Tag: artificial intelligence

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 362

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.

362 feels like a num­ber that should have lots of fac­tors, but it’s only got the prime fac­tors 2 and 181.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Explor­ing AI-Assist­ed Bible Study (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “I prompt­ed GPT‑3 to gen­er­ate text for each chap­ter in the Bible in each cat­e­go­ry. For exam­ple, the prompt to gen­er­ate a prayer was: “Write 5 prayers inspired by John 3 in the Bible. Remem­ber that the events described here are in the past. First include a short obser­va­tion or les­son for each prayer, and then write a per­son­al prayer relat­ed to the les­son.”  I reviewed the gen­er­at­ed text to avoid (or at least min­i­mize) unhelp­ful or hereti­cal con­tent. I accept­ed about 90% of GPT‑3’s sug­ges­tions on its first pass and regen­er­at­ed the rest until it gave me some­thing use­ful. It cost about $150 over six weeks to gen­er­ate this con­tent, which con­sists of 71,062 gen­er­a­tions and 1.1 mil­lion words.”
    • This is the same guy who gen­er­at­ed the AI Bible art­work I shared recent­ly (these and oth­er exper­i­ments of his are avail­able at http://www.openbible.info/labs/).
  2. What an Over­ly Pes­simistic View of Amer­i­ca Gets Wrong (Yascha Mounk inter­view­ing Eboo Patel, Per­sua­sion): “If every insti­tu­tion found­ed by a faith com­mu­ni­ty in your city dis­ap­peared overnight, preschools, hos­pi­tals, and uni­ver­si­ties would be gone. YMCAs would be gone, places where AA groups meet would be gone. Half of your social ser­vices would prob­a­bly be gone. It feels to me that reli­gious iden­ti­ty diver­si­ty should be at the cen­ter of our nation­al con­ver­sa­tion, and I’m curi­ous as to why it’s not.” This con­ver­sa­tion is full of wis­dom and I high­ly rec­om­mend it.
  3. Peo­ple Are Dat­ing All Wrong, Accord­ing to Data Sci­ence (Seth Stephens-Davi­d­owitz, Wired): “Good roman­tic part­ners are dif­fi­cult to pre­dict with data. Desired roman­tic part­ners are easy to pre­dict with data. And that sug­gests that many of us are dat­ing all wrong.”
    • From lat­er in the arti­cle: “…how a per­son answered ques­tions about them­selves was rough­ly four times more pre­dic­tive of their rela­tion­ship hap­pi­ness than all the traits of their roman­tic part­ner com­bined.”
  4. A Cru­cial Court Case Expos­es the Dark­ness of America’s Worst Indus­try (David French, The Dis­patch): “If some­one want­ed to cre­ate a sys­tem that was designed to facil­i­tate the dis­tri­b­u­tion of child pornog­ra­phy, videos of rape and oth­er kinds of abuse, or revenge porn, it would be hard to con­struct a more effi­cient sys­tem than MindGeek’s. And the sheer amount of MindGeek’s traf­fic and the vol­ume of the down­loads demon­strates that Porn­hub and oth­er sites are inject­ing poi­son into Amer­i­can life at an indus­tri­al scale.”
    • A stu­dent rec­om­mend­ed this piece from a month ago in addi­tion to the above: The Fight to Hold Porn­hub Account­able (Shee­lah Kol­hatkar, The New York­er): “Pschorr was sur­prised by the lack of reg­u­la­tion in the U.S. ‘It was always inter­est­ing for me as a Ger­man to see that, in the U.S., you’d get I.D.’d if you went to a bar, and if you’re not twen­ty-one you get in big trou­ble,’ he said. ‘But if you want to con­sume porn all you have to do is click ‘Yes, I’m 18,’ and you’re in the realm of dirt.’ ” I found this arti­cle inter­est­ing because it por­trays Chris­tians both favor­ably and unfa­vor­ably in short order.
  5. How Did a Two-Time Killer Get Out to Be Charged Again at Age 83? (Rebec­ca Davis O’Brien & Ali Watkins, New York Times): “A home­less shel­ter work­er and peo­ple close to Ms. Ley­den ques­tioned whether, despite her gen­der iden­ti­ty, Ms. Har­vey should have been placed in a home­less shel­ter for women, giv­en her his­to­ry of attack­ing and mur­der­ing them.” Read that sen­tence slow­ly. Wow. And the last eight para­graphs are jaw drop­ping.
  6. A large new study offers clues about how low­er-income chil­dren can rise up the eco­nom­ic lad­der. (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “Church­es and oth­er reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions may have some lessons to teach oth­er parts of soci­ety. Although many church­es are socioe­co­nom­i­cal­ly homo­ge­neous, those with some diver­si­ty tend to fos­ter more cross-class inter­ac­tions than most oth­er social activ­i­ties. Churchs [sic] have low­er lev­els of what the researchers call socioe­co­nom­ic ‘friend­ing bias.’ ”
    • Sad­ly there isn’t more info on the reli­gious dynam­ic, even though this sec­tion of the newslet­ter is called “How Church­es Shine”
    • Although this is a NYT piece, it is not pay­walled because it is from their morn­ing newslet­ter.
  7. Non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al Church­es Are Adding Mil­lions of Mem­bers. Where Are They Com­ing From? (Ryan P. Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “What is dri­ving the growth of non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al church­es? While in the past it result­ed from a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of indi­vid­u­als leav­ing a main­line tra­di­tion, now it looks like non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al con­gre­ga­tions are increas­ing by tak­ing in peo­ple who were raised Catholic—which is about a quar­ter of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Prob­lem Isn’t the ‘Mer­it,’ It’s the ‘Ocra­cy’ (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Amer­i­can sys­tem of gov­ern­ment was built on the assump­tion that the most salient polit­i­cal divides would reflect geog­ra­phy, not ide­ol­o­gy or class. The sen­a­tor from Mass­a­chu­setts would share bonds in com­mon with the lay cit­i­zen­ry of Boston that he did not share with a sen­a­tor from South Car­oli­na. On the nation­al sphere this would allow him to rep­re­sent the inter­ests of his con­stituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in Amer­i­can his­to­ry than oth­ers; yet because of the way Amer­i­can politi­cians are elect­ed, this sense of rep­re­sent­ing the inter­ests of a geo­graph­i­cal­ly bound­ed group of peo­ple is more true in the polit­i­cal are­na than in most oth­ers.” First shared in vol­ume 232

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 361

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 361, which is also the num­ber of inter­sec­tions on a Go board.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Actu­al­ly Good AI-Gen­er­at­ed Bible Art with DALL·E 2 (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “The GPT‑3 prompts I used evolved over time, but this one is emblem­at­ic: Sug­gest 5 unique con­cept ideas for a work of visu­al art inspired by Luke 14:7–11 (do not pick the place of hon­or) in the Bible. Include art direc­tion and a spe­cif­ic medi­um and artist to emu­late. Include artists from a vari­ety of eras, styles, and media. Try for an unusu­al per­spec­tive. Title, year, medi­um. Descrip­tion.”
    • Some of these are stun­ning. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Reli­gion Is Dying? Don’t Believe It (Byron R. John­son & Jeff Levin, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Data from five recent U.S. pop­u­la­tion sur­veys point to the vibran­cy, ubiq­ui­ty and growth of reli­gion in the U.S. Amer­i­cans are becom­ing more reli­gious, and reli­gious insti­tu­tions are thriv­ing. Con­sis­tent with some pre­vi­ous stud­ies but con­trary to wide­ly held assump­tions, many peo­ple who report no reli­gious affiliation—and even many self-iden­ti­fied athe­ists and agnostics—exhibit sub­stan­tial lev­els of reli­gious prac­tice and belief.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors of social sci­ence and epi­demi­ol­o­gy, respec­tive­ly. I one hun­dred per­cent believe this report. The so-called “rise of the nones” is most­ly the result of con­fir­ma­tion bias by sec­u­lar aca­d­e­mics and jour­nal­ists who find reli­gious­ly com­mit­ted peo­ple annoy­ing.
    • This WSJ arti­cle (which I think is pay­walled) is based on the freely avail­able schol­ar­ly arti­cle: Are Reli­gious “Nones” Real­ly Not Reli­gious?: Revis­it­ing Glenn, Three Decades Lat­er (Levin et al, Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Jour­nal of Research on Reli­gion): “The use of words and phras­es such as none, no reli­gion, and not reli­gious to describe this group of unaf­fil­i­at­ed indi­vid­u­als is thus inap­pro­pri­ate, inac­cu­rate, and mis­lead­ing.”
  3. Which Sins Are Feed­ing Your Sin of Lust? (David Powli­son, Cross­way): “Tom con­cen­trat­ed all his atten­tion on one mar­quee sin that sur­faced spo­rad­i­cal­ly, defin­ing and ener­giz­ing all his guilty feel­ings. But that nar­row­ing of atten­tion served to mask far more seri­ous, per­va­sive sins. As a pas­tor, friend, or oth­er coun­selor, you don’t want to con­cen­trate all your ener­gies in the same place Tom did. There were oth­er, deep­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for grace and truth to rewrite the script of this man’s life.”
  4. A Media-Fueled Social Pan­ic Over Unmarked Graves (Jonathan Kay, Quil­lette): “It’s now been 14 months since the orig­i­nal announce­ment was made about pre­sumed graves in Kam­loops, and no phys­i­cal evi­dence has been unearthed. No graves. No corpses. No human remains.… I’ve been in jour­nal­ism for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry, and have wit­nessed plen­ty of bizarre con­tro­ver­sies with­in my trade. But I’ve nev­er wit­nessed any­thing sim­i­lar to this phe­nom­e­non. It’s like one of those case-stud­ies in mass hys­te­ria and pop­u­lar delu­sion that you read about in his­to­ry books.”
    • This is not a claim that bad things did­n’t hap­pen. It’s more of a claim that the spe­cif­ic bad things that are alleged did­n’t hap­pen or that they did­n’t hap­pen on the scale wide­ly report­ed.
  5. Chi­na relat­ed:
  6. NHS will SHUT its con­tro­ver­sial Tavi­s­tock trans­gen­der clin­ic for chil­dren after damn­ing report warned it was ‘not safe’ (John Ely and Lau­rence Dol­limore, The Dai­ly Mail): “It fol­lows an announce­ment last month that every child treat­ed for gen­der dys­pho­ria in the last decade will have their med­ical records scru­ti­nised to see if NHS care is caus­ing them more harm than good.”
  7. Hot Takes Don’t Belong in Church (Chris Nye, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “So long as we are cre­at­ing a palat­able state­ment for social media or Sunday’s ser­mon, we are not pray­ing, wor­ship­ing, or orga­niz­ing our­selves for mean­ing­ful action. But in today’s cul­ture, the appear­ance of moral­i­ty is more impor­tant than moral actions, and speak­ing is more high­ly val­ued than pray­ing.”
    • This is full of good points. Chris is an acquain­tance of mine.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have This Cul­tur­al Moment (pod­cast): I lis­tened to this pod­cast about fol­low­ing Jesus in the post-Chris­t­ian world upon the rec­om­men­da­tion of some alum­ni and a stu­dent. It’s quite good. Def­i­nite­ly start with episode 1. First shared in vol­ume 231.

