This is a very plain blog with quotes from and links to articles I found interesting, thought-provoking, or relevant to the times. Linking is neither endorsement nor condemnation. Run by http://willslack.com
09 February, 2023
06 February, 2023
Ravi Zacharias’ sins of sexual abuse went undetected for years. Here are the lessons the Church needs to learn
“One of the things that we identify around culture is that if we’re not sufficiently attentive on an ongoing basis, then what we call ‘shadow cultures’ emerge – those things which become custom and practice by mistake, because we weren’t alive to them and didn’t challenge them when they first arrived.”
According to Humphreys, shadow cultures run in parallel to an organisation’s existing culture, but largely go unacknowledged or unopposed. They are the behaviours displayed by colleagues, or the privileges conferred on particular members of staff, which demonstrate “an alternative set of rules are being used”.
In the case of RZIM, this might include Zacharias’ use of a personal phone and email address instead of official work ones, or the encrypted BlackBerry he owned, from which messages were not retrievable once deleted. These kinds of “low level” concerns can be a subtle indicator of deeper organisational health issues, warns Humphreys. They should be called out in an appropriate way and “without fear of retribution or penalty”.
05 February, 2023
UnitedHealthcare Tried to Deny Coverage to a Chronically Ill Patient. He Fought Back, Exposing the Insurer’s Inner Workings.
https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-insurance-denial-ulcerative-colitis
After a college student finally found a treatment that worked, the insurance giant decided it wouldn’t pay for the costly drugs. His fight to get coverage exposed the insurer’s hidden procedures for rejecting claims.
04 February, 2023
Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's "FTX Pre-Mortem Overview"
https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/sbf-ftx-pre-mortem-overview
Sam Bankman-Fried has apparently decided to fill his time spent confined to his parents' Palo Alto home with blogging, perhaps in the hopes that he can just blog his way out of the massive criminal and civil penalties he's facing.
Although many of his statements here repeat things he's said elsewhere, I think it is useful to be able to analyze some of the story he's trying to spin all in one place, rather than cobbling his narrative together from multiple sources.
It's remarkable the extent to which SBF outright lies, or at the very least twists his version of events to distort reality in his favor. I don't intend to annotate further posts from him—which I suspect will be many—but instead hope that this will be sufficient to give some idea of just how thoroughly misleading his statements are.
Eight Women Say the Same Man Raped or Assaulted Them. Now They’re Out for Justice
When the system failed to help them, these survivors banded together and took matters into their own hands
A Small Boat, a Vast Sea and a Desperate Escape From Russia
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/29/us/russian-asylum-boat-alaska.html
In September, two men set out from Russia, hoping a boat could carry them to asylum on U.S. soil. Their quest for freedom did not go as planned.
The Unwritten Laws of Physics for Black Women
https://www.wired.com/story/the-unwritten-laws-of-physics/
I rode high on those words when, in 2016, I arrived at UChicago, one of the top physics departments in the country. I was one of two Black women in a department of about 200 grad students. It quickly became clear that she and I were novelties. “I’ve dated a mulatto like you before,” a peer told me in an attempt to make conversation. When I showed up at a weekly meeting that discussed articles in scientific journals, a professor handed me an abandoned backpack near his seat—as if the only reason I could be in that room was to collect a forgotten bag. (He blushed when I shook my head and sat down.) Another time, my adviser asked me to pose for a picture for his grant application. “Of course, I have other photos,” he said as he tossed me a wrench. “But it looks better if it’s a woman.”
One day, worn out by always feeling like an alien, I opened my laptop and poked around the department website. I was searching for signs of Black women who had come before me—to reassure myself that someone had once done what I was trying to do. No luck. So I turned to Google, where I stumbled on a database simply titled The Physicists, maintained by an organization called African American Women in Physics.
I sorted the catalog by graduation year. A few rows down the first page, I saw the name of a UChicago physicist: Willetta Greene-Johnson, who defended her dissertation in 1987. I scrolled through the next page, and the next, and kept scrolling until I finally reached another UChicago entry in 2015. Her name was Cacey Stevens Bester.
That can’t be it, I thought. That meant I was on track to be number three.
