I don’t think it would be useful to ask AI whether a particular argument is best explained by motivated reasoning. But you can ask AI what an argument from motivated reasoning would look like, and compare the result to arguments that have been made.

Here’s an example from biblical scholarship.

A friend — most reasonably — asked why. This is an answer.

For a long time, I have been — what is the word? — devoted to John’s Gospel, and John’s letters.

There is something mesmerizing about them. I see it — feel it — at once with the start of John’s Gospel:

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made;

without him nothing was made that has been made.

In him was life,

and that life was the light of all mankind.

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness has not overcome it.

There is architecture there. You have to look up, in awe.

It is as if you have entered a room, to find an old man, half in prayer, half teaching — talking to himself, but speaking into history. You can almost hear him saying, perhaps muttering (interlinear English / Greek):

En archē ēn ho logos,

kai ho logos ēn pros ton theon,

kai theos ēn ho logos.

And you can also feel — this man loves — worships — his friend, who spoke so fully, who lived as he did. A few verses on at the start of the Gospel:

The Word became flesh

and made his dwelling among us.

We have seen his glory,

the glory of the one and only Son,

who came from the Father,

full of grace and truth.

The letters read like the same old man — the elder — as he talks, astonished, about what he has seen:

We are writing to you about something which has always existed yet which we ourselves actually saw and heard: something which we had an opportunity to observe closely and even to hold in our hands, and yet, as we know now, was something of the very Word of life himself! For it was life which appeared before us: we saw it, we are eye-witnesses of it, and are now writing to you about it. It was the very life of all ages, the life that has always existed with the Father, which actually became visible in person to us mortal men. We repeat, we really saw and heard what we are now writing to you about.

That’s how I read it. It’s almost like music, like a long, beautiful song, full of structure and detail, but yet, nothing could be different; once it is written, we see it must be as it is.

That’s how I read it, but then I read many commentators, and historians, and they say — well, he can’t be an eye-witness, why does Jesus speak in this way, it doesn’t sound like the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke), how did a fisherman learn to write Greek like that, where do they come from, all these long speeches by Jesus, surely this “John” did not remember them?

And for many of those commentators, the answer is — it’s just some person, we know not who, who made it up — it’s a fantasy — a fake; it’s a story, maybe a lovely story, but nothing but.

I was mystified by that conclusion. The Gospel just doesn’t read that way — in part because it is just so astonishing, unlike anything else in the world before and during and after the New Testament. What kind of mind was this, that could make that up? And how, in God’s name, did the church and every scholar since that time, lose track of this writer, perhaps the most gifted of all antiquity? Or, it is really true, as some have said, that there was some set of people, who all learned to talk this way, and wrote in John’s name — although, strikingly, he is not named in the Gospel or the letters.

I hadn’t read anything like the Gospel or letters of John, but perhaps there were others who wrote that way. So I went reading, and no, there are no others who wrote that way. I’ve read quite a lot of early church writing now — some of it is boring, some it is silly and credulous, some of it is moving and impressive, but there is nothing anything like the Gospel or the letters.

And I began to wonder, as you can see in some of my posts: is this — the historical study of early church writing — just another field that has fallen into irrelevance with capture by the need for cleverness, for ostentatious learning, for novelty — for fascinating speculations? Has that study wandered into some faint and fantasy realm where they just cannot see — as Lightfoot puts it above — the “historical position in all its bearings”.

Now I read, and read, and forget, trying to keep track of what has happened, what has been said, analysing arguments to find those that are foolish, speculative — and those that are sound, and must be answered.

Of course it’s hard. As Lightfoot says, many, perhaps not most of the people writing about these matters, do have good arguments, that must be answered. But many, perhaps most, perhaps the same people, make assertions that are far too strong, or must be wrong. It is rocky, uneven ground, and full of houses set up, taken down, in ruins, or ruined and rebuilt.

In this strange landscape, I wonder — who did write John? The writer writes very simple Greek, as you can feel in the English — with simpler syntax and a smaller vocabulary than the other Gospel writers. He knows many things about the world of the Gospel that an eye-witness would know, and a forger would not. Maybe it was John, the brother of James, the fisherman. Maybe it was someone else. Now would we know — without falling into safety or speculation?

It’s another one of those big problems — how would I know if I was wrong? — especially here, where I have strong engagements.

That is why.

The quote below is at the end of an essay on Polycarp of Smyrna that he wrote in response to the then-anonymous author of the book Supernatural Religion (1874). In this, and other essays responding to the book, collected in Lightfoot (1889), he is clearly frustrated by what he regards (with much supporting evidence) as the writer’s sloppy, incompetent and partisan analysis of the early church writers. His essay on Polycarp ends (p141) by acknowledging his debts to the critical German theologians of his day, but appealing to his readers “to exercise their judicial faculties independently” in order to see past “fascinating speculations” to understand the “historical position in all its bearings” of the early church writers:

But I would wish to add one caution. No good will ever come from merely working on the lines of modern theorists. Perhaps the reader will forgive me if I add a few words of explanation, for I do not wish to be misunderstood. I should be most ungrateful if, in speaking of German writers, I used the language of mere depreciation. If there is any recent theologian from whom I have learnt more than from another, it is the German Neander. Nor can I limit my obligations to men of this stamp. All diligent students of early Christian history must have derived the greatest advantage on special points from the conscientious research, and frequently also from the acute analysis, even of writers of the most extreme school. But it is high time that the incubus of fascinating speculations should be shaken off, and that Englishmen should learn to exercise their judicial faculty independently. Any one who will take the pains to read Irenaeus through carefully, endeavouring to enter into his historical position in all its bearings, striving to realize what he and his contemporaries actually thought about the writings of the New Testament and what grounds they had for thinking it, and, above all, resisting the temptation to read in modern theories between the lines, will be in a more favourable position for judging rightly of the early history of the Canon than if he had studied all the monographs which have issued from the German press during the last half century.

