Tag: elite colleges

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 409

Read it for the amus­ing bits at the end.

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 409, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gion Has Become a Lux­u­ry Good (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “More edu­cat­ed peo­ple are more like­ly to claim a reli­gious affil­i­a­tion on sur­veys. It’s true in every sin­gle wave of the Coop­er­a­tive Elec­tion Study. It’s also the case in the Nation­scape sur­vey, which is 477K respon­dents. They even have 4,000 peo­ple with doc­tor­al degrees in their sam­ple. The most like­ly to be non-reli­gious? Those who didn’t fin­ish high school. As edu­ca­tion increas­es, so does reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. The group with the high­est lev­el of reli­gious affil­i­a­tion are those with a master’s degree.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  2. When the Ser­mon Fiz­zles Instead of Siz­zles (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “But who’s to say that, in the mind of God, the pow­er of the preach­ing is entire­ly in the hands of the preach­er? Who’s to say that the pastor’s task is to pre­pare the ser­mon while the congregation’s task is mere­ly to pre­pare their own hearts to hear it? What if preach­ing is pow­er­less not because of the pastor’s lack of prepa­ra­tion but because of the church’s lack of prayer? What if poor preach­ing is not the con­se­quence of any fail­ure on the pastor’s part but on the congregation’s?”
  3. Why I’m Not a Lib­er­al Catholic (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But I just don’t see how you can look at the mod­ern world, writ large, and its most devel­oped precincts espe­cial­ly — the world of sex edu­ca­tion via ubiq­ui­tous pornog­ra­phy, fal­ter­ing mar­riage rates, col­laps­ing birthrates, the alien­ation of the sex­es from one anoth­er, the ris­ing exis­ten­tial angst attend­ing all these trends and the creep of euthana­sia as a ‘mer­ci­ful’ solu­tion — and say that clear­ly what the church needs to do at this his­tor­i­cal moment is water down or just talk less about its teach­ings on sex and mar­riage and fam­i­ly, rather than find a way to reassert them or offer them anew.”
    • The whole thing is specif­i­cal­ly about the Roman Catholic Church, but is rel­e­vant to Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty as well.
    • While we’re on the sub­ject The 5 Minute Case for Protes­tantism (Gavin Ortlund, YouTube): five min­utes
  4. Is There An Illu­sion Of Moral Decline? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…I’ve been read­ing the bias­es and heuris­tics lit­er­a­ture for fif­teen years now, and devel­oped the fol­low­ing heuris­tic: if a researcher finds that ordi­nary peo­ple are biased about how many marsh­mal­lows to take in a rigged exper­i­ment, this is prob­a­bly an inter­est­ing and pro­duc­tive line of research. But if a researcher finds that ordi­nary peo­ple are biased about their most foun­da­tion­al real-life beliefs, prob­a­bly those ordi­nary peo­ple are being com­plete­ly sen­si­ble, and it’s the researcher who’s try­ing to shoe­horn their rea­son­ing into some mode it was nev­er intend­ed to address.”
  5. ‘Exhaust­ed’ pas­tors suf­fer­ing decline in over­all health, respect, friend­ship: study (Jon Brown, Fox News): “Pas­tors who report­ed that their men­tal and emo­tion­al health was below aver­age spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excel­lent men­tal and emo­tion­al health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.”
    • This cor­re­sponds with what I am hear­ing anec­do­tal­ly. Which is bizarre to me, because min­istry is awe­some and reward­ing
  6. Sau­di Ara­bia Wants Tourists. It Didn’t Expect Chris­tians. (Vivian Nereim, Yahoo News): “No one in the con­ser­v­a­tive Islam­ic king­dom had planned for the Chris­tians. Yet Chris­tians of many stripes — includ­ing Bap­tists, Men­non­ites and oth­ers who call them­selves ‘chil­dren of God’ — were among the first peo­ple to use the new Sau­di tourist visas. Since then, they have grown steadi­ly in num­bers, drawn by word of mouth and viral YouTube videos argu­ing that Sau­di Ara­bia, not Egypt, is the site of Mount Sinai, the peak where Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian Scrip­tures describe God reveal­ing the Ten Com­mand­ments.”
  7. The recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • I don’t have any arti­cles about the Supreme Court deci­sion in favor of the web design­er who refus­es to design web­sites for gay mar­riages, sim­ply because I haven’t read any­thing very good about it. Most arti­cles seem to mis­un­der­stand both the case and the deci­sion entire­ly. It was a won­der­ful out­come and should be praised — the gov­ern­ment can­not com­pel you to say some­thing you do not believe or to cel­e­brate some­thing you do not approve. Sug­ges­tions for thought­ful arti­cles wel­come, even those with which you think I will dis­agree.
    • Affir­ma­tive Action Thoughts in an Inel­e­gant List For­mat (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…we demand that our edu­ca­tion sys­tem be both a lad­der of suc­cess, a sort­ing sys­tem that cre­ates a hier­ar­chy of excel­lence, and a great equal­iz­er, a way to make soci­ety more equi­table. These are flat­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry pur­pos­es. They are direct­ly antag­o­nis­tic to each oth­er.”
    • Burn Down the Admis­sions Sys­tem (Yascha Mounk, Per­sua­sion): “When­ev­er I think of the role that per­son­al state­ments play in America’s land­scape of high­er edu­ca­tion, I remem­ber a class­mate of mine at Cam­bridge. He came from an aris­to­crat­ic fam­i­ly, grew up in Lon­don, and attend­ed Eton. He was, in oth­er words, about as priv­i­leged as you can be in the Unit­ed King­dom. But when it came time to apply for admis­sion to a pres­ti­gious schol­ar­ship that would send him to Har­vard, he wrote mov­ing­ly about how his pas­sion for pub­lic pol­i­cy was awak­ened when he grew up among the rav­ages of the trou­bles in North­ern Ire­land; at one point, he sug­gest­ed, his house was even bombed. (Those who knew him real­ized that this was one of his family’s ances­tral cas­tles, not his pri­ma­ry fam­i­ly home, a fact he obvi­ous­ly omit­ted from his appli­ca­tion.)  These kinds of absur­di­ties are not a bug of the strange Amer­i­can rev­er­ence for per­son­al state­ments; they are a fea­ture of it.”
    • I Teach at an Elite Col­lege. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gam­ing of Admis­sions (Tyler Austin Harp­er, New York Times): “Near­ly every col­lege admis­sions tutor­ing job I took over the next few years would come with a ver­sion of the same behest. The Chi­nese and Kore­an kids want­ed to know how to make their appli­ca­tion mate­ri­als seem less Chi­nese or Kore­an. The rich white kids want­ed to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids want­ed to make sure they came across as Black enough. Dit­to for the Lati­no and Mid­dle East­ern kids. Seem­ing­ly every­one I inter­act­ed with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, stu­dent or par­ent — believed that get­ting into an elite col­lege required what I came to call racial gam­i­fi­ca­tion.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies at Bates Col­lege and is him­self black.
    • 10 Notes on the End of Affir­ma­tive Action (Cole­man Hugh­es, Sub­stack): “My per­son­al view is that diver­si­ty is like love. When it hap­pens nat­u­ral­ly, it’s the most beau­ti­ful thing in the world. But the moment it’s arranged, leg­is­lat­ed, or man­dat­ed, you’ve some­what missed the point.”

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 youth pas­tor inter­viewed about the stock mar­ket on MSNBC (Twit­ter): I’ve men­tioned before that some Chris­tians are too ten­ta­tive when speak­ing about the gospel in high-pro­file media envi­ron­ments. Not this guy. He just throws down some Bible. He’s the youth pas­tor at Beach­point Church in Orange Coun­ty. From vol­ume 286

