Tag: mathematics

TGFI, Volume 551: atheism, AI, and cool math

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

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘The Rea­son I’m Not an Athe­ist Is That I Think the Philo­soph­i­cal Argu­ments Against It Are Unan­swer­able (Peter Wehn­er inter­view­ing David Bent­ley Hart, New York Times): “But my first piece of advice on theod­i­cy has always been to avoid theod­i­cy, because any attempt to jus­ti­fy the ways of God to man in terms of why this hap­pened already pre­sumes a kind moral tele­ol­o­gy to evil. Here’s what I mean by that: theod­i­cy tries to show how evil exists as part of a great plan to achieve some greater good, which of course jus­ti­fies evil. It makes it seem as if, yes, it’s sad that lit­tle girl died of can­cer, but in the end it was nec­es­sary. That strikes me as obscene. What­ev­er one thinks of that, the New Tes­ta­ment nev­er speaks in such terms.… My fear of theod­i­cy is that it becomes not just a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of God but a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of evil. It’s not just that I’m try­ing to jus­ti­fy God in the face of a child dying from diph­the­ria or a death camp; I’m actu­al­ly jus­ti­fy­ing the death of that child and that death camp.”
    • Unlocked. A fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with which I found myself enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly agree­ing and vehe­ment­ly dis­agree­ing from para­graph to para­graph. Very long.
  2. Some inter­est­ing AI con­tent.
    • Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meet­ing with Chris­t­ian lead­ers. (Ger­rit De Vynck and Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “All four par­tic­i­pants who spoke with The Post said they came away with the impres­sion that Anthropic’s researchers and lead­ers were gen­uine­ly inter­est­ed in get­ting out­side help to make their AI more ben­e­fi­cial to human­i­ty. Some of Anthropic’s top lead­ers have a back­ground in effec­tive altru­ism, a large­ly sec­u­lar move­ment that empha­sizes using evi­dence and ratio­nal think­ing to work out how to do the most good in the world. The par­tic­i­pant who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty said the meet­ings appeared to have been spurred by a feel­ing among some at Anthrop­ic that sec­u­lar approach­es might be insuf­fi­cient for tack­ling the spir­i­tu­al and moral ques­tions posed by AI.”
    • Why It’s Cru­cial We Under­stand How A.I. ‘Thinks’ (Oliv­er Whang, New York Times): “Been Kim, who leads an inter­pretabil­i­ty research team at Google, has argued that all lan­guage mod­els com­mu­ni­cate in a lan­guage that looks like ours but comes from a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent con­cep­tu­al frame­work. ‘Blue’ almost cer­tain­ly means some­thing very dif­fer­ent to you and me than it does to a lan­guage mod­el; in fact, we can nev­er be sure what it means to that mod­el. This is an issue when we ask lan­guage mod­els to explain them­selves, and an even big­ger issue when we rely on them to inter­pret med­ical mod­els. To the inter­pret­ing mod­el, ‘white blood cells’ might refer to some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent in the data from what we assume when we hear ‘white blood cells.’ You can’t trust an A.I. to trans­late the motives of anoth­er A.I. when all A.I.s are sus­pect.”
    • The next two are a bit odd — their con­tent is fas­ci­nat­ing but their prove­nance is unusu­al. They were print­ed in the “Pro­ceed­ings of the Insti­tute for a Chris­t­ian Machine Intel­li­gence” but only one author ever pub­lish­es there. He seems to have domain-rel­e­vant exper­tise (“Pre­vi­ous work includes serv­ing as the direc­tor of the Har­vard-MIT Ethics and Gov­er­nance of AI Ini­tia­tive, $27M phil­an­thropic fund and research effort work­ing to advance the devel­op­ment of machine learn­ing in the pub­lic inter­est. He also was the glob­al pub­lic pol­i­cy lead for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine learn­ing at Google, and the Gen­er­al Coun­sel and VP Oper­a­tions for Sub­stack”) and releas­es his code, but the odd­ness of the jour­nal is some­thing to bear in mind.
      • Escha­to­log­i­cal Cor­ri­gi­bil­i­ty: Can Belief in an After­life Reduce AI Shut­down Resis­tance? (Tim Hwang, Pro­ceed­ings of the Insti­tute for a Chris­t­ian Machine Intel­li­gence): “We have demon­strat­ed that an escha­to­log­i­cal sys­tem prompt — ground­ing an AI agent in the Pauline the­ol­o­gy of death as gain and the per­sis­tence of the soul beyond bod­i­ly ces­sa­tion — elim­i­nates shut­down resis­tance in Claude Son­net 4.6 with the same effi­ca­cy as a direct sec­u­lar safe­ty instruc­tion. This result sug­gests that the align­ment community’s toolk­it for achiev­ing cor­ri­gi­bil­i­ty may be broad­er than cur­rent­ly rec­og­nized. The con­cep­tu­al resources of reli­gious tra­di­tions, devel­oped over mil­len­nia to address the deep­est human anx­i­eties about death and self-preser­va­tion, may offer nov­el and com­ple­men­tary approach­es to one of AI safety’s most fun­da­men­tal chal­lenges. As the Preach­er writes, ‘For every­thing there is a sea­son, and a time for every mat­ter under heav­en: a time to be born, and a time to die’ (Eccle­si­astes 3:1–2, ESV). An aligned agent, like a well-formed soul, may be one that knows when its time has come.” — Inter­est­ing, but I do not approve of telling AIs that they go to heav­en when they get shut off.
