Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 389

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 389, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty Can Still Come Back (Tim Keller, The Atlantic): “There was no such thing as monasticism—through which pagan North­ern Europe was turned Christian—until there was. There was no Ref­or­ma­tion until there was. There was no revival that turned Methodists and Bap­tists into cul­tur­al­ly dom­i­nant forces in the mid­west­ern and south­east­ern Unit­ed States—until there was. There was no East African Revival, led pri­mar­i­ly by African peo­ple, that helped turn Africa from a 9 per­cent Chris­t­ian con­ti­nent in 1900 into a 50 per­cent Chris­t­ian con­ti­nent today—until there was. Chris­tian­i­ty, like its founder, does not go from strength to strength but from death to res­ur­rec­tion.”
  2. Is the Pub­lic Domain Just?: Bib­li­cal Stew­ard­ship and Legal Pro­tec­tion For Tra­di­tion­al Knowl­edge Assets (Ruth L. Okedi­ji, The Colum­bia Jour­nal of Law and the Arts): “The Arti­cle pro­pos­es a the­o­log­i­cal frame­work of ‘bib­li­cal stew­ard­ship’ root­ed in ima­go Dei—the foun­da­tion­al con­cept inform­ing Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian under­stand­ings of human nature and social interaction—to address the socio-moral dimen­sions that are con­sti­tu­tive of TK [tra­di­tion­al knowl­edge] sys­tems and the insti­tu­tion­al con­text in which they unfold. The bib­li­cal stew­ard­ship frame­work focus­es on the coop­er­a­tive and kin­ship arrange­ments that enable and sus­tain pro­duc­tive capac­i­ty for TK.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law and a sol­id Chris­t­ian. I just heard her speak and the per­son intro­duc­ing her men­tioned this arti­cle as an exam­ple of how bold she is in inte­grat­ing her faith into her schol­ar­ship.
  3. Some COVID per­spec­tives
    • Sure­ly Right (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…the only sen­si­ble posi­tion is to advo­cate for ear­ly and wide­spread vac­cine access, be high­ly crit­i­cal of all the pol­i­tick­ing about vac­cine tim­ing around the elec­tion, and to avoid man­dates unless you intend to enforce them at gun­point.… Because we live in a world where the default is not to vac­ci­nate, pol­i­tics poi­sons every­thing it touch­es, and the child­hood man­dates are his­tor­i­cal acci­dents that could very well fall to con­cert­ed polit­i­cal action.”
      • A brief, fas­ci­nat­ing read.
    • Why the Odds Are Stacked Against a Promis­ing New Covid Drug (Ben­jamin Mueller, The New York Times): “By for­ti­fy­ing the body’s own mech­a­nisms for quash­ing an invad­ing virus, they can poten­tial­ly help defend against not only Covid, but also the flu and oth­er virus­es with the poten­tial to kin­dle future pan­demics.… For all of its promise, though, the drug — called pegy­lat­ed inter­fer­on lamb­da — faces an uncer­tain road [due to the FDA].”
    • Not pay­walled. Infu­ri­at­ing. Out­ra­geous. Ridicu­lous.
    • Bureau­crats: “COVID is so bad we need to change every aspect of soci­ety to deal with it. But don’t change our bureau­cra­cy. It’s not THAT bad.”
  4. Boston Uni­ver­si­ty pro­vides update on CTE study, dis­cov­ers brain dis­ease in 92 per­cent of ex-NFL play­ers ana­lyzed (Vic­to­ria Her­nan­dez, USA Today): “The Boston Uni­ver­si­ty CTE Cen­ter stud­ied the brains of 376 deceased for­mer NFL play­ers and diag­nosed 345 of them with chron­ic trau­mat­ic encephalopa­thy. This is 91.7 per­cent of those stud­ied.”
    • I’ve been say­ing this for about two stu­dent gen­er­a­tions now, but foot­bal­l’s days are num­bered in Amer­i­ca. It’s hard to imag­ine the sport sur­viv­ing the sorts of reforms that would be nec­es­sary.
  5. I Thought I Was Sav­ing Trans Kids. Now I’m Blow­ing the Whis­tle. (Jamie Reed, The Free Press): “I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and polit­i­cal­ly to the left of Bernie Sanders.… I’m now mar­ried to a trans man, and togeth­er we are rais­ing my two bio­log­i­cal chil­dren from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage and three fos­ter chil­dren we hope to adopt.… Giv­en the secre­cy and lack of rig­or­ous stan­dards that char­ac­ter­ize youth gen­der tran­si­tion across the coun­try, I believe that to ensure the safe­ty of Amer­i­can chil­dren, we need a mora­to­ri­um on the hor­mon­al and sur­gi­cal treat­ment of young peo­ple with gen­der dys­pho­ria.”
    • Not sur­pris­ing if you’ve been fol­low­ing this top­ic, but depress­ing and with new anec­dotes.
  6. Chat­G­PT Is a Blur­ry JPEG of the Web (Ted Chi­ang, The New York­er): “Think of Chat­G­PT as a blur­ry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the infor­ma­tion on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the infor­ma­tion of a high­er-res­o­lu­tion image, but, if you’re look­ing for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approx­i­ma­tion. But, because the approx­i­ma­tion is pre­sent­ed in the form of gram­mat­i­cal text, which Chat­G­PT excels at cre­at­ing, it’s usu­al­ly accept­able. You’re still look­ing at a blur­ry JPEG, but the blur­ri­ness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the pic­ture as a whole look less sharp.”
    • This is a good anal­o­gy.
  7. A Black Pro­fes­sor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell (Vin­cent Lloyd, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “Each stu­dent read from a pre­pared state­ment about how the sem­i­nar per­pet­u­at­ed anti-black vio­lence in its con­tent and form, how the black stu­dents had been harmed, how I was guilty of count­less microag­gres­sions, includ­ing through my body lan­guage, and how stu­dents didn’t feel safe because I didn’t imme­di­ate­ly cor­rect views that failed to treat anti-black­ness as the cause of all the world’s ills.… I am a black pro­fes­sor, I direct­ed my university’s black-stud­ies pro­gram, I lead anti-racism and trans­for­ma­tive-jus­tice work­shops, and I have pub­lished books on anti-black racism and prison abo­li­tion. I live in a pre­dom­i­nant­ly black neigh­bor­hood of Philadel­phia, my daugh­ter went to an Afro­cen­tric school, and I am on the board of our local black cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tion.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Vil­lano­va (which is not, to be clear, the loca­tion of this deba­cle).

