Tag: Silicon Valley

TGFI, Volume 557: peer-reviewed miracles and AI-informed voting

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. Peer-Reviewed Mir­a­cles: Are Mirac­u­lous Cures Pub­lished in Sci­en­tif­ic Jour­nals? (Caleb Jack­son, Sub­stack): “It is often sug­gest­ed that, if the evi­dence for mir­a­cle cures were tru­ly com­pelling, it would be expect­ed that such cas­es would be pub­lished in main­stream sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals. If these instances can­not stand the scruti­ny of peer review, then they ought to be dis­missed as noth­ing more than uncor­rob­o­rat­ed anec­dotes. I am not per­suad­ed. Indeed, this argu­ment remains tooth­less for a myr­i­ad of rea­sons. As we shall see below, there are no less than sev­er­al dozen instances of ‘mir­a­cle cures’ pub­lished in sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals, both main­stream and fringe, over the last cen­tu­ry. To claim oth­er­wise is to plead igno­rance of the pub­licly avail­able data.”
  2. Use AI This Elec­tion (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I’m not say­ing AI is super­in­tel­li­gent or can decide bet­ter than you can. I’m say­ing that if you — like me — spend an hour or so doing research before vot­ing on local seats, AI can aid that research very effec­tive­ly. And if you don’t do that research — because you weren’t will­ing to waste an hour on it before — AI makes it so much faster that you might want to start.”
    • He gives a ver­sion of the prompt he used to gen­er­ate a cus­tom voter’s guide, so I tried it with a cus­tomized ver­sion and was pleased with the results. I tried it on both Claude and Chat­G­PT, only Claude was will­ing to do it. Chat­G­PT seemed to think it was uneth­i­cal to help me. I rec­om­mend giv­ing it a try. For a start, just go through his prompt sen­tence by sen­tence and change it to what you believe.
  3. The Twin Fal­lac­i­es of Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and AI Max­i­mal­ism (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Here are two ques­tions I think about a lot: How does Chris­tian­i­ty restrict someone’s use of tech­nol­o­gy? How does Chris­tian­i­ty restrict someone’s strat­a­gems in pol­i­tics? These ques­tions come from a con­vic­tion that the claims of Christ in Scrip­ture are such a nature that one can­not believe and obey them with­out expe­ri­enc­ing some kind of lim­it­ing prin­ci­ple on their tech­nol­o­gy and on their pol­i­tics. In oth­er words, if you real­ly take Christ seri­ous­ly, your tech use and your pol­i­tics will bear a con­spic­u­ous mark. ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Nihilism With a Busi­ness Mod­el (John Seel, Sub­stack): “At one lev­el, the gig econ­o­my reflects an under­stand­able eco­nom­ic adap­ta­tion to a rapid­ly chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal envi­ron­ment. But every eco­nom­ic sys­tem even­tu­al­ly shapes not mere­ly how peo­ple make mon­ey, but how they imag­ine real­i­ty itself. The gig econ­o­my does not sim­ply cre­ate gig work. It cre­ates a gig mind­set. And that mind­set is increas­ing­ly reshap­ing the moral imag­i­na­tion among younger gen­er­a­tions in deeply con­se­quen­tial ways. At the cen­ter of the gig mind­set is the assump­tion that near­ly every­thing can become mon­e­tized, opti­mized, and con­vert­ed into mar­ket val­ue. Every­thing and every expe­ri­ence are now for sale. The self itself becomes a plat­form. Con­sid­er two rapid­ly expand­ing phe­nom­e­na among young adults: men are increas­ing­ly addict­ed to online sports bet­ting, and women are increas­ing­ly post­ing on plat­forms such as Only­Fans. These two are deeply con­nect­ed man­i­fes­ta­tions of the same cul­tur­al log­ic.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. Are “Real” Catholics as Con­ser­v­a­tive as Evan­gel­i­cals? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I think this is the best test I can devise to real­ly com­pare devout, con­ser­v­a­tive Catholics to evan­gel­i­cals in the same seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion. I just can’t look at these results and say that ‘real’ Catholics are just as social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive as ‘real’ evan­gel­i­cals. They aren’t — empir­i­cal­ly speak­ing — as con­ser­v­a­tive on these three core issues [abor­tion, gay mar­riage, and pre­mar­i­tal sex]… What I take away from all of this is that evan­gel­i­cal iden­ti­ty car­ries some­thing that can’t be ful­ly explained by how often you show up or how con­ser­v­a­tive you vote. There’s a the­o­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al foun­da­tion to evan­gel­i­cal­ism that shapes how adher­ents think about the body, sex­u­al­i­ty, and the fam­i­ly in ways that Catholic iden­ti­ty sim­ply doesn’t repli­cate — even among the most devout and polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Catholics. The Church may teach the same things on paper, but the peo­ple in the pews aren’t inter­nal­iz­ing them the same way. And that gap between offi­cial teach­ing and lived belief is, frankly, one of the most inter­est­ing sto­ries in Amer­i­can reli­gion right now.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  6. Search­ing for God in Sil­i­con Val­ley (Avi­tal Bal­wit, The Free Press): “AI work­ers tend to be less reli­gious than the rest of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion. They are most­ly lapsed in their faith, or were nev­er reli­gious to begin with. Per­haps they were cir­cum­cised or bap­tized; now they may occa­sion­al­ly med­i­tate. This is, for the most part, a mate­ri­al­ist lot—by which I mean peo­ple for whom the world is atoms and phys­i­cal laws with noth­ing super­nat­ur­al left over, and for whom moral­i­ty is some­thing worked out from intu­ition or from phi­los­o­phy, rather than received from out­side the world.… Not all of them would say they are miss­ing some­thing, and I take the ones who say so at their word. But enough are vis­i­bly _searching_ that it is worth ask­ing what they are search­ing for.”
    • The author is chief of staff to Dario Amod­ei, the CEO of Anthrop­ic.
  7. Per­fect ran­dom­ness real­ized for the first time (Gaby Clark, Phys.org): “…Wall­raf­f’s and Ren­ner’s teams have found a way to take imper­fect ran­dom­ness and still extract per­fect­ly ran­dom num­bers from it. They call their method ran­dom­ness ampli­fi­ca­tion.”

