To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, gains in machine learning technology are a “known unknown.” Unlike some other future changes and development, we are reasonably confident that the machine learning revolution (also known as artificial intelligence, but that is a loaded term) of the past 10 years will continue at least over the medium-term. I’m skeptical that we’ll ever reach “artificial intelligence” in the sense of being able to create a feeling, thinking being from a computer because, as I’ve discussed before, I don’t think our brains are just meat calculators. Still, the machine learning revolution is exciting enough without Skynet. Recent machine learning models produce content that is uncannily human-like, and it is going to continue to continue improving. The GPT-3 system that produced the cited essay has 175 billion neural network parameters, whereas the GPT-4 system that will probably roll out sometime in the next couple of years will have over 500 times as many. While the computer might not be able to feel, it will certainly be able to perform sophisticated tasks that we now think of as requiring human intuition for. So what does this mean for the Church? I can think of a few possibilities. Gospel Information and Research In 2022 we can ask Alexa to tell us a joke, generate a random number between 1 and 10, or “play some country music.” However, with future advances in Natural Language Processing we’ll eventually be able to ask…
Category: News and Politics
Politics – Current Events – Media
Scattered Thoughts on Conference
Asking and seeking are clearly not the same as demanding. The former is Joseph Smith at 14, the latter is Martin Harris with the lost pages, and I think this distinction is evident to most people who watched the talk in good faith. Earlier I talked about how it seemed that many of the brethren came from inactive households, now there are two more that I didn’t know about until their conference talks: Elder Cook and President Ballard. Again, something to buoy up people who feel otherized because their family situation doesn’t match some ideal template. I also see some chatter on why the brethren keep hitting the Proc. “Everybody knows what the Church’s position is, can’t they move on?” Yes, I don’t think anybody is unclear on the Church’s position, but some are still promoting the “hold on and the Church will change” perspective on Proc issues, which I think does more harm than good (I would believe this just as much if I was on the other side of the issue), whereas the more times the Church hits this the harder it is to walk back. In international relations this is called “costly signaling,” and I suspect it’s intentional. The sooner this point gets across the sooner people can stop halting between two opinions and make their life decisions accordingly. It does look like growth rates are starting to rebound. As I’ve mentioned before, some of this…
[Languages of the Spirit] Science
“We are obsessed with ourselves. We study our history. Our psychology, our philosophy…Much of our knowledge revolves around ourselves, as if we were the most important thing in the universe. I think I like physics because it opens a window through which we can see further. It gives me the sense of fresh air entering the house. What we see out there through the window is constantly surprising us.”[1] Carlo Rovelli “The earth rolls upon her wings, and the sun giveth his light by day, and the moon giveth her light by night, and the stars also give their light, as they roll upon their wings in their glory, in the midst of the power of God…All these are kingdoms, and any[one] who hath seen any or the least of these hath seen God.” D&C 88:45, 47 In explaining his belief in God, scientist Francis Collins (a world leaders in genome research), expressed something that many believers can relate to when he said, “I’ve never heard God speak out loud to me. That’s not an experience I have had.” For him, like for so many, God does not speak with an audible voice. There is, however, another way that God reaches him. “I believe God did intend, in giving us intelligence, to give us the opportunity to investigate and appreciate the wonders of his creation.” I am not a scientist. Science bored me to tears when I was…
“Royal Families” in the Church and Spiritual Special Sauce
And think not to say within yourselves,We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. –Matthew 3:9 The mythos of the Latter-day Saint royalty that I bought into while growing up in the Utah of Utah went something like this: some families happened to give rise to a lot of functional, financially successful church leaders because their family had some spiritual special sauce that was transmitted from generation to generation, and this special sauce leads to both occupational and spiritual successes as a natural outgrowth of being super spiritual. I’m not going to blame the Church for this childhood belief since one would be hard pressed to see it taught anywhere, but I do have the sense that this narrative is still in the cultural air even if it is less of a thing now than it was in the past, so it is worth addressing why and how it is false. In his Mormon Hierarchy series Michael Quinn ran the numbers for how many early Church leaders were related to other Church leaders, and it does look like in pioneer-era Utah there were a lot of within-family appointments. If there was an era when dynastic, royal Mormonism was a reality it was then. Furthermore, the boundaries between the political, business, and religious were much more porous, so religious status often accompanied financial and political…
The Future and the Church, Part II: Longer Human Lives
