Steve Zelt

[Steve Zelt @SteveZelt]

@jenniferwilkin "My 4 year old grandson fell and hurt his knee. He's fallen down." Active voice. Do I hold him responsible? Should I blame him or feel sorry for him? Or did something happen to him? Is the sentence neutrally descriptive?

[Steve Zelt @SteveZelt]

Exactly right. Except I doubt it will mean anything "for us" because most of us continue to say, "Well, Jesus was perfect, so we can't be like him. That's why he died on the cross." And so on.

[Steve Zelt @SteveZelt]

Exactly right. Except I doubt it will mean anything "for us" because most of us continue to say, "Well, Jesus was perfect, so we can't be like him. That's why he died on the cross." And so on.

[Tom Wright @profntwright]

The Sermon on the Mount isn’t just about us. If it was, we might admire it as a fine bit of idealism, but we’d then return to our normal lives. It’s about Jesus himself. This was the blueprint for his own life. He asks nothing of his followers that he hasn’t faced himself. And, within his own life, we can already sense a theme that will grow larger and larger until we can’t miss it. If this is the way to show what God is really like, and if this is the pattern that Jesus himself followed exactly, Matthew is inviting us to draw the conclusion: that in Jesus we see the Emmanuel, the God-with-us person. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t just about how to behave. It’s about discovering the living God in the loving, and dying, Jesus, and learning to reflect that love ourselves into the world that needs it so badly.

-Matthew for Everyone

[Steve Zelt @SteveZelt]

Empathy is what Chatbots do. In what way is empathy different from 1 Cor 4:7.? Aren't those verses a precise description of what ChatGPT is?

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

I’ve just finished reading Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy.

It ranks, along with Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories, as the best take-down of the lunacy at the heart of the wokeist philosophy.

For Saad, empathy—in itself a perfectly decent trait—has become so grossly exaggerated that it threatens truth, reality, and justice.

Cases in point abound: so they won’t feel bad about themselves, we’ll allow biological men to compete in women’s sports and crush the dreams of thousands of young women; so as not to undermine the self-esteem of minorities, we will permit unqualified candidates to have positions in universities and the corporate world; so that everyone might feel included, we will characterize the meritocracy as “white privilege,” etc.

As I was making my way through Saad’s book, I kept remarking the sharp distinction between empathy and love.

To empathize is to enter profoundly into the experience of another and to endeavor not to hurt that person’s feelings. But to love is, as Thomas Aquinas taught, “to will the good of the other.”

As I said, in itself and all things being equal, empathy is a good thing. But it is not the same as love, which, depending on circumstances, can very much involve hurting someone’s feelings.

When a professor gives a student a “C” as an honest reflection of his work, he might well be insulting him, but he’s also telling him the truth and perhaps even urging him to try harder.

When, in the Confessional, a priest tells a murderer to turn himself in to the police, he’s undoubtedly making that person’s life more uncomfortable, but he’s also willing the man’s good.

Any decent parent knows that showing real love for her children means engendering all kinds of bad feelings in them.

In light of this distinction, we can understand why Jesus didn’t say, “have empathy for one another,” but rather “love one another.” And why St. John the Evangelist didn’t say, “God is empathy,” but rather “God is love.”

It occurred to me as I was reading Saad’s book that one reason Wokeism has seized the consciousness of so many in the West is that Christianity has faded as a cultural force and Christians themselves have forgotten what stands at the heart of their faith.

[AI Evolution @AiEvolutio58513]

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose thinks we've been using the wrong word for decades, and the wrong word is quietly warping how we think.

His argument is straightforward but hits hard:

"The name is wrong. It's not artificial intelligence. It's not intelligence. Intelligence would involve consciousness. Well, if it's a machine, it's not conscious."

For Penrose, the field confused raw computational muscle with actual understanding.

"People have lost the plot. They've lost it in the power of computing. The thing is that computers have got so powerful that they've lost the thread of what they're doing. But I think consciousness is something different. It's not computational."

The label itself, he thinks, has put people into a kind of trance:

"People are so hypnotized. The trouble is that AI is a bad term. It means artificial intelligence. Now intelligence in my view is conscious. That's what intelligence is about."

His proposed fix: call it Artificial Cleverness. AC, not AI.