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 Uncon­scious Learn­ing Under­lies Belief in God – Stronger Beliefs in Peo­ple Who Can Uncon­scious­ly Pre­dict Com­plex Pat­terns (Sci Tech Dai­ly): “Indi­vid­u­als who can uncon­scious­ly pre­dict com­plex pat­terns, an abil­i­ty called implic­it pat­tern learn­ing, are like­ly to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who cre­ates pat­terns of events in the uni­verse, accord­ing to neu­ro­sci­en­tists at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty.” Shock­er: peo­ple who see real­i­ty clear­ly are more like­ly to per­ceive God’s hand at work in real­i­ty. From vol­ume 267.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 388

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The par­ti­cle col­lec­tion that fan­cied itself a physi­cist (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Democritus’s point is that if the atom­ist says both that atoms are all that exist and that col­or, sweet­ness, etc. and the oth­er qual­i­ties of con­scious expe­ri­ence are not to be found in the atoms, then we have a para­dox.” From vol­ume 264.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 387

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 387, which I learned today is the low­est num­ber with a sort-then-add per­sis­tence of 10, which is a real­ly weird con­cept. Take 387 and add it to 378 (the dig­its sort­ed) and you get 765. Take 765 and add it to 567 to get 1332. Then sort that to add 1233. Keep doing that until you get an answer whose dig­its are already sort­ed (appear in increas­ing order). It takes 10 iter­a­tions to get there. Some­one dis­cov­ered this. Math­e­mati­cians are both won­der­ful and weird.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Under Munic­i­pal Reg­u­la­tions, UK Abor­tion Clin­ics ‘Safe’ From Silent Prayer (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Adam Smith-Con­nor prayed silent­ly on a pub­lic street in Bournemouth, Eng­land, ear­li­er this month, his back to an abor­tion clin­ic. When com­mu­ni­ty safe­ty offi­cers asked what he was doing, he told them he was ‘pray­ing for [his] son, who is deceased.’ The offi­cers expressed con­do­lences but then said Smith-Con­nor, a 49-year-old phys­i­cal ther­a­pist and British army vet­er­an, was ‘in breach’ of a Pub­lic Space Pro­tec­tion Order (PSPO), accord­ing to a video of the inci­dent. Lat­er he was fined.”
    • I’ve been fol­low­ing these sto­ries on social media, this is the first decent write­up of them that I’ve seen. It blew my mind when I first saw it and I assumed some cops mis­un­der­stood a pol­i­cy. Nope. Insane and demon­ic. I’ve long known that you don’t have the right to free speech in the U.K. I did­n’t real­ize you also lacked the right to free silence.
  2. AI Stuff
    • OY, A.I. (Jaron Lanier, Tablet): “The prob­lem wasn’t that Israelites want­ed to craft a calf, but that they wor­shipped it, even though it was a thing they had just made. The calf was social nar­cis­sism and amne­sia. Jews have always had a prob­lem of get­ting bored, of not get­ting enough of a charge from what­ev­er is going on. The Israelites wait­ing for Moses to come back down were bored enough to go nuts. We peo­ple, not just Jews, still make gold­en calves all the time. Adam Smith’s invis­i­ble hand, cor­po­ra­tions-as-per­sons, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, Wikipedia, the lat­est AI pro­grams. All the same. All a bunch of peo­ple being sub­sumed to cre­ate an imag­i­nary super­hero.” An inter­est­ing the­o­log­i­cal reflec­tion on AI by a guy I don’t remem­ber hear­ing of before but clear­ly should have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier
    • What if you could talk to the Bible? (Andrew Gao, Twit­ter): See biblegpt.org
    • AI Ser­mon Out­line Gen­er­a­tor (John Dyer, Open­Bible): “To start, please enter up to 5 Bible pas­sages. The AI will then gen­er­ate 4 ser­mon the­sis state­ments, or main argu­ments, based on the pas­sages. After you choose a the­sis state­ment you like, it will gen­er­ate an out­line for you.”
    • Put Not Your Trust in Chat­G­PT, for Now (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Here is a sys­tem that will turn my head: You take an emp­ty sys­tem, and it has the capa­bil­i­ty of learn­ing lan­guage at the speed of a child. The way kids acquire lan­guage is tru­ly mind-blow­ing. And not just lan­guage, but even if you go open the cup­board door—they see some­thing once, and they fig­ure out how to do it. The sys­tem that this Google engi­neer was talk­ing about, it was giv­en tril­lions of exam­ples in order to get some sense of intel­li­gence out of it. It con­sumed ridicu­lous amounts of ener­gy, where­as a lit­tle kid’s brain requires the pow­er of a flash­light, and it’s able to learn lan­guage. We’re not any­where close to that kind of gen­er­al AI.” The inter­vie­wee has a PhD in physics and works in AI -https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomkehler
    • Five Days in Class with Chat­G­PT (Thomas Rid, The Alper­ovitch Insti­tute): “Last week brought two relat­ed fea­tures of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in edu­ca­tion into sharp relief: the first is that all that talk about pla­gia­rism and cheat­ing and abuse is unin­spir­ing and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Yes, some unam­bi­tious stu­dents will use this new tool to cov­er sub­par per­for­mance, and yes, we could talk about how to detect or dis­in­cen­tivize such behav­ior. The far more inspir­ing con­ver­sa­tion is a dif­fer­ent one: how can the most cre­ative, the most ambi­tious, and the most bril­liant stu­dents achieve even bet­ter results faster?” An engag­ing and thought-pro­vok­ing case study.
  3. Five Rules for an Aging World (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “There are two kinds of peo­ple in the world: Those who believe the defin­ing chal­lenge of the 21st cen­tu­ry will be cli­mate change, and those who know that it will be the birth dearth, the pop­u­la­tion bust, the old age of the world.”
  4. What­ev­er Hap­pened to Light Verse? (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “Part of this seems to be due to what has late­ly been termed ‘elite over­pro­duc­tion.’ In pre­vi­ous eras, much of America’s jour­nal­ism, poet­ry, and fic­tion were writ­ten by peo­ple who not only lacked an elite col­lege edu­ca­tion, many of them lacked any col­lege edu­ca­tion at all. Nei­ther Ogden Nash nor Dorothy Park­er earned a col­lege degree (nor, for that mat­ter, did Emi­ly Dick­in­son, H.D., Robert Frost, and any num­ber of oth­er ‘seri­ous’ poets of pre­vi­ous eras). But for half a cen­tu­ry now, most of America’s most promi­nent jour­nal­ists, poets, and nov­el­ists have been grad­u­ates of elite uni­ver­si­ties. And, because the lec­ture is a pri­ma­ry method of deliv­er­ing edu­ca­tion at schools like Har­vard and Yale and Stan­ford, much con­tem­po­rary jour­nal­ism, poet­ry, and fic­tion reads like a lec­ture.”
