- What the search for meaning actually means;
- How AI apps fulfill religious needs;
- Reasons why math scores are falling;
- Short items about Nick Fuentes, people fired for criticizing Charlie Kirk, Trump and the Saudi crown prince, and RFK Jr.’s miasma theory.
- Robert Reich on honor and shame.
Thought for the day. It’s been long established that primitive human nature involved searching for patterns in the environment, to detect causes and effects that could be relied on for survival. And this in fact led to the development of the human mind, but also a lot of false positives, i.e. apparent causes that did not actually exist. Thus superstitions. And, now is my thought, the idea that every effect, even human existence, must have a cause, is the origin of the persistence human pursuit of “meaning”. What is the “meaning” of life? Perhaps that notion is a projection based on the need for survival, and doesn’t actually exist in the universe. Perhaps we just are.
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This story has been floating around in various forms for a few weeks. It means more than what most people think it means.
Axios, Jessica Boehm, Russell Contreras, Isaac Avilucea, 17 Nov 2025: AI arrives at church: How chatbots are shaking up religion
A new digital awakening is unfolding in some churches, where pastors and prayer apps are turning to artificial intelligence to reach worshippers, personalize sermons and power chatbots that supposedly resemble God.
Why it matters: Some users say AI is helping churches stay relevant in the face of shrinking staff, empty pews and growing online audiences. But the practice raises new questions about who, or what, is guiding the flock.
State of play: New AI-powered apps allow you to “text with Jesus” or “talk to the Bible,” giving the impression you are communicating with a deity or angel.
The Week summarizes several stories on his topic in this morning’s report, posted separately here: God is now just one text away because of AI subtitled “People can talk to a higher power through AI chatbots”
They say God is always with you, and now that includes in your pocket. From chatbot Jesus to AI-written sermons, churches are using the technology to try to get more people engaged with religion. AI could improve access and allow pastors more freedom for hands-on work, but it may not be effective in drawing in the masses.
My comments: People, people, remember what AI does, which is to gather as much information as it can from the web, from digitized books and other sources, and generate replies to queries that it thinks *look like* what such replies should be.
There’s nothing *there*, there’s no man behind the curtain. To the extent these AI bots are useful to people, they are fooling themselves. But that, to my mind, is always what religion has done: feed back what the user wants to hear. There’s no there there.
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Why is this happening?
The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch, 19 Nov 2025: ‘A Recipe for Idiocracy’, subtitled “What happens when even college students can’t do math anymore?”
For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.
Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with “logical thinking” than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems.
A couple obvious culprits spring to mind. But let’s not jump to conclusions.
One theory is that the attention-shredding influence of phones and social media is to blame. The dip in math scores coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones; by 2015, nearly three-quarters of high-school-aged kids had access to one. A related possibility is that technology is making students complacent. Emelianenko told me that students “are just not engaged in math classes anymore”; they seem to believe that they don’t need to learn math, because they can use AI instead.
Or maybe the pandemic “supercharged the decline.” Or maybe it’s because universities phased out using test scores from the SAT and ACT, that filtered out those not good at math. There’s no one clean answer here (as there seldom is in life) but the problem is real.
“Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?” Brian Conrad, a Stanford math professor, told me. “The premise that foundational ideas don’t need to be learned anymore is a recipe for idiocracy.”
Referring to the 2006 film, which is a hoot.
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Items briefly noted.
- The New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang, 18 Nov 2025: Nick Fuentes Is Not Just Another Alt-Right Boogeyman, subtitled “The rise of the white-nationalist streamer should worry us even more than it already does.” — — Noted, but I think I’ve heard enough about this guy for a while. I have better things to do. If he becomes a danger, I’ll come back and read this.
- JMG, 19 Nov 2025 (from Reuters): Reuters: Hundreds Were Fired For Criticizing Kirk — — Free speech! as conservatives claim to venerate.
- PolitiFact, 18 Nov 2025: US intelligence report on journalist’s murder contradicts Trump’s defense of Saudi crown prince — — A more important story than I’m giving it due here, but there are so many such stories.
- The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu, 19 Nov 2025: RFK Jr.’s Miasma Theory of Health Is Spreading, subtitled “The NIH is picking up Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s argument that a healthy immune system can keep even pandemic germs at bay.” — — Humanity cannot bear very much reality; we keep slipping back into intuitive, and wrong, takes on the world. The miasma theory of health is like flat-eartherism. This is another piece of evidence about a very serious, existential threat to human existence — the limitations of human cognition.
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OK, here’s more on the third item just above.
Robert Reich, 19 Nov 2025: Honor and Shame in the Era of Trump and Epstein, subtitled “Honor comes with wealth. The only exception is pedophilia.”
When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) arrived at the White House yesterday, he was met by a Marine band, officers on horseback carrying the Saudi and American flags, and fighter jets flying over the White House in a V formation.
It was far more pomp than visiting foreign leaders normally receive.
What had the crown prince done to merit such honor from the United States?
He has helped broker a tentative peace between Hamas and Israel. But so have Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates.
The real reason for the honor is that MBS and the Saudis are doing lots of business with Trump’s family — and this visit is part of the payoff.
It’s MBS’s effort to rehabilitate his reputation after Saudi operatives murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and chopped his body into pieces with a bone saw — a killing that U.S. intelligence determined was greenlit by MBS.
But in yesterday’s joint Oval Office appearance — freighted with flattery between Trump and MBS — Trump brushed off a reporter’s question about MBS and the murder.
“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen,” said Trump, referring to Khashoggi.
Things happen?
Once again, Trump and MAGA are nothing about law and order, or even civilized life. They are about authoritarian power.