The central question

Church tradition has the apostle John as the author of the Gospel according to John, and the three letters of John (1 John, 2 John, 3 John).

By “the apostle John” I mean John, son of Zebedee, brother of James, one of the twelve named apostles in the Gospels. At the beginning of e.g. Mark (Mark 1:16-20), he is a fisherman, working in a business with his brother and father:

Now walking beside the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother, sons of Simon, casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, Come-here after me and I will make you to become fishermen of men. And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And he advanced a few feet from there and saw James and John his brother, the sons of Zebedee, and they were in the ship mending the nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee with the hired-hands in the ship and went after him. (Modern Literal Version - MLV)¹

For reasons that will soon become clear, I will call this person “John son of Zebedee” or JsZ for short.

For the moment, I’ll assume that there is a single primary author of John’s Gospel. Let’s say we don’t know who that author is. So we’ll call this person the “Author of John’s Gospel” or AJG for short.

For reasons I won’t detail here, but discussed in Lightfoot (1904) (chapter I, p3) and most famously described in (dodd1963historical?), there is internal evidence that AJG knew geographical and historical details of first-century Palestine and Jerusalem and Judaism, that make it tempting to assume that AJG was an eye-witness. JsZ would have been such an eye-witness. But was he the author of John?

The Gospel itself indicates that it was written by “the disciple whom Jesus loved”, otherwise written as “the beloved disciple”. From John 21:21-22,24:

But Peter turned again and sees the disciple whom Jesus loved following; who also leaned-back upon his chest at the supper and who had said, Lord, who is he who is giving you up? … This is the disciple who is testifying concerning these things and wrote these things and we know that his testimony is true.

For various reasons, it seems likely that we are to understand it was this disciple who was the “other disciple” that went with Peter to the house of the High Priest while Jesus was being tried (John 18:15-16):

Now Simon Peter was following Jesus and the other disciple. Now that disciple was known to the high-priest and entered in together-with Jesus into the courtyard of the high-priest; but Peter stood outside before the door. Therefore, the other disciple, who was known to the high-priest, went forth and spoke to the doorkeeper and led in Peter. (MLV)

It’s possible, but hard, to see how a fisherman, even someone who worked in a business with hired hands, would have been “known to the high-priest”.

One response to this and other difficulties, is to suggest that John, the beloved disciple, was a disciple named John, other than JsZ. Martin Hengel made this proposal in Hengel (1989), followed by Bauckham (1993) and others.

However, there is a hard test for this hypothesis, in the form of Irenaeus of Lyons. He wrote several works in the late second century, listed below, that cite John and refer to the authorship of the Gospel and letters. He would have had good reason to know who had written the Gospel and letters, because he had been a disciple of Polycarp (c69 AD - c155 AD), who had in turn been taught by a John who had seen Jesus. Irenaeus writes, in IF II (letter to Florinus):

I can even describe the place where the blessed Polycarp used to sit and discourse — his going out, too, and his coming in — his general mode of life and personal appearance, together with the discourses which he delivered to the people; also how he would speak of his familiar intercourse with John, and with the rest of those who had seen the Lord; and how he would call their words to remembrance.

As we will see, it must be this John that Irenaeus believes to be AJG.

So, there is a strong eye-witness tradition linking AJG to Irenaeus, through Polycarp, and perhaps through Pothinus, Irenaeus’ predecessor as Bishop of Lyons, who may also have been a disciple of Polycarp.

The test for the Hengel / Bauckham hypothesis, is whether Irenaeus’ substantial extant writings can reasonably be read on the understanding that Irenaeus knew that AJG was not JsZ, but another disciple of Jesus, also called John.

That is the theme for the rest of the page, starting with some discussion and summary, and ending with all evidence I could bring to bear from Irenaeus’ writing.

As J B. Lightfoot points out, it is worth reading Irenaeus directly on his testimony to the four Gospels, and especially John:

If any reader is really in earnest on [the four-Gospel Canon], I will ask him to read Irenaeus and judge for himself. He will find many things for which perhaps he is not prepared, and which will jar with his preconceived ideas; but on the one point at issue I have no fear that I shall be accused of exaggeration. Indeed it is impossible to convey in a few paragraphs the whole force of an impression which is deepened by each successive page of a long and elaborate work. (Lightfoot 1889, p271)

To anticipate, it does seem to me that Irenaeus’ writing is compatible with AJG as JsZ, or with AJG being another of Jesus’ disciples, also called John. It’s striking that AJG in Irenaeus is very specifically and often called “the disciple of the Lord”, which seems to have been a familiar title of AJG, and no other disciple. Perhaps this suggests “the disciple whom Jesus loved” of the Gospel text.

