Wednesday Bible Study: The Gospel According to Matthew

There is far too much background information about the Gospels I can even begin to convey in one post. We'll lay it out piece by piece as we go along. As most people know, there are four Gospels, i.e. purported accounts of the life and sayings of Jesus. Three of them -- Matthew, Mark and Luke -- are called "synoptic," which means they have a lot of overlapping material. Most scholars think that Mark was actually written first and that Matthew drew on it, but it is also posited that there was a lost work called "Q" which was also source material for Matthew. We just don't know. However, even though the synoptic gospels share material, there are also contradictions among them, and for that matter within them.  

 

The author of Matthew was purportedly one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, but this is generally considered impossible, and it is thought to have been written sometime late in the first century CE, at which time it is highly unlikely that Matthew the disciple would have remained alive. We'll get to more of those details and disputes later. For now, I'll just deal with Chapter One. It is incredibly boring. Purporting to be the genealogy of Jesus, but of course that's a contradiction already because it's actually the genealogy of Joseph, the husband of Mary, who according to the self-same book was not the father of Jesus. Furthermore, it directly and multiply contradicts the genealogy given in Luke -- they don't even agree on the name of Joseph's father. The actual point of this exercise is to demonstrate that Jesus was a descendant of David, and hence could be king of the Jews. Except that he wasn't. Whatever. Here you go, enjoy the 39 begats.

BTW, notice that there is no order from Augustus that all the world should be taxed, and that the family had to go to Bethlehem. Joseph just takes Mary home.  Apparently they lived in Bethlehem the whole time. Also, the prophecy referred to in verse 22 is from Isaiah, and it refers not to a virgin but to a young woman, alive at the time, not 700 years later, and Jesus is never called Emanuel. Just sayin'.

 

1 This is the genealogy^[a] of Jesus the Messiah^[b] the son of David, the son of Abraham:

² Abraham was the father of Isaac,

Isaac the father of Jacob,

Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,

³ Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar,

Perez the father of Hezron,

Hezron the father of Ram,

⁴ Ram the father of Amminadab,

Amminadab the father of Nahshon,

Nahshon the father of Salmon,

⁵ Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab,

Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,

Obed the father of Jesse,

⁶ and Jesse the father of King David.

David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife,

⁷ Solomon the father of Rehoboam,

Rehoboam the father of Abijah,

Abijah the father of Asa,

⁸ Asa the father of Jehoshaphat,

Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram,

Jehoram the father of Uzziah,

⁹ Uzziah the father of Jotham,

Jotham the father of Ahaz,

Ahaz the father of Hezekiah,

¹⁰ Hezekiah the father of Manasseh,

Manasseh the father of Amon,

Amon the father of Josiah,

¹¹ and Josiah the father of Jeconiah^[c] and his brothers at the time of the exile to Babylon.

¹² After the exile to Babylon:

Jeconiah was the father of Shealtiel,

Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel,

¹³ Zerubbabel the father of Abihud,

Abihud the father of Eliakim,

Eliakim the father of Azor,

¹⁴ Azor the father of Zadok,

Zadok the father of Akim,

Akim the father of Elihud,

¹⁵ Elihud the father of Eleazar,

Eleazar the father of Matthan,

Matthan the father of Jacob,

¹⁶ and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah.

¹⁷ Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.

Joseph Accepts Jesus as His Son

¹⁸ This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about^[d]: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹ Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet^[e] did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

²⁰ But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹ She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,^[f] because he will save his people from their sins.”

²² All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ²³ “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”^[g] (which means “God with us”).

²⁴ When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. ²⁵ But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.

Footnotes

1. Matthew 1:1 Or is an account of the origin
2. Matthew 1:1 Or Jesus Christ. Messiah (Hebrew) and Christ (Greek) both mean Anointed One; also in verse 18.
3. Matthew 1:11 That is, Jehoiachin; also in verse 12
4. Matthew 1:18 Or The origin of Jesus the Messiah was like this
5. Matthew 1:19 Or was a righteous man and
6. Matthew 1:21 Jesus is the Greek form of Joshua, which means the Lord saves.
7. Matthew 1:23 Isaiah 7:14

 

Sunday Sermonette: Let's get this over with

This will be my last post on the Tanakh, AKA the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. We'll finally be moving on to the Christian canon. A couple of remarks about the denouement of the Book of Jonah are called for. First, Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire. Obviously, the emperor and the people there were not devotees of Yahweh, and there is no evident reason why the Big Guy in the Sky would single it out for destruction. On the contrary, of course, Assyria subjugated Judah and destroyed the northern kingdom before the Babylonians came along to finish the job. Yahweh is said to have made that happen because the Israelites weren't offering sufficiently slavish devotion. So this whole thing makes no sense in context, which is one reason why many people think it's intended as a sort of satire.

