jour­nal­ists with lib­er­al polit­i­cal beliefs who are hard­er on Democ­rats pre­cise­ly because they care about fair­ness and about how Democ­rats act. I know a lot of lib­er­al jour­nal­ists whose pol­i­tics you’d nev­er spot by read­ing their report­ing.…  This, in some ways, actu­al­ly cre­ates an unex­pect­ed imbal­ance in the media: Con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal­ists and pun­dits, sens­ing that they are the minor­i­ty in the space, are far more reluc­tant to crit­i­cize ‘their side.’ Lib­er­al jour­nal­ists and pun­dits, under­stand­ing that they can ‘stick out’ or earn cred­it by being hard on both sides, are more will­ing to do so. It’s com­pli­cat­ed. Just because The New York Times is over­whelm­ing­ly made up of peo­ple who prob­a­bly vote for Democ­rats does­n’t mean that it’s always going to play nice with Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians. My favorite exam­ple to cite is that it was The New York Times that broke the ‘Hillary emails’ sto­ry, which effec­tive­ly ruined her polit­i­cal career.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. The Misog­y­ny Myth (John Tier­ney, City Jour­nal): “Gen­der dis­par­i­ties gen­er­al­ly mat­ter only if they work against women. In com­put­ing its Glob­al Gen­der Gap, the much-quot­ed annu­al report, the World Eco­nom­ic Forum has explic­it­ly ignored male dis­ad­van­tages: if men fare worse on a par­tic­u­lar dimen­sion, a coun­try still gets a per­fect score for equal­i­ty on that mea­sure. Prod­ded by the fed­er­al Title IX law ban­ning sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion in schools, edu­ca­tors have con­cen­trat­ed on elim­i­nat­ing dis­par­i­ties in ath­let­ics but not in oth­er extracur­ric­u­lar pro­grams, which most­ly skew female. The fact that there are now three female col­lege stu­dents for every two males is of no con­cern to the White House Gen­der Pol­i­cy Coun­cil. Its ‘Nation­al Strat­e­gy on Gen­der Equi­ty and Equal­i­ty’ doesn’t even men­tion boys’ strug­gles in school, instead focus­ing exclu­sive­ly on new ways to help female stu­dents get fur­ther ahead.”
    • Long, worth the read espe­cial­ly if you’re unfa­mil­iar with the argu­ments that mod­ern soci­ety is struc­tured to advan­tage women over men.
    • Relat­ed: How Then Should Men Live? (Mike Cosper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The new social script for women is at once pur­pose­ful and lib­er­tar­i­an. Girls can do any­thing, as the slo­gan goes, including—if they want—pursuing a tra­di­tion­al mod­el of mar­riage and fam­i­ly. Mean­while, Reeves says, men have yet to find our new social script. The old role of bread­win­ner, pro­tec­tor, and spir­i­tu­al head of the house­hold isn’t mere­ly viewed as quaint; it’s often seen as pater­nal­is­tic or worse.”
    • I also believe this to be relat­ed: Sec­u­lar­iza­tion Begins at Home (Lyman Stone, The Insti­tute For Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “By now, it should be clear that child­hood, includ­ing before age 13, is the key bat­tle­ground for reli­gious for­ma­tion, not adult­hood. By the time a child goes to col­lege, much of the reli­gious ques­tion has already been set­tled.… For par­ents to keep their kids in the faith, they must recap­ture their influ­ence. Shield chil­dren from school­ing envi­ron­ments that rel­e­gate faith to a sec­ond-class top­ic, deny access to unsu­per­vised online com­mu­ni­ties and pornog­ra­phy, and have dai­ly, par­ent-led activ­i­ties cen­tered on fam­i­ly sol­i­dar­i­ty around shared faith. Fam­i­lies that do these things still have extreme­ly high rates of suc­cess­ful reli­gious trans­mis­sion, but fam­i­lies who trust that chil­dren will ‘pick it up along the way’ fail to trans­mit their reli­gious beliefs, and sud­den­ly find to their great sur­prise that their 20-some­thing chil­dren cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly reject their faith.”

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 418

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 418, and 418 has the inter­est­ing prop­er­ty that the sum of its prime fac­tors is equal to the prod­ucts of its dig­its. In oth­er words, 2+11+19=32=4·1·8

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This 5 minute Tik­Tok on Twit­ter is very much worth your time: https://twitter.com/deejayfaremi/status/1694972810978799727 — it gets bet­ter and bet­ter. I’m strong­ly tempt­ed to show it dur­ing a wor­ship ser­vice.