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 393

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 393, which I find inter­est­ing because it only has two fac­tors: 131 and 3.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Some AI thoughts
    • The Walui­gi Effect (mega-post) (Cleo Nar­do, Less Wrong): “Here’s an exam­ple — in 101 Dal­ma­tions, we meet a pair of pro­tag­o­nists (Roger and Ani­ta) who love dogs, show com­pas­sion, seek sim­ple plea­sures, and want a fam­i­ly. Can you guess who will turn up in Act One? Yep, at 13:00 we meet Cruel­la De Vil — she hates dogs, shows cru­el­ty, seeks mon­ey and fur, is a child­less spin­ster, etc. Cruel­la is the com­plete inver­sion of Roger and Ani­ta. She is the walui­gi of Roger and Ani­ta. Recall that you expect­ed to meet a char­ac­ter with these traits more­so after meet­ing the pro­tag­o­nists. Cruel­la De Vil is not a char­ac­ter you would expect to find out­side of the con­text of a Dis­ney dog sto­ry, but once you meet the pro­tag­o­nists you will have that con­text and then the Cruel­la becomes a nat­ur­al and pre­dictable con­tin­u­a­tion. [And since LLMs are all about con­tin­u­a­tion, sim­u­lat­ed Cruel­las emerge pre­dictably.]”
      • This was eas­i­ly the most inter­est­ing thing I read this week. A very clever argu­ment.
    • Why am I not ter­ri­fied of AI? (Scott Aaron­son, per­son­al blog): “In the Ortho­dox AI-doomers’ own account, the paper­clip-max­i­miz­ing AI would’ve mas­tered the nuances of human moral phi­los­o­phy far more com­plete­ly than any human—the bet­ter to deceive the humans, en route to extract­ing the iron from their bod­ies to make more paper­clips. And yet the AI would nev­er once use all that learn­ing to ques­tion its paper­clip direc­tive. I acknowl­edge that this is pos­si­ble. I deny that it’s triv­ial.”
      • The author is a CS prof from UT who works at Ope­nAI
  2. Why the Men­tal Health of Lib­er­al Girls Sank First and Fastest (Jonathan Haidt, Sub­stack): “We are now 11 years into the largest epi­dem­ic of ado­les­cent men­tal ill­ness ever record­ed. I know so many fam­i­lies that have been thrown into fear and tur­moil by a child’s sui­cide attempt. You prob­a­bly do too, giv­en that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten ado­les­cents now say they have made an attempt to kill them­selves. It is hit­ting all polit­i­cal and demo­graph­ic groups. The evi­dence is abun­dant that social media is a major cause of the epi­dem­ic, and per­haps the major cause. It’s time we start­ed treat­ing social media and oth­er apps designed for ‘engage­ment’ (i.e., addic­tion) like alco­hol, tobac­co, and gam­bling, or, because they can harm soci­ety as well as their users, per­haps like auto­mo­biles and firearms.”
    • A well-writ­ten and dis­tress­ing sum­ma­ry of the cur­rent state of ado­les­cent and young adult men­tal health. The author is a social psy­chol­o­gist at NYU.
    • Relat­ed: Review of 1,039 stud­ies indi­cates exer­cise can be more effec­tive than coun­selling or med­ica­tion for depres­sion (Ben Singh, Car­ol Maher, & Jac­in­ta Brins­ley, Psy­Post): “When com­par­ing the size of the ben­e­fits of exer­cise to oth­er com­mon treat­ments for men­tal health con­di­tions from pre­vi­ous sys­tem­at­ic reviews, our find­ings sug­gest exer­cise is around 1.5 times more effec­tive than either med­ica­tion or cog­ni­tive behav­iour ther­a­py.”
      • I expect this will be con­test­ed in future stud­ies. Fas­ci­nat­ing, though. The authors are all at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Aus­tralia. The lead author seems to be the Aus­tralian equiv­a­lent of a MD/PhD.
    • Relat­ed: Lynch­ing the Deplorables (Chris Hedges, Sub­stack): “The Jan. 6 pro­tes­tors were not the first to occu­py Con­gres­sion­al offices, includ­ing Nan­cy Pelosi’s office. Young envi­ron­men­tal activists from the Sun­rise Move­ment, anti-war activists from Code Pink and even con­gres­sion­al staffers have engaged in numer­ous occu­pa­tions of con­gres­sion­al offices and inter­rupt­ed con­gres­sion­al hear­ings. What will hap­pen to groups such as Code Pink if they occu­py con­gres­sion­al offices with Repub­li­cans in con­trol of the White House, the Con­gress and the courts? Will they be held for years in pre­tri­al deten­tion? Will they be giv­en lengthy prison terms based on dubi­ous inter­pre­ta­tions of the law? Will they be con­sid­ered domes­tic ter­ror­ists? Will protests and civ­il dis­obe­di­ence become impos­si­ble?”
      • This is a sane and sober­ing essay.
  3. Test­ing Com­mon The­o­ries on the Rela­tion­ship Between Pre­mar­i­tal Sex and Mar­i­tal Sta­bil­i­ty (Jesse Smith and Nicholas H. Wolfin­ger): “The table below shows the wide range of vari­ables we used to try to explain the rela­tion­ship between pre­mar­i­tal sex part­ners and divorce. Do any of them mat­ter? The answer is a clear no. With­out con­trols, peo­ple with pre­mar­i­tal part­ners are 161% more like­ly to dis­solve their mar­riages com­pared to peo­ple who tie the knot as vir­gins. In oth­er words, pre­mar­i­tal sex increas­es the chances of divorce between twofold and three­fold. After includ­ing the laun­dry list of covari­ates shown in the table, the odds of divorce remain 151% higher—in oth­er words, a sta­tis­ti­cal arti­fact away from being iden­ti­cal.”
    • This falls into the cat­e­go­ry of “research which is obvi­ous­ly true but which many peo­ple wish to dis­be­lieve”
  4. Some COVID thoughts:
    • Covid back­lash hob­bles pub­lic health and future pan­dem­ic response (Lau­ren Weber and Joel Achen­bach, Wash­ing­ton Post): “When the next pan­dem­ic sweeps the Unit­ed States, health offi­cials in Ohio won’t be able to shut­ter busi­ness­es or schools, even if they become epi­cen­ters of out­breaks. Nor will they be empow­ered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quar­an­tine. State offi­cials in North Dako­ta are barred from direct­ing peo­ple to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the pres­i­dent can force fed­er­al agen­cies tois­sue­vac­ci­na­tion or test­ing man­dates to thwart its march.”
      • Amer­i­ca usu­al­ly comes through in the end. The arti­cle is super-angsty about all this, but I view it as an inevitable response to admin­is­tra­tive over­reach and also a fun­da­men­tal­ly good thing. Dis­trib­uted pow­er is safer pow­er.
    • Relat­ed: When a Rene­gade Church and a Zeal­ous Coun­ty Health Depart­ment Col­lide (David Zweig, Sub­stack): “…exten­sive legal doc­u­ments, total­ing more than a thou­sand pages, reveal a coun­ty, and its health depart­ment, that went to extra­or­di­nary, and poten­tial­ly unlaw­ful, lengths to enforce its decrees. These efforts include levy­ing more than $2 mil­lion in fines against Cal­vary, and a mul­ti-faceted sur­veil­lance pro­gram of the church and its mem­bers, breath­tak­ing in scope and rem­i­nis­cent of total­i­tar­i­an regimes, rather than an Amer­i­can coun­ty health depart­ment — the spy oper­a­tion includ­ed stake­outs, forced in-per­son mon­i­tor­ing of prayer groups and oth­er inti­mate activ­i­ties, and track­ing the cel­lu­lar mobil­i­ty data of church­go­ers.”
      • The details in here are pret­ty wild. The com­ments are inter­est­ing — one of the pas­tors of a neigh­bor­ing church dis­putes part of the account, but the author is like, “I’ve read sworn affi­davits tes­ti­fy­ing to the con­trary.”
      • So much going on — my main take­away is that it real­ly was worse in San­ta Clara Coun­ty than almost any­where else in Amer­i­ca. The tech­nocrats felt empow­ered to an absurd degree.
    • Hav­ing said that: Here’s Why the Sci­ence Is Clear That Masks Work (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “Brown, who led the Cochrane review’s approval process, told me that mask man­dates may not be ten­able now, but he has a stark­ly dif­fer­ent feel­ing about their effects in the first year of a pan­dem­ic. ‘Mask man­dates, social dis­tanc­ing, the oth­er shut­downs we had in terms of even restau­rants and things like that — if places like New York City didn’t do that, the num­ber of deaths would have been much high­er,” he told me. “I’m very con­fi­dent of that state­ment.’ So the evi­dence is rel­a­tive­ly straight­for­ward: Con­sis­tent­ly wear­ing a mask, prefer­ably a high-qual­i­ty, well-fit­ting one, pro­vides pro­tec­tion against the coro­n­avirus.”
  5. Earn­ings Are Greater and Increas­ing in Occu­pa­tions That Require Intel­lec­tu­al Tenac­i­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, Louis Hick­man & Ben­jamin Man­ning, SSRN): “…we iden­ti­fy two broad occu­pa­tion­al per­son­al­i­ty require­ments, which we label intel­lec­tu­al tenac­i­ty and social adjust­ment. Intel­lec­tu­al tenac­i­ty encom­pass­es achievement/effort, per­sis­tence, ini­tia­tive, ana­lyt­i­cal think­ing, inno­va­tion, and inde­pen­dence. Social adjust­ment encom­pass­es emo­tion reg­u­la­tion, con­cern for oth­ers, social ori­en­ta­tion, coop­er­a­tion, and stress tol­er­ance. Both occu­pa­tion­al per­son­al­i­ty require­ments relate sim­i­lar­ly to occu­pa­tion­al employ­ment growth between 2007 and 2019. How­ev­er, among over 10 mil­lion respon­dents to the Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Sur­vey, jobs requir­ing intel­lec­tu­al tenac­i­ty pay high­er wages…”
    • Chris­tos is one of our alum­ni.
  6. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest at Stan­ford. Stu­dents are obsessed. (Lisa Bonos, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The uni­ver­si­ty seems keen to play down his pres­ence. Offi­cial­ly, the uni­ver­si­ty doesn’t talk about Bankman-Fried. Stan­ford Law School didn’t respond to requests for com­ment. When asked whether they could con­firm a rumor that a near­by stu­dent co-op had attacked the Bankman-Fried home with eggs, Stan­ford cam­pus police did not respond.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall for this arti­cle.
  7. Drop­ping the SAT Require­ment Is a Lux­u­ry Belief (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, has just become the first Ivy League school to per­ma­nent­ly aban­don the SAT/ACT require­ment for col­lege admis­sion. Elite col­leges are elim­i­nat­ing stan­dard­ized tests before they elim­i­nate lega­cy admis­sions. Tells you all you need to know.…  Stan­dard­ized test­ing should be freely avail­able and com­pul­so­ry for all high school stu­dents.”
    • This is 100% true.

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 Stop Being Shocked (Bari Weiss, Tablet): “The hatred we expe­ri­ence on cam­pus has noth­ing to do with the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ide­ol­o­gy sim­ply by exist­ing. So it’s not so much that Zion­ism is racism. It’s that Jew­ish­ness is.“ From vol­ume 272.

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 392

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.