He draws the line using math students as an example:

"You have mathematics students. Some of them understand what they're doing. Some are just clever. They can repeat what they've learned. They know how to do it very cleverly. They can calculate very well, but they don't necessarily understand what they're doing."

That gap between calculating and understanding is exactly the gap between today's systems and real intelligence.

Cleverness can be engineered. Consciousness, Penrose argues, cannot.

Worth sitting with: when you call a system intelligent, are you describing what it does, or silently assuming something about what it is?

Interested in AI?

Follow @AiEvolutio58513 and never fall behind.

I track ChatGPT, Claude, and every tool quietly changing how we work and create, then hand you the tested signals.

[Jon Hernandez @JonhernandezIA]

"AI models are terrible for learning."

Andrew Ng, AI researcher and co-founder of Google Brain and Coursera, says AI boosts output while weakening long-term retention.

The real challenge is using AI to amplify thinking without outsourcing the thinking itself.

Open intelligence only creates progress if humans keep building judgment and context.

[Edward Feser @FeserEdward]

St. Augustine: “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention… For it was a witty and a truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. The king asked the fellow, ‘What is your idea, in infesting the sea?’ And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, ‘The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I'm called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you're called an emperor.’” (City of God, Book IV, Chapter 4)

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

Friends, in the latest episode of the Word on Fire Show, I sat down with @MattPetrusek to discuss @GadSaad's provocative and timely new book, “Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind.” We explore how a distorted form of empathy is undermining Western civilization, how it fundamentally differs from authentic Christian charity, and what we should do to constructively respond.

[Paul Bloom @paulbloomatyale]

I've been trying to figure out what I (and so many others) dislike about AI writing. It's very clear. It's good at getting the level right, not going over the reader's head but not talking down. Often it's clever, and sometimes even funny. (At least Claude is) ...

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

AI will do to minds what the decline in manual labor did to bodies.

The privileged few will keep exercising their minds with literature, art and science, just like they kept exercising their bodies despite escalators, elevators and desk work.

The many will suffer something akin to the obesity crisis but for the mind.

[Thea Vales @codesthea]

Dave Chappelle says no one needs to think anymore because of AI: “Thinking is for poor people”

“I was talking to a friend of mine and we were laughing about how no one really would know what to teach a kid now. What skill sets are going to matter 10 or 20 years from now as the world becomes automated”

“We decided your character is your destiny. If you’re a good person that’s all you can ask from anybody and hope for the best”

“I don’t know if anyone needs to think anymore. It’s AI, quantum computing, it seems like thinking is for poor people”

[Susan Wise Bauer @SusanWiseBauer]

Put aside the "how will schools and universities cope with AI?" for a minute, and think about our brains.

I still remember a pivotal class in graduate school: I was doing an M.A. in literature, but I took an elective seminar in linguistics. That class was the hardest I'd worked (possibly, then or since). I had to line up four different schools of linguistic theory and explain what they had in common, and how they were different.

As this was in the Dark Ages, I had to do this without outside help.

I made a chart. I hand-wrote everything that I knew of each school on that chart. I lined up each element of each school side by side. I wrote painstaking paragraphs about each element. I assembled them into an essay.

By the end of it that essay, I *understood* what I was doing. I knew what those linguistic schools were about. More than that, I had learned how to take a set of conflicting, complicated ideas and put them into my own framework.

(And the professor wrote, at the top of the essay, that it was the best one on the subject he'd ever seen. These things matter.)

I've often said that wrestling with a difficult set of ideas and finding understanding is, for me, like the moment when (to use a farm metaphor) you back up the truck with a bumper ball hitch, lower the trailer coupler over it, and feel the sweet moment when the coupler snaps into place. It's a sweet, satifisfying visceral connection. (Maybe some of you can offer a less trailer-based metaphor; I do this a couple of times a week, so that's what comes to mind for me.)

Now, I could ask AI to produce that chart for me. It would be a great chart. It just wouldn't do the same work for my brain.

This week's NYTimes opinion column had an excellent take on this situation.

