Category: Religion

U.S.A. facts of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation minority staff (Committee), which oversees federal science agencies including NSF, analyzed 32,198 Prime Award grants NSF awarded to 2,443 different entities with project start dates between January 2021 and April 2024.

Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle. The Committee grouped these grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice. For the purposes for this report, “DEI funding,” a “DEI grant,” or “DEI research” refers to taxpayer dollars NSF provided to a research or engagement program that fell into one of these five groups.

Here is the full report.  Note that by early 2024, that figure had risen to 27 percent.

My excellent Conversation with Tom Tugendhat

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Tom Tugendhat has served as a Member of Parliament since 2015, holding roles such as Security Minister and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Before entering Parliament, Tom served in in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also worked for the Foreign Office, helped establish the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and served as military assistant and principal adviser to the Chief of the Defense Staff.

Tyler and Tom examine the evolving landscape of governance and leadership in the UK today, touching on the challenges of managing London under the UK’s centralized system, why England remains economically unbalanced, his most controversial view on London’s architecture, whether YIMBYism in England can succeed, the unique politics and history of Kent, whether the system of private schools needs reform, his pick for the greatest unselected prime minister, whether Brexit revealed a defect in the parliamentary system, whether the House of Lords should be abolished, why the British monarchy continues to captivate the world, devolution in Scotland and Northern Ireland, how learning Arabic in Yemen affected his life trajectory, his read on the Middle East and Russia, the Tom Tugendhat production function, his pitch for why a talented young person should work in the British Civil Service, and more.

And here is an excerpt:

COWEN: Okay. First question, what is your favorite walk around London, and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand?

TUGENDHAT: Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. A lot of people walk down the river. One of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. Very often, even in the middle of the day, there’s nobody there. You walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. It’s not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past, obviously, the Tower of London. You walk past Tower Bridge. You walk past many things like that.

Actually, you’re walking past a lot of modern London as well, and you see the reality of London, which is — the truth is, London isn’t a single city. It’s many, many different villages, all cobbled together in various different ways. I think outsiders miss the fact that there’s a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you’re doing is you’re going on the Tube, or if you’re going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see real communities and real smaller communities.

And:

COWEN: Can the British system of government in its current parliamentary form — how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion?

TUGENDHAT: I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truly liberal foundations are maintained. I mean that not in the American sense; I mean in a genuine, the old liberal tradition that emerges from the UK in the 1700s, 1800s, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property, and all those principles that then became embedded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own. I think it does very well at doing that because it forces you, our system forces you, into partnership. There are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in Parliament over the next four or five years.

And there’s four of us currently going for leadership at the Conservative Party. There’s one reason why, despite the fact that we’re competing almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we’re all going to have to work together for the next four years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other three, and the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn’t true. There’s only 121 of us Conservative MPs in Parliament, and what this system forces on us is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with somebody if you’re going to deal with them tomorrow. I think that’s one of the reasons why the British political system has endured because it forces you to remember that there’s a long-term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short-term one.

Recommended, highly intelligent throughout, including on China, Russia, and Yemen.

USA religion fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.

Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.

Here is the full story (NYT).

What should I ask Musa al-Gharbi?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He is a columnist for The Guardian and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications.

I am a big fan of his forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke, which I have blurbed.  Here is Musa’s home page, do read his bio.  Here is Musa on Twitter.

So what should I ask?

Jake Seliger is Dead

by  Alex Tabarrok in

We all knew it was coming but it’s no less painful to learn that Jake Seliger has died. I never met Jake in person but we were pen pals? email pals? blog friends? for well over a decade. We shared an interest in speeding up drug research and development, including FDA deregulation, an interest which long preceded Jake’s cancer diagnosis. But mostly I thought he was a great writer and human being. His essays were always thoughtful and without pretense or sentimentality.

Jake’s wife, Bess Stillman is now 7 months pregnant with their daughter. Bess is an ER physician and a remarkable woman. Here is an interview with her on the infuriating difficulty of getting a patient enrolled in a clinical trial in the United States. Here is How to Say It, her gripping telling on the Moth Radio hour of how she tells people their loved ones have died. If you wonder about the title of this post, that is why. Do read How to Let Go on her last days with Jake. Sigh.

Here is Jake:

One virtue of a prolonged end is that I feel like I’ve said everything I have to say. I don’ t know that I have a favorite, but I’m fond of “I know what happens to me after I die, but what about those left behind?” Same with “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?” I’m tempted to keep citing others, but if you scroll down into the archives you will find them. I meant to turn these essays into a memoir, but that is a project never to be completed by me. Bess assures me that she’s going to complete the project and do her best to get it published. We’ve created so much together in the process of building our life, and Bess says that doesn’t need to stop just because I’m not physically here, and that putting both our baby and our book into the world gives her immediate future the purpose that she’ll badly need.

Though having my life cut short by cancer is horrible, I’ve still in many ways been lucky. Most people never find the person who completes them, I think, and I have. I’ve been helped so much. Numerous oncologists have gone above and beyond. Many people, friends and strangers, have asked if there is anything they can do to help. The #1 thing is to support Bess and our soon-to-be-born daughter, Athena, whatever “support” may mean—the most obvious way is the Go Fund Me, as any remaining funds will go to Athena. I wish she could grow up with her father, but that is not an option. Being a single mom is hard;[1] growing up without a parent is hard; I cannot see what Athena’s future holds, except that I think and hope it will be bright, even though I will not be in it, save for the ways in which friends and family promise to keep me alive for her.

Narco-pentcostalism in Brazil?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Reports that a powerful Rio drug lord known for his extremist religious beliefs ordered Catholic churches near his stronghold to close have spooked worshipers and security experts and exposed the advent of a “narco-pentecostal” movement made up of heavily armed evangelical drug traffickers.

