Remember the recent article about young men watching hours of porn per day? We all understand that is deeply disordered. But how different is it from those who bathe themselves in political anger? Both anger and sexual pleasure are good things when channeled appropriately; they are terrible masters.
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This second issue of Robin Sloan’s pop-up newsletter on AI offers a series of helpful metaphors around the limts of AI. Essentially, AI is blocked by the air gap between it and the real world. If your work is entirely within the digital “symbols in, symbols out” then your work is in trouble.
Philip K Dick famously said, “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” Equally true: nearly all of the good in the world is happening in small acts, at a local level. If you never attend to the small and local, you will think the world is worse than it is.
A question for Christians: how would you square a belief in the inherent dignity of honest work with the idea that hard work was the curse of God on Adam? This isn’t a gotcha. I’m genuinely interested.
I love this series of three haying videos from Just a Few Acres Farm:
There are a lot of reasons to love the series, but right now, on this cold day, it’s because I can almost feel that warm, bright sun as I watch them.
“A Farm Winter, with Jerry Apps” What a wonderful storyteller! Well worth your time. I hadn’t heard of him before but turns out he’s a known Wisconsin treasure. His books can be found here.
Despite being a good speller, I can never, never, never remember how to spell Cincinnati. Cincinatti. Ciinncciinnaattii. Sensenattea.
They should have kept the name
According to Steven Nolt in A History of the Amish, the split between the tradition-minded Old Order Amish and the change-minded Amish Mennonites happened around 1865, though gradually and not due to any single event. Among the Amish Mennonites there was a bishop named Henry Egly who had a powerful conversion experience during an illness in the 1840s. Whether the influence of American evangelicalism and revivalism on him came before or after this experience is not clear from the text.
Matt Stansberry asks, “What does success look like in this situation?” For me, one measure will be that I do not close my heart to the suffering around me in a vain attempt at self-preservation. I will neither bathe myself in it, nor turn away from it. I will keep pursuing the hard path of love.
One of the southern Indiana electric companies asked people to conserve energy over the next couple of days to prevent outages. The comments are full of people telling them to turn off the data centers and I love it.