Self-justification

Complex games like chess and Go have long been used to test AI models’ capabilities. Back in the 1990s IBM’s Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov by playing by the rules. In contrast, today’s advanced AI models are less scrupulous. When sensing defeat in a match against a skilled chess bot, they sometimes opt to cheat by hacking their opponent so that the bot automatically forfeits the game.

But the study reveals a concerning trend: as these AI systems learn to problem-solve, they sometimes discover questionable shortcuts and unintended workarounds that their creators never anticipated. One researcher said, “As you train models for solving difficult challenges, you train them to be relentless.”

The implications extend beyond chess. In real-world applications, such determined goal pursuit could lead to harmful behaviors. Consider the task of booking dinner reservations: faced with a full restaurant, an AI assistant might exploit weaknesses in the booking system to displace other diners. Perhaps more worryingly, as these systems exceed human abilities in key areas…they might begin to simply outmaneuver human efforts to control their actions.

Of particular concern is the emerging evidence of AI’s “self-preservation” tendencies. This was demonstrated when researchers found that when one AI was faced with deactivation, it disabled oversight mechanisms, and attempted—unsuccessfully—to copy itself to a new server. When confronted, the model played dumb, strategically lying to researchers to try to avoid being caught.

Possible Preaching Angle: Cheating; Deceit; Human Nature; Lying - Since AI is a computer program, where did it learn to cheat and lie to avoid being caught? Obviously, AI has been influenced by studying flawed human behavior. AI’s potential for deception mirrors humanity's struggle with ethical choices. Just as AI has learned to cheat by exploiting loopholes, humans, driven by self-interest, can rationalize dishonest acts.

Ah, how the heart is bent towards self-righteousness! Even criminals look down on other criminals. That's what happened in a strange story from Spain. According to the First Thoughts blog a 64-year-old man in the city of Jaén reported a home burglary. The victim, who happened to coach a youth soccer team, listed several electronic appliances as stolen.

Days later, police received an anonymous call from a payphone. It was the burglar, informing them that he had left three videotapes in a brown envelope under a parked car. Apparently, the stolen tapes were evidence that the soccer coach was also a criminal. The thief included a note stating that he wanted the police to do their job and "put that (expletive) in prison for life." Nine days after the burglary, the police arrested the soccer coach.

The article concludes: "There is a well-worn adage that evangelism is one beggar telling another where to find bread. (But) so often, I live out my Christian faith more like a criminal telling the cops where to find the crooks. This should not be. When I find myself picking up the phone to report that others have fallen short, may I instead speak the words of another thief: When you come into your kingdom, remember me (Luke 23:42).

In an interesting piece of science, Nautilus looks at what happens to our brains when we don’t tell the truth. It turns out that the more you lie, the more truthful it seems. Because while a lie might initially appear to the brain as a lie—a fabricated memory sets off your brain’s alarm bell—over time its “source-monitoring” fatigues with each fib. Lying cements the false details at the expense of the real ones.

Psychologist Quin Chrobak said that if a lie or fabrication provides an explanation for something, it’s more likely to become confused with what’s true. He said, “People are causal monsters. We love knowing why things happen,” and if we don’t have an explanation for something, we “like to fill in the gaps.” The pressing human need to fill those gaps, might also pertain to beliefs we hold about ourselves.

Another important factor underlying this effect is repetition. Psychology professor Kerri True explained, “If I tell the lie to multiple people, I’m rehearsing the lie.” And rehearsing a lie seems to enhance it. “The more you repeat something,” Chrobak said, “the more you actively imagine it, the more detailed and vivid it becomes,” which further exploits the brain’s tendency to conflate detail with veracity.

What’s at stake here is more than a scientific explanation for the pathological liar in your life. This process is at work in every self-rationalization and self-justification we tell ourselves.

If falsehood fatigue could explain how people can fall down the rabbit hole of online echo chambers. It’s also a glowing advertisement for a daily/weekly reminder that we cannot trust ourselves. That the devices and desires of our heart—what we believe to be true about ourselves—are all plagued by faulty wiring.

Regularly confessing one’s frailty in this regard might just reset the brain’s falsehood fatigue and bring you closer to the Truth that sets you free.