There has always been a need for those persons who could be called finishers. Their ranks are few, their opportunities many, their contributions great. …I pray humbly that each one of us may be a finisher in the race of life and thus qualify for that precious prize: eternal life with our Heavenly Father in the celestial kingdom. I testify that God lives, that this is his work, and ask that each may follow the example of his Son, a true finisher.” -President Monson The history of human lifespan predictions is essentially the history of people theorizing that there’s some biological, natural ceiling for average lifespan, only to have that ceiling shattered. A derivative of a famous visualization in Science shows this history in one pithy image, with the sidebars being different hypothesized ceilings to average human life expectancy. However, like Moore’s Law predicting the increase of computing power, there’s little in the way of underlying theory driving this observation, and it too has to end at some point unless you think humans have it in them to eventually live to be a million years old. However, we still don’t have a clear picture for where that ceiling is, so for now extrapolating forward past trends that have been uncannily accurate in the past (specifically, we gain 2.5 more years of life for every decade since the 1840s) seem to be our best estimate for now. When we do this we find…
[Languages of the Spirit] Doubt
My husband frequently says of our team dynamic that he is the historian and I am the theologian, and that before I talk about anything I lay a theological framework for it. This is clearly interesting and endearing of me. The last couple of posts have been me laying the theological framework for this series, and now we get to get into actual examples of spiritual divergence. Just one last thing, though. A few comments in a previous post pointed out that I have not clarified what exactly I mean by spirit. This is a really good point because, frankly, the concept of spirit isn’t always clear. There is the Holy Ghost (which is talked about as a power by which our mind is connected with God[1] but is also described as a person). There is the Light of Christ which sometimes is the conscience with which everyone is born and is secondary to the holy spirit which is the source of greater truth[2], but other times is the source of all light and truth and makes the role of the Holy Ghost a little more ambiguous[3]. There is the spirit that is inside our bodies and the spiritual creation inside everything and the spirit of different powers and principles. So what does “the spirit” mean? Firstly, I think this is a really important question and I am grateful for the comments that brought it to my attention. Secondly, I…
How Old Are Latter-day Saint Bishops?
Last time we used Duke’s National Congregations Study to see how racially representative Latter-day Saint bishops were of the Church. Today we’ll look at how old Latter-day Saint bishops are compared to their peer congregational leaders in other traditions. If we take the two most recent waves (2012 and 2018) of the survey and calculate the means and confidence intervals, it looks like Latter-day Saint bishops are relatively young (with an average age of 51) compared to congregational leaders from other traditions. I’ll admit to being surprised, I knew that Catholic priests tended to be older, but I guess I envisioned Protestant pastors as being more hipster, youth minister types (that’s not a dig, just my false, apparently, image). When we look at the distribution of bishop’s ages it’s “left skewed,” which means that there are some bishops that are much younger than average, but not a lot of bishops that are much older than average, with the “modal,” i.e. most standard bishop being in the 55-59 range. The youngest bishop in this sample is 32, and the oldest is 68. To whoever the 68-year old bishop is: R Code library(foreign) library(dplyr) DCS = read.spss(“LOCATION”, to.data.frame=TRUE) DCS = filter(DCS,(YEAR==2018) | (YEAR==2012)) DCS<-DCS[!is.na(DCS$CLERGAGE),] MeanTable <- DCS %>% group_by(DENOM) %>% summarise( AvgAge = mean(CLERGAGE), sd = sd(CLERGAGE), n = n(), se = sd / sqrt(n) ) write.csv(MeanTable, “LOCATION”) LDS = filter(DCS,DENOM==’Mormon’) table1<-as.data.frame(table(LDS$CLERGAGE))
The Future and the Church, Part I: Reproductive Technologies
Series that dives into future technologies and trends, and what they might mean for the Church. Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem, where Jewish women pray for fertility. “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”-Matthew 2:18 My wife and I would love to have a large family, we would have ten kids if we could, but unfortunately nature doesn’t always cooperate, so we *only* have six. Eye rolls aside, serious infertility can be particularly painful in a highly pronatalist church (there’s a reason infertility issues take up half of Genesis). I, along with many people I am sure, know plenty of Latter-day Saints who wanted nothing more than a traditional big LDS family (and who would have made absolutely incredible mothers and fathers), only to face the stress of the cursed single line on pregnancy test after pregnancy test. Adoption helps obviously, but it is expensive and difficult enough that many still cannot have the number of children they want. While some forms of privilege have been reified in our discourse (e.g. white privilege), others are less visible and talked about, but their relative invisibility doesn’t make them any less painful. In the case of the Church, “fertile privilege” is a very real thing.(As a sidebar, while a common rejoinder to this is that the Church should resolve this by de-emphasizing the reproductive imperative, many of the people making this argument wouldn’t have a problem with…
Thoughts on Ukraine
It’s going to be horrific.