  5. Has Church Abuse Activism Tak­en a Wrong Turn? (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “So why do so few peo­ple want to say ‘evil’ and so many more seem to say ‘tox­ic’? Because the word ‘evil’ evokes moral absolutes, where­as the word ‘tox­ic’ is impres­sion-cod­ed. An evil regime mer­its oppo­si­tion, even sac­ri­fi­cial oppo­si­tion. A tox­ic cul­ture mer­its qui­et quit­ting and self-care after­wards.”
  6. A clus­ter of LGBT-relat­ed arti­cles I stum­bled upon this week:
    • The first of two reac­tions to an hon­est con­ver­sa­tion about LGBT issues: L’Esprit d’Escalier, Dish­cast Edi­tion (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I did not give an argu­ment about why the Chris­t­ian sex­u­al eth­ic is good. I real­ize that it’s because for me, it’s total­ly a mat­ter of obe­di­ence. As I’ve explained many times, and did again on Andrew’s show, once I under­stood that my own sex­u­al activ­i­ty was the only bar­ri­er to accept­ing Christ, and once I saw what a mess I was mak­ing of my life by stand­ing firm for what I believed was my sex­u­al free­dom, I knew that I had a choice to make: I could have my sex­u­al free­dom, or I could have Christ. Any­thing short of mak­ing that sac­ri­fice was dis­hon­est.”
    • The oth­er guy’s per­spec­tive (along with fas­ci­nat­ing com­men­tary from lis­ten­ers): Rod Dreher On His Crises Of Faith And Fam­i­ly (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “He’s cur­rent­ly writ­ing a book about bring­ing the enchant­ment back to Chris­tian­i­ty in a time of grow­ing sec­u­lar­ism. He was enchant­ed him­self after tak­ing LSD in col­lege, putting him on the path to Chris­tian­i­ty — some­thing he hasn’t talked about in pub­lic until now. We’ve been spar­ring online for a cou­ple of decades, while remain­ing friends.”
    • ‘Isla Bryson’ and the mad­ness of Scotland’s gen­der bill (Alex Massie, The Spec­ta­tor): “More­over, some 50 per cent of Scot­tish inmates only dis­cov­ered their new gen­der iden­ti­ty after they were charged by police. Bryson now adds to this num­ber. This seems dubi­ous­ly con­ve­nient to the point of being sus­pi­cious and it can­not sen­si­bly be thought ‘trans­pho­bic’ to think so. Some­thing is hap­pen­ing here, even if it is con­sid­ered indeco­rous to spec­u­late on pre­cise­ly what is occur­ring.… Ulti­mate­ly, this is a dis­agree­ment between fan­ta­sists and real­ists and it is deplorable to realise that the major­i­ty of Scot­tish par­lia­men­tar­i­ans are signed-up mem­bers of the fan­ta­sy club.”
    • Ivan Provorov jer­seys sell out days after NHL play­er refus­es to wear LGBT pride jer­sey (Luke Gen­tile, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “Jer­seys for Philadel­phia Fly­ers defense­man Ivan Provorov have sold out online days after the 26-year-old refused to wear a gay pride-themed jer­sey for reli­gious rea­sons. Both NHL Shop and Fanat­ics have list­ed Provorov’s jer­seys as ‘almost gone,’ and there are no longer any men’s jer­seys with his name and num­ber avail­able. On Fanat­ics, the defense­man is list­ed as hav­ing the most pop­u­lar men’s jer­sey, wom­en’s jer­sey, and sweat­shirt, and his Brand­ed Backer shirt is being adver­tised as the most pop­u­lar sell­er relat­ed to the Philadel­phia Fly­ers, accord­ing to the online store.”
    • The Myth of “Reli­able Research” in Pedi­atric Gen­der Med­i­cine: A crit­i­cal eval­u­a­tion of the Dutch Studies—and research that has fol­lowed (Abbruzzese, Levine & Mason, Jour­nal of Sex & Mar­i­tal Ther­a­py): “Our analy­sis of the Dutch pro­to­col has been writ­ten with three goals in mind. First, we want­ed to defin­i­tive­ly refute the claims that the foun­da­tion­al Dutch research rep­re­sents ‘sol­id prospec­tive research’ that pro­vides reli­able evi­dence of net ben­e­fits of youth gen­der tran­si­tion. In fact, it is much bet­ter described as case series—one of the low­est lev­els of evi­dence avail­able (Dekkers et al., 2012, Math­es & Pieper, 2017). Sec­ond, we aimed to demon­strate that the type of non-com­par­a­tive, short-term research that the gen­der med­i­cine estab­lish­ment con­tin­ues to pur­sue is inca­pable of gen­er­at­ing reli­able infor­ma­tion. And third and most impor­tant­ly, we want­ed to remind the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty that med­i­cine is a dou­ble-edged sword capa­ble of both much good and much harm. The bur­den of proof—demonstrating that a treat­ment does more good than harm—is on those pro­mot­ing the inter­ven­tion, not on those con­cerned about the harms.” I am sure there will be arti­cles cri­tiquing this in com­ing days, but wow. The authors did not come to play.
    • You Don’t Want A Pure­ly Bio­log­i­cal, Apo­lit­i­cal Tax­on­o­my Of Men­tal Dis­or­ders (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten):  “The peo­ple ask­ing for apo­lit­i­cal tax­onomies want an inco­her­ent thing. They want some­thing which doesn’t think about pol­i­tics at all, and which simul­ta­ne­ous­ly is more polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect than any oth­er tax­on­o­my. Or if ‘polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness’ sounds too dis­mis­sive, we can rephrase it as: ‘they want some­thing that doesn’t think about ethics and prac­ti­cal­i­ty at all, but which is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly more eth­i­cal­ly cor­rect and prag­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect than oth­er tax­onomies’.” Super spicy, short, and says things out loud which most peo­ple avoid.
  7. Who’s More Irra­tional — The Reli­gious or the Irre­li­gious? (Den­nis Prager, syn­di­cat­ed col­umn): “The truth is that today the sec­u­lar have a vir­tu­al monop­oly on irra­tional beliefs. One proof is that col­leges have become the most irra­tional insti­tu­tions in the coun­try. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, they are also the most sec­u­lar insti­tu­tions in our soci­ety. In fact, the for­mer is a result of the lat­ter.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Church Forests of Ethiopia (YouTube): nine min­utes. This com­men­tary by Rod Dreher was what brought the video to my atten­tion. Watch the video before you read the com­men­tary. These forests are a beau­ti­ful pic­ture of the way the Church bless­es the world around it, and what the Church must do to thrive in the envi­ron­ment we find our­selves in. From vol­ume 262.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 386