03 February, 2023
Wrestling with an Approach to Karl Barth, and some Advice from D Stephen Long
https://growrag.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/wrestling-with-an-approach-to-karl-barth-and-some-advice-from-theologian-x/
I also think that no single, individual theologian [WLS: and I would say this applies to anyone speaking on morals] is responsible for his or her theology. Each one lives from and depends on the communion of saints, on those who come before us and those who receive our work. An individual theologian’s work should not be discarded because of her or his failures because it is never solely their work. I do think we must raise questions as to the connection between theology and ethics that could lead a Barth or Yoder to their self-deception, especially when they themselves refused a sharp distinction between theology and ethics. Is there something in their theology that contributed to it?
So I have come to terms with these failures by thinking: 1. their theology cannot be wholly discarded because their theology was never their’s. They do not own it, and theologians are not individual heroes. 2. Theologians’ failures cannot be overlooked but must be considered as part and parcel of their theology. Many of us were attracted to Barth because he saw the failures of theology to resist the Nazis. If we easily overlook ethical and political failures, then we would have to say that theology makes little difference in the world and that would be devastating to the theological task.
An obituary for the man who saved North Carolina from nuclear disaster
https://www.ncrabbithole.com/p/jack-revelle-goldsboro-nc-broken-arrow-obituary
Dr. Jack ReVelle disarmed two hydrogen bombs that accidentally fell near Goldsboro during the Cold War. But a military career of cleaning up nuclear accidents may have cut his life short.
26 January, 2023
Obama: I Underestimated the Threat of Disinformation
What we’re seeing is a reversion back to old ways of thinking about power and place and identity. And I think part of our complacency grew out of the notion that once the Berlin Wall fell and Nelson Mandela was released and the world was flat and you had McDonald’s everywhere, and now suddenly that was it—we were done. And we forgot that that post–World War II 50-years stretch to 60-years stretch—that’s the anomaly. And that there is millennia of brutality and pillage and violence and displacement and cruelty, and we created a set of institutions out of 60 million people dying in World War II and tried to reconfigure how we might organize our societies. But it is not self-executing. It’s something that we have to continually nurture and respond to new circumstances, whether that’s changes in technology, changes in globalization, climate change—all those things require us to say, All right, what does that mean for our capacity to maintain human dignity and freedom and self-governance? And that’s the prism through which we should be examining these questions and being willing to modify, adjust, reform our institutions to keep up with that. And that’s something that I think we have not done as well as we need to.
Heresy
http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html
A heresy is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime — one that makes some people feel not merely that you're mistaken, but that you should be punished. Indeed, their desire to see you punished is often stronger than it would be if you'd committed an actual crime. There are many on the far left who believe strongly in the reintegration of felons (as I do myself), and yet seem to feel that anyone guilty of certain heresies should never work again.
There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago, and even those who are happy about this would have to agree that it's so.
In defense of "The West Wing"
https://www.slowboring.com/p/in-defense-of-the-west-wing
And something “The West Wing” deeply gets about politics is that there are a lot of people like that kicking around. Are there kooks and grifters and opportunists and criminals and morons? Sure.
But you genuinely can’t understand key developments in American political history — good ones like the Affordable Care Act or bad ones like the Dobbs decision — without understanding the large and often critical role played by earnest people who sincerely believe in what they are doing. Even a lot of the really bad characters in politics — Paul Ryan, for example — are extremely sincere. And when you look at someone who is both bad and also non-sincere like Donald Trump, you can’t understand Trump’s successes without understanding the sincerity of many of his collaborators. For better or worse, helping Trump beat Clinton seemed like a good way to try to advance the causes of making abortion illegal and taking health insurance away from poor people, and unless you grasp the sincerity with which lots of Republicans believe in those causes, you won’t be able to make sense of how he related to the party’s professionals.
22 January, 2023
Mapping out the tribes of climate
https://nadia.xyz/climate-tribes
Climate is a gravity well for talent, but why don’t other, equally impactful topics attract talent in the same way? Why isn’t everyone dropping everything to work on homelessness, or global poverty, or curing cancer? With many peers in tech now working on climate issues, I tried to understand why this topic holds such purchase for so many people – and its incredible staying power over the decades.
