Year: 2024

A few days ago OpenAI released its much-rumored “Strawberry” system titled Chat-GPT4o1. While previous LLMs can provide an impressive writing at, say, the undergraduate level (especially if prompted well), the new system can “think” and plan better for technical concepts, and it can now answer scientific, technical questions more accurately than a PhD in that field. If Chat-GPT4 is undergraduate level, Chat-GPT4o1 is graduate level.  Of particular utility is explaining difficult concepts. For example, I’ve never had anybody explain to me, at a very high level, Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem; it’s the kind of thing where people who are smart enough to understand don’t have the kind of smarts necessary to dumb it down for us mortals, but I asked the new system to explain it in a way that a high schooler can understand and it led me by the hand, step-by-step, until I kind of understood it, again at a high level. So everybody has a really good graduate school-level tutor now.  So, how this is related to the Church? Its ability to tie concepts together and *think* in less formulaic ways means that every Mormon Studies person has a graduate student-level research assistant–that you still need to check, since hallucination is still kind of a problem, but this will especially take off when you can, say, feed thousands of pages of primary source materials and have it produce rather sophisticated, less boiler-plate essays. (Also, anybody…

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  This morning this headline was prominently displayed at the top of the page of CNN (on the mobile version, the Internet version was much more tame to their credit). The version I snapshotted above is newer, the original version had “Mormon” prominently displayed in both the title and the subheading. (It originally said something like “Small town Mormon doctor is accused of abuse…More than 100 former patients say Mormon doctor abused them.”) Of course, if the doctor was a stake president and systematically used his position to abuse most of his victims, then such a headline would have been completely appropriate. However, it is clear when reading the article that he was a sexual abuser that happened to be Mormon. Yes, some of the abuse leveraged Church connections, but I somehow doubt that if there was a Jewish doctor, among whom some of his 100+ victims were some that he knew from his synagogue, that they would prominently display the word “Jewish” two times in the heading and subheading. Of course it would have been appropriate to discuss the synagogue connection to his victims in the body of the article, but prominently displaying it as the main identifier twice is clearly the editor either trying to get clicks by piling onto a not-cool religious groups, or outright malice.  To be clear, I don’t have much to complain about with the body of the article. Out of 128 victims it’s…

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  Years ago I wrote a very high-level, abstract post where I analyzed whether the Church was replacing itself, arguing that a lot of the “growth” we’re seeing is an artifact of population momentum, and that we shouldn’t pat ourselves on our back too much (although we should some, since we’re doing a lot better than most/almost all).  Now that I’ve run some numbers on Latter-day Saint fertility I am going to be more specific with my numbers to make a related point, although here I am putting conversion baptisms to the side and simply asking whether, without missionary activity, we are treading water in terms of membership in the United States.  Of course, this is still very much back-of-the-envelope, but I think I’m in the ballpark.    For any group in the developed world to replace itself they need to have 2.1 children.   According to the last solid estimate, we retain about 64% of our children in the faith.    Therefore, in order to have enough children to offset the children lost to religious switching, we would need to have an average of 3.28 children.    Latter-day Saints in the US have about three children on average.    Therefore, we appear to be slowly declining from generation to generation without taking into account conversions. At that rate each generation is 91% of the size of the previous one.    It is worth noting that this is probably conservative,…

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A part of the graph, the link below has the whole thing.  Of the big AI players, Anthropic’s Claude is quite good at making diagrams, so I used it to generate an infographic I’ve always wanted to see, something that conveys in one visual how far away from Christ a book in the NT was written, the size of the work, and whether it’s considered “authentic” by scholars, either in the sense that it was written by whoever it claims to be written by (the undisputed Pauline epistles), or whether it has authentic first-hand reports from the time of Christ not found elsewhere (The Synoptic Gospels and Acts). In other words, I want to see which sources are closest to the “historical Jesus.” On one hand I think most historical Jesus research and thought processes get a little carried away about their narrow false negative confidence intervals, but at the same time the premise that the manuscripts closer to Christ could tell us more about Him is valid for most purposes. In order to show the data in year-by-year and to scale the size of the block proportional to the size of the book I created a graph that could not fit onto one page (and I don’t know how to embed it into WordPress), but you can see the a version that you can scroll through here. (Claude now has an “artifacts” feature where you can share the results…

