- Bubba on The Book of Mormon’s Anti-colonialism: “Members of the Q12 – especially Elder Bednar – have been vocal about their efforts to rid the Church of the vestiges of inter-mountain western US culture. This of course cannot be done overnight.” Apr 28, 08:01
- on Latest AI Updates: “Mormon Trail,” a Graphic Novel of Mormon/Moroni, and 3 Nephi on Gold Plates.: “A grad student recently came close to embodying one of my fears about AI: after describing a not-hard-but-not-trivial data wrangling problem, she ended not with “How can I do that?” but with “I don’t know Stata, so I got AI to write this code for me. Can you tell me if it’s right?” It wasn’t. To be fair, she may not have described the problem clearly in her prompt. Learning to code also teaches you to describe things precisely. The good news is she knew she needed to ask, and had someone she could ask. I’m more worried about all the grad students who don’t. We’re seeing a drop in registrations for the workshops we teach, and I suspect that’s because many grad students are thinking, like this one, “Now that we have AI, I don’t need to learn R/Stata/Python/whatever.” This leaves them incapable of even reading the code AI generates for them. I don’t know how these errors are going to get caught. With something like your Mormon Trail game, you can test it and see if it works, but that’s hard to do with social science research code–especially if your solution is getting AI to write testing code you also can’t read. In her case, the errors were egregious enough that someone who is familiar with the subject could probably look at her “Table 1” and say, “That doesn’t seem right,” but it’s easy to imagine errors that give plausible-looking results but the wrong answer to your research question. Peer review is not code review; a reviewer may tell you you used the wrong statistical technique, but isn’t going to catch that you tried to use the right technique but didn’t get the code right. I fear it’s going to take some high-profile, embarrassing replication failures along the lines of Reinhart and Rogoff’s “Growth in a Time of Debt” paper, which could be career-ending for a young scholar, before the message sinks in that AI can help you spend less time coding, but can’t get you out of learning how to do so. Yes, I’m banging this drum with the faculty responsible for training these grad students.” Apr 28, 07:58
- on What Was Revealed to You In Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday), 4/26)?: “I realize as I read this that for me, generally, I’m letting the messages of the sabbath wash over me, rather than sink into me, much. Sunday services tend to be intense and exhausting (as organist, Primary Music Leader, and choir accompanist), from prelude to choir practice I’m in near constant motion. A lot of my sabbath thoughts occur when i plan preludes and prep my Primary lesson; i’m just too busy watching and responding in the moment otherwise. What i did delight in, Sunday, was the recent convert, called upon to pray for the first time, who basically bore a testimony as his prayer, and ended with “in the name of the Father. And the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” I was happy to give him a loud Amen from my seat at the organ. I hope desperately that nobody “corrected” him unkindly, for it was beautiful. And I loved the question a 9 year old asked right at the end of Singing Time, about whether his (school, I think) teacher had broken a commandment when she took a toy away from a child in class and would not return it until the end of the school year. I knelt beside him after the closing prayer as we reasoned together on that. Kids really think about what we teach them, and it is so important to honor that!” Apr 28, 04:02
- on The Book of Mormon’s Anti-colonialism: “Too true! Back when our ward was the official magnet for the stake’s Spanish speakers and I was in charge of the Christmas program, I asked if they could sing some of Christmas music they’d grown up with. The response was a dismissive “No, it’s all too Catholic” with a clear lack of enthusiasm. They picked “Star Bright” instead. I’m glad we have the Reformation chorales we do have in our hymnbook, and I sure hope we don’t lose any.” Apr 27, 23:49
- on The Book of Mormon’s Anti-colonialism: “RLD, I know the Church surveyed members in 2018 about their favorite hymns and songs they might want to add to the hymnbook, and in some areas members do want to add songs from their culture’s musical tradition, but in other areas, they’re more interested in the traditional LDS hymns. I don’t know the survey results for any particular place, but I have noticed that members in the European country with the greatest tradition of Christian music in the world are often uninterested in singing it (“Ugh, not that Protestant stuff”), preferring the latest FSY anthem instead. My dreams of a hymnbook with a half dozen new Reformation chorales is probably not going to become a reality.” Apr 27, 19:34
