Author: Daniel Harper

AI lies

Science fiction author Charles Stross took Google’s “Bard” for a test drive. Bard is what popular culture calls “Artifical Intelligence,” a.k.a., but which is more properly called a Large Language Model (LLM); or, to use Ted Chiang’s more general nomenclature, it’s merely Applied Statistics.

In any case, Stross asked Google Bard to provide five facts about Charles Stross. Because he has an unusual name, he was fairly certain there were no other Charles Strosses to confuse Google Bard. The results? “Bard initially offers up reality-adjacent tidbits, but once it runs out of information it has no brakes and no guardrails: it confabulates without warning and confidently asserts utter nonsense.”

Stross concludes his post with a warning: “LLMs don’t answer your questions accurately — rather, they deliver a lump of text in the shape of an answer.” However, a commenter adds nuance to Stross’s warning: “Bard is clearly showing signs of prompt exhaustion, and that should have triggered a ‘this answer is out of confidence’ error and terminated the output. In a well-designed system you would not have seen those answers.” But even admitting that Bard is a poorly-designed LLM, how would the average user know which LLM is well-designed and which is not?

LLMs deliver answer-shaped text — with no way of judging how accurate it is.

More alleged misconduct, and a glitch in the notification system

I received an email today signed by Sarah Lammert, the executive secretary of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). The MFC was notifying congregational leaders that Rev. Stephen Furrer had resigned from fellowship with the UUA rather than face a “Full Fellowship Review…for sexual misconduct.”

Mostly when these emails are sent out, there is just the simple notification that the minister has either resigned from fellowship before charges could be brought, or was removed from fellowship. Unusually, this email added: “The Rev. Furrer served many congregations as a settled or interim minister over more than four decades as a minister. In reviewing his record, it became clear that the Rev. Furrer had a broader pattern of boundary violations which impacted at least four of these congregations in differing degrees.”

Presumably the UUA will contact those four congregations. And perhaps the UUA will contact all the congregations the Furrer served. But there are others of us who might have reasons for wanting to know if Furrer had served a particular congregation — for example, a minister or DRE thinking of accepting a job at a congregation may want to do a little research to see if a congregation has a history of past clergy misconduct (something congregations frequently neglect to tell job applicants). Or, for another example, congregational leaders wondering if Furrer once served a nearby congregation, with possible effects on their own congregation.

So, out of curiosity, I checked the online UUA Directory of professional leaders. Not surprisingly, Furrer’s entry in that directory had already been removed, which is entirely appropriate. However, this leaves us with no official record of his employment history. His own personal website still happens to provide a listing of his ministerial positions up to 2018. That list follows, with my annotations in square brackets []:

1981-1982 Asst. Minister, Berkeley, CA [not clear if this is the Berkeley fellowship or the Berkeley church Confirmed this was the Berkeley church]
1983-1987 Settled Minister, West Redding, CT
1987-1988 Interim Minister, Saco, ME
1988-1991 Settled Minister, Vineyard Haven, MA
1991-1993 Interim Minister, Berlin, MA
1993-1999 Settled Minister, East Suburban Pittsburgh, PA [presumably part-time, combined with the following two contract positions:]
1994-1996 Contract Minister, Morgantown, WV
1996-1999 Contract Minister, Indiana, PA
1999-2000 Interim Minister, Binghamton, NY
2000-2009 Settled Minister, Santa Fe, NM
2009-2010 Interim Minister, Santa Monica, CA
2010-2011 Interim Minister, Long Beach, CA
2011-2013 Interim Minister, San Francisco, CA
2013-2014 Interim Minister, Redwood City, CA
2014-2016 Interim Minister, Fullerton, CA
2016-2017 Interim Minister, Rancho Palo Verdes, CA
2017-2018 Interim Minister, Livermore, CA
2018-???? Developmental Minister, Bellevue, WA [a quick glance at their website shows this was through at least 2021]

All this raises an interesting point. The UUA maintains an online list of ministers who have been removed from fellowship, or who have resigned from fellowship pending misconduct investigations. Once they’re out of fellowship, they disappear from the UUA Directory, which is appropriate. But the UUA Directory is the only place where you can find a public list stating which congregations a given minister has served. The unfortunate result is that histories of clergy misconduct may be obscured.