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Monument in Warsaw to Janusz Korczak’s “Last Walk” as he accompanied his orphans to the Treblinka trains. Janusz Korczak is a remarkable figure that is surprisingly almost unknown in the United States despite being quite famous in Europe. A children’s author and pedagogue, his books, particularly King Matt the First about a child who becomes a king and rules like a child was as well known among Poles and Germans as Peter Pan was among British children. (while a lot of classic works of children’s literature don’t hold up anymore, this charming work still does, and is highly recommended). Raised in a formal, upper-class home, he came to envy the street children who were able to play outside, and the rest of his life was spent trying to free children from the unreasonable strictures of adults and to grant them some measure of respect and dignity as individuals. But it was not his writing or child-raising theories that granted him immortality. He was the headmaster of an orphanage of Jewish children during the time that the Jews were being forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, an open-aired, barbed-wire prison. As the Nazis squeezed them tighter and tighter the streets became cluttered with the bodies of frozen and starved refugees and children. While dead adults are obviously tragic, there is.a particular twisted horror and injustice that accompanies the corpses of innocent children (or as Dostoevsky puts it in Brothers Karamazov, “[adults] ate…

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  A few days ago Latter-day Saint apologist Jacob Hansen of A Thoughtful Faith had a debate with noted Catholic apologist of Pints with Aquinas fame Trent Horn that has been garnering some attention.  At the outset, I love these sorts of things. A respectful but straightforward debate about contrasting religious views can help both sides articulate their beliefs and responses better. When a faith does not face explicit doubts and pressures their scalpels become dull. Another example of this in our tradition is Stephen Robinson’s excellent back and forth How Wide the Divide? With Craig Bloomberg. Eminently respectful but not holding anything back.  There’s a long, venerable tradition of structured interfaith debates; even in the Middle Ages Christian kings would sponsor religious debates between Jews and Christians in the great “disputations” (which, given the power imbalance weren’t exactly “anything goes” debates on the part of the Jewish rabbis), and prominent, structured debates between Proto-Protestants and Catholics played a vital role in the early religious fermentation of the Reformation.  However, anybody with proselytizing experience knows that the following literally never happens: two people get into a debate about this or that theological point, one person marshals their argument and convinces the other by sheer reasoning, the other person concedes, loses their faith, and converts to the other faith. When somebody has a strong faith to begin with, some people see the conversion as a two-step process: 1) destroy their initial…

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In the AI world there is a debate swirling about how much AI providers should censor their image generation. Of course there are plenty of things to mock in past attempts to censor or otherwise put a thumb on the scale of AI to be more socially appropriate. Exhibit A of course were the racially diverse, Black SS stormtroopers created by Google Gemini, but anybody who’s spent a decent amount of time using AI has run into these guardrails, and sometimes they can be annoying. I had a tragicomical experience myself in the early days of Midjourney when they didn’t have the fingers right, and when I tried to create a picture of Adam and Eve it gave Adam multiple genitalia. I tried to regenerate the image specifying “no nudity,” and got a warning that I was using a forbidden term and would be banned if I continued to try to create nude images.  The guardrails around religious topics in particular are so strict that it becomes difficult to do anything religious per se, one has to describe a religious scene without invoking religious vocabulary. (I assume the skittishness about depicting religious imagery is really just about depicting Mohammad, but they’re trying to be consistent). However, in the past week or so the world was exposed to an almost completely uncensored AI tool with the release of Elon Musk’s Grok 2 (because of course it’s Elon). All of the sudden…