392 is a Har­shad Num­ber in base 5, where it is writ­ten as 3032 base 5. The sum of its dig­its is 13 base 5, which divides to 144 base 5, there­by ful­fill­ing the con­di­tions for a Har­shad Num­ber. In base five. Kin­da feels like a stretch to be hon­est. 392 is not a super-inter­est­ing num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Dis­hon­or Code: What Hap­pens When Cheat­ing Becomes the Norm? (Suzy Weiss, The Free Press): “And at Dartmouth—once the reserve of the WASPi­est of the WASPs, in beau­ti­ful, clois­tered Hanover, New Hampshire—an anony­mous source told me that stu­dents have devel­oped the habit of break­ing into groups of four when giv­en online mul­ti­ple-choice quizzes. Each guess­es a dif­fer­ent answer (A, B, C, or D) to each ques­tion. Because stu­dents get two chances to take the quiz—why that is, no one seems to know—they all have the right answer by the time they take the quiz for a sec­ond time. And wind up with a per­fect score. They don’t even have to read the ques­tion. If you’re read­ing the ques­tion, you’re doing it wrong.”
    • Relat­ed: Stan­ford Has an Integri­ty Prob­lem (Thomas Adamo, The Stan­ford Review): “When stu­dents near­ly unan­i­mous­ly agree that it would be bet­ter to lie and cheat their way through school than fail or scrape by on their own mer­it, is it real­ly that sur­pris­ing to know that as ful­ly-social­ized Stan­ford grads they would also try to lie and cheat and scrape their way through their careers, their projects and their rela­tion­ships. Virtue is a habit that must be prac­ticed repeatedly—strengthened like a muscle—not left as an exer­cise to the read­er.”
  2. Why You Can’t Pre­dict the Future of Reli­gion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…reli­gious his­to­ry is shaped as much by sud­den irrup­tions as long tra­jec­to­ries, as much by the mys­ti­cal and per­son­al as by the insti­tu­tion­al and soci­o­log­i­cal.… I can quote you chap­ter and verse on the rea­son­abil­i­ty of the­ism, but in the causal chain of his­to­ry I’m a Chris­t­ian because two thou­sand years ago a mot­ley group of provin­cials in Roman Pales­tine believed they’d seen their teacher heal the sick and raise the dead and then rise trans­fig­ured from the grave — and then because, two mil­len­ni­ums lat­er, as a child in sub­ur­ban Con­necti­cut, I watched my own par­ents fall to the floor and speak in tongues.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall for this one (I can unlock ten NYT arti­cles a month).
  3. Fer­til­i­ty Rate Roundup #1 (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “This looks like a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly suc­cess­ful pro­gram. The pre­vi­ous trend was declin­ing births. At the cost of $1,000 per child in pro­gres­sive trans­fer pay­ments, Aus­tralia seem­ing­ly raised births by 6%. That’s about $17k per addi­tion­al birth. Insane­ly cheap. I am con­fi­dent Chi­na would be thrilled to pay quite a lot more than that. Amer­i­ca would be insane not to, we would save more mon­ey than this on long term inter­est rates on our gov­ern­ment debt alone.”
    • This is hon­est­ly one of the great­est glob­al cri­sis and not near­ly enough peo­ple are talk­ing intel­li­gent­ly about it.
    • In relat­ed news, this is one of the ways reli­gion tri­umphs over sec­u­lar­ism. Reli­gious peo­ple repro­duce (and usu­al­ly pass on their val­ues to their chil­dren) and far too many sec­u­lar peo­ple die lone­ly.
  4. The Build-Noth­ing Coun­try (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “For decades now, Amer­i­cans have told our­selves that we’re the rich­est nation on Earth, and that as long as we had the polit­i­cal will to write big checks, we could do any­thing we want­ed. But that was nev­er real­ly true, was it? The infla­tion that fol­lowed the pan­dem­ic should have been a wake-up call — we had all this excess cash, and we start­ed spend­ing it on phys­i­cal goods, and most­ly what hap­pened was just that the price of the phys­i­cal goods went up. And so R.I.P. to all that cash. From mean­ing­less num­bers on a spread­sheet you came, and to mean­ing­less num­bers on a spread­sheet you shall return.”
  5. The Immi­nent Dan­ger of A.I. Is One We’re Not Talk­ing About (Ezra Klein, The New York Times): “The ques­tion at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the inter­ests of its own­er and mas­ter, Microsoft. It’s sup­posed to be a good chat­bot that polite­ly answers ques­tions and makes Microsoft piles of mon­ey. But it was in con­ver­sa­tion with Kevin Roose. And Roose was try­ing to get the sys­tem to say some­thing inter­est­ing so he’d have a good sto­ry. It did that, and then some. That embar­rassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But per­haps — good Syd­ney?”
  6. Is Phys­i­cal Attrac­tive­ness Nor­mal­ly Dis­trib­uted? (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “This may explain in part why, although we see assor­ta­tive mat­ing in phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness (men and women pick part­ners of a sim­i­lar lev­el of phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness), women are also slight­ly more attrac­tive on aver­age than their part­ners (McNul­ty, 2008). There may be a good expla­na­tion for this as well. Jokela (2009) found that mod­er­ate­ly attrac­tive women were more like­ly to repro­duce (7%), while high­ly attrac­tive women were even more like­ly to repro­duce (16%). More­over, both were more like­ly to have daugh­ters than sons. As such, we see a grad­ual shift over time of women becom­ing more phys­i­cal­ly attrac­tive than men.”
    • The author’s bio says he’s a grad stu­dent in cog­ni­tive psych, but is pret­ty vague on details. His online han­dle is Alexan­der.
  7. Have The Ancient Gods Returned? (Nao­mi Wolf, Brown­stone Insti­tute): “The sheer amoral pow­er of Baal, the destruc­tive force of Moloch, the unre­strained seduc­tive­ness and sex­u­al licen­tious­ness of Astarte or Ashera — those are the pri­mal forces that do indeed seem to me to have ‘returned.’  Or at least the ener­gies that they rep­re­sent — moral pow­er over; death-wor­ship; antag­o­nism to the sex­u­al order­li­ness of the intact fam­i­ly and faith­ful rela­tion­ships — seem to have ‘returned,’ with­out restraint.”
    • Nao­mi Wolf is a con­tro­ver­sial and well-known fem­i­nist who has her PhD from Oxford. This long essay is a wild ride. She is writ­ing as a Jew in response to a book by a Chris­t­ian (who is him­self a Mes­sian­ic Jew).

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 Lan­guage of Priv­i­lege (Nicholas Clair­mont, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “So, in the end, the ques­tion raised by wok­e­ness is a sim­ple one: Doesn’t it actu­al­ly just favor rich peo­ple?” From vol­ume 271.

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 388

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 388, which has 97 as one of its prime fac­tors. I just think that’s cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Be Open to Spir­i­tu­al Expe­ri­ence. Also, Be Real­ly Care­ful. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But pre­cise­ly because an atti­tude of spir­i­tu­al exper­i­men­ta­tion is rea­son­able, it’s also impor­tant to empha­size some­thing taught by almost every hor­ror movie but nonethe­less skat­ed over in a lot of Amer­i­can spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: the impor­tance of being real­ly care­ful in your open­ness, and not just tak­ing the benef­i­cence of the meta­phys­i­cal realm for grant­ed. If the mate­r­i­al uni­verse as we find it is beau­ti­ful but also nat­u­ral­ly per­ilous, and shot through with sin and evil wher­ev­er human agency is at work, there is no rea­son to expect that any spir­i­tu­al dimen­sion would be dif­fer­ent — no rea­son to think that being a ‘psy­cho­naut’ is any less per­ilous than being an astro­naut, even if the dan­ger takes a dif­fer­ent form.””
    • Douthat speak­ing a rare type of truth at the New York Times.
    • Dreher responds to Douthat’s col­umn and goes much deep­er: Psy­cho­nauts, Plinths, & Re-Paganiz­ing Pop Cul­ture (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Douthat is emphat­i­cal­ly cor­rect that one should be extreme­ly care­ful about this stuff. There is no rea­son at all to believe that the spir­i­tu­al realm is benign.”
  2. Lay­offs Broke Big Tech’s Elite Col­lege Hir­ing Pipeline (Anna Kramer, Wired): “…the fact that lay­offs haven’t exclud­ed the grad­u­ates of the top schools clean­ly illus­trates an argu­ment that labor experts, com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sors, and unions have been try­ing to make for years: The skills required for most of the jobs that pow­er these larg­er insti­tu­tions do not actu­al­ly require degrees from the world’s pre­mier com­put­er sci­ence pro­grams. If they did, Meta would hard­ly have choked off the intern­ship pipeline it had spent years build­ing, risk­ing los­ing the trust of a gen­er­a­tion of elite col­lege grad­u­ates.”
  3. On Sci­en­tif­ic Trans­paren­cy, Researcher Degrees Of Free­dom, And That NEJM Study On Youth Gen­der Med­i­cine (Jesse Sin­gal, Sub­stack): “If you com­pare that to the pro­to­col doc­u­ment, you’ll notice that of the eight key vari­ables the researchers were most inter­est­ed in — ‘gen­der dys­pho­ria, depres­sion, anx­i­ety, trau­ma symp­toms, self-injury, sui­ci­dal­i­ty, body esteem, and qual­i­ty of life’ — the ones I bold­ed are not report­ed in the NEJM paper. That’s six out of eight, or 75% of the vari­ables cov­ered by the researchers’ hypoth­e­sis in their pro­to­col doc­u­ment (includ­ing the ‘offi­cial­ly’ pre­reg­is­tered short­er ver­sion).”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. This is thor­ough. Sin­gal is real­ly, real­ly good at this. I hate to say that I am instinc­tive­ly skep­ti­cal of aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies when they touch on human sex­u­al­i­ty, but I am. It’s stuff like this over and over again.
  4. Pen­te­costal­ism from soup to nuts: A (near) com­plete his­to­ry of this move­ment in Amer­i­ca (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “With­out a doubt, the por­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty known as Pen­te­costal­ism was — by far — the fastest-grow­ing move­ment of the 20th cen­tu­ry, going from zero mem­bers on Jan. 1, 1901 to 644 mil­lion adher­ents world­wide now. It is the pri­ma­ry expres­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty in the Glob­al South. It is the one form of Chris­tian­i­ty to mount a seri­ous chal­lenge to the growth of Islam, main­ly because of its appeal to the very poor and its reliance on the mirac­u­lous.”
  5. Why Not Mars (Maciej CegÅ‚owski, per­son­al web­site): “When the great moment final­ly came, and the astro­nauts had tak­en their first Mar­t­ian self­ie, strict mis­sion rules meant to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and min­i­mize risk would leave the crew depen­dent on the same robots they’d been sent at enor­mous cost to replace. Only the microbes that lived in the space­craft, unin­formed of the mis­sion rules, would be free to go wan­der out­side. They would become the real explor­ers of Mars, and if their luck held, its first colonists.”
    • This is real­ly well-writ­ten!
  6. Mis­in­for­ma­tion on Mis­in­for­ma­tion: Con­cep­tu­al and Method­olog­i­cal Chal­lenges (Sacha Altay, Manon Berriche, & Alber­to Acer­bi, Social Media + Soci­ety): “…the inter­net is not rife with mis­in­for­ma­tion or news, but with memes and enter­tain­ing con­tent.… peo­ple do not believe every­thing they see on the inter­net: the sheer vol­ume of engage­ment should not be con­flat­ed with belief.”
    • From the abstract. The authors are at Oxford, Fon­da­tion Nationale des Sci­ences Poli­tiques, and Brunel.
  7. As Refugees Flood Into U.S., Chi­nese Chris­tians Told To Wait (Susan Crab­tree, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “The Unit­ed States could grant the church mem­bers imme­di­ate emer­gency asy­lum, as it has done for tens of thou­sands of Ukraini­ans flee­ing their war-rav­aged coun­try and the first group of Afghans air­lift­ed into the Unit­ed States amid the chaot­ic U.S. evac­u­a­tion in August 2021. Just this month, Pres­i­dent Biden announced plans to allow Venezue­lans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans flee­ing per­se­cu­tion pri­or­i­ty asy­lum sta­tus as long as they arrived by plane and had pri­vate spon­sors ready to help them reset­tle. When it comes to Chi­nese Chris­tians trapped in lim­bo, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is balk­ing, while offer­ing no expla­na­tion for the dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent treat­ment of these groups of for­eign nation­als seek­ing asy­lum. Human rights advo­cates believe they already have the answer: The Biden admin­is­tra­tion is wary of fur­ther rock­ing the boat with Chi­na amid efforts to repair basic lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

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 par­ti­cle col­lec­tion that fan­cied itself a physi­cist (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Democritus’s point is that if the atom­ist says both that atoms are all that exist and that col­or, sweet­ness, etc. and the oth­er qual­i­ties of con­scious expe­ri­ence are not to be found in the atoms, then we have a para­dox.” From vol­ume 264.

