Tim Tebow’s Shocking Story About John 3:16 ‘Coincidence’ Goes Viral!!!
Tim Tebow 3:16 game: A video of former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow recalling an amazing Biblical ‘coincidence’ in his life is going viral on social media. The story begins with Tebow in his college football years. It was 2009 and he was also weeks away from competing in the highly televised national championship football game. Tebow said God led him to write John 3:16 under his eyes for all the world to see while he played.
“The next six weeks leading up to the game I was really agonizing and contemplating what verse and God kept bringing up to my heart and my head John 3:16 which is the essence of our Christianity. It’s the essence of our hope,” Tebow said in the video.
After winning the championship game he found out something incredible happened- during the game: 94 million people Googled John 3:16. “Honestly my first thought was ‘How do 94 million people do not know John 3:16?’” Tebow said. “I was just so humbled by how big God is that we serve.” But that’s not where the story ends.
Fast-forward three years to 2012.
Tebow is a Denver Bronco playing the Pittsburgh Steelers in the playoffs, and after the Broncos won, he headed into the post-game press conference when his public relations representative stopped him in his tracks.
“He says, ‘Timmy, did you realize what happened?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, we just beat the Steelers. We’re going to play the Patriots.’ And he was like, ‘No, do you realize what happened?’” Tebow shared. “He said, ‘It’s exactly three years later from the day that you wore John 3:16 under your eyes,'” Tebow continued. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really cool.'”
“He said, ‘No, I don’t think you realize what happened. During the game you threw for 316 yards, your yards per completion were 31.6, your yards per rush were 3.16, the ratings for the night we’re 31.6, and the time of possession was 31.06 and during the game 91 million people google John 3:16 and it’s the number one trending thing on every platform,’” Tebow shared. “I was just standing there in the hallway about to do this press conference just thinking that that night was about a football game. It really wasn’t… we serve such a big God,” he continued.
Tebow believes God did something miraculous that night.
“The God that we serve is a God of miracles,” he said. “I just have to be willing to step
out and say, ‘Here you go, God, I’m going to give you my fish and my loaves of bread
and watch what he does with it.”
READ: ‘I Know Jesus Has a Plan’: Eagles QB Carson Wentz Uses Injury to Share Faith
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t
by Julia Galef
When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see.
In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a soldier mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we
are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe–and shoot down those we don’t.
But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a scout mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout’s goal isn’t to defend one side over the other. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what’s actually true.
In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn’t that they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It’s a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world–which anyone can learn. With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how super forecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.
There is a kind of smug, self-satisfaction to books like this that invariably make me feel, regardless of how useful parts of them might prove to be, uncomfortable. I used to think
of political beliefs as existing on a continuum running from left to right. Then I thought of this continuum as being more like a circle, where the far left and far right end up virtually touching – something the current pandemic has made particularly clear to me.
As I’ve watched some Marxists have started sounding much more like Q-Anon supporters. But I’ve started thinking that perhaps the geometric figure that most accurately describes ideas is the triangle. Aristotle liked to talk of the ‘golden mean’ – his rational position between two extremes – and this book certainly plays that idea for all that it is worth –
but actually, I sometimes feel that the center can be just as extreme as any of the ‘ends.
Surely, we have all met one of these people in our travels. The sort who says things like ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation’ or ‘it seems like you are projecting’ or ‘can we stick
to the facts and leave the ad hominem attacks at the door’. And don’t get me wrong –
I’ve been that person too. But again, the problem isn’t always what is said, but rather
the unbearable smugness with which it is said.
At one point the author says that all she is really doing is providing us with the tools discussed in all those books popular in the early 2000s more accessible to people – books like Predictably Irrational, thinking: Fast and Slow, Mistakes Were Made, but not by me… I was struggling with this book anyway but became completely put off at the end when she started spruiking her group – the ‘effective altruists’. Look, I don’t believe in God, I feel uncomfortable around people who say very silly things about science – but you will definitely know something is deeply wrong if I ever join an evangelical Atheist rationalist society or if I start wearing ‘Science Rocks, but you are just too stupid to know…fart face.’ t-shirt. The author criticizes people like this too, well, in part, although she has nice things to say about Richard Dawkins. All the same, an organization that spends its time praising itself for how wonderfully self-critical it can be. Hmm… I don’t know.