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I assume they aren’t actually this dour, but what some people envision a disciplinary council looks like. Here I’m not addressing the normative question of whether we should excommunicate, I have already said my piece about that here.  A while ago I was speaking to my stake president and made some humorous quip about him excommunicating people, and he had responded that he had actually never excommunicated anybody before. I was kind of surprised at this, as my father who has served in bishoprics in the 1990s and 2000s referred to disciplinary councils and excommunications during his time. (And yes, I know it’s not technically called “excommunication” anymore, but here I’m using the term to be more pithy).     I have no hard data on this, but I would not be surprised if excommunications are less of a thing nowadays for several reasons.  To some extent the excommunication process requires the consent of the person being disciplined. They could just not show up and/or request their records be removed. Whereas before the Church may have had enough sociocultural heft in some geographic areas to get people to show up, even if there was a call to a disciplinary council I suspect many people just wouldn’t bother (unless, of course, they want to invite a bunch of media and make some point of it).  Of course, they can have one without the person, but generally speaking completely inactive, members-on-records-only are…

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Chat-GPT’s rendition of a very strict, orthodox Mormon, right next to a liberal, heterodox Mormon, because even heterodox Mormons still wear buttoned-up, tucked-in shirts evidently.  O’Sullivan’s law, one of those cute Internet “laws,” states that “any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time.” Like most Internet laws, it kind of holds up, even though exceptions can be found. There’s something to it in regards to Church-related institutions if you replace left-wing and right-wing with edgy and/or heterodox. For example, one of the early, founding members of Dialogue was Dallin H. Oaks, whereas a simple perusal of the Table of Contents of issues through the years shows a clear veer towards critical studies issues in the Dialogue journal and, presumably, community. I’m not, in this post, making an argument for whether that is a good or bad thing, but the directionality of the drift is clear.  And then of course the classic case is the Maxwell Institute. Not that it was ever “edgy,” just that it clearly shifted from being what could be described as being on the Molly Mormon side of the continuum with its apologetics focus to speaking to a smaller, more academic niche. Again, I have no desire to rehash the old fights over the “coup,” although for the most part I will admit that I think, after the dust has settled, I like the division of labor, and think…

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Elijah calling down fire from heaven, 21st century version Years ago I saw a New Atheist-y meme that showed a cartoon panel of “the power of God across time,” starting with the creation of the world, moving onto the great flood and turning water into wine, and then ending with Christ appearing on toast, with the idea that in today’s age we kind of grasp at straws to see this little miracle here or there whereas in the past there were seas being split and fire coming out of the heavens to burn up sacrifices.  This is one of those things where I think they have a point on some level. As a general principle I think miracles operate at the same cadence and magnitude today that they did in the past (typically in the subtle, private moments of our lives) and the farther back the record goes the more I’m open to the possibility that the miracles described were later additions, that the correlation between the magnitude and how public the miracle was and how old it is is attributable to the kind of folkloric additions that we see in just about every really old story that has had time to evolve and become grander. Ethics aside, If Brigham Young isn’t calling down a pillar of fire to block the way of the invading US Army in Echo Canyon, or President Oaks isn’t calling she-bears out of Cottonwood Canyon…

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I do not have the brain chemistry for gambling. If I bet my house on a coin flip and won, I would be a sleepless wreck for weeks anxiously wondering about what would have happened had I lost. (Like tobacco, this is one of those Latter-day Saint rules I would keep even if I left the Church). Perhaps because of this, the idea of a gambling addiction, where people destroy their lives because they need the next hit or are trying to get back to even, is very viscerally unpleasant to me (which makes gambling addiction-centered films such as Molly’s Game, The Gambler [preferably the 1974 version, which is based on Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name] and Uncut Gems very intense for me), and I am glad that Utah is one of the most anti-gambling states in the country. I usually bristle at the reflexive Utah=Latter-day Saint connection that many draw, but in this case it makes theoretical sense that Utah’s anti-gambling is in part derived from its Latter-day Saint heritage.  Recently due to a Supreme Court decision the floodgates for sports gambling were opened across the country, and many states liberalized gambling laws. They did this in a staggered fashion, which makes it so that researchers can more rigorously draw causal conclusions about what happens when sports gambling is legalized. A recent paper that just dropped found that when online sports gambling was legalized they “find a roughly…

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