- on What Was Revealed to You In Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday), 4/26)?: “Kent Larsen, your thoughts about burnout are insightful. Culturally it is interesting that that symbol of Utah is a beehive and not a lotus bloom. It is indeed cultural and at times not helpful.” Apr 27, 17:13
- on The Book of Mormon’s Anti-colonialism: “Stephen: “Jack, yes, there is a big list of the Gentiles’ wickedness, but 3 Ne 16, 20, and 21 also list taking the Natives’ land as one of the sins.” Only if they don’t repent–as strange as that may seem. And in chapter 21 the Savior goes through another list of evils the Gentiles need to be wary of. That said, I’m of the opinion that these prophecies are being fulfilled more through the Latinos than the Native Americans. And it behooves us (collectively) to repent and receive the fulness of the gospel and also to be willing to carry these people upon our shoulders.” Apr 27, 16:42
- on What Was Revealed to You In Church (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday), 4/26)?: “It was just my daughter and I who attended, as my wife was visiting family. I missed being with her. It helped me understand more of how singles and part-member families feel at Church. A young man spoke for the first time ever. He said it was the worst day of his life (but smiled as he said it) A woman from Mexico spoke entirely in Spanish. I used Google Translate and it worked quite well. I am grateful for these sorts of tools. We can all worship together, and generally can all understand each other. There was a good discussion in EQ about temperance. I did find the class to feel kind of long. I’m thinking that a shorter class time in September will keep things focused without so much repetition. I’m feeling optimistic about the change.” Apr 27, 14:38
- on The Book of Mormon’s Anti-colonialism: “To oversimplify, some things are cultural and can be different in different cultures, and some things are objective reality and the same for everyone. It’s true that many people (most?) think some things are objective reality that are really cultural. But I have no patience for those who insist everything is cultural and it’s colonialism to teach “western” science, for example. To call proselytizing colonialism is to implicitly claim religion has no objective reality. But a rock falls at the same rate and for the same reason no matter who drops it, and that person is a child of Heavenly Parents no matter what culture they belong to. I am concerned about us spreading “church culture” along with the gospel and elements of local cultures being lost. For example, my biggest disappointment with the new hymns so far is that while they’ve done a good job of bringing in both European and African American music, there’s nothing from Africa itself, or Asia, or South America (I think). I’m sure that reflects what was submitted, which reflects the Church’s demographic and economic realities. But what was submitted also probably reflects the former sentiment that “the hymns of Zion” were the only proper genre for worship music, and we can push back against that. Our Primary children would love more call-and-response music, and even our adults might grow to like singing it. If you look at Area Presidencies, it’s clear that the Church has enough leaders from most regions to make most or all of them entirely “local.” But they’ve decided to mix them up instead. That probably does reflect a desire not to create separate church cultures in separate regions. But I take the fact that my Area Presidency is entirely from outside the US as an invitation to learn from their cultures.” Apr 27, 10:05
- on The Book of Mormon’s Anti-colonialism: “Jack, yes, there is a big list of the Gentiles’ wickedness, but 3 Ne 16, 20, and 21 also list taking the Natives’ land as one of the sins. Jonathan, see my comment to Roger. JB, yes I also interpret the Gentiles being commanded to “join with” the remnant of Jacob. Suggests a privileged status for Native peoples. And yes, we do a lot of picking and choosing in our religions. It does seem there is an “American gospel” of white Protestantism that emphasizes certain things, and that our church has worked to conform to that gospel in a lot of ways. And central to that gospel is that idea that America (run by white people) is unequivocally good. So it seems important to rework 3 Ne 16, 20, and 21.” Apr 27, 07:46
