From Nathan Perrin: “When my Quaker friends heard I was going to Chicagoland to minister at Lombard (Illinois) Mennonite Church, they asked several questions. One question that they asked was whether or not I renounced Quakerism by taking this calling. The brief, less complex answer is: No.”
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ Quaker
Mennonite Church USA Testimonies and scandals
May 5, 2023
From Brian Drayton: “An essential fact to meditate upon is that regardless of what we say, the way we act, the way we are, is “our testimony to the whole world.” In that connection, what are we showing, and what can we show, about what we believe about the foundations of our activities?”
Yes, you could type Quaker queries into the ChatGPT typing monkey or you could, you know, support Friends Journal
April 19, 2023
Via Mackenzie Morgan on a Mastodon thread, a Washington Post article, “Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart.” The best part is that it lets you type in URLs to see just how much data the chatbot is pulling from particular websites.
Of course, I had to start looking at my niche of Quaker websites. Yes, behind my laid-back demeanor I can be quietly competitive, so I ranked them. The count is “tokens,” which the article describes as “small bits of text used to process disorganized information — typically a word or phrase.” This is a Google AI chatbot but presumably all of these bots are scraping the same open website data.
- friendsjournal.org 1.44m
- quakerquaker.org 620k
- afsc.org 300k
- qhpress.org 290k
- westernfriend.org 230k
- nyym.org 210k
- afriendlyletter.com 160k
- pym.org 150k
- fcnl.org 140k
- quakersintheworld.org 140k
- quakerpodcast.org 130k
- quaker.org.uk 130k
- fgcquaker.org 120k
- Quaker.org 110k
- Quakerspeak.com 100k
- quakercloud.org 58k
- friendscouncil.org 39k
- quakerinfo.com 32k
- quakerinfo.org 22k
- thefriend.org 29k
- fwcc.world 12k
- fwccamericas.org 5.8k
There’s been a flurry of blog posts by Quakers typing things into ChatGPT. See Mark Pratt-Russum’s “A Quaker Pastor Asks ChatGBT to Write a Sermon” or Chuck Fager’s “Chatbot Names Top Quaker Issues; Makes Blog Obsolete?”
If the ChatGPT results sound like a rehashed Friends Journal article, as Chuck implies, well they mostly are: with Friends Journal and QuakerQuaker (huh!) accounting for as much of ChatGPT’s content as the next dozen-ranked sites put together. (Am I missing any content-rich Quaker site?)
So yes, you could type queries into a chatbot that has no idea what it’s thinking. Or you could, you know, support the Quaker media that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc., are training their bots on. Real Quaker writing by real Quakers who write. I’ve long thought big tech is the biggest threat to Quaker media but now they’ve started competing against us with our own words. It’s really quite nuts.
Changing hats to wear mine as senior editor of Friends Journal. The reason our website seems to rule the roost of AI content-scraping is that we don’t have a paywall. Generous donors, mostly everyday readers, allow us to make all of our articles and QuakerSpeak videos and Quaker.org explainers free to read. Yes, chatbots are “reading” it, but so too are isolated seekers looking for a faith path and spiritual answers and stumbling on Friends Journal. Think about becoming an FJ sustaining member and at least join the free email list from the box on the homepage. I’m a bit surprised and humbled that QuakerQuaker is so high up; a donation there could help jumpstart my 2023 resolution to relaunch it with modern tech.
Think about it: a donate to Friends Journal and QuakerQuaker will help ensure quality chatbot answers for generations to come!
Apparently our weddings are now deemed glamorous
March 28, 2023
Glam This line is one of my favorites: “According to the History Channel, an English Dissenter called George Fox established the Religious Society of Friends, or the Quaker Movement, in England in the 1800s.” I’m not sure what’s worse: admitting you’re sourcing your work from the History Channel or getting the date wrong by a couple of centuries (Quakerism is considered to have started in 1652).