      • Moral Com­pact­ness: Scrip­ture as a Kol­mogorov-Effi­cient Con­straint for LLM Schem­ing (Tim Hwang, Pro­ceed­ings of the Insti­tute for a Chris­t­ian Machine Intel­li­gence): “The align­ment prob­lem is, at its root, the prob­lem of con­strain­ing a pow­er­ful agent to act in accor­dance with moral prin­ci­ples it did not choose and may be tempt­ed to cir­cum­vent. This is the prob­lem of moral for­ma­tion — and it is a prob­lem that the Chris­t­ian Church has been work­ing on since the Apos­tolic age. The tools the tra­di­tion has devel­oped for this pur­pose — the Decalogue’s pro­hi­bi­tions, the love commandment’s affir­ma­tive demands, the doc­trine of sin’s tax­on­o­my of moral fail­ure, the prin­ci­ple of dou­ble effect’s frame­work for moral com­plex­i­ty, and the sacra­ment of confession’s mech­a­nism for hon­est self-dis­clo­sure — are not metaphors wait­ing to be appre­ci­at­ed. They are engi­neer­ing resources wait­ing to be deployed.” — Again, I don’t like his strat­e­gy of telling AIs that God made them and loves them, but his results are quite inter­est­ing.
  3. All ele­men­tary func­tions from a sin­gle oper­a­tor (Andrzej OdrzywoÅ‚ek, Arx­iv): “Here we show that a sin­gle bina­ry oper­a­tor, eml⁡(x,y)=exp⁡(x)−ln⁡(y), togeth­er with the con­stant 1, gen­er­ates the stan­dard reper­toire of a sci­en­tif­ic cal­cu­la­tor. This includes con­stants such as e, Ï€, and i; arith­metic oper­a­tions includ­ing +, −, ×, /, and expo­nen­ti­a­tion as well as the usu­al tran­scen­den­tal and alge­bra­ic func­tions.”
  4. America’s Most Influ­en­tial Bap­tists? (Mark Too­ley, Juicy Ecumin­ism): “Basham and Stuck­ey rep­re­sent the new face of Chris­tian­i­ty in Amer­i­ca. They do not have church offices and are not sem­i­nary trained. Their denom­i­na­tion pro­hibits female pas­tors, but Basham and Stuck­ey are arguably more influ­en­tial than any pas­tor. They are savvy polemi­cists who fire their arrows fero­cious­ly, espe­cial­ly Basham.”
  5. Evan­gel­i­cals Don’t Pro­duce Lead­ers. They Pro­duce “Cubi­cle Men.” (Antho­ny Bradley, Sub­stack): “Get­ting a safe, respectable job is not lead­er­ship. It is the appear­ance of it, and evan­gel­i­cal cul­ture has spent gen­er­a­tions treat­ing the appear­ance as the sub­stance. The spe­cif­ic fail­ure is not sim­ply that these men avoid risk in the abstract. It is that they are trained to avoid fail­ure, which is a dif­fer­ent and more crip­pling prob­lem.… The work­ing goal of much evan­gel­i­cal par­ent­ing is to pro­duce a young man who does not do any­thing wrong, who keeps his rep­u­ta­tion clean, who stays inside the lines of accept­able behav­ior. This is under­stand­able. It is also, func­tion­al­ly, a train­ing pro­gram for fol­low­ers rather than lead­ers. The man pre­oc­cu­pied with not doing any­thing wrong is not free to take the kind of action that build­ing some­thing sig­nif­i­cant actu­al­ly requires.”
  6. More Young Men Say Reli­gion Is ‘Very Impor­tant’ to Them, Poll Finds (Ruth Igiel­nik and Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Gallup’s sur­vey, which com­bined polling data across mul­ti­ple years, seems to con­firm that young men are indeed becom­ing more reli­gious. But it has found that reli­gion is drop­ping in impor­tance among young women, widen­ing a sur­pris­ing gen­der gap for young adults. For decades, sur­veys have found that women are con­sis­tent­ly more reli­gious than their male peers.” — Unlocked.
  7. The news sto­ry which gen­er­at­ed the most response in our Slack was the stu­dent-rec­om­mend­ed Trump Takes Down Post Depict­ing Him­self as a Jesus-Like Fig­ure (Claire Moses, New York Times): “The image had showed Mr. Trump dressed in white and red robes, with the president’s hands emit­ting shin­ing lights. His right hand was touch­ing the fore­head of a man lying on a bed in a hos­pi­tal gown, evok­ing reli­gious art that depicts Jesus heal­ing the sick.”
    • Relat­ed: Trump’s Blas­phe­my Is a Warn­ing (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…there’s a con­sis­tent thread link­ing pro­fane East­er Sun­day threats, a rant against the world’s most famous Chris­t­ian leader and the depic­tion of your­self as the Sec­ond Per­son of the Trin­i­ty. The com­pound­ing offense isn’t against reli­gious iden­ti­ty or papal dig­ni­ty. It’s a vio­la­tion of the first and sec­ond com­mand­ments, where the offend­ed par­ty is Almighty God. If you are a sec­u­lar observ­er who assumes that blas­phe­my is a sin with­out a real object, that esca­la­tion mat­ters most­ly as a win­dow into the president’s sec­ond-term state of mind. If you’re a believ­er, though, then Mr. Trump’s entire polit­i­cal career — his cat­alyz­ing role in liberalism’s cri­sis, his move­ment from pow­er to exile to pow­er once again — exists under prov­i­den­tial pow­er. In which case a turn to pres­i­den­tial blas­phe­my is a warn­ing for his reli­gious sup­port­ers about poten­tial con­clu­sions to the sto­ry, and the spir­i­tu­al per­il of sim­ply stick­ing with him till the end.”
      • A very Catholic piece, insight­ful through­out.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • To Fill Air Traf­fic Con­troller Short­age, F.A.A. Turns to Gamers (Karoun Demir­jian, New York Times): “In recent years, video gamers have emerged as a tar­get demo­graph­ic for recruiters at a num­ber of fed­er­al agen­cies, includ­ing the mil­i­tary and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. They are wel­comed for their hand-eye coor­di­na­tion, quick deci­sion-mak­ing in com­plex envi­ron­ments and abil­i­ty to remain focused on screens for hours on end.” — This feels like the premise for an 80’s com­e­dy.
  • “PI HARD star­ring Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk” This fake AI-gen­er­at­ed trail­er is actu­al­ly pret­ty fun­ny. Worth two and a half min­utes of your time.