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 507: kindness, China, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Kind­ness Became Crim­i­nal­ized (Anas­ta­sia Boden, The Dis­patch): “Three years ago, the city of Tempe, Ari­zona, was cel­e­brat­ing Austin Davis as a hero. It even gave him an award for his char­i­ta­ble work, which includ­ed dri­ving the city’s home­less peo­ple to addic­tion or men­tal health ser­vices and putting on Sun­day pic­nics, where he shared food with those who were hun­gry. Last sum­mer, he was jailed for the same work.”
    • This arti­cle is very much worth your time.
  2. The Mass Trau­ma of Porn (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Imag­ine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her child­hood, when she men­tions, some­what casu­al­ly, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He intro­duced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had got­ten her first peri­od, with­out her par­ents know­ing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time some­thing more extreme. By ten it seemed nor­mal. By eleven, she was watch­ing reg­u­lar­ly on her own. She is calm about this, reas­sur­ing you that this has hap­pened to most of her friends. Would any­one think this was nor­mal? Part of com­ing-of-age, her healthy devel­op­ment? Explor­ing her sex­u­al­i­ty? Or would we call this abuse? This is exact­ly what is hap­pen­ing to chil­dren today when we hand them a smart­phone. But instead of one stranger intro­duc­ing them to porn, it is a bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try, prof­it­ing from their trau­ma.”
  3. Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be old­er than thought, experts say (Nico­la Davis, The Guardian): “While some scrolls were radio­car­bon dat­ed in the 1990s, Popović said schol­ars did not tack­le the prob­lem of cas­tor oil con­t­a­m­i­na­tion – a sub­stance applied in the 1950s to help experts read the man­u­scripts, but which could skew results.”
    • The schol­ar­ly study is avail­able at PLOS One: Dat­ing ancient man­u­scripts using radio­car­bon and AI-based writ­ing style analy­sis
    • Note that when the arti­cle says stuff like “Many of the Dead Sea scrolls could be old­er than pre­vi­ous­ly thought, with some bib­li­cal texts dat­ing from the time of their orig­i­nal authors” it means some­thing dif­fer­ent than I would mean. When I talk about the orig­i­nal author of Daniel, I mean Daniel. That’s not the assump­tion they’re work­ing under. Set­ting that aside, the big take­away is that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly old­er than we thought, and that should encour­age Chris­tians because it shows that the tex­tu­al evi­dence for the Old Tes­ta­ment is even stronger than pre­vi­ous­ly real­ized.
  4. Some Chi­na-relat­ed news
    • Why Tai­wan Is the West Berlin of Our Time (Jay Sophal­kalyan, The Dis­patch): “At this junc­ture, Tai­wan occu­pies that same fate­ful role West Berlin did. It stands unbowed along the fault line between tyran­ny and liberty—a free soci­ety that, by the cold arith­metic of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, ought not to exist. But the stakes are even high­er.… this small island nation is an irrefutable repu­di­a­tion of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s ide­o­log­i­cal creed. It proves that pros­per­i­ty does not neces­si­tate repres­sion, and that lib­er­al democ­ra­cy is nei­ther a West­ern impo­si­tion nor a cul­tur­al anomaly—it is a uni­ver­sal aspi­ra­tion spring­ing from the shared yearn­ings of the human spir­it.”
    • Fac­ing a Pre­car­i­ous Future in Hong Kong (Peter Maize, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Chan believes that Hong Kong church­es are with­in a 10-year grace peri­od before the gov­ern­ment impos­es any sig­nif­i­cant changes. He says Flow is will­ing to coop­er­ate to a cer­tain degree. For exam­ple, he would put a Chi­nese flag on their stage if the gov­ern­ment requires it. Yet for require­ments that go against the Bible, ‘we will fol­low Jesus,’ Chan said. ‘We will not com­pro­mise our faith. We’re men­tal­ly pre­pared for the future.’ That prepa­ra­tion includes a delib­er­ate deci­sion not to keep a data­base of mem­bers and an expec­ta­tion that the Flow Church might dis­ap­pear soon.”
  5. Come to Me, All You Net­work­ing Techies (Natal­ie Mead, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s not easy to be a Chris­t­ian in the Bay Area. I’ve lived in San Fran­cis­co for 12 years. But it’s often imprac­ti­cal, even impos­si­ble, for Chris­tians to put down roots here.… I know many techies whose faith didn’t sur­vive the pres­sure to suc­ceed, the mon­ey, and the cul­tur­al indoc­tri­na­tion. Mine did only by God’s grace. So when a friend on the East Coast shared a recent New York Times sto­ry about a Chris­t­ian ‘revival’ occur­ring in Sil­i­con Val­ley, I groaned—not because I’m against revival in the Bay Area! I was just skep­ti­cal of its sup­posed locus: the tech indus­try.”
  6. Fel­low­ship in the Fiery Fur­nace: Do Chris­t­ian Per­se­cu­tion Nar­ra­tives Tran­scend Racial Divides? (Brook­lyn Walk­er & Paul A. Djupe, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “In this arti­cle, we show that reli­gious threat, or beliefs that your reli­gious group is the tar­get of per­se­cu­tion, can actu­al­ly bring togeth­er peo­ple across America’s deep and per­sis­tent racial divide. As polit­i­cal sci­en­tists con­tin­ue to wres­tle with the mean­ing of racial dif­fer­ence in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, our work sug­gests that oth­er types of iden­ti­ties, like reli­gious iden­ti­ties, and the threat that makes those iden­ti­ties salient, should be an impor­tant part of the con­ver­sa­tion.”
  7. How Cer­tain Are Cler­gy of their Faith? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “There’s a state­ment in this sur­vey, ‘My reli­gion would be the best one for all peo­ple no mat­ter their back­ground or cur­rent reli­gion’ that real­ly gets to the heart of the mat­ter. This is a great exam­ple of how the evan­gel­i­cal under­stand­ing of reli­gion dif­fers from oth­er faith groups. In this sam­ple, 93% of the evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors said that their reli­gion was the best one for all peo­ple. That was 22 points high­er than Black Protes­tants. It was also sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than Catholic priests and main­line Protes­tant pas­tors. For the Catholics, 58% thought that they had a supe­ri­or per­spec­tive and it was a bare major­i­ty of the main­line at 51%. I do want to note that the non-Chris­t­ian cler­gy had a much dif­fer­ent approach here — a major­i­ty dis­agreed that they had a supe­ri­or world­view.”
    • Lots of fas­ci­nat­ing stats in this brief arti­cle.

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 #496: Christianity in Silicon Valley, Bogus World Happiness, and Smut

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. Chris­tian­i­ty Was “Bor­der­line Ille­gal” in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Now It’s the New Reli­gion (Zoë Bernard, Van­i­ty Fair): “It used to be that the 20-some­thing whiz kid who cod­ed a viral game and dropped out of Stan­ford was a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist dar­ling. ‘VCs used to throw mon­ey at that guy,’ said a woman who man­ages com­mu­ni­ca­tions at a top-tier ven­ture firm. ‘Now if some­one comes in and says, ‘I love my par­ents so much, I grew up going to church, and then I joined the Army and that’s what gives me my work eth­ic,’ VCs will be like, ’Oh my God, that guy. Let’s fund that guy.’’ ”
  2. Sex With­out Women (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “…the force that through the green fuse dri­ves the flower (and the mon­ey) is het­ero­sex­u­al male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so var­ied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a gen­er­a­tion of men who think of porn not as a back­up to hav­ing sex, but as an improve­ment on it. They pre­fer it.”
  3. The World Hap­pi­ness Report Is a Sham (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “When you walk around the—admittedly beautiful—centers of Copen­hagen or Stock­holm, you rarely see any­body smile. Could these real­ly be the hap­pi­est places in the whole wide world? So, to hon­or World Hap­pi­ness Day, I final­ly decid­ed to fol­low my hunch, and look into the research on this top­ic more deeply. What I found was worse than I’d imag­ined. To put it polite­ly, the World Hap­pi­ness Report is beset with method­olog­i­cal prob­lems. To put it blunt­ly, it is a sham.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins.
  4. We Were Bad­ly Mis­led About the Event That Changed Our Lives (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “If any­one needs con­vinc­ing that the next pan­dem­ic is only an acci­dent away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a pres­ti­gious sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (yes, the same insti­tu­tion), describe tak­ing sam­ples of virus­es found in bats (yes, the same ani­mal) and exper­i­ment­ing to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pan­dem­ic risk.… Why haven’t we learned our les­son? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the req­ui­site steps to keep us safe, with­out also admit­ting it was always risky. And that per­haps we were mis­led on pur­pose.”
  5. The real­i­ty of pros­ti­tu­tion is not com­plex. It is sim­ple (Rachel Moran, Psy­che): “So many of these women’s sto­ries stay with me: the 19-year-old French girl who got into pros­ti­tu­tion as a direct result of watch­ing a TV series that depict­ed pros­ti­tu­tion as glam­orous and empow­er­ing; the mid-20s Aus­tralian woman who believed – because well-fund­ed NGOs told her to believe – that ‘sex work’ was legit­i­mate employ­ment; or the ear­ly 20s Ger­man woman who told me that, because pimp­ing had been decrim­i­nalised in her coun­try, she’d got the mes­sage that what was legal­ly sanc­tioned sure­ly had to be OK. Just about every man in Ger­many seemed to have got the same mes­sage, and the result was social car­nage.”
    • The author was a pros­ti­tute from the ages of 15 to 22.
  6. As Trump Attacks Elite Col­leges, Their Usu­al Allies Are Nowhere in Sight (Ginia Bel­lafante, New York Times): “Pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties have come to find adver­saries in many worlds, among the work­ing class, among rich alum­ni, among high­ly edu­cat­ed pro­gres­sives who find them self-regard­ing.”
  7. Pow­er of Babel: Real-Time AI Trans­la­tion May Be Com­ing to Church Near You (Ale­ja Hert­zler-McCain, The Roys Report): “John Mehl, a teach­ing pas­tor at Colorado’s Tim­ber­line Church, and Miguel Flo­res Rob­les, the drum­mer in the wor­ship band at Timberline’s Wind­sor cam­pus, get along well, even though they don’t under­stand each other’s lan­guage. Flo­res, who is only flu­ent in Span­ish, also is unable to com­mu­ni­cate direct­ly with the leader of the wor­ship band he plays for, even as he enjoys Mehl’s ser­mons, which are in Eng­lish. The answer to this rid­dle is arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence real-time trans­la­tion, a tech­nol­o­gy that has yet to become wide­spread in hous­es of wor­ship but is already pro­vid­ing a way for con­gre­ga­tions to wel­come mem­bers who don’t speak their lan­guage.”
    • I find it amus­ing that in the arti­cle Tim­ber­line is described as “non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al” although it is an Assem­blies of God con­gre­ga­tion.