 

It makes even less sense that everybody would suddenly believe this uncredentialed interloper. Actually it's far from clear how he even survived and traveled since he was barfed out onto the beach with nothing but what was left of his clothing. That the Ninevehns even put sackcloth on their animals is a further indication that this is intended as a joke. The last chapter seals the case for me, it is comically ridiculous, and it ends with a pseudo moral. So this is a fitting note to end on.

 

3 Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: ² “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.”

³ Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. ⁴ Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” ⁵ The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.

⁶ When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. ⁷ This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh:

“By the decree of the king and his nobles:

Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. ⁸ But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. ⁹ Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”

¹⁰ When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.

 

4 But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. ² He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. ³ Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

⁴ But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

⁵ Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. ⁶ Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant^[a] and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. ⁷ But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. ⁸ When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”

⁹ But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”

“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”

¹⁰ But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. ¹¹ And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”

Footnotes

1. Jonah 4:6 The precise identification of this plant is uncertain; also in verses 7, 9 and 10.

 

 

Plagiarism

Gioia's 6th point I'm afraid I find rather baffling:

 

(6) Plagiarism is getting exposed at all levels from students to corporations—and all the way to Harvard's president. But the authorities just take it for granted.


A healthy knowledge system requires honesty and accountability, and not long ago this was taken for granted. But plagiarism is now everywhere, and taken for granted. It’s even embedded in the dominant technologies and institutions.

Now hold on a minute. Plagiarism is as old as human language -- people don't normally give credit for repeating phrases or even entire stories that they've heard from someone else. In fact, the basic idea that an author has some sort of property right in their creation is a fairly modern invention. As we've been reading the Bible we've seen that many works don't have a credited author at all, and those that do were written by somebody else,  extensively re-written, often centuries after they were purportedly created. 

We have reliably creditable authorship going back to classical antiquity, but recycling other people's stories remained commonplace -- Shakespeare did it all the time. The novel Tristram Shandy, published in installments from from 1769 to 1777, contains many passages copied without attribution, word for word from Robert Burton, Francis Bacon and other writers. What's new is precisely that we don't tolerate this. The example Gioia gives, Claudine Gay, was fired from her job as president of Harvard because of somewhat dubious accusations of plagiarism.*

 

He does link to a story about large language models and yes, many copyright owners are suing their creators or at least complaining vociferously that they are expropriating proprietary material. I'm not sure that's exactly the right definition of the problem. They do provide citations, even if inaccurately, and very few human writers actually present original ideas. Ninety-nine percent of non-fiction writing consists of digestion, remixing, and restatement of existing knowledge and ideas. If you look in the back of the book, you'll find a bibliography. The boundaries of plagiarism are very difficult to define in writing, and even more difficult in music. So again, maybe there's a problem here somewhere, but I don't think Gioia has identified it correctly. 

 

* Actually what is puzzling about the whole Claudine Gay story is that her scholarly output, plagiarism or not, was astonishingly meager. As I recall there were exactly seven publications on her CV, none of them at all noteworthy, most of them not even peer reviewed. It is inexplicable how she even remained on the Harvard faculty, let alone got tenure and became president of the university. Something strange going on there. 

 

This time he's on to something

Gioia's 5th Thesis:  

(5) Universities have lost their prestige, and have made enemies of their core constituencies.

This is also in the news recently—you may have noticed.

But the criticisms have been building up for many years. Tuition costs have skyrocketed. The value of the degrees have plummeted. Meanwhile the leading universities have built up huge, stultifying bureaucracies—that seem self-serving and disconnected from educational priorities.

Vultures are now circling over these campuses, and we’ve quickly moved into full blown crisis mode. But this wouldn’t be happening if universities hadn’t irritated (or even betrayed) so many constituencies over the last 25 years.

 

Of course, there's always been a strand in American culture that resents higher education. Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was derided as an "egghead," and George W. Bush, even though he had degrees from Yale and Harvard, managed to use a phony cowboy accent and the fact that he is actually an idiot to appeal to people who resented the intellectualism of Al Gore and John Kerry. But it's gotten worse.

 

It is true that college education has gotten more expensive. Ironically, and frustratingly, that's partly because conservative politicians have cut funding for state university systems and forced more of the cost onto tuition payers. But it is also true that university bureaucracies have metastasized and compensation for the often useless people who occupy them has exploded. Selective colleges and universities have also competed for students by investing in fancy amenities such as gourmet dining halls, recreational facilities and posh dormitories. The truth is that the elite, well-endowed institutions hardly ever charge the sticker price and they are in fact affordable for people who manage to get admitted, but a lot of students are admitted because their parents are alumni or wealthy potential donors. 

 

I don't agree that the value of a college degree has plummeted, but maybe it isn't as great a return on investment as it used to be and it's less accessible to less privileged people. But even more important, universities often act with contempt for the communities in which they are located, and they don't focus enough attention on problems that really matter to people. Furthermore, they don't speak the same language. 