  2. Daniel’s 3 Tips for Sur­viv­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of Baby­lon (Catie Robert­son & Andrew M. Sel­by, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Try­ing to feel vague­ly close to God and frat­er­niz­ing fre­quent­ly with the lost (in the name of win­some love) may be nice, but it like­ly won’t be effec­tive as a long-term strat­e­gy for evan­ge­lism, let alone for the health of our own faith.…If we form pock­ets of resis­tance with believ­ers, the uni­ver­si­ty itself will be saved.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Nutri­tion Science’s Most Pre­pos­ter­ous Result (David Mer­ritt Johns, The Atlantic): “Back in 2018, a Har­vard doc­tor­al stu­dent named Andres Ardis­son Korat was pre­sent­ing his research on the rela­tion­ship between dairy foods and chron­ic dis­ease to his the­sis com­mit­tee. One of his stud­ies had led him to an unusu­al con­clu­sion: Among dia­bet­ics, eat­ing half a cup of ice cream a day was asso­ci­at­ed with a low­er risk of heart prob­lems. Need­less to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with sat­u­rat­ed fat and sug­ar might actu­al­ly be good for you raised some eye­brows at the nation’s most influ­en­tial depart­ment of nutri­tion.”
    • Unlocked. Fun to read, and with impli­ca­tions beyond diet.
  4. Everyone’s tired of pol­i­tics (Sale­na Zito, Pitts­burgh Post-Gazette): “If you spent your time watch­ing the news or trolling social media every day — which is lit­er­al­ly the job descrip­tion for many nation­al jour­nal­ists — you might assume that near­ly every per­son in the coun­try is invest­ed in either Trump or Biden. How­ev­er, when you dri­ve to places where the speed lim­it is 35 miles an hour, you find a dif­fer­ent real­i­ty. And that’s the prob­lem with how the coun­try too often is cov­ered these days. Our pol­i­tics would like­ly improve — some­what at least — if more in the media checked their assump­tions and lis­tened to the peo­ple they pur­port to cov­er.”
    • I cer­tain­ly feel this. I haven’t been shar­ing arti­cles about the Trump indict­ment or the Biden fam­i­ly cor­rup­tion or the age of politi­cians or the Repub­li­can debate because I sim­ply don’t find the arti­cles I read about them inter­est­ing.
  5. An anguished ‘noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar’ believ­er shakes up coun­try music estab­lish­ment (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “As for faith, Antho­ny added: ‘I spent a long time being an angry lit­tle agnos­tic punk. … I had sort of per­vert­ed what my vision of God was, because I looked at the reli­gion of man as God and not God Him­self. But there is a Divine Cre­ator who loves you and some­times it takes falling down on your knees and get­ting ready to call things quits before it becomes obvi­ous that He’s there. But He’s always there.’ It would appear, said Wat­son, that this hill­bil­ly song­writer is – to use a pop­u­lar research term – a ‘noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar’ believ­er, one with­out ties to orga­nized reli­gion. This is pre­cise­ly the kind of Amer­i­can that many church lead­ers are strug­gling to under­stand.”
    • I think many of you have heard me say that the delight of some sec­u­lar pun­dits over the rise of the “nones” is mis­placed. They aren’t athe­ists. They’re just not real­ly church­go­ers.
    • Relat­ed to the “nones”: Fresh off a Supreme Court Win, the Pray­ing Coach Takes the Field (Julia Duin, The Free Press): “He has also left his church—Newlife South Kit­sap in Port Orchard—chiefly because then-school super­in­ten­dent Leavell also attend­ed the con­gre­ga­tion. The pas­tors at the church ‘kind of dis­tanced them­selves from the very begin­ning,’ Kennedy said. They met with Kennedy and Leavell sep­a­rate­ly ‘and asked if we could get along and work this out. They didn’t want to choose sides.’ Though Kennedy said he wasn’t ful­ly sup­port­ed by his church, he feels ‘bad’ for Leavell and his kids, because ‘they were asked, ‘Why doesn’t your dad like pray­ing?’ and ‘Why don’t they like Chris­tians?’’ Peo­ple, Kennedy said, ‘don’t under­stand this was a big polit­i­cal and Con­sti­tu­tion­al thing.’ Kennedy said he and his wife have been ‘spir­i­tu­al­ly home­less’ since 2020.”
      • Fas­ci­nat­ing details in here I’ve not seen any­where else.