Initially, I started with the idea that climate was an attractive industry for “doomer” types, and I painted their motivations monolithically. I was searching for the one weird reason that was causing hordes of people to drop what they were doing and march, hypnotically, towards the same problem space.
What I found instead is that while the media still portrays climate as a simple question of beliefs, the climate field has long moved on to diversified solutions. Whether one believes in climate change is no longer the interesting question; now it’s “What do you think is the right approach?”
Pass through the asteroid belt of climate doomerism, and the universe expands into a rich panoply of different climate tribes. People who work in and around climate don’t all believe the same things. Instead, they inhabit a parallel, mirror world that looks a lot like the non-climate world. Just like in the regular world, there are factions, politics, and competing belief systems.
Guessing C For Every Answer Is Now Enough To Pass The New York State Algebra Exam
My student, River, spent more time in the courtroom than the classroom last year. One Friday night in September, a drunk friend called and asked for a ride home from a party. River obliged. That’s a problem when you’re 14 years old. On his excellent adventure with his drunk friend, River drove over the landscaping of several local businesses and ended with his car in the woods caught in a web of maple sugaring lines. Things spiralled from there.
All of which is to say that River didn’t learn algebra last year.
I mean it: zero algebra was learned. He wasn’t even present in my classroom for most of three marking periods. At the end of the year, he asked me how he was supposed to pass the state test.
“No problem,” I said. “Just pick all Cs.”
“What?”
“Try it. I bet it will work.”
It worked.
20 January, 2023
20 Things I’ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer
https://www.simplethread.com/20-things-ive-learned-in-my-20-years-as-a-software-engineer/
2. The hardest part of software is building the right thing
I know this is cliche at this point, but the reason most software engineers don’t believe it is because they think it devalues their work. Personally I think that is nonsense. Instead it highlights the complexity and irrationality of the environments in which we have to work, which compounds our challenges. You can design the most technically impressive thing in the world, and then have nobody want to use it. Happens all the time. Designing software is mostly a listening activity, and we often have to be part software engineer, part psychic, and part anthropologist. Investing in this design process, whether through dedicated UX team members or by simply educating yourself, will deliver enormous dividends. Because how do you really calculate the cost of building the wrong software? It amounts to a lot more than just lost engineering time.
3. The best software engineers think like designers
Great software engineers think deeply about the user experience of their code. They might not think about it in those terms, but whether it is an external API, programmatic API, user interface, protocol, or any other interface; great engineers consider who will be using it, why it will be used, how it will be used, and what is important to those users. Keeping the user’s needs in mind is really the heart of good user experience.
4. The best code is no code, or code you don’t have to maintain
All I have to say is “coders gonna code.” You ask someone in any profession how to solve a problem, and they are going to err on the side of what they are good at. It is just human nature. Most software engineers are always going to err on the side of writing code, especially when a non-technical solution isn’t obvious. The same goes for code you don’t have to maintain. Engineering teams are apt to want to reinvent the wheel, when lots of wheels already exist. This is a balancing act, there are lots of reasons to grow your own, but beware of toxic “Not Invented Here” syndrome.
18 January, 2023
The Plan Was Simple: Infiltrate MAGA World and Tell Everyone What She Saw. Then She Was Found Out
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/02/amanda-moore-undercover-maga/
The “fringe” that Trejo was involved in had developed a parallel world organized alongside more mainstream events. For example, she recalled attending the conservative organization Turning Point USA’s student action summit in Tampa in July, where the American Populist Union, a pro–white power group, had scheduled an event on the same day at a hotel just across the street. APU’s event started in the evening, as Turning Point’s general session was ending. “I already had a ticket for APU, but multiple people told me to make sure I got one at various events during TPUSA,” she explained. Republicans for National Renewal used the same playbook in December, holding its own event in Phoenix at the same time TPUSA hosted “Americafest.” She witnessed something similar at 2021’s CPAC conference, where white power activist Nick Fuentes held his own nearby gathering.