 

This whole "LatinX" thing is a perfect example. Latino people don't actually say that, in fact most of them find it offensive, it's actually completely unpronounceable in Spanish, and it purports to solve a problem that doesn't exist for Spanish speakers. Grammatical gender doesn't mean that people who speak Spanish think that tables are female and the floors they sit on are male. 

Some collective nouns for people are masculine and some are feminine. Policia, a police person, is feminine. The police, who are mostly male, are all La policia. Doctor is masculine, and it is true that if you want to refer specifically to an individual female doctor you will say doctora. However, people understand that the collective term includes women. Same goes for Latino. If you want to refer to a specific female individual, you will say Latina, but Latino as a collective includes women. That comes naturally to Spanish speakers, and college professors going around saying Latinx isn't going to change the fundamental structure of the Spanish language.

 So yes, they've made themselves unpopular, and that provides an opening for politicians to attack them. The word elite and elitist ought to refer to the obscenely wealthy plutocrats who have taken over the country, but instead it refers to people with college degrees. So yeah, that's a problem. 

 

 

Wednesday Bible Study: Sea to Sky Communication

Chapter two of Jonah isn't very interesting -- just a turgid prayer from inside the fish, and then our hero gets barfed up. This whole thing is ridiculous, of course, but I wondered if a human ever has been swallowed by a whale. The answer seems to be, not exactly. There have been a few instances of humans being engulfed in a humpback whale's mouth, like this one from a few years ago off Cape Cod. However, the whale did not actually swallow the guy, nor could it. Humpbacks feed on plankton and small fish, and they can't swallow something as big as a human. They'll spit it out after a few seconds.

 

The Cape Cod Times also reported on a story from the 1800s of a man from Hyannis who was ostensibly in the mouth of a sperm whale.  "The whale closed his mouth upon the captain's legs, tearing the bones, and dived under the water. He soon found he had too large a mouthful, and was glad to release his unbidden guest." Again, the whale did not swallow the man. I'm struck by this story because the guy's name was Peleg, and Captain Peleg was one of the co-owners of the Pequod. So, obviously, this would likely have been part of Melville's inspiration. The story does not give the date that this happened, however. Moby Dick was published in 1851, at which time Peleg would have been 34 years old, so it's certainly plausible. Anyway, neither of them was in the whale's mouth long enough to say this prayer.

 

2 ^1 [a]From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. ² He said:

“In my distress I called to the Lord,
    and he answered me.
From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help,
    and you listened to my cry.
³ You hurled me into the depths,
    into the very heart of the seas,
    and the currents swirled about me;
all your waves and breakers
    swept over me.
⁴ I said, ‘I have been banished
    from your sight;
yet I will look again
    toward your holy temple.’
⁵ The engulfing waters threatened me,^[b]
    the deep surrounded me;
    seaweed was wrapped around my head.
⁶ To the roots of the mountains I sank down;
    the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you, Lord my God,
    brought my life up from the pit.

⁷ “When my life was ebbing away,
    I remembered you, Lord,
and my prayer rose to you,
    to your holy temple.

⁸ “Those who cling to worthless idols
    turn away from God’s love for them.
⁹ But I, with shouts of grateful praise,
    will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed I will make good.
    I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.’”

¹⁰ And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.

Footnotes

1. Jonah 2:1 In Hebrew texts 2:1 is numbered 1:17, and 2:1-10 is numbered 2:2-11.
2. Jonah 2:5 Or waters were at my throat

 

Continuing with Gioia . . .

I will have something to say about the guy who murdered two people in Minnesota, tried to murder two more, and intended to murder dozens, but I'm waiting until I'm absolutely sure what he was all about. The corporate media are being very reticent to discuss his motives, which may mostly be fear of offending the people who share his ideology, but it might be that it isn't exactly as it appears. Note that MAGAts are climbing all over each other to claim that he is actually some sort of disgruntled radical leftist, which is a blatant and insane lie, no doubt about that. But I'm better than them, so I'm not jumping to any conclusions. -- C

 

Part 4 of Gioia's essay is titled "Funding for science and tech research is disappearing in every sphere and sector." That's a pretty sweeping claim? Let's see if it's true. First I'll just quote the entire section:

The whole technology and science power structure requires research—and somebody must pay for it. But, in very short order, the major sources of funding have dried up.

This is more than just a change in government policy. Even the huge corporations that fund their own research programs are now investing in AI data centers, not scientists. Somebody should measure this, but I’m confident that the shift from human-driven R&D projects to capital equipment investing is enormous. That’s why Meta is preparing for layoffs. That’s why Microsoft is getting rid of software jobs. That’s why Google is elminating people.

I need to emphasize that this is NOT a short term economic trend. Even the most successful tech companies are losing their appetite for human-driven research projects.