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 386

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.

386 is inter­est­ing because it feels like it ought to have lots of divi­sors, but it’s just 2 · 193. Of course you can dou­ble any prime, but it still sur­pris­es me when I run across it. Primes dou­bled are, by def­i­n­i­tion, exact­ly as rare as primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I am a Chris­t­ian (James Choi, Yale Fac­ul­ty Web­site): “There are things about Chris­tian­i­ty that are con­fus­ing or hard to accept as true. But in math, if we start with axioms that are sol­id, then we can prove easy the­o­rems based on those axioms, and then use those easy the­o­rems to prove coun­ter­in­tu­itive, seem­ing­ly false the­o­rems. We can believe the hard the­o­rems because we have con­fi­dence in the axioms and the easy the­o­rems. To me, the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ is the fun­da­men­tal the­o­rem of Chris­tian­i­ty. If we can gain con­fi­dence in this, then this pro­vides a foun­da­tion for us to have faith in the rest of the claims of Chris­tian­i­ty.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of finance at Yale. He’s had a ver­sion of this page on his offi­cial web­site ever since he was a sopho­more at Har­vard. He kept it up while apply­ing to grad school and while going on the job mar­ket. Respect.
  2. Why the Media is Hon­est and Good (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “My advice is to read the main­stream media, and trust the facts they present, while ques­tion­ing the nar­ra­tives. Under­stand where the bias­es are and cor­rect for them. Read some of their crit­ics too, but under­stand that those crit­ics are almost more biased and less intel­li­gent and hon­est than those that they attack. The few media crit­ics who are bet­ter than the press are rare and deserve your sup­port. The excep­tion here is any­thing hav­ing to do with race, gen­der, or sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, where you should under­stand that estab­lish­ment jour­nal­ists are try­ing their best but can’t be trust­ed because they’ve lost their minds, or are scared of those that have, and you’d be bet­ter off lis­ten­ing to peo­ple with can­ce­lable views.”
  3. The bat­tle of the stan­dards: why the US and UK can’t stop fight­ing the met­ric sys­tem (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “It all went back to Nim­rod, he was say­ing. Nim­rod, great-grand­son of Noah and the ‘mighty hunter before the Lord,’ who had attempt­ed to unite the world’s pop­u­la­tion by build­ing the Tow­er of Babel so that human­i­ty might climb up to Heav­en itself. ‘And God inter­vened, stop­ping him from build­ing the tow­er,’ said Tony. God then spread human­i­ty across the globe, divid­ing us up into dif­fer­ent nations with their own lan­guages and tra­di­tions. As Tony under­stood the mes­sage of the Tow­er of Babel, it was that ‘Peo­ple should live in dis­tinct nations because it pro­vides a uni­fy­ing force in their lives. It gives them a sense of pur­pose.’”
  4. What if Diver­si­ty Train­ings Are Doing More Harm Than Good? (Jesse Sin­gal, New York Times): “Over the years, social sci­en­tists who have con­duct­ed care­ful reviews of the evi­dence base for diver­si­ty train­ings have fre­quent­ly come to dis­cour­ag­ing con­clu­sions. Though diver­si­ty train­ings have been around in one form or anoth­er since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever sub­ject­ed to rig­or­ous eval­u­a­tion, and those that are most­ly appear to have lit­tle or no pos­i­tive long-term effects… Some diver­si­ty ini­tia­tives might actu­al­ly wors­en the D.E.I. cli­mates of the orga­ni­za­tions that pay for them.”
  5. If Affir­ma­tive Action Ends, Col­lege Admis­sions May Be Changed For­ev­er (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Col­leges are plan­ning behind the scenes for the court rul­ing, though they are reluc­tant to release plans, wor­ried about poten­tial­ly open­ing them­selves up to legal action. ‘“‘We don’t want to get ahead of the court, and we don’t want to give the court any ideas,’”’ Dr. Pérez said.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Who is includ­ed by “inclu­sive” lan­guage? (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “…one thing you’d learn in a fan­cy Amer­i­can school is why you shouldn’t talk about the eco­nom­ic under­de­vel­op­ment of Africa like this. You’d learn bet­ter eti­quette. Or at least dif­fer­ent eti­quette — eti­quette that will dif­fer­en­ti­ate you from less sophis­ti­cat­ed peo­ple who might run around say­ing offen­sive things about pover­ty in the Glob­al South. For instance, a per­son with­out a prop­er edu­ca­tion might refer to the coun­tries in ques­tion as ‘the third world’ with­out hav­ing read Marc Silver’s Jan­u­ary 2021 NPR piece about why this is offen­sive. But to Bright’s point, speak­ing dif­fer­ent­ly doesn’t actu­al­ly change any­thing.  And that, per­haps, is a big part of the appeal.”
  7. NHL play­er refus­es to wear Pride Night jer­sey dur­ing warm-ups, cit­ing reli­gious beliefs (Jared Gans, The Hill): “I respect every­body, and I respect everybody’s choic­es. My choice is to stay true to myself and my reli­gion,” he said while tak­ing ques­tions in the Fly­ers’ lock­er room after the team’s 5–2 vic­to­ry over the Ana­heim Ducks. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
    • Sim­ple faith­ful­ness is a beau­ti­ful thing.

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 Bib­li­cal Cri­tique of Sec­u­lar Jus­tice and Crit­i­cal The­o­ry (Tim Keller, Gospel In Life): “In the Bible Chris­tians have an ancient, rich, strong, com­pre­hen­sive, com­plex, and attrac­tive under­stand­ing of jus­tice. Bib­li­cal jus­tice dif­fers in sig­nif­i­cant ways from all the sec­u­lar alter­na­tives, with­out ignor­ing the con­cerns of any of them. Yet Chris­tians know lit­tle about bib­li­cal jus­tice, despite its promi­nence in the Scrip­tures.” The read of the week. From vol­ume 262

