Category: Latter-day Saint Thought

Obviously I think the Church would bulldoze temples before it got this bad, but still, an interesting thought experiment.  Over the next century or so we are going to potentially see a bizarre phenomenon with Church growth. In some countries churches will shutter en masse with wards and stakes being merged many times over–all while…

“God, I thank you that I am not like other people: even like this jock. I watch my language, am always worthy to pass the sacrament, am on the honor roll, and I give a tenth of all my income.” As a note, I put this post in the queue for the 5th a long…

Apologies for doing another one of these so soon after the other one, but when it rains it pours. Since I last posted OpenAI released “advanced voice mode” to all plus subscribers. What this means is that the lag we’re used to when talking to AI is now gone, and now it is indiscernible from…

A very, very, particular niche subgenre I find educational (“enjoy” isn’t the right word) are accounts of mental health struggles or extreme circumstances by people who really know how to write. For those of us who have never been starving or so depressed that we defecate in our bed because we can’t get out of…

As a TBM there are a surprising number of issues dealing with religion where I have some agreement with Richard Dawkins, and one of them is that the King James Version is the best version of the Bible.  When I say “best,” I don’t mean “most accurately conveys the oldest documents.” I know there are…

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…

  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…

  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…

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…

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 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…

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…