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 360

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.

360 is, of course, the num­ber of degrees in a cir­cle. It’s also due north on a com­pass.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The God Gap Helps Explain a ‘Seis­mic Shift’ in Amer­i­can Pol­i­tics (David French, Sub­stack): “Count­less polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al issues don’t have a clear ‘Chris­t­ian’ pol­i­cy solu­tion, yet when a party’s mem­bers per­ceive it to be the par­ty of Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty, then the plat­form is wrong­ly infused with reli­gious fer­vor, even on issues (like tax rates, gun pol­i­cy, envi­ron­men­tal pol­i­cy, for­eign pol­i­cy, and count­less oth­ers) where the cor­rect reli­gious answer is far from clear.”
    • The excerpt is not the main point, which is also good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. I’m a Scam Pre­ven­tion Expert, and I Got Scammed (Natasha Lupinia, per­son­al web­site): “This scam went against every­thing I thought I knew about social engi­neer­ing attacks. The caller was pro­fes­sion­al, knowl­edge­able, patient, and easy to under­stand (con­nec­tion issues notwith­stand­ing). He had so much infor­ma­tion about me already that, even know­ing how easy it is to find sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion about peo­ple, I was inclined to take him at face val­ue…”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. A clus­ter of links which touch on com­mon col­lege sce­nar­ios:
    • Bomb­shell alco­hol study fund­ed by Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion finds only risks, zero ben­e­fits for young adults (Chloe Tay­lor, For­tune): “Researchers said that for peo­ple aged between 15 and 39, the rec­om­mend­ed amount of alco­hol that could be con­sumed before risk­ing their health was ‘a lit­tle more than one-tenth of a stan­dard drink.’ They defined a stan­dard drink as 3.4 flu­id ounces of red wine or 12 flu­id ounces of beer.”
    • When We Con­sent, We Shouldn’t Feel Ter­ri­ble After, Right? (Emma Camp, New York Times): “Con­sent edu­ca­tion takes already anx­ious, inex­pe­ri­enced young peo­ple, and gives them a sim­plis­tic, bina­ry way of under­stand­ing sex. It’s no sur­prise then that many of us have absorbed the mes­sage that sex is a straight­for­ward trans­ac­tion with lit­tle room for com­pli­cat­ed feel­ings — and that we’re con­fused when we expe­ri­ence the inevitable com­pli­ca­tions that sex­u­al inti­ma­cy brings.”
      • A cri­tique of uni­ver­si­ty mes­sag­ing around sex. It does­n’t say all I would like, but it accu­rate­ly iden­ti­fies prob­lems with the cur­rent sys­tem.
    • First base is hook­ing up, sec­ond base is talk­ing, third base is going on a date and fourth base is dat­ing (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “In terms of attrac­tive­ness, the bot­tom 80% of men are com­pet­ing for the bot­tom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are com­pet­ing for the top 20% of men.”
      • Fas­ci­nat­ing through­out.
    • Pro­nouns: Progressivism’s Pre­pos­ter­ous Plight (Farhana K, Tra­vers­ing Tra­di­tion): “With­out the abil­i­ty to define a woman as female, for exam­ple, encroach­ment into women’s only spaces will become com­mon­place. There is no way for the state to pro­tect the needs and wants of women, because noth­ing is essen­tial to being a woman and no defin­i­tive fea­ture of women that require such pro­tec­tions, because a woman is any­one who defines them­selves as one. Yet for the Mus­lim woman who abides by the shar’i com­mands to veil from unre­lat­ed men and min­i­mize phys­i­cal con­tact, increas­ing­ly decon­struc­tive atti­tudes to gen­der will pose a clash that few pol­i­cy­mak­ers and mem­bers of the pub­lic have had the strength to accom­mo­date.”
      • Inter­est­ing to see a Mus­lim per­spec­tive.
  4. The Great Fic­tion of AI (Josh Dzieza, The Verge): “…it might not be such a bad thing to have to apply a Tur­ing test to every­thing I read, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the more com­mer­cial­ized mar­ket­ing-dri­ven cor­ners of the inter­net where AI text is most often deployed. The ques­tions it made me ask were the sorts of ques­tions I should be ask­ing any­way: is this sup­port­ed by facts, inter­nal­ly con­sis­tent, and orig­i­nal, or is it coast­ing on pleas­ant-sound­ing lan­guage and rehash­ing con­ven­tion­al wis­dom?; how much human writ­ing meets that stan­dard?; how often am I read­ing with enough atten­tion to notice? If this is the epis­temic cri­sis AI-gen­er­at­ed text is going to bring, maybe it’s a healthy one.”
    • I found this one super inter­est­ing and some­what amaz­ing.
  5. The Hypocrisy of Elites (Erik Toren­berg, Sub­stack): “…we see this every­where: elites pro­mote body pos­i­tiv­i­ty — the idea that being over­weight is healthy — while being most obsessed with main­tain­ing per­fect health. Elites pro­mote sex­u­al inde­pen­dence and polyamory, yet them­selves are most like­ly to be monog­a­mous in sta­ble long-term rela­tion­ships. Elites com­plain about over­pop­u­la­tion and car­bon foot­print, but they’re the ones hav­ing the most kids and inflict­ing the largest car­bon foot­print.”
  6. The Fall of His­to­ry as a Major–and as a Part of the Human­i­ties (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Amer­i­can cul­ture has lost faith in his­to­ry as a vehi­cle for under­stand­ing the human expe­ri­ence. Our high cul­ture ques­tions the very con­cept of shared human expe­ri­ence. It is hard for history—or any of the humanities—to flour­ish in a world that does not put much stock in the human. By adopt­ing inter­sec­tion­al ide­ol­o­gy as their own, the pro­fes­sion­al human­ists have con­firmed that they do not believe in the promise of their own dis­ci­pline. And if they do not believe in it…. why should any 18 year old stu­dent?” This is an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly insight­ful essay.
  7. 33 Prob­lems With Media in One Chart (Nick Rout­ley, Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist): rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. I now know what astro­turf­ing is.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Dis­hon­esty of the Abor­tion Debate (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “The argu­ment for abor­tion, if made hon­est­ly, requires many words: It must evoke the recent past, the dire con­se­quences to women of mak­ing a very sim­ple med­ical pro­ce­dure ille­gal. The argu­ment against it doesn’t take even a sin­gle word. The argu­ment against it is a pic­ture…. The truth is that the best argu­ment on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowl­edge that fact, you aren’t speak­ing or even think­ing hon­est­ly about the issue. You cer­tain­ly aren’t going to con­vince any­body. Only the truth has the pow­er to move.” First shared in vol­ume 227. I know I shared this recent­ly in light of the Dobbs deci­sion, and it is def­i­nite­ly worth shar­ing again.