See “Summary of results” below for more detail.

John’s gospel has the following in the description of the crucifixion (John 19:31-35):¹

Therefore, the Jews asked Pilate in-order-that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the Sabbath since it was the Preparation (for the day of that Sabbath was a great day), that their legs might be fractured and that they might be taken down.

Therefore, the soldiers came, and indeed fractured the legs of the first and of the other one who was crucified together-with him, but after they came upon Jesus, as they saw him the one who had already died, they did not fracture his legs; but one of the soldiers pierced his rib-cage with a spear and immediately blood and water came forth.

And he who has seen, has testified and his testimony is true and he knows that he says true things, in-order-that you might believe.

But — is this testimony true? I mean, did an eye-witness see blood and water come forth from the rib-cage of the dead Jesus?

One approach is physiological — it is to ask whether it is plausible that something like this would happen if cutting into the chest of a crucified man after death. It appears that the answer to this is Yes — severe flogging followed by crucifixion may lead to the build-up of effusions (fluid) in the linings of the heart and lungs. This in turn will appear as clear water-like fluid when someone cuts into the chest. See Edwards et al 1986 (On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ. Journal of the American Medical Association) for a discussion.²

Therefore, the water probably represented serous pleural and pericardial fluid, and would have preceded the flow of blood and been smaller in volume than the blood. Perhaps in the setting of hypovolemia and impending acute heart failure, pleural and pericardial effusions may have developed and would have added to the volume of apparent water.

So one model of the Gospel text would be that it is a direct or relayed account by an eye-witness who did indeed see blood and something like water, was surprised by it, thought it might be important, and so wrote it down, or told someone else, who wrote it down. And of course that person might also have come to think that this event had some deeper meaning, as the death of Jesus itself had a deeper meaning than the surface description, of another judicial execution. That is, the event happened, and looking back, the event can be seen as having deeper meaning.

Another model is that no-one saw this, and it did not happen, but someone thought we should believe it, in some sense, for the sake of a deeper meaning.

For example, Rudolf Bultmann had a complicated³ and now largely rejected⁴ theory of John’s Gospel where someone (the “ecclesiastical redactor”) assembled and edited and added to material from three different, now-lost written sources to form the current Gospel. The redactor “was anxious to make the Gospel more acceptable to the church by introducing doctrinal references…”⁵

Bultmann was confident that the “blood and water” event was a later and symbolic addition by the “ecclesiastical redactor”:

The ecclesiastical redaction has gained yet another and deeper meaning from the lance-thrust, in that it adds in v. 34b, καὶ ἐξῆλθεν εὐθὺς αἷμα καὶ ὕδωρ [and immediately there came out blood and water]. Doubtless a miracle is being recounted here, and equally doubtless this miracle has a definite meaning. It can scarcely be other than that in the death of Jesus on the cross the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper have their foundation.⁶

It seems to me that part of his argument is that — because the event can be seen to have symbolic meaning — it is likely it was invented.

Of course, we don’t know whether Bultmann would have written differently if he was aware that it was quite plausible that an eye-witness to the soldier’s spear would have seen something like blood and water spill from the wound.

It’s the one-word rephrasing of what people mean when they use terms like “bringing them to heel”, or “it’s the only language these people understand” or “we should bring them to their knees”.

It’s the magical thinking that led Germany to waste its war effort on bombing London, and the Allies to waste their war effort in bombing civilians in Germany, and the US to waste their war effort in bombing Vietnam.

Kratopistia derives from two Greek words:

• kratos : strength, power, power over (something or someone).
• pistis : trust, faith, confidence, assurance, credence.

Thus kratopistia is (over-)confidence in (the use of) power.

Tolstoy refers to this idea in his posthumous (1919) book: The Pathway of Life. The book is a compilation of thoughts and meditations. It has a section devoted to “Force”. One sub-section is “The Inefficiency of Force”:

There are only two ways of directing human activities: one is to gain the inclination and to convince the reasoning, and the other to compel a man to act against his inclinations and against his reasoning. The first method is proved by experience and is always crowned by success, and the other is employed by ignorance and always results in disappointment.

Another sub-section is “Ruinous Effects of the Superstition of Force”.

[1] That evil which men think to ward off with force is incomparably less than the harm they do to themselves when defending themselves by force.

…

[7]. If it were asked how man could strip himself entirely of moral responsibility and commit the most evil deeds without a feeling of guilt, a more effective means could not be devised than the superstition that force can promote the well-being of people.

Otto Kohn deals with a related idea in his 1937 book Force or Reason: Issues of the Twentieth Century. The second chapter is “The Cult of Force”. For Kohn, the cult of force is not at heart a foolish error of judgment — the meaning I intend for kratopistia — but a dark cultural movement, a thirst for war and conquest. In the chapter: “The Cult of Force”:

… : the Cult of Force, the Dethronement of Reason, and the Crisis of Imperialism seem today to determine the political, intellectual and social life, at least in large parts of Europe and the Old World.

As a charming side-note, he follows this sentence directly with:

They have threatened least, perhaps, to become a dominant issue in the United States, and this circumstance seems to me to give a unique importance to the United States at the present time.