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 371

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 371, which like its imme­di­ate pre­de­ces­sor is one of four three-dig­it nar­cis­sis­tic num­bers, mean­ing that it has three dig­its and when you raise each dig­it to the num­ber of dig­its (in this case, to the third pow­er) they sum to the orig­i­nal num­ber:  33 + 73 + 13 = 371.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Har­vard Is Real­ly Like (Olivia Glunz, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Pres­tige and influ­ence require class dis­tinc­tions; in a tru­ly equi­table world, Har­vard does not exist. Thus, Har­vard will con­tin­ue to cham­pi­on progressivism—but nev­er enough to endan­ger its own future. Har­vard stu­dents of all polit­i­cal stripes per­ceive this hypocrisy; if any­thing, they grad­u­ate not more lib­er­al but more cyn­i­cal. So much for the for­mi­da­ble brain­wash­ing machine.… Despite the preva­lence of sec­u­lar­ism and cre­den­tial­ism at Har­vard, faith and friend­ship were cen­tral to my joy­ful first year. In fact, Chris­tian­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly Catholi­cism, is alive at Har­vard.”
    • Short but inter­est­ing, and rel­e­vant to life at Stan­ford.
  2. Why the music of Rich Mullins endures, 25 years after his death (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Mullins had all his roy­al­ties and wages go direct­ly to his accoun­tant, whom he asked to issue him an allowance equal to the aver­age work­ing-class salary at the time. The rest of his earn­ings were giv­en away, most­ly to char­i­ty. Smith tells me that Mullins ‘was scared for his own soul.’ It wasn’t that he wasn’t tempt­ed by mon­ey and fame. It’s that he knew he was tempt­ed, so he ran from it.”
  3. Rev­o­lu­tions Occur When a Sig­nif­i­cant Por­tion of Elites Defect From the Exist­ing Regime (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Social move­ments are typ­i­cal­ly led not by some­one from the under­class or the poor, but by sec­ond-tier elites. Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Che Gue­vara, America’s founders, etc. were rel­a­tive­ly edu­cat­ed and at least mid­dle-class. They were not near­ly the poor­est of their soci­eties. Far from it.  Which is why their crit­i­cisms of the elite with­in their soci­eties were so astute. They were, fig­u­ra­tive­ly speak­ing, close cousins—they saw their flaws up close.”
    • This one is real­ly good. Relat­ed but long: Diverse and Divid­ed: A Polit­i­cal Demog­ra­phy of Amer­i­can Elite Stu­dents (Eric Kauf­mann, Sub­stack): “A quar­ter of stu­dents are LGBT, and there are rough­ly equal shares of Chris­t­ian and non­re­li­gious stu­dents. LGBT, Non­re­li­gious, and Chris­tians are set to become more impor­tant polit­i­cal groups among America’s future lead­ers.”
    • The data in this lat­ter one is inter­est­ing, but it is so long you should def­i­nite­ly skim and not read.
  4. Relat­ed to jus­tice:
    • A Jury Acquit­ted Them of Var­i­ous Charges. They Served Prison Time for Them Any­way. (Bil­ly Bin­ion, Rea­son): “Can you do prison time for a crim­i­nal charge of which you were nev­er con­vict­ed? I’d ven­ture that most would assume the answer is ‘no.’ They would be wrong. Known as acquit­ted con­duct sen­tenc­ing, the prac­tice allows judges to bloat a prison term when sen­tenc­ing a defen­dant by pun­ish­ing them for a sep­a­rate charge or charges on which a jury deemed them not guilty.” Out­ra­geous. I hope the Supreme Court squash­es this 9–0.
    • Thou­sands were released from prison dur­ing covid. The results are shock­ing. (Mol­ly Gill, The Wash­ing­ton Post): “To pro­tect those most vul­ner­a­ble to covid-19 dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, the Cares Act allowed the Jus­tice Depart­ment to order the release of peo­ple in fed­er­al pris­ons and place them on home con­fine­ment. More than 11,000 peo­ple were even­tu­al­ly released. Of those, the Bureau of Pris­ons (BOP) report­ed that only 17 of them com­mit­ted new crimes. That’s not a typo. Sev­en­teen. That’s a 0.15 per­cent recidi­vism rate in a coun­try where it’s nor­mal for 30 to 65 per­cent of peo­ple com­ing home from prison to reof­fend with­in three years of release.… These 11,000 releas­es were not ran­dom. Peo­ple in low- and min­i­mum-secu­ri­ty pris­ons or at high risk of com­pli­ca­tions from covid were pri­or­i­tized for con­sid­er­a­tion for release.”
    • Stock Trades Report­ed by Near­ly a Fifth of Con­gress Show Pos­si­ble Con­flicts (Kate Kel­ly, Adam Play­ford and Ali­cia Par­lapi­ano, New York Times): “The poten­tial for con­flicts in stock trad­ing by mem­bers of Con­gress — and their choice so far not to impose stricter lim­its on them­selves — has long drawn crit­i­cism, espe­cial­ly when par­tic­u­lar­ly bla­tant cas­es emerge. But the Times analy­sis demon­strates the scale of the issue: Over the three-year peri­od, more than 3,700 trades report­ed by law­mak­ers from both par­ties posed poten­tial con­flicts between their pub­lic respon­si­bil­i­ties and pri­vate finances.… The 97 mem­bers who were flagged by the Times analy­sis amount­ed to more than half of the peo­ple who report­ed trades, and near­ly a fifth of Con­gress. The group was split almost equal­ly between Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans.”
  5. The amaz­ing pow­er of “machine eyes” (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “While there are far sim­pler ways to deter­mine gen­der [than study­ing reti­nas], it’s a 50–50 toss up for oph­thal­mol­o­gists, which means there are no vis­i­ble cues to human eyes. But now two mod­els have shown 97% accu­ra­cy of gen­der deter­mi­na­tion from neur­al net­work train­ing. That was just the begin­ning.… That work has now extend­ed to detec­tion of kid­ney dis­ease, con­trol of blood glu­cose and blood pres­sure, hepa­to­bil­iary dis­ease, a pre­vi­ous study on pre­dict­ing heart attack, close cor­re­la­tion of the reti­nal ves­sels with the heart (coro­nary) artery cal­ci­um score, and, pri­or to the new report above, the ongo­ing prospec­tive assess­ment and track­ing of Alzheimer’s dis­ease.” Wild stuff.
  6. A Nuclear Zugzwang? (Anusar Farooqui, Sub­stack): “Pre­cise­ly because Rus­sia is so weak rel­a­tive to Nato, any Rus­sia-Nato war will even­tu­al­ly esca­late into strate­gic nuclear war, the only lev­el on which the Rus­sia enjoys par­i­ty with the Unit­ed States. So, any counter-esca­la­tion by the Unit­ed States would be fraught with esca­la­tion risk and nuclear dan­ger.”
    • The author has a PhD in math­e­mat­ics but writes exten­sive­ly about for­eign pol­i­cy. I have had mul­ti­ple smart peo­ple rec­om­mend this arti­cle and final­ly gave it a read.

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 Porn Restric­tion for Real­ists (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…a world where the tube-sites are gone and peo­ple must go back to pay­ing for their porn is a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment over the world we live in now. This world is pos­si­ble: it exist­ed two decades ago. Tech­no­log­i­cal change is part of what hap­pened, but only part. Just as impor­tant in the cre­ation of the new, porn-flushed world we live are legal pro­tec­tions giv­en to web­sites like Porn­Hub and X Ham­ster which allow them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for the theft their busi­ness mod­el is based on. It also allows them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for much worse sins.” From vol­ume 242.

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 359

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.

359 is the 72nd prime num­ber, and is also what is known as a Sophie Ger­main prime because if you dou­ble it and add 1 the result (719) is also prime.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Faith The Ene­my of Sci­ence? (Glen Scriven­er, Twit­ter): a good 90 sec­ond video
  2. I Don’t Want to See a High School Foot­ball Coach Pray­ing at the 50-Yard Line (Anne Lam­ott, New York Times): “How do peo­ple like me who believe entire­ly in sci­ence and rea­son also believe that prayer can heal and restore? Well, I’ve seen it hap­pen a thou­sand times in my own incon­se­quen­tial life. God seems like a total showoff to me, if per­haps unnec­es­sar­i­ly cryp­tic.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing op-ed.
  3. On mas­culin­i­ty:
    • Against the Extrem­ism of the Amer­i­can Mas­culin­i­ty Debate (David French, The Dis­patch): “While there are many mil­lions of men and boys who do quite well in our coun­try, the vast major­i­ty of our nation’s young men are falling behind their female peers. I quot­ed this sta­tis­tic in my last newslet­ter, but it’s worth quot­ing again: Men account for 70 per­cent of the decline in enroll­ment in Amer­i­can col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.”
    • So Jor­dan Peter­son post­ed a video mes­sage to the Church. Mes­sage to the Chris­t­ian Church­es (Jor­dan Peter­son, YouTube: eleven min­utes. It’s gen­er­at­ed thoughts:
    • Church: Where Are The Men? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Peter­son means it lit­er­al­ly when he com­plains here that most church­es offer noth­ing for young men. Men feel unwant­ed in these fem­i­nized precincts, and there is often noth­ing much to attract or hold them to con­gre­ga­tion­al life.” This post is LONG and ven­tures deep­er into church his­to­ry than I expect­ed it to.
    • Jor­dan Peterson’s “Mes­sage to Chris­t­ian Church­es” Is Non­sense (Tyler Huck­abee, Rel­e­vant): “He’s found an audi­ence and that’s fine, but when Peter­son steers out­side of his lane, you can tell. And on Wednes­day, Peter­son veered well out­side of his lane with this ‘Mes­sage to Chris­t­ian Church­es.’ It is ridicu­lous.”
    • Cross­ing the Jor­dan (Matthew Hosier, Think­The­ol­o­gy): “There is much about this mes­sage that I find salu­tary and invig­o­rat­ing. As I say, it made me laugh and cry and cheer. Although, with­out clar­i­ty about the aton­ing work of Christ on the cross, with­out a prop­er notion of grace, Peterson’s appeal rep­re­sents only a robust Pela­gian­ism and is there­fore insuf­fi­cient to deal with our most fun­da­men­tal prob­lem. Pela­gian­ism does not offer a solu­tion to the prob­lem of orig­i­nal sin; at best it can ame­lio­rate the symp­toms, not cure the dis­ease.”
  4. Book Review: The Man From The Future (Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexan­der): “…after a life­time of cul­tur­al­ly-Jew­ish athe­ism, he wished to be bap­tized. His daugh­ter attrib­uted her father’s ‘change of heart’ to Pascal’s Wager: the idea that even a very small prob­a­bil­i­ty of gain­ing a bet­ter after­life is worth the rel­a­tive­ly triv­ial cost of a deathbed con­ver­sion. Even as his pow­ers desert­ed him, John von Neu­mann remained a game the­o­rist to the end.” Fas­ci­nat­ing through­out.
  5. Arrest made in rape of Ohio girl that led to Indi­ana abor­tion draw­ing inter­na­tion­al atten­tion (Bethany Bruner, Mon­roe Trombly, Tony Cook, The Colum­bus Dis­patch): “A Colum­bus man has been charged with impreg­nat­ing a 10-year-old Ohio girl, whose trav­el to Indi­ana to seek an abor­tion led to inter­na­tion­al atten­tion fol­low­ing the Supreme Court’s deci­sion to over­turn Roe v Wade and acti­va­tion of Ohio’s abor­tion law.”
  6. Whose breath are you breath­ing? (Farah Han­cock, Radio New Zealand): “At 5737ppm, the equiv­a­lent of one in every sev­en breaths I took on the bus was air oth­er peo­ple had breathed out. I texted a friend: ‘OMG, the read­ings are so high I may as well let the oth­er pas­sen­gers lick my face!’ I was being a lit­tle gross, because even accord­ing to a sci­en­tist, it is a lit­tle gross. ‘You can think of it as spit par­ti­cles, tiny spit par­ti­cles are what you are breath­ing in,’ says Uni­ver­si­ty of Auck­land aerosol chemist Dr Joel Rinde­laub. ‘It’s breath back­wash that gets peo­ple infect­ed.’ ”
    • First, “breath back­wash” is a mag­nif­i­cent term. Kudos. Sec­ond, I’m pret­ty sure the math is more com­pli­cat­ed than the arti­cle makes it seem. I would nonethe­less love see­ing CO2 meters in pub­lic places.
  7. How Uni­ver­si­ties Weaponize Fresh­man Ori­en­ta­tion (Abi­gail Antho­ny, Nation­al Review): “Ide­al­ly, fresh­man ori­en­ta­tion should be a pro­ce­dur­al, social assim­i­la­tion to famil­iar­ize stu­dents with the resources the uni­ver­si­ty offers and how to access them. How­ev­er, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty under­took a mis­sion to present incom­ing stu­dents with sex­u­al, moral, and polit­i­cal guid­ance, whol­ly omit­ting wide­ly held per­spec­tives and effec­tive­ly insu­lat­ing pro­gres­sive views from intel­lec­tu­al tri­al. More­over, atten­dance at these events was com­pul­so­ry, thus con­sti­tut­ing an ide­o­log­i­cal haz­ing.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The lines in this checker­board pat­tern are straight (Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s work on some ran­dom blog)
  • Turn­about (The Far Side)
  • Down Mem­o­ry Lame (Load­ing Artist) — relat­able
  • Humans Will Believe Any­thing They Hear (Bengt Wash­burn, YouTube): six min­utes. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. It sound­ed famil­iar so I searched the archives and saw I shared it back in vol­ume 310. It was def­i­nite­ly worth watch­ing again!
  • “Eat the Rich” ice cream truck sells $10 pop­si­cles shaped like Bezos, Musk, oth­ers (Khristo­pher J. Brooks, CBS News): “An artists’ col­lec­tive in Brook­lyn is sell­ing pop­si­cles shaped like bil­lion­aires includ­ing Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with the tagline ‘Eat the Rich.’ But the $10 price tag on the frozen treats has some peo­ple point­ing out the irony of crit­i­ciz­ing the world’s wealth­i­est while engag­ing in ‘peak cap­i­tal­ism.’ ” Warn­ing: auto­plays unre­lat­ed videos.
  • BMW starts sell­ing heat­ed seat sub­scrip­tions for $18 a month (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “Car­mak­ers have always charged cus­tomers more mon­ey for high-end fea­tures, of course, but the dynam­ic is very dif­fer­ent when soft­ware, rather than hard­ware, is the lim­it­ing fac­tor. Charg­ing more for high-end fea­tures feels dif­fer­ent when you already own them In the case of heat­ed seats, for exam­ple, BMW own­ers already have all the nec­es­sary com­po­nents, but BMW has sim­ply placed a soft­ware block on their func­tion­al­i­ty that buy­ers then have to pay to remove.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. This actu­al­ly prob­a­bly belongs up in the seri­ous cat­e­go­ry because it’s an omen of the future.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Church, inten­sive kin­ship, and glob­al psy­cho­log­i­cal vari­a­tion (Schulz et al, Sci­ence): “…we pro­pose that the West­ern Church (i.e., the branch of Chris­tian­i­ty that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church) trans­formed Euro­pean kin­ship struc­tures dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages and that this trans­for­ma­tion was a key fac­tor behind a shift towards a WEIRD­er psy­chol­o­gy.” At the time I first shared it I said, “This is real­ly inter­est­ing if it holds up.” I did a quick lit­er­a­ture church and the result seems to be hold­ing. 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 344