      • Note that as a “spir­i­tu­al­ly home­less” non-church atten­der this guy would now qual­i­fy as one of the “nones” in most sur­veys, and he was at the heart of a major reli­gious lib­er­ty case. The “nones” are not always who peo­ple think they are.
  6. No human remains found 2 years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Cana­da (Dana Kennedy, NY Post): “Tom Flana­gan, a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­gary, told The Post Wednes­day that he sees the issue as a ‘moral pan­ic’ sim­i­lar to the hys­te­ria over repressed mem­o­ries and alleged Satan­ic cults in schools in the US in the 1980s and ’90s.”
    • Relat­ed: 2021 Cana­di­an church burn­ings. (Wikipedia): “A series of van­dal­iza­tions, church arsons, and sus­pi­cious fires in June and July 2021 des­e­crat­ed, dam­aged, or destroyed 68 Chris­t­ian church­es in Cana­da. Coin­ci­dent with fires, van­dal­ism and oth­er destruc­tive events dam­aged church­es in Cana­da and the Unit­ed States, pri­mar­i­ly in British Colum­bia. Of these, 25 were the results of fires of all caus­es. Cana­di­an gov­ern­ment offi­cials, church mem­bers, and Cana­di­an Indige­nous lead­ers have spec­u­lat­ed that the fires and oth­er acts of van­dal­ism have been reac­tions to the May 2021 reports of alleged dis­cov­ery of over 1,000 unmarked graves at Cana­di­an Indi­an res­i­den­tial school sites.”
  7. Dri­ver­less cars may already be safer than human dri­vers (Tim­o­thy B. Lee, Sub­stack): “For this sto­ry, I read through every crash report Way­mo and Cruise filed in Cal­i­for­nia this year, as well as reports each com­pa­ny filed about the per­for­mance of their dri­ver­less vehi­cles (with no safe­ty dri­vers) pri­or to 2023. In total, the two com­pa­nies report­ed 102 crash­es involv­ing dri­ver­less vehi­cles. That may sound like a lot, but they hap­pened over rough­ly 6 mil­lion miles of dri­ving. That works out to one crash for every 60,000 miles, which is about five years of dri­ving for a typ­i­cal human motorist. These were over­whelm­ing­ly low-speed col­li­sions that did not pose a seri­ous safe­ty risk. A large major­i­ty appeared to be the fault of the oth­er dri­ver.”

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 415

On Fri­days (or lat­er when I’m busy) 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 415, which is the sum of suc­ces­sive squares (72 + 82 + 92 + 102 + 112).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Sim­ple Law Is Doing the Impos­si­ble. It’s Mak­ing the Online Porn Indus­try Retreat. (Marc Novi­coff, Politi­co): “Though the first of its kind, Louisiana’s age-ver­i­fi­ca­tion bill was not the last. Near­ly iden­ti­cal bills have passed in six oth­er states — Arkansas, Mon­tana, Mis­sis­sip­pi, Utah, Vir­ginia and Texas — by sim­i­lar­ly lop­sided mar­gins. In Utah and Arkansas, the bills passed unan­i­mous­ly. The laws were passed by over­whelm­ing mar­gins in leg­is­la­tures con­trolled by both par­ties and signed into law by Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Repub­li­can gov­er­nors alike. In just over a year, age-ver­i­fi­ca­tion laws have become per­haps the most bipar­ti­san pol­i­cy in the coun­try, and they are cre­at­ing hav­oc in a porn indus­try that many had con­sid­ered all but impos­si­ble to actu­al­ly reg­u­late.”
  2. Mis­read­ing Scrip­ture with Arti­fi­cial Eyes (John Boyles, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “First, Chat­G­PT metaphorizes and indi­vid­u­al­izes Scrip­ture with­out a clear method for when and why, with­out war­rant, and often in direct con­tra­dic­tion to the text itself. Sec­ond, the bot’s inter­pre­ta­tions are igno­rant of the inter­pre­tive tra­di­tions that pro­duce them. Third, because the bot is dis­em­bod­ied, its inter­pre­ta­tions are nec­es­sar­i­ly disembodied—and thus a bot is unable to rec­og­nize the real­i­ties of Scrip­ture and inter­pre­ta­tion. Each of the above ten­den­cies present in AI’s respons­es is in some way a reflec­tion of his­toric weak­ness­es in our own human inter­pre­ta­tion.”
    • Unlocked.