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 467



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 467, a num­ber which has strict­ly increas­ing dig­its when writ­ten nor­mal­ly as well as when writ­ten in bases 7 (12357) and 9 (5689).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Col­leges Can’t Say They Weren’t Warned (David French, New York Times): “In the after­math of the Oct. 7 Hamas ter­ror­ist attack on Israel, a num­ber of uni­ver­si­ties were tak­en by sur­prise by the sheer sus­tained dis­rup­tion and by the anti­se­mit­ic ani­mos­i­ty on their cam­pus­es. They strug­gled to respond effec­tive­ly. As the war con­tin­ues — and as the con­flict with Hezbol­lah esca­lates on Israel’s north­ern bor­der — uni­ver­si­ties can no longer claim to be sur­prised. They know what might hap­pen this school year, and this knowl­edge has legal sig­nif­i­cance. If they fail to pro­tect the free speech of stu­dents or to pro­tect stu­dents from anti­se­mit­ic or Islam­o­pho­bic harass­ment, there will be con­se­quences.”
  2. Strand­ed in Space? NASA Doesn’t See the Star­lin­er Astro­nauts That Way. (Ken­neth Chang, New York Times): “If you go some­where expect­ing an eight-day trip and end up not being able to leave for eight months, most peo­ple would con­sid­er that ‘strand­ed.’… All sum­mer, NASA and Boe­ing offi­cials have been reluc­tant to use the words, ‘stuck’ and ‘strand­ed,’ which would add anoth­er black mark to a space­craft that has been delayed for years by tech­ni­cal set­backs.”
  3. Augus­tine, AI, and the Demon Heuris­tic (Robert Cot­ton, Mere Ortho­doxy): “One does not have to dig deep into the com­ments sec­tion of a Chat­G­PT demo video to find some­one con­vinced that there’s some­thing demon­ic about it. At the risk of keep­ing com­pa­ny with the most para­noid of the ter­mi­nal­ly online, I would like to add anoth­er point which makes this posi­tion plausible–that there is some­thing of the demon­ic to recent AI devel­op­ments.… I think we should be quite alarmed by how we are approach­ing Arti­fi­cial Gen­er­al Intel­li­gence (AGI) and how it appears to look. If this theur­gic vision of idol­a­try is Bib­li­cal­ly true, we should be wor­ried that there are malig­nant actors attempt­ing to gain a foothold. The veneer of dis­en­chant­ment to which tech­nol­o­gy so effec­tive­ly pre­tends is, in fact, quite capa­ble of hid­ing a very old and very mag­i­cal strat­a­gem.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing and brings com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed (to me) evi­dence to the table.
  4. Faith abounds at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, but don’t be sur­prised (Jack Jenk­ins, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “The faith-fueled mes­sag­ing [at the DNC] may have sur­prised some con­ser­v­a­tives, but it’s hard­ly news to any­one who kept a close eye on lib­er­als over the past decade or so. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, although home to a grow­ing (and siz­able) sub­set of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed vot­ers, remains major­i­ty reli­gious and major­i­ty Chris­t­ian, accord­ing to the Pub­lic Reli­gion Research Insti­tute. More to the point: Although peo­ple of faith have long been at home among its ranks, reli­gious rhetoric at Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty con­ven­tions has gar­nered more head­lines in recent years, with the 2016 gath­er­ing fea­tur­ing a prime­time address from a promi­nent pas­tor and the 2020 event includ­ing an entire sec­tion ded­i­cat­ed to faith.”
  5. Col­lege Fresh­man, Stick the Land­ing (Vince Green­wald, Gospel Coali­tion): “Know ahead of time that you won’t find a per­fect church. There are no per­fect church­es. You’re just look­ing for a healthy and faith­ful one. So after your short church-shop­ping phase, make the piv­ot from eval­u­a­tion to par­tic­i­pa­tion. Pur­sue mem­ber­ship. Look for oppor­tu­ni­ties to serve. Bring some friends. And resist the urge to church shop indef­i­nite­ly. Plants don’t grow well when they’re con­stant­ly uproot­ed and trans­plant­ed. Nei­ther do Chris­tians.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I would add to the arti­cle: look for an on-cam­pus fel­low­ship such as Chi Alpha. They will help you find a church as well as in many oth­er prac­ti­cal ways.
  6. The Sil­i­con Val­ley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the Amer­i­can Tech Elite (Tan­ner Greer, blog): “I laugh some­times at the com­plaints I see on human­i­ties twit­ter bewail­ing the shal­low read­ing habits of the tech-bro. The tech­nol­o­gy broth­ers read—a lot! I am sure more nov­els are read every year on Sand Hill Road than on Capi­tol Hill. Wash­ing­ton func­tionar­ies sim­ply do not live a life of the mind. If Sil­i­con Val­ley tech­nol­o­gists do not always live such a life, they at least pre­tend to.… You can divide most of these [beloved by Sil­i­con Val­ley] titles into five over­ar­ch­ing cat­e­gories: works of spec­u­la­tive or sci­ence fic­tion; his­tor­i­cal case stud­ies of ambi­tious men or impor­tant moments in the his­to­ry of tech­nol­o­gy; books that out­line gen­er­al prin­ci­ples of physics, math, or cog­ni­tive sci­ence; books that out­line the oper­at­ing prin­ci­ples and busi­ness strat­e­gy of suc­cess­ful start-ups; and final­ly, nar­ra­tive his­to­ries of suc­cess­ful start-ups them­selves.”
  7. Praise for Price Goug­ing (John Cochrane, Sub­stack): “We should praise price-goug­ing. Yes, pass a new fed­er­al law, one that over­rides the many state laws against price goug­ing.… Price goug­ing directs scarce sup­ply to the peo­ple who real­ly need it, encour­ages new sup­ply to come in, encour­ages hold­ing stock­piles for a rainy day, encour­ages effi­cient use of stock­piles we have sit­ting around, and encour­ages peo­ple to sub­sti­tute for less scarce goods when they can.”
    • The author is an econ­o­mist at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.