 

Well, in the first place, the major source of funding for science, per se -- basic science, trying to understand how the universe and organisms and human brains work -- is government. Wealthier nations fund most of it, for the obvious reason that they have the money. It is true that the U.S., in the past 5 months, has cut back drastically on its funding for scientific research, but that obviously is indeed, contrary to Gioia, a short term trend, and it's quite unpopular. European countries and Japan, and even China, are now trying to aggressively recruit U.S. scientists.

Microsoft, Meta and Apple have never funded very much scientific research. They have funded technological applications of scientific knowledge, which is not the same thing. You can learn some science along the way, to be sure, and discover some anomalies that suggest research questions to real scientists, but the objective of the research is not to learn fundamental truths about the universe but to make products that can be sold at a profit. Those corporations are still trying to do that, but like every other industry, when they have a chance to profitably substitute capital for labor, they'll do that. They're probably making a mistake thinking that so-called Artificial Intelligence (a grotesque misnomer) is where they'll make the big bucks in the future, but just because they're doing that with fewer computer programmers than they formerly employed doesn't mean they aren't engaged in technological research.

 Basic scientific research enterprises used to employ a lot of humans, whose job title was "computer." (They were mostly women.) Now that's no longer a job title because machines do it. And they can do computations that humans could never do. But just because fewer people are employed to do computation doesn't mean that computers meant less scientific research was happening.

 Gioia  seems to think that employment of computer programmers is the measure of investment in scientific research. That doesn't mean we don't have a problem, it just means that, once again, Gioia has misidentified it.

  

 

Sunday Sermonette: Fish story

As I say, the minor prophets are mostly just the same old "God is going to afflict you all with mass murder and torture and rape because you've been insufficiently devoted to him, and the terrorism will continue until morale improves." We don't need to keep reading the all very similar versions of this, but before we move on to the Christian Bible we do need to stop off with Jonah. Unlike the other minor prophets, it's mostly a narrative, rather than a lot of ranting. 

 

The prophet Jonah is mentioned in 2 Kings 14, which places him in the reign of Jeroboam II,  (786–746 BC), but the Book of Jonah doesn't mention a king or give a date. In any case, as usual, it was written long after the purported events it describes, as is evident from its use of Aramaic words and sources. It is generally considered to be a work of fiction, even satirical in intent. It is often retold, however, and is well known. Joppa was a port in Israel. Jonah was trying to flee to Tarshish, which was probably in the western Mediterranean, i.e. modern Spain, which was at the time the end of the earth. By the way, the story is referenced in the song "It Ain't Necessarily So," from the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess. Ira Gershwin's lyric includes:

It ain't necessarily so, it ain't necessarily so
De t'ings dat yo' li'ble to read in de Bible
It ain't necessarily so . . .

Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale
Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale
Fo' he made his home in dat fish's abdomen
Oh, Jonah, he lived in de whale

It ain't necessarily so, it ain't necessarily so
Dey tell all you chillun de debble's a villun
But it ain't necessarily so.

I'm preachin' dis sermon to show
It ain't nessa, ain't nessa, ain't nessa, ain't nessa
Ain't necessarily so. 

 

 

1 The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: ² “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.”

³ But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.

⁴ Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. ⁵ All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship.

But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep. ⁶ The captain went to him and said, “How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god! Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish.”

⁷ Then the sailors said to each other, “Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity.” They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. ⁸ So they asked him, “Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What kind of work do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?”

⁹ He answered, “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”

¹⁰ This terrified them and they asked, “What have you done?” (They knew he was running away from the Lord, because he had already told them so.)

¹¹ The sea was getting rougher and rougher. So they asked him, “What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?”

¹² “Pick me up and throw me into the sea,” he replied, “and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.”

¹³ Instead, the men did their best to row back to land. But they could not, for the sea grew even wilder than before. ¹⁴ Then they cried out to the Lord, “Please, Lord, do not let us die for taking this man’s life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, Lord, have done as you pleased.” ¹⁵ Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. ¹⁶ At this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him.

Jonah’s Prayer

¹⁷ Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

 

Gioia Part Three

I almost put this post back in the queue because of the political assassinations in Minnesota, but I'll wait till we know all the facts about that before I comment. I've been poking holes in Gioia's essay but please understand I wouldn't bother if I didn't think there was a lot there that's worth thinking about. I just want us to be clear and precise in our thinking so these are intended as constructive criticisms. His part three headline is "(3) The career path for knowledge workers is breaking down—and many only have unpaid student loans to show for their years of training and preparation." 

 

This claim is difficult to evaluate because he gives a single, and in my view highly inapt example:

 

The shift here has been rapid and shocking. Not long ago, students were told “learn to code”—and that three-word phrase summed up the dominant worldview. Hard knowledge and technical skills were priceless, and everything else was worthless, a waste of your tuition dollars. But now “learn to code” sounds like a joke. Knowledge workers are getting fired everywhere. Art history majors now have an easier time finding a job than computer engineers. 