  3. China’s Lat­est Prob­lem: Peo­ple Don’t Want to Go There (Wenx­in Fan, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Nation­wide, just 52,000 peo­ple arrived to main­land Chi­na from over­seas on trips orga­nized by trav­el agen­cies dur­ing the first quar­ter, the lat­est peri­od for which nation­al data is avail­able, com­pared with 3.7 mil­lion in the first quar­ter of 2019. As in past years, near­ly half of the vis­i­tors came from the self-ruled island of Tai­wan and the Chi­nese ter­ri­to­ries of Hong Kong and Macau, rather than far­ther-away places like the U.S. or Europe.”
    • That’s almost a 99% drop in num­bers!
  4. What if We’re the Bad Guys Here? (David Brooks, New York Times): “Does this mean that I think the peo­ple in my class are vicious and evil? No. Most of us are earnest, kind and pub­lic-spir­it­ed. But we take for grant­ed and ben­e­fit from sys­tems that have become oppres­sive. Elite insti­tu­tions have become so polit­i­cal­ly pro­gres­sive in part because the peo­ple in them want to feel good about them­selves as they take part in sys­tems that exclude and reject. It’s easy to under­stand why peo­ple in less-edu­cat­ed class­es would con­clude that they are under eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, cul­tur­al and moral assault — and why they’ve ral­lied around Trump as their best war­rior against the edu­cat­ed class. He under­stood that it’s not the entre­pre­neurs who seem most threat­en­ing to work­ers; it’s the pro­fes­sion­al class.”
    • David Brooks Means Well, But… (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “At a super­fi­cial lev­el this is a qua­si-plau­si­ble analy­sis of what hap­pened in 2016, even if some of his evi­dence does not quite show what he thinks it shows. If this had been pub­lished sev­en years ago, it would have been tren­chant. In 2023, there’s so much to pick apart. The most impor­tant point is that the gen­er­al cor­re­la­tions Brooks takes for grant­ed are not nec­es­sar­i­ly true, as the 2020 elec­tion demon­strat­ed.”
  5. The Dig­i­tal Dictator’s Dilem­ma (Eddie Yang, PDF host­ed on his web­site): “I sug­gest that auto­crats suf­fer from a ‘Dig­i­tal Dictator’s Dilem­ma,’ a repres­sion-infor­ma­tion trade-off in which cit­i­zens’ strate­gic behav­ior in the face of repres­sion dimin­ish­es the amount of use­ful infor­ma­tion in the data for train­ing AI. This trade-off pos­es a fun­da­men­tal lim­i­ta­tion in AI’s use­ful­ness for serv­ing as a tool of author­i­tar­i­an con­trol — the more repres­sion there is, the less infor­ma­tion there will be in AI’s train­ing data, and the worse AI will per­form. I illus­trate this argu­ment using an AI exper­i­ment and a unique dataset on cen­sor­ship in Chi­na. I show that AI’s accu­ra­cy in cen­sor­ship decreas­es with more pre-exist­ing cen­sor­ship and repres­sion. The drop in AI’s per­for­mance is larg­er dur­ing times of cri­sis, when peo­ple reveal their true pref­er­ences. I fur­ther show that this prob­lem can­not be eas­i­ly fixed with more data. Iron­i­cal­ly, how­ev­er, the exis­tence of the free world can help boost AI’s abil­i­ty to cen­sor.”
    • From the abstract. I have skimmed but not read the whole arti­cle. The author is a PhD can­di­date at UC San Diego.
  6. The Oba­ma Fac­tor (David Samuels, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “So the con­clu­sion I’ve come to in time is that that best way to under­stand Barack Oba­ma is that he is a lit­er­ary cre­ation of Barack Oba­ma, the writer, who authored the nov­el of his own life and then pro­ceed­ed to live out this fic­tion­al char­ac­ter that he cre­at­ed for him­self on the page. Which is remark­able.”
    • This is super long but utter­ly fas­ci­nat­ing if you remem­ber Oba­ma’s pres­i­den­cy.
  7. Let the Tragedy in My Home­land Be a Les­son (Tahir Hamut Izgil, The New York Times): “Lit­tle atten­tion was paid as, in the ear­ly 2010s, sur­veil­lance cam­eras were installed in every nook and cran­ny of our cities. When the police began ran­dom cell­phone checks on the street, peo­ple were alarmed at first, but grad­u­al­ly grew used to it. Not long after, when high­way check­points expand­ed and mul­ti­plied, folks pri­vate­ly expressed con­cern but ground their teeth and bore it. When, in 2016,police posts were con­struct­ed every 200 meters along city streets, peo­ple ignored them and hur­ried past. As time passed, we adapt­ed to these changes and to this new, more author­i­tar­i­an way of life.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.