Later in the same chapter:

… Force has come to be seen as the great master-builder. Patience and compromise are laughed at. People do not try to convince their adversaries, to solve patiently difficult problems. They “liquidate” their enemies.

One side was the three Earp brothers (Virgil, Wyatt and Morgan), with Doc Holliday. The Earps all had pistols. Doc Holliday had a shotgun and a pistol.

The other was a selection of Cochise County Cowboys: Ike and Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Claiborne. But — Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne were unarmed, and, understandably - fled. It’s not clear whether Tom McLaury was armed or not.

An early shot hit Billy Clanton through his right wrist, so he was shooting left-handed for the rest of the fight.

So, at the start we have four armed people on one side, against either two or three armed people on the other, and where one of the two who were certainly armed was quickly disabled and shooting left-handed.

To quote the summary on that page:

How a new “woke” elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status …

He argues that “woke” language is used both defensively and offensively in jostling for position between what he calls “symbolic capitalists” — but let’s use elites as a shorthand.

Is that fair? Let’s consider a particular case.

There is an annual creative writing challenge called the National Novel Writing Month, usually shortened to NaNoWriMo. Quoting from that article:

[NaNoWriMo] is an annual creative writing challenge that takes place in November of each year. Participants are tasked with writing a 50,000-word novel draft by the end of the month

It used to have an associated non-profit organization, also called NaNoWriMo, but it closed down in mid-2025, amid significant scandal, and “ongoing financial problems”. By “scandal”, I mean (quoting the Guardian article) allegations of child grooming and “other complaints related to child safety”.

Obviously, one problem with the challenge in general, is that writing a novel at that speed becomes trivial if you ask AI to do it for you.

Meanwhile, as the various scandals developed, the organization posted to say that:

NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI. …

We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.

It continues in the same vein.

Among the many responses, BlueSky user “ceej” posted:

thanks to ai I just finished my nanowrimo novel a few months early. I’m excited to read it

I don’t think there can be any argument that the post on AI is at the far risible end of “woke” in al-Gharbi’s terms.

It is tempting to infer that using that language, to defend technology that would make it absurdly easy to submit a novel in the given time, is classic woke-washing, where the intent is to distract from a) the very strong reaction to AI among writers, and b) the scandals that the organization was trying to deal with.

I encourage you to look into these cases, as they are, quite clearly, absurd. Quite clearly, the correct explanation of these deaths and injuries is a combination of the known fact that sick babies can die, with chronic incompetence, arrogance and understaffing in the relevant intensive care unit. Unfortunately this was compounded by biased and incompetent expert advice to the investigation and court.

A panel of international experts, with much more convincing qualifications than those of the expert witnesses at trial, concluded that:

1. There was no medical evidence to support malfeasance causing death or injury in any of the 17 cases in the trial.
2. Death or injury of affected infants were due to natural causes or errors in medical care.
3. There were problems related to the medical care of patients at the Countess of Chester Hospital neonatal unit.
4. There were problems related to teamwork and inter-disciplinary collaboration at the Countess of Chester Hospital neonatal unit.

To give you a flavor of the absurdity, consider the case of baby K. A jury convicted Letby of attempted murder, of which more below. The judge said, in his sentencing:

… only you know the reason or reasons for your murderous campaign. … It was another shocking act of calculated, callous cruelty.

Now let us look at the evidence, reviewed by the international panel of experts. They identify baby K as “baby 11”. I’ll summarize, and then quote their conclusions in full.

In summary: baby K needed an endotracheal (breathing) tube. It was placed incompetently by the unit doctors, and the tube was too small. The doctors noticed that air wasn’t getting into the baby’s lungs as it should, but failed to understand that this was because they had put in a tube that was too small. Instead they concluded that Letby had displaced the tube, for which there was no evidence.

Here are the full conclusions of the international panel:

CONVICTION

The consultant alleged that Baby 11’s first episode of clinical deterioration was caused by deliberate dislodgment of her endotracheal tube, since bagging failed to move the chest and carbon dioxide was not detected by capnography. He alleged that the incubator alarms were deliberately turned off to prevent prompt rescue response because he did not hear the alarms when he entered the room.

PANEL OPINION

Baby 11 required a size 2.5 ETT [EndoTracheal Tube]. Instead, she was traumatically intubated with a size 2 ETT, with a resulting 94% air leak. As a result, ventilation was ineffective because 94% of the air was leaking out and only 6% was entering the lung. Effective gas exchange could not occur and mechanical ventilation could not generate sufficient pressure to keep the small air spaces in the lung open. This led to gradual collapse of the small air spaces in the lung and deteriorating gas exchange. When the tipping point was reached, the infant decompensated, desaturated and collapsed. Bagging to reopen the collapsed small air spaces in the lung requires relatively high pressures. With a 94% air leak, bagging with the Neopuff, which has a safety feature to limit air pressures, did not generate sufficient pressure to move the chest. Capnography did not work because the device measures build-up of carbon dioxide in the endotracheal tube during expiration, but with 94% air leak, the carbon dioxide could not build-up sufficiently to trigger measurement. There is no evidence to support dislodgement of the endotracheal tube. The consultant stated that he did not hear the alarms, but a nurse (not LL) stated that “When I returned to the unit, I immediately became aware of the alarms sounding from Baby 11’s incubator.”

