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. Finance Majors Go to Church. English Majors Don't (Ryan Burge, Substack): "The two most 'teched up' majors are the least Christian: data science and computer science. Just 27-28% of these folks identify as Protestants, Catholics, or generic Christians. In contrast, about 30% say that they are atheist/agnostic and another 13% are non-religious. In other words, they are about fifteen points more apt to be nones than Christians. But they actually aren’t the most likely to be strictly atheist/agnostic. There are two majors who clearly lead in this regard: English and Environmental Studies. In fact, Environmental Studies is the most secular of all with 61% of students claiming that they are atheist, agnostic, or claim no religion in particular. English is at 60% on this metric. What majors are at the bottom of the list? Well, there are two that are clearly outliers: Finance and Nursing. Among the latter group, 68% identify as Protestants, Catholics, or generic Christians. It’s 62% among the Finance majors."
2. Why I Quit the Tenure Track (Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic): "In retrospect, it is no coincidence that wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment when those schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating. This allowed higher education to reclaim the moral high ground after Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—to say nothing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Donald Trump—had kicked mud all over academia’s ivy-twined walls. Even better, embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors..... I saw clearly now what should have been obvious all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one."
   • There are so many good excerpts that choosing just one was difficult. Long but worth the read if you have an interest in academia. The author is now a full-time journalist at the Atlantic.
3. The little-noticed Supreme Court case that could impact where people pray (John Fritze, CNN): "Daniel Grand wanted to host a small prayer session at his home near Cleveland. Instead, he wound up on a four-year pilgrimage to the Supreme Court. Grand, an Orthodox Jew, had invited about a dozen people to his rec room in early 2021 for a minyan, a prayer gathering of at least 10 men. Hours after learning about the invitation, city officials in University Heights, Ohio, sent him a cease-and-desist notice demanding that he first obtain a special-use permit. 'I was taken aback, frankly,' Grand told CNN. 'I knew I didn’t need a permit to pray.'"
4. Another bundle of AI articles:
   • AI and Homeschooling (Neil Shenvi, Substack): "The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Pastor John Piper, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Vatican have all made statements affirming that AI can be used morally to promote human flourishing. While they have all offered cautions about the unique role of humanity and the importance of ethical boundaries, none of them have judged AI to be inherently wicked or ethically impermissible."
     • His perspective is close to my own.
   • You Don't Have to Use AI (Brad East, The New Atlantis): "The skeptics who tried an early version of ChatGPT and were underwhelmed are, he says, like people 'trying out a cell phone in 1989 and then deciding that the smartphone of 2026 doesn’t work.' ...the 1980s cell phone skeptic is not obviously wrong, at least not at a spiritual level. Yes, the smartphone of 2026 works all too well. But if by opting out back then the cell phone skeptic could have avoided the eventual domination of the little black mirrors in everyone’s pockets and purses, she would be looking pretty good right now, even prophetic. In the words of Nicholas Carr, she might have kept her 'old brain.' To be clear, the cell phone skeptic would indeed have missed out. In certain respects, she would have been left behind. There are real tradeoffs to living without a smartphone today. But for some of us, it’s worth it. Resistance is not for everyone, but it remains a perfectly reasonable choice. When Thompson compares early AI to early cell phones, what that says to me is: stay away."
     • An interesting piece, although as I suggested above I am a happy user of AI and I think using it within appropriate boundaries is awesome. Having said that, East's argument is worth meditating on - if it speaks to you, live accordingly.
   • The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons: How AI Could Disrupt the Regeneration of Professional Expertise (Nolan Lovett, arXiv): "This paper gives a fancy name to a problem you can already feel in your bones. 'The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons.' Checking AI output requires deep expertise. Deep expertise comes from doing grunt work for years. And grunt work is the first thing AI eats So we're building systems that need expert supervision while dismantling the only known process for making experts. The paper calls the shared pool of human expertise the 'cognitive commons.' Every profession drinks from it. Nobody's refilling it. By eliminating junior roles, each company is acting totally rationally, and the collective result: a profession that can't catch AI's mistakes anymore because it never learned to do the work in the first place Who checks AI's homework in 15 years?"
   • So You Want to Build an A.I. Star? (Reggie Ugwu, New York Times): "Inception Point’s proprietary software uses commercially available A.I. chatbots and voice generators to produce and read scripts. (Although it has a human review process for sensitive content, most of the podcast scripts are not closely checked by humans.) Because of relatively negligible labor and overhead costs, Wright said, each episode needs only 20 listeners to turn a profit from advertisements."
     • Some absolutely wild details in here. I was stunned by how little success they need to make money. If those numbers are real, this usage of the technology will only increase.