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 358

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 358, a num­ber whose base 3 rep­re­sen­ta­tion ends in its base 7 rep­re­sen­ta­tion. 3583 is 111021, and 3587 is 1021.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cul­ture War That More Chris­tians Should Be Fight­ing (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “But the peo­ple who debate the moral­i­ty (or lack there­of) of Dis­ney or Hob­by Lob­by rarely dis­cuss how much paid time off these com­pa­nies pro­vide employ­ees or whether they pay a liv­ing wage or what the wealth dis­par­i­ty is between their top and bot­tom earn­ers or whether they have ade­quate mater­ni­ty leave poli­cies or how much a cor­po­ra­tion finan­cial­ly gives back to a com­mu­ni­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. The Sur­pris­ing Case for Mar­ry­ing Young (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Our analy­ses indi­cate that reli­gious men and women who mar­ried in their twen­ties with­out cohab­it­ing first — a pat­tern which describes Joey and Samantha’s path to the altar to a ‘T’ — have the low­est odds of divorce in Amer­i­ca today.”
  3. I should have loved biol­o­gy (James Somers, per­son­al blog): “In the text­books, aston­ish­ing facts were pre­sent­ed with­out aston­ish­ment. Some­one prob­a­bly told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoul­ders, say­ing how crazy that was.”
  4. Con­cern­ing abor­tion and the Supreme Court:
    • Chris­tians Should Rejoice Over Dobbs (Carl True­man, First Things): “Nobody of whom I am aware, for exam­ple, regards the lib­er­a­tion of Auschwitz in 1945 as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing. No child freed that day was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned that his lib­er­a­tors were mem­bers of the Red Army, act­ing on Stalin’s orders. Yet the Red Army was engaged in a mil­i­tary action that, in the long term, would lead to the noto­ri­ous Iron Cur­tain divid­ing Europe. Nobody regards the fall of Hitler as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing, even though it was only made pos­si­ble by the Amer­i­cans and the British strik­ing a deal with Joseph Stal­in. Yes, Trump is obnox­ious, but he isn’t Stal­in, and he did deliv­er on the abor­tion issue. Dobbs is a moment for joy.”
    • Here’s the Sur­pris­ing Back­sto­ry of the Down­fall of Roe v. Wade (Mark Hem­ing­way, Real Clear Inves­ti­ga­tions): “…con­ser­v­a­tive activists have long argued the pro-life move­ment was a moral cause on par with the civ­il rights move­ment – and ignor­ing the strate­gies com­mon­ly used to get the Supreme Court’s atten­tion would amount to uni­lat­er­al dis­ar­ma­ment in a lot of impor­tant legal bat­tles.”
    • SCOTUS Jus­tices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cit­ed Her Boss­es to End Roe (Kara Voght & Tim Dick­in­son, Rolling Stone): “In the shad­ow of the high court, across the street from its cham­bers, sits a clus­ter of unas­sum­ing row hous­es known only to the ini­ti­at­ed as ‘Min­istry Row.’ The strip is host to evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal groups that have spent the past sev­er­al decades push­ing Belt­way con­ser­v­a­tives to embrace the reli­gious right’s polit­i­cal caus­es…”
    • In a Post-Roe World, We Can Avoid Pit­ting Moth­ers Against Babies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, New York Times): “The first per­son to see us was anoth­er ultra­sound tech­ni­cian. Her voice got sharp when I asked if our baby had a heart­beat. ‘It’s not a baby, don’t talk like that,’ she told me, as I lay on the table. Her voice soft­ened a lit­tle, ‘You don’t have to think of it that way.’ For her, part of pro­vid­ing care was deny­ing there was any room for grief. But when the sur­geon came in, he began by express­ing his con­do­lences. He talked about our options, he talked about our baby as a baby.”
    • There’s a fol­low-up at My Ectopic Preg­nan­cies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, Sub­stack): “I want­ed to write about Camil­lian to describe not just what is allowed but what can be offered to par­ents who are los­ing their child when the doc­tors acknowl­edge their child as a child, rather than min­i­miz­ing their loss.” This one is a sad reminder of how cru­el peo­ple can be.
    • Angry about Roe, many jour­nal­ists focus on cri­sis preg­nan­cy cen­ters as vil­lains behind it all (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Like, the CPCs have out­wit­ted the abor­tion clin­ics when it comes to fig­ur­ing out what many preg­nant women real­ly want and it’s clear the abor­tion facil­i­ties have suf­fered finan­cial loss­es as a result. How about ask­ing peo­ple at the lat­ter hard ques­tions about the clients they’ve lost to the CPCs and whose bad mar­ket­ing deci­sion that was? Hint: It might have to do with the free ultra­sounds offered by the CPCs. Offer­ing this ser­vice was a trend that began a decade or more ago and it real­ly cried out for cov­er­age. But, you know. That wasn’t news.”
    • ‘The Pro-Life Gen­er­a­tion’: Young Women Fight Against Abor­tion Rights (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Young women whose activism is not con­nect­ed to reli­gious belief are rel­a­tive new­com­ers to the move­ment, where they make up a small but bois­ter­ous niche. Kristin Turn­er start­ed a chap­ter of a youth cli­mate group in her home­town, Red­ding, Calif. Her Insta­gram bio includes her pro­nouns (she/they) and sup­port for Black Lives Mat­ter. She describes her­self as a fem­i­nist, an athe­ist and a left­ist. At 20, she is also the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for Pro­gres­sive Anti-Abor­tion Upris­ing, whose goals include edu­cat­ing the pub­lic about ‘the exploita­tive influ­ence of the Abor­tion Indus­tri­al Com­plex through an anti-cap­i­tal­ist lens.’”
  5. See­ing Like a Finite State Machine (Hen­ry Far­rell, Crooked Tim­ber): “In short, there is a very plau­si­ble set of mech­a­nisms under which machine learn­ing and relat­ed tech­niques may turn out to be a dis­as­ter for author­i­tar­i­an­ism, rein­forc­ing its weak­ness­es rather than its strengths, by increas­ing its ten­den­cy to bad deci­sion mak­ing, and reduc­ing fur­ther the pos­si­bil­i­ty of neg­a­tive feed­back that could help cor­rect against errors.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins and I hope he is cor­rect.
  6. Why I’m Giv­ing Up Tenure at UCLA (Joseph Man­son, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Grad­u­al­ly, one hire at a time, prac­ti­tion­ers of ‘crit­i­cal’ (i.e. left­ist, post­mod­ernist) anthro­pol­o­gy, some of them lying about their beliefs dur­ing job inter­views, came to com­prise the department’s most influ­en­tial clique. These mil­i­tant fac­ul­ty mem­bers recruit­ed even more mil­i­tant grad­u­ate stu­dents to work with them.”
  7. Trans­gen­der-relat­ed:
    • Trans­for­ma­tion of a Trans­gen­der Teen (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “Mar­tin Luther King Jr. talks about the long arc of jus­tice,” said Falls Church Angli­can rec­tor Sam Fer­gu­son, who has spent time with mul­ti­ple tran­si­tion­ing young adults and their fam­i­lies. “The Bible also envi­sions the long arc of redemp­tion, which aims at the res­ur­rec­tion of the body. There is continuity—the end reflects the begin­ning. Our Cre­ator doesn’t need to start over. If your child has an XY chro­mo­some, then he’ll be raised from the dead as a male. We need to work along the arc of redemp­tion, not against it.”
    • Pro­nouns and Cas­es Involv­ing Trans­gen­der Par­ties (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “For a bit of the fac­tu­al back­sto­ry, which may be rel­e­vant because it may illus­trate how use of pro­nouns might col­or read­ers’ per­spec­tive: Peti­tion­er C.G. was found to have sex­u­al­ly assault­ed a 14-year-old boy (whom the opin­ion calls Alan, a pseu­do­nym) who had been ‘diag­nosed with autism’ and who was appar­ent­ly work­ing in school at three grades below his age lev­el. At the time, C.G., who was 15 and who would a year lat­er be 300–345 pounds and 6’4” or 6′5″, was appar­ent­ly per­ceived by peo­ple, or at least by Alan, as male.” For a lit­tle more on the case: No First Amend­ment Right to Legal Name Change (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Uh oh! (The Far Side)
  • Study Finds 92% Of Cal­i­for­ni­ans Who Flee The State Don’t Sur­vive First Win­ter (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Clas­sic (The Far Side)
  • Magi­cian Dan White Proves Fate Real­ly Exists (The Tonight Show, YouTube): ten and a half min­utes.
  • Fright­en­ing But 100% True Facts About Guns (Baby­lon Bee, YouTube): four min­utes. The first part is the fun­ni­est, it drags a lit­tle at the end.
  • Tru­ly Hum­bled to Be the Author of This Arti­cle (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and espe­cial­ly if you’re around the high-sta­tus world of the achieva­trons, you are prob­a­bly famil­iar with the basic rules of the form. The first rule is that you must nev­er tweet about any event that could actu­al­ly lead to humil­i­ty. Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I went to a par­ty, and nobody noticed me.’ Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I got fired for incom­pe­tence.’ The whole point of humil­i­ty dis­play is to sig­nal that you are hum­bled by your own mag­nif­i­cent accom­plish­ments. We can all be hum­bled by an awe­some moun­tain or the infini­tude of the night sky, but to be hum­bled by being in the pres­ence of yourself—that is a sign of tru­ly great humil­i­ty.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How I Got Rich On The Oth­er Hand (Derek Sivers, per­son­al blog): “It’s not how much you have. It’s the dif­fer­ence between what you have and what you spend. If you have more than you spend, you’re rich. If you spend more than you have, you’re not. If you live cheap­ly, it’s easy to be free.” This is real­ly sim­ple and real­ly true. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal. First shared in vol­ume 226.

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 357

lots of arti­cles from a busy week — skim the titles and you’ll find at least one that intrigues you

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.