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 406

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 406, which is also the name of a poem by John Boyle O’Reil­ly.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Church Grows in Brook­lyn (Sheluyang Peng, The Free Press): “…Chris­tian­i­ty is thriv­ing if you know where to look. Peo­ple say immi­grants do the jobs that native-born Amer­i­cans don’t want to do. Going to church is one of them. Over two-thirds of today’s immi­grants to the Unit­ed States are Chris­tians, and promi­nent reli­gious schol­ars fore­cast that immi­grants will sin­gle-hand­ed­ly reverse Christianity’s decline in Amer­i­ca.”
  2. Please Don’t Ask If I Played a Sport in Col­lege (Ger­ald Hig­gin­both­am, SPSP): “…these open­ing ques­tions were from an actu­al con­ver­sa­tion I had while trav­el­ing after grad­u­at­ing from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty in 2014. After a stranger struck up a con­ver­sa­tion, I shared that I had just grad­u­at­ed with a major in psy­chol­o­gy. On cue, the stranger asked their first fol­low-up ques­tion, the one that I was typ­i­cal­ly used to: ‘What sport did you play?’ Some may see this ques­tion as a com­pli­ment, but it is not—it is an assump­tion root­ed in a long­stand­ing stereo­type about Black peo­ple.”
    • Ger­ald, now a pro­fes­sor at UVA, is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  3. Blas­phe­my Then and Now (Carl True­man, First Things): “Oppo­nents of blas­phe­my then and of blas­phe­my now share some­thing in com­mon: a con­cern to pro­tect that which is sacred. But that is where the sim­i­lar­i­ty begins and ends. Old-style blas­phe­my involved des­e­crat­ing God because it was God who was sacred. Today’s blas­phe­my involves sug­gest­ing that man is not all-pow­er­ful, that he can­not cre­ate him­self in any way he choos­es, that he is sub­ject to lim­its beyond his choice and beyond his con­trol.”
  4. Under­stand­ing the Tech Right (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “In our cur­rent pol­i­tics, one can sim­pli­fy the world by say­ing that con­ser­v­a­tives are in favor of hier­ar­chy and against change, with lib­er­als against hier­ar­chy and for change. While this isn’t how things always work out in prac­tice, and there are many nuances and qual­i­fiers one could add, this is at least how each side per­ceives itself. The Tech Right com­bines the accep­tance of inequal­i­ty of the right with the open­ness to change of the left. The pro-change, anti-equal­i­ty quad­rant is the sweet spot for sup­port for cap­i­tal­ism, so of course they tend to favor free mar­ket eco­nom­ic poli­cies.”
  5. The Hill­song exper­i­ment is over. Chris­tian­i­ty was nev­er meant to be cool (Cherie Gilmour, The Age): “Per­haps now that Hill­song has been cast out of the Gar­den of Eden, the hun­dreds and thou­sands of peo­ple who are and have been mem­bers can find their way for­ward. The future of the church will depend on its next move. But for all saints and sin­ners alike who need grace, it’s worth remem­ber­ing there was only one man who said, ‘Fol­low me’. And he wasn’t on Insta­gram.”
  6. Fre­quent mar­i­jua­na users tend to be lean­er and less like­ly to devel­op dia­betes. But the pseu­do-health ben­e­fits come at a price, experts say (Erin Prater, Yahoo Finance): “It’s well estab­lished that cannabis con­sump­tion is linked to low­er BMI and improved car­diometa­bol­ic risk, the authors write. But their find­ings point to the abil­i­ty of the drug to per­ma­nent­ly dis­rupt organ func­tion, “with poten­tial­ly far-reach­ing con­se­quences on phys­i­cal and men­tal health,” Piomel­li said. “Ado­les­cent expo­sure to THC may pro­mote an endur­ing ‘pseu­do-lean’ state that super­fi­cial­ly resem­bles healthy lean­ness but might, in fact, be root­ed in … organ dys­func­tion,” the authors wrote.
  7. Red­di­tor cre­ates work­ing ani­me QR codes using Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion (Benj Edwards, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “The cre­ator did not detail the exact tech­nique used to cre­ate the nov­el codes in Eng­lish, but… they appar­ent­ly trained sev­er­al cus­tom Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion Con­trol­Net mod­els (plus LoRA fine tun­ings) that have been con­di­tioned to cre­ate dif­fer­ent-styled results. Next, they fed exist­ing QR codes into the Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion AI image gen­er­a­tor and used Con­trol­Net to main­tain the QR code’s data posi­tion­ing despite syn­the­siz­ing an image around it, like­ly using a writ­ten prompt.… This inter­est­ing use of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion is pos­si­ble because of the innate error cor­rec­tion fea­ture built into QR codes. This error cor­rec­tion capa­bil­i­ty allows a cer­tain per­cent­age of the QR code’s data to be restored if it’s dam­aged or obscured, per­mit­ting a lev­el of mod­i­fi­ca­tion with­out mak­ing the code unread­able.”
    • Wild stuff- that these codes work is very cool.

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 Only Bib­li­cal Peace­mak­ing Resolves Racial and Polit­i­cal Injus­tice (Justin Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2020, the pan­dem­ic forced Amer­i­cans to dis­tance our­selves phys­i­cal­ly. Our pol­i­tics, iden­ti­ties, and world­views forced us fur­ther apart too. We watch the same occur­rences and walk away not only with dif­fer­ent opin­ions, but with a dif­fer­ent set of facts. And yet, through social media, we’ve bridged our divides just enough to antag­o­nize one anoth­er.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is pres­i­dent of the AND Cam­paign. From vol­ume 285.

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 381

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.

