Pastor @ABAdventist, #YEG Central. ThD student @AndrewsUniv. I aim to post thought-provoking content. My views are my own.
Edmonton, Alberta
Joined November 2013
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David Hamstra retweeted
I encourage those at frontier AI companies to read this quote, from Ellsberg to Kissinger back in 1968:
“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret."
“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you."
“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well."
“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools."
“Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn."
“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself."
“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
"….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet."
David Hamstra retweeted
Last time I mentioned Vattimo’s After Christianity and its relationship to the Advent of the Sacred. What has happened for me, and this has often happened to me, is that this book has entered into a chorus with three other books. They are all unfolding in concert with each other where each is helping me to see more deeply into the others.
One of these is my friend Bayo Akomolafe’s wonderful book Selah which makes a powerful case for a new ontology of the sacred making itself known through all the cracks in our current worldview. His is a powerful way of arguing; it is not the standard premise by premise argument, but instead is a series of lyrically expressed insights that unfold like notes in a song that carries you to a new vantage point.
This leads to Elvis Imafidon’s Doing African Philosophy which is making a powerful case for the practice of philosophy being much more about the oral dialogical cultivation of wisdom, as in Africa, rather than the monological production of text, as in academic Western philosophy. For me this recovers the ancient sense of Philosophy as emphasized in the work of Pierre Hadot while helping me see that tradition from the outside -- from the cracks.
This in turn carries me into Alicia Juarrero’s Why Context Matters: or where did Anglo-American philosophy go wrong? Her argument, which is very convergent with my work on relevance realization, is that Anglo-American philosophy tried to de-contextualize argumentation and meaning and thereby sever it from the sense-making pointed to by Imafidon. Her book takes me back to Vattimo’s work and the paradigm shift in our sense-making, understanding of meaning, and our apprehension of truth as we pass out of this Anglo-American framework.
David Hamstra retweeted
Alberta neuroscientists and sleep researchers—including Dr. Robert McDonald from the University of Lethbridge and Dr. Michael Antle from the University of Calgary—state that Alberta’s move to permanent Daylight Saving Time (DST) on November 1, 2026, is the worst possible choice
David Hamstra retweeted
This is basically the David Foster Wallace essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” boiled down to a 45 second post game interview.
I’m sure DFW would have appreciated (despised) it.
gwern.net/doc/psychology/wil…
David Hamstra retweeted
For retirees:
If your children RIGHT NOW are paying enough payroll taxes to cover 100% of your and their other parent’s Social Security and Medicare
Then you did your part paying in!
If not, you are receiving welfare subsidies.
That’s the actual math.
David Hamstra retweeted
Once listened to an excellent philology lecture by a Dutch professor on preserved non-Indo-European words in Ancient Greek. His main example was “bath tube. Midway through, someone went up and whispered in his ear, and he coughed and said “I’m hearing it’s pronounced ‘bath tub’.”
David Hamstra retweeted
Lots of talk about "common good" these days, but, as Andrew Willard Jones points out (The Church Against the State), they largely miss the point.
"Common good" isn't a political principle, certainly not a statist political principle. It's a cosmology.
God created all things good. Not just each thing good in itself, which later are brought into communion. They're created in communion, each with each, each with all.
Thus, the good individual things of creation "become fully themselves only through their interactions with other parts becoming fully themselves."
The good of the world is common because "it is essentially shared, because it is a good that can be had only when it is had together."
Plants need water to achieve their glory, but one of water's glories is to nourish plants. They rise from glory to glory together, in mutual dependence.
Each thing realizes itself by transcending itself, which it can achieve "only through the humble reception of the power of another."
In short, "the good of each includes essentially the good of the other."
And so too with man. We reach our perfection only when other people activate our potential. This is the dynamic that makes "human social order [an] image of cosmic order."
Man the microcosmos: this is how "common good" becomes a politics, realized most fully in the church.
Think of Paul's teaching on the body: Gifted teachers fulfill their particular good in teaching, and their teaching brings their hearers to maturity.
"'Hope' is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -" youtube.com/watch?v=NEfmRXYC…
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"Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come:
'tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
and grace will lead me home." youtube.com/watch?v=s51mg6Ow…
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"We should and must fight for righteous outcomes, but we must be on our guard for when our zeal tempts us to unrighteous acts." mereorthodoxy.substack.com/p…
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"In autumn 2026, Russia plans to add 16,000–20,000 beds in civilian hospitals for military use, mainly in the Northwestern Federal District near the Baltic states." militarnyi.com/en/news/russi…
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David Hamstra retweeted
I’ve given Claude Opus various published papers (and my own unpublished ones) and asked it to review them. (Don’t panic—I’m not uploading confidential manuscripts.)
The reviews it produces are excellent. It finds statistical errors, internal contradictions, and conceptual confusions that human reviewers miss; it provides useful suggestions; it has a good sense of what counts as significant and novel and what doesn’t; and it’s generous in its appreciation for what the authors get right. And it doesn’t suffer from the strong “myside bias” humans have; it doesn’t recommend rejection because the author didn’t cite it enough; it doesn’t insult the authors; and it doesn’t agree to write a review and then never send anything in.