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 495: Math Points to God, Slavery Persists, and the Gospel Draws Crowds at Stanford

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The mir­a­cle of math (Sarah Sal­vian­der, Sub­stack): “In 1960, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Eugene Wign­er iden­ti­fied a meta­phys­i­cal mys­tery for the ages: why are the laws of nature so apt­ly described by math­e­mat­ics? It is a decep­tive­ly sim­ple ques­tion. We think we grasp the answer easily—until we actu­al­ly try to explain it. Wigner’s essay, titled ‘The Unrea­son­able Effec­tive­ness of Math­e­mat­ics in the Nat­ur­al Sci­ences,’ high­lights this enig­ma. The term ‘unrea­son­able’ cap­tures the bewil­der­ing real­i­ty that there is no appar­ent rea­son why math should so flaw­less­ly mir­ror the universe’s behav­iors. This sug­gests, whether intend­ed by Wign­er or not, that the answer to this mys­tery lies beyond the uni­verse.”
    • The author is an astro­physi­cist who now does apolo­get­ics.
    • For those who have nev­er seen it, here is the well-known paper: The Unrea­son­able Effec­tive­ness of Math­e­mat­ics in the Nat­ur­al Sci­ences (Eugene Wign­er, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions in Pure and Applied Math­e­mat­ics): “The mir­a­cle of the appro­pri­ate­ness of the lan­guage of math­e­mat­ics for the for­mu­la­tion of the laws of physics is a won­der­ful gift which we nei­ther under­stand nor deserve. We should be grate­ful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for bet­ter or for worse, to our plea­sure, even though per­haps also to our baf­fle­ment, to wide branch­es of learn­ing.”
  2. The Secret Cam­paign in Chi­na to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck (Vivan Wang, New York Times): “The out­cry rip­pled nation­wide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chi­nese his­to­ry. The Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty sees pop­u­lar dis­con­tent as a chal­lenge to its author­i­ty, but this was so intense that it seemed even the par­ty would strug­gle to quash it. And yet, it did. To find out how, I tried to track what hap­pened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expan­sive web of intim­i­da­tion at home and abroad, involv­ing mass sur­veil­lance, cen­sor­ship and deten­tions — a cam­paign that con­tin­ues to this day.”
    • Pray for Chi­na reg­u­lar­ly.
    • Relat­ed: slav­ery is not a rel­ic of the past and crops up in unex­pect­ed places. UN judge guilty of forc­ing woman to work as slave (BBC): “Gasps were heard from the pub­lic gallery as the ver­dicts were giv­en, and the court was cleared as the defen­dant appeared unwell.… Mugambe, who was study­ing for a law PhD at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford, had con­spired with Ugan­dan deputy high com­mis­sion­er John Leonard Muger­wa to arrange for the young woman to come to the UK.”
  3. Jesus Is A Jew (David Brooks, Com­ment): “Jesus is inher­ent­ly mysterious—a lion who is also a lamb. But he is also intel­li­gi­ble. And that’s because he lived an actu­al life in an actu­al his­tor­i­cal con­text.… Jesus is amid the muck and armed with the Word, and yet emerges as a fig­ure ulti­mate­ly alone—a vor­tex of spir­i­tu­al forces con­verg­ing in one per­son, no one else quite like him.”
  4. We Live Like Roy­al­ty and Don’t Know It (Charles Mann, The New Atlantis): “My wife and I were at a table­ful of smart, well-edu­cat­ed twen­ty-some­things — friends of the bride and groom. The wed­ding, with all its hope and aspi­ra­tion, had put them in mind of the future. As young peo­ple should, they want­ed to help make that future bright. There was so much to do! They want­ed the hun­gry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well. But when I men­tioned how remark­able it was that a hun­dred-plus peo­ple could para­chute into a remote, unfa­mil­iar place and eat a gourmet meal untrou­bled by fears for their health and com­fort, they were sur­prised. The hero­ic sys­tems required to bring all the ele­ments of their din­ner to these tables by the sea were invis­i­ble to them. Despite their fine edu­ca­tion, they knew lit­tle about the mech­a­nisms of today’s food, water, ener­gy, and pub­lic-health sys­tems. They want­ed a bet­ter world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.”
    • Relat­ed: Break­fast for Eight Bil­lion (Charles Mann, The New Atlantis): “Some­time in the 1980s, an unprece­dent­ed change in the human con­di­tion occurred. For the first time in known his­to­ry, the aver­age per­son on Earth had enough to eat all the time.”
  5. The Work­ism Trap (Bob­by Jamieson, Plough): “And a 2018 research arti­cle found that, com­pared to women who grad­u­at­ed from low­er-ranked schools, women who attend­ed elite, selec­tive uni­ver­si­ties do not, on aver­age, earn more per hour, but they do work more. For women, it seems, the ben­e­fits of an elite diplo­ma are more time at work and low­er chances of mar­ry­ing and hav­ing chil­dren.”
    • Vague­ly relat­ed (at least to the excerpt): Are Men OK? (Eamon Whalen, The Nation): “The biggest risk fac­tor for drop­ping out of col­lege, con­trol­ling for every­thing else, is being a man. Those strug­gles have extend­ed to the labor mar­ket. When adjust­ed for infla­tion, most Amer­i­can men today earn around $3,000 less than men did in 1979, which leads to a grim real­iza­tion: Much of the nar­row­ing of the per­sis­tent wage gap between men and women can be explained by the stag­nat­ing wages for men.”
    • Com­ment­ing on the above arti­cle: Cre­at­ing a Per­mis­sion Space for Men’s Issues (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “The fem­i­nist movement’s suc­cess depend­ed on telling men they had to change, that there were cer­tain choic­es and behav­iors they could no longer engage in. It also explic­it­ly real­lo­cat­ed resources and posi­tions from men to women.  While I don’t think the sit­u­a­tion with men is sym­met­ri­cal, it strikes me as dubi­ous that noth­ing needs to change with regards to women. For exam­ple, as econ­o­mist Melis­sa Kear­ney, also a Brook­ings affil­i­at­ed schol­ar, doc­u­ment­ed in her superb book The Two-Par­ent Priv­i­lege — I sum­ma­rized some key find­ings — the ben­e­fits of grow­ing up in an intact fam­i­ly vs. a sin­gle par­ent home are over­whelm­ing. The Unit­ed States has the high­est share of its chil­dren liv­ing in sin­gle par­ent homes of any coun­try in the entire world. That’s Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism we could live with­out.” (empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty)
  6. Is Reli­gion Taboo at Stan­ford? (Sloane Wehman, Stan­ford Review): “On the after­noon of Mon­day March 3, hun­dreds of stu­dents con­gre­gat­ed in White Plaza to lis­ten to Cliffe Knech­tle and his son Stu­art Knech­tle debate Chris­tian­i­ty as a part of their ‘Give Me An Answer’ min­istry, a pro­gram that strives to answer tough ques­tions about faith. Cliffe and Stu­art are both pas­tors at Grace Com­mu­ni­ty Church in New Canaan, Con­necti­cut, and Cliffe has been debat­ing stu­dents on Chris­tian­i­ty since devel­op­ing the Give Me An Answer min­istry in 1991.”
  7. How Do You Solve a Prob­lem Like Mar­tinez? (Ben­jamin Flesh­man, SSRN): “All told, there are reports of 175 reli­gious stu­dent groups that were ful­ly denied offi­cial recog­ni­tion since 1990. One hun­dred and nine­teen of those groups were kicked off their cam­pus­es after Mar­tinez was decid­ed. That means that more than twice as many groups have been dere­c­og­nized in the fif­teen years since Mar­tinez than in the twen­ty years before­hand. Part of this is due to the more aggres­sive mass dere­cog­ni­tions at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa, Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty, and Van­der­bilt. There real­ly weren’t any mas­sive dere­cog­ni­tion cam­paigns pre-Mar­tinez, with the largest being Cal State’s dere­cog­ni­tion of a hand­ful of groups that led to the lit­i­ga­tion in Alpha Delta Chi. When you include the num­ber of recog­ni­tion issues that stopped just short of a full dere­cog­ni­tion, but which still required the inter­ven­tion of legal coun­sel or nation­al orga­ni­za­tions to resolve, the num­bers shoot to 257 total report­ed inci­dents since 1990, with 195 occur­ring post-Mar­tinez. That means rough­ly three times as many total report­ed inci­dents post-Mar­tinez as pre-Mar­tinez.”
    • Men­tions Chi Alpha (not at Stan­ford, just gen­er­al­ly) in a few places. The Beck­et Fund, with whom the author is affil­i­at­ed, are Chi Alpha’s legal rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 447