She ends the book with a list of ‘Scout Habits’ for the reader to practice.
I’m going to quote them in full:
1. The next time you’re making a decision, ask yourself what kind of bias could be
affecting your judgment in that situation, and then do the relevant thought experiment (e.g., outsider test, conformity test, status quo bias test).
2. When you notice yourself making a claim with certainty (“There’s no way . . .”),
ask yourself how sure you really are.
3. The next time a worry pops into your head and you’re tempted to rationalize it away, instead make a concrete plan for how you would deal with it if it came true.
4. Find an author, media outlet, or other opinion source who holds different views from you, but who has a better-than-average shot at changing your mind—someone you find reasonable or with whom you share some common ground.
5. The next time you notice someone else being “irrational,” “crazy,” or “rude,” get curious about why their behavior might make sense to them.
6. Look for opportunities to update at least a little bit. Can you find a caveat or exception to one of your beliefs, or a bit of empirical evidence that should make you slightly less confident in your position?
7. Think back to a disagreement you had with someone in the past in which your perspective has since shifted and reach out to that person to let them know how you’ve updated.
8. Pick a belief you hold strongly and attempt an ideological Turing test of the other side. (Bonus points if you can actually find someone from the other side to judge your attempt.)
Again, she doesn’t say this is an exhaustive list, just something people might like to practice. It is a list of what I guess could be called ‘intellectual empathy exercises’ – and as such they aren’t outrageous. In fact, some of them are quite good, I mean, I quite like the idea of the ‘ideological Turing test’. It is just — that I think some of her earlier advice is better, and that this stuff is likely to be the take-away people leave the book with – mixed with a hyper-dose of smugness too, I fear.
Earlier, she said we should ‘hold our identities lightly’ – since having decided we are a particular kind of person makes it very difficult for us to ever change our minds.
She says somewhere else that we should notice that we are highly influenced by the situations that we find ourselves in. This is one of the reasons she gives for joining a group like her effective altruists, that you will be around people who hold their identities lightly and so they will help to make you a better person. I find that the generally accepted ideas around identities are something I’m rather uncomfortable with at the best of times.
I don’t think we have nearly as fixed identities as we imagine we have.
I think our identities are much more situationally constrained. In fact, my main problem with this book is that it assumes that people’s behavior can be changed by changing how they think – whereas the reality is more that the cart of thinking needs to go behind the horse of being, that is, people’s ideas are unlikely to change until their situation does.
That is, this book is a kind of primer advocating a new form of consciousness raising – but I’m not sure any form of consciousness raising really works all that well. I think, instead, I think that people’s ideas are much more tied to their life experiences than to how they go about practicing particular habits of mind. Still, the people most likely to learn to practice these habits of mind will then be able to congratulate themselves on how open they are, how rational, how reasonable. Whereas, they have likely just codified what were already their ‘extreme middle’ views.
To provide what I think might be a case in point. I consider myself to be a feminist – which, in turn, I do not consider to be a particularly big statement. In fact, it strikes me as odd that we are in the 2020s and the idea that men and women should be judged on their abilities and their character rather than their genitals still hasn’t quite taken on. We have had decades and decades of ‘steps’ towards equality between the sexes. Yet men are still paid significantly more than women, men still do significantly less housework than women, and men are still much more likely to work in jobs with higher status than women. I don’t know that the decades and decades of consciousness raising have achieved anywhere near enough.
I don’t want to say it has been a complete waste of time – but I do think that were the changes brought about by feminism have been most impactful have been where facts on the ground have been changed – rather than just opinions. I don’t know that the real achievements of feminism have been where it has made an old male chauvinist feel a bit uncomfortable while noticing the logical inconsistency in some of their strongly held opinions.