**

Writing well requires a command of vocabulary, spelling and grammar. It forces writers to comprehend a subject, to sift through their working memory of that topic, to organize and plan. Writing an essay is so difficult that a person in the throes of it can do hardly anything else — as anyone who has shushed a spouse or child while trying to compose a decent sentence can attest.
Very few people would volunteer to dig a ditch. Likewise, it is hard — almost impossible, many English teachers will admit — to turn a reluctant writer into an enthusiastic one.

Yet the American education system expects nearly all students to learn how to write an essay. It’s little wonder, then, that as soon as a tool arrived promising to lessen the pain people grabbed it.

Like it or not, artificial intelligence is now firmly embedded in how students produce text. Somewhere between two-thirds and 90 percent of high school and college students are already using A.I. for schoolwork, according to recent surveys, often requesting help with writing assignments.

A growing number of educators are alarmed, and insist that students should write without A.I. These teachers are returning to handwriting, blue books and proctored, in-class essay tests — all attempts to prevent students from outsourcing their writing to chatbots.

This is baffling to tech industry leaders, who see A.I. rejection as a form of educational malpractice. They point out that writing is already the leading use of A.I. in the workplace, and argue there is no need to continue suffering through the task without help. After all, they say, chatbots now exceed the ability of most human beings to produce fluent prose.

All this points to some questions about writing itself: Why work so hard to learn it? And what do students stand to lose when they stop facing down a blank page, alone with their thoughts?

...Research shows that traditional, unassisted composition is valuable, not despite its difficulty, but because of it. Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood...

[T]here is no part of the writing process that can be handed over to A.I. without some cost. Intellectual growth occurs at every stage, from brainstorming to fine-tuning a final draft. If writing is thinking, then any part of the struggle that is outsourced to technology amounts to relinquishing some freedom to perceive. How will students ever know what they really think of anything — whether it’s “The Crucible” or A.I. itself — if they ask a machine to spit out an answer for them?

**
Those who want to do the hard work of thinking will write.

Those who don't will cheat.

I'm guessing that there will be an early advantage for the cheaters, and a longer-term advantage for the thinkers. It's possible that our task as responsible parents and pre-AI thinkers is to hold onto some semblance of culture while those advantages shake themselves out.

https://t.co/SRQkBDik0j

[Steve Zelt @SteveZelt]

Add complexity. Ask a lot of questions.

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

Apparently, the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts has determined not to count letter grades toward its freshmen’s GPAs during their first semester, starting in 2027. The reason given is that this move will address the growing mental health crisis among young people. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will, in fact, exacerbate the crisis.

Across cultures, one can discern a common pattern in the initiation rituals of primal peoples. The elders of the tribe rip a young person from the comfort of his home during the night. He is then scarified or otherwise physically marked in some way—a tooth is knocked out or his face is cut—in order to impress upon him that life is difficult.

Then he is introduced to the lore and history of his people, and finally he is taken to the edge of the wilderness, given a few simple provisions, and told to make his way for an extended period of time.

The entire purpose of the exercise is to break him free from the dominance of his self-regarding feelings and to orient him to the achievement of objective goods.

Plato famously compared the soul to a horse-drawn chariot. The animals represent the passions, which provide energy for the vehicle, and the driver represents intelligence and refined moral consciousness. As long as the charioteer is in place, the chariot makes its way purposefully. But if the charioteer is kicked out, the horses will run amok.

Our “suicidally empathetic” culture, which consistently privileges feeling over objective value, has produced armies of dangerously uninitiated young people. In terms of Plato’s metaphor, it has given rise to lots and lots of chariots with no sense of direction, crashing into one another.

Electing not to count first-semester grades toward students’ GPAs in order to spare the delicate emotions of eighteen-year-olds is, spiritually speaking, about as dumb a move as a university could make.

[Perks @perksverse]

Christopher Nolan says AI is a “Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside”

“The funny thing with AI, I think it's actually pretty fascinating to see how in the last few years it's taken over Wall Street and the world of business and investment. I've never seen a technology advancing so rapidly, so completely rejected by the public”

“Everybody's suspicion of it is so extreme, particularly young people. The reactions to AI videos online. People my children's age immediately calling it ‘AI slop’ and coining that term and just putting it in a box, which I think is a very healthy skepticism”

“Technology is always going to give us great gifts, but it has to be viewed with skepticism. The motives of the people giving it to us also have to be viewed with skepticism. That's when we'll get the best out of a new technology rather than just blind faith that everything's going to be great”

[Steve Zelt @SteveZelt]

ChatGPT does not love you.