 

First of all, aren't art history majors knowledge workers? As a matter of fact the linked article says that computer science majors have an unemployment rate of 7.5%, and nutritional science majors had an unemployment rare of .04%. So first of all, the vast majority of computer engineers are employed, and other categories of knowledge workers are doing quite well, thank you. Anyway, is coding really "knowledge work"? It's a technical job, sure, but it is incredibly tedious and it requires absolutely no judgment or self-reflection. Coders have no responsibility for the uses to which their work will be put, and the work is no more interesting or intrinsically rewarding than bolting cars together. 

 

There may be a canary in the coal mine phenomenon going on here -- there may be. Computer programming is increasingly automated -- i.e., computers now write computer code. It still needs checking and fixing by humans, but the number of people needed to do that is fewer than when people were drafting all the code in the first place. So computing technology is indeed replacing human labor. Of course word processing long ago displaced most secretaries, and travel agencies have also largely gone the way of the hansom cab driver. The printing press put scribes out of business. Technology has been displacing human brains as well as brawn for a long time. Maybe that process is accelerating but the returns to a college education are still greater than ever. 

 

So no, just because computer programs aren't in as much demand as they were four years ago doesn't mean that the knowledge system is collapsing or that human knowledge and cognitive skills are already obsolete. In and of itself, it doesn't mean much at all.  

 

Gioia on expertise: Part Two

 Recall that on Monday I started to discuss this essay by Ted Gioia, and I argue that he has misunderstood the so-called "replication crisis." Scientists and philosophers of science have long known that many published findings are incorrect. Science isn't always right, but it gets more right over time. Furthermore, there is an increasingly influential movement away from frequentist statistics toward Bayesian statistics. Without getting too technical, I'll just say that there is a growing tendency to express findings in terms of probabilities rather than definitive conclusions. 

 

While I think this is more epistemologically valid, ironically, perhaps, it is precisely the reluctance of scientists to speak with absolute certainty that has undermined some people's respect for expertise.  Gioia goes on to a second assertion, that "Public distrust of experts has reached an intensity never seen before." However, the example he gives has nothing to do with "public" distrust, but rather with the specific actions of the Trump Administration to expel federal employees who disagree with or might undermine Dear Leader. He goes on to state that:

The only experts who still possess authority are blue collar ones. The public still wants to hire the best plumber or car mechanic or hair stylist, and will pay more if these workers have established a reputation for expertise. But the expertise of white collar professionals is derided at every turn. 

 Well, I don't know how people feel about civil engineers or economists, but while public trust of physicians and hospitals in general did decline during the Covid 19 pandemic,   this was a recent and contingent phenomenon, and: 

Overall, 78% of people say they trust their primary doctor. Significant differences exist, however, between different groups of people, with older adults (90%), white people (82%), and high-income individuals (89%) being much more likely to say they trust their doctors. Among people who report lower trust in their doctors, 25% said their doctor spends too little time with them and 14% said their doctor does not know or listen to them.  

In fact, in 2019, "Some 91.9% of respondents said they had trust in doctors. In the survey, physicians outranked six other professions including IT workers, plumbers, ride-hailing or taxi drivers, housecleaners and auto mechanics." 

 

Sorry Ted. It turns out that  most people do indeed trust their physicians more than they trust their plumber or car mechanic, and those who do not aren't doubting their physicians' expertise, they aren't liking how they interact. 

 

The fact is that most of the quacks who tout "alternative" medicine do in fact have M.D.s, which they proudly and aggressively tout. The father of the vaccine/autism fraud, Andrew Wakefield, is a medical doctor (no longer licensed) who published his fraudulent findings in The Lancet, the most prestigious medical journal there is. The prominent climate change skeptics (of whom few to none are left) all have Ph.D.s. The problem is not that people don't trust experts, it's that there are a whole lot of people out there claiming to be experts who are actually full of shit.   

I agree this is a problem, but it's not the same problem Gioia is writing about. Part Three next. 

Wednesday Bible Study

As I say, the minor prophets are mostly just the same old prophecies of God's wrath on the people and maybe a restoration. Most of them are rooted in the decline and destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel. So I'll just finish up Hosea with the last chapter, which is the bit about restoration, after several chapters of denunciation of Israel's apostasy and predictions of God's wrath. Then we'll move on to Joel.

 

Joel is mercifully short -- just three chapters in the KJV and NIV, though other versions divide it into four. Scholars also disagree wildly on when it was written. Anyway, it depicts hard times in Israel, including a plague of locusts, although some think that's intended metaphorically. Whatever. Anyway, the third and last chapter is the cliched promise of restoration, so we'll just cut to that, and go on to Amos next time. 

Joel 3 is noteworthy because it consciously reverses the famous passage in Isaiah about beating swords into plowshares. Israel is going to again become militarily powerful, so it needs to beats its plowshares into swords. I presume Netanyahu has been reading this.