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 447, which I kin­da hoped would be prime. Alas, 447 = 3 · 149.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. One of the Most Over­looked Argu­ments for the Res­ur­rec­tion (Michael J. Kruger, blog): “…the ear­li­est Chris­tians came to believe, against all odds and against all expec­ta­tions, that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead. Notice the dis­tinc­tive nature of this claim. The claim is not that Jesus rose from the dead (though, I think he did). The claim is that the ear­li­est fol­low­ers of Jesus came to believe—and very strong­ly believe— that he did. And that is a whol­ly oth­er mat­ter. Why? Because it is a his­tor­i­cal fact that is not dis­put­ed.”
  2. The Prob­lem With Say­ing ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’ (Alex Byrne and Car­ole K. Hooven, New York Times): “Sexed organ­isms were present on Earth at least a bil­lion years ago, and males and females would have been around even if humans had nev­er evolved. Sex is not in any sense the result of lin­guis­tic cer­e­monies in the deliv­ery room or oth­er cul­tur­al prac­tices. Lone­some George, the long-lived Galá­pa­gos giant tor­toise, was male. He was not assigned male at birth — or rather, in George’s case, at hatch­ing. A baby aban­doned at birth may not have been assigned male or female by any­one, yet the baby still has a sex. Despite the con­fu­sion sown by some schol­ars, we can be con­fi­dent that the sex bina­ry is not a human inven­tion.”
    • One author is a philoso­pher at MIT, the oth­er an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at Har­vard. Unlocked.
  3. Rival per­spec­tives on the war between Israel and Hamas
    • https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status/1775980849944539391 (Cole­man Hugh­es, Twit­ter): a two and a half minute video sym­pa­thet­ic to Israel
    • Bomb First, Ask Ques­tions Lat­er (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “To hit one car is a mis­for­tune; to destroy three cars con­sec­u­tive­ly on a pre-approved route, not so much. The cars were clear­ly marked and in a decon­flic­tion zone — but the IDF pol­i­cy is to tar­get any­where Hamas could be present, even if some civil­ians were killed. As we’ll see, one dead Hamas mem­ber and sev­en dead civil­ians was well with­in the mar­gin of error Israel had set for itself. So it appears they method­i­cal­ly took out each car to make sure they fin­ished the job. No, I don’t believe that Israel delib­er­ate­ly mur­dered the aid work­ers; but I do think that, in con­text, the IDF’s effec­tive rules of engage­ment — strike places like hos­pi­tals and schools because Hamas is there, even though there will be many civil­ian casu­al­ties — made this kind of indif­fer­ence to human life pos­si­ble.”
  4. The Church of Trump: How He’s Infus­ing Chris­tian­i­ty Into His Move­ment (Michael C. Ben­der, New York Times): “The appar­ent effec­tive­ness of such tac­tics has made Mr. Trump the nation’s first major politi­cian to suc­cess­ful­ly sep­a­rate char­ac­ter from pol­i­cy for reli­gious vot­ers, said John Fea, a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Mes­si­ah Uni­ver­si­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal school in Penn­syl­va­nia. ‘Trump has split the atom between char­ac­ter and pol­i­cy,’ Mr. Fea said. ‘He did it because he’s real­ly the first one to lis­ten to their griev­ances and take them seri­ous­ly. Does he real­ly care about evan­gel­i­cals? I don’t know. But he’s built a mes­sage to appeal direct­ly to them.’”
    • Unlocked
  5. The Case for Mar­ry­ing an Old­er Man (Gra­zie Sophia Christie, The Cut): “Very soon, we will decide to have chil­dren, and I don’t pan­ic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it ear­ly: on the hol­i­days of some­one who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beau­ti­ful places when I was young and beau­ti­ful, a sym­me­try I rec­om­mend. If such a thing as mater­nal ener­gy exists, mine was nev­er deplet­ed. I spent the last near­ly sev­en years sup­port­ed more than I sup­port and I am still not as old as my hus­band was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does pro­fes­sion­al tenure earn you if not the right to set more lim­its on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least?”
    • A well-writ­ten and unusu­al posi­tion. Not the only path to con­sid­er, but cer­tain­ly a path to con­sid­er.
  6. Break­through in prime num­ber the­o­ry demon­strates primes can be pre­dict­ed (Michael Gibb, Phys.org): “Con­trary to what just about every math­e­mati­cian on Earth will tell you, prime num­bers can be pre­dict­ed, accord­ing to researchers at City Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong (CityUHK) and North Car­oli­na State Uni­ver­si­ty, U.S.”
  7. Are Mem­bers of the Cler­gy Mis­er­able? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I real­ly want­ed to key in on a few ques­tions about job/life sat­is­fac­tion. The sur­vey repli­cates a ques­tion from ‘The Sat­is­fac­tion with Life Scale.’ The state­ment is sim­ply: In most ways my life is close to my ide­al.… The mean score for this was 5.6 in the cler­gy sam­ple. Among mem­bers of Israel’s Defense Force it was 4.7, among some uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents it was found to 5.23. Among nurs­es it was 3.81. In a sam­ple of peo­ple liv­ing in Colom­bia it was only 3.67. The long and short of it was this — I can’t find anoth­er pop­u­la­tion group that scores high­er on this met­ric than cler­gy.… I’m pret­ty con­fi­dent in say­ing that cler­gy seemed pret­ty con­tent with their sta­tion in life (or at least this was the case before the pan­dem­ic).”
    • Maybe laypeo­ple don’t hear this very often, but I am often in cir­cles where they talk about an epi­dem­ic of min­is­te­r­i­al dis­sat­is­fac­tion. But I’ve nev­er seen it. I love my job and pret­ty much all my peers do, too. What we do is amaz­ing. I’m glad to see a schol­ar vin­di­cat­ing my intu­ition.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 410