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

I’ve just finished reading Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy.

It ranks, along with Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories, as the best take-down of the lunacy at the heart of the wokeist philosophy.

For Saad, empathy—in itself a perfectly decent trait—has become so grossly exaggerated that it threatens truth, reality, and justice.

Cases in point abound: so they won’t feel bad about themselves, we’ll allow biological men to compete in women’s sports and crush the dreams of thousands of young women; so as not to undermine the self-esteem of minorities, we will permit unqualified candidates to have positions in universities and the corporate world; so that everyone might feel included, we will characterize the meritocracy as “white privilege,” etc.

As I was making my way through Saad’s book, I kept remarking the sharp distinction between empathy and love.

To empathize is to enter profoundly into the experience of another and to endeavor not to hurt that person’s feelings. But to love is, as Thomas Aquinas taught, “to will the good of the other.”

As I said, in itself and all things being equal, empathy is a good thing. But it is not the same as love, which, depending on circumstances, can very much involve hurting someone’s feelings.

When a professor gives a student a “C” as an honest reflection of his work, he might well be insulting him, but he’s also telling him the truth and perhaps even urging him to try harder.

When, in the Confessional, a priest tells a murderer to turn himself in to the police, he’s undoubtedly making that person’s life more uncomfortable, but he’s also willing the man’s good.

Any decent parent knows that showing real love for her children means engendering all kinds of bad feelings in them.

In light of this distinction, we can understand why Jesus didn’t say, “have empathy for one another,” but rather “love one another.” And why St. John the Evangelist didn’t say, “God is empathy,” but rather “God is love.”

It occurred to me as I was reading Saad’s book that one reason Wokeism has seized the consciousness of so many in the West is that Christianity has faded as a cultural force and Christians themselves have forgotten what stands at the heart of their faith.

[Steve Zelt @SteveZelt]

That's pretty good.

[Peter Leithart @PLeithart]

The United States is the first and greatest post-Christendom Christian nation.

Founded after the collapse of medieval order, the earliest Americans didn't renounce Christianity, as many modern Europeans did, exhausted by seemingly endless war.

On the contrary. Our earliest colonists were among the most intense Christians ever to grace planet Earth.

But the new-world setting detached American Puritans, Pilgrims, and others from the institutions and symbols of European Christendom.

You can't go far in Europe without happening across a monastery, a village church, a cross planted on some remote hill commemorating some forgotten miracle. Every cranny boasts a centuries-old Christian history.

The Puritans encountered a virgin landscape, as far as Christianity was concerned. Their errand was to put their stamp on an unstamped wilderness.

From the first, American Christianity has had an eccentric flavoring, a boisterous spirit of religious innovation.

And American Christianity just kept getting eccentricker and eccentricker, spawning sects and cults but also heroic missionary expeditions to Christianize the continent and later the world. 

Irish monks camped out on whales and hopped into boats to commit "white martyrdom." 

Our rugged, bristly Methodist circuit riders hopped onto horses, strapped on a gun belt, and tamed the frontier.

American Christianity is easy to criticize, especially for people (like me) with fondness for old Christendom.

But the energy, ingenuity, tenacity, zest, the sheer Americanness of American Christianity awes and terrifies the world. As it should.

As we celebrate the 250th this week, give thanks for all the things that turned the world upside down - the Founding Fathers, Lexington and Concord and Yorktown, the Constitution, our supersized opulence.

And spare a word of thanks for the reckless adventurers who made America what it is, the first and greatest post-Christendom Christian nation.

[Steve Zelt @SteveZelt]

Unruly and short-sighted passions? Gosh. What are those?

[Edward Feser @FeserEdward]

Especially over political disagreements. If a friendship that has been long-lasting is threatened by such matters, the likelihood is that the problem is with the unruly and short-sighted passions that politics tends to stoke, not with the friendship.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

The reason why Watergate would be a 12 hour news story today is that Trump is so corrupt that Nixon seems almost quaint by comparison. Heck, the Guilded Age guys are kicking themselves for being born in the wrong century. There's much more dirty money to be made now.

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing…”

—Christopher Hitchens