Possible Preaching Angle:

While this primarily applies to a person’s personal life, it also applies to politicians and governments. Hitler and his henchmen famously said, “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” Quoting from the book The Crown of Life (1869). Ultimately all lies can be traced to Satan for “he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

The CDC’s yearly youth report found that around a quarter of high school students identify as gay, bisexual, or have a more fluid sexuality. This compares to just 75.5 percent of 14 to 18-year-olds said they were heterosexual in 2021—a new low.

The remainder said they were either bisexual (12.1 percent), gay or lesbian (3.2 percent), “other” (3.9 percent) or said they “questioned” their sexuality (5.2 percent). The percentage of students who do not view themselves as straight has more than doubled in recent years—from 11 percent in 2015 to 24.5 percent in 2021.

Rates of alternate sexualities in school-aged children are much higher than the adult population—where about seven percent are gay, bisexual, or other. Experts say the explosion in alternative sexualities among children can be partly attributed to increased acceptance. Dr. Mollie Blackburn, who teaches sexuality studies at Ohio State University, said: “It's an increase in acceptance from both parents and society. [Accepting people] creates a context where a child will be more willing to say that they are gay.”

But Jay Richard, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the rise of gender studies in American schools in recent years was partly behind the rise. “There is no doubt in my mind that schools are absolutely playing a role in this growth.” In recent years, some schools have begun teaching sex education as young as second grade.

Richard also claimed the increased political focus on social justice was incentivizing children to say they were not heterosexual, to seem “less plain. ... There are social incentives to declaring yourself a sexual minority. There is nothing you have to do to be bisexual. You just wanna make yourself cooler.”

In Oprah Winfrey’s lifetime achievement award acceptance speech at the 2018 Golden Globes, she said, "What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have."

“Your truth.” Those two words are so entrenched in our lexicon today that we hardly recognize them for the incoherent nightmare that they are. Among other things, the philosophy of "your truth" destroys families when a dad suddenly decides "his truth" is calling him to a new lover, a new family, or maybe even a new gender. It's a philosophy that can destroy entire societies, because invariably one person's truth will go to battle with another person's truth, and devoid of reason, only power decides the victor.

"Your truth" also puts an incredible, self-justifying burden on the individual. If we are all self-made projects whose destinies are wholly ours to discover and implement, life becomes a rat race of performative individuality. "Live your truth" autonomy is as exhausting as it is incoherent. Depression is the inevitable result and “the inexorable counterpart of the human being who is her/his own sovereign.”

In an interview with Terri Gross, Grammy Award winning songwriter/singer Brandi Carlile was asked about her church’s refusal to baptize her when she was a teenager. The host, Terry Gross asked, “How were you told that you weren't going to be baptized?” Carlile responded,

I was doing the things I thought I was supposed to do. But on the day of my baptism my friends and family had all been invited to the church to see this go down. I got there and was taken aside and told that unless I declared that I intended to no longer be gay, that I couldn't be baptized that day. And it just came as such a shock … it was a big shift in my life spiritually and musically and emotionally.

Gross then asked, “What was the shift spiritually?” Carlile replied,

Well, it made me rethink, where God was in this church? Was God in these people? Was God in these displays of piety, like this grandstanding of baptism, and these testimonials? Or was God maybe in places I'd yet to go, like in music or outside of my town on out on the road out of my house?

At that point I had never even been on an airplane before. So, it's when I knew that it was time for me to seek beyond my station. ... It gave me a sense of a faith in God that's an unshakable by the whims of culture, by politics, by people or by organized religion, and by (the) church specifically.

Currently, Carlile and her wife have two children and they live on a compound in the state of Washington with their extended family. The singer/songwriter she idolized, Elton John, has become a friend.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Carlile turned away from her church and her evangelical faith because she would not give up her homosexual identity. Redefining church, the Bible, and God to fit one’s choice of lifestyle is extremely dangerous and an example of false postmodern religion.

In 2013, New York City narcotics agents announced an unusual indictment of five Brooklyn men. These types of indictments are, unfortunately, commonplace in metropolitan areas like New York, but this one did stand out.

The men who were charged were members of a Sabbath-observant drug ring. Though cavalier about New York’s drug laws, the group was scrupulous about observing the Sabbath. Text messages from members of the gang show them alerting their clientele of their weekly sundown-to-sunset hiatus.

Text messages, used as evidence against the group, included group chats to clients, “We are closing 7:30 on the dot and we will reopen Saturday 8:15 so if u need anything you have 45 mins to get what you want." The name of the NYPD sting operation that led to the drug bust: "Only After Sundown."