There’s a simple fix. The online list of ministers who have been removed from fellowship, or who have resigned from fellowship pending misconduct investigations, should include a list of where each minister had served, and when.

Oh, and here’s a caveat so I don’t get sued by someone — I have no personal knowledge of this case, and as far as I know this case has not been adjudicated in a court of law. Thus I cannot comment on the truth of the allegations. I’m simply using this case as an example to point out what I consider to be a flaw in the way the UUA reports cases of alleged clergy misconduct.

Update, 12/8: A sentence that got dropped during revision was restored (last sentence, third paragraph); two minor typographical errors fixed.

Bookstores in Pioneer Valley

Last week, Carol and I spent four days at a retreat center in Deerfield, Mass. We managed to visit four bookstores in those four days. Here are some notes about each bookstore:

World Eye Bookshop is quite small. As is often the case these days, about half the store is taken up with gifts, toys, art supplies, etc. But although the book selection is small, it’s well chosen. A number of interesting books on local history (I almost bought a book on the history of the Mass Central Railroad). If you’re in downtown Greenfield, it’s worth stopping in.

I was sad when Raven Used Books closed their Cambridge location, so I made Carol drive down to Northampton because I wanted to stop in at the store’s original location. Not what you’d call an expansive store, but they pack an enormous amount of books into their relatively small space. Fewer scholarly books than I remembered, but used scholarly books are hard to sell these days so the fact that they had any at all made it worth the thirty-minute drive.

Federal Street Books in Greenfield is an absolute delight. They have a good selection of both new and used books. Not many scholarly books, which is my always my main interest. But the selection of fantasy and science fiction books was especially good, and there were lots of quirky fun books, like the children’s book titled “Goodnight Krampus.” I like the fact that they require masks in the store — lately I’ve been forgetting to put on my mask when I go in stores, and I liked being reminded. This bookstore is worth a special trip.

The real find, though, was Roundabout Books in Greenfield. They’ve just re-opened in a new location. They’re still bringing in books, so the shelves looked a little bare when I walked in. But once I started looking around, I realized that there are actually a huge number of books; they’re just lost in the huge space. I was happy to find both new and used scholarly books mixed in among the more mainstream books. I found an excellent selection in most of the subject areas in which I tend to buy books, including religion, poetry, science fiction and fantasy, and nature and the environment.

Just to give you an idea of the range of the titles they stock, I bought a complete translation of the Ramayan; a trashy science fiction novel; three books of poetry, American, contemporary Chinese, and contemporary Greek; a field guide to the grasses of New England; and I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said’s America by Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst.

Roundabout is so good, it’s worth a long drive to visit.

In our four day trip, I bought a dozen books. The only reason I purchased any of these books is when I leafed through them I realized they were exactly what I needed to read right now. It’s still important to be able to pore through dozens of books, brought into the store by someone who knows books, so you can find books that you didn’t know you wanted, though once you see them you know you need them. (The same principle holds true for libraries, by the way.) This is why Amazon can never replace real bookstores. And that’s why we need to buy our books at real bookstores; even if it costs a little more than Amazon, we need to make sure the real bookstores stay in business.

(And before you ask: No, we did not visit the Montague Bookmill. We’ve been there; you should go if you haven’t been before; but it isn’t a perfect match for us. This, by the way, is why we need a wide variety of bookstores: everyone should have access to a bookstore that’s a perfect match for them.)

You don’t gotta

We walked through the Nelson Homestead at Woolman Hill Conference Center. This is where Wally and Juanita Nelson lived the last couple of decades of their lives — off the grid, growing their own food, refusing to pay taxes that funded the war machine of the United States. Carol remembers Wally and Jaunita Nelson coming to the annual conferences of the Northeast Organic Farmers Association of Massachusetts, back when she served on the NOFA Mass board, but she had no idea that they had both been civil rights activists and peacemakers.

Both of us liked the sign that Wally Nelson used to carry at demonstrations and rallies. The message is simple, but it makes you think: “You Don’t Gotta.”