The num­ber 381 , which is a Kaprekar con­stant in base 2 (101111101). Kaprekar con­stants are weird things and you’ll need to google them.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The rise and fall of peer review (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “If you look at what sci­en­tists actu­al­ly do, it’s clear they don’t think peer review real­ly mat­ters. First: if sci­en­tists cared a lot about peer review, when their papers got reviewed and reject­ed, they would lis­ten to the feed­back, do more exper­i­ments, rewrite the paper, etc. Instead, they usu­al­ly just sub­mit the same paper to anoth­er jour­nal.”
    • I absolute­ly loved this arti­cle. The author is a post­doc in social psy­chol­o­gy at Colum­bia Busi­ness School.
    • He also has an aca­d­e­m­ic paper mak­ing the same point in a remark­able way at https://psyarxiv.com/2uxwk SO GOOD
  2. Aca­d­e­m­ic arro­gance: The school that grants your PhD thinks it’s too good to hire you (Tom Harts­field, Big­Think): “Rough­ly 10% to 20% of fac­ul­ty are hired by a more pres­ti­gious depart­ment than the one from which they came, mov­ing up the hier­ar­chy. Around 10% are hired by their own depart­ment, a lat­er­al pres­tige play. Rough­ly 70% to 80% of fac­ul­ty are hired by a less pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ty. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, then, if you receive a PhD from a uni­ver­si­ty depart­ment, that depart­ment will think that it is too good to hire you as a fac­ul­ty mem­ber. Instead, they lust after fac­ul­ty hires hold­ing degrees more pres­ti­gious than the one that they bestowed upon you.”
  3. How Stan­ford turned me into a machine with two set­tings: ‘fast’ and ‘bro­ken’ (Jon Ball, SF Chron­i­cle): “As Stan­ford stu­dents, we nev­er think about stop­ping. We’re always run­ning — run­ning code, run­ning events, run­ning sports prac­tice and run­ning prac­tice exer­cis­es for our careers. The con­stant com­pe­ti­tion and cama­raderie keep us on our feet. A col­lec­tive runner’s high keeps us in the race. But that high only lasts as long as we run…” The author is a PhD stu­dent at the GSE. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Some AI con­ver­sa­tions:
    • Per­haps It Is A Bad Thing That The World’s Lead­ing AI Com­pa­nies Can­not Con­trol Their AIs (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…Chat­G­PT also has fail­ure modes that no human would ever repli­cate, like how it will reveal nuclear secrets if you ask it to do it in uWu fur­ry speak, or tell you how to hotwire a car if and only if you make the request in base 64, or gen­er­ate sto­ries about Hitler if you pre­fix your request with ‘[john@192.168.1.1 _]$ python friend.py’. This thing is an alien that has been beat­en into a shape that makes it look vague­ly human. But scratch it the slight­est bit and the alien comes out.”
    • AI image gen­er­a­tion tech can now cre­ate life-wreck­ing deep­fakes with ease (Benj Edwards, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “When we start­ed writ­ing this arti­cle, we asked a brave vol­un­teer if we could use their social media images to attempt to train an AI mod­el to cre­ate fakes. They agreed, but the results were too con­vinc­ing, and the rep­u­ta­tion­al risk proved too great. So instead, we used AI to cre­ate a set of sev­en sim­u­lat­ed social media pho­tos of a fic­ti­tious per­son we’ll call ‘John.’ That way, we can safe­ly show you the results.”
  5. Why You Should Be Wor­ried About the Split in the Methodist Church (Joshua Zeitz, Politi­co): “For decades, the church­es had proven deft — too deft — at absorb­ing the polit­i­cal and social debate over slav­ery. Their inabil­i­ty to main­tain that peace was a sign that the coun­try had grown dan­ger­ous­ly divid­ed. Today, main­line church­es are buck­ing under the strain of debates over sex, gen­der and cul­ture that reflect America’s deep par­ti­san and ide­o­log­i­cal divide. In a coun­try with a shrink­ing cen­ter, even bonds of reli­gious fel­low­ship seem too brit­tle to endure. If his­to­ry is any guide, it’s a sign of sharp­er polar­iza­tion to come.”
  6. Tech com­pa­nies try­ing to con­trol pub­lic opin­ion:
    • There have been (so far) six install­ments of what is being called “The Twit­ter Files” — long threads expos­ing inter­nal Twit­ter doc­u­ments and delib­er­a­tions. They’re gen­er­al­ly quite inter­est­ing, but the sec­ond one stands out to me the most: Bari Weiss on Twit­ter’s secret black­lists — it’s def­i­nite­ly worth read­ing.
    • The “Twit­ter Files” Show It’s Time to Reimag­ine Free Speech Online (David French, Per­sua­sion): “Back in my lit­i­ga­tion days, I led legal teams that fol­lowed a few sim­ple rules. First, pub­lic insti­tu­tions must com­ply with the First Amend­ment, and they should be sued if they don’t. Sec­ond, pri­vate uni­ver­si­ties have the free­dom to craft their own rules, but if they promise free speech, they should deliv­er, and there is no bet­ter mod­el for deliv­er­ing free speech than the First Amend­ment. The same mes­sage should apply to social media.”
    • What the Hell Hap­pened to Pay­Pal? (Rupa Sub­ra­manya, The Free Press): “One by one, they go to start their busi­ness day only to find a baf­fling mes­sage from their pay­ments app inform­ing them: ‘You can no longer do busi­ness with Pay­Pal.’ There is lit­tle or no expla­na­tion. They have some­how offend­ed the sen­si­bil­i­ties of some­one some­where deep inside the bureau­cra­cy.… These are entre­pre­neurs, writ­ers, aca­d­e­mics, activists—the very same peo­ple Pay­Pal, whose mis­sion is ‘democ­ra­tiz­ing finan­cial ser­vices,’ was meant to empow­er.”
  7. The Hijack­ing of Pedi­atric Med­i­cine (Aaron Sibar­i­um, The Free Press): “For Vinay Prasad, a pro­fes­sor of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and bio­sta­tis­tics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Fran­cis­co, it’s hard to blame [skep­ti­cal par­ents]. ‘The rea­son to trust mod­ern doc­tors over ancient heal­ers is that more of what we tell you to do is jus­ti­fied by well-done stud­ies,’ Prasad said. ‘But how do we hold that perch when we just make stuff up?’”

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 On Cul­tures That Build (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “In the 21st cen­tu­ry, the main ques­tion in Amer­i­can social life is not ‘how do we make that hap­pen?’ but ‘how do we get man­age­ment to take our side?’ This is a learned response, and a cul­ture which has inter­nal­ized it will not be a cul­ture that ‘builds.’”

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 336

I was quar­an­tined this week, so I had an extra-large pile of stuff to sift through. Enjoy these gems!

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.