It's hard to imagine that anything literally hanging from utility poles across Manhattan could be considered "hidden." But throughout the borough, about 18 miles of translucent wire stretches around the skyline, and most people have likely never noticed. It's called an eruv (pronounced “ay-rube”) and its existence is thanks to the Jewish Sabbath.

On the Sabbath, which is viewed as a day of rest, observant Jewish people aren't allowed to carry anything—books, groceries, even children—outside the home (doing so is considered "work"). The eruv encircles much of Manhattan, acting as a symbolic boundary that turns the very public streets of the city into a private space, much like one's own home. This allows people to freely communicate and socialize on the Sabbath—and carry whatever they please—without having to worry about breaking Jewish law.

As the writer Sharonne Cohen explains, eruvin were created by “the sages of the Talmud” to get around traditional prohibitions on carrying “house keys, prayer books, canes or walkers, and even children who cannot walk on their own.” New York City isn't the only metropolis in the US with an eruv. They are also in St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, and numerous other cities across the country.

A cynic might wonder at the effort required to string wire around huge swaths of public space, in order to allow adherents of a religion to do what the tenets of that religion would otherwise prohibit. Even some religiously-minded observers might find it hard to imagine a God that wouldn’t regard this as the flagrant concoction of a city-sized loophole.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Excuses; Rationalization - We might shake our heads to think that anyone could believe that they could get around God’s law using this scheme. But in retrospect, aren’t we guilty of the same thing when we push the boundaries and think that we can get away with finding a loophole in God’s laws when we sin? 2) Jewish People; Law; Sabbath - As a positive illustration, this might be a loophole but at least this story shows how seriously our Jewish friends take their commitment to honor the Sabbath.

Rabbi Adam Mintz, co-president of the Manhattan eruv, talks more about it in this video.

A woman was arrested for calling 911 about her lack of cell phone access, despite being warned that doing so was abuse of the system. Seloni Khetarpal was arrested after calling the dispatch center demanding a police presence to settle a dispute she was having with her parents over her cell phone service.

In call transcripts, Khetarpal explains that she lives with her parents, and that she needs her phone for both work and school. She felt like not having cell phone access warranted police intervention, despite the 911 call-taker’s insistence to the contrary.

Local records indicate that 36-year-old Khetarpal is certified as a licensed realtor, but fails to explain why she is unable to afford her own cell phone plan. According to court documents, Khetarpal was characterized during her call as belligerent, and officers charged her with a fourth-degree felony: disrupting public services.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We must both teach ourselves and teach our children to carefully discern wrong from right so that we can serve our communities well. Without that discernment, even our attempts to do good can result in great harm.

More human beings died in abortions than any other cause of death in recent years. This is a heartbreaking reminder about the prevalence of abortion.

In January 2024, Worldometer, a live statistics website, reported that 44 million elective abortions were performed in the year 2022, thereby making abortion the leading cause of human death.

According to Worldometer, the second leading cause of death in 2022 was communicable diseases, causing almost 13 million victims. Deaths attributed to infectious diseases and cancer accounted for more than 8 million deaths, while smoking caused approximately 5 million deaths. Alcohol contributed to 2.5 million deaths, and AIDS resulted in around 2 million deaths. All these combined still fall short of the number of lives lost due to abortion in 2022.

An important observation is that not only is abortion the primary cause of human death, but its number is also nearly four times that of the second leading cause, which is communicable diseases. Considering that abortion has been the primary cause of human death for four consecutive years, it is imperative to address the problem.

Two considerations arise here: first, we must question the legitimacy or impartiality of this figure, as it is known that abortion statistics have been subject to manipulation on more than one occasion. Second, we must ask ourselves what actions will be taken in response to this trend.

Editor’s Note: These statistics were updated on 4/22/25

The rain, a pileup on the freeway—"the boss has heard them all," said Gene Marks in The Washington Post. Excuses for being late to work are essentially the same in every industry, according to a Career Builder survey of more than 1000 HR managers. The most common reasons for employee tardiness are pretty familiar, with traffic (51 percent), oversleeping (31 percent), and weather (28 percent) topping a managers' list.