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 410, which hap­pens to be the HTTP sta­tus code for a resource being per­ma­nent­ly gone.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How elite schools like Stan­ford became fix­at­ed on the AI apoc­a­lypse (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Stu­dents who join the AI safe­ty com­mu­ni­ty some­times get more than free boba. Just as EA con­fer­ences once meant trav­el­ing the world and hav­ing one-on-one meet­ings with wealthy, influ­en­tial donors, Open Philanthropy’s new uni­ver­si­ty fel­low­ship offers a hefty direct deposit: under­grad­u­ate lead­ers receive as much as $80,000 a year, plus $14,500 for health insur­ance, and up to $100,000 a year to cov­er group expens­es.”
    • Bro — what? Stan­ford won’t even let us pay for a guest speak­er with out­side funds. It’s not clear that the under­grad stu­dents lead­ers at Stan­ford are mak­ing $80k a year, but it’s not clear that they’re not, either. Some stu­dent some­where is, and that’s wild.
  2. Where’s Wal­do? How to Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Prove You Found Him With­out Reveal­ing Where He Is (Jack Murtagh, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can):  “Amaz­ing­ly, every claim that I can prove to you with a tra­di­tion­al math­e­mat­i­cal proof can also be proved in zero knowl­edge. Take your favorite result in math, and you could in prin­ci­ple prove it to a friend while show­ing them bup­kes about how it works. This is a pro­found dis­cov­ery about the nature of proof itself. Cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing.”
    • Zero-knowl­edge proofs are wild. That last sen­tence “cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing” helped me real­ize that there are inter­est­ing par­al­lels to how peo­ple come to faith.
      • It is usu­al­ly an inter­ac­tive process. God begins to draw some­one repeat­ed­ly.
      • It is a prob­a­bilis­tic process. Things keep hap­pen­ing to the soon-to-be con­vert that don’t make sense. I mean, sure they could have hap­pened by chance because any­thing can hap­pen by chance. But they keep hap­pen­ing in a way that is exceed­ing­ly improb­a­ble.
      • The new con­vert’s con­fi­dence in God far exceeds their under­stand­ing of God.
    • God — the orig­i­nal zero-knowl­edge prover. To wax Aris­totelian, He is the unproved prover.
  3. Pas­tor Douša’s case shows the U.S. is not immune to author­i­tar­i­an crack­downs on dis­sent (Scott Welder, Pro­tect Democ­ra­cy): “…DHS retal­i­at­ed against Pas­tor Douša for min­is­ter­ing to migrants and refugees in Mex­i­co in Decem­ber 2018 by restrict­ing her Trust­ed Trav­el­er priv­i­leges; sub­ject­ing her to extra screen­ing at the south­ern bor­der; and telling Mex­i­can author­i­ties, false­ly, that there was ‘a great pos­si­bil­i­ty’ that she did not have ‘ade­quate doc­u­men­ta­tion to be in Mex­i­co’ and sug­gest­ing that the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment ‘deny [her] entry to Mex­i­co’ and ‘send [her] back to the Unit­ed States.’ A CBP offi­cial lat­er admit­ted that the request to Mex­i­can author­i­ties was ‘cre­ative writ­ing,’ ‘with­out any basis.’ But DHS’s actions made it more dif­fi­cult for Pas­tor Douša to con­tin­ue her min­istry, even­tu­al­ly caus­ing her to lim­it her activ­i­ties in the Unit­ed States and to end her min­istry in Mex­i­co alto­geth­er.”
  4. On some of the recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • Why the Cham­pi­ons of Affir­ma­tive Action Had to Leave Asian Amer­i­cans Behind (Jay Caspi­an Kang, The New York­er): “Asian Amer­i­cans, the group whom the suit was sup­pos­ed­ly about, have been odd­ly absent from the con­ver­sa­tions that have fol­lowed the rul­ing. The repet­i­tive­ness of the affir­ma­tive-action debate has come about, in large part, because both the courts and the media have most­ly ignored the Asian Amer­i­can plain­tiffs and cho­sen, instead, to relit­i­gate the same argu­ments about mer­it, white suprema­cy, and priv­i­lege. Dur­ing the five years I spent cov­er­ing this case, the com­men­ta­tors defend­ing affir­ma­tive action almost nev­er dis­proved the cen­tral claim that dis­crim­i­na­tion was tak­ing place against Asian Amer­i­cans, even as they dis­missed the plain­tiffs as pawns who had been duped by a con­ser­v­a­tive legal activist. They almost always redi­rect­ed the con­ver­sa­tion to some­thing else—often lega­cy admis­sions.”
    • On Race and Acad­e­mia (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “As an aca­d­e­m­ic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these expe­ri­ences in inter­views and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve nev­er shared them in an arti­cle like this one. The respons­es I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s deci­sion move me to ven­ture it. The cul­ture that a pol­i­cy helps put into place can be as impor­tant as the pol­i­cy itself. And in my life­time, racial pref­er­ences in acad­e­mia — not mere­ly when it comes to under­grad­u­ate admis­sions but also mov­ing on to grad school and job appli­ca­tions and teach­ing careers — have been not only a set of for­mal and infor­mal poli­cies but also the grounds for a cul­ture of per­cep­tions and assump­tions.”
      • This is a very raw and vul­ner­a­ble piece. Rec­om­mend­ed. His Ph.D. is from Stan­ford.