357 is an idoneal num­ber, only 65 of which are known to exist (and there are at most 2 more). A num­ber is idoneal if there is no way to write it as ab+bc+ac where a, b and c are all dif­fer­ent pos­i­tive num­bers. I did­n’t know idoneal num­bers exist­ed until today. Here’s a paper about them.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI Relat­ed Arti­cles (Inter­est­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing)
    • GPT‑3 is ‑right now- already more than capa­ble of enabling stu­dent pla­gia­rism (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “I can­not empha­size enough that this is not ‘some­time vague­ly in the next five years’, nor is it ‘acces­si­ble only to stu­dents with a back­ground in comp sci’. It’s a 6 cents per thou­sand words pla­gia­rism ser­vice avail­able to every­one right now.… One idea- play around with your own ques­tions before assign­ing them to stu­dents and make sure GPT‑3 has trou­ble answer­ing them.” This is actu­al­ly quite stun­ning.
    • AI Wrote and Per­formed a Jer­ry Sein­feld Rou­tine (YouTube): one minute. GPT‑3 wrote a Jer­ry Sein­feld joke and this YouTube chan­nel did a deep­fake of his voice deliv­er­ing it. Not per­fect… but sur­pris­ing­ly good.
    • Google Engi­neer on His Sen­tient AI Claim (Bloomberg Tech­nol­o­gy, YouTube): ten min­utes. This is, to be clear, a dif­fer­ent AI sys­tem than GPT‑3.
    • ‘An Invis­i­ble Cage’: How Chi­na Is Polic­ing the Future (Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao & John Liu, New York Times): “The lat­est gen­er­a­tion of tech­nol­o­gy digs through the vast amounts of data col­lect­ed on their dai­ly activ­i­ties to find pat­terns and aber­ra­tions, promis­ing to pre­dict crimes or protests before they hap­pen. They tar­get poten­tial trou­ble­mak­ers in the eyes of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment — not only those with a crim­i­nal past but also vul­ner­a­ble groups, includ­ing eth­nic minori­ties, migrant work­ers and those with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness. They can warn the police if a vic­tim of a fraud tries to trav­el to Bei­jing to peti­tion the gov­ern­ment for pay­ment or a drug user makes too many calls to the same num­ber. They can sig­nal offi­cers each time a per­son with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness gets near a school.” Empha­sis added.
  2. Weed users near­ly 25% more like­ly to need emer­gency care and hos­pi­tal­iza­tion (Sandee LaM­otte, CNN): “When com­pared with peo­ple who did not use mar­i­jua­na, cannabis users were 22% more like­ly to vis­it an emer­gency depart­ment or be hos­pi­tal­ized, the study revealed. The find­ing held true even after adjust­ing the analy­sis for over 30 oth­er con­found­ing fac­tors, includ­ing oth­er illic­it drug use, alco­hol use and tobac­co smok­ing.”
  3. Some Supreme Court arti­cles:
    • Dobbs Is Not the Only Rea­son to Ques­tion the Legit­i­ma­cy of the Supreme Court (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Our polit­i­cal sys­tem is not designed for polit­i­cal par­ties this dif­fer­ent, and this antag­o­nis­tic. It wasn’t designed for polit­i­cal par­ties at all. The three branch­es of our sys­tem were intend­ed to check each oth­er through com­pe­ti­tion. Instead, par­ties com­pete and coop­er­ate across branch­es, and pow­er in one can be used to build pow­er in anoth­er — as McConnell well under­stood.”
    • The End of Roe Is Just the Begin­ning (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…any con­fi­dent pre­dic­tion about this ruling’s con­se­quences is prob­a­bly a fool­ish one. There can be no cer­tain­ty about the future of abor­tion pol­i­tics because for almost 50 years all pol­i­cy debates have been over­shad­owed by judi­cial con­tro­ver­sy, and only now are we about to find out what the con­test real­ly looks like. It’s mere­ly the end of the begin­ning; the true end, in what­ev­er set­tle­ment or vic­to­ry, lies ahead.”
    • After Dobbs, mar­ried women keep­ing their sur­names regains polit­i­cal mean­ing (Kim­ber­ly A. Ham­lin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Today, sur­veys esti­mate that between 10 per­cent and 20 per­cent of Amer­i­can women keep their maid­en names, though the per­cent­age is high­er for women with advanced degrees and those who mar­ry lat­er in life. Debates about sur­names are, in essence, debates about women’s auton­o­my. Do we regard women as indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens or, pri­mar­i­ly, as wives and moth­ers?” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Mia­mi Uni­ver­si­ty (in Ohio).
    • Vouch­ers for Reli­gious Schools Don’t Threat­en the Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State (Chris Freiman, Sub­stack): “Crit­ics of vouch­ers fail to dis­tin­guish between a direct sub­sidy for reli­gion and a tax-fund­ed enti­tle­ment dis­trib­uted to cit­i­zens who may use that enti­tle­ment for reli­gious pur­pos­es.… Cit­i­zens should be free to use school vouch­ers for pri­vate reli­gious edu­ca­tion because every­one should be free to use their state-sup­plied resources to pur­sue their own good in their own way, whether their good is reli­gious or not.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at William & Mary. This is pithy and well argued.
    • The Supreme Court hands the reli­gious right a big vic­to­ry by lying about the facts of a case (Ian Mill­his­er, Vox): “Kennedy will no doubt inspire oth­er teach­ers and coach­es to behave sim­i­lar­ly to Coach Kennedy, but those teach­ers and coach­es will do so at their own per­il. Gorsuch’s opin­ion doesn’t weigh whether a coach is allowed to do what Kennedy actu­al­ly did. That remains an open ques­tion, because the Court did not actu­al­ly decide that case.” A while ago I men­tioned that Mill­his­er often has a hard time under­stand­ing those he dis­agrees with or por­tray­ing them sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly. I give you exhib­it A.
    • Court’s Excel­lent Rul­ing in Coach Kennedy Case (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “The school dis­trict dis­ci­plined him only for his deci­sion to per­sist in pray­ing qui­et­ly with­out his play­ers after three games in 2015. It sought to restrict his actions at least in part because of their reli­gious char­ac­ter. Its poli­cies were not neu­tral toward reli­gion. Nor were they gen­er­al­ly applic­a­ble: In response to Kennedy’s reli­gious exer­cise, the dis­trict imposed on him a post-game oblig­a­tion to super­vise stu­dents that it did not impose on oth­er mem­bers of the coach­ing staff.” You would not know any of these facts had you only read Mill­his­er’s arti­cle.
    • Jus­tice Thomas and Lov­ing v. Vir­ginia (Josh Black­man, Rea­son): “…Lov­ing was premised on both the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause and the Due Process Clause. Even if you reject sub­stan­tive due process, you could still find that Lov­ing reached the cor­rect result on the basis of the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause. After all, the law lit­er­al­ly treats peo­ple dif­fer­ent­ly on the basis of their race. Two white peo­ple can get mar­ried, but a white per­son and a black per­son can­not. Even the most con­ser­v­a­tive jurists would deem such a law uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.”
    • Politi­co, Axios, and NBC News ped­dle a weird smear of Clarence Thomas (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “Thomas didn’t claim that the cells of abort­ed chil­dren are in the vac­cines, but NBC News, Politi­co, and Axios all wrote as if he did. They were dead wrong on an eas­i­ly check­able fact. How did this hap­pen? How did three out­lets all ‘fact check’ a claim Thomas nev­er made, imply­ing or stat­ing that he did make it?”
  4. The Cathe­dral Vs. Yeshi­va (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “How will­ful­ly blind do you have to be to say that Yeshi­va is not a reli­gious insti­tu­tion? Some­thing tells me that the judge had her mind made up before the first argu­ments were heard. Anoth­er thing that ticks me off is that LGBT rights are wide­ly accept­ed and cel­e­brat­ed in near­ly every col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty in this land. Yeshi­va is one of a rel­a­tive hand­ful of insti­tu­tions of high­er edu­ca­tion where peo­ple who choose to attend do not have to vio­late their reli­gious con­sciences by burn­ing a pinch of incense to the LGBT Cae­sar. But the Grand Inquisi­tors of the new reli­gion will not tol­er­ate any dis­sent. Their god is a jeal­ous god.” The updates at the end are worth read­ing.
  5. A Can­did Con­ver­sa­tion with Reporter Jeanne Lenz­er on Uncov­er­ing Cor­po­rate Influ­ence in Med­i­cine and the Media for Over Two Decades (Paul Thack­er, Sub­stack): “I called the Amer­i­can Heart Asso­ci­a­tion and found out that they were tak­ing Genen­tech mon­ey, and when I asked them about any finan­cial con­flicts among their pan­elists, they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. When we put peo­ple on a pan­el, we insist on finan­cial dis­clo­sure.’ I said, ‘Fine, would you send me those dis­clo­sures?’ They said, ‘We don’t dis­close dis­clo­sures.’ ”
    • Inter­est­ing through­out. From Aug 2021. Also, that excerpt is fun­ny.
  6. Ire­land’s COVID Response, Part 4: The Def­i­n­i­tion of Insan­i­ty… (Sam Enwright, Sub­stack): “The vac­cines proved that our civil­i­sa­tion is still capa­ble of great­ness on the scale of the Apol­lo pro­gram. Yet, can the aver­age per­son on the street even name a sin­gle indi­vid­ual that designed and built them? This New York Times arti­cle about Katal­in Karikó, pio­neer of mRNA tech­nol­o­gy, is unbe­liev­ably depress­ing. She spent decades on the fringes of acad­e­mia strug­gling to get research fund­ing or recog­ni­tion. After Salk devel­oped the polio vac­cine, peo­ple par­tied in the streets. Today, we get end­less screeds about how ‘tech can’t save us’ and Big Phar­ma is ‘prof­it­ing from pain’. I’m not say­ing there is no mer­it to these com­plaints. But a word of advice: before you crit­i­cise, go to where peo­ple are doing tru­ly extra­or­di­nary things, and observe. Lis­ten, for ye have much to learn.”
    • This is much bet­ter than the title might lead you to assume.
  7. Acad­e­mia
    • Account­ing For Col­lege Costs (John Went­worth, Less Wrong): “In this post, we’ll dig into the account­ing data for col­lege costs, espe­cial­ly for 4‑year pri­vate non­prof­it col­leges. The main the­o­ry we’ll end up at, based on the account­ing data, is that col­lege costs are dri­ven main­ly by a large increase in diver­si­ty of cours­es avail­able, which results in much low­er student/faculty ratios, and cor­re­spond­ing­ly high­er costs per stu­dent.”
    • It’s Time to Review the Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (Willy Chert­man, CSPI): “Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (IRBs) are ethics com­mit­tees, ide­al­ly com­posed of sci­en­tif­ic peers and lay com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, that review research before it can be con­duct­ed. Their osten­si­ble pur­pose is to pro­tect research sub­jects from research harms. But often­times, IRBs are cost­ly, slow, and do more harm than good. They cen­sor con­tro­ver­sial research, invent harms where none exist, and by des­ig­nat­ing cer­tain cat­e­gories of sub­jects as ‘vul­ner­a­ble,’ cause a cor­re­spond­ing dimin­ish­ment in research on those sub­jects.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week hear­kens back to the 90’s, when polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote two arti­cles back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism. I encour­age you to read them both — espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. (first shared in a non-Fri­day blog post)

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 355

Two pieces crit­i­cal of Stan­ford plus lots more.