3 ^[a]“In those days and at that time,
    when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem,
² I will gather all nations
    and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat.^[b]
There I will put them on trial
    for what they did to my inheritance, my people Israel,
because they scattered my people among the nations
    and divided up my land.
³ They cast lots for my people
    and traded boys for prostitutes;
    they sold girls for wine to drink.

⁴ “Now what have you against me, Tyre and Sidon and all you regions of Philistia? Are you repaying me for something I have done? If you are paying me back, I will swiftly and speedily return on your own heads what you have done. ⁵ For you took my silver and my gold and carried off my finest treasures to your temples.^{[c] 6} You sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks, that you might send them far from their homeland.

⁷ “See, I am going to rouse them out of the places to which you sold them, and I will return on your own heads what you have done. ⁸ I will sell your sons and daughters to the people of Judah, and they will sell them to the Sabeans, a nation far away.” The Lord has spoken.

⁹ Proclaim this among the nations:
    Prepare for war!
Rouse the warriors!
    Let all the fighting men draw near and attack.
¹⁰ Beat your plowshares into swords
    and your pruning hooks into spears.
Let the weakling say,
    “I am strong!”
¹¹ Come quickly, all you nations from every side,
    and assemble there.

Bring down your warriors, Lord!

¹² “Let the nations be roused;
    let them advance into the Valley of Jehoshaphat,
for there I will sit
    to judge all the nations on every side.
¹³ Swing the sickle,
    for the harvest is ripe.
Come, trample the grapes,
    for the winepress is full
    and the vats overflow—
so great is their wickedness!”

¹⁴ Multitudes, multitudes
    in the valley of decision!
For the day of the Lord is near
    in the valley of decision.
¹⁵ The sun and moon will be darkened,
    and the stars no longer shine.
¹⁶ The Lord will roar from Zion
    and thunder from Jerusalem;
    the earth and the heavens will tremble.
But the Lord will be a refuge for his people,
    a stronghold for the people of Israel.

Blessings for God’s People

¹⁷ “Then you will know that I, the Lord your God,
    dwell in Zion, my holy hill.
Jerusalem will be holy;
    never again will foreigners invade her.

¹⁸ “In that day the mountains will drip new wine,
    and the hills will flow with milk;
    all the ravines of Judah will run with water.
A fountain will flow out of the Lord’s house
    and will water the valley of acacias.^[d]
19 But Egypt will be desolate,
    Edom a desert waste,
because of violence done to the people of Judah,
    in whose land they shed innocent blood.
²⁰ Judah will be inhabited forever
    and Jerusalem through all generations.
²¹ Shall I leave their innocent blood unavenged?
    No, I will not.”

The Lord dwells in Zion!

Footnotes

1. Joel 3:1 In Hebrew texts 3:1-21 is numbered 4:1-21.
2. Joel 3:2 Jehoshaphat means the Lord judges; also in verse 12.
3. Joel 3:5 Or palaces
4. Joel 3:18 Or Valley of Shittim

 

A provocative essay

Ted Goia sees the declining trust in expertise as the harbinger of what I will call a new epistemological era,  comparable to the Renaissance, or the enlightenment, or the rise of the monotheistic religions. He calls it the collapse of the knowledge system. He's a little vague about what he expects to take the place of science as the standard for belief and understanding, and he gets a few things wrong, but it's a conversation starter. He writes:

 

The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime—and for our parents and grandparents—is collapsing. And it’s taking place everywhere, all at once.

If this were just an isolated situation—a problem in universities, or media, or politics—the current hierarchy could possibly survive. But that isn’t the case.The crisis has spread into every sector of society which relies on clear knowledge and respected authority.

Some things he gets wrong:

He exaggerates the so-called "replicability crisis," writing that "40% or more of published studies fail to replicate." This is incorrect, and he evidently did not carefully read the source he cites, or the source on which it is based.  The 39% replication rate is in the field of social psychology only. Two-thirds of studies in other fields of science have been found to replicate. Furthermore, this is not a surprise to actual scientists. We are very well aware of the many reasons why initial findings may not bear up under further scrutiny, and there is an entire field called meta-analysis in which findings from multiple studies of the same research question or phenomenon are combined to yield a more reliable conclusion, based on the well-known fact that they often do not agree. 

 

The real problem is not with science in general, but with the field of social psychology, which unfortunately has developed a non-rigorous culture. Social psychology experiments are typically done with small numbers of subjects, often students in the professor's class, using shoddy methods and testing unlikely premises. In fact, a good deal of fraud has been uncovered in the field. Some of these bogus conclusions make for good TED talks or fodder for marketing consultants, so they get undeserved attention. 