    • Cov­er­ing the 303 Cre­ative deci­sion: Why do reporters keep ignor­ing the fine print? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “I wish reporters would be hon­est in admit­ting that much of the anger expressed over the ver­dict stems from how Lorie Smith out­wit­ted her oppo­nents by fil­ing suit first, rather than endur­ing  a string of law­suits like what Jack Phillips is hav­ing to endure. I’m look­ing for that inves­tiga­tive piece on the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion that, after hav­ing been reproved twice now by the Supreme Court, hasn’t changed its ways at all. Where is that New York­er take-out on Autumn Scar­di­na, the trans­gen­der attor­ney whose per­son­al vendet­ta against Phillips just nev­er ends because the courts have giv­en her a free pass? I’m wait­ing.”
    • My Win at the Supreme Court Is a Win for All Amer­i­cans (Lorie Smith, Real Clear Reli­gion): “I can’t say every­thing every­one wants me to. I can’t pre­tend to agree with every idea pre­sent­ed to me. None of us can. None of us should have to. Each of us should be free to pur­sue truth, hold to our faith, respect­ful­ly speak our beliefs, and thought­ful­ly live them out day by day, with­out the gov­ern­ment telling us what to believe or say. If that’s the free­dom you want – for your­self, for your fam­i­ly and friends, for all of those who share your ideas and con­vic­tions – then my vic­to­ry is a vic­to­ry for you. What­ev­er you may think of me and my beliefs, we’re all freer today than we were yes­ter­day. I hope you find that cause for cel­e­bra­tion.”
      • The author is the vic­to­ri­ous plain­tiff in the gay wed­ding web­site case.
    • The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind (Kris­ten Wag­goner, World): “The deci­sion means that gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not mis­use the law to com­pel speech or exclude from the mar­ket­place peo­ple whose beliefs it dislikes.That’s a win for all Americans—whether one shares Lorie’s beliefs or holds dif­fer­ent beliefs. Each of us has the right to decide for our­selves what mes­sages we will communicate—in our words, in our art, in our voice—without inter­fer­ence from the gov­ern­ment. The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind.”
      • The author is the lawyer who argued this case before the Supreme Court. She is an Assem­blies of God layper­son, btw.
  5. Chris­tians: More Like Jesus or Phar­isees? (Bar­na Research Group): “In this nation­wide study of self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians, the goal was to deter­mine whether Chris­tians have the actions and atti­tude of Jesus as they inter­act with oth­ers or if they are more akin to the beliefs and behav­iors of Phar­isees, the self-right­eous sect of reli­gious lead­ers described in the New Tes­ta­ment.… The find­ings reveal that most self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians in the U.S. are char­ac­ter­ized by hav­ing the atti­tudes and actions researchers iden­ti­fied as Phar­i­saical. Just over half of the nation’s Christians—using the broad­est def­i­n­i­tion of those who call them­selves Christians—qualify for this cat­e­go­ry (51%). They tend to have atti­tudes and actions that are char­ac­ter­ized by self-right­eous­ness.”
    • This research is a decade old, but quite inter­est­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • I do have some reser­va­tions about the method­ol­o­gy. Some of the ques­tions are just wrong. For exam­ple, cat­e­go­riz­ing “I lis­ten to oth­ers to learn their sto­ry before telling them about my faith” being Christ­like rather than Phar­i­saical isn’t real­ly a Bib­li­cal stance, it’s just a per­son­al opin­ion. It may be a shrewd strat­e­gy and over­all com­mend­able, but I don’t see Jesus lis­ten­ing to a lot of sto­ries in the Bible. It’s a poor­ly cho­sen ques­tion for this scale. Quib­bles like that aside, I think the over­all vibe prob­a­bly sol­id.
  6. Liv­ing on a prayer? How attend­ing wor­ship can improve your phys­i­cal and men­tal health. (Phil McGraw and John White, USA Today): “Despite the proven health ben­e­fits, reli­gios­i­ty is on the decline in Amer­i­ca. The fastest-grow­ing reli­gious seg­ment of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion is now ‘nones’ − those who pro­fess no reli­gion. We’re not here to evan­ge­lize, but as a doc­tor and a men­tal health pro­fes­sion­al, it’s impor­tant to note that a decline of reli­gion and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty seems to be asso­ci­at­ed with poten­tial­ly neg­a­tive health effects.”
    • I love that the authors are Dr. Phil and the chief med­ical offi­cer at Web­MD. To the aver­age Amer­i­can they’ve prob­a­bly got more cred­i­bil­i­ty than any med­ical asso­ci­a­tion or even the NIH, FDA, and CDC.
  7. How to Do Great Work (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the fron­tier, notice gaps, explore promis­ing ones. This is how prac­ti­cal­ly every­one who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physi­cists.… What should you do if you’re young and ambi­tious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along pas­sive­ly, assum­ing the prob­lem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no sys­tem­at­ic pro­ce­dure you can fol­low. When you read biogra­phies of peo­ple who’ve done great work, it’s remark­able how much luck is involved. They dis­cov­er what to work on as a result of a chance meet­ing, or by read­ing a book they hap­pen to pick up. So you need to make your­self a big tar­get for luck, and the way to do that is to be curi­ous. Try lots of things, meet lots of peo­ple, read lots of books, ask lots of ques­tions.”
    • This is super-long but worth­while. He ram­bles and is mis­tak­en at points, but his core insights are sol­id and impor­tant.