The world really does need to change, it’s just I’m not in the least sure that scouting is likely to get us to where we need to be. Another case in point – and perhaps a clearer example of my view – the US has just ended its longest foreign war. It spent something like $2 trillion blowing up stuff in Afghanistan. The Taliban are back in control. Presumably, they are even more convinced they are right than before.
What if, rather than blowing stuff up, the US had sought to build Afghanistan up?
Two trillion dollars might have made a pretty nice country.
It certainly would have completely changed the situation in the country and possibly
made it very hard for the Taliban to convince people that they look like a credible alternative. I just don’t think people’s ideas are as fixed as they are made out to be. But, sure, there really are great ways to make them as fixed as you want them to be. A solid book with mass appeal to help people care more about being accurate. Highly readable, easy to recommend.
Also, see this related LessWrong post, which provides an excellent summary.
This is much better than my notes. Outline of Galef’s “Scout Mindset” – LessWrong
The Scout Mindset is the sort of book I’m both happy with and frustrated by.
I’m frustrated because this is a relatively casual overview of what I wish were a thorough Academic specialty. I felt similarly with The Life You Can Save when that was released.
I think it’s quite good on its own and recommend it as such. Just know what
you’re going in for!
Another way of putting this is that I was sort of hoping for an academic work,
but instead, think of this more as a journalistic work. It reminds me a bit more of Popular Documentaries and Malcolm Gladwell (in a nice way), instead of Super forecasting or The Elephant in the Brain. That said, journalistic works have their unique contributions in the literature, it’s just a very different sort of work.
I just read through the book on Audible and don’t have notes. To write a really solid
review would take more time than I have now, so instead, I’ll leave scattered thoughts.
The main theme of the book is the dichotomy of “The Scout Mindset” vs. “The Soldier Mindset”, and more specifically, why the Scout Mindset is (almost always?) better than
the Soldier Mindset. Put differently, we have a bunch of books about “how to think accurately”, but surprisingly few on “you should even try thinking accurately.”
Sadly, this latter part has to be stated, but that’s how things are.
In considering how I liked this book, one of the author’s phrases comes to mind:
“Just as there are fashions in clothing, so, too are their fashions in ideas.” Understandably, people are trying to make sense of a world that makes less and less sense every day, and I believe the current rationality movement is the latest fad to capitalize upon the need for more certainty. In turn, this book will seemingly appeal to those who are already convinced that they will be able to see things clearly when others don’t.
And this, in my opinion, is:
Issue #1: the subtitle implies an “us” and “them” worldview: one hopes that “rational people” will be better than “irrational people.” Is the categorization of a person as either “rational” or “irrational” a moral statement?
Issue #2: After reading this book, I continue to be at a loss as to what “rationality”
actually is. In the author’s opinion, what is behind this idea? It seems to me that “rational” is associated with a range of definitions that seem to be a function of the academic discipline providing the definition (e.g., economics, history, mathematics, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience, physics, etc.).
Issue #3: The author presumes a common understanding of “reality” and “truth.”
Rest assured, I am not the “everything is relative” type, but the book left me with the impression that I am “rational” when I stumble into “reality” or the “truth” – that is,
we’ll realize it in retrospect IF we are rational, however, how do I know I’m not
making the “best” decision already?
Issue #4: The author convinced me that I am really alone with my circumstances.
It is very easy for me to imagine making an irrational decision (ha-ha – I think it’s my default setting). In this decision, as with every decision, I’m either rational or irrational –
I have to be clever enough to figure it out. If anything goes wrong, I’ve only got myself to blame, right? What a terrible way to live. What if I have to make a very time-sensitive medical decision for a person I love?
Do I have time to run through a menu of decision-making tools, or can I turn to someone
I trust to help me with the decision. How do I know that person is rational? Is it enough to know that they care, and that I trust them under the circumstances? Is rational thinking the litmus test for every real-life situation? Ultimately, I believe the author falls short in her effort to suggest that rationality is not only necessary, but sufficient in order to be “better than” those who can’t see clearly. How many grandparents do you have? (2021)
How many people have ever lived on the earth (2021) – YouTube
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly
and Others Don’t by Julia Galef – Bing video