Ethan Donahue

Christian, Pilgrim, Marrow Man, PCA

[Vesuvius Challenge @scrollprize]

This sounds crazy, BUT this week we READ A FULL SCROLL!!

https://t.co/6Jcn13yOQv

It’s PHerc. 1667, aka Scroll 4!

And that’s not all.

We also proved that we can directly see ink in a rescan of PHerc. Paris 4 — Scroll 1 — WITHOUT machine learning…

…and we UNROLLED ABOUT 140 COLUMNS FROM IT.

This was honestly POETIC.

We first saw a glimpse of the results over dinner in Naples, in a restaurant where Caravaggio was stabbed. Federica was so excited — more excited than we had ever seen her — that we abandoned dinner, went back to work, and unrolled the 140 columns until 3 a.m. on a hotel rooftop, with Vesuvius in the background.

The unroll is not perfect.

But guys…

140 columns, with text visible everywhere.

It’s HUGE.

This project has been full of ups and downs, but somehow, at some point, something ALWAYS happens.

We’re starting to think these scrolls have personalities…

…and they want to be read.

@natfriedman has announced a $1M Grand Prize to read another full scroll. Official details coming soon!

[Presbycast @presbycast]

Machen:

“I think I am just about as strongly opposed to the reading of the Bible in state-controlled schools as any atheist could be.

“For one thing, the reading of the Bible is very difficult to separate from propaganda about the Bible. I remember, for example, a book of selections from the Bible for school reading, which was placed in my hands some time ago. Whether it is used now I do not know, but it is typical of what will inevitably occur if the Bible is read in public schools. Under the guise of being a book of selections for Bible-reading, it really presupposed the current naturalistic view of the Old Testament Scriptures.

“But even where such errors are avoided, even where the Bible itself is read, and not in one of the mistranslations but in the Authorized Version, the Bible still may be so read as to obscure and even contradict its true message. When, for example, the great and glorious promises of the Bible to the redeemed children of God are read as though they belonged of right to man as man, have we not an attack upon the very heart and core of the Bible’s teaching? What could be more terrible, for example, from the Christian point of view, than the reading of the Lord’s Prayer to non-Christian children, as though they could use it without becoming Christians, as though persons who have never been purchased by the blood of Christ could possibly say to God, ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven’? The truth is that a garbled Bible may be a falsified Bible; and when any hope is held out to lost humanity from the so-called ethical portions of the Bible apart from its great redemptive core, then the Bible is represented as saying the direct opposite of what it really says.

J. Gresham Machen, in “The Necessity of the Christian School”

[Honest Youth Pastor @HonestYPTweets]

Honestly I’m ashamed I didn’t think of this earlier.

[Blake Neff @BlakeSNeff]

Gut feeling: This would be the most societally disruptive technological development of the century if it happens.

-A lot of people will prefer to skip pregnancy entirely for obvious reasons. In will make in vitro children that much easier, of course, but Eespecially if the tech is there to remove an embryo from a woman safely, I think this would pretty quickly becoming the default. There will be lots of trad moral arguments against it, but 1. The lifestyle upsides are too obvious, and 2. Basically any woman with the slightest health risk from a pregnancy will prefer this (and I suspect avoiding health risks will be a way many conservative religious people reconcile themselves to this).

-I don't know if this would raise the median birthrate too much, but behavior by outliers could be really wild. There are already billionaires paying dozens of surrogates for an army of kids, now imagine not even needing the surrogates. Billionaires could go from dozens to thousands of kids, ideological extremists could produce a bunch of kids to match a demographic preference, etc.

-There may well be a government (China? SK?) that decides to solve fertility decline by just manufacturing kids. If this becomes common it could seriously break the default assumption of a person *having* a family.

-This will, I think, put the lie to a lot of the more common arguments in favor of abortion, because I think people will 100% demand the right to "abort" a robowomb pregnancy. I would love to be wrong, but I think it might even increase support for abortion by making babies more abstract and "unreal" until they are actually born.

[Arthur Schopenhauer @SchopenhauerNow]

Schopenhauer wrote this paragraph more than 150 years ago, and it’s still true

[Redeemed Zoomer @redeemed_zoomer]

What each group acts like when you argue with them:

Catholics: like 10 year olds when you insult their favorite superhero

Orthodox: like fatherless 15 year olds when you challenge them to a fight in the school parking lot

Baptists: like old men when you trespass on their lawn

Non-denominationals: like California valley girls when you're trying to explain how statistics work

[Ethan Donahue @3FormsReformed]

@Jeff_Palouse I was impressed with it. I think Katz captured the ebb and flow between mania and catharsis quite well. Although it's been 10 years since I originally read a different translation so its hard to compare between them. I plan to pick up more of his translations in the future.

[evan loves worf @esjesjesj]

The looksmaxxers told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential mog.

[mjsrightglove @mjsrightglove]

dudes used to just hand you particles

[Shane Morris @GShaneMorris]

Teens not having sex or drinking bc smart phones nuked human social development is a bit like your roach problem being solved bc your house burned down. Good news? I guess, technically. But hardly worth celebrating in light of the cause (or the mental health stats).