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 385

On Fri­days (this did go to my Sub­stack on Fri­day, but my web­site crashed and I only just got it back up) 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 385, which is 5 x 7 x 11. That feels cool to me and I don’t know exact­ly why.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Tall Would a Stack of New Tes­ta­ment Man­u­scripts Be? (Daniel B. Wal­lace, per­son­al blog): “If you could stack up all hand­writ­ten man­u­scripts of the New Testament—Greek, Syr­i­ac, Latin, Cop­tic, all languages—how tall would the stack be? I  was recent­ly chal­lenged on my num­bers in a Face­book dis­cus­sion in the group ‘New Tes­ta­ment Tex­tu­al Crit­i­cism.’ I have said in many lec­tures that it would be the equiv­a­lent of c. 4 & 1/2 Empire State Build­ings stacked on top of each oth­er. How did I come up with that num­ber?”
  2. A Poet for ‘Bruised Evan­gel­i­cals’ (Kara Bet­tis, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “My pub­lish­er was very reluc­tant to take on my book, because ‘Nobody’s writ­ing son­nets now, and young peo­ple won’t like that,’ ” Gui­te told me at a sand­wich shop in Van­cou­ver. “But actu­al­ly, it turns out that’s exact­ly what they like, because it’s pre­cise­ly not a tweet.”
  3. What’s Up with Weird Bible Sex? (Dru John­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Any­one who reads the Bible today may be tempt­ed to skip over the sex. It can seem too crude, too impo­lite, or at least not spir­i­tu­al­ly edi­fy­ing for our morn­ing devo­tions. But I want to argue that we should read the Bible that we have and take it seri­ous­ly. Even the R‑rated bits. When you read Gen­e­sis, pay atten­tion to the details of the sex. They are try­ing to teach us about the nature of our bod­ies and com­mu­ni­ties before God.”
  4. How Stan­ford Failed the Aca­d­e­m­ic Free­dom Test (Jay Bat­tacharya, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Fac­ul­ty at Stan­ford should right­ly wor­ry whether their pro­fes­sion­al work will lead to deplat­form­ing, excom­mu­ni­ca­tion, and polit­i­cal tar­get­ing. In this envi­ron­ment, pro­fes­sors and stu­dents alike would be wise to look over their shoul­ders at all times, in the knowl­edge that the uni­ver­si­ty no longer has your back. And mem­bers of the pub­lic should under­stand that many of those urg­ing them to ‘trust the sci­ence’ on com­pli­cat­ed mat­ters of pub­lic con­cern are also those work­ing to ensure that ‘the sci­ence’ nev­er turns up answers that they don’t like.” Dr. Bat­tacharya is both a believ­er and a pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford.
    • Kin­da relat­ed: How DEI Is Sup­plant­i­ng Truth as the Mis­sion of Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ties (John Sail­er, The Free Press): “One med­ical researcher at an elite insti­tu­tion who request­ed anonymi­ty told me that grants for med­ical research increas­ing­ly use veiled ide­o­log­i­cal lan­guage that focus­es on issues such as health equi­ty and racial dis­par­i­ties. ‘The answer is pre­or­dained: The cause of dis­par­i­ties is racism,’ he told me. ‘If you find some oth­er expla­na­tion, even if it’s tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect, that’s prob­lem­at­ic.’  This fix­a­tion can have a stul­ti­fy­ing effect on med­ical research, and even­tu­al­ly med­ical care, the researcher told me. ‘We’re abdi­cat­ing our respon­si­bil­i­ty. We’re cre­at­ing fake research and fake stan­dards, align­ing ide­ol­o­gy with med­i­cine, and under­min­ing our basic abil­i­ty to engage in mean­ing­ful sense­mak­ing.’”
  5. Why is progress in biol­o­gy so slow? (Sam Rodriques, per­son­al blog): “The bio­med­ical lit­er­a­ture is vast and suf­fers from three prob­lems: it does not lend itself to sum­ma­riza­tion in text­books; it is unre­li­able by com­mis­sion; and it is unre­li­able by omis­sion. The first prob­lem is sim­ple: biol­o­gy is too diverse. Every dis­ease, every gene, every organ­ism, and every cell type is its own grand chal­lenge. The sec­ond prob­lem is trick­i­er — some things in the lit­er­a­ture are sim­ply wrong, made up by trainees or pro­fes­sors who were des­per­ate to pub­lish rather than per­ish. But it is the third prob­lem that is real­ly per­ni­cious: many things in the lit­er­a­ture are unin­ter­pretable or mis­lead­ing due to the omis­sion of key details by the authors, inten­tion­al or oth­er­wise. Authors may report a new, gen­er­al strat­e­gy for tar­get­ing nanopar­ti­cles to cells express­ing spe­cif­ic recep­tor pro­teins and show that it works for HER2 and EGFR, while declin­ing to men­tion that it does not work for any one of the 20 oth­er recep­tors they tried.“Excellent reflec­tions on how AI will and will not help with medical/etc research. The author holds a PhD from MIT and is  biotech researcher and entre­pre­neur.
  6. I’m home­less in Cal­i­for­nia. And I have an easy, cost-free solu­tion to home­less­ness (Lydia Blum­berg, Sacra­men­to Bee): “One thing that would dra­mat­i­cal­ly improve the lives of unhoused peo­ple in Cal­i­for­nia could be done today, wouldn’t cost tax­pay­ers any mon­ey and would require no effort by politi­cians or city work­ers. It’s as sim­ple as a gov­er­nor or may­or utter­ing three words: Stop sweeps now. Each time a home­less camp is dis­man­tled, people’s lives are destroyed. All the effort we put into cre­at­ing a home — we do not actu­al­ly con­sid­er our­selves home­less because our camp is our home — is wiped away. Our world­ly pos­ses­sions, includ­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, med­ical records, fam­i­ly heir­looms, cloth­ing, elec­tron­ics, fur­ni­ture, instru­ments, bed­ding, tents, tools and oth­er items that we use to earn income, are lit­er­al­ly thrown into garbage trucks. Our hand­made shel­ters are smashed by giant machines as we watch.”
  7. Yes, Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry Is Being Taught in Schools (Zach Gold­berg &  Eric Kauf­mann, City Jour­nal): “We began by ask­ing our 18- to 20-year-old respon­dents (82.4 per­cent of whom report­ed attend­ing pub­lic schools) whether they had ever been taught in class or heard about from an adult at school each of six concepts—four of which are cen­tral to crit­i­cal race the­o­ry. The chart below, which dis­plays the dis­tri­b­u­tion of respons­es for each con­cept, shows that ‘been taught’ is the modal response for all but one of the six con­cepts. For the CRT-relat­ed con­cepts, 62 per­cent report­ed either being taught in class or hear­ing from an adult in school that ‘Amer­i­ca is a sys­tem­i­cal­ly racist coun­try,’ 69 per­cent report­ed being taught or hear­ing that ‘white peo­ple have white priv­i­lege,’ 57 per­cent report­ed being taught or hear­ing that ‘white peo­ple have uncon­scious bias­es that neg­a­tive­ly affect non-white peo­ple,’ and 67 per­cent report­ed being taught or hear­ing that ‘Amer­i­ca is built on stolen land.’ ”

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 How I Redis­cov­ered Faith (Mal­colm Glad­well, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “I have always believed in God. I have grasped the log­ic of Chris­t­ian faith. What I have had a hard time see­ing is God’s pow­er. I put that sen­tence in the past tense because some­thing hap­pened to me…” From vol­ume 261. It’s been pay­walled since I first shared it. There is a sub­stan­tive excerpt at https://aleteia.org/2020/08/02/author-malcolm-gladwell-relates-how-he-re-found-christianity/

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 383

On Fri­days (Sat­ur­days when I offi­ci­ate a wed­ding on Fri­day — con­grats Alex & Andrea!) 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.

Hap­py New Year! Most of my read­ers know this, but this bun­dle of links is an over­flow from a min­istry called Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. Today is Decem­ber 31st, which is the biggest giv­ing day of the year. If you are inclined toward gen­eros­i­ty on New Year’s Eve, con­sid­er mak­ing a year-end dona­tion to sup­port the min­istry.