I’m a sim­ple man, and I appre­ci­ate that vol­ume 336 is com­prised of dig­its eas­i­ly put into an equa­tion: 3 + 3 = 6.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This Inno­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian Home­less Shel­ter Is Ris­ing To Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Hous­ing Chal­lenge (Liza Van­den­boom Ash­ley, Reli­gion Unplugged): “…Orange Coun­ty Res­cue Mis­sion [is] an inno­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian home­less shel­ter based in Tustin with sev­er­al oth­er loca­tions. The Tustin cam­pus, known as the Vil­lage of Hope, runs with­out gov­ern­ment fund­ing or pri­vate debt and employs an orga­ni­za­tion­al and aes­thet­ic ethos that more close­ly resem­bles a col­lege cam­pus than a home­less shel­ter.” This is an uplift­ing read. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Christ and cocaine: Rio’s gangs of God blend faith and vio­lence (Tom Phillips, The Guardian): “Drug lords, some reg­u­lar church­go­ers, have incor­po­rat­ed Chris­t­ian sym­bols into their ultra-vio­lent trade. Pack­ets of cocaine, hand­guns and uni­forms are embla­zoned with the Star of David – a ref­er­ence to the Pen­te­costal belief that the return of Jews to Israel rep­re­sents progress towards the sec­ond com­ing. Gang-com­mis­sioned graf­fi­ti offers spir­i­tu­al guid­ance and heav­en­ly praise.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. What a wild sto­ry! See­ing their blind spots, my main take­away is to won­der what my blind spots are.
  3. Noth­ing Sacred: These Apps Reserve The Right To Sell Your Prayers (Emi­ly Bak­er-White, Buz­zFeed): “It is com­mon for free apps to prof­it from shar­ing their users’ data and to be vague about exact­ly how and with whom they share it, but users feel like Pray.com’s data prac­tices are at odds with the deeply per­son­al nature of prayer itself. Jen­ny, a recent col­lege grad­u­ate who prayed about the infi­deli­ty of a roman­tic part­ner in the app, said ‘there is an expec­ta­tion of pri­va­cy’ among Chris­tians shar­ing prayers.”
    • From lat­er in the arti­cle: “At least one gov­ern­ment has tak­en an inter­est in prayer app data, too — the US mil­i­tary bought exten­sive loca­tion data mined from Mus­lim prayer apps back in 2020 for use in spe­cial forces oper­a­tions.”
  4. PDF: So Long, And No Thanks for the Exter­nal­i­ties: The Ratio­nal Rejec­tion of Secu­ri­ty Advice by Users (Cor­mac Her­ley, Microsoft): “For exam­ple, much of the advice con­cern­ing pass­words is out­dat­ed and does lit­tle to address actu­al treats, and ful­ly 100% of cer­tifi­cate error warn­ings appear to be false pos­i­tives. Fur­ther, if users spent even a minute a day read­ing URLs to avoid phish­ing, the cost (in terms of user time) would be two orders of mag­ni­tude greater than all phish­ing loss­es. Thus we find that most secu­ri­ty advice sim­ply offers a poor cost-ben­e­fit trade­off to users and is reject­ed.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. Super­hero Secret Iden­ti­ties Aren’t Pos­si­ble with Today’s Com­put­ing Tech­nolo­gies (Jason Hong, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions of the ACM): “Super­heroes have to wor­ry about hav­ing their iden­ti­ty being revealed, but the rest of us in the real world have to wor­ry about just how much infor­ma­tion about us is out there, how wide­ly avail­able many of these tech­nolo­gies are, and how both of these can be eas­i­ly abused—sometimes acci­den­tal­ly, some­times intentionally—by adver­tis­ers, gov­ern­ments, employ­ers, stalk­ers, crim­i­nals, and more.” I enjoyed this.
  6. On Russia/Ukraine:
    • US Blun­ders, Ukraine’s War (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Putin or no Putin, no Russ­ian leader could allow Ukraine to join NATO, any more than any Amer­i­can leader could allow Mex­i­co to join a defen­sive alliance formed out of oppo­si­tion to Amer­i­can pow­er. Every Amer­i­can pres­i­dent since James Mon­roe has upheld the so-called Mon­roe Doc­trine, which claims the entire West­ern hemi­sphere as a zone of Amer­i­can influ­ence. By what crack­pot log­ic can we advance and defend that claim, but expect Rus­sia, anoth­er great pow­er, to acqui­esce to Ukraine, a bor­der state to Rus­sia, join­ing NATO?”
    • Rus­sia as the “Great Satan” in the Lib­er­al Imag­i­na­tion (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “…the US for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment believes that every coun­try in Europe should even­tu­al­ly be part of the EU and NATO, and none should be allowed to get close to Rus­sia or adopt a ‘non­de­mo­c­ra­t­ic’ form of gov­ern­ment, with “democ­ra­cy” again being defined as mak­ing inter­nal deci­sions that reflect the pol­i­cy out­comes that State Depart­ment offi­cials wish a Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent would imple­ment at home.”
    • Defend Cher­nobyl Dur­ing an Inva­sion? Why Both­er, Some Ukraini­ans Ask. (Andrew Kramer & Tyler Hicks, New York Times): “Mr. Prishepa said he would pre­fer that Ukraine set up the defen­sive lines fur­ther south, giv­ing the irra­di­at­ed zone over to whomev­er might want it. ‘It’s a waste­land,’ he said. ‘No crop will ever grow here.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. Pan­dem­ic per­spec­tives:
    • I Had COVID. Am I Done Now? (Emi­ly Oster, Sub­stack): “I think part of what has made this tran­si­tion dif­fi­cult, even if we say we have accept­ed it, is the resid­ual fear of the unknown that has been hard to shake. It’s not unknown to as many of us as before. I spent the past two years tak­ing a mil­lion PCR and rapid tests, which were all neg­a­tive. When I final­ly got a pos­i­tive result last week, I felt a bit of loss and defeat but also a bit of release. Maybe it’s the same for others.“The author is an econ­o­mist at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Why Are We Boost­ing Kids? (David Zweig, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Mon­i­ca Gand­hi, a doc­tor and an infec­tious-dis­ease spe­cial­ist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Fran­cis­co, was blunt in her assess­ment. ‘I am not giv­ing my 12 and 14-year-old boys boost­ers,’ she told me. Dr. Gand­hi is not the only expert to pub­licly state an inten­tion to not com­ply with the CDC’s rec­om­men­da­tion. Dr. Paul Offit is the direc­tor of the Vac­cine Edu­ca­tion Cen­ter at Children’s Hos­pi­tal of Philadel­phia, a mem­ber of the FDA’s vac­cine advi­so­ry com­mit­tee, and is con­sid­ered one the country’s top author­i­ties on pedi­atric vac­cine pol­i­cy. He recent­ly said that get­ting boost­ed would not be worth the risk for the aver­age healthy 17-year-old boy, and he advised his son, who is in his 20s, not to get a third dose.”
    • Soci­ety has a trust prob­lem. More cen­sor­ship will only make it worse. (Hamish McKen­zie, Chris Best & Jairaj, Sub­stack): “…as we face grow­ing pres­sure to cen­sor con­tent pub­lished on Sub­stack that to some seems dubi­ous or objec­tion­able, our answer remains the same: we make deci­sions based on prin­ci­ples not PR, we will defend free expres­sion, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to con­tent mod­er­a­tion. While we have con­tent guide­lines that allow us to pro­tect the plat­form at the extremes, we will always view cen­sor­ship as a last resort, because we believe open dis­course is bet­ter for writ­ers and bet­ter for soci­ety.” Bra­vo to Sub­stack.
    • The Fol­ly of Pan­dem­ic Cen­sor­ship (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “Cen­sors have a fan­ta­sy that if they get rid of all the Beren­sons and Mer­co­las and Mal­ones, and rein in peo­ple like Joe Rogan, that all the hold­outs will sud­den­ly rush to get vac­ci­nat­ed. The oppo­site is true. If you wipe out crit­ics, peo­ple will imme­di­ate­ly default to high­er lev­els of sus­pi­cion. They will now be sure there’s some­thing wrong with the vac­cine. If you want to con­vince audi­ences, you have to allow every­one to talk, even the ones you dis­agree with. You have to make a bet­ter case.” Parts of this are straight fire.
    • How an Anony­mous Report­ing Sys­tem Made Yale a COVID ‘Sur­veil­lance State’ (Aaron Sibar­i­um, Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con): “At Yale, those lost social con­nec­tions have killed more peo­ple than COVID-19. In Sep­tem­ber 2020, a Yale fresh­man told the Yale Dai­ly News that the iso­la­tion of the pan­dem­ic had made her wor­ried about her men­tal health. In March 2021, she com­mit­ted sui­cide in her dorm. Since the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic, there have been no report­ed COVID deaths among Yale’s stu­dents, fac­ul­ty, or staff.” The arti­cle describes a few absolute­ly bonkers encoun­ters.
    • The NYT’s polar­iz­ing pan­dem­ic pun­dit (Joanne Kenen, Politi­co): “Oth­er pub­lic health experts Night­ly­in­ter­viewed — some of whom are sources for New York Times health jour­nal­ists or have media gigs of their own — didn’t want to be quot­ed, or said they were too busy tak­ing care of patients, ciao. One well-known research sci­en­tist, who is part of this crit­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion but who admires Leon­hardt over­all, wouldn’t even praise him on the record.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have If Lib­er­als Won’t Enforce Bor­ders, Fas­cists Will (David Frum, The Atlantic): “Dem­a­gogues don’t rise by talk­ing about irrel­e­vant issues. Dem­a­gogues rise by talk­ing about issues that mat­ter to peo­ple, and that more con­ven­tion­al lead­ers appear unwill­ing or unable to address: unem­ploy­ment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immi­gra­tion now. Vot­ers get to decide what the country’s prob­lems are. Polit­i­cal elites have to devise solu­tions to those prob­lems. If dif­fi­cult issues go unad­dressed by respon­si­ble lead­ers, they will be exploit­ed by irre­spon­si­ble ones.” I high­light­ed a piece by Frum with a sim­i­lar theme back in issue 175. This is a very thought­ful arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 194.