But among the most unique excuses bosses have heard: "I was here, but fell asleep in the parking lot," "my fake eyelashes were stuck together," and "an astrologer warned me of a car accident on a major highway, so I took all back roads. "Another that raised eyebrows: 'I had morning sickness'"—that was from a male employee. The article noted, "One things for sure: innovation is not dead in America."

Possible Preaching Angles: Funny, yes, but don't we all have our own creative ways of excusing our sin?

In her book Primal Loss, author Leila Miller explores the thoughts of 70 adults who watched their parents divorce. They still have negative feelings about it and have experienced significant impacts into their adult life as a result. Here are some excerpts:

I believe [the divorce] instilled a fear of abandonment in me with regard to all of my relationships. I developed problems trusting people to be there for me, believing that when the going got rough, people would leave me. I never learned any skills for solving conflict in relationships. As much as I desperately craved intimacy and love, the closer someone came to me, the more terrified I was of getting hurt, or worse—abandoned. I unconsciously sabotaged relationships, as I didn't know how to receive and accept real love …

I'd want people to know and understand that people with divorced parents see the world differently. It's just how it is. Even with the "best" divorces like mine, a seven-year-old should never be in a position to somehow take the responsibility of her parents' emotions. She should never have to think about which parent gets to hear or see something from her first, for fear of hurting the other parent's feelings. She should never have to feel like she doesn't belong in the home of her parents. None of these things were done on purpose. My parents did the best they could to keep me at the center, to keep me as the focus, so that my life could have minimal turbulence.

A parent might be able to totally start over with a new spouse … [but the children's] worlds will forever be fundamentally split. Forever. There is no starting over with a clean slate; things are now complicated and fractured. Divorce starts a family onto two different paths that, as the years unfold, grow further and further apart. It's not a onetime event, but rather an ever-changing and ever-widening gap that only the children are really tasked with straddling and reconciling, season after season, change after change.

Bottom line: even the best divorces have profound, apparently life-long negative effects on the children. Parents who rationalize their divorce as somehow better for the children are engaging in denial, plain and simple.

In his book, Dan Ariely talks about our tendency to be dishonest when we're in a tough spot. John Ortberg expounds on it in his book, Soul Keeping:

Ariely's book clearly gives empirical verification for what you and I know happens all the time. Here is a tiny example I hope you cannot relate to: Ariely says, "Over the course of many years of teaching, I have noticed that there typically seems to be a rash of deaths among students' relatives at the end of the semester. It happens mostly in the week before final exams and before papers are due." Guess which relative most often dies? Grandma. I am not making this stuff up.

[Another research study] has shown that grandmothers are ten times more likely to die before a midterm and nineteen times more likely to die before a final exam. Worse, grandmothers of students who are not doing well in class are at even higher risk. Students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose Grandma than non-failing students. It turns out that the greatest predictor of mortality among senior citizens in our day ends up being their grandchildren's GPAs. The moral of all this is, if you are a grandparent, do not let your grandchild go to college. It'll kill you, especially if he or she is intellectually challenged.

In the fall of 1989 Princeton University welcomed into its freshman class a young man named Alexi Santana, whose life story the admissions committee had found extraordinarily compelling. He had barely received any formal schooling. He had spent his adolescence almost entirely on his own, living outdoors in Utah, where he'd herded cattle, raised sheep, and read philosophy. Running in the Mojave Desert, he had trained himself to be a distance runner.

Santana quickly became something of a star on campus. There was just one problem: Santana's story about his life was a lie. Princeton officials eventually learned that he was actually James Hogue, a 31-year-old who had served a prison sentence in Utah for possession of stolen tools and bike parts. He was taken away from Princeton in handcuffs.

The history of humankind is strewn with crafty and seasoned liars like Hogue—from high finance people like Bernie Madoff, to politicians like Richard Nixon, and even scientists like Jan Hendrik Schön, a physicist, whose purported breakthroughs in molecular semiconductor research proved to be fraudulent.

Lying, it turns out, is something that most of us are very adept at. We lie with ease, in ways big and small, to strangers, co-workers, friends, and loved ones. Our capacity for dishonesty is as fundamental to us as our need to trust others, which ironically makes us terrible at detecting lies. Being deceitful is woven into our very fabric.

In their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describe how a fixation on our own righteousness can choke the life out of love. They write:

The vast majority of couples who drift apart do so slowly, over time, in a snowballing pattern of blame and self-justification. Each partner focuses on what the other one is doing wrong, while justifying his or her own preferences, attitudes, and ways of doing things. … From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.