 

Historically, science has often taken wrong turns, or generated heated debates among opposing partisans. This is not new. And yes, wrong ideas can become entrenched for too long. It has been said that we have to wait for their champions to retire or die and a new generation to come up through the ranks to get rid of them. It's a bit too technical for me to go into deeply here, but there is a strong intellectual current at the moment to use Bayesian, rather than frequentist methods for testing hypotheses. Bayesian statistics accommodates uncertainty and allows us to update our degree of confidence in a proposition by updating existing evidence with new observations, and to factor in the plausibility or quality of evidence in the process. As standards for scientific writing start to place more emphasis on the degree of confidence in findings, the replicability problem no longer seems so critical.

 

He is on firmer ground with most of his other observations. Public trust in scientific expertise is certainly on the decline, at least in the U.S. I'll be at a conference all day tomorrow so I may not be able to continue this discussion until Wednesday, but I promise  I will then. 

 

Sunday Sermonette: Minor prophets

I should have said earlier that with Hosea, we're into the so-called minor prophets. These are the last section of the Christian Old Testament but in the Tanakh, they are grouped with the other prophets, and the last section is called the Ketuvim, or writings. These are Psalms, Proverbs, and Job, which are grouped together and written in a special two column form to emphasize their poetic structure; the so-called Megillot, or scrolls, consisting of the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther; and Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. We have already read all of these. 

 

The main reason the minor prophets are minor is because the books are relatively short, but they're also relatively unimportant theologically. They are quite repetitive in theme -- they're mostly about how the people haven't properly worshiped God so he's going to punish them with atrocities, and then there may be a promise of redemption. By now you know that this tiresome theme runs throughout the Tanakh, and it's getting very stale by now. Accordingly, I will skip through the minor prophets and get us on to the New Testament shortly, because this is all very boring. 

 

Chapter Three of Hosea is quite bizarre. He's required to act out the boring story by buying back his former wife, symbolizing the eventual redemption. Chapter four is the same old same old, God making terroristic threats. As I say, we'll skip past much of this.

 

3 The Lord said to me, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.”

² So I bought her for fifteen shekels^[a] of silver and about a homer and a lethek^[b] of barley. ³ Then I told her, “You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will behave the same way toward you.”

⁴ For the Israelites will live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without ephod or household gods. ⁵ Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the Lord and to his blessings in the last days.

Footnotes

1. Hosea 3:2 That is, about 6 ounces or about 170 grams
2. Hosea 3:2 A homer and a lethek possibly weighed about 430 pounds or about 195 kilograms.

4 Hear the word of the Lord, you Israelites,
    because the Lord has a charge to bring
    against you who live in the land:
“There is no faithfulness, no love,
    no acknowledgment of God in the land.
² There is only cursing,^[a] lying and murder,
    stealing and adultery;
they break all bounds,
    and bloodshed follows bloodshed.
³ Because of this the land dries up,
    and all who live in it waste away;
the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky
    and the fish in the sea are swept away.

⁴ “But let no one bring a charge,
    let no one accuse another,
for your people are like those
    who bring charges against a priest.
⁵ You stumble day and night,
    and the prophets stumble with you.
So I will destroy your mother—
⁶     my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge.

“Because you have rejected knowledge,
    I also reject you as my priests;
because you have ignored the law of your God,
    I also will ignore your children.
⁷ The more priests there were,
    the more they sinned against me;
    they exchanged their glorious God^[b] for something disgraceful.
⁸ They feed on the sins of my people
    and relish their wickedness.
⁹ And it will be: Like people, like priests.
    I will punish both of them for their ways
    and repay them for their deeds.

¹⁰ “They will eat but not have enough;
    they will engage in prostitution but not flourish,
because they have deserted the Lord
    to give themselves ¹¹ to prostitution;
old wine and new wine
    take away their understanding.
¹² My people consult a wooden idol,
    and a diviner’s rod speaks to them.
A spirit of prostitution leads them astray;
    they are unfaithful to their God.
¹³ They sacrifice on the mountaintops
    and burn offerings on the hills,
under oak, poplar and terebinth,
    where the shade is pleasant.
Therefore your daughters turn to prostitution
    and your daughters-in-law to adultery.

¹⁴ “I will not punish your daughters
    when they turn to prostitution,
nor your daughters-in-law
    when they commit adultery,
because the men themselves consort with harlots
    and sacrifice with shrine prostitutes—
    a people without understanding will come to ruin!

¹⁵ “Though you, Israel, commit adultery,
    do not let Judah become guilty.

“Do not go to Gilgal;
    do not go up to Beth Aven.^[c]
    And do not swear, ‘As surely as the Lord lives!’
¹⁶ The Israelites are stubborn,
    like a stubborn heifer.
How then can the Lord pasture them
    like lambs in a meadow?
¹⁷ Ephraim is joined to idols;
    leave him alone!
¹⁸ Even when their drinks are gone,
    they continue their prostitution;
    their rulers dearly love shameful ways.
¹⁹ A whirlwind will sweep them away,
    and their sacrifices will bring them shame.