This is vol­ume 383, which is both a prime num­ber and a palin­drome. Not too shab­by, 383. Hold your head up high among the num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Rea­sons to believe, Christ­mas edi­tion:
    • How Would You Prove That God Per­formed a Mir­a­cle? (Mol­ly Worthen, New York Times): “Josh Brown directs the pro­gram in neu­ro­science at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Bloom­ing­ton. He has pub­lished dozens of arti­cles on top­ics like the neur­al basis of deci­sion mak­ing in the brain. He has wire-rimmed glass­es and a calm, method­i­cal way of speak­ing. And after almost two decades of keep­ing rel­a­tive­ly qui­et, he is now speak­ing open­ly about his most sur­pris­ing research find­ing: He believes that God mirac­u­lous­ly healed him of a brain tumor.”
      • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is a his­to­ri­an at UNC.
    • When Mary Met the Angel (Rebec­ca McLaugh­lin, Wall Street Jour­nal): “ ‘Sci­ence is the descrip­tion of how God choos­es to work most of the time,’ writes Rus­sell Cow­burn, a pro­fes­sor of physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge. ‘We know dead bod­ies don’t come back to life accord­ing to sci­ence. And yet Chris­tian­i­ty is built on the obser­va­tion that Jesus came back to life. I am very hap­py to say that at that spe­cial moment, God was act­ing dif­fer­ent­ly.’ Like many oth­er world-class sci­en­tists I’ve interviewed—including Fran­cis Collins, for­mer direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health—Prof. Cow­burn came to faith in Jesus as an adult. He is not just try­ing to make sci­en­tif­ic sense of a child­hood faith that he can­not shed.”
      • Dis­claimer: I know the author and am thrilled she was invit­ed to write about faith for the WSJ.
    • A Christ­mas Con­ver­sa­tion About Christ (Nico­las Kristof inter­view­ing Rus­sell Moore, New York Times): “The most impor­tant blind spot is per­haps miss­ing why so many of us are drawn to faith in the first place. We real­ly do believe the Gospel is Good News that answers the deep­est long­ings of the human heart. I would just rec­om­mend that peo­ple read one of the Gospels with an open mind. Jesus loves New York Times read­ers, too.”
  2. A Dark­ness Revealed (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…the great chal­lenge here, as ever, is to strive to see our ances­tors and our con­tem­po­raries with moral clar­i­ty, not white­wash­ing their sins and fail­ings with poet­ic mem­o­ry, while also rec­og­niz­ing their virtues — and in all cas­es, nev­er, ever allow­ing their full human­i­ty, the good and the bad alike, to be assim­i­lat­ed into the realm of ideas.”
    • I found this grip­ping. A man wres­tles with the not-entire­ly-sur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion that his father was in the KKK.
  3. Urbana Mis­sions Con­fer­ence That Once Drew 20,000 Expect­ed to Fall Far Short (Bob Smi­etana, Min­istry Watch): “Jao said that lin­ger­ing con­cerns over COVID-19 and the country’s eco­nom­ic woes are help­ing to dri­ve pro­ject­ed atten­dance down for the con­fer­ence, usu­al­ly held every three years, but delayed until this year by the pan­dem­ic. Like many church­es, he said, Inter­Var­si­ty and oth­er cam­pus min­istries are still rebuild­ing their atten­dance.”
  4. Our First Close­up Image of Mars Was a Paint-By-Num­bers Pas­tel Draw­ing (Jason Kot­tke, per­son­al blog): “On July 15, 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe flew with­in 6,118 miles of the sur­face of Mars, cap­tur­ing images as it passed over the plan­et. The image data was trans­mit­ted back to sci­en­tists on Earth, but they didn’t have a good way to quick­ly ren­der a pho­to­graph from it. They deter­mined that the fastest way to see what Mariner 4 had seen was to print out the imag­ing data as a series of num­bers, paste them into a grid, buy a set of pas­tels from a near­by art store, and do a paint-by-num­bers job with the pas­tels on the data grid.”
    • This is actu­al­ly beau­ti­ful.
  5. Amer­i­cans Have Found Their Hap­py Place (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “Two econ­o­mists, David G. Blanch­flower of Dart­mouth and Alex Bryson of Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, have come up with a new and more intu­itive way to mea­sure well-being. The results are strik­ing. If you con­sid­er US states as com­pa­ra­ble to coun­tries, 16 of the top 20 polit­i­cal units in the world for well-being are in the US — includ­ing the top sev­en.”
  6. The Media Very Rarely Lies (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “The point is: the media rarely lies explic­it­ly and direct­ly. Reporters rarely say spe­cif­ic things they know to be false. When the media mis­in­forms peo­ple, it does so by mis­in­ter­pret­ing things, exclud­ing con­text, or sig­nal-boost­ing some events while ignor­ing oth­ers, not by par­tic­i­pat­ing in some bright-line cat­e­go­ry called ‘mis­in­for­ma­tion’.”
    • Fol­low-up: Sor­ry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…I find it real­ly inter­est­ing that so many com­menters were so resis­tant to the idea that the worst and dumb­est con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries of our time don’t involve out­right lies. I think all of us — not just cen­sors — want to main­tain the com­fort­ing illu­sion that the bad peo­ple are doing some­thing fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent than the good peo­ple, some­thing that marks them as Obvi­ous­ly Bad in bright neon paint.”
  7. Is the right win­ning the com­e­dy wars? (Con­stance Grady, Vox): “It’s as though there’s some sort of fun­da­men­tal dis­con­nect between right and left on the issue of com­e­dy. On a very basic lev­el, the two sides seem to dis­agree on the ques­tion of what a joke should look like, what it’s okay to joke about, and what is so under threat that to joke about it would be unthink­able. No one seems sure how to talk about the dif­fer­ence, exact­ly. They just know that they want to be the fun­ny ones.”

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 Fer­til­i­ty rate: ‘Jaw-drop­ping’ glob­al crash in chil­dren being born (James Gal­lagher, BBC): “Chi­na, cur­rent­ly the most pop­u­lous nation in the world, is expect­ed to peak at 1.4 bil­lion in four years’ time before near­ly halv­ing to 732 mil­lion by 2100. India will take its place.” From a long-term per­spec­tive, this is pos­si­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant news you will read this year. Some of you will still be alive when China’s pop­u­la­tion is half what it is now. And it’s not just Chi­na — many nations are on the same path (with only a few siz­able ones head­ed in the oppo­site direc­tion). From vol­ume 259

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 382

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.

