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
- The Chinese House Church Leaders Who Didn’t Win Release (Angela Lu Fulton, Christianity Today): “Geng ‘Cherie’ Pengpeng joined Zion in 2008. She met her now-husband, Gao ‘Joshua’ Yingjia, at the church. Like many members, Geng and Gao had advanced degrees at top Chinese schools—Geng a PhD in theoretical physics and Gao a PhD in plant genetics—but they felt God’s call to pursue full-time ministry.… By June of last year, police were arresting ministers several times a month. In August, they detained 27 people—including babies—at the Sunday service in Jiaxing and sought to arrest Su on charges of participating in an illegal gathering.”
- What does AI look like? (David Zax, IBM): “A modern AI system like ChatGPT (or Claude, DeepSeek or Granite) is a series of spreadsheets filled with numbers. It’s a curious irony that this verbal technology is, at root, almost purely numerical. How many spreadsheets? It depends on the model. For the rest of this article, we’ll focus our energy on OpenAI’s GPT‑3, released in 2020, which served as the basic ‘engine’ of the breakout product ChatGPT two years later. Though you may well run a more souped-up model today, it works basically the same way. GPT‑3 has 577 spreadsheets. People in the AI industry call these ‘tensors,’ but it’s fair to think of them as spreadsheets. Each and every cell of each and every spreadsheet is filled with a single, small number (typically between ‑1.0 and 1.0).… The very first spreadsheet—which has a special function we’ll discuss soon—is the biggest: it’s 50,257 rows tall, and 12,288 columns wide. (If you do the math, that’s 617,558,016 tiny numbers, just in the first spreadsheet.) Then, after the very first spreadsheet, the remaining 576 settle into a repeating pattern of shapes: first four squares, 12,288 rows and 12,288 columns. Then a wide rectangle, 12,288 rows tall but four times as wide. Then a tall rectangle with the same proportions, only rotated upright, 12,288 columns wide.”
- From an alumnus. Way more interesting than I anticipated.
- Examples of AI in the real world
- Pastors Using AI to Help Write Sermons Grapple With Where to Draw the Line (Anvee Bhutani, Wall Street Journal): “Stetler, the Oklahoma City pastor, has made mistakes with AI. Two years ago, rushing to finish a slide for a sermon on a South Pacific missionary, he dropped in an AI-generated image without checking it closely. After the service, a congregant approached him. ‘Did you make that with AI?’ Yes, he said. ‘Did you know there’s a topless woman in the background?’ He apologized on the spot. He tells that story now as a cautionary tale to anyone he’s introducing to the tools.”
- HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Some wild stories in here.
- Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled (Kevin Buzzard, blog): “A few days earlier I had got an email from a professor in the maths department here at Imperial, expressing surprise that some of our graduate students were paying $200 per month to access models such as Sol and Fable. He said that he thought that these people were crazy. I did not immediately respond. But after meeting with Andrew I emailed the professor back and told him that in my opinion, any PhD student who was not paying $200 per month to access these tools was crazy. In fact during the workshop I learnt from Harvard PhD student Bryan Wang that Harvard were already giving free Fable access to all PhD students, post-docs and faculty at Harvard.”
- Politicians Are Trying to Change What Chatbots Say About Them (Stuart A. Thompson and Tiffany Hsu, New York Times): “Candidates have long had to worry about their reputations among voters. Now, they have to worry about what A.I. thinks about them, too. And a new industry has sprung up to help them navigate this world.… Caucus AI ran an experiment to see how long it took for content newly published to Wikipedia to end up in a chatbot’s answer. The result: about 12 minutes. That suggests that candidates can already insert their own information into an A.I.’s responses by tweaking public information ‘quickly, unvetted and without anyone on the other side watching,’ the company wrote in a blog post about its findings.”