Handmade sign reading "You Don't Gotta."

Changes in a New England Meetinghouse

First Parish in Cohasset, where I work, has a meetinghouse built in 1747. When you come at it from the north and see it across Cohasset Common, it looks like the classic white New England church with a simple steeple:

White clapboard New England church set amid lawn and autumnal trees
Cohasset Meeting House from the north

But the tower and the steeple weren’t added until 1799, over half a century after the meetinghouse was first erected. Let’s go back to 1773, the year of the Boston Tea Party. There were three young men from Cohasset who participated in the Boston Tea Party (after being encouraged by their Patriot minister), and they might have seen something like this when they came at the meetinghouse from the north:

Line drawing of Cohasset meetinghouse before the tower and steeple were added
My visualization of the appearance of the Cohasset Meetinghouse c. 1775

Instead of the tower and steeple, there would have been small belfry on the north end of the building. (When you go up into the attic today, you can see timbers in the north end that now serve no special purpose, and it’s possible they served to support the belfry.) I haven’t found any record of what Cohasset’s belfry looked like, but there are drawings of other eighteenth century meetinghouses with belfries. The sketch above shows the north facade with a representative eighteenth century belfry.

This still isn’t the original appearance of the Cohasset Meetinghouse. Originally, there was no porch on the west side. That porch was built in 1761. In order to create more floor spaces for pews, the original stairs to the gallery in the northwest and southwest corners inside the main building were removed. The porch was added to house a new set of stairs to the gallery. Prior to the addition of the porch, the Cohasset Meetinghouse looked something like this:

Line drawing of meetinghouse
My visualization of the appearance of the Cohasset Meetinghouse c. 1760

As you can see, prior to the addition of the porch the meetinghouse was just a simple rectangular building with a small belfry on the north end. Mind you, we don’t really know the exact appearance of the building. In my visualizations, I’ve added triangular pediments above the doors, but who knows if there was even that level of ornamentation.

The earliest drawings we have of the Cohasset Meetinghouse date from the mid-nineteenth century. They are fairly consistent in showing the tower with crossed balusters at the bell level, and a steeple with a rounded section before the actual spire — quite different from the present steeple. The meetinghouse was not painted white; it was pea green. In fact, most New England meetinghouses were not painted white prior to the Colonial Revival in the late nineteenth century; documented colors include various shades of yellow, red, and green; there were even a few meetinghouses painted orange. Here’s my digitally edited version of an 1850s woodcut showing the Cohasset Meetinghouse:

Reproduction of a woddcut

There have been several other changes over the years. The clock was added in 1764. Shutters (or more accurately, exterior louvered blinds) were added around 1765. The steeple was completely rebuilt after 1869; it got shattered by a lightning strike in that year. The shutters were removed again around 1986.

In short, like most historic buildings the Cohasset Meetinghouse has changed considerably over the years.

Carlton Pearson is dead

Carlton Pearson, the evangelical Christian preacher who in midlife came to accept the happy teachings of universal salvation, died on Sunday. At his death, Pearson was probably the most widely known and most influential person affiliated with Unitarian Universalism.

When Pearson announced to his Tulsa, Oklahoma, congregation that he was a Universalist, many members of the congregation left. He eventually found a home for the remainder of his congregation — and for himself — at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Tulsa.

Back in 2009, I remember hearing Pearson speak at General Assembly. The GA Web Team wrote an excellent account of that event. I remember thinking he was a charismatic, riveting, and convincing speaker. The GA Web Team’s report quotes him as saying, “Jesus didn’t come to protect us from God, but to reconnect us to God.”

Even if Jesus and God aren’t at the center of your religion, this remains a powerful statement in our Western culture. It is a concise refutation of the widespread Western belief in retributive justice. When we drift away from the ultimate goodness of the universe, instead of retribution we need to be reconnected to that goodness.