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 355, which is 5 times 71. It’s also appar­ent­ly the num­ber of labeled topolo­gies with 4 ele­ments, but I think know­ing that it is 5 · 71 is cool­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Two fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles about Stan­ford:
    • Stanford’s War on Social Life (Ginevra Davis, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “The Uni­ver­si­ty sent a clear mes­sage with its treat­ment of the Band. Spon­ta­neous orga­ni­za­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they could become chaot­ic, con­tro­ver­sial, or oth­er­wise a space for break­ing rules, were now some­thing to be con­trolled. Rather than treat­ing free­dom and spon­tane­ity as strengths, the dynam­ic became one where stu­dents had to jus­ti­fy their projects and ideas while under sus­pi­cion from admin­is­tra­tors. Stu­dent life was becom­ing dom­i­nat­ed by restric­tive bureau­cra­cy.” I believe this is sub­stan­tial­ly cor­rect.
    • How I Almost Did­n’t Grad­u­ate From Stan­ford (Maxwell Mey­er, Sub­stack): “Appar­ent­ly, in order to grad­u­ate from Stan­ford while not offi­cial­ly enrolled, I need­ed to be placed in a spe­cial 0‑unit ‘course’ that exists only on paper. And because Stan­ford requires boost­er vac­cines in order to enroll in cours­es, the degree progress office was lit­er­al­ly unable to place me in the fake course.”
  2. The Google engi­neer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As he talked to LaM­DA about reli­gion, Lemoine, who stud­ied cog­ni­tive and com­put­er sci­ence in col­lege, noticed the chat­bot talk­ing about its rights and per­son­hood, and decid­ed to press fur­ther. In anoth­er exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robot­ics.” Spec­u­la­tive and dis­put­ed.
  3. This traf­fic stop between a Black man and a White state troop­er began with fear. It end­ed with a sur­pris­ing act of kind­ness (John Blake, CNN): “Doty closed his tick­et book and opened his car door. He walked back over to Wilk­er­son­’s car and turned to Ged­dis. ‘Sir, do you mind if I ask what kind of can­cer you have?’ ‘No, I don’t mind. I have colon can­cer.’ Doty took a deep breath and looked at Ged­dis. ‘Can I pray for you?’ Doty said.” Heart­warm­ing.
  4. In the world of med­i­cine:
    • A turn­ing point in can­cer (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “The con­ver­gence of genomics of the cancer—be it from the person’s DNA or tumor direct­ly or the blood (known as liq­uid biopsy)—matched with the appro­pri­ate ther­a­py is lead­ing to out­comes that are being described as ‘unheard-of’ by expert oncol­o­gists.”
    • The Bat­tle Over Gen­der Ther­a­py (Emi­ly Bazelon, New York Times): “ ‘Being trans comes with goals — this is what to do,’ Butzen says. ‘It comes with a sup­port net­work and a cause to fight for.’ Online, where the stakes start rel­a­tive­ly low, teenagers in pro­gres­sive com­mu­ni­ties can trade in a cis­gen­der, het­ero­sex­u­al, white iden­ti­ty — the epit­o­me of priv­i­lege and oppres­sion — to join a com­mu­ni­ty with a clear claim to being mar­gin­al­ized and deserv­ing of pro­tec­tion.”
      • It is sig­nif­i­cant that this report­ing is in New York Times. This is a long arti­cle and it was dif­fi­cult to find a pas­sage to excerpt. I am con­fi­dent the jour­nal­ist would not con­sid­er this a rep­re­sen­ta­tive excerpt nor the one she con­sid­ers most impor­tant.
  5. Pro­fes­sors Need the Pow­er to Fire Diver­si­ty Bureau­crats (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “At present, sanc­tions in high­er edu­ca­tion flow in one direc­tion: Diver­si­ty bureau­crats exert con­trol over fac­ul­ty mem­bers whose speech alleged­ly under­mines inclu­sion. I pro­pose giv­ing fac­ul­ty the pow­er to inves­ti­gate, sanc­tion, and fire diver­si­ty offi­cials if they under­mine free speech. Admin­is­tra­tive abus­es will con­tin­ue as long as bureau­crats can pun­ish speech, even in fla­grant vio­la­tion of uni­ver­si­ty pol­i­cy, with­out any con­se­quences.” I like this. I don’t think it’s struc­tural­ly pos­si­ble at most uni­ver­si­ties, but I like this.
  6. Inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive:
    • Five Blunt Truths About the War in Ukraine (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The Rus­sians are run­ning out of pre­ci­sion-guid­ed weapons. The Ukraini­ans are run­ning out of Sovi­et-era muni­tions. The world is run­ning out of patience for the war. The Biden admin­is­tra­tion is run­ning out of ideas for how to wage it. And the Chi­nese are watch­ing.… an army that can­not wage a high-tech war, rel­a­tive­ly low on col­lat­er­al dam­age, will wage a low-tech war, appalling­ly high on such dam­age. Ukraine, by its own esti­mates, is suf­fer­ing 20,000 casu­al­ties a month. By con­trast, the U.S. suf­fered about 36,000 casu­al­ties in Iraq over sev­en years of war. For all its brav­ery and resolve, Kyiv can hold off — but not defeat — a neigh­bor more than three times its size in a war of attri­tion.”
    • China’s mil­i­tary expan­sion is reach­ing a dan­ger­ous tip­ping point (Josh Rogin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Chi­na is build­ing the capa­bil­i­ty to use nuclear black­mail to deter a U.S. inter­ven­tion if it invades Tai­wan, fol­low­ing Russia’s mod­el. China’s region­al mil­i­tary pres­ence is expand­ing, includ­ing a secret naval base in Cam­bo­dia and a secret mil­i­tary coop­er­a­tion agree­ment with the Solomon Islands. Chi­na has devel­oped new tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing hyper­son­ic mis­siles and anti­satel­lite lasers, to keep the U.S. mil­i­tary at bay in a Tai­wan sce­nario. And now, Chi­na no longer rec­og­nizes the Tai­wan Strait as inter­na­tion­al waters.”
  7. Ele­phant in the Zoom (Ryan Grim, The Inter­cept): “…Planned Par­ent­hood, NARAL Pro-Choice Amer­i­ca, and oth­er repro­duc­tive health orga­ni­za­tions had sim­i­lar­ly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between com­pet­ing fac­tions of their orga­ni­za­tions, most often break­ing down along staff-ver­sus-man­age­ment lines. It’s also true of the pro­gres­sive advo­ca­cy space across the board, which has, more or less, effec­tive­ly ceased to func­tion. The Sier­ra Club, Demos, the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union, Col­or of Change, the Move­ment for Black Lives, Human Rights Cam­paign, Time’s Up, the Sun­rise Move­ment, and many oth­er orga­ni­za­tions have seen wrench­ing and debil­i­tat­ing tur­moil in the past cou­ple years.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Impor­tance of Stu­pid­i­ty in Sci­en­tif­ic Research (Mar­tin A. Schwartz, Jour­nal of Cell Sci­ence): “At some point, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to why she had left grad­u­ate school. To my utter aston­ish­ment, she said it was because it made her feel stu­pid. After a cou­ple of years of feel­ing stu­pid every day, she was ready to do some­thing else. I had thought of her as one of the bright­est peo­ple I knew and her sub­se­quent career sup­ports that view. What she said both­ered me. I kept think­ing about it; some­time the next day, it hit me. Sci­ence makes me feel stu­pid too. It’s just that I’ve got­ten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I active­ly seek out new oppor­tu­ni­ties to feel stu­pid.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Yale. First shared in vol­ume 221.