But in reality, I’m not sure you need to click through to the article unless you want to see just how bad it’s gotten on some of these SEO-chasing content farms. I’m pretty sure this was largely written by AI. The ZeroGPT detector picked up some sentences; I checked other articles written under the same bylines and ZeroGPT lights up whole paragraphs.
How is blockchain like Quakerism?
March 28, 2023
Filed in the “whaaa?” department: I find this more curious and surprising than enlightening but the author is a bone fide Friend who argues that the evolution of the internet is analogous to a Quaker model of organization.
Brooklyn Friends support a youth-led outreach music and arts show
March 28, 2023
Supporting younger Friends in an outreach effort, by Kristen Cole:
A few weeks before the show, one of the adult organizers made an announcement about the upcoming show at the rise of meeting for worship. He explained, “We did a really radical thing. We asked our teens what they would want to do if they could organize an event for young people. And they told us. And we listened.” At a time when we are deeply engaged in conversations about the direction of Quakerism, it’s powerful to be reminded that building toward our future might be easier to achieve if we open our hearts and minds and listen to the next generation.
Read more at Finding the Divine in a Mosh Pit. This is from the March edition of Spark, New York Yearly Meeting’s publication, which focuses on the arts this issue.
Be sure to scroll to the bottom of Cole’s article for a disclaimer about the mosh pit (spoiler: there wasn’t one). It made me wonder if kids still mosh. Wikipedia dates the practice to 1980. I’m sure some do, as we live in an age of evergreen sub-genres. The availability of music and video on-demand and the ability to quickly organize communities via app make every era easily accessible. I’ve lost track of how many 80s revivals we’ve gone through.
But concerts these days are so mediated by cell phones. Even I find myself taking it out when the first chords of a favorite song start up. And even if you yourself resist, others will have their phones out videoing you. I’m fascinated by the videos of high school kids from the 1980s that sometime get posted on YouTube. They’re so unfazed by the camera, which would have been some bulky Hi8 camcorder, probably because they figured no one would actually ever look at the footage. It’s hard to imagine the wild abandon and non-self-consciousness of 1980s moshing when you know any awkward move you make might show up on Tiktok or Insta the next day.
Quakers on Wikipedia
March 27, 2023
Steven Davison on how Wikipedia describes Quakers—and how we might respond.
This raises a concern for me about how the Quaker movement might oversee this kind of public presentation of our faith and practice going forward. In the spirit of Wikipedia’s platform as a peer-to-peer project, and in keeping with the non-hierarchical governance structures so important to Friends, and, of course, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I propose a peer-to-peer process for the oversight of such presentations, a long-range project of review that would hopefully include Friends with real expertise in the many areas of Quaker history, faith, and practice covered in this entry and whatever other entries we find
This relates to a long-term concern of mine that so much of the most public information on Friends isn’t created by us. Wikipedia’s relatively benign (there’s actually a bit of a Quaker process connection) but our participation on social media like Facebook and Twitter are mediated by algorithms favoring controversy. I edit Wikipedia entries a couple of times a year but am also a small part of Friends Journal efforts to built out Quaker.org to make it a useful, accurate, and publicly visible introduction to the Religious Society of Friends.
There’s some good discussion on Mastodon by some Wikipedia editors who explain that Davison’s plan would be seen with some suspicion by Wikipedia. As commenter Dan York wrote:
Wikipedia has a very strong ethos around “conflict of interest” with the sense that people too close to a topic can’t write in a neutral point-of-view. There’s definitely value in folks working to improve the pages, but they need to keep these views in mind — and back up everything they do with reliable sources.
Belonging: The Community or the Institution (12/37)
March 21, 2023
Quaker membership has long been a contentious issue for thr past few decades (Why should someone join? What does it mean? What linits should there be?) but it’s becoming more complicated with the rise of hybrid worship. Emily Provance looks at thr state of membership and how it’s evolving.
A lot of the work done about membership lately, especially by young adults, has been about helping Friends in general understand that the institutional practices need to change to reflect what God is doing in our communities.