CONCLUSIONS

1. There is no evidence to support a dislodged endotracheal tube.
2. The clinical deterioration was caused by use of an undersized endotracheal tube.
3. The initial intubation was traumatic and poorly supervised.
4. The consultant did not understand the basics of resuscitation, air leak, mechanical ventilation, and how equipment that were commonly used in the unit work, e.g. Neopuff and capnograph.
5. There is evidence that the incubator alarms were not turned off.

Commander Adama is speaking to President Adar, who leads the delegation to sign the armistice:

ADAR: Oh, surely you don’t cling to your suspicions about the Cylons? They asked for this armistice. They want peace.

ADAMA: Forgive me, Mr. President, but they hate us with every fiber of their existence. We love freedom, we love independence, to feel, to question, to resist oppression, but — to them, it’s an alien way of existing they will never accept.

From the episode 1 transcript.

I realized that I hadn’t heard this “they hate us for our freedom” phrasing since the second Iraq war. It sounded hollow and self-serving at the time, but it’s striking how poorly it has aged.

Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

The translation error is for the words “godly” and “godliness”. It’s a serious translation error because it conveys a meaning almost opposite to the one intended in the original Greek.

You can see the Greek with transliteration and translation in the Interlinear version of 1 Timothy 4.

You will see there, that “godliness” (above) is the translation for the Greek word εὐσέβεια (transliterated as eusebeia).

The plain English meaning of “godly” is being (more) like God.¹ The plain meaning of “godliness” is the property of being (more) like God.

However, this is not at all what eusebeia means.

As usual, you can follow the links from the word “eusebeia” in the Interlinear version above, to get the standard Strong’s concordance entry for eusebeia. This gives the meaning, directly but rather literally, as “well-reverence”.

“Eusebeia” consists of the common Greek stem eu-, meaning good, well done, balanced — suffixed with a version of the word sebomai, meaning to “personally esteem; to hold something (someone) in high respect; showing the reverence or awe (veneration) of someone who is devout.” Hence “well-reverence”.

William Barclay has a 10-page exposition on eusebeia in his book New Testament Words. He states that “The Greeks used eusebeia to translate the equally noble Latin word pietas. Pietas was the spirit of devotion to goodness, to honour, to goodness and to duty.” (Pietas has reached us in English as the word piety.) For example, Barclay notes that the Vulgate, a 4th century Latin translation of the Bible, uses “pietas” to translate eusebeia. You can see this in the Vulgate version of the quote from Timothy above.

The Septuagint is a 3rd and 2nd century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (and therefore, more or less, the Christian Old Testament). The Septuagint offers some understanding of how the translators understood Greek words at the time. Barclay again: “In Is[iah] 11.2 eusebeia is used for the fear of the Lord, which is one of the gifts of the spirit; and in Prov[erbs] 1.7 it is used for that fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom.”

See detailed notes on eusebeia for more on etymology in classical Greek.

Thus, eusebeia is not “godliness” — being like God — but reverence for God.

Some English translations don’t use godliness for eusebeia. The Darby translation of the passage above translates eusebeia as “piety” and Moffatt’s translation uses “religion”. All the French translations I could find on Biblegateway use piété. Spanish translations on Biblehub tend to use piedad, but Nueva Traducción Viviente has “la sumisión a Dios” (submission to God). My wife’s Bible is the 1987 edition of La Traducción del Nuevo Mundo; it has “devoción piadosa” (pious devotion) with a note in the online edition offering “temor a Jehová” (fear of the Lord). The current study edition of the same translation has “la devoción a Dios” (devotion to God).

So where did “godliness” come from, as a translation of eusebeia into English? The answer seems to be Martin Luther, modified by William Tyndale. Luther translated eusebeia as Gottseligkeit. This is made up of Gott- (God), -selig- (rich in, full of, devoted to) and -keit (-ness), and therefore means the property of being full of God.² Luther appears to have coined this word himself. However, Tyndale seems to have adopted Luther’s translation, but simplified it in English, in my view disastrously, as “godliness”, and this reading flowed into the King James Version and thence to many other translations.

Why does it matter? Because if you are not careful, you would think that 1 Timothy 4 (and other uses of eusebeia) are encouraging us to be more like God. With that wrong translation in mind, you might describe someone as “godly”, and mean that you perceive their behavior as particularly righteous. But that is not what eusebeia is encouraging us to; it is asking us to seek more reverence towards God. It is encouraging us to humility, and not to pride.

If you told me I wasn’t allowed to use Vim for a particular task, but had to use something else, I would be frustrated. I would probably avoid the task you set me, to avoid that frustration.

This is not just practical. I would probably be OK using another editor, after a short while. It is partly emotional; I wouldn’t feel right, using something else.

There’s an entertaining joke in “Silicon Valley”, where the main character, Richard Hendricks, gets into an argument with his girlfriend about whether it is better to use tabs or spaces to indent code in text files. He gets angry about it, and they split up. Hendricks has an emotional attachment to tabs. Of course one could (they do) argue about whether tabs or spaces are better, but he is past the point of argument, he is committed. He can’t help but lose his balance at the idea of losing his preference.