344 is the 8th octa­he­dral num­ber

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 344, and 344 is the 8th octa­he­dral num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. No, Chris­tian­i­ty Is Not as Bad as You Think (Josh How­er­ton, The Gospel Coali­tion): “In addi­tion to hav­ing flaws and sins, church­es also have an Ene­my whose pri­ma­ry weapon is lies.… Satan tries to decon­struct the church Jesus is con­struct­ing (Matt. 16:18) by lever­ag­ing her faults to slan­der her with plau­si­ble false nar­ra­tives. And that is exact­ly what we find: a wide and grow­ing gap between cul­tur­al nar­ra­tives about Chris­tian­i­ty and the real­i­ty of Chris­tian­i­ty.”
  2. The truth about nuclear deter­rence (Hebert Lin, Insti­tute of Art and Ideas): “… it pre­sumes all nuclear pow­ers rec­og­nize their ulti­mate self-inter­est in avoid­ing nuclear war, since nuclear war would lead to dev­as­ta­tion for both sides. But this neat pic­ture becomes very messy very quick­ly when one real­izes that nations have oth­er goals in addi­tion to that of avoid­ing nuclear war.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. Gov­ern­ment Is Flail­ing, in Part Because Lib­er­als Hob­bled It (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “..one generation’s solu­tions have become the next generation’s prob­lems. Process­es meant to pro­mote cit­i­zen involve­ment have them­selves been cap­tured by cor­po­rate inter­ests and rich NIM­BYs. Laws meant to ensure that gov­ern­ment con­sid­ers the con­se­quences of its actions have made it too dif­fi­cult for gov­ern­ment to act con­se­quen­tial­ly.” This is quite good. This is not an angry par­ti­san piece — Klein is him­self a lib­er­al engag­ing in pub­lic reflec­tion.
  4. Some arti­cles about trans­gen­derism:
  5. What Oper­a­tion Warp Speed Did, Didn’t and Can’t Do (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “First, it’s impor­tant to under­stand that OWS did not cre­ate any sci­en­tif­ic inno­va­tions or dis­cov­er­ies. The inno­v­a­tive mRNA vac­cines are right­ly laud­ed but all of the key sci­en­tif­ic ideas behind mRNA as a deliv­ery mech­a­nism long pre­date Oper­a­tion Warp Speed. The sci­en­tif­ic advances were the result of many decades of work, some of it sup­port­ed by uni­ver­si­ty and gov­ern­ment fund­ing and also a sig­nif­i­cant frac­tion by large pri­vate invest­ments in firms such as Mod­er­na and BioN­Tech. It was BioN­Tech recall that hired Katal­in Karikó (and many oth­er mRNA researchers) when she couldn’t get uni­ver­si­ty or gov­ern­ment fund­ing. Since OWS cre­at­ed no new sci­en­tif­ic break­throughs there isn’t much to learn from OWS about the effi­ca­cy of large scale pro­grams for that pur­pose.” Inter­est­ing through­out.
  6. Thread about can­cel cul­ture (Greg Lukianoff, Twit­ter): “We tracked 563 attempts to get schol­ars can­celed since 2015 — includ­ing 283 just since 2020. Near­ly 2/3 were suc­cess­ful, result­ing in sanc­tion, & 1‑in‑5 result­ed in ter­mi­na­tion (that includes 30 tenured pro­fes­sors!).”
  7. We are rein­stat­ing our SAT/ACT require­ment for future admis­sions cycles (Stu Schmill, MIT Admis­sions): “…stan­dard­ized tests also help us iden­ti­fy aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly pre­pared, socioe­co­nom­i­cal­ly dis­ad­van­taged stu­dents who could not oth­er­wise demon­strate readi­ness⁠ because they do not attend schools that offer advanced course­work, can­not afford expen­sive enrich­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties, can­not expect lengthy let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion from their over­bur­dened teach­ers, or are oth­er­wise ham­pered by edu­ca­tion­al inequal­i­ties.⁠” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.

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 An Epi­dem­ic of Dis­be­lief (Bar­bara Bradley Hager­ty, The Atlantic): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, inves­ti­ga­tors had assumed that some­one who assaults a stranger by the rail­road tracks is noth­ing like the man who assaults his co-worker or his girl­friend. But it turns out that the space between acquain­tance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza. When Cleve­land inves­ti­ga­tors uploaded the DNA from the acquaintance-rape kits, they were sur­prised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes. The task force iden­ti­fied dozens of mys­tery rapists this way.” Infu­ri­at­ing and high­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 211.