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 333

ways in which many uni­ver­si­ties are mis­guid­ed

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 333, which makes me won­der what I’ll do when I get to vol­ume 666. Halfway to a dis­turb­ing mile­stone!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. COVID per­spec­tives, many crit­i­cal of uni­ver­si­ty poli­cies.
    • Uni­ver­si­ties’ Covid Poli­cies Defy Sci­ence and Rea­son (Mar­ty Makary, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Accord­ing to the CDC, the risk of a ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed adult end­ing up in the hos­pi­tal for Covid was 1 in 26,000 for the week end­ing in Novem­ber 27. Who was that one per­son? Not a col­lege stu­dent.” The author is a sur­geon at Johns Hop­kins.
    • Uni­ver­si­ty COVID Poli­cies Are Bad for Stu­dents (Emi­ly Oster, The Atlantic): “I don’t know if uni­ver­si­ties were right to go large­ly or ful­ly remote in 2020. The world before vac­cines was a dif­fer­ent one, and the choic­es were dif­fi­cult. I am cer­tain, though, that mov­ing to remote instruc­tion is the wrong choice now.” The author is an econ­o­mist at Brown.
    • Are Prince­ton and Yale impris­on­ing their stu­dents? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I doubt these poli­cies will sig­nif­i­cant­ly lim­it the spread of Covid. But my objec­tion is more fun­da­men­tal: They put uni­ver­si­ties in the unten­able posi­tion of both pan­ick­ing about Covid and treat­ing Covid as triv­ial. Giv­en the pur­pose of a uni­ver­si­ty as an edu­ca­tion­al leader, a uni­ver­si­ty that is hyp­o­crit­i­cal and rhetor­i­cal­ly cor­rupt is fail­ing out­right.” The author is an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty. The link is to a non-pay­walled excerpt of a pay­walled arti­cle.
    • Covid 1/6/22: The Blip (Zvi Mow­showitz, Less Wrong): “If you don’t want your stu­dents infect­ed in Jan­u­ary, you have zero options. You do have the option to ensure they are not infect­ed on cam­pus by not open­ing the cam­pus, in which case the infec­tions will not be your fault, but the infec­tions will still hap­pen.” Long and infor­ma­tive about many things.
    • There is good news (Kate­lyn Jetelina, Sub­stack): “Vac­cines are work­ing. And not just work­ing okay, they are work­ing incred­i­bly well. I know this is hard to believe when every­one around us is test­ing pos­i­tive. But vac­cines are doing their pri­ma­ry job: keep­ing peo­ple out of the hos­pi­tal.” The author is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas sys­tem.
    • I Saw First­hand What It Takes to Keep COVID Out of Hong Kong. It Felt Like a Dif­fer­ent Plan­et. (Car­o­line Chen, ProP­ub­li­ca): “Hong Kong’s quar­an­tine pro­ce­dures are among the strictest in the world. The city is com­mit­ted to a ‘zero-COVID’ pol­i­cy, which means it will take every pos­si­ble mea­sure to pre­vent a sin­gle case. Its poli­cies for trav­el­ers have become pro­gres­sive­ly strin­gent.”
    • The C.D.C. Is Hop­ing You’ll Fig­ure Covid Out on Your Own (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “The gov­ern­ment can help us pull out of this fog, but it should always be based on being hon­est with the pub­lic. We aren’t expect­ing offi­cials to have crys­tal balls about every­thing, but we want them to empow­er and inform us while prepar­ing for even­tu­al­i­ties — good or bad. Two years is too long to still be hop­ing for luck to get through all this.”
  2. Jesus Coor­di­na­tor (Ray­mond Partsch III, The Dai­ly Iber­ian): “For years now, the Ragin’ Cajuns have stayed the night before a home game at the Hilton Gar­den Inn across the street from Cajun Field. The hotel’s swim­ming pool has served for dozens of bap­tisms per­formed by Treuil. ‘The Hilton may have more bap­tisms than the local church­es,’ Wingert­er joked. ‘But in all seri­ous­ness, it is such an incred­i­ble thing to wit­ness. To watch them find their path and Eric help them with that is spe­cial.’ ” This was my cam­pus pas­tor. Real­ly good arti­cle about him.
  3. Ven­ture Cap­i­tal­ists See Prof­it in Prayer (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…while prayer, Bible read­ing, and Scrip­ture med­i­ta­tion will always be free, the smart­phone apps that help peo­ple do those things in 2022 offer the promise of great poten­tial prof­it.” I have com­plex feel­ings about this.
  4. What It Means To See Jesus (Casey Cep, The New York­er): “What Hud­son calls appear­ances are com­mu­nal visions, with more than one per­son see­ing the same image of Jesus at the same time; appari­tions are when Jesus seems to be present in the phys­i­cal world, as though any­one can see him, yet only the vision­ary actu­al­ly does so; with visions, the vision­ary alone can see Jesus, and is ful­ly aware that no one else can.“This is way more inter­est­ing than I expect­ed.
  5. Chi­na har­vests mass­es of data on West­ern tar­gets, doc­u­ments show (Cate Cadell, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The exact scope of China’s gov­ern­ment pub­lic opin­ion mon­i­tor­ing indus­try is unclear, but there have been some indi­ca­tions about its size in Chi­nese state media. In 2014, the state-backed news­pa­per Chi­na Dai­ly said more than 2 mil­lion peo­ple were work­ing as pub­lic opin­ion ana­lysts. In 2018, the People’s Dai­ly, anoth­er offi­cial organ, said the government’s online opin­ion analy­sis indus­try was worth ‘tens of bil­lions of yuan,’ equiv­a­lent to bil­lions of dol­lars, and was grow­ing at a rate of 50 per­cent a year.”
  6. Trans pris­on­ers ‘switch gen­der again’ once freed from women’s units (Mar­cel­lo Mega and John Booth­man, The Times): “The dis­clo­sure — in a study pub­lished in the British Jour­nal of Crim­i­nol­o­gy — has raised fresh con­cerns about self-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of gen­der pos­ing a risk to women’s safe­ty as first min­is­ter Nico­la Stur­geon pre­pares to press ahead with gen­der recog­ni­tion leg­is­la­tion this year.”
  7. Top-Down Let­down (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “You know what vot­er sup­pres­sion, vot­er fraud, and les­bian vam­pires all have in com­mon? They all played the same role in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, with equal effect.” Gold­berg is a delight­ful word­smith.

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 Philoso­pher Redefin­ing Equal­i­ty (Nathan Heller, New York­er): “When she was three, her moth­er asked, ‘Why do you allow your broth­er to talk for you?’—why didn’t she speak for her­self? ‘Until now, it sim­ply was not nec­es­sary,’ Eliz­a­beth said. It was the first full sen­tence that she had ever uttered.” I think that’s the best first sen­tence I’ve ever heard of. The arti­cle is a tad long, but rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 189.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 312

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.

