Teresa Pitt Green

Advocate for Child Protection and Trauma-Informed Pastoral Care. Clergy-Abuse Survivor. CoFounder of Spirit Fire.

[Alex & Books 📚 @AlexAndBooks_]

“It's just God's gift. If you're into self-education, there's nothing like reading. Of course, people who do a lot of it have an enormous advantage.”

–Charlie Munger

[Teresa Pitt Green @SpiritFireSpark]

Something for the Church to ponder

[Teresa Pitt Green @SpiritFireSpark]

Be this guy.

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A Oxford PhD student got flagged for submitting AI-generated work.

His advisor called it the most sophisticated research process he had seen in 20 years.

The student had not used AI to write a single word.

Here is the workflow that got him reported.

He starts every essay with a diagnostic he calls brutal. He dumps his rough argument into Claude and asks one question: what are the three weakest logical jumps in this reasoning, and where would a hostile examiner attack first? The AI does not write his essay. It destroys his draft, and then he rebuilds from whatever survives.

Most students using AI are doing the opposite. They hand Claude a topic and ask it to write. He hands Claude his thinking and asks it to find every place where that thinking falls apart. The difference between those two approaches is the difference between outsourcing your brain and sharpening it.

The second step is the one that made his advisor go quiet. He uploads the five most important papers in his field alongside his draft and asks Claude what claims in his argument contradict or oversimplify what these authors actually found. Most PhD students cite papers they have skimmed once. He cites papers he has been forced to genuinely reckon with, because Claude keeps catching the places where he got them wrong.

The final move is almost unfair. Before he submits anything, he pastes his conclusion and runs one more prompt. He asks what a philosopher of science would say is missing from this argument and what assumptions he is making that he has not defended. His essays come back from reviewers with phrases like unusually rigorous and demonstrates rare critical depth, and his committee has no idea that the depth came from a machine asking him harder questions than any human in his department was willing to ask.

The academic integrity hearing lasted three hours. The panel asked him to rebuild his methodology from scratch in the room. He opened his laptop and showed them exactly how the workflow ran, prompt by prompt. They did not just clear him. They gave him the highest grade in the department's history and asked him to present the process to faculty.

Here is what that story actually means. What took most PhD candidates six months of back-and-forth with advisors, he was compressing into a single session because he had figured out something almost nobody else has. AI does not make your thinking better by replacing it. It makes your thinking better by attacking it faster than any human critic ever would.

He was not using AI to write. He was using it to think harder than he could alone.

The tool is the same one everyone has. The workflow is the part nobody is teaching.

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.”

-Saint Augustine

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

The world's tallest church is about to get its crown.

On June 10, 2026, exactly 100 years after Antoni Gaudí's death, the Sagrada Família will inaugurate the four-armed cross atop the Tower of Jesus Christ.

[Teresa Pitt Green @SpiritFireSpark]

“behavioral activation”

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

"Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it."

— Leonardo da Vinci

[Essential Mastery @EssentialMastry]

“Being hated by idiots is the price you pay for not being one of them.”

- Jean Cocteau

[Teresa Pitt Green @SpiritFireSpark]

Job Opening: FADICA is a great organization, and very hard-working. This is a remote comms job for someone in a second or third step of a career. https://t.co/ephcz8lMsd

[🌻 @snflower500]

The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot
~Michael Altshulen Oregon last April

[🌻 @snflower500]

Lay your weary head to rest … goodnight

[Restoring Your Faith in Humanity @HumanityChad]

Statue of that famous rescue act

[Catholic Frequency @CatholicFQ]

The human soul needs silence and beauty.

[Become A Saint @BeSaintly]

_

[Mathematica @mathemetica]

“Do not use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe, to create, to learn, to think and to grow.”

[Teresa Pitt Green @SpiritFireSpark]

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the Church tolerates it.

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”

—Leo Tolstoy

[Teresa Pitt Green @SpiritFireSpark]

That one wedding guest who -

[AllieJade @AllieJade1]

Well you don't' see this every day at a wedding!
I'd say he wasn't originally invited, wouldn't you? 😅

[Multipolar Press / Constantin von Hoffmeister @constantinvonh]

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up."

— Robert Frost

[Mama45🇺🇸 @kdlmama]

@TechOperator

[Teresa Pitt Green @SpiritFireSpark]

@TechOperator Related?