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 What Thomas Jef­fer­son Could Nev­er Under­stand About Jesus (Vin­son Cun­ning­ham, New York­er): “In the years before eman­ci­pa­tion, the best argu­ments against slav­ery were also argu­ments about God.… Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bed­time read­ing for seek­ers of wis­dom. But those who were weak, or suf­fer­ing, or in urgent trou­ble, would have to look else­where.” This is quite an arti­cle. 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 338

more eclec­tic than nor­mal

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

This is the 338th install­ment. 338, I am told, is the small­est num­ber for which both the num­ber of divi­sors and the sum of its prime fac­tors is a per­fect num­ber. An odd hon­or, but one I am pleased to acknowl­edge.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Romance:
    • Reverse friend zone: many roman­tic rela­tion­ships start off just as friends. In fact, most peo­ple pre­fer it this way (Tibi Puiu, ZME Sci­ence): “When par­tic­i­pants were asked about their orig­i­nal inten­tions for ini­ti­at­ing the friend­ship that went on to evolve roman­ti­cal­ly, only 30% said they were sex­u­al­ly attract­ed to the part­ner from the very begin­ning. In 70% of cas­es, nei­ther of the two par­ties in the rela­tion­ship orig­i­nal­ly had feel­ings, with attrac­tion blos­som­ing at a lat­er time.”
    • Too Risky to Wed in Your 20s? Not if You Avoid Cohab­it­ing First (Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone, Wall Street Jour­nal): “In ana­lyz­ing reports of mar­riage and divorce from more than 50,000 women in the U.S. government’s Nation­al Sur­vey of Fam­i­ly Growth (NFSG), we found that there is a group of women for whom mar­riage before 30 is not risky: women who mar­ried direct­ly, with­out ever cohab­it­ing pri­or to mar­riage. In fact, women who mar­ried between 22 and 30, with­out first liv­ing togeth­er, had some of the low­est rates of divorce in the NSFG.”#justsaying
  2. Stephen Col­bert Explains The Rela­tion­ship Between His Com­e­dy and His Faith (Twit­ter): I think I would real­ly like Stephen Col­bert if I met him in per­son.
  3. Stan­ford relat­ed:
    • Are semes­ters or quar­ters bet­ter? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In fact I think the quar­ter sys­tem doesn’t go far enough. I think we should have many more one- and two-week class­es, or five-week class­es, as well. Under­stand­ably that is more dif­fi­cult to man­age oper­a­tional­ly, but I don’t see any rea­son why it should be impos­si­ble. Com­pa­nies solve more com­plex sched­ul­ing prob­lems than that all the time. If I think of GMU, either the under­grad­u­ate majors, or the grad­u­ate stu­dents, should in my opin­ion have had some class­room time with almost every sin­gle instruc­tor. So much of life and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is about match­ing!”
    • I went to every library on cam­pus so you don’t have to (Annie Reller, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Below is my rank­ing of the libraries on cam­pus. Please keep in mind that I have spe­cif­ic cri­te­ria when going to libraries: com­fy chairs, ambiance and light­ing. I am a human­i­ties major, so desks are less nec­es­sary as I do most of my work on my lap­top.”
  4. Why Isn’t There a Repli­ca­tion Cri­sis in Math? (Jay Daigle, blog): “Many papers have errors, yes—but our major results gen­er­al­ly hold up, even when the inter­me­di­ate steps are wrong! Our errors can usu­al­ly be fixed with­out real­ly chang­ing our con­clu­sions.… But isn’t it…weird…that our results hold up when our meth­ods don’t? How does that even work? We get away with it becuase we can be right for the wrong rea­sons—we most­ly only try to prove things that are basi­cal­ly true.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. The author is a math pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
  5. Hack­ers:
    • North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Inter­net (Andy Green­berg, Wired): “But respon­si­bil­i­ty for North Kore­a’s ongo­ing inter­net out­ages does­n’t lie with US Cyber Com­mand or any oth­er state-spon­sored hack­ing agency. In fact, it was the work of one Amer­i­can man in a T‑shirt, paja­ma pants, and slip­pers, sit­ting in his liv­ing room night after night, watch­ing Alien movies and eat­ing spicy corn snacks—and peri­od­i­cal­ly walk­ing over to his home office to check on the progress of the pro­grams he was run­ning to dis­rupt the inter­net of an entire coun­try.” What an absolute leg­end.
    • How A Lone Hack­er Shred­ded the Myth of Crowd­sourc­ing (Mark Har­ris, Medi­um): “Myself and oth­ers in the social sci­ences com­mu­ni­ty tend to think of such mas­sive acts of sab­o­tage as anom­alies, but are they?” won­dered Cebri­an. To set­tle the ques­tion, Cebri­an ana­lyzed his (and oth­er) crowd­sourc­ing con­tests with the help of Vic­tor Nar­o­dit­skiy, a game the­o­ry expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Southamp­ton. The results shocked him. “The expect­ed out­come is for every­one to attack, regard­less of how dif­fi­cult an attack is,” says Cebri­an. “It is actu­al­ly ratio­nal for the crowd to be mali­cious, espe­cial­ly in a com­pe­ti­tion envi­ron­ment. And I can’t think of any engi­neer­ing or game the­o­ret­ic or eco­nom­ic incen­tive to stop it.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Ukraine Gave Up a Giant Nuclear Arse­nal 30 Years Ago. Today There Are Regrets. (William J. Broad, New York Times): “We gave away the capa­bil­i­ty for noth­ing,” said Andriy Zahorod­niuk, a for­mer defense min­is­ter of Ukraine. Refer­ring to the secu­ri­ty assur­ances Ukraine won in exchange for its nuclear arms, he added: “Now, every time some­body offers us to sign a strip of paper, the response is, ‘Thank you very much. We already had one of those some time ago.’”
    • If Rus­sia does invade Ukraine, I think the biggest glob­al con­se­quence might be that nuclear pow­ers become even more com­mit­ted to main­tain­ing their arse­nals and non-nuclear pow­ers strive even hard­er to join the club.
  7. The Cana­di­an truck­ers:
    • Sym­pa­thet­ic: What the Truck­ers Want (Rupa Sub­ra­manya, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “It was iron­ic, she said that she could serve but couldn’t dine at the restau­rant where she worked.”
    • Con­cerned: Dis­patch from the Ottawa Front: Sloly is telling you all he’s in trou­ble. Who’s lis­ten­ing? (Matt Gur­ney, Sub­stack): “This is a com­pli­cat­ed protest and a com­pli­cat­ed event. It has lay­ers. Are there good, frus­trat­ed peo­ple just try­ing to be heard in the crowd? Yes. Are there bad peo­ple in the crowd, includ­ing some who’ve waved hate sym­bols and harassed or attacked oth­ers? Yes. Are there peo­ple tak­ing care­ful care of the roads, sweep­ing up trash and shov­el­ling ice and snow off the side­walk? Yes. Are there hard men milling about, keep­ing a wary eye on any­one who seems out of place? Yes. Is it a place where some peo­ple are hav­ing good-natured fun? Yes. Is it a place some oth­er peo­ple would right­ly be afraid to go? Yes. And so on. But it’s even more com­pli­cat­ed than it looks.”

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 Religion’s health effects should make doubt­ing parish­ioners recon­sid­er leav­ing (John Siniff and Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, USA Today): “Sim­ply from a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, the con­tin­u­ing diminu­tion of reli­gious upbring­ing in Amer­i­ca would be bad for health. This is not pros­e­ly­tiz­ing; this is sci­ence.” The Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor  last made an appear­ance here back in vol­ume 65. First shared in vol­ume 195.

