I don't follow "evangelical Twitter" pretty much at all, but I have a theory as to the pushback to this kind of data collection-- it's that while Shenvi may be a good actor and approaching the data scientifically, there is and has been various instances of people using Twitter-follower information as a "guilt by association" as a way to discredit or condemn someone adjacent to someone else they don't like. This happened a few years back when (I can't remember who did it, Buzzfeed or one of those organizations) was trying to link Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan among others to unsavory rightwing/alt-right figures on Twitter based on some of these kinds of statistics, similar followers also following others. While the data may be valuable and useful, I think there is some rightful trepidation concerning this kind of inquiry. There have been many instances in the recent past where people have not been good-faith actors and pseudo-scientific with this kind of data.
So what makes it okay to assume his motivations are anything like that, when he has given no sign of that? He has been very forthright about why he is doing this and what sort of limited results it might give at this stage. He is hoping it might show some of the stuff Paul has posted above, but he's not presenting this as even showing very much at this initial stage in his experimentation. The fact that they are reading all that stuff into it says a lot more about them than it does him, and that doesn't reflect well on them.
And I haven’t seen anyone pissed at Shenvi who wasn’t pissed at Shenvi two weeks ago, and who won’t be pissed at Shenvi two weeks from now. It’s a weird trend, and I don’t find myself led to give any particular gripe much weight…because there was another one before, and there’ll be another one after.
I hope this isn't a stupid question, but how is your analysis of sense-making - which you present as a sort of third-person perspective - not also limited? In other words, how do you yourself rise above the limits of sense-making to see limits of sense-making? What you accuse modernity of doing, you are doing in this video, Paul. It seems inescapable.
I’ve been thinking about it and I think the reason say, a Catholic might see JBP as friend and Pope as foe is based on a Intuition of who now holds the cultural power.
Although by group they should align with the pope, by values they see the pope as complicit to the powers that be and JBP as standing against them.
These things are just distractions... Twitter is a tiny subset of self-selected people of a certain type. It tells us nothing about the general population or about churches or denominations... Just another aspect of scientism and materialistic thinking to analyze such statistics and to think it tells us anything about the real human condition on the ground....
I think if one tries to frame what Neil is doing with Twitter data as something about the general population or churches or denominations, that’s a choice to go way beyond what he says he’s doing (so in that sense, I agree—assuming that’s what it’s for is a bad call).
Might be worth considering in what ways those forces do drive trends, dialogues, and worldviews, though. Again, that’s not at all what Neil is asserting when looking at patterns in the Twitter data (he’s not asserting…much of anything as far as I’ve seen with this!), but inasmuch as getting a sense of the spirit of the age is helpful, Twitter is full of leading rather than a trailing indicators. Lots of the culture struggles we see now showed up there long before. Things that trickle into, then roar through churches and denominations percolated on social media years before (my home denomination, the PCA, is rife with current examples).
But that, too, may have really limited value: there’s no sense getting obsessive about the spirit of the age, either. The world, the flesh, and the devil are the enemies of our souls and the church, same as always. Personally, I find some of it interesting, but I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong to ignore a lot of it, either—particularly if we’re instead devoting ourselves to being more rooted in Christ and connected with our brothers and sisters.
I would agree that you have a good point in that the self-selected intellectual elite on Twitter are going to drive conversation and trends. If one was trying to head off or diffuse those trends within one's own community perhaps that foreknowledge would be useful. I doubt that anyone can do that... So again I would wonder what the use would be in a practical sense. My biggest irritation with all of it is that it now is a spectator sport. It is the coliseum where we get to watch the Lions tear apart the Christians or the progressives tear apart the conservatives in our context. Regardless it's a distraction and has little value other than from a academic sociological sense perhaps. If we are to take the apostle Paul's advice and to remain innocent of evil then it might be wise to turn the screens off or at least away from anything that inflames the passions.
Yes, and we each find ways to take and leave that advice (here I am, on a screen, corresponding with brethren I've never met—mostly a good, but there's risk, too). I think our definitions of practical use may vary not only with our lives as we live them, but also with our preferences. While I think those overlap, I don't know if they're exactly the same, at least for me.
My undergrad degree was in sociology (long ago…my, how things have changed), so I've definitely got some curiosity along those lines. Likewise, I'm kind of a nerd (there aren't a lot of non-nerds on Substack, though I'd grant an exception to anyone who objected, because what do I really know?). So I can easily see why I'd be interested. Is it practically useful for me? Likely not, at least by any rigorous definition. But it's at least as practically useful to me as reading here—which I don't really classify as entertainment, either. I guess it's…something else? Not sure.
Anyway, I agree that I see a lot of the evangelical slapfighting on Twitter as a distraction at *best*. But I think that's one of the reasons I'm interested in what Shenvi's doing for coding practice: in some respects, it strips a bit of the veneer of importance right off the whole thing. There are possible insights, and there's also the sheer banality of social groups and cliques that are in play while folks bandy in supposedly high-minded discourse. It's a bit of a memento mori for the whole enterprise.
I would have to agree with you on that... My personal bete noire is in how the "laptop class" has retreated into their screens as a replacement for reality of these last two years while the blue collar muscular classes have ensured that their water and power has remained on as well as food in the grocery store and delivered packages to their doorstep from Amazon. For most of the country these past couple years has felt like a family member saddled them with their siblings dependant children who are narcissistic and spoiled.... So don't mind me when my head explodes every time somebody mentions Twitter because to me it represents much of what is wrong with the elite class in this country... Just my own bias showing through...