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 351

this week’s news was full of stuff I did not like

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

This is the 351st install­ment. 351 is, I am told, the small­est num­ber such that it and its sur­round­ing num­bers are all prod­ucts of 4 or more primes (in the case of 351=3·3·3·13).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. My Col­lege Stu­dents Are Not OK  (Jonathan Malesic, New York Times): “High­er edu­ca­tion is now at a turn­ing point. The accom­mo­da­tions for the pan­dem­ic can either end or be made per­ma­nent. The task won’t be easy, but uni­ver­si­ties need to help stu­dents rebuild their abil­i­ty to learn. And to do that, every­one involved — stu­dents, fac­ul­ties, admin­is­tra­tors and the pub­lic at large — must insist on in-per­son class­es and high expec­ta­tions for fall 2022 and beyond.” The author has a PhD in reli­gious stud­ies and was a tenured the­ol­o­gy prof, but now teach­es writ­ing at anoth­er uni­ver­si­ty. His per­son­al jour­ney seems inter­est­ing.
  2. MIT, Har­vard sci­en­tists find AI can rec­og­nize race from X‑rays — and nobody knows how (Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe): “Ghas­se­mi and her col­leagues remain baf­fled, but she sus­pects it has some­thing to do with melanin, the pig­ment that deter­mines skin col­or. Per­haps X‑rays and CT scan­ners detect the high­er melanin con­tent of dark­er skin, and embed this infor­ma­tion in the dig­i­tal image in some fash­ion that human users have nev­er noticed before. It’ll take a lot more research to be sure.”
  3. Pan­dem­ic news, not great this week:
    • The Covid Capit­u­la­tion (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “To recap, we have a high­ly unfa­vor­able pic­ture of: (1) accel­er­at­ed evo­lu­tion of the virus; (2) increased immune escape of new vari­ants; (2) pro­gres­sive­ly high­er trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty and infec­tious­ness; (4) sub­stan­tial­ly less pro­tec­tion from trans­mis­sion by vac­cines and boost­ers; (5) some reduc­tion on vaccine/booster pro­tec­tion against hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and death; (6) high vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty from infec­tion-acquired immu­ni­ty only; and (7) like­li­hood of more nox­ious new vari­ants in the months ahead” The author is a pro­fes­sor of mol­e­c­u­lar med­i­cine at the Scripps Insti­tute.
    • Per­ma­nent Pan­dem­ic (Justin E. H. Smith, Harper’s Mag­a­zine): “That the polit­i­cal is always biopo­lit­i­cal, in at least this gen­er­al sense, may be a fact that recedes from view in those rare moments when things are func­tion­ing smooth­ly. At such times, the var­i­ous doc­u­ments that gov­ern­ments make us fill out and sign, or fill out on our behalf when we are born, mar­ried, arrest­ed, or dead; the var­i­ous licens­es we get renewed; and the accred­i­ta­tions we col­lect come to appear as ends in them­selves rather than as part of a vast appa­ra­tus that lim­its what we can do with our own bod­ies.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris.
    • The new Covid equi­lib­ri­um (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I know many of you like to say ‘No worse than the com­mon cold!’ Well, the thing is…the com­mon cold impos­es con­sid­er­able costs on the world. Imag­ine a new com­mon cold, which you catch a few times a year, with some sliv­er of the pop­u­la­tion get­ting some form of Long Covid. One 2003 esti­mate sug­gest­ed that the com­mon cold costs us $40 bil­lion a year, and in a typ­i­cal year I don’t get a cold even once.… Even under mild con­cep­tions of cur­rent Covid, it is entire­ly plau­si­ble to believe that the costs of Covid will run into the tril­lions over the next ten years.”
    • With Plung­ing Enroll­ment, a ‘Seis­mic Hit’ to Pub­lic Schools (Shawn Hubler, New York Times): “No over­rid­ing expla­na­tion has emerged yet for the wide­spread drop-off. But experts point to two poten­tial caus­es: Some par­ents became so fed up with remote instruc­tion or mask man­dates that they start­ed home-school­ing their chil­dren or send­ing them to pri­vate or parochial schools that large­ly remained open dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. And oth­er fam­i­lies were thrown into such tur­moil by pan­dem­ic-relat­ed job loss­es, home­less­ness and school clo­sures that their chil­dren sim­ply dropped out.”
  4. Abor­tion-relat­ed:
    • Roe draft is a reminder that reli­gion’s role in pol­i­tics is old­er than the repub­lic (Ron Elv­ing, NPR): “The ques­tion aris­es: Since when did so much of our pol­i­tics have to do with reli­gion? And the answer is, since the begin­ning – and even before. Reli­gion was a dri­ving and deter­mi­na­tive force in pol­i­tics on this con­ti­nent even before the ‘Unit­ed States’ had been formed.And it has been brought to bear in wide­ly dis­parate caus­es. Reli­gion has been invoked to con­demn slav­ery and seg­re­ga­tion, to ban alco­hol and the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion­ary sci­ence and to bol­ster anti-war move­ments.”
    • When an Abor­tion Is Pro-Life (Matthew Lof­tus, New York Times): “I view my work as a physi­cian as part of a bat­tle against bro­ken­ness in the phys­i­cal health of my patients, a bat­tle whose tide was turned when Jesus Christ rose from the dead. The Bible teach­es that our phys­i­cal bod­ies will one day be res­ur­rect­ed as Christ’s was, mys­te­ri­ous­ly trans­formed but some­how also con­tin­u­ous with our present flesh and blood — like a seed is trans­formed into a plant. I teach and work along­side local health pro­fes­sion­als so that we can care holis­ti­cal­ly for peo­ple in need, fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of Jesus, the heal­er.… Here, I think the excep­tion proves the rule: End­ing a child’s life before birth is so wrong that only sav­ing anoth­er life could be worth it.” This is a remark­able op-ed.
    • A cri­tique of the reli­gious pro-life move­ment: The Reli­gious Right and the Abor­tion Myth (Ran­dall Balmer, Politi­co): “White evan­gel­i­cals in the 1970s did not mobi­lize against Roe v. Wade, which they con­sid­ered a Catholic issue. They orga­nized instead to defend racial seg­re­ga­tion in evan­gel­i­cal insti­tu­tions, includ­ing Bob Jones Uni­ver­si­ty. To sug­gest oth­er­wise is to per­pe­trate what I call the abor­tion myth, the fic­tion that the gen­e­sis of the Reli­gious Right — the pow­er­ful evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal move­ment that has reshaped Amer­i­can pol­i­tics over the past four decades — lay in oppo­si­tion to abor­tion.”
    • But actu­al­ly no: What every­one gets wrong about evan­gel­i­cals and abor­tion (Gillian Frank & Neil J. Young, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Twelve years before the Roe deci­sion, a young woman wrote to the lead­ing U.S. evan­ge­list, the Rev. Bil­ly Gra­ham, with the fol­low­ing ques­tion: ‘Through a young and fool­ish sin, I had an abor­tion. I now feel guilty of mur­der. How can I ever know for­give­ness?’ Gra­ham, whose syn­di­cat­ed news­pa­per col­umn ‘My Answer’ reached mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, replied: ‘Abor­tion is as vio­lent a sin against God, nature, and one’s self as one can com­mit.’ Gra­ham telegraphed evan­gel­i­cals’ unease with abor­tion, which would become increas­ing­ly polit­i­cal in the com­ing years.”
    • Real­ly actu­al­ly no: There’s been some dis­cus­sion about how evan­gel­i­cals in the U.S. didn’t start oppos­ing abor­tion until the late 1970s – sev­er­al years after Roe v. Wade in 1973. There’s a lot more nuance to that his­to­ry. (Andrew Lewis, Twit­ter): an inter­est­ing thread from a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati.
    • As in strong­ly no: Ballmer also mis­rep­re­sent­ed the legal aspects of this sto­ry (Jon White­head, Twit­ter)
  5. How Mary White­house Waged War on Pornog­ra­phy (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “White­house was mocked for pre­dict­ing that sex­u­al mes­sag­ing would soon tar­get chil­dren; it is now the norm for LGBT con­tent to appear on children’s TV shows and in sto­ry­books. She warned that films such as Bernar­do Bertolucci’s Last Tan­go in Paris crossed a line; it was lat­er revealed that the rape scene in the movie deeply trau­ma­tized the scene’s young actress, who received vile treat­ment at the hands of old­er men. On the big cul­tur­al ques­tions, White­house was right and her crit­ics were wrong.”
  6. Nao­mi Judd: ‘It’s scary to show that part of you that is the not so smart, not so togeth­er side’ (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Nao­mi Judd thought she under­stood the ties that bind coun­try-music stars and their audi­ence – then one aggres­sive fan went and joined the Pen­te­costal church the Judd fam­i­ly called home. ‘It real­ly bur­dened me,’ said Judd, after sign­ing hun­dreds of her ‘Love Can Build a Bridge’ mem­oir back in 1993. ‘I just don’t sign auto­graphs at church. The best way I can explain it to chil­dren … is to say, ‘Hon­ey, Jesus is the star.’ ” What a great open­ing sto­ry.
  7. On the shoot­ings:
    • Faith on the ground in Buf­fa­lo: Voice Buf­fa­lo exec­u­tive direc­tor Denise Walden (Adelle M. Banks, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “They are some of the matri­archs and the pil­lars of our com­mu­ni­ty. They will be missed in ways that I don’t think I can do jus­tice to describ­ing, but who bring joy to this com­mu­ni­ty. They’re the ones who help stand and hold this com­mu­ni­ty togeth­er.”
    • The FAQs: What Chris­tians Should Know About the ‘Great Replace­ment’ The­o­ry (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “The recent shoot­ing in Buf­fa­lo is the fifth ter­ror­ist attack in the past five years in which a white suprema­cist gun­man made ref­er­ence to the Great Replace­ment con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry.… Chris­tians should be the first to decry the racism and xeno­pho­bia of the the­o­ry, along with con­demn­ing the vio­lence it has per­pet­u­at­ed.”
    • Doc­tor Who Fought Church Gun­man Remem­bered as Kind Pro­tec­tor (Julie Wat­son, Min­istry Watch): “The fam­i­ly and sports med­i­cine physi­cian was like fam­i­ly to the staff and he encour­aged them to learn kung fu, telling them about the impor­tance of know­ing self-defense tech­niques. He also learned how to han­dle a gun for that same rea­son. That pre­pared­ness com­bined with Cheng’s serene dis­po­si­tion like­ly gave him a pro­cliv­i­ty for act­ing hero­ical­ly, accord­ing to active shoot­er experts.… Author­i­ties cred­it Cheng’s quick action with sav­ing per­haps dozens of lives at a cel­e­bra­to­ry lun­cheon for con­gre­gants and their for­mer pas­tor at Irvine Tai­wanese Pres­by­ter­ian Church, which wor­ships at Gene­va Pres­by­ter­ian Church in the Orange Coun­ty com­mu­ni­ty of Lagu­na Woods.”
    • After Shoot­ing, Church­es Nav­i­gate Chi­na-Tai­wan Ten­sions Under the Sur­face (Kate Shell­nutt & Sean Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “As soon as they heard that a gun­man attacked a Tai­wanese church in Cal­i­for­nia on Sun­day, some Tai­wanese cor­rect­ly assumed polit­i­cal motives.… The shoot­ing sus­pect, David Wen­wei Chou, was born and raised in Tai­wan but con­sid­ers him­self Chi­nese. (Chi­na cur­rent­ly claims Tai­wan as its ter­ri­to­ry.) He left notes in Chi­nese in his car stat­ing he did not believe Tai­wan should be inde­pen­dent from Chi­na. Chi­nese social media cir­cu­lat­ed pho­tos of Chou indi­cat­ing that he was a leader of a Chi­nese pro-uni­fi­ca­tion orga­ni­za­tion in Las Vegas.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books] in par­tic­u­lar I have often have use­ful. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syl­labus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their cours­es.”  First shared in vol­ume 217.

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 347

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 347, a Fried­man num­ber. That means it can be writ­ten as an equa­tion com­prised of its own dig­its (3+4=7).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What John Updike and Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins knew about the pow­er of East­er (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “If Jesus wasn’t actu­al­ly res­ur­rect­ed, then East­er is less real than the bud­ding buzz of spring, less real than a dying breath, less real than my own hands, feet and skin. I have no inter­est in a Chris­tian­i­ty that isn’t deeply, pro­found­ly, irre­ducibly mate­r­i­al.”
  2. Frag­men­ta­tion Is Not What’s Killing Us (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[The break­down at Babel] does indeed sound like now. But the lessons we learn will be wrong if we don’t see the pri­ma­ry point of the Babel sto­ry: The prob­lem wasn’t the frag­men­ta­tion. The prob­lem was the uni­ty.”
  3. Chi­na Covid #2 (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “I want to empha­size that it is very dif­fi­cult to know what is going on inside Chi­na and my sources for this are not the best. I find the Ukraine war a rel­a­tive epis­temic cake­walk com­pared to this. So please under­stand that the alarmist claims from var­i­ous threads are to be tak­en with large heap­ings of salt.”
  4. Solve for the wartime pre­sen­ta­tion equi­lib­ri­um (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The country’s IT Army, a vol­un­teer force of hack­ers and activists that takes its direc­tion from the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment, says it has used [facial recog­ni­tion search­es] to inform the fam­i­lies of the deaths of 582 Rus­sians, includ­ing by send­ing them pho­tos of the aban­doned corpses. The Ukraini­ans cham­pi­on the use of face-scan­ning soft­ware from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a bru­tal but effec­tive way to stir up dis­sent inside Rus­sia, dis­cour­age oth­er fight­ers and has­ten an end to a dev­as­tat­ing war.” Tech­nolo­gies always have unex­pect­ed appli­ca­tions.
  5. Help­ing the Poor: The Great Dis­trac­tion (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Gov­ern­ments around the world impose numer­ous poli­cies that active­ly hurt the poor. The whole debate about ‘help­ing the poor’ cre­ates the illu­sion that the sole rea­son for their suf­fer­ing is mere neglect, even though out­right abuse is ram­pant.… They don’t need us to help them; they need us to stop hurt­ing them.”
  6. There is No Pink Tax (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Pref­er­ences dif­fer sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly across gen­ders lead­ing to sub­tly dif­fer­ent prod­ucts even in cat­e­gories which appear sim­i­lar on the sur­face.… Women and men could save mon­ey by buy­ing prod­ucts pri­mar­i­ly mar­ket­ed to the oppo­site gender–like 2‑in‑1 shampoo+conditioner–but only by buy­ing prod­ucts that they pre­fer less than the prod­ucts they choose to buy.”
  7. Study explores aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess among Jew­ish girls (Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty, Phys.org): “Girls raised by Jew­ish par­ents are 23 per­cent­age points more like­ly to grad­u­ate col­lege than girls with a non-Jew­ish upbring­ing, even after account­ing for their par­ents’ socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus. Girls raised by Jew­ish par­ents also grad­u­ate from more selec­tive col­leges, accord­ing to a new­ly pub­lished study by Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Ilana Hor­witz.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. One of our PhD can­di­dates is coau­thor on the paper — con­grat­u­la­tions!