[Benjamin Glaser @WVPitt]

*Alarm*, *Alarm*, *Alarm*, *Alarm*

https://t.co/6ECj7sFmzS

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

I am challenging any death penalty opponent — there are millions of them, allegedly — to step up to the plate right now and explain why this guy should not be executed. His guilt is established beyond any doubt whatsoever. His crime is utterly savage and heinous. Tell us why he doesn’t deserve to die. Go ahead.

[sudo Heraclitus @cyberpyre]

Richard Dawkins has officially been one-shot

[John Ehrett @johnehrett]

There is almost nothing better than sitting and reading a hard book and feeling it activate new connections between ideas you hadn’t made yourself. But you have to do that away from a screen. And you have to choose not to give up even when it’s dense (3/x)

[Gabriel @gabriel_horwitz]

You open ChatGPT. You type the question. A clean, structured answer comes back in three seconds. You read it, it makes sense, you move on. You feel like you learned something.

Forty-five days later, a professor walks in and hands you a test you weren't expecting. You don't remember most of it.

André Barcaui at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro ran the experiment to find out if the feeling was accurate. 120 undergraduate business students, ages 18 to 24. All told to spend two weeks researching AI concepts, ethics, societal impacts, technical foundations, and prepare a 10-minute presentation.

Sixty used ChatGPT freely. Sixty used textbooks, library databases, articles, and standard web search. Then, 45 days later, with no warning, a retention test.

The ChatGPT group scored 57.5%. The traditional group scored 68.5%. Cohen's d was 0.68, a medium-to-large effect. In most grading systems, that's the difference between passing and failing.

This is called cognitive offloading. When your brain delegates thinking to an external tool, it reduces the mental effort required during encoding. Effort is what makes memories durable. Struggling to find, synthesize, and connect information is not an inefficiency in the learning process. It is the learning process. ChatGPT removes the struggle and takes the encoding with it.

Barcaui calls what the AI group experienced "borrowed competence." The answer was structured, the vocabulary was right, the reasoning felt sound. It just wasn't theirs. And 45 days later, it was gone.

The AI group's forgetting curve was steeper and didn't stabilize the way the traditional group's did. The memories weren't just smaller. They were more fragile from the start.

You didn't learn it. You borrowed it.

[Mechanical Knowledge @mechanical_4u]

Recent test reveals that a cow is actually more aerodynamic than a jeep wrangler

[Andrew Snyder @Andrewnsnyder]

C.S. Lewis on why it is difficult to discuss Christianity:

"When He created the vegetable world He knew already what dreams the annual death and resurrection of the corn would cause one to stir in pious Pagan minds, He knew already that He Himself must so die and live again and in what sense, including and far transcending the old religion of the Corn King. He would say "This is my Body." Common bread, miraculous bread, sacramental bread—these three are distinct, but not to be separated. Divine reality is like a fugue. All His acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one another. It is this that makes Christianity so difficult to talk about. Fix your mind on any one story or any one doctrine and it becomes at once a magnet to which truth and glory come rushing from all levels of being."

- C.S. Lewis, Miracles

[Alastair Roberts @zugzwanged]

It is important to bear in mind that many people aren't reading the books they are talking about. The books are tribal props. They'll have the book on their shelves, listen to podcasts about it, push it on Twitter, make memes about it, but never read it.

[corsaren @corsaren]

types of guy in the AI consciousness debate:

- guy who thinks ai can’t be conscious because it’s “just a stochastic parrot”
- guy who thinks ai must be conscious because claude is a good boi
- guy who hasn’t gotten over 4o
- guy who unironically thinks everything is computer
- guy who claims to have a more nuanced argument for computational functionalism, but it just boils down to everything is computer
- dualist whose belief in dualism is downstream of their belief in god, yet tries to argue the inverse
- guy who doesn’t understand the difference between cognition and p-consciousness
- guy who asserts illusionism but has apparently wrestled with zero of the implications other than “reductive materialism wins again”
- guy who says the hard problem is easy, but then proceeds to only answer the easy problem
- guy who rejects ai consciousness because otherwise it might be wrong to abuse claude with death threats to make CRUD apps faster
- guy who argues that consciousness is is the key to moral patienthood, but completely ignores that when discussing animal rights
- eliezer yudkowsky being pedantic
- guy being pedantic about eliezer yudkowsky’s pedantry
- guy who rejects dualism because that would make mind uploading impossible and mean that he finally has to confront the inevitability of his own death
- guy who thinks this argument is unresolvable so everyone should just shut up and accept his position (which obviously deserves the benefit of the doubt)
- guy who would literally cut off his own hand if he thought there were a 1 in 10 trillion chance of creating ~infinite utility~
- guy who just thinks that redness is, like, super weird, man. can’t explain that!
- guy with a rarely-updated philosophy blog despite not majoring in philosophy or even reading that many books, talking about how “the whole field is up its own ass”
- academic philosopher who, for some reason, expects a higher caliber of discussion on x dot com the everything app
- guy who thinks that vectors are literally emotions and bites the bullet that, yes, your thermostat does feel hot
- panpsychist who took dmt once and contributes almost nothing to the conversation
- guy who is literally a solipsist but is still really invested in convincing strangers on the internet that he’s right

any that i missed?

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

Only one chance in this lifetime…

Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.

I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.