In Defense of Boundary Maintenance at BYU
BYU’s recent policy changes that appear to be geared towards reinforcing the institution’s Latter-day Saint character are causing consternation in some circles, so I thought now would be a good time to be the bad guy and make a case for why proactive faculty boundary maintenance is needed for an institution like BYU to fulfill its mission. Like a lot of other people, I get the sense that recent changes are bellwethers for future shifts to come, so this will probably be a relevant topic for the next little while. First, a common response is that a religiously sponsored institution can positively reinforce its religious mission while still allowing faculty to challenge the teachings of the sponsoring institution. However, the whole idea of a religious institution of higher education is the belief that a synthesis of the faith’s framework and the traditional academic venture is synergistic in some way. Challenging the faith’s framework itself doesn’t fit into that; using that framework as a lens through which to view academic learning does. If you don’t hold to the premise that religious institutions are right to perform any boundary maintenance, if you’re okay with an anti-Mormon teaching a religion class as long as they have an MDiv, then this is the part in a “choose your own adventure” book where it tells you to skip to the end, but as a parting note I would just add that there’s plenty of ideological boundary maintenance…
Are Black and Hispanic Men Called as Bishops as Much as White Men?
The other day I realized that Duke University’s National Congregations Study, which includes about 87 randomly sampled LDS wards, has information on the race and ethnicity of the “person who is the head or senior clergy person or religious leader in your congregation,” which I assume in the Latter-day Saint case is the bishop, so I decided to see if we can glean any information about how racially representative leadership is relative to membership. Upfront, statistically this is very much seeing through a glass darkly, but frankly I think it’s the only information that we non-COB employees have on this subject, so it’s worth taking a look. The NCS had four waves: 1998, 2006, 2012, and 2018. The NCS piggy backed off of another survey that is taken almost every year, the General Social Survey, with some individuals asked more detailed questions about their religious congregation. (For the wonks; weights with small cell sizes can get squampous, plus the GSS that the NCS is based on is a relatively self-weighted survey already, so for my purposes here I’m not going to worry about the weights). If we simply look at the racial/ethnic composition of Latter-day Saint bishops by year we have the following table. (For some reason WordPress is cutting off the image; apologies.) As you can see, we only have 23 wards/branches in 2018, 19 in 2012, 35 in 2006, and 9 in 1998. However, this isn’t nothing. Obviously, the vast majority…
[Languages of the Spirit] You Shall Know it by its Fruit
“The entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’…The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Galatians 5: 14, 22-23 Section 93 of the Doctrine and Covenants is, in my opinion (which is correct), one of the most radical, beautiful works of theology ever written. While I could happily do a whole series about it, there is one particular part of it I want to draw upon for the sake of this series. The revelation in Section 93 starts with describing the nature of Christ, his greatness and glory and goodness. This is familiar and comforting language describing God. So far so good. Generally, however, the language that describes God is used to show how very, very different God is from humanity (who, the interpretive narrative often interjects, are kind of gross but whom God seems to inexplicably love sometimes anyway). Section 93, however, goes in a very different direction. Jesus, the revelation says, was with God before the world was, became perfect because he learned a bit at a time, and is made of the spirit of truth, the same as God. These traits are what define him. Again, other than the teaching that Christ needed to learn (which deserves plenty of attention), this is pretty standard stuff. But here Christ adds something of paradigm shifting importance. These same things that are true of…