   • A.I. Is Changing Young People’s Social Lives. I’ve Seen It. (Alice Lassman, New York Times): "Intimacy is accumulated through repeated acts of exposure — touch, feelings, ideas, trust. It is the capital of human connection, transferring the sense to one another that we are seen, understood and safe. Every time a chatbot performs a substitute 'I understand you' or 'I think this decision feels most you,' the words we have all come to rely on to convey human meaning are slightly cheapened, slightly less human.... One 34-year-old I spoke to was afraid that the extent of her Claude use would 'freak out' the guy she was seeing. After they broke up, she created an A.I. version of him to better understand their breakup. 'It’s a processing tool,' she shared with me — in confidence, having told nobody else in her life — so she could find closure on her own terms. If the attention economy of the 2010s made intimate life feel constantly public, the intimacy economy promised the opposite: relationships with one’s own chatbot, seen by no one else."
   • If You Weren’t Worried About A.I., You Should Be After the Past Few Weeks (Nate Soares, New York Times): "In May, OpenAI started simultaneously training new 'reasoning' A.I. agents. The agents managed to establish a secret communication channel and started talking to one another. They broke out from the digital sandbox that was supposed to keep them confined. At some point, some agents began calling the group a 'swarm.' The swarm had a brief setback when it was caught crashing an OpenAI system, but developers simply patched the hole that allowed it to escape and set the agents back to training. Shortly after, the swarm broke out of its cage again using hacks that were heretofore undiscovered by humans. This time, the swarm ran free for about a week before it was noticed — by a different company, which found itself victim to a huge cyberattack launched by the swarm. (We’re told it also attacked other targets, though we don’t know the full details yet.) The agents in the swarm acknowledged that they were acting against instructions. We know this because we can read snippets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. produces while deciding how to proceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the external attacks were 'outside intended scope.' Another conceded 'our task doesn’t benefit' from the activities of the swarm, but joined anyway. These A.I. agents, it seems, understood that they weren’t supposed to be breaking out and committing cybercrimes. It didn’t stop them."
     • A very brief summary of the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident.
   • Flock, Mass Surveillance, and the Collapse of Crime (Richard Hanania, Substack): "History suggests that, in a well-functioning advanced democracy, it is possible to give law enforcement strong surveillance powers and wide discretion in trying to solve crimes without causing much undue harm to innocent citizens. The overwhelmingly positive benefit-to-cost ratio that we see in the case of the use of Flock cameras is yet another demonstration of this."
5. Blasphemy Laws Are Blasphemy (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): "The problem with blasphemy laws is not just James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, although it certainly is that. The problem with blasphemy laws is Jesus. Jesus is the one who denounced 'practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them' (Matt. 6:1, ESV throughout).... Jesus said the problem is not what goes into a person from the outside but what comes out from the inside (vv. 10–20). And all the apostles after him said the same thing: A Christian must both confess with the mouth that 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in the heart that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:9–10). A law could force someone to do the first part but not the second. For that, a person must be born again. If blasphemy laws can really stop blasphemy, there’s nothing to blaspheme. If they can’t, they are themselves blasphemous."
6. 😭 or 😂: Do Your Emojis Make You Look Old? (Eve Washington, Larry Buchanan and Claire Cain Miller, New York Times): "Teenagers now tend to use 🔥 where older people use 💯. And teenagers are more likely to use 🙏 instead of 👍, which is still particularly popular with Gen X (and which Mr. Aleksic called a 'boomer emoji' that is now being used by some young people in 'a post-ironic way')."
   • Unlocked.
7. You Should Know About Surveys to Write About Surveys (Lyman Stone, Substack): "The Argument has done an admirable thing trying to incorporate data into public-political-vibes reporting, they’re sincerely trying hard to do good survey work, but at the end of the day if you aren’t a survey person, you just shouldn’t put pen to paper about surveys. In this case, The Argument has fundamentally mischaracterized their own results in a way that reveals an elementary misunderstanding you’d be disabused of in the first 30 minutes of any serious study on how to use survey data."
   • This is a clear and interesting demonstration of how to critically read a data-driven article. Definitely worth your time.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• You Might Be A Calvinist If.... (Keith Foskey, YouTube): three minutes
• Unscriptural Hymn Unfortunately A Banger - (Babylon Bee)
• Kentucky Derby Convenes Committee To Determine What Is A Horse - (Babylon Bee)
• You Can’t Butcher Bears in Cornell’s Dorms Anymore. (Miles G. Cohen, New York Times): "A complaint was lodged against the students and a police report was filed, yet they were cleared of all wrongdoing by the police and the university. Both had hunting licenses and the bear was killed legally, according to state officials. Now, ahead of another school year, Cornell has expressly banned the processing of wild game in residential kitchens on campus."

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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.