- A.I. Drones Are Coming. We Are Not Ready. (W.J. Hennigan, New York Times): “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in January that he intends to make the military ‘an ‘A.I. first’ warfighting force across all domains.’ Throughout the Pentagon, Uncle Sam-style recruitment posters with Mr. Hegseth’s likeness declaring ‘I want YOU to use A.I.’ are plastered on the walls. His department has requested $54.6 billion in next year’s budget for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG, a body recently set up to coordinate all autonomous weapons programs across U.S. forces. The United States isn’t alone in this pursuit. Around the world, and particularly in China and Russia, an arms race is emerging to mass-produce autonomous, A.I.-operated war machines. President Vladimir Putin of Russia declared in 2017 that whoever leads in A.I. ‘will become the ruler of the world.’ President Xi Jinping of China has poured billions of dollars into A.I. development for the country’s military. Prototypes of smaller, rudimentary A.I.-assisted weapons have already been reported in action in Ukraine, Libya, Azerbaijan and Gaza.”
- China’s A.I. Play Is Different From America’s (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “American A.I. companies and the national security state seem to assume that we’re already at a point where you simply can’t let the world use the best A.I. models without controls and guardrails any more than you’d ship atomic bombs or ICBMs to random homes or private companies. Whereas the Chinese are willing to shrug and push the envelope and let America fret about safety and sovereignty, on the assumption that A.I. is a normal technology and the safety concerns will get figured out along the way.”
- Pastors Using AI to Help Write Sermons Grapple With Where to Draw the Line (Anvee Bhutani, Wall Street Journal): “Stetler, the Oklahoma City pastor, has made mistakes with AI. Two years ago, rushing to finish a slide for a sermon on a South Pacific missionary, he dropped in an AI-generated image without checking it closely. After the service, a congregant approached him. ‘Did you make that with AI?’ Yes, he said. ‘Did you know there’s a topless woman in the background?’ He apologized on the spot. He tells that story now as a cautionary tale to anyone he’s introducing to the tools.”
- Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “The elegant mathematical response is: happiness scales with log(income), not with income: ‘In a large U.S. sample, the shape of the association between happiness and Log(income) was extremely systematic: from $10,000/y to over $500,000/y, average happiness rose almost perfectly linearly with Log(income), with group-level correlations of 0.98–0.99 across a range of happiness measures, including both in-the-moment experience and overall life satisfaction.’ So if income increased 225x since the medieval era, then using observed coefficients, happiness should have increased about three points on a 1–10 scale. If the average serf would have rated his condition 3/10, we should be at 6/10.”
- An absolutely fascinating way to model the idea that money has diminishing power to increase happiness as wealth increases.
- America Has 2 Political Parties but 8 Political Tribes (Kristen Soltis Anderson, New York TImes): “There’s nothing wrong, of course, with being a party loyalist, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that most of us don’t line up neatly with the platform of either of America’s two major parties. It’s also worth keeping in mind that there’s a reason Democrats range from the aforementioned democratic socialist Representative Ocasio-Cortez to the centrist Senator Elissa Slotkin. And why Republicans range from the moderate Senator Lisa Murkowski to the populist Representative Anna Paulina Luna. It may be more useful to think of our two parties as two coalitions. For now, at least, both have to accept some level of ideological incoherence in order to cobble together a majority.”
- The interview that exposed academia’s cluelessness (Megan McArdle, Washington Post): “Carolyn Rouse, the president of the American Anthropological Association, was not one to stay silent while outsiders claimed that her field had abandoned rigorous argument in favor of social justice orthodoxy. No, sir. Instead, she opened her mouth and proved it. Her interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education has to be read to be believed. No, strike that, I’ve read it three times, and I am still struggling to convince myself that it’s real.”
- The interview in question: Is Anthropology Hopelessly Politicized? (Stephanie M. Lee, Chronicle of Higher Education) — “So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that. ”
- Zohran Mamdani Doesn’t Know What Working Class Means (Rob K. Henderson, Substack): “People often conflate social class with economic class. This allows us to talk about the former while pretending we are talking about the latter.… The focus on economic class (rather than social class) promotes the belief that we could have an egalitarian society if everyone simply had enough money. This focus is especially convenient for the upper and upper middle classes. It allows them to express concern about inequality without implicating themselves.”
- A super-interesting article that explains social class very helpfully.
Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen
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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.