I don't follow "evangelical Twitter" pretty much at all, but I have a theory as to the pushback to this kind of data collection-- it's that while Shenvi may be a good actor and approaching the data scientifically, there is and has been various instances of people using Twitter-follower information as a "guilt by association" as a way to discredit or condemn someone adjacent to someone else they don't like. This happened a few years back when (I can't remember who did it, Buzzfeed or one of those organizations) was trying to link Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan among others to unsavory rightwing/alt-right figures on Twitter based on some of these kinds of statistics, similar followers also following others. While the data may be valuable and useful, I think there is some rightful trepidation concerning this kind of inquiry. There have been many instances in the recent past where people have not been good-faith actors and pseudo-scientific with this kind of data.
So what makes it okay to assume his motivations are anything like that, when he has given no sign of that? He has been very forthright about why he is doing this and what sort of limited results it might give at this stage. He is hoping it might show some of the stuff Paul has posted above, but he's not presenting this as even showing very much at this initial stage in his experimentation. The fact that they are reading all that stuff into it says a lot more about them than it does him, and that doesn't reflect well on them.
And I haven’t seen anyone pissed at Shenvi who wasn’t pissed at Shenvi two weeks ago, and who won’t be pissed at Shenvi two weeks from now. It’s a weird trend, and I don’t find myself led to give any particular gripe much weight…because there was another one before, and there’ll be another one after.
I hope this isn't a stupid question, but how is your analysis of sense-making - which you present as a sort of third-person perspective - not also limited? In other words, how do you yourself rise above the limits of sense-making to see limits of sense-making? What you accuse modernity of doing, you are doing in this video, Paul. It seems inescapable.
I’ve been thinking about it and I think the reason say, a Catholic might see JBP as friend and Pope as foe is based on a Intuition of who now holds the cultural power.
Although by group they should align with the pope, by values they see the pope as complicit to the powers that be and JBP as standing against them.
These things are just distractions... Twitter is a tiny subset of self-selected people of a certain type. It tells us nothing about the general population or about churches or denominations... Just another aspect of scientism and materialistic thinking to analyze such statistics and to think it tells us anything about the real human condition on the ground....
I think if one tries to frame what Neil is doing with Twitter data as something about the general population or churches or denominations, that’s a choice to go way beyond what he says he’s doing (so in that sense, I agree—assuming that’s what it’s for is a bad call).
Might be worth considering in what ways those forces do drive trends, dialogues, and worldviews, though. Again, that’s not at all what Neil is asserting when looking at patterns in the Twitter data (he’s not asserting…much of anything as far as I’ve seen with this!), but inasmuch as getting a sense of the spirit of the age is helpful, Twitter is full of leading rather than a trailing indicators. Lots of the culture struggles we see now showed up there long before. Things that trickle into, then roar through churches and denominations percolated on social media years before (my home denomination, the PCA, is rife with current examples).
But that, too, may have really limited value: there’s no sense getting obsessive about the spirit of the age, either. The world, the flesh, and the devil are the enemies of our souls and the church, same as always. Personally, I find some of it interesting, but I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong to ignore a lot of it, either—particularly if we’re instead devoting ourselves to being more rooted in Christ and connected with our brothers and sisters.
I would agree that you have a good point in that the self-selected intellectual elite on Twitter are going to drive conversation and trends. If one was trying to head off or diffuse those trends within one's own community perhaps that foreknowledge would be useful. I doubt that anyone can do that... So again I would wonder what the use would be in a practical sense. My biggest irritation with all of it is that it now is a spectator sport. It is the coliseum where we get to watch the Lions tear apart the Christians or the progressives tear apart the conservatives in our context. Regardless it's a distraction and has little value other than from a academic sociological sense perhaps. If we are to take the apostle Paul's advice and to remain innocent of evil then it might be wise to turn the screens off or at least away from anything that inflames the passions.
Yes, and we each find ways to take and leave that advice (here I am, on a screen, corresponding with brethren I've never met—mostly a good, but there's risk, too). I think our definitions of practical use may vary not only with our lives as we live them, but also with our preferences. While I think those overlap, I don't know if they're exactly the same, at least for me.
My undergrad degree was in sociology (long ago…my, how things have changed), so I've definitely got some curiosity along those lines. Likewise, I'm kind of a nerd (there aren't a lot of non-nerds on Substack, though I'd grant an exception to anyone who objected, because what do I really know?). So I can easily see why I'd be interested. Is it practically useful for me? Likely not, at least by any rigorous definition. But it's at least as practically useful to me as reading here—which I don't really classify as entertainment, either. I guess it's…something else? Not sure.
Anyway, I agree that I see a lot of the evangelical slapfighting on Twitter as a distraction at *best*. But I think that's one of the reasons I'm interested in what Shenvi's doing for coding practice: in some respects, it strips a bit of the veneer of importance right off the whole thing. There are possible insights, and there's also the sheer banality of social groups and cliques that are in play while folks bandy in supposedly high-minded discourse. It's a bit of a memento mori for the whole enterprise.
I would have to agree with you on that... My personal bete noire is in how the "laptop class" has retreated into their screens as a replacement for reality of these last two years while the blue collar muscular classes have ensured that their water and power has remained on as well as food in the grocery store and delivered packages to their doorstep from Amazon. For most of the country these past couple years has felt like a family member saddled them with their siblings dependant children who are narcissistic and spoiled.... So don't mind me when my head explodes every time somebody mentions Twitter because to me it represents much of what is wrong with the elite class in this country... Just my own bias showing through...