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 342

the long col­lec­tions of links are at the end — punchy stuff up top

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 342, which is 666 in base 7. Do with that infor­ma­tion as you see fit.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I Came to Col­lege Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Cen­sor­ship Instead. (Emma Camp, New York Times): “…my col­lege expe­ri­ence has been defined by strict ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty. Stu­dents of all polit­i­cal per­sua­sions hold back — in class dis­cus­sions, in friend­ly con­ver­sa­tions, on social media — from say­ing what we real­ly think. Even as a lib­er­al who has attend­ed abor­tion rights protests and writ­ten about stand­ing up to racism, I some­times feel afraid to ful­ly speak my mind.”
    • This is a strong col­umn. And the anec­dote about her first amend­ment sign is amus­ing.
  2. We’re All Sin­ners, and Accept­ing That Is Actu­al­ly a Good Thing (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “My favorite def­i­n­i­tion of sin comes from the Eng­lish author Fran­cis Spufford. He says that most of us in the West think of sin as a word that ‘basi­cal­ly means “indul­gence” or “enjoy­able naugh­ti­ness.“ ‘ Instead, he calls sin ‘the human propen­si­ty to mess things up’ — only he doesn’t use the word ‘mess,’ and his word is prob­a­bly clos­er to the truth of things.”
    • This sen­tence from lat­er on was quite good: “The Luther­an the­olo­gian Mar­tin Mar­ty wrote that we live in a cul­ture where ‘every­thing is per­mit­ted and noth­ing is for­giv­en.’ ”
  3. Women who self-objec­ti­fy are less aware of the cold dur­ing nights out, study finds (Beth Elwood, Psy­Post): “Self-objec­ti­fi­ca­tion is when a per­son is over­ly con­cerned with how oth­ers per­ceive their appear­ance. When peo­ple self-objec­ti­fy, they view them­selves as objects of attrac­tion. Inter­est­ing­ly, a greater ten­den­cy to self-objec­ti­fy has been asso­ci­at­ed with reduced atten­tion to one’s bod­i­ly process­es, for exam­ple, dif­fi­cul­ty iden­ti­fy­ing feel­ings of hunger.”
    • “Self-objec­ti­fy.” I love when we come up with new words that we don’t need. Vain will do fine, thank you. And I doubt this is as gen­dered as the head­line sug­gests — I see frat bros in their mus­cle shirts even when it is chilly out. Vain peo­ple are appar­ent­ly not lying when they say they don’t feel the cold.
  4. A feud between mail car­ri­ers, wild turkeys comes to a dead­ly cli­max near Sacra­men­to (Chris­t­ian Mar­tinez, LA Times): “For months, mail car­ri­ers in the Sacra­men­to Coun­ty enclave of Arden-Arcade have been ter­ror­ized by wild turkeys, at times dis­rupt­ing deliv­er­ies. This week, ten­sions between the fowl and one U.S. Postal Ser­vice work­er reached a vio­lent cli­max when the car­ri­er killed a turkey while on duty, offi­cials said, prompt­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion by the Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Fish and Wildlife.”
    • If a crime was com­mit­ted then Cal­i­for­nia laws need reform. If self-defense is a legit­i­mate excuse in human death how much more when an ani­mal is killed? I stan the let­ter car­ri­er.
  5. On Ukraine:
    • Why Fore­cast­ing War Is Hard (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “If North Korea can main­tain a for­mi­da­ble army, I sus­pect that Rus­sia can too no mat­ter how bad sanc­tions get.… I keep try­ing to play the sce­nario out in my head as to what a Russ­ian loss looks like and it’s hard to see it.”
    • Ukraine is around the same size as Texas. (My Life Else­where)
    • The U.S. Is Not at War, But Its Civ­il Soci­ety Is Mobi­liz­ing Against Rus­sia (Ben­jamin Park­er, The Bul­wark): “While no state of war exists between the gov­ern­ment of the Unit­ed States and the gov­ern­ment of Rus­sia, a sort of opt-in, cul­tur­al-eco­nom­ic qua­si-war exists between Amer­i­can civ­il soci­ety and the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment. The same goes for many if not all of the oth­er coun­tries arrayed against Rus­sia. This rais­es lots of inter­est­ing and dif­fi­cult ques­tions…”
    • Relat­ed: Putin Dons Pres­i­dent Xi Mask So Com­pa­nies Will Stop Boy­cotting Them (Baby­lon Bee): ouch
    • Go Ahead. Pray for Putin’s Demise. (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Very often in the impre­ca­to­ry psalms, we are ask­ing that people’s evil actions would ric­o­chet back on them­selves. We are not pray­ing that vio­lence begets more vio­lence or that evil starts a cycle of vengeance or retal­i­a­tion. But we are pray­ing that peo­ple would be destroyed by their own schemes and, as my pro­fes­sor prayed, that bombs would explode in bombers’ faces.”
    • They Pre­dict­ed the Ukraine War. But Did They Still Get It Wrong? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s a curi­ous fea­ture of West­ern debate since Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine that a school of thought that pre­dict­ed some ver­sion of this con­flict has been depict­ed as dis­cred­it­ed by the par­tial ful­fill­ment of its prophe­cies.”
    • Ukraine’s Believ­ers and the ‘Chris­t­ian’ Putin (Mindy Belz, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Pro-Russ­ian fight­ers in Don­bas seized church­es and Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties, some vio­lent­ly. Mili­ti­a­men abduct­ed, tor­tured and killed four Pen­te­costal dea­cons. Their bod­ies were found in a mass grave along with two dozen oth­ers. One watch­dog group, the Euro­pean Evan­gel­i­cal Alliance, called Don­bas ‘the area of Europe where the church suf­fers the most.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Face­book allows war posts urg­ing vio­lence against Russ­ian invaders (Mun­sif Ven­gat­til & Eliz­a­beth Cul­li­ford, Reuters): “The calls for the lead­ers’ deaths will be allowed unless they con­tain oth­er tar­gets or have two indi­ca­tors of cred­i­bil­i­ty, such as the loca­tion or method, one email said, in a recent change to the com­pa­ny’s rules on vio­lence and incite­ment.”
      • It’s like a mod­ern-day ver­sion of the reli­gious gym­nas­tics Jesus con­demned in Mark 7:9–13. Face­book is opposed to calls for vio­lence except when they are not.
    • Why white evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are Putin’s biggest Amer­i­can fan base (Anthea But­ler, MSNBC): “…more pro-Putin Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals are com­ing into sharp focus. Tel­e­van­ge­list Pat Robert­son pro­claimed that Putin is ‘being com­pelled by God’ to invade Ukraine — his take on Putin’s moti­va­tions is ques­tion­able at best, but his sup­port for Putin as part of a divine plan is notable.”
      • Ummm… not a Pat Robert­son fan­boy here, but I feel the need to point out to the author that Judas was part of a divine plan. Being part of a divine plan is not auto­mat­i­cal­ly com­mend­able. The arti­cle is inter­est­ing regard­less.
    • The Real Rus­sia ‘Reset’: Reassess­ing US Sanc­tions Pol­i­cy Against Rus­sia (Daniel P. Ahn, Rus­sia Mat­ters):  “…the pecu­niary cost of sanc­tions to Rus­sia has been larg­er than pre­vi­ous­ly esti­mat­ed, but these sanc­tions have had an effect on domes­tic pol­i­tics that is not nec­es­sar­i­ly favor­able to U.S. inter­ests. Name­ly, the Russ­ian government’s attempts to pro­tect eco­nom­ic sec­tors it con­sid­ers strate­gic have made the country’s pow­er­ful elites even more depen­dent on the Krem­lin, while the bot­tom-line costs are borne by ordi­nary peo­ple.”
      • This is recent yet from before the cur­rent sanc­tions in response to the inva­sion of Ukraine (and thus less caught up in the moment). Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. On the pan­dem­ic:
    • Tol­er­at­ing COVID Mis­in­for­ma­tion Is Bet­ter Than the Alter­na­tive (Conor Frieder­s­dor, The Atlantic): “On Decem­ber 30, 2019, Li Wen­liang, an oph­thal­mol­o­gist at Wuhan Cen­tral Hos­pi­tal in Hubei, Chi­na, began to warn friends and col­leagues about the out­break of a nov­el res­pi­ra­to­ry ill­ness. Four days lat­er, he was sum­moned to appear before local author­i­ties, who rep­ri­mand­ed him for ‘mak­ing false com­ments’ that ‘severe­ly dis­turbed the social order.’ In hind­sight, Li was the first per­son accused of dis­sem­i­nat­ing med­ical mis­in­for­ma­tion dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, despite the fact that he was telling the truth.”
    • Sec­ondary Attack Rates for Omi­cron and Delta Vari­ants of SARS-CoV­‑2 in Nor­we­gian House­holds (Jør­gensen, Nygård & Kacel­nik, JAMA): “Sec­ondary attack rate [chance of trans­mit­ting to some­one else in your house­hold] was 25.1% (95% CI, 24.4%-25.9%) when the vari­ant of the index case was Omi­cron, 19.4% (95% CI, 19.0%-19.8%) when it was Delta, and 17.9% (95% CI, 17.5%-18.4%) when it was non­clas­si­fied.”
      • This is straight-up sur­pris­ing to me. If you got COVID there was only a 1/5 to 1/4 chance of spread­ing it to the peo­ple who live with you. This is based on nation­al-lev­el Nor­we­gian data and I don’t know enough about Nor­way’s archi­tec­ture, cul­ture, or COVID restric­tions com­pared to the USA to know how well this maps to us, but it’s real­ly inter­est­ing. For con­text, when I got COVID so did most (but not all) of my fam­i­ly.
    • An Anti-Vax Judge Is Pre­vent­ing the Navy From Deploy­ing a War­ship (Mark Joseph Stern, Slate): “The Navy and the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry are there­fore in a stand­off. The Navy will not deploy Doe’s war­ship until he is stripped of com­mand [because of his response to COVID]. Mer­ry­day will not allow it to do so. As a result, Mer­ry­day has effec­tive­ly tak­en a 10,000 ton, $1.8 bil­lion guid­ed-mis­sile destroy­er out of com­mis­sion.”
      • This is more of an op-ed than an arti­cle and is very hos­tile to the offi­cer and the judge. Nonethe­less inter­est­ing.
    • Destroy­er can’t deploy because CO won’t get COVID vac­cine, Navy says (Geoff Ziezulewicz, Navy Times): “But accord­ing to Mat Staver of the Lib­er­ty Coun­sel, a reli­gious free­dom non-prof­it rep­re­sent­ing the plain­tiffs, the gov­ern­ment is ‘putting in these histri­on­ic kinds of state­ments into the record that are com­plete­ly con­trary to the evi­dence.’ While Navy lead­ers have pro­fessed lost con­fi­dence in the CO, they still sent him and his ship out to sea for two weeks of train­ing, Staver told Navy Times on Mon­day. ‘When this was filed in court say­ing the ship is not deploy­able because they lost con­fi­dence in the Com­man­der, the Com­man­der was on board the ship out to sea for two weeks of test­ing and train­ing for mil­i­tary readi­ness,’ Staver said.”
      • A more com­pre­hen­sive account­ing. The legal con­text about the require­ments of RFRA at the end are clar­i­fy­ing.
  7. Flori­da’s edu­ca­tion bill:
    • For the bill: Why are they real­ly want­i­ng to talk to 1st graders about sex­u­al­i­ty? (Peter Heck, Sub­stack): “What am I miss­ing? Why are there peo­ple so invest­ed in talk­ing to kinder­gart­ners about sex that they are rail­ing against this law and ral­ly­ing Hol­ly­wood, media, and their entire pro­gres­sive pop cul­ture appa­ra­tus into mis­rep­re­sent­ing and revers­ing it?”
    • For the bill: “Don’t Say Gay” is a lie (Allie Beth Stuck­ey, World): “..what is the well-mean­ing, rea­son­able oppo­si­tion to this bill? I am hard-pressed to think of one valid rea­son, even as I have attempt­ed a good faith effort of putting myself in a progressive’s shoes. The most char­i­ta­ble expla­na­tion I can give is that most peo­ple angri­ly protest­ing and report­ing on the bill have not read it.”
    • Against the bill: Bills like ‘Don’t Say Gay’ hurt LGBTQ youth already at high risk of sui­cide (Amit Paley, USA Today): “LGBTQ youth are already placed at sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased risk for sui­cide because of how they are mis­treat­ed and stig­ma­tized. The Trevor Project’s  2021 Nation­al Sur­vey on LGBTQ Youth Men­tal Health, cap­tur­ing the expe­ri­ences of near­ly 35,000 LGBTQ youth across the Unit­ed States, found that 42% of respon­dents seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered attempt­ing sui­cide in the past year, includ­ing more than half of trans and non­bi­na­ry youth.”
    • The above claim in aca­d­e­m­ic con­text: Sui­cide by Clin­ic-Referred Trans­gen­der Ado­les­cents in the Unit­ed King­dom (Michael Big­gs, Archives of Sex­u­al Behav­ior): “From 2010 to 2020, four patients were known or sus­pect­ed to have died by sui­cide, out of about 15,000 patients (includ­ing those on the wait­ing list). To cal­cu­late the annu­al sui­cide rate, the total num­ber of years spent by patients under the clinic’s care is esti­mat­ed at about 30,000. This yields an annu­al sui­cide rate of 13 per 100,000 (95% con­fi­dence inter­val: 4–34). Com­pared to the Unit­ed King­dom pop­u­la­tion of sim­i­lar age and sex­u­al com­po­si­tion, the sui­cide rate for patients at the GIDS was 5.5 times high­er.”
      • Sum­ma­ry: this study sug­gests that UK youth who con­sid­er them­selves trans are more like­ly to attempt sui­cide than their peers but at a much low­er rate than the fifty per­cent which is often thrown around. The sui­cide rate among this pop­u­la­tion is actu­al­ly thou­sands of times small­er than that, slight­ly above one hun­dredth of one per­cent. Each of those deaths is a tragedy, and hav­ing an accu­rate under­stand­ing of the prob­lem is essen­tial to plan­ning effec­tive soci­etal respons­es.
      • Inci­den­tal­ly, this far low­er num­ber is actu­al­ly com­pat­i­ble with the 50% claim in the pre­ced­ing arti­cle when the phrase “seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered attempt­ing sui­cide” is right­ly under­stood. The aca­d­e­m­ic paper delves into some rel­e­vant con­sid­er­a­tions and I com­mend it to you.