As a journal editor, I’m not sure what to do with this. If I gave up on human reviewers and used GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus instead, my bosses would fire me, probably rightfully so. The only constructive thing I can recommend is that, before submitting something to a journal, researchers and scholars use this tremendously valuable resource. (Just don’t tell the models that it’s your paper, because they do suffer from sycophancy.)
David Hamstra retweeted
Two Superpowers. Two Structural Weaknesses. One Race.
China has a demand-side problem. America has a supply-side problem.
China’s answer is to keep pumping supply. It wants to make the world increasingly dependent on Chinese manufacturing, use massive trade surpluses to pull its economy forward, and export the consequences of weak domestic demand. Despite years of rhetoric about boosting consumption, Beijing has shown little willingness to tackle the underlying demand problem.
America is the mirror image. It has long been the world’s demand engine while allowing much of its industrial base to erode. Under Trump, it is trying to rebuild manufacturing, reduce its dependence on China, and restore its supply side. But breaking decades of reliance on foreign imports while overcoming America’s own institutional obstacles to building will be extraordinarily difficult.
Geopolitically, this is becoming a race to see which country can fix its structural weakness first.
Can America rebuild its industrial base and reduce its dependence on Chinese supply before it loses the strategic competition?
Or can China keep the world dependent on Chinese supply long enough to sustain an economic model that increasingly relies on external demand?
It is a race to see which country hits the wall first.
If America hits the wall first, it may prolong the G2 contest only to lose it—ceding industrial power, strategic leverage and ultimately global leadership.
If China hits the wall first, the consequences could be far more severe. The export engine that now underpins its economy would stall while domestic demand remains too weak to take its place. What follows may not simply be slower growth, but a systemic economic crisis.
One side risks losing global leadership.
The other risks the viability of its economic model.
This is no ordinary trade conflict. It is a race of severe consequences.
"The first high-profile application of the FIFA Disciplinary Code in Chapter 4, Article 27, regarding a player suspension involved Portugal superstar Cristiano Ronaldo." foxsports.com/stories/soccer…
"Multiple USMNT players, preferring to remain anonymous to protect relationships, have told talkSPORT that Trump publicly confirming he had spoken to Infantino on July 6 caused more damage in their view than news of the original call itself. ..."
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"... This came just a day before the game and was seen as unhelpful because it essentially aided Belgium’s team talk." talksport.com/football/world…
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David Hamstra retweeted
Given all the talk about viewpoint diversity and that I have published in the area of academic bias, I think I want to offer an extended comment. First, as to what viewpoint diversity means. I, and others, have produced evidence of political and religious discrimination in academia. It is not as some would say, “Well, I just do not want to hire someone who is a sexist or racist. The evidence shows that merely knowing someone is a Republican or an Evangelical will convince a nontrivial percentage of individuals that he or she should be hired. That is textbook discrimination where a person’s social identity in and of itself is the source of discrimination.
Second, this discrimination is part of what limits the scope of what we can study. Allow me one simple example. Since 2016, there has been a ton of research on white conservatives and Christians. The vast majority of it is critical of those groups, likely as they were the key to Trump’s victory. You know who we have not studied with a critical eye? White progressives. Oh, but those people are not bigots, right? How do you know that without studying them? Indeed, one of the knocks against conservatives is about how fearful they are, and yet I have a paper under review showing that progressives are more fearful than conservatives. Stop with the foolish – do we need to include the perspective of Nazis? Very real research questions are being left on the table because different perspectives have been shut down.
Third, when people are only surrounded by people who think like them, there is a strong tendency to be overconfident in their assessments. I am not saying there are no arguments in academia. I am saying that the scope of the arguments is so narrow because of what is not allowed. In my example above, it becomes easy to blame just about all the social conflict on white conservatives/Christians, which is what most of the work on these topics does. By all means, we need assessment with those groups, and perhaps they are more responsible for our social conflict than white progressives. But if they are not, or if the responsibility is relatively equal, it will be hard to see that in modern academia because nearly everyone agrees that the responsibility is mostly on the conservatives. Unless you put your argument into the fire for critique, you will not know whether you have a sound argument or not.
Fourth and finally, some have talked about how academics have made themselves vulnerable by pissing off half the country, and thus the resources that drive our work are at stake. That is a valid reason to consider as we look at viewpoint diversity. I prefer the other reasons given above since those are more centered morally and can lead to better science. However, if the practical reasons of stopping the threat of the cutting off of funds is what works, then so be it. Nonetheless, at the very least, more viewpoint diversity will better allow us to talk to the half of the country that voted for Trump (for the record, I have never voted for him nor will I ever vote for him). Even if you disagree with people, we have to learn how to communicate with them beyond dehumanizing stereotypes.
Anyway, that is my 2cents, well maybe a nickel, on the subject.