I don’t recall that Carlton Pearson made much of an impact on General Assembly attendees in 2009. Marlin Lavanhar, senior minister at All Souls, was Pearson’s co-presenter at General Assembly, and Lavanhar talked about how difficult it was for a White upper middle class church to welcome in well over a hundred non-White Universalists, a welcome that included changes in the worship style of the congregation. The Web Team reported:

“Unitarian Universalist churches, Lavanhar said, ‘have a corner on a very small slice of the NPR listening audience.’ He worries that UUism might become so parochial that it dies out. But Tulsa’s second service [with Pearson’s followers] attracts a different, younger, more racially diverse set of people, who come both for the spirit of the service and the message of Unitarian Universalism.”

Pearson continued to espouse Universalist theology for the rest of his life. He remained an affiliated minister at All Souls in Tulsa, and went on to serve at other congregations as well. In the years after his presentation at General Assembly, the majority of Unitarian Universalists — many of whom are White NPR listeners — mostly ignored Pearson. Unitarian Universalists seem to have a difficult time connecting to, or respecting, Pearson’s message of universal love. This, despite Pearson using the theology of universal love to stand up for LGBTQ rights. This, despite (or perhaps because of) Pearson’s ability to reach beyond Unitarian Universalism’s core White upper middle class audience.

So it is that Carlton Pearson, whose spirit-filled happy teachings about universal Love have touched tens of thousands of people, has had little impact on Unitarian Universalism outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

But he had an impact on me, and I find I’m deeply saddened at his death.

Carlton Pearson quotes

Pearson, both as an author and a speaker, is eminently quotable. In his memory, here’s a brief selection of his words:

I don’t fear God and if I was going to fear anybody, I’d fear some of [God’s] so-called people because they can be some mean sons of biscuit eaters, as my brother used to say. — Quoted in The Guardian.

God is not angry with humanity. — Quoted in Christianity Today.

Belief compelled through fear is not belief, it is blind and forced obedience. — God Is Not a Christian, Nor a Jew, Muslim, Hindu (2010), p. 32.

I’m the heretic, and I enjoy that, wear that like a badge these days. … It’s like a tattoo that I can’t wash off. — Quoted in Christianity Today.

Fear of God creates more harm than good for the human race. God isn’t angry with [hu]mankind. But because of erroneous concepts of God, most human beings are secretly angry with God. — The Gospel of Inclusion (2009), p. 149.

We do not need to be saved from God; we need to be saved from religion. We need to be saved from perceptions of God that portray Him as an angry deity with a customized torture chamber called hell, managed by a malcontent called the devil, where we may be forever consigned because we didn’t believe, didn’t believe correctly, or didn’t obey. — The Gospel of Inclusion, p. 6.

Christianity (though not exclusively) has become a kind of survival-of-the-fittest ideology. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the hypothesis about the adaptation to the environment, in many ways reflects the dynamics of most religions. It is one thing to adapt to a hostile environment be developing webbed feet, as the Galapagos Islands lizards did; and another thing to resist the environment by attempting to change, confront, or retaliate against it. Religion does both. It attempts to adjust to the hostility it encounters (in this case, the perceived attacks of science or the refusal of more enlightened people to tolerate its sanctioning destructive acts) by changing its story (creationism becomes intelligent design, for example), and at the same time, it promotes a virulent theology in which we must placate not only an angry, violent God but also Her equally vicious and sinister devil. The result is predictable: intelligent, open-minded people of a spiritual disposition are driven away by blind extremism, and what remains are the cowed and the clueless, more terrorized and enslaved than ever. — God Is Not a Christian, Nor a Jew, Muslim, Hindu (2010)

That idea of a ubiquitous, angry God has created a lot of mental illness on Earth. If there’s one thing I wish I could expel from people’s consciousness, it’s the idea of an angry God, that he hates people, not just wants to punish, but as Genesis says, regrets that he made us. That’s a very human-concocted entity that has never existed for a moment. If there is a devil, it would be that God. — Quoted in UU World magazine.

If I say everybody’s going to heaven, then I can’t raise money from you to get me to keep people out of hell. — Quoted by ABC News.

Jesus didn’t come to protect us from God, but to reconnect us to God. — Quoted by the GA Web Team, 2009.