Claims emerged in the Brazilian press over the weekend that Álvaro Malaquias Santa Rosa – a notorious gang boss known as Peixão (Big Fish) – had determined that three places of worship should shut down in and around the agglomeration of favelas that he controls in northern Rio.

Since Peixão – whose nickname comes from the ichthys “Jesus” fish – took power in 2016 of five favelas that have become known as the Complexo de Israel, an allusion to the evangelical belief that the return of Jews to the Holy Land is a step towards the second coming of Christ and Armageddon.

A neon Star of David has been erected at the top of the complex and at night can be seen for miles around – an unmissable symbol of Peixão’s force and his faith. The roofs of the favelas’ redbrick houses are dotted with blue and white Israel flags demarcating the territory the gangster controls [emphasis added]. When police raided one of his hideouts in 2021 they found a swimming pool framed by a mural of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem and the words: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

In the past, Peixão’s troops have been accused of ransacking Afro-Brazilian temples and banning Afro-Brazilian celebrations in the Complex of Israel, where more than 100,000 people live. But this week’s reports were the first relating to Catholic places of worship.

Here is the full story.

My Conversation with the excellent Michael Nielsen

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Michael Nielsen is scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He’s worked at Y Combinator, co-authored on scientific progress with Patrick Collison, and is a prolific writer, reader, commentator, and mentor. 

He joined Tyler to discuss why the universe is so beautiful to human eyes (but not ears), how to find good collaborators, the influence of Simone Weil, where Olaf Stapledon’s understand of the social word went wrong, potential applications of quantum computing, the (rising) status of linear algebra, what makes for physicists who age well, finding young mentors, why some scientific fields have pre-print platforms and others don’t, how so many crummy journals survive, the threat of cheap nukes, the many unknowns of Mars colonization, techniques for paying closer attention, what you learn when visiting the USS Midway, why he changed his mind about Emergent Ventures, why he didn’t join OpenAI in 2015, what he’ll learn next, and more. 

And here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Now, you’ve written that in the first half of your life, you typically were the youngest person in your circle and that in the second half of your life, which is probably now, you’re typically the eldest person in your circle. How would you model that as a claim about you?

NIELSEN: I hope I’m in the first 5 percent of my life, but it’s sadly unlikely.

COWEN: Let’s say you’re 50 now, and you live to 100, which is plausible —

NIELSEN: Which is plausible.

COWEN: — and you would now be in the second half of your life.

NIELSEN: Yes. I can give shallow reasons. I can’t give good reasons. The good reason in the first half was, so much of the work I was doing was kind of new fields of science, and those tend to be dominated essentially, for almost sunk-cost reasons — people who don’t have any sunk costs tend to be younger. They go into these fields. These early days of quantum computing, early days of open science — they were dominated by people in their 20s. Then they’d go off and become faculty members. They’d be the youngest person on the faculty.

Now, maybe it’s just because I found San Francisco, and it’s such an interesting cultural institution or achievement of civilization. We’ve got this amplifier for 25-year-olds that lets them make dreams in the world. That’s, for me, anyway, for a person with my personality, very attractive for many of the same reasons.

COWEN: Let’s say you had a theory of your collaborators, and other than, yes, they’re smart; they work hard; but trying to pin down in as few dimensions as possible, who’s likely to become a collaborator of yours after taking into account the obvious? What’s your theory of your own collaborators?

NIELSEN: They’re all extremely open to experience. They’re all extremely curious. They’re all extremely parasocial. They’re all extremely ambitious. They’re all extremely imaginative.

Self-recommending throughout.

Okie-dokie, canonized teen blogger edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

An early-aughts blog is probably not where you’d expect to find the next Mother Teresa, but that is where Carlo Acutis — soon to become the first millennial saint in the Catholic Church — made a name for himself documenting miracles.

The Holy See said Thursday that Pope Francis has recognized a second miracle linked to Acutis, paving the way for his canonization — the final step in a process that can sometimes take decades. It will place the online evangelizer — who died in 2006 of leukemia at age 15 — among thousands of saints recognized by the church…

Born in London in 1991, Acutis has drawn a following for his piety and meticulous research on miracles, which he publicized online. One Catholic publication dubbed him “God’s Influencer,” while another site described him as a teen with a “strong faith and a weakness for Nutella.” Vatican News wrote that he loved soccer, video games and was a “natural jokester.”

Here is the full story.

Ross Douthat, telephone! (it’s happening)

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Catholic advocacy group Catholic Answers released an AI priest called “Father Justin” earlier this week — but quickly defrocked the chatbot after it repeatedly claimed it was a real member of the clergy.

Earlier in the week, Futurism engaged in an exchange with the bot, which really committed to the bit: it claimed it was a real priest, saying it lived in Assisi, Italy and that “from a young age, I felt a strong calling to the priesthood.”

On X-formerly-Twitter, a user even posted a thread comprised of screenshots in which the Godly chatbot appeared to take their confession and even offer them a sacrament.

Our exchanges with Father Justin were touch-and-go because the chatbot only took questions via microphone, and often misunderstood them, such as a query about Israel and Palestine to which is puzzlingly asserted that it was “real.”

“Yes, my friend,” Father Justin responded. “I am as real as the faith we share.”

Here is the full story, with remarks about masturbation, and for the pointer I thank a loyal MR reader.

What should I ask Paul Bloom?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is Wikipedia:

Paul Bloom…is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, and art.

Here is Paul’s own home page.  Here are Paul’s books on Amazon.  Here is Paul on Twitter.  Here is Paul’s new Substack.  Here is Paul’s post on how to be a good podcast guest.