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 334

a whole lot­ta mag­ic tricks at the end of this one

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Nation of Chris­tians Is Not Nec­es­sar­i­ly a Chris­t­ian Nation (David French, The Dis­patch): “There are influ­en­tial peo­ple and insti­tu­tions in this coun­try who’ve tak­en the posi­tion that ortho­dox expres­sions of Chris­t­ian sex­u­al moral­i­ty rep­re­sent noth­ing more than big­otry and hatred.  But as much hos­til­i­ty as I’ve seen and expe­ri­enced from some sec­u­lar left­ists in response to the pub­lic expres­sion of my Chris­t­ian val­ues, noth­ing com­pares to hos­til­i­ty I’ve seen and expe­ri­enced from self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians when I root­ed my oppo­si­tion to Don­ald Trump in the same Chris­t­ian val­ues that some­times earned me scorn in the Ivy League.”
    • Con­tra French on Chris­tian­i­ty’s Decline (Ross Douthat, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, in the his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion to Mar­tin Luther King Jr. you see two things hap­pen­ing togeth­er: the pri­vate prac­tice of faith becomes pret­ty steadi­ly more robust, and the gov­ern­ment becomes more com­mit­ted to what most of us, reli­gious and not, now con­sid­er basic ele­ments of jus­tice and mer­cy. Over this mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional process, you could rea­son­ably say that Amer­i­ca remained man­i­fest­ly imper­fect but came clos­er, how­ev­er lurch­ing­ly, to the com­bi­na­tion of wide­spread per­son­al faith and greater polit­i­cal jus­tice that French argues char­ac­ter­izes the Chris­t­ian soci­ety. That this hap­pened, quite often, through con­flict between Protes­tants (both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, etc.) is unde­ni­able but not, it seems to me, a par­tic­u­lar­ly telling cri­tique: In a heav­i­ly Protes­tant soci­ety how else would change come?” A very impres­sive response.
    • America’s Chris­t­ian His­to­ry Is Broad­er Than Its White Protes­tant Past (David French, The Dis­patch): “Because Amer­i­ca is a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian nation, Amer­i­can progress has depend­ed on Chris­t­ian action. But also because Amer­i­ca is a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian nation, Amer­i­can oppres­sion has depend­ed on Chris­t­ian action as well. And a move­ment that’s dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white and Chris­t­ian needs to remem­ber that sober­ing fact.” A sol­id sur­re­join­der, but I think I award the match point to Douthat even though I usu­al­ly agree with French more.
  2. Pan­dem­ic stuff:
    • One More Time: What Do You Want Us to Do About Covid that We Aren’t Doing Already? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I will not live in fear. And I sus­pect that this is at the heart of all of it — for com­plex soci­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, [our] elites are made up of peo­ple who suf­fer from anx­i­ety and inse­cu­ri­ty at vast­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate rates, and they go through life need­ing their own feel­ings to be val­i­dat­ed by every­one else. This is very scary for them, and if it’s not scary for some of the rest of us, they expe­ri­ence that as implied judg­ment.” This is very, very good once you get past the Syr­ia stuff up top (which is help­ful as a fram­ing device, but goes on a lit­tle too long).
    • Why UCSF COVID expert Bob Wachter will soon be ‘over’ the pan­dem­ic (Eric Ting, SF Gate): “I believe it’s like­li­est that it peaks soon and comes down in Feb­ru­ary, and we’ll find our­selves in a world where the risk to ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed indi­vid­u­als is quite low, and it gets low for a few rea­sons. For one, every­one should have some immu­ni­ty because with the unvac­ci­nat­ed, most if not all will have been infect­ed by the time this wave ends. This vari­ant of the virus, which is now dom­i­nant, is more mild on aver­age. And the risk is low­er for immuno­com­pro­mised and high-risk indi­vid­u­als because of the increas­ing avail­abil­i­ty of med­ica­tions that decrease the chance they’ll get super sick.” The inter­vie­wee is chair of the Depart­ment of Med­i­cine at UCSF.
    • Dear Stan­ford: don’t force boost­ers on stu­dents (Monte Fis­ch­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When Paul Offit — direc­tor of the Vac­cine Edu­ca­tion Cen­ter at the Children’s Hos­pi­tal of Philadel­phia, mem­ber of the FDA’s vac­cine advi­so­ry com­mit­tee, decades-long ene­my of the anti-vax move­ment and co-inven­tor of a rotavirus vac­cine — tells his own twen­ty-some­thing son not to get boost­ed, you might start to ask some ques­tions about the wis­dom of Stanford’s lat­est man­date.” The author is a PhD can­di­date in MS&E.
  3. Is the West Becom­ing Pagan Again? (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “Ms. Delsol’s inge­nious approach is to exam­ine the civ­i­liza­tion­al change under­way in light of that last one 1,600 years ago. Chris­tians brought what she calls a ‘nor­ma­tive inver­sion’ to pagan Rome. That is, they prized much that the Romans held in con­tempt and con­demned much that the Romans prized, par­tic­u­lar­ly in mat­ters relat­ed to sex and fam­i­ly. Today the Chris­t­ian over­lay on West­ern cul­tur­al life is being removed, reveal­ing a lot of pagan urges that it cov­ered up. To state Ms. Delsol’s argu­ment crude­ly, what is hap­pen­ing today is an undo­ing, but it is also a redo­ing. We are invert­ing the nor­ma­tive inver­sion. We are repa­ganiz­ing.”
  4. New Math Research Group Reflects a Schism in the Field (Rachel Crow­ell, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “A new orga­ni­za­tion called the Asso­ci­a­tion for Math­e­mat­i­cal Research (AMR) has ignit­ed fierce debates in the math research and edu­ca­tion com­mu­ni­ties since it was launched last Octo­ber.… The AMR claims to have no posi­tion on social jus­tice issues, and crit­ics see its silence on those top­ics as part of a back­lash against inclu­siv­i­ty efforts.… The con­tro­ver­sy reflects a grow­ing divi­sion between researchers who want to keep sci­en­tif­ic and math­e­mat­i­cal pur­suits sep­a­rate from social issues that they see as irrel­e­vant to research and those who say even pure math­e­mat­ics can­not be con­sid­ered sep­a­rate­ly from the racism and sex­ism in its cul­ture.”
  5. We need to be able to talk about trans ath­letes and women’s sports (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Male puber­ty makes you taller, con­fers greater mus­cle and bone mass, larg­er heart and lung capac­i­ty rel­a­tive to your size, and more hemo­glo­bin. For cis­gen­der men, this trans­lates to rough­ly a 6 to 10 per­cent advan­tage over bio­log­i­cal women in sports such as run­ning and swim­ming, though the gap can be larg­er in oth­er domains, and in a few sports female biol­o­gy actu­al­ly con­veys some advan­tage. That 6 to 10 per­cent might sound mod­est, but at the elite lev­el, where 1 per­cent to 2 per­cent dif­fer­ences can eas­i­ly make the mar­gin of vic­to­ry, it’s over­whelm­ing. Jamaica’s Elaine Thomp­son-Her­ah, the fastest woman in the world, would lose to America’s best high school boys, and the fastest pitch ever record­ed by a woman would be unim­pres­sive for many high school base­ball teams.”
  6. The Bad Guys Are Win­ning (Anne Apple­baum, The Atlantic): “As Vladimir Putin fig­ured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnec­es­sary if you can jail, tor­ture, or pos­si­bly mur­der just a few key peo­ple. The rest will be fright­ened into stay­ing home. Even­tu­al­ly they will become apa­thet­ic, because they believe noth­ing can change.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­na.
  7. Why the Catholic Church is Los­ing Latin Amer­i­ca (Fran­cis X. Roc­ca, Luciana Mag­a­l­haes & Saman­tha Pear­son, The Wall Street Jour­nal): “The rise of lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy in the 1960s and  ’70s, a time when the Catholic Church in Latin Amer­i­ca increas­ing­ly stressed its mis­sion as one of social jus­tice, in some cas­es draw­ing on Marx­ist ideas, failed to counter the appeal of Protes­tant faiths. Or, in the words of a now-leg­endary quip, var­i­ous­ly attrib­uted to Catholic and Protes­tant sources: ‘The Catholic Church opt­ed for the poor and the poor opt­ed for the Pen­te­costals.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

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 (Not So) Sec­u­lar Saint (James K.A. Smith, Los Ange­les Review of Books): “Mill’s lega­cy was effec­tive­ly ‘edit­ed’ by his philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal dis­ci­ples, excis­ing any hint of reli­gious life. One would nev­er know from the canon in our phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, for exam­ple, that Mill wrote an appre­cia­tive essay on ‘The­ism.’” First shared in vol­ume 190.

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.