Footnotes

1. Hosea 4:2 That is, to pronounce a curse on
2. Hosea 4:7 Syriac (see also an ancient Hebrew scribal tradition); Masoretic Text me; / I will exchange their glory
3. Hosea 4:15 Beth Aven means house of wickedness (a derogatory name for Bethel, which means house of God).

 

1.  
2.  

 

Wednesday Bible Study: What's in a name?

Hosea 2 will seem very strange and puzzling, especially to people who don't speak Hebrew and can only read it in translation. The metaphor of Israel as God's "wife" explains much of the imagery. It's bizarre but I'll just leave it at that. What's going on in Verse 16 requires explanation. "Baal" in Hebrew is a word meaning lord or master and it was an appellation of Yahweh. However, it is also the name of the Canaanite storm god, who evidently some of the Israelites had built shrines to, which is what this whole rant is ultimately about. So the big guy in the sky wants them to stop calling him Baal, which just creates confusion and perhaps legitimizes worship of the Canaanite storm god, who maybe people are conflating with him? Something like that. Anyway, it's just one more example of the absurdities of religion.

 

2 ^[a]“Say of your brothers, ‘My people,’ and of your sisters, ‘My loved one.’

Israel Punished and Restored

² “Rebuke your mother, rebuke her,
    for she is not my wife,
    and I am not her husband.
Let her remove the adulterous look from her face
    and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.
³ Otherwise I will strip her naked
    and make her as bare as on the day she was born;
I will make her like a desert,
    turn her into a parched land,
    and slay her with thirst.
⁴ I will not show my love to her children,
    because they are the children of adultery.
⁵ Their mother has been unfaithful
    and has conceived them in disgrace.
She said, ‘I will go after my lovers,
    who give me my food and my water,
    my wool and my linen, my olive oil and my drink.’
⁶ Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes;
    I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.
⁷ She will chase after her lovers but not catch them;
    she will look for them but not find them.
Then she will say,
    ‘I will go back to my husband as at first,
    for then I was better off than now.’
⁸ She has not acknowledged that I was the one
    who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil,
who lavished on her the silver and gold—
    which they used for Baal.

⁹ “Therefore I will take away my grain when it ripens,
    and my new wine when it is ready.
I will take back my wool and my linen,
    intended to cover her naked body.
¹⁰ So now I will expose her lewdness
    before the eyes of her lovers;
    no one will take her out of my hands.
¹¹ I will stop all her celebrations:
    her yearly festivals, her New Moons,
    her Sabbath days—all her appointed festivals.
¹² I will ruin her vines and her fig trees,
    which she said were her pay from her lovers;
I will make them a thicket,
    and wild animals will devour them.
¹³ I will punish her for the days
    she burned incense to the Baals;
she decked herself with rings and jewelry,
    and went after her lovers,
    but me she forgot,”
declares the Lord.

¹⁴ “Therefore I am now going to allure her;
    I will lead her into the wilderness
    and speak tenderly to her.
¹⁵ There I will give her back her vineyards,
    and will make the Valley of Achor^[b] a door of hope.
There she will respond^[c] as in the days of her youth,
    as in the day she came up out of Egypt.

¹⁶ “In that day,” declares the Lord,
    “you will call me ‘my husband’;
    you will no longer call me ‘my master.^[d]’
¹⁷ I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips;
    no longer will their names be invoked.
¹⁸ In that day I will make a covenant for them
    with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky
    and the creatures that move along the ground.
Bow and sword and battle
    I will abolish from the land,
    so that all may lie down in safety.
¹⁹ I will betroth you to me forever;
    I will betroth you in^[e] righteousness and justice,
    in^[f] love and compassion.
²⁰ I will betroth you in^[g] faithfulness,
    and you will acknowledge the Lord.

²¹ “In that day I will respond,”
    declares the Lord—
“I will respond to the skies,
    and they will respond to the earth;
²² and the earth will respond to the grain,
    the new wine and the olive oil,
    and they will respond to Jezreel.^[h]
23 I will plant her for myself in the land;
    I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one.^[i]’
I will say to those called ‘Not my people,^[j]’ ‘You are my people’;
    and they will say, ‘You are my God.’”

Footnotes

1. Hosea 2:1 In Hebrew texts 2:1-23 is numbered 2:3-25.
2. Hosea 2:15 Achor means trouble.
3. Hosea 2:15 Or sing
4. Hosea 2:16 Hebrew baal
5. Hosea 2:19 Or with
6. Hosea 2:19 Or with
7. Hosea 2:20 Or with
8. Hosea 2:22 Jezreel means God plants.
9. Hosea 2:23 Hebrew Lo-Ruhamah (see 1:6)
10. Hosea 2:23 Hebrew Lo-Ammi (see 1:9)