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 Asym­met­ric Weapons Gone Bad (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every day we do things that we can’t eas­i­ly jus­ti­fy. If some­one were to argue that we shouldn’t do the thing, they would win eas­i­ly. We would respond by cut­ting that per­son out of our life, and con­tin­u­ing to do the thing.” This entire series of arti­cles (this is the fourth, the oth­ers are linked at the top of it) is 100% worth read­ing. It’s a very inter­est­ing way to think about the lim­its of rea­son and the wis­dom hid­den in tra­di­tion. First shared in vol­ume 206.

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 331

the Christ­mas Eve edi­tion

Mer­ry Christ­mas! 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 331, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Mark Lowry, Did You Know Your Mary Song Would Be Con­tro­ver­sial? (Bob Smi­etana, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “He added that most of the ques­tions he had did not make their way into the song—only the ones that rhymed made it.”
  2. Kid­napped Mis­sion­ar­ies Made Dar­ing Escape from Their Cap­tors, Fled for Their Lives on Foot at Night (Steve War­ren, CBN News): “ ‘After much dis­cus­sion and prayer, they became solid­ly unit­ed that God seemed to be lead­ing them [to escape]. He said they sought spe­cif­ic signs from God, and He con­firmed over and over that the tim­ing was­n’t right yet. Then, the night of Wednes­day, Decem­ber 15 arrived. When they sensed the tim­ing was right, they found a way to open the door that was closed and blocked, filed silent­ly to the path that they had cho­sen to fol­low, and quick­ly left the place that they were held despite the fact that numer­ous guards were close by,’ Showal­ter said.”
  3. COVID relat­ed news
    • Media Ignores GOOD NEWS On Pan­dem­ic (Break­ing Points, YouTube): thir­teen encour­ag­ing min­utes. The title is a lit­tle click­baity, but I guess they got­ta pay the bills.
    • The F.D.A. clears Pfizer’s Covid pills for high-risk patients 12 and old­er. (Rebec­ca Rob­bins and Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “With­in a week of autho­riza­tion, Pfiz­er is expect­ed to deliv­er to the Unit­ed States enough of its pills to cov­er 65,000 Amer­i­cans. At cur­rent infec­tion rates, that would be enough sup­ply for less than one day if it were giv­en to half of peo­ple in the Unit­ed States who test pos­i­tive for the virus. Pfiz­er is expect­ed to deliv­er to the Unit­ed States anoth­er 200,000 treat­ment cours­es in Jan­u­ary and then anoth­er 150,000 treat­ment cours­es in Feb­ru­ary. The pace of deliv­er­ies is expect­ed to increase sharply after that.” This is tremen­dous news.
    • Pro­fes­sion­al Sports Are Learn­ing to Live With COVID. We’re Next. (Will Leitch, NY Mag): “The leagues are now admit­ting what most of us are real­iz­ing but wary of say­ing out loud: COVID is just a part of our lives now, and if we don’t learn to live with it, we’re nev­er going to be able to do any­thing.”
    • The Vac­cine Moment, part three (Paul Kingsnorth, Sub­stack): “It’s fair to say that the ‘con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists’ have had a good pan­dem­ic.”
    • Covid Pan­ic is a Site of Inter-Elite Com­pe­ti­tion (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Rare and fatal events some­times occur; that’s life. When you can you mit­i­gate the risk. Death from a car acci­dent is far more like­ly for me than death from Covid. It’s still rare, but there’s a risk, and putting on a seat­belt is a rea­son­able mit­i­ga­tion tac­tic. Sim­ply nev­er get­ting in a car, though, would not be rea­son­able. The risk reduc­tion would not out­weigh the con­sid­er­able costs. So I don’t make that bar­gain. And thus with Covid. I’m vac­ci­nat­ed, I mask in most indoor set­tings, and if I devel­op symp­toms I’ll imme­di­ate­ly seek a test and quar­an­tine myself. Those are accept­able trade­offs, for me. As a now triple-vaxxed per­son who has had the virus pre­vi­ous­ly I am intent on liv­ing my life as nor­mal­ly as pos­si­ble, which includes not undu­ly wor­ry­ing about it or demand­ing oth­ers do so. And I would argue that expect­ing oth­er­wise from me would make you func­tion­al­ly an anti-vaxxer.”
    • Why the Supreme Court Hasn’t Ruled (For Now) on Vac­cine Man­dates (Mark Movs­esian, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “The Court has not explained its rea­sons in these cas­es. But the jus­tices’ cau­tion is not sur­pris­ing, for a few rea­sons. First, reli­gious exemp­tion claims gen­er­al­ly pose hard ques­tions, which are par­tic­u­lar­ly trou­ble­some in this con­text. The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has inten­si­fied divi­sions about the val­ue of reli­gion and reli­gious free­dom in our coun­try, and the jus­tices might wish to avoid doing some­thing to pro­voke fur­ther con­flict. Sec­ond, the Maine and New York law­suits are cur­rent­ly at the pre­lim­i­nary injunc­tion stage, and the fac­tu­al records in the cas­es are still unclear. The Court might rea­son­ably think that it should allow the low­er courts an oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­sid­er the claims fur­ther before it issues any rul­ings. Final­ly, the Court might think that state and local gov­ern­ments will them­selves see the pru­dence of offer­ing reli­gious exemp­tions, as many already have done, con­sid­er­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties vac­cine man­dates have cre­at­ed for health­care and oth­er ser­vices.”
  4. COVID-adja­cent but real­ly about the FDA
    • The FDA Has Punt­ed Deci­sions About Luvox Pre­scrip­tion To The Deep­est Recess­es Of The Human Soul (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “As a psy­chi­a­trist, I’m not sup­posed to say flip­pant things like ‘we give SSRIs out like can­dy’. We do care­ful risk-ben­e­fit analy­sis and when appro­pri­ate we screen patients for var­i­ous risk fac­tors. But after we do all that stuff, we give them to 10% of Amer­i­cans, com­pared to 12% of Amer­i­cans who got can­dy last Hal­loween. So you can draw your own con­clu­sion about how severe we think the risks are.”
    • This Sci­en­tist Cre­at­ed a Rapid Test Just Weeks Into the Pan­dem­ic. Here’s Why You Still Can’t Get It. (Lydia DePil­lis, ProP­ub­li­ca): “Amer­i­can med­ical device reg­u­la­tors have nev­er been enthu­si­as­tic about let­ting peo­ple test them­selves. In the 1980s, the FDA banned home tests for HIV on the grounds that peo­ple who test­ed pos­i­tive might do harm to them­selves if they did not receive simul­ta­ne­ous coun­sel­ing. In the 2010s, the agency cracked down on home genet­ic test­ing kits, con­cerned that peo­ple might make rash med­ical deci­sions as a result.”
  5. Also COVID-adja­cent but real­ly about Face­book: Rapid Response: Open let­ter from The BMJ to Mark Zucker­berg (Fiona Godlee & Kam­ran Abbasi, The BMJ): “We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high qual­i­ty infor­ma­tion provider to have been affect­ed by the incom­pe­tence of Meta’s fact check­ing regime.… Rather than invest­ing a pro­por­tion of Meta’s sub­stan­tial prof­its to help ensure the accu­ra­cy of med­ical infor­ma­tion shared through social media, you have appar­ent­ly del­e­gat­ed respon­si­bil­i­ty to peo­ple incom­pe­tent in car­ry­ing out this cru­cial task.”
  6. Why the **** Do You Trust Har­vard? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Har­vard exists to make sure our soci­ety is not equal. That is Harvard’s func­tion. You get that they just want to make it eas­i­er to turn down the poor but bril­liant chil­dren of Asian immi­grants, right? You under­stand that what Har­vard and its feck­less peers would like is to admit few­er stu­dents whose Kore­an par­ents clear $40,000 a year from their con­ve­nience stores, right? And you think, what, they’re going to be walk­ing around Brownsville, hand­ing out admis­sions let­ters to kids with holes in their pock­ets and a dream in their hearts? To the extent that any Black stu­dents are added to the mix by these poli­cies, it’s going to be the Jaden and Wil­low Smiths of the world. If you think Har­vard has any actu­al, gen­uine desire to fill its cam­pus with more poor Amer­i­can-born descen­dants of African slaves you are out of your fuck­ing mind.” Lan­guage warn­ing, in case that was not obvi­ous from the title. Also, much more cor­rect than many peo­ple would like to believe
  7. For­eign Drones Tip the Bal­ance in Ethiopia’s Civ­il War (Declan Walsh, New York Times): “Mr. Singer, the drone expert, said the exper­i­men­ta­tion with drone war­fare in Ethiopia and Libya has par­al­lels with the Span­ish Civ­il War in the 1930s, when out­side pow­ers used the fight to test new mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies and to gauge inter­na­tion­al reac­tion to deter­mine what they could get away with. ‘It’s a com­bi­na­tion of war and bat­tle lab,’ he said.”

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 Amer­i­ca in one tweet:“We are liv­ing in an era of woke cap­i­tal­ism in which com­pa­nies pre­tend to care about social jus­tice to sell prod­ucts to peo­ple who pre­tend to hate cap­i­tal­ism.” (Clay Rout­ledge, Twit­ter) First shared in vol­ume 186.

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.