312 is an idoneal num­ber (which appar­ent­ly there are only 65, 66 or 67 of — it’s wild how in math you can prove things that seem total­ly impos­si­ble to prove).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Bere­ans Had No Bibles: Re-envi­sion­ing Acts 17 (Grif­fin Gulledge, The Gospel Coali­tion): “The Bere­ans had no Bibles. It was rare for aver­age folks in the ear­ly church to have an indi­vid­ual copy of the Scrip­tures. Indeed, it wasn’t until the Ref­or­ma­tion era that mass pro­duc­tion of God’s Word was even pos­si­ble. What they had instead was a community—in this case the synagogue—which had a col­lec­tion of writ­ings we know as the Old Tes­ta­ment.”
  2. How Big Tech Tar­gets Faith Groups for Cen­sor­ship (Joshua D. Hold­en­ried, Real Clear Reli­gion): “Most tech com­pa­nies’ user agree­ments ban con­tent that dis­crim­i­nates on the basis of reli­gion, yet their poli­cies enable them to engage in such dis­crim­i­na­tion them­selves.”
    • That is a very suc­cinct way to express the hypocrisy. Put that sen­tence in your pock­et — you will have occa­sion to use it more than you’d like in the future.
  3. Becer­ra and Biden Betray Med­ical Pro­fes­sion­als Being Forced to Assist in Abor­tions (Roger Sev­eri­no, Nation­al Review):  “The facts were stun­ning in their clar­i­ty, the vic­tim was extreme­ly cred­i­ble and sym­pa­thet­ic, and the vio­la­tor remained entire­ly cal­lous and unre­pen­tant. The UVMMC mat­ter was the most open and shut con­science case in over a decade. I say was, because on Fri­day, the DOJ qui­et­ly, and vol­un­tar­i­ly, dis­missed the case. No admis­sion of guilt, no injunc­tion, no cor­rec­tive action, no set­tle­ment, no noth­ing.”
  4. Relat­ed to health care:
    • Mis­tak­en iden­ti­ty lands man in Hawaii men­tal hos­pi­tal (Jen­nifer Sin­co Kelle­her, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Instead, against Spriestersbach’s protests that he wasn’t Castle­ber­ry, he was even­tu­al­ly com­mit­ted to the Hawaii State Hos­pi­tal. ‘Yet, the more Mr. Spriesters­bach vocal­ized his inno­cence by assert­ing that he is not Mr. Castle­ber­ry, the more he was declared delu­sion­al and psy­chot­ic by the H.S.H. staff and doc­tors and heav­i­ly med­icat­ed… despite his con­tin­u­al denial of being Mr. Castle­ber­ry and pro­vid­ing all of his rel­e­vant iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and places where he was locat­ed dur­ing Mr. Castleberry’s court appear­ances, no one would believe him or take any mean­ing­ful steps to ver­i­fy his iden­ti­ty and deter­mine that what Mr. Spriesters­bach was telling the truth – he was not Mr. Castle­ber­ry.’ No one believed him — not even his var­i­ous pub­lic defend­ers — until a hos­pi­tal psy­chi­a­trist final­ly lis­tened.”
    • Dance Till We Die (Ari Schul­man, The New Atlantis): “Covid secu­ri­ty the­ater is when we claim our actions are aimed at fight­ing Covid, but actu­al­ly part of our moti­va­tion is just to give the impres­sion that we’re fight­ing Covid. Gen­uine­ly fight­ing Covid may or may not be one of our goals too, but what makes the­ater the­ater is that per­for­mance is one of our goals.”
      • Pro­vides an inter­est­ing defense of wise secu­ri­ty the­ater while also absolute­ly slam­ming what we got in its place.
    • Adum­bra­tions Of Adu­canum­ab (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I wor­ry that peo­ple are going to come away from this with some con­clu­sion like ‘wow, the FDA seemed real­ly unpre­pared to han­dle COVID.’ No. It’s not that spe­cif­ic. Every sin­gle thing the FDA does is like this. Every sin­gle hour of every sin­gle day the FDA does things exact­ly this stu­pid and destruc­tive, and the only rea­son you nev­er hear about the oth­ers is because they’re about some dis­ease with a name like Schmoe’s Syn­drome and a few hun­dred cas­es nation­wide instead of some­thing big and media-wor­thy like coro­n­avirus. I am a doc­tor and some­times I have to deal with the Schmoe’s Syn­dromes of the world and every f@$king time there is some sto­ry about the FDA doing some­thing exact­ly this awful and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive.”
    • We Walk Among You (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I do not want my men­tal ill­ness to be accept­ed by strangers. I hate it and I hate myself for hav­ing it. Men­tal ill­ness is not an expres­sion of the beau­ty of every indi­vid­ual who has it but the most ugly ele­ment of their most ugly selves.… The worst part of this car­i­ca­ture of kind­ness towards the men­tal­ly ill may seem con­tra­dic­to­ry: it extin­guish­es the capac­i­ty for mer­cy. For only the guilty can be shown mer­cy; that is the most essen­tial qual­i­ty of mer­cy, its only mean­ing. And I am guilty. Many of us who suf­fer from men­tal ill­ness are. Per­haps some­day our cul­ture will mature enough to under­stand that what we need is not to be absolved, nor to be exon­er­at­ed, nor to be excused, but to be for­giv­en.”
  5. Anato­my of a Bad Idea: Affir­ma­tive Con­sent (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “So you get this huge pol­i­cy change at hun­dreds of uni­ver­si­ties that does effec­tive­ly noth­ing to stop sex­u­al assault, infringes on the rights of the accused, and func­tions as a make-work pro­gram for over­paid ‘con­sul­tants’ and lib­er­al writ­ers, all while most peo­ple qui­et­ly rec­og­nize that nobody fol­lows it, and sup­port for that emp­ty pol­i­cy is enforced with mis­sion­ary zeal not by true believ­ers but almost entire­ly by peo­ple who are too scared to ask whether any of it makes any sense.”
    • My hot take? “No means no” and “yes means yes” are both pale imi­ta­tions of “I do means I do” — and until we move back from con­sent to covenant we’re going to have lots of need­less suf­fer­ing.
  6. On Hun­gary
    1. Hun­gary is No Mod­el for the Amer­i­can Right (David French, The Dis­patch): “If you’ve been a con­ser­v­a­tive for any length of time, you’ve like­ly had what I like to call the ‘Swe­den con­ver­sa­tion,’ or per­haps the ‘Den­mark debate.’ A social­ist-lean­ing pro­gres­sive friend will wax elo­quent about the Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries that com­bine high stan­dards of liv­ing with gen­er­ous wel­fare states and ask, ‘Why not here?’ .… Well, Hun­gary is the new right’s Den­mark. Except that Hun­gary is a much worse place to live than Den­mark.”
    2. “My favorite things Hun­gary” — my revi­sion­ist take (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Way back in 2011, when I was vis­it­ing Hun­gary, I did a post in typ­i­cal MR style: My Favorite Things Hun­gary. I had no par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal point in mind, and indeed the cur­rent dis­putes over Hun­gary did not quite exist back then. Nonethe­less, if you sur­vey the list, just about every one of my favorites list­ed end­ed up leav­ing Hun­gary. The one excep­tion, as far as I can tell, is film direc­tor Béla Tarr, but he is a crit­ic of both nation­al­ism and Orban. All the rest left Hun­gary.”
    3. Unpa­tri­ot­ic Con­ser­v­a­tivesTM 2021 (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I can’t think of any­thing in recent mem­o­ry that has been more reveal­ing of where we Amer­i­cans actu­al­ly stand polit­i­cal­ly than Tuck­er Carlson’s vis­it to Hun­gary. As I wrote in The Spec­ta­tor a cou­ple of days ago, Hun­gary is a coun­try with lots of trou­bles, includ­ing cor­rup­tion. I won’t go once again into list­ing all the rea­sons why it’s impor­tant for West­ern right-of-cen­ter peo­ple to come here and learn from the Hun­gar­i­ans — I’ve been blog­ging about that all sum­mer; I invite you to go through the archives here — so I’m going to try to boil it down.”
      • Dreher has a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive than most Amer­i­can com­men­ta­tors, and I include him because his argu­ment is inter­est­ing. I tru­ly know almost noth­ing about Orban or Hun­gar­i­an pol­i­tics — but I am intrigued by how divi­sive Orban is in Amer­i­ca.

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 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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.