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Revolt of the Fem­i­nist Law Profs (Wes­ley Yang, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The sex bureau­cra­cy, in oth­er words, piv­ot­ed from pun­ish­ing sex­u­al vio­lence to impos­ing a nor­ma­tive vision of ide­al sex, to which stu­dents are held admin­is­tra­tive­ly account­able.” First shared in vol­ume 214.

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 324

some pre-Hal­loween links

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 324, which is 182.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Emp­ty Pews Are an Amer­i­can Pub­lic Health Cri­sis (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele and Bren­dan Case, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious par­tic­i­pa­tion strong­ly pro­motes health and well­ness. This means that Amer­i­cans’ grow­ing dis­af­fec­tion with orga­nized reli­gion isn’t just bad news for church­es; it also rep­re­sents a pub­lic health cri­sis, one that has been large­ly ignored but the effects of which are like­ly to increase in com­ing years.”
    • The authors are part of the Human Flour­ish­ing Pro­gram at Har­vard. I have quot­ed Tyler Van­der­Weele’s research sev­er­al times in the past.
  2. Some per­spec­tives on the Amer­i­can church:
    • J.D. Vance and the Great Chal­lenge of Chris­t­ian Mal­ice (David French, The Dis­patch): “The real cri­sis [in Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal engage­ment] is instead a cri­sis of the heart. Our ortho­doxy is under­mined by our actions, and our actions spring forth from the deep­est parts of our being. At a time of ris­ing antipa­thy, a Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty should blaze forth with a radi­ant coun­ter­cul­tur­al embrace of kind­ness and grace. Instead, all too many of us have for­got­ten a fun­da­men­tal truth. There are no ‘right peo­ple’ to hate.”
    • Why ‘Evan­gel­i­cal’ Is Becom­ing Anoth­er Word for ‘Repub­li­can’ (Ryan Burge, New York Times): “For instance, in 2008, just 16 per­cent of all self-iden­ti­fied evan­gel­i­cals report­ed their church atten­dance as nev­er or sel­dom. But in 2020, that num­ber jumped to 27 per­cent. In 2008, about a third of evan­gel­i­cals who nev­er attend­ed church said they were polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive. By 2019, that had risen to about 50 per­cent.… [also] more peo­ple are embrac­ing the label who have no attach­ment to Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty. For exam­ple, the share of Catholics who also iden­ti­fied as evan­gel­i­cals (or born again) rose to 15 per­cent in 2018 from 9 per­cent in 2008. That same pat­tern appears with Mus­lims. In fact, there’s evi­dence that the share of mem­bers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, Ortho­dox Chris­tian­i­ty and Hin­duism who iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cal is larg­er today than it was just a decade ago.”
    • The Evan­gel­i­cal Church Is Break­ing Apart (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Scott Dud­ley, the senior pas­tor at Belle­vue Pres­by­ter­ian Church in Belle­vue, Wash­ing­ton, refers to this as ‘our idol­a­try of pol­i­tics.’ He’s heard of many con­gre­gants leav­ing their church because it didn’t match their pol­i­tics, he told me, but has nev­er once heard of some­one chang­ing their pol­i­tics because it didn’t match their church’s teach­ing. He often tells his con­gre­ga­tion that if the Bible doesn’t chal­lenge your pol­i­tics at least occa­sion­al­ly, you’re not real­ly pay­ing atten­tion to the Hebrew scrip­tures or the New Tes­ta­ment.”
    • Church Mem­ber­ship Is Not a One-Way Street (Alex Duke, Cross­way): “Think of your church as a light­bulb hooked up to a dim­mer switch in a dark room. Every­thing we do makes our wit­ness brighter or dark­er. Prac­tic­ing mean­ing­ful mem­ber­ship is one of the surest ways to turn that dim­mer switch up; ignor­ing it is one of the surest ways to turn it down. Mean­ing­ful mem­ber­ship is more impor­tant than you think.”
  3. The Prob­lem With Dave Chap­pelle (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Chap­pelle is not a hap­less vic­tim of a crush­ing ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da; he’s not Bar­ronelle Stutz­man or James Eich. Chap­pelle is, like many before and many after him, a Robe­spierre of the very rev­o­lu­tion that’s after him now. His for­tune was made inside the same pro­gres­sive sen­si­bil­i­ty that threat­ens him, and it is pre­cise­ly Chappelle’s (and many oth­er come­di­ans) skill with which he dis­missed any notion of the sacred that has tak­en root in the peo­ple who are walk­ing out on his un-PC act.” Real­ly sol­id insights here.
  4. The par­ent­ing prob­lem the gov­ern­ment can’t fix (Stephanie H. Mur­ray, The Week): “There is a cul­tur­al weight dan­gling from the yoke of mod­ern Amer­i­can par­ent­hood — one that is prob­a­bly beyond the gov­ern­ment to alle­vi­ate.… Chil­dren are a per­son­al choice and there­fore a per­son­al prob­lem, many peo­ple seem to believe. Have as many as you want — just make sure they don’t both­er the rest of us. The prob­lem is that this cre­do is total­ly out of step with real­i­ty.… par­ent­ing is an inher­ent­ly social occu­pa­tion. Try­ing to cram it into an indi­vid­u­al­ist frame­work, where the costs and con­se­quences of chil­dren fall on par­ents and no one else, dis­torts the whole endeav­or.”
    • I have long thought that dis­lik­ing chil­dren is pro­found­ly hyp­o­crit­i­cal. You were once a child who craved affec­tion and under­stand­ing, how rude to reject chil­dren now that you have learned to nav­i­gate the world more effec­tive­ly.
  5. Sci­en­tists Built an AI to Give Eth­i­cal Advice, But It Turned Out Super Racist (Tony Tran, Futur­ism): “And as is often the case, part of the rea­son Delphi’s answers can get ques­tion­able can like­ly be linked back to how it was cre­at­ed. The folks behind the project drew on some eye­brow-rais­ing sources to help train the AI, includ­ing the ‘Am I the Ass­hole?’ sub­red­dit, the ‘Con­fes­sions’ sub­red­dit, and the ‘Dear Abby’ advice col­umn, accord­ing to the paper the team behind Del­phi pub­lished about the exper­i­ment. It should be not­ed, though, that just the sit­u­a­tions were culled from those sources — not the actu­al replies and answers them­selves.… the team behind Del­phi used Amazon’s crowd­sourc­ing ser­vice Mechan­i­cal­Turk to find respon­dents to actu­al­ly train the AI.”
  6. About Israel and Jew­ish peo­ple:
    • When Your Body Is Some­one Else’s Haunt­ed House (Dara Horn, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “Those girls were not stu­pid, and prob­a­bly not even big­ot­ed. But in their entire­ly typ­i­cal and well-inten­tioned edu­ca­tion, they had learned about Jews main­ly because peo­ple had killed Jews. Like most peo­ple in the world, they had only encoun­tered dead Jews: peo­ple whose sole attribute was that they had been mur­dered, and whose mur­ders served a clear pur­pose, which was to teach us some­thing. Jews were peo­ple who, for moral and edu­ca­tion­al pur­pos­es, were sup­posed to be dead.”
    • Whose Promised Land? A Jour­ney Into a Divid­ed Israel (Patrick Kings­ley & Laeti­tia Van­con, New York Times): “‘I believe in the coun­try as long as it doesn’t fight reli­gion, as long as it doesn’t fight me,’ he said. In his view, the new gov­ern­ment has under­mined Israel’s Jew­ish­ness, under­cut­ting the state’s legit­i­ma­cy. ‘If it’s not a Jew­ish state, then we have no right to exist here,’ he said. ‘Our right to exist here is based on the fact that God gave us the land.’”
    • Pales­tine Isn’t Fer­gu­son (Susie Lin­field, The Atlantic): “Any use­ful analy­sis of the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict requires engag­ing with an unre­solved, frus­trat­ing­ly com­plex, griev­ous­ly resilient strug­gle between two nation­al move­ments, each with a jus­ti­fied claim to the land. Once that effort is aban­doned, a vac­u­um ensues. It is filled by the trans­for­ma­tion of a coun­try into a metaphor; by the rewrit­ing (or ignor­ing) of his­to­ry; by Manichean think­ing; and by the con­ver­sion of lan­guage into a means of per­for­mance rather than a descrip­tion of real­i­ty.”
  7. Learn­ing From Our Defeat: The Skill of the Vul­cans (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…both of these rel­a­tive non-enti­ties were pulled aside from their reg­u­lar posi­tions and hand­ed an addi­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ty— coor­di­na­tor of the Amer­i­can effort in Afghanistan.Read that again: they were both giv­en the same job at the same time. Yet the prob­lem was worse than just dupli­ca­tion of effort and con­fused lines of author­i­ty. The two men were not even aware the oth­er man was work­ing the same port­fo­lio!”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Dis­solv­ing the Fer­mi Para­dox (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Imag­ine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tion. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one para­me­ter Drake Equa­tion, we deter­mine that on aver­age there should be 5 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tions. Since we see zero, that’s quite the para­dox, isn’t it? No. In this case the mean is mean­ing­less. It’s not at all sur­pris­ing that we see zero alien civ­i­liza­tions, it just means the coin must have land­ed tails. SDO say that rely­ing on the Drake Equa­tion is the same kind of error.”  First shared in vol­ume 159.

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 314

Afghanistan links at the bot­tom.

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.

314 is rough­ly Ï€ times 100, and that makes me hap­py.