I must admit, I don’t like using AI to generate code. When I do, I start to feel something that the Harvard Business Review calls brain-fry. As others have described, and data shows, I can feel myself starting to skip read the generated code, and I feel my intellect starting to sag. I get the same uncomfortable feeling reading other people’s code, generated by AI. I realize I will have to apply great discipline in analyzing the code, but because I know it was not written by a fellow human, with whom I am collaborating, my motivation sinks. My feeling is one of disappointment; that I was looking for something I cared about, but I did not find it.

I read a quote, that I cannot now find, that I believe was from Lee Se-dol, the Go champion, on playing Deepmind. He said something on these lines: “I kept asking myself, what is the AI thinking, but of course it isn’t thinking anything at all”. When I read this, it seemed to me a great and bitter insight.

Up until now, when I am working on code, my happiness in it, is that of a teacher and a problem solver, working to make the problem clear, and solve it for the pleasure and benefit of my peers. My enjoyment comes from the process of thinking and writing, more than the capability of what I have written. My code is a message to those who read it, like a tutorial, to say “Look, I worked this out, I see it clearly now, is this not a fine thing that I brought into existence”.

Sometimes, I suppose, one must prefer capability, to process — and choose the efficient mind that does not think, to inefficient minds that do.

But I cannot work without pleasure in my work. I have an emotional attachment to writing code.

The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.

In 1913, Ambassador Page wrote to Wilson:

“The future of the world belongs to us …. Now what are we going to do with the leadership of the world presently when it clearly falls into our hands?”

And in 1914: “What are we going to do with this England and this Empire, presently, when economic forces unmistakably put the leadership of the race in our hands?”

This Empire … And the others …

And indeed, do you not see how ostentatiously these gentlemen have just unfurled the banner of anti-colonialism?

“Aid to the disinherited countries,” says Truman. “The time of the old colonialism has passed.” That’s also Truman.

Which means that American high finance considers that the time has come to raid every colony in the world. So, dear friends, here you have to be careful!

Behind this informal way of operating was a tried and true principle from construction days: choose good men, give them the ball, and let them run with it. By delegating to his men almost complete responsibility, Kaiser motivated them consistently to outperform themselves. As Kaiser himself explained “You find your key men by piling work on them. They say ‘I can’t do any more,’ and you say ‘Sure you can.’ So you pile it on, and then they’re doing more and more. Pretty soon you have men you can rely on absolutely. You have an organization that really can get things done.”

Consider the following snapshot of interaction with the National Health Service (NHS).

For background, my wife and I live in Birmingham, the second largest city in the UK, with a population of around 1.2 million people.

Last Saturday, my wife woke up with very severe back pain, so that she couldn’t walk without holding on to something.

Our General Practice (GP) surgery is closed during the weekend, as seems almost universal in the NHS, apparently as a result of the “core hours” part of the NHS contract with GPs.

We therefore had to phone the national 111 helpline.

This was a series of “press one for …” options, that ended up with a five minute conversation with an operator, who said that someone would call back within two hours.

After around two and a half hours, a specialist nurse called up, talked to my wife, and agreed she needed to be seen urgently.

Here’s where the frustration ramped up quickly.

The specialist nurse gave us a numeric code and a phone number. She told us to call the phone number and give the code, and they would give us an appointment.¹

At once, at about 3.30pm, we called the number the nurse had given us, and the person answering said in fact we had to go to a website — http://badgeruts.uk — log in, and then book ourselves an appointment with the given code. He explained that there were three places we could book an appointment in Birmingham. One of these releases appointments at 6pm, and the other two release appointments at 4pm. He warned us to be quick because the appointments go fast.

So we went to the website, which, entertainingly enough, redirected us to a site called Drive Thru Care.

Have a look at that site. It’s a really clunky old interface. Luckily my wife had logged in before, so we went straight to the Log In phase, and this took us to the booking phase, where things got nasty.

Sure enough, this phase offers us the options of the three sites above offering appointments. Sure enough, on choosing one, we got a year 2000 vintage web interface, where we click on a box to confirm the patient is not bleeding to death or suffering a heart attack, enter the date of symptom onset, and type a summary of the problem. Below, sure enough, is a series of 24 or so appointment boxes for Saturday, either labeled “Booked” or “N/A” — nothing we can select.

We know from the helpful phone call that some appointments will be released at or around 4pm in two sites.

Does this website auto-refresh when the appointments become available? Looking at the low quality of the site, we have to guess no. So we refresh the page, at which point the page clears all our previous information, so we have to fill the checkbox, date and summary again. And refresh, and again. And again. And again. We can copy / paste the summary, but still, it takes a few seconds to refill each time.

Meanwhile, for reasons inaccessible to us, more appointments become “Booked”. Presumably wondering how someone got these appointments without going through the same process is part of the entertainment. I noticed that the total number of slots decreased by one — again, for reasons unknown. We begin to wonder whether there will be any bookable appointments left when we get to 4pm. We wait, refresh / retype / paste, refresh / retype / paste, every few seconds.

At last, a little past 4pm, a series of slots appear, and immediately about half of them appear to be “Booked”. We very quickly select one of the six or so remaining, retype / paste, click “Book”. Error, the slot is no longer available. Refresh. One slot left. Select, retype / paste, “Book”. We get the last slot.²

I guess there was about 40 seconds between the slots appearing and all of them being booked. We got a slot only because we are very good at using computers — we know to refresh, copy / paste the long stuff, and do it very quickly, with keyboard shortcuts, on good WiFi.

