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. Stop Pathologizing Ordinary Life (Clay Routledge, New York Times): "The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.... Nearly a third of American adults and half of Gen Z adults have given themselves a diagnosis of a mental illness based on information from social media. And research suggests that people who rely on social media for information about mental illnesses tend to have less accurate knowledge about them."
2. Counterfeit Providence: Why Christians Must Reject the Conspiratorial Mind (Mitchell Bahnsen, Substack): "The believer has been catechized, rightly, to reject the secular picture of history as a directionless churn of matter and accident. He knows in his bones that events mean something, that history is going somewhere, that appearances deceive and a deeper order underlies them. Conspiracism takes the providential instinct, a theologically healthy one, and transfers its object from the fatherly hand of God to the hidden hand of the deep state. Where providence teaches that history is governed by a God who is for us, conspiracism teaches that it is governed by powers who are against us."
3. US prosecutors charge Atlanta man after GrapheneOS phone wipes itself during airport search (Skye Jacobs, TechSpot): "The case raises questions about which constitutional rights apply at US borders, including international airports, where authorities have broader search powers.... GrapheneOS is designed to improve privacy and security on Pixel phones. Supporters say those tools are legitimate security protections, not evidence of criminal intent. Boutry pointed to France and Spain, where authorities have struggled to gain access to secured devices. He said authorities have treated the use of GrapheneOS itself as suspicious. In Catalonia, Spain, police have been profiling people carrying Pixel phones, assuming they have GrapheneOS installed and are drug dealers or gang members."
4. A revolution is unfolding. Voters everywhere are furious. (Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post): "We summon a car in three minutes. A package arrives the same day. AI answers complicated questions in seconds, and does more complex work that took people months in mere minutes. Naturally, citizens begin to expect similar efficiency from government. But democracy is not designed for speed. It is designed for legitimacy. It bargains, compromises, consults courts, protects vulnerable groups and balances competing interests. Those safeguards are precisely what distinguish democracy from authoritarianism. Yet in an age shaped by technology’s warp speed, they increasingly look like paralysis."
5. How the modern plea bargain undercuts the constitutional right to a jury trial (Matt Martens, The Hill): "Jury trials, by publicly airing and testing the evidence of the crimes, serve the dual functions of both protecting the accused from false accusations and coercion to wrongly admit guilty and protecting the community from lenient sentencing of dangerous offenders. Modern American-style plea bargains wreak havoc on both those vital interests."
   • The author is a lawyer and a well-known Christian thinker on the subject of justice. He has a seminary degree in addition to his legal training and attends Capitol Hill Baptist Church in DC.
6. The Apples and Oranges Tribunal (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): "Hayek nailed it in The Mirage of Social Justice: justice is about conduct — how one person treats another. An employer who defrauds his workers, an employee who steals from the till, a product sold under false pretenses — condemn them, take them to court. But the pattern of prices that emerges from millions of voluntary trades is nobody’s conduct. No one chose it, no one designed it, no one can be guilty of it. The constellation of prices is, in Ferguson’s phrase, the result of human action but not of human design. Demanding that prices be just is a category error, like suing the weather. Prices don’t grade our merit; they guide our actions. Ask them to do the first and they can no longer do the second."
7. Some thoughts on AI:
   • What will more intelligence actually do for us? (Noah Smith, Substack): "So although we don’t know yet, it’s possible that humans were already hitting the point of diminishing returns with regards to individual cognitive capacity, and that superintelligent machines will never be as far beyond us as we are beyond dogs. But even if that’s true, I can think of at least three reasons why machine superintelligence could still deliver huge productivity gains.... (1) The most obvious advantage that machine superintelligence confers is replicability.... (2) in the age of AI, distributed tacit knowledge might not be nearly as big of a barrier to technological diffusion.... (and 3) there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can."
     • This is really good and worth a ponder.
   • The Hidden Cost of China’s Free A.I. (Tal Feldman, New York Times): "When researchers asked DeepSeek to write code for users whom the Chinese government views with hostility, such as Falun Gong or Tibetans, DeepSeek wrote code with security vulnerabilities, making it easier for hackers to penetrate.... Imagine an employee inside an American company who was smart and hard-working and whose goal in life was to promote the interests of a foreign government. We would call that person a foreign agent. We are now hiring millions of them through the use of Chinese A.I."

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• $200,000 Spent On Travel Ball Finally Pays Off With Son’s $500 College Scholarship (Babylon Bee): "Benson's uncle Matthew, a financial planner, had advised years ago that if the family would put all the travel ball money in a 529 account, young Brayden would have roughly one million dollars to pay for his college education. 'Who's laughing now, Matthew?' said Mr. Benson. 'What a dope. I can't wait to text out pictures of the scholarship offer. He's going to feel so stupid.' After 10 years of missing church, school, birthdays, weddings, and funerals for travel ball, the Benson family was thankful their persistence had paid off. 'I admit, there were times I questioned if we were doing the right thing,' said mom Jessica. 'When we skipped my sister's wedding because there was supposed to be a college scout at this tournament in Alabama, I had my doubts. Holding this $500 check in my hands, those doubts are finally gone.'"
• California's iconic welcome signs are getting a dramatic makeover (Tessa McLean, SF Gate): "Aside from being 'warm and welcoming,' Cochrane said the goal for the new designs was to present 'a legit photo op' for passing motorists. He said they’ve already become 'social media magnets' in just the short time they’ve been displayed."
  • They look really nice. I'm impressed.
• Datatype: a variable font that turns text into charts: "Datatype is an OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no rendering library — just type the syntax and Datatype's ligature substitution does the rest."
  • THIS IS SO COOL! Note: this is for websites, won't work on a Word document.

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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.