382 is the small­est num­ber such that σ(n) =σ(n+3). σ(n) is the divi­sor func­tion, found by adding up n’s pos­i­tive divi­sors. In oth­er words, σ(382) equals 576 because it is the sum of its four divi­sors 1 + 2 + 191 + 382 which also equals 1 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 35 + 55 + 77 + 385 which are the eight divi­sors of 385, hence σ(385)=σ(382).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. O Come All Ye Faith­ful, Except When Christ­mas Falls on a Sun­day (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Christ­mas is con­sid­ered by most Chris­tians to be the sec­ond-most sig­nif­i­cant reli­gious hol­i­day of the year, behind East­er. But most Protes­tants do not attend church ser­vices on Christ­mas Day when it falls on a week­day. If every­one from the pews to the pul­pit would rather stay home, what is a prac­ti­cal house of wor­ship to do? This year, some Protes­tant church­es are decid­ing to skip Sun­day ser­vices com­plete­ly.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent a while ago.
    • My take? Skip­ping church because it’s Christ­mas makes as much sense as skip­ping cake because it’s your birth­day.
  2. The Dan­gers of Elite Pro­jec­tion (Jar­rett Walk­er, per­son­al blog): “Elite pro­jec­tion is the belief, among rel­a­tive­ly for­tu­nate and influ­en­tial peo­ple, that what those peo­ple find con­ve­nient or attrac­tive is good for the soci­ety as a whole. Once you learn to rec­og­nize this sim­ple mis­take, you see it every­where.… [The prob­lem is] elites are always a minor­i­ty, and that plan­ning a city or trans­port net­work around the pref­er­ences of a minor­i­ty rou­tine­ly yields an out­come that doesn’t work for the major­i­ty. Even the elite minor­i­ty won’t like the result in the end.”
    • Rel­e­vant to many cul­tur­al con­tro­ver­sies about mar­riage and gen­der, btw.
  3. A Sign That Tuition Is Too High: Some Col­leges Are Slash­ing It in Half (Anemona Har­to­col­lis, New York Times): “Col­by-Sawyer has joined a grow­ing num­ber of small, pri­vate col­leges in what’s called the tuition reset, which over­hauls prices to reflect what most stu­dents actu­al­ly pay after dis­count­ing through need-based and mer­it finan­cial aid. The reset is part mar­ket­ing move and part real­i­ty check. It is frank recog­ni­tion among some less­er-known col­leges that their prices are some­thing of a feint.”
  4. Mar­tyrs in Mosul: A Con­ver­sa­tion on Chris­t­ian Per­se­cu­tion with Father Bene­dict Kiely (Anni­ka Nordquist, Madis­on’s Notes Pod­cast): a pod­cast by one of our alum­ni. I haven’t had a chance to lis­ten to this episode yet (and may not for a while because of being around fam­i­ly 24/7 dur­ing the hol­i­days), but she asked me post it and I trust her judge­ment that it is of gen­er­al inter­est.
  5. Girl Scout mom kicked out of Radio City and barred from see­ing Rock­ettes after facial recog­ni­tion tech iden­ti­fied her (Julianne McShane, NBC News): “Kel­ly Con­lon, a senior asso­ciate with the New Jer­sey per­son­al injury firm Davis, Saper­stein and Salomon — which is rep­re­sent­ing a client suing a restau­rant owned by the par­ent com­pa­ny, MSG Enter­tain­ment — told NBC New York that secu­ri­ty guards approached her and asked for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion as soon as she arrived on the week­end after Thanks­giv­ing. The guards ulti­mate­ly turned her away from the show even though she is not involved in her fir­m’s lit­i­ga­tion against the com­pa­ny. Conlon’s daugh­ter and the rest of the Girl Scouts were able to attend the per­for­mance, she told the sta­tion.”
    • When­ev­er we say we’re afraid of tech­nol­o­gy we’re usu­al­ly say­ing we’re afraid of how peo­ple will use tech­nol­o­gy. And our fears are often well-found­ed.
  6. USCIS Has Added 500 Pages to Its Immi­gra­tion Forms Since 2003 (David J. Bier, Cato Insti­tute): “It is worth empha­siz­ing that no sig­nif­i­cant immi­gra­tion reform has become law dur­ing the last two decades. The agency is uni­lat­er­al­ly impos­ing dra­mat­ic increas­es in the bureau­crat­ic obsta­cles to immi­gra­tion ben­e­fits with­out input from Con­gress. But the hun­dreds of new pages of infor­ma­tion is also mak­ing the agency less effi­cient at its job, delay­ing appli­ca­tions and caus­ing back­logs to grow to unimag­in­able lengths.”
  7. The FBI and Twit­ter (Arnold Kling, Sub­stack): “Today, the main­stream reac­tion to the Twit­ter Files sto­ry is to chant ‘noth­ing­burg­er.’ These peo­ple cat­er­waul about the threats to ‘our democ­ra­cy,’ and here is a threat to democ­ra­cy in plain sight, and now it’s ‘noth­ing to see here, move along.’ For me, the big con­cern is lack of account­abil­i­ty with­in the gov­ern­ment intel­li­gence agen­cies.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What the Tent­mak­ing Busi­ness Was Real­ly Like for the Apos­tle Paul (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “[It] cost the Apos­tle Paul to write his let­ters, includ­ing the secur­ing of mate­ri­als and the hir­ing of a sec­re­tary to make a copy for him­self. After exten­sive research and cal­cu­la­tion, he deter­mined that on the low side it would have cost him at least $2,000 in today’s cur­ren­cy to write 1 Corinthi­ans. (And that doesn’t include the cost of send­ing some­one like Titus on a long jour­ney to deliv­er it.)” Short and fas­ci­nat­ing. From vol­ume 256.

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 380

I found a remark­ably strong list of arti­cles to choose from this week — what float­ed to the top is worth pon­der­ing