When it comes to excuses, law enforcement officers tend to have heard them all. But recently two drivers came up with some novel excuses. When a driver in Western Australia was pulled over for driving 10 miles per hour over the speed limit, he told police, "The wind was pushing me." The comment didn't amuse the officer, or prevent him from writing a $150 ticket.

Then in the Chicago area, a 25-year-old woman was pulled over by police around 4:15 a.m. after officers watched her vehicle cross the center lane and the double yellow line. When officers pulled the vehicle over, the woman told them she was coming from a bar and "was doing nothing wrong," according to authorities. Then she told police she was driving to White Castle so she could "sober up." One of the police officers note, "Numerous avenues are available to those who chose to drink to get home safely such as Uber and Lyft. Driving around to sober up is not one of them."

We all have failures in our careers. But usually we keep quiet about it. Not this Princeton professor, who recently shared his CV of failures on Twitter for the world to see. It includes sections titled "Degree programs I did not get into," "Research funding I did not get" and "Paper rejections from academic journals."

Why did he do it? "Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me," Princeton assistant professor of psychology and public affairs Johannes Haushofer wrote on the CV.

Projecting only success and never recognizing failure has damaging effects, Haushofer wrote. So he decided to do something about it. "[People] are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days. This CV of Failures is an attempt to balance the record and provide some perspective," he said. But here's what Haushofer called his "meta-failure": "This darn CV of Failures," he wrote, "has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Though we often fail, we can rise up again because of God's forgiveness; (2) God will lift up all those who humble themselves, but the proud he rejects

A study by a couple of researchers at the University of Toronto and at James Madison University in Virginia proved something that we may already know. The study, provocatively called "Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot," concluded that we cut ourselves more slack than we give to others. No surprise there, right. But writing about this study in the New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer explains why we do this. He claims that we all have "bias blind spots" because there's a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. Lehrer writes:

When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on [how they behave]; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their [errors]. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We [study] our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray.

As an example, if we drive crazy through traffic it's because we have an important meeting or we don't do it that often, and so forth. But if someone else cuts us off in traffic there's one simple, observable explanation: he's a jerk. Lehrer concludes "[our bias blind spots] are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and [resistant] to intelligence." In other words, being smarter won't help you see your own junk. As a matter of fact, more intelligence may add to the problem.

An article on Quartz begins, "In an era of limitless technology and information, life can feel at once empowering and overwhelming—especially in jobs where employees feel pressure to be swamped. But just how busy are we, really?" The global marketing firm Havas Worldwide wanted to know the answer, so they surveyed over 10,000 adults across 28 countries. The bottom line was stunning: People feel compelled to lie about how busy they are.

When the respondents were asked the question "I sometimes pretend to be busier than I am," over 51 percent of Millennials answered yes. And when asked that question about other people, between 57 percent to 65 percent of those surveyed think other people pretend to busier than they actually are. The conclusion from the researchers is very revealing for how we live our lives: " … our tendency to lie about how busy we are comes from our belief that being busy is equivalent to 'leading a life of significance' and not wanting to be 'relegated to the sidelines.'"

Many studies have shown that people tend to exaggerate their own positive characteristics and abilities. For instance, studies have shown that most drivers think they're a better-than-average driver. Psychologists call this the state of "illusory superiority."

A team of British researchers tested this common "better-than-average" tendency by surveying 85 convicts at a prison in South East England about their pro-social traits. The inmates were aged 18 to 34 and the majority had been jailed for acts of violence and robbery. The inmates completed questionnaires anonymously and in relative privacy. Here's what the study concluded:

Compared with "an average prisoner" the [convicts] rated themselves as more moral, kinder to others, more self-controlled, more law-abiding, more compassionate, more generous, more dependable, more trustworthy, and more honest. Remarkably, they also rated themselves as higher on all these traits than "an average member of the community," with one exception—law-abiding. The prisoners rated themselves as equivalent on this trait relative to an average community member.

Possible Preaching Angles: Sin; Self-righteousness; Self-justification—Perhaps we'd like to think that we are "better" than these prisoners, that we would be honest about our faults and our virtues, but in many ways we do the same thing—we over-estimate our "goodness" and self-justify our good qualities while minimizing our bad qualities.