Glen & Paula Davis

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. College Won’t Get Fixed. But It Also Won’t Disappear. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “The Ivies and other top schools will prove invulnerable. Their value for networking, and also as a dating and marriage service, is unparalleled. There are no trends that threaten to disrupt those functions. If these institutions can prove useful in other ways too, such as learning and research, consider that gravy.”
2. I can never talk to an AI anonymously again (Kelsey Piper, The Argument): “From only the above text, 125 words, Claude Opus 4.7 informed me that the likeliest author is Kelsey Piper. This is an Opus 4.7‑specific power; ChatGPT guessed Yglesias, and Gemini guessed Scott Alexander. I did not have memory enabled, nor did I have information about me associated with my account; I did these tests in Incognito Mode. To make sure it wasn’t somehow feeding my account information to Claude even in Incognito Mode, I asked a friend to run these tests on his computer, and he received the same result; I also got the same result when I tested it through the API.…. I think the amount of public text that is needed for this kind of deanonymization to work is likely to eventually decrease. You should expect that, if you leave a detailed anonymous review on Glassdoor after leaving your job, within a year or two it will be possible for companies to paste that text into an AI and learn exactly who wrote it. How long it takes for this to happen will depend on how much data about you is in the training data and on how much anonymous text you produced.”
3. AI Is Not Draining the Colorado River. I Measured It. (Len Necefer, Outside): “I work on the Colorado River water for a living as a filmmaker and storyteller. I have a PhD in engineering and public policy. I am Diné. The threats to the river are not abstract to me; they are very real. So earlier this year, I decided to quantify something that has been missing in the conversation about AI and water: I measured my own AI water use. For 11 weeks, I tracked all of my AI use. One hundred sessions. I counted the tokens processed and applied publicly available numbers on per-token energy and water intensity from Epoch AI and operator-reported data from Microsoft and Google. Anyone can run this math. In those 11 weeks, I built an iOS app from scratch and wrote policy briefs on extreme heat for nonprofits I work with. I produced documentary pitch decks and drafted a 15,000-word climate fiction piece about the Colorado River collapse. I used AI every single day, often for hours at a time. Total lifecycle water footprint of all that work: about five gallons. That accounts for everything: the water used to cool the data centers, the water consumed at power plants to generate the electricity, and the water embedded in manufacturing the hardware.”
4. Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer? (David DeSteno, New York Times): “Anthropic’s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn’t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises — texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated — but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body.” — Far more interesting than I expected. I almost skipped because I imagined I knew where the author was going. I was quite wrong. The author is a psychology professor at Northeastern. FYI: the author is not personally religious, he just studies religion.
5. A Brief History of Singing in the Early Christian Church (podcast, 33 minutes): According to Augustine, Ambrose re-introduced the practice of congregational singing of hymns in the western church, which raises the question of what had happened to singing before that. An interesting listen. Recommended by a student.
6. There’s a Reason Americans Hold Israel to a Higher Standard (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…Americans have a fundamentally different relationship to Jews, Judaism, Zionism and Israel than to any of the ‘much worse governments’ that Gur is referring to — Saudi Arabia and its war in Yemen is his prime example, but one could make a much longer list of authoritarian states whose war crimes pass without sufficient notice.… So part of the answer to Gur’s question — why do Westerners freak out in a unique way about Israel policy? — is connected to identification, not hostility, and to the feeling that Israel is part of our zone of identity and responsibility in a way that the Saudi monarchy is not.”
7. Three articles about the Southern Poverty Law Center case:
   • The SPLC Targeted Me. Now Its Reckoning Has Come. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Free Press): “A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, on Tuesday issued an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The charges include wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC funneled more than $3 million of donors’ money to members of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Movement—groups it simultaneously condemned in fundraising letters and press releases. To move the money, the SPLC allegedly used fictitious business names. For many of us who spent years on the receiving end of the organization’s lists and labels, the indictment itself was no surprise. What surprised us was that it took until 2026 to arrive.”
   • The SPLC Has Spread Hate. Is It Guilty of a Crime? (Jed Rubenfield, The Free Press): “Is there any evidence that the SPLC collected substantial donations by ‘stoking’ the ‘racial hatred’ it told donors it was fighting? That’s a shocking, vicious accusation, and the story recounted in the indictment contains nearly nothing specifically supporting it.… At the end of the day, the nonlegal case against the Southern Poverty Law Center may be stronger than the legal case.”
     • The author is a law professor at Yale.
   • How the Southern Poverty Law Center Drew the Ire of Conservatives (Richard Fausset, New York Times): “For much of the 21st century, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been at the center of a bitter partisan war in America over what constitutes hate. The law center, which is based in Alabama, began in 1971, earning a reputation for battling the Ku Klux Klan in court and helping reporters and law enforcement keep tabs on far-right domestic extremists. More recently, however, the S.P.L.C. has earned the ire of conservatives by criticizing a number of organizations — including Moms For Liberty, the Family Research Council and Turning Point USA — that many on the right consider to be squarely within the American mainstream.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Integer programming easily encloses horse (Substack): “So, since I can’t enjoy this kind of game, I thought I’d try to ruin it for everyone by showing that it’s extremely easy for machines.” Recommended by a student.

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Disclaimer

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