Afghanistan links are at the bot­tom and are well worth read­ing, but oth­er stuff is up top in case you’re over­whelmed already.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Guide to Find­ing Faith (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the world in 2021, no less than the world in 1521 or 321, presents con­sid­er­able evi­dence of an orig­i­nat­ing intel­li­gence pre­sid­ing over a law-bound world well made for our minds to under­stand, and at the same time a panoply of spir­i­tu­al forces that seem to inter­vene unpre­dictably in our exis­tence.” This is a won­der­ful thing to have print­ed in the New York Times.
  2. The Real Col­lege Scan­dal (Agnes Callard, The Point Mag­a­zine): “If I had to mea­sure the worth of my class­es in my stu­dents’ sub­se­quent civic virtue or life sat­is­fac­tion, I couldn’t afford to lose touch with most of them after grad­u­a­tion. I am some­times sad­dened when I lose touch with them, but it nev­er caus­es me to won­der whether their edu­ca­tion was worth­while.” Enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. Ope­nAI Codex Live Demo (Ope­nAI, YouTube): thir­ty astound­ing min­utes. This tech­nol­o­gy is going to change SO MUCH. I’m hon­est­ly blown away. Sign up for beta access at https://openai.com/join
  4. Unmar­ried Sex Is Worse Than You Think (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra & Collin Hansen, Gospel Coali­tion): “Amer­i­cans talk a lot about sex. Any­one would think they’re hav­ing a lot of it.… Instead, the oppo­site has hap­pened. Young peo­ple are hav­ing less sex—and are less happy—than the mar­ried, church­go­ing gen­er­a­tion before them.”
  5. Does Cana­da have a reli­gion prob­lem? (Ray Pen­nings, Sub­stack): “In part­ner­ship with the Angus-Reid Insti­tute, Car­dus has been mea­sur­ing Cana­di­an spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. We asked about sev­en prac­tices — belief in God’s exis­tence, prayer, read­ing a scrip­ture, par­tic­i­pat­ing in wor­ship, believ­ing in an after­life, hav­ing reli­gious expe­ri­ences, teach­ing your kids about faith. We termed the 16 per­cent who do at least six of these ‘reli­gious­ly com­mit­ted’ and the 19 per­cent who do zero or one ‘non-believ­ers.’ That leaves the 64 per cent of Cana­di­ans in the mid­dle — nei­ther devout­ly reli­gious, nor reli­gious­ly indif­fer­ent. They’re a big chunk of the 86 per cent of Cana­di­ans who pray at least month­ly.  But many reli­gious Cana­di­ans, of var­i­ous faiths, don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly feel it’s safe to be pub­lic about their beliefs.” The author is the co-founder of Car­dus, a Cana­di­an think tank. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  6. Who Tells Them Things They Don’t Want to Hear? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…I don’t think and have nev­er sug­gest­ed that crowd­fund­ed media can replace the basic news­gath­er­ing func­tion of news­pa­pers and that the NYT in par­tic­u­lar still serves a vital func­tion in its fun­da­men­tal repor­to­r­i­al duties. This is, in fact, pre­cise­ly why I am so dis­turbed by the paper’s takeover by a fringe ide­ol­o­gy embraced by a tiny sliv­er of the Amer­i­can pub­lic and by behind-the-scenes high school bull­shit.”
    • These two lines at the end grabbed me, “It’s only integri­ty when it hurts, guys. Some­thing you write is only brave when it piss­es off all your friends and col­leagues.
  7. Con­cern­ing Afghanistan, the work­ing out of which has made me more ashamed of my coun­try than I can put into words.
    • What We Got Wrong in Afghanistan (Mike Jason, The Atlantic): “We didn’t send the right peo­ple, pre­pare them well, or reward them after­ward. We rotat­ed strangers on tours of up to a year and expect­ed them to build rela­tion­ships, then replaced them. We were over­ly opti­mistic and large­ly made things up as we went along. We didn’t like over­sight or tough ques­tions from Wash­ing­ton, and no one real­ly both­ered to hold us account­able any­way.… We didn’t fight a 20-year war in Afghanistan; we fought 20 inco­her­ent wars, one year at a time, with­out a sense of direc­tion.” The author is an Army vet who served in Afghanistan. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Bru­tal.
    • I Was Deeply Involved in War in Afghanistan for More Than a Decade. Here’s What We Must Learn (James Stavridis, Time): “The on-the-ground lead­ers in Afghanistan, most­ly Army and Marine Corps, were over­whelm­ing­ly brave, thought­ful, and com­pe­tent. But as we learned over the long years, we sim­ply rotat­ed them too fre­quent­ly. If we had fought World War II by lim­it­ing Gen­er­al Eisen­how­er or Admi­ral Nimitz to one year tours of duty, the out­come would have been dif­fer­ent, to say the least. We made the same mis­take in Viet­nam, where every­one was on a one year tour, and the out­come was a dis­as­ter. This was reflect­ed up-and-down the chain of com­mand, and the lack of con­ti­nu­ity and sense of ‘I’ve just got to make it to my depar­ture date’ hin­dered strate­gic coheren­cy bad­ly.” The author is a for­mer com­man­der of NATO. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • Nation­al Humil­i­a­tions (Mark Too­ley, Prov­i­dence): “And Amer­i­ca like all great nations will endure and hope­ful­ly learn from its humil­i­a­tions, whether 1941 or 1950 or 1975 or 2001 or today. All nations ulti­mate­ly decide their own des­tinies medi­at­ed by divine judg­ment and mer­cy. Maybe Afghanistan’s col­lapse is a divine judg­ment on it and us. But there is mer­cy always avail­able, accom­pa­nied by wis­dom.”
      • The sur­vey of his­to­ry at the begin­ning is what caught my atten­tion. Some of those dis­as­ters are bare­ly on my his­tor­i­cal radar.
    • Afghan Trav­es­ty (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “God knows how to hum­ble great mil­i­tary pow­ers. He has done it numer­ous times, and that is what you are see­ing right now. What are we to make of that great patri­ot­ic vaunt, ‘these col­ors don’t run’? The reply is that they will run any and every time God deter­mines that they will.” The­o­log­i­cal­ly brac­ing.
    • Dis­as­ter in Afghanistan Will Fol­low Us Home (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “But didn’t we have to leave Afghanistan some­time? So goes a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment. Yes, though we’ve been in Korea for 71 years, at far high­er cost, and the world is bet­ter off for it.”
    • Did Amer­i­ca just lose Afghanistan because of What­sApp? (Pre­ston Byrne, per­son­al blog): “The Unit­ed States thought it was fight­ing an army. I sus­pect the rea­son we lost is because we were fight­ing a meme.”
    • The above dove­tails nice­ly with a Tan­ner Greer essay: Fight­ing Like Tal­iban (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pick­up bas­ket­ball, a con­test among friends, a tour­na­ment where you nev­er knew which team you’d be on when the next game got under way. Shirts today, skins tomor­row. On Tues­day, you might be part of a fear­some Tal­iban reg­i­ment, run­ning into a mine­field. And on Wednes­day you might be man­ning a check­point for some gang of the North­ern Alliance.”
    • Dis­hon­or in Afghanistan (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “You can believe that get­ting out of Afghanistan is the right policy––again, I have friends whom I respect who believe that––while also under­stand­ing that this was a ter­ri­ble way to get out of Afghanistan. We can all agree that it’s time to leave a par­ty; that doesn’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly mean you should jump out the near­est win­dow to make your exit.”
    • The Fall of Impe­r­i­al Amer­i­ca (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “As a friend of mine put it this morn­ing, how many meet­ings to plan an order­ly evac­u­a­tion of Afghanistan did our mil­i­tary brass miss so they could attend diver­si­ty train­ing? Again, we are an unse­ri­ous coun­try, and the world knows it. A friend of mine whose son is head­ed to West Point told me that in the boy’s pack­et of infor­ma­tion that just came in there is a rain­bow-flag diver­si­ty stick­er. Amer­i­ca might not know how to win actu­al wars, but it sure is going to equip its troops to win the cul­ture war against tra­di­tion­al moral­i­ty and old-fash­ioned Amer­i­can val­ues.” Feisty.
    • What We Can Learn From Europe’s Refugee Crises (John Gus­tavs­son, The Dis­patch): “As a Euro­pean with expe­ri­ence of work­ing with eco­nom­ic and migra­tion pol­i­cy, and who wit­nessed what hap­pened in my home coun­try of Swe­den, I have seen what works—and espe­cial­ly what doesn’t.”
      • Full of real talk. I am in favor of reset­tling vir­tu­al­ly any­one who can get out (or who we can get out) of Afghanistan and putting them onto a path to cit­i­zen­ship (like­wise for Hong Kong). I am also in favor of being thought­ful in the ways described in this arti­cle.
    • Today’s Tal­iban uses sophis­ti­cat­ed social media prac­tices that rarely vio­late the rules (Craig Tim­berg and Cris­tiano Lima, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…U.S. con­ser­v­a­tives have been demand­ing to know why for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has been banned from Twit­ter while var­i­ous Tal­iban fig­ures have not. The answer, ana­lysts said, may sim­ply be that Trump’s posts for years chal­lenged plat­form rules against hate speech and incit­ing vio­lence. Today’s Tal­iban, by and large, does not.”
      • This illus­trates a weak­ness in the West. We pun­ish pro­ce­dur­al vio­la­tions more than we pun­ish actu­al vice, in part because so many of our elites don’t have a moral com­pass that they view as true and bind­ing. It’s OK if the Tal­iban uses social media to achieve actu­al evil as long as they don’t make us think about what they’re doing. Kind of like it’s okay for Chi­na to bru­tal­ize their own pop­u­la­tion as long as they don’t tweet about it and lie about doing it. Tech com­pa­nies will boy­cott Geor­gia but not Chi­na; they will dis­man­tle Par­ler but not Tik­Tok.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have If I Were 22 Again (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “There have been about 18,340 days since I turned 22, and I think I have read my Bible on more of those days than I have eat­en. I have cer­tain­ly read my Bible on more of those days that I have watched tele­vi­sion or videos.… Read your Bible every day of your life. If you have time for break­fast, nev­er say that you don’t have time for God’s word.” This whole thing is real­ly good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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.