Dusk

I went for a walk to Wheelwright Park this afternoon. I still forget that the time change means the sun sets pretty early. By 4:30, it was already getting dark. As much as I enjoyed listening to the Great Horned Owls calling, there have been reports of Coyotes in the woods at dusk. So far, the Coyotes have done little more than harass small dogs, but just in case I now carry a whistle and a bright flashlight.

Woods path at dusk.
Wheelwright Park Trail, 4:31 p.m.

The woods were lovely, dark, and peaceful. Since I had several miles to go, I began walking faster.But I had to stop twice, so I could take photos of the yellow and orangey-brown leaves of American Beech saplings looking surprisingly bright against the dark pines and oaks.

Woods path at dusk.
Wheelwright Park Trail, 4:34 p.m.

And I couldn’t help thinking how much better I’d like it if we stayed on Daylight Savings Time all year long. The woods would still be lovely, dark, and deep, but I’d have an hour longer to enjoy them.

Says it right in the Bible

Conservative Christians in the U.S. are lining up to tell us that the Israel Hamas war is a harbinger of the End Times. A number of Bible-based preachers are telling their followers to get ready for the Apocalypse.

Robert Jefress of First Baptist Church, Dallas, Tex., recently said: “We are on the verge of the beginning of the End Times…. Things are falling into place for this great world battle, fought by the super powers of the world, as the Bible said. They will be armed with nuclear weapons….”

Actually, nuclear weapons are not mentioned in the Bible….

Greg Laurie of Harvest Riverside Fellowship, Calif., recently said: “The Bible predicted hundreds of thousands of years ago that a large force from the North of Israel will attack her after [Israel] was regathered and one of the allies with modern Russia, or Magog, will be Iran or Persia.”

Well, actually, Russia is not mentioned in the Bible….

John Hagee of Hagee’s Cornerstone Church, San Antonio, Tex., recently said: “Israel is God’s prophetic clock; when the Jewish people are in Israel, the clock is running. When the Jewish people are out of Israel, the clock stops.”

Um, actually, the Bible says nothing about Israel being a clock….

Each of these three people claims belief in the literal truth of the Bible. I assume each one of them also honestly believes what he preaches. While I respect their belief that they are doing a literal reading of the Bible, looking at what they say from the outside I don’t see that any one of these three people shows evidence of a literal belief in the Bible. From my perspective, they are each engaged in substantial reinterpretation of the Bible. Their interpretations veer farther from the Bible’s text than any of the progressive Christians I know. So I think I would argue that they have actually started a New Religious Movement. While this New Religious Movement was originally based on Christianity, it now includes a large proportion of anachronistic beliefs that have little to do with Christianity.

The unlamented decline of the platform formerly known as Twitter

According to the BBC, Elon Musk recently shared “an antisemitic conspiracy theory, calling it ‘actual truth’.” Of course, Musk has denied that he’s antisemitic. And no doubt he’ll insist that he’s just a free speech advocate. But his remarks are yet more evidence that platform decay has progressed quite far on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. It’s no longer a social media space, it’s a cesspool.

I actually spent some time on Twitter, during the second year of its existence. I liked it at first because it allowed me to post to my blog using my phone (I couldn’t afford one of those fancy new smartphones). I soon discovered that Twitter’s biggest strength was in polemic and diatribe, with a subsidiary strength of news-without-nuance. Not my jam. But that mix attracted a lot of people, especially (from what I could see) people who were a generation younger than I: tail-end Gen Xers and older Millennials.

I get the impression that most of the people lamenting the ongoing demise of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, are still from that age group. Without realizing it, they’ve gotten to the age where it’s hard to let go of the familiar, hard to adopt something new. It’s hard for them to watch X turn into a cesspool of hatred which is now led by an antisemitic conspiracy theorist. They lament the loss of what they once had.

Here’s some advice from someone who’s ten or twenty years older: Don’t go around lamenting the loss of something that no one else cares much about. If you do, you’ll sound like the Boomers lamenting the Sixties — which weren’t all that great to begin with, so that lamenting them just makes Boomers look faded and sad.

There are many problems in the world worthy of lamentation: antisemitism, racism, conspiracy theorists. The demise of Twitter is not one of them. It’s time to move on.