Aren’t we the wrong people to prefer for urgent care slots? I mean, yes, we needed a slot, but why do we get it for being in the top few centiles for fluidity and speed in using web interfaces?

Given how fast the slots went, I assume that a large majority of people who should have got slots, did not get slots. Before we succeeded in getting the last slot, we had spent maybe 20 minutes on the phone, 2.5 hours waiting for a phone call, and about 20 minutes on the website. A specialist nurse had agreed we needed an appointment. Given our experience, I’d have to guess that a small proportion of people in that situation got a slot — maybe 15%, maybe less. So now you have 85% of your patients, and particularly those patients who not very skilled with clunky web interfaces, who need to be seen, have spent maybe 40 minutes working on getting an appointment, and waited more than three hours since contacting the health services, and they get — nothing.

What should have happened?

By looking at the web interface while we were waiting, I estimate that there were around 100 Saturday evening slots available across the three urgent treatment centres. Bear in mind that these three centres cover the UK’s second largest city, with a population of 1.2 million.

It seems most unlikely that 100 slots were enough for the demand.

OK, say that the NHS just doesn’t have enough money or staff to provide more than 100 evening appointments. How should these slots be distributed?

Not, I think, by making your sick and needy patients run an obstacle course of outdated web technology, and giving the slots to the winners.

And in fact, how hard would it be to allocate the slots by answering the phone?

Remember that we already had to phone somebody, to tell us to use the website, and to give us the miserable but useful advice on how to play the system to get an appointment.

Let’s take my guess of 85% pre-screened people not getting appointments, and 100 appointments. That’s about 670 people who need appointments, of whom only 15% are going to get one. Let’s pay 10 doctors to answer the phone on Saturday afternoon. They each take about 70 calls, and then negotiate to allocate the 100 appointments. Give them an average of five minutes to talk to each (already pre-screened) patient, giving them each around six hours of work, and allow time for negotiation, and between calls, for an eight hour shift. Let’s say the average GP gets paid £87K per year; this would give an hourly rate of about £50. So the cost of this service would be about £4000 per weekend day. For the UK’s second largest city.

And at least, that way a) the patients get a better assessment and triage service, and b) the selection of who gets an appointment would be based at least plausibly on clinical need, rather than skill and speed in using poor web interfaces.

On the other hand, the advantage of the current system is there is no person to whom one can direct one’s anger — one can only marvel at the extraordinary but terribly familiar incompetence of NHS IT provisioning, and tell one’s friends. Put simply, our leaders appear not to be much worried if we fall into existential rage as long as that rage is impotent.

I thought to go back to the original interview, to see what she meant. As one might predict, the quote is not quite as it seems. I think it’s reasonable to infer that Clinton does believe that the political climate would be improved by more content moderation, and she is looking forward to a time, after the Democrats win the forthcoming election, that “the fever will be broken”, but the specific quote refers to removing content that is harmful for children.

The transcript below is unedited and verbatim from around 5 minutes into the interview by Michael Smerconish with Hillary Clinton, dated September 28, 2024. Clinton is promoting her just-published book “Something Lost, Something Gained”.

Smerconish: … You cite Jonathan Haidt, you cite Jean Twenge. Here’s what disappoints me — and it’s not about you, Madam Secretary — I’m shocked that no person — no Republican, no Democrat — is championing this issue. The social science is so clear, the political science is so clear — our fabric has frayed as a nation, our kids are disconnected; too much time behind closed doors on devices and not enough time replicating the experience of their parents and grandparents. So what do we do about it? What do we do about it for your grandkids?

Clinton: Well Michael, there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to get anything done. Actually we can look at the state of California, the state of New York — I think some other states have also taken action — but we need national action. And sadly our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children. So you’re absolutely right — this should be at the top of every legislative political agenda. There should be a lot of things done. We should be — in my view — repealing something called section 230, which gave platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs, that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted — but we now know that that was an overly simple view — that if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter/X or Instagram or Tik-Tok, whatever they are — if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control — and it’s not just the social and psychological effects — it’s real harm — it’s child porn and threats of violence — things that are terribly dangerous. So I couldn’t agree with you more — we need to remove the immunity from liability and we need to have guardrails, we need regulation. We’ve conducted this big experiment on ourselves and particularly our kids and I think the evidence is in, that we’ve got to do more — take phones out of schools. I’m so happy to see schools beginning to do that, where the kids turn their phone in when they walk in the door — and guess what Michael — it won’t surprise you because you’re on this — kids are paying better attention in class, they are talking to each other in the lunchroom — things that used to be part of your daily life when you were a child in school.

Smerconish: So someone once said — final thought for secretary Clinton — someone once said, “it takes a village.” The way I like to express that is: we need to mingle. And what you’ve said about section 230 is correct from a policy standpoint, but somehow everybody’s got to get back involved, joining in their community. Final thought to you, as the author of “Something Lost, Something Gained”.

