five quotes (3.14.25)

First note: I will be gallivanting around Europe for the next two weeks with 25 college students. Pray for me. I will neither have my computer available to me nor spend any time writing. Regularly scheduled programming will resume in April.

Second note: I realize I didn’t hit the send button before I left for the airport. Along with packing a phone charger, this seems to be the only thing that slipped through the cracks. Not bad: so, here this is, 13 days late!

Then the last challenge: If the intuition against a benevolent God rests on the sense that we are surfeited with suffering, the skeptic has to concede that we are surfeited in other ways as well. Is it possible to imagine a world with less pain than ours? Yes, but it’s also very easy to imagine a world that lacks anything like what we know as pleasure — a world where human beings have the same basic impulses but experience them merely as compulsions, a world in which we are driven to eat or drink or have sexual intercourse, to hunt and forage and build shelter, without ever experiencing the kind of basic (but really extraordinary) delights that attend a good meal or a good movie, let alone the higher forms of eros, rapture, ecstasy.

—Ross Douthat, “The Best Argument Against Having Faith in God” (New York Times)

I have often thought about this when debating the problem of evil. No one who loudly declares this as evidence of an absence of a benevolent God seems to be moved much by the problem of good or the problem of beauty. The problem of evil, in its classical statement, seems to take it for granted that a good God would only ever allow unfettered bliss and pleasure to his creatures. A painless, immortal existence seems to be their imagined default state. If only Christianity had an answer to that problem. . .

Jefferson was one of the richest men in the new United States. He had a 5,000-acre plantation worked by hundreds of slaves, a splendid mansion in Virginia that he had designed himself, one of the biggest wine collections in America, and one of the greatest private libraries in the world — it became the foundation of the Library of Congress. But despite his wealth and status his home was so cold in winter that the ink in his pen sometimes froze, making it difficult for him to write to complain about the chill.

Jefferson was rich and sophisticated, but his life was closer to the lives of people in the Iron Age than it was to ours.

—Charles Mann, “We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It” (The New Atlantis)

I saw this all of the time. We cannot emphasize enough how much easier our lives are than those who came before us. Each of us, even in a trailer park, has untold riches compared to the wealthiest kings in the past. And some of this is because we just don’t understand how things work. That’s what Mann’s new series is about; you should click on the link and read through.

To see where AI usage shows up in Bloom’s hierarchy, researchers surveyed a group of 319 knowledge workers who had incorporated AI into their workflow. What makes this survey noteworthy is how in-depth it is. They didn’t just ask for opinions; instead they compiled ~1,000 real-world examples of tasks the workers complete with AI assistance, and then surveyed them specifically about those in all sorts of ways, including qualitative and quantitative judgements.

In general, they found that AI decreased the amount of effort spent on critical thinking when performing a task.

—Erik Hoel, “brAIn drAIn” (The Intrinsic Perspective)

Wow! I’m so surprised that a tool expressly designed to decrease time spent thinking critically has decreased critical thinking. I thought people were going to only use it as a digital assistant, offloading their onerous, mindless tasks and saving their energy for super brain time.

Younger adults are far less likely than Americans over 50 to say achieving the American Dream of success from hard work is still a possibility, according to a Wall Street Journal/NORC poll in July. But here, too, the reality is more complicated. At least part of what’s stunting the growth of a generation of young people are outsized dreams of what a good life looks like. . . “Our expectations are so much higher today,” says Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland whose research focuses on children and family. “Generations before us didn’t expect to have large houses where every kid had a bedroom and there were multiple vacations.”

—Rachel Wolfe, “What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?” (Wall Street Journal)

Growing up is good. As Wolfe points out, millennials are really doing fine economically. They just don’t feel like they’re doing fine. Our expectations are ramped up beyond any reasonable ability to conform. We expect to have everything else dialed in before we move on to the traditional markers of adulthood. You don’t need a beautiful home and a ton of money squirreled away to have kids. But we think we do.

This introduces a theme of the 1960 Hobbit, an odd theme indeed: Bilbo was a fool. First of all, this corrupts the value of the book for children, namely that a bookish little homebody can go off on an adventure with knot-muscled bearded types who carry battleaxes and end up being the most important person on the whole expedition. It is also a strange theme for Tolkien, because Bilbo is one of the most remarkable characters in Tolkien’s whole legendarium, the one person who could possess the ring for decades and then simply walk away from it. This says a tremendous amount about his character. But Tolkien rather dislikes him: later he has Bilbo unable to tell what month of the year it is. Tolkien scholar John D. Rateliff finds that Tolkien had adopted the same attitude to Bilbo as is found in the fragment “The Quest of Erebor,” which tells the tale of The Hobbit from Gandalf’s perspective: “It diminishes Bilbo in the reader’s eyes, casting him very much as a silly fellow puffing and bobbing on the mat.”

—John Byron Kuhner, “Tolkien Almost Wrecked The Hobbit” (Newsletter)

This is hilarious. I always say that The Lord of the Rings novels would have benefited from an editor. Cool it on the songs, J.R.R.! But now I need to say, “As long as that editor wasn’t Tolkien.”