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 380, which one web­site claims is the num­ber of 13-bead neck­lace pat­terns you can cre­ate if you have only two col­ors of beads. That seems real­ly low to me so I must not under­stand the way they define pat­terns and I don’t want to do the math, so that’s my num­ber fac­toid for the week.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Euthana­sia Has Done to Cana­da (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “The idea that human rights encom­pass a right to self-destruc­tion, the con­ceit that peo­ple in a state of ter­ri­ble suf­fer­ing and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty are real­ly ‘free’ to make a choice that ends all choic­es, the idea that a heal­ing pro­fes­sion should include death in its bat­tery of treat­ments — these are inher­ent­ly destruc­tive ideas. Left unchecked, they will forge a cru­el brave new world, a dehu­man­iz­ing final chap­ter for the lib­er­al sto­ry.”
    • Woman fea­tured in pro-euthana­sia com­mer­cial want­ed to live, say friends (Tristin Hop­per, Nation­al Post): “In sev­er­al more egre­gious cas­es, Cana­di­ans have even been offered MAID in lieu of prop­er med­ical treat­ment. Last month, a House of Com­mons com­mit­tee heard about five sep­a­rate inci­dents of Cana­di­an Armed Forces vet­er­ans being offered MAID after seek­ing assis­tance with issues rang­ing from depres­sion to PTSD. Most recent­ly, for­mer par­a­lympian Chris­tine Gau­thi­er went pub­lic with her sto­ry of being offered MAID by a Vet­er­ans Affairs case­work­er after she com­plained about delays in installing an in-home chair­lift.”
  2. What Too Lit­tle For­give­ness Does to Us (Tim Keller, New York Times): “…there must be the recog­ni­tion that for­give­ness does not con­tra­dict the pur­suit of jus­tice. Rather, it is its pre­con­di­tion. For­giv­ing is not excus­ing. To for­give some­thing, you must name it as the evil it is.… [But] if you don’t for­give inter­nal­ly, you won’t con­front the wrong­do­ers for justice’s sake or for future vic­tims’ sake or for God’s sake. You will be doing it for your sake, and the project will go awry. ”
  3. Anato­my of a Can­cel­la­tion (Scott Yenor, First Things): “The Title IX charges marked an esca­la­tion and, strange­ly, a path to qua­si-vic­to­ry.… I had been prepar­ing for it for years, know­ing that some­one who treads on con­tro­ver­sial top­ics such as the fam­i­ly and fem­i­nism would even­tu­al­ly face the ire of the university’s civ­il rights regime. All my lec­tures for the past five years are record­ed and stored. All stu­dent com­mu­ni­ca­tions and grades are saved. I had kept detailed records on whom I called on dur­ing each class.”
    • Remark­able. Will prob­a­bly enter my ros­ter of clas­sics I repost at the bot­tom of these emails.
  4. Remem­ber­ing What Repen­tance Looks Like (David French, The Dis­patch): “Any per­son can live a life of great mean­ing and hon­or far removed from the spot­light. And not one of us is capa­ble of peer­ing into a man’s heart to know when he’s changed. But let me sug­gest a clear warn­ing sign that repen­tance isn’t real—when a pow­er­ful per­son doesn’t just ask for for­give­ness but also seeks restora­tion to the life they lived before. No one is enti­tled to be a pas­tor or a politi­cian, and there are times when the con­tin­ued quest for those posi­tions is itself a sign that a per­son sim­ply doesn’t under­stand the price they should pay when they’ve com­mit­ted a seri­ous wrong.”
  5. When Gay Rights Clash With Reli­gious Free­dom (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Ms. Smith serves gay cus­tomers. She would not refuse to build a web­site for some­one sim­ply because the per­son is gay. She specif­i­cal­ly does not want her ser­vices to be used as part of a cel­e­bra­tion of a same-sex wed­ding. We make sim­i­lar allowances for oth­er ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences. A pro-choice artist should not be com­pelled to make a logo for a pro-life ral­ly. A pro­gres­sive par­ty plan­ner should not be required to take on a Trump PAC as a client. A gay web design­er ought not be forced to cre­ate a site pro­mot­ing a con­ser­v­a­tive church.”
    • Relat­ed: The Respect for Mar­riage Act Is Also a Vic­to­ry for Same-Sex-Mar­riage Oppo­nents (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, New York­er): “When this bill is signed into law, there will be a fed­er­al statute that makes a res­o­lu­tion of con­flict between reli­gious free­dom and gay-rights claims explic­it in a way that it arguably was not before, clear­ly favor­ing a reli­gious group over a gay couple—even though the con­flict involves open ques­tions on the rela­tion­ship between the First Amend­ment and antidis­crim­i­na­tion laws.”
    • Gersen is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law.
  6. More about Chat­G­PT and AI gen­er­al­ly
    • Does Chat­G­PT Mean Robots Are Com­ing For the Skilled Jobs? (Paul Krug­man, New York Times): “OK, I didn’t write the para­graph you just read; Chat­G­PT did, in response to the ques­tion ‘How will A.I. affect the demand for knowl­edge work­ers?’ The give­away, to me at least, is that I still refuse to use ‘impact’ as a verb. And it didn’t explic­it­ly lay out exact­ly why we should, over­all, expect no impact on aggre­gate employ­ment. But it was arguably bet­ter than what many humans, includ­ing some peo­ple who imag­ine them­selves smart, would have writ­ten.” Nobel lau­re­ate Paul Krug­man opin­ing on the poten­tial impact of tech­nol­o­gy like Chat­G­PT.
    • The Mechan­i­cal Pro­fes­sor (Ethan Mol­lick, Sub­stack): “But, rather than be scared of AI, we should think about how these sys­tems pro­vide us an oppor­tu­ni­ty to help extend our own capa­bil­i­ties. Think of it like hav­ing an intern, but one who just hap­pens to work instan­teous­ly, can write both code and sol­id descrip­tive writ­ing, and has a large chunk of the world’s knowl­edge in their brain.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of man­age­ment at the Whar­ton School.
    • Before the flood (Samuel Ham­mond, Sub­stack): “In par­tic­u­lar, I sus­pect near-term AI will break a lot of things, start­ing with our lega­cy insti­tu­tions. The firmware of the US gov­ern­ment is 70+ years old. We val­i­date people’s iden­ti­ty with a nine dig­it num­ber­ing sys­tem cre­at­ed in 1936. The Admin­is­tra­tive Pro­ce­dure Act, which gov­erns all reg­u­la­to­ry process, came only ten years lat­er. The IRS Mas­ter File runs on assem­bly from the 1960s. Our labor laws are from the assem­bly line era. Unem­ploy­ment Insur­ance — the safe­ty-net for help­ing peo­ple adjust to employ­ment shocks from AI or oth­er­wise — is so bro­ken that Con­gress found it eas­i­er to give every­one an extra $600 a week and live with $150 bil­lion worth of fraud than to recruit the retired Cobol engi­neers nec­es­sary to sim­ply update the code. There is a great deal of ruin in this nation.” The author is the direc­to­ry of social pol­i­cy for the Niska­nen Cen­ter.
    • How come GPT can seem so bril­liant one minute and so breath­tak­ing­ly dumb the next? (Gary Mar­cus, Sub­stack): “GPT doesn’t talk ran­dom­ly, because it’s pas­tich­ing things actu­al peo­ple said. (Or, more often, syn­onyms and para­phras­es of those things.) When GPT gets things right, it is often com­bin­ing bits that don’t belong togeth­er, but not quite in ran­dom ways, but rather in ways where there is some over­lap in some aspect or anoth­er.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • What are the pol­i­tics of Chat­G­PT? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Most of all, I see Chat­G­PT as ‘pro-West­ern’ in its per­spec­tive, while grant­i­ng there are dif­fer­ent visions of what this means. I also see Chat­G­PT as ‘con­tro­ver­sy min­i­miz­ing,’ for both com­mer­cial rea­sons but also for sim­ply wish­ing to get on with the sub­stan­tive work with a min­i­mum of exter­nal fuss. I would not myself have built it so dif­fer­ent­ly, and note that the bias may lie in the train­ing data rather than any bias­es of the cre­ators.”
  7. Air­plane Mode to Become Obso­lete in the EU (Nik­ki Main, Giz­mo­do): “It’s been said that the rea­son for ban­ning cell phone use on air­planes is because it could inter­fere with the pilot’s nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems. How­ev­er, Busi­ness Insid­er report­ed in 2017 that the FCC instat­ed the air­plane cell phone ban to ‘pro­tect against radio inter­fer­ence to cell phone net­works on the ground.’ If all air­lines allowed cell phone access at 40,000 feet in the air, mul­ti­ple cell tow­ers on the ground could pick up on ser­vice from active cell phones which could crowd the ground net­works, dis­rupt­ing ser­vice, accord­ing to the out­let.”
    • This one intrigues me because it calls into ques­tion a sit­u­a­tion so many of us take for grant­ed. I, for one, would not like there to be phone calls on air­planes (hard to read or watch a movie with that going on next to you). But stay­ing touch via text would be nice.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What Unites Most Grad­u­ates of Selec­tive Col­leges? An Intact Fam­i­ly (Nicholas Zill & Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “… even after con­trol­ling for par­ent edu­ca­tion, fam­i­ly income, and stu­dent race and eth­nic­i­ty, being raised by one’s mar­ried birth par­ents pro­vides an addi­tion­al boost to one’s chances of get­ting through Prince­ton.” From vol­ume 254.