Clinton: Well Michael, this book is really about life and love and liberty. I talk about my own personal life and some of the lessons that I’ve learned, the experiences that I’ve had, but I also obviously talk about the threats to our democracy, to our freedom, to our liberty, because I think if you’re going to be an involved citizen, you have to pay attention to what’s going on, and we have to be focused on this election, we have to understand what’s at stake. But to finally add to what you said — we’ve got to get back to being a community again — having people interact with each other, find common ground together — so hopefully the election will turn out the right way, the fever will be broken, and we can go back to trying to put our families and our communities on the right track.

Smerconish: Good luck with the book. Thank you for coming back.

Clinton: Thanks a lot Michael, good to talk to you.

A lot of graduates and students of elite universities will attempt to co-opt the suffering of marginalized people. They’ll identify whatever commonalities they share with historically marginalized groups and then essentially co-opt the suffering of those people, even if they themselves haven’t suffered.

They say, “Well, the category I belong to, there’s been this long history of mistreatment.” And then from there claim that anyone who doesn’t understand what they’ve been through or what these marginalized communities have been through, they must be privileged.

But I mean, ironically, the less marginalized or the more privileged you are, the better positioned you are to accentuate your own marginalization because you can communicate it in a way that’s palatable to upper-middle-class people.

Often what you’ll find — and I struggled with this myself, and I speak to young people who have recently applied to college — if you’ve truly been through something stressful or traumatic, there’s a reluctance to speak about it. You don’t want that to be your identity. You want to rise above it by embracing a different aspect of your identity.

You want to talk about your interests or your intellectual preoccupations or the hobbies that allowed you to distract yourself from, or allowed you to draw your attention away from, those negative experiences. And if you ask them to talk about those experiences, they don’t know how to put it into words that are sort of just the right amount of uncomfortable for the reader, the kind of Disney version of the story rather than the real thing.

Whereas people who have grown up relatively affluent and privileged, and maybe they’ve experienced some mild adversity, they know how to use the right language and the right jargon and terminology, hitting all those right buttons so that another privileged person can read it and say, “Okay, you’re the right kind of marginalized, you’re the right kind of person who knows how to communicate your suffering in a compelling way.

• “It’s really hard to govern today” because of the “problem … of building consensus”.
• This because people “self-select where they go for their news”.
• There is “a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities” providing such news.
• “… our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer [disinformation] out of existence”.
• The solution is to “win the right to govern” in “this election” so we can “implement change”.
• But he worries whether democracies have the ability to implement these changes “fast enough, big enough”.

Do you, dear voter, want to use your vote to give John Kerry and his colleagues more power to hammer disinformation, so they can build consensus, and make it easier to govern?

Questioner: … Could perhaps Secretary Kerry and the panelists could expand on the role of tackling climate misinformation on the solutions in the marketplace, ’cause that seems to me that it’s rife out there both from business investment and consumer.

Kerry: It’s so tough, everybody is wrestling with that right now. And I think the dislike of, and anguish over social media, is just growing and growing and growing. And it’s part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. You can’t, you know there’s no .. the referees we used to have to determine what’s a fact, and what isn’t a fact, the kind of … have been eviscerated to a certain degree. And people go and people self-select where they go for their news and for their information, and then you just get into a vicious cycle. So it’s really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today, than at any time in the 45-50 years I’ve been involved in this. And there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence, so what you need, what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully having, winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change. Now obviously there are some people in this country who are prepared to implement change in other ways, and that’s really dangerous.

Interviewer: So you’re questioning really for democracy can survive unregulated social media?

Kerry: I think democracies are deeply, very challenged right now, and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges that we are facing. And to me that is part of what this race, this election is all about — will we break the fever in the United States, will we bring ourselves back to a regular order as John McCain used to say, where we’re able to get things done — like a budget — pass a budget for God’s sake.

When I travel around the world, I’m pounded by people who say “What’s the matter with America?” or “Where the hell are you guys going?” And you all know — I’m not raising anything new — it doesn’t look good, it’s not working well. And we have to be able to … and I’ve heard this from leaders of other countries, I won’t mention their names, but some of them semi-adversarial, and they don’t think our system works very well, and you look at it and you say, well maybe …

This is from the World Economic Forum session It’s not easy trading green, on September 25, 2024. The text above starts from around 44.45 in the video.

Wagner is not even reading Nietzsche’s book … He said to me that people only read Nietzsche in so far as they cling to him [Wagner] … He got off some really nasty remarks about Nietzsche that I shall never forget … You should have heard in Bayreuth the constant grumbling against the Jews and “Snap up” (Bismarck). Lucky is he who has nothing to do with Wagner!

On Nietzsche:

Quite another sort of man is Nietzsche. … From the outset I was struck by the love and warmth of this man.

Both quotes are from “Friedrich Nietzsche: a biography” by Curtis Cate (2002), p 271.

[The United Nations] owns the science, and we think the world should know it.

This is a quote from the World Economic Forum 2022 Special Agenda Dialog on “Tackling Misinformation”, starting at 41:58.

The person speaking is Melissa Fleming, the Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, United Nations. She is a journalist with a bachelor’s degree in German and a master’s in journalism. Here is the quote in context.

It’s educating, it’s hopefully elevating the content. You know, we partnered with Google, for example. If you Google climate change you will at the top of your search you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled climate change we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. So we’re becoming much more proactive — you know we own the science and we think that the world should know it — and the platforms themselves also do — but again it’s a huge huge challenge that I think all sectors of society need to be very active in.