16 January, 2023
Silenced Women–Modern Lessons from an Ancient Murder
https://bethallisonbarr.com/silenced-women-modern-lessons-from-an-ancient-murder/
I often assign Regilla’s story in my upper level Women’s History course. The text makes a significant impression on my students. Questions spill from them during our discussions. How in the world was Herodes acquitted? Why in the world did the Roman legal system provide so few protections for battered women? Why were women in the ancient world so disempowered that their voices–just like Regilla’s–could not be heard? How did a woman who was so powerful and wealthy in her own right end up in such a desperate and deadly domestic situation?Although we discuss these questions from a historical context, we can’t really answer them. There are no good answers to why Regilla was killed by her husband nor to why he escaped punishment.
12 January, 2023
Cultivating agency
The world doesn’t happen to us; it is shaped by us. More people now have access to simple tools that allow them to “program,” or modify, the world around them. Teaching kids that the world is programmable – whether it’s through actual coding, games like Roblox and Minecraft, encouraging them to ask for what they want, or even white-hat social engineering – is a critical skill that prepares them to tackle the social challenges of the future.
If Gen X and Millennials grew up with a “digital divide,” perhaps Gen Z will face an “agentic divide”: those who believe they have the power to change their circumstances, versus those who do not. And this belief in personal agency appears to be a critical difference between social movements that have pronatalist versus antinatalist outcomes.
If you believe that the world is shaped by your and others’ actions, then the climate crisis or other global catastrophic risk don’t look quite so scary: they’re an opportunity to do something meaningful. If you believe that the world’s problems are solved by people, then having children doesn’t seem like a waste of resources; it seems, in fact, like the most good you could do in the world.
The opposite of agency is learned helplessness. If people believe that we can’t do very much to stop the world’s problems, it’s unsurprising that they’d be terrified to bring children into the world. But this seems like a mental trap that we can, and should, teach people to resist falling into. As Clare Coffey writes in “Failure to Cope ‘Under Capitalism’”: “[A]n imperfect struggle to live well and love a world badly in need of repair is better than staying still because things are terrible.”
Schedule F: An Unwelcome Resurgence
https://www.lawfareblog.com/schedule-f-unwelcome-resurgence
Over 2 million career civil servants working across dozens of large and small agencies are hired under the competitive service process. More than 70 percent work in national security-oriented agencies, such as the Defense Department, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the Energy Department. Many more work in technical, administrative, policy, and legal roles. They do work that often results in news that makes headlines—negotiating sanctions policies, advising on the legality of drone strikes overseas, maintaining relationships with allies and partners, preparing procedures and resources for future pandemic response—and a great deal more behind the scenes that may end up on a cabinet secretary’s or president’s desk for consideration.
Author Michael Lewis describes civil servants’ responsibilities in the “The Fifth Risk,” calling the U.S government the manager of “the biggest portfolio of [catastrophic] risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world.” Some are obvious—the threat of nuclear attacks, for example—but most are glacial and opaque, demanding a portfolio of reliable and steady risk managers who can prioritize the nation’s security without fearing for their job security.
10 January, 2023
u/ReverendDizzle on third places
Third places have been in catastrophic decline for decades. The book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community came out in 2000, talking about the collapse of community activities and third places (and that book was, in turn, based on a 1995 essay written by the author).
Discussion of the collapse of third places goes back even further than that, though, the seminal work on the topic, Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place was published in 1989.
One of the reasons the show Cheers was so profoundly popular in the 1980s was because generations of Americans were mourning, whether they realized it or not, both the death of (and the crass capitalization of) the third place. Cheers functioned as a pseudo-third-place that millions of people sat down to watch every night to feel like they were going to the third places that were fading from the American experience.
A lot of people don't think about it, but part of the death of the third place is the crass capitalization mentioned above. How many places can the average American go anymore without the expectation that they spend their money and get out?
Sure, many current and historic third places have an element of capitalism (after all, the public house might be a public house, but somebody needs to pay the land taxes and restock the kegs). But modern bars and restaurants fail to fulfill the function of a pub and most would prefer you consume and leave to free up space for another person to consume and leave. The concept of the location functioning as a "public house" for the community is completely erased.