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 379

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 379, the 75th prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Holy Spir­it is a Polit­i­cal Lia­bil­i­ty (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “It does not mean we have to accept that we sim­ply can­not win. It means the oppo­site: accept­ing that we have already won. When Christ emerged from that tomb, all the gen­der insan­i­ty, all the reli­gious per­se­cu­tion, all the aban­don­ment of first prin­ci­ples in the uni­verse were giv­en a death sen­tence. Christ him­self is truth. Truth was killed, then got back up, and will nev­er die again. This is not just piety. It’s a real­i­ty that must go down deep in our meth­ods, our speech, our atti­tudes.”
  2. Tolkien Was Right: Notes on the Respect for Mar­riage Act and the Post-Boomer Church (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Some time after his death, an edi­tor was going through the papers and books in J. R. R. Tolkien’s library when he came across an old copy of C. S. Lewis’s pam­phlet ‘Chris­t­ian Behav­ior,’ which would lat­er be re-pub­lished as one sec­tion in Lewis’s clas­sic Mere Chris­tian­i­ty. Fold­ed inside the book was a let­ter Tolkien had writ­ten but appar­ent­ly nev­er sent to his long-time friend and fel­low Oxford don. In it, Tolkien took issue with Lewis’s treat­ment of divorce in the pam­phlet.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. FORUM: The New Shape of Chris­t­ian Pub­lic Dis­course (Jay Green, Cur­rent): “ ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ do not have self-explana­to­ry or sta­ble mean­ings. The old labels tend to obscure at least as much as they reveal. The ter­mi­nol­o­gy is handy in a fight as long we aren’t asked to define exact­ly what we mean by them. But espe­cial­ly dur­ing the past sev­en years some of the most acri­mo­nious dis­agree­ments among Chris­tians about pub­lic life go well beyond the issues iden­ti­fied by Hunter in the 1990s. Our pub­lic fights have become far more than basic dis­agree­ments over ‘issues.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Covenant Col­lege. I think he is on to some­thing, but his fram­ing is not quite right.
  4. Check out Chat­G­PT — it’s free to play with and extreme­ly impres­sive. You can sign up at https://beta.openai.com/playground
    • I had it write a wor­ship song: https://beta.openai.com/playground/p/iWbGQyANHXhdXGw2fM0AGQQJ
    • Andy Crouch, a shrewd Chris­t­ian thinker, believes this rep­re­sents the end of a lot of home­work. https://twitter.com/ahc/status/1598323606303424512 — this sim­ple tool can do col­lege-lev­el home­work pret­ty eas­i­ly.
    • Jail­break­ing Chat­G­PT on Release Day (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “One of the things it attempts to do to be ‘safe.’ It does this by refus­ing to answer ques­tions that call upon it to do or help you do some­thing ille­gal or oth­er­wise out­side its bounds. Makes sense. As is the default with such things, those safe­guards were bro­ken through almost imme­di­ate­ly. By the end of the day, sev­er­al prompt engi­neer­ing meth­ods had been found.”
    • In anoth­er bit of AI news, On the Diplo­ma­cy AI (Zvi Mowsh­witz, Sub­stack): “When peo­ple say the AI ‘solved’ Diplo­ma­cy, it real­ly real­ly didn’t. What it did, which is still impres­sive, is get a han­dle on the basics of Diplo­ma­cy, in this par­tic­u­lar con­text where bots can­not be iden­ti­fied and are in the minor­i­ty, and in par­tic­u­lar where mes­sage detail is suf­fi­cient­ly lim­it­ed that it can use an LLM to be able to com­mu­ni­cate with humans rea­son­ably and not be iden­ti­fied.”
  5. Some Stan­ford news:
    • Stan­ford president’s research under inves­ti­ga­tion (Theo Bak­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in this arti­cle and what fol­lows is not the main point, but this para­graph caught my atten­tion: “Pri­or to tak­ing on Stanford’s pres­i­den­cy in ear­ly 2016, Tessier-Lav­i­gne direct­ed more than a thou­sand sci­en­tists at biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies Genen­tech as well as Regen­eron. Tessier-Lavigne’s salary at Regen­eron in 2014 was $1,764,032, accord­ing to a pre­vi­ous­ly-unre­port­ed class action law­suit alleg­ing exces­sive com­pen­sa­tion for mem­bers of the Com­pen­sa­tion Com­mit­tee, which includ­ed Tessier-Lav­i­gne. It was lat­er set­tled. He earned $1,555,296 from Stan­ford in 2021 with an addi­tion­al $700,000 annu­al­ly as a board direc­tor for Regen­eron.”
    • ‘This actu­al­ly changes every­thing’: Altered image in 1999 paper rais­es poten­tial per­il for Stan­ford pres­i­dent (Olivia Gold­hill  & Megan Molteni, Stat News): “The new­ly iden­ti­fied appar­ent manip­u­la­tion in Cell is espe­cial­ly seri­ous as it seems to alter the results and appears to be inten­tion­al, said Bik. ‘I would tes­ti­fy in court that’s been dig­i­tal­ly altered,” she told STAT. “This actu­al­ly changes every­thing. … It’s a more severe lev­el of dig­i­tal alter­ing.’”
    • Most damn­ing — lat­er in the arti­cle they explain that sim­i­lar prob­lems have occurred at mul­ti­ple insti­tu­tions with vary­ing sets of coau­thors with MTL being the only con­stant pres­ence. Eep!
    • Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion opens inves­ti­ga­tion into Stan­ford for bias against male stu­dents (Judy Liu, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The com­plaint, which was filed by Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor James Moore and Kur­sat Pekgoz, CEO of Turk­ish real estate com­pa­ny Doruk, alleges that mul­ti­ple Stan­ford pro­grams vio­late Title IX, a fed­er­al civ­il rights law that pro­tects peo­ple from sex-based dis­crim­i­na­tion in edu­ca­tion pro­grams that receive fed­er­al funds.” An inevitable devel­op­ment in our iden­ti­ty-obsessed cul­ture.
  6. ‘It’s The First Time I’ve Seen This in Chi­na’ (Simon Lep­lâtre, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “When some­one shout­ed, ‘Xi Jin­ping, resign,’ the crowd explod­ed, and soon oth­er peo­ple were say­ing it, and it was as if the shouter had bro­ken a taboo in a coun­try where peo­ple usu­al­ly low­ered their voice when men­tion­ing the name of their leader.  Then some­one else in the crowd shout­ed, ‘Down with the Com­mu­nist Par­ty,’ which was a big no-no—the Chi­nese gen­er­al­ly broad­cast their ide­o­log­i­cal fervor—and the crowd loved that, too. It was like top­pling the stat­ue of a dic­ta­tor. I told a col­league we were prob­a­bly wit­ness­ing some­thing impor­tant that might become very impor­tant.”
  7. Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own (Brooks B. Ander­son, Har­vard Crim­son): “Across the Uni­ver­si­ty, for every aca­d­e­m­ic employ­ee there are approx­i­mate­ly 1.45 admin­is­tra­tors. When only con­sid­er­ing fac­ul­ty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Har­vard employs 7,024 total full-time admin­is­tra­tors, only slight­ly few­er than the under­grad­u­ate pop­u­la­tion. What do they all do?” The sit­u­a­tion is sim­i­lar at Stan­ford.

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 Reli­gious ser­vices may low­er risk of ‘deaths of despair’ (Chris Sweeney, Har­vard Gazette): “After adjust­ing for numer­ous vari­ables, the study showed that women who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 68 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair com­pared to those nev­er attend­ing ser­vices. Men who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 33 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair.” Those are HUGE reduc­tions! From vol­ume 251.

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.