Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler.
And I'm still Woe.
Today's Stone Choir is going to be the prequel to the beginning
of our series on the Septuagint.
It's something we've been talking about for probably about sixteen months now.
Been excited for a really long time to begin doing these episodes.
We had been holding off waiting for a book to be published
so that we could release this episode the same time that that
book had come out.
Hopefully it's gonna be coming soon, but we're not gonna wait any
longer. The next episode that we do probably not next week, 'cause
we're gonna have to do a bunch of final prep to prepare
that episode.
We've been working on it for sixteen months, but we want to
get all our ducks in a row because the Septuagint series is
going to be the most important thing that Stone Choir ever does.
And so we gotta get it right.
We wanna make it enjoyable, listenable, digestible, and understandable.
And so it's gonna be the 100th episode.
We'll be beginning of that.
This is our 99th episode.
And I call it a prequel because as I was preparing my
comments in the preamble for the 100th episode, for the Septuagint episode,
I was going to talk about what we're going to discuss today.
And once my preparatory comments got probably best about the thirty minute
mark, I realized this should really probably just be an episode by
itself. Because what we're going to talk about today doesn't have anything
to do with Septuagint.
It has to do with a methodical approach to what we learn
and how we learn, how the human mind works.
So the title of the episode is the context window, which is
a term of art from LLM's large language models or AI.
We're going to be talking in some detail about how AIs work
in this specific regard, but this is not a bunch of nerd
stuff. you don't need to know or care about AI.
This is about how the human mind works.
This is about your brain, my brain, how we process information, how
we store it, how we access it, and how we reason with
the information that we have.
This episode is going to be kind of the intersection of the
genealogy of ideas and the IQ episode, and it's specifically related to
how much can you hold in your mind at once when you're
mulling over something?
And that's really what the context window is.
For an LLM, the context window is kind of its RAM in
a way.
It's its working set of whatever conversation you're having at a given
time. How much of that conversation can it remember and refer back
to both what you've said to the AI and what it said
to you?
Because as long as you stay inside that context window, it can
have perfect recollection of everything that's been spoken.
The problem, and the reason for doing this episode, is as soon
as with an LLM you spill over the maximum extent of that
context window, it just loses its mind.
It can't remember anything larger than that window.
And And the human mind works the same way, just fuzzier.
So you can be having a conversation with someone and you know,
if the conversation goes on for ten or fifteen minutes, you can
sort of remember most basic things that they said ten minutes ago,
maybe. You get the gist of it.
you couldn't quote a back to them, but you're on the same
page, because you've been having a back and forth and you can
sort of understand it.
So with humans, the context window is fuzzy.
With computers, it's very fixed.
The reason that we want to talk about it is a preface
for the next episode, the Septuagint episode, when we begin that series,
we are going to be going through about 2,500 years of church
history. We're going to be presenting numerous facts in order.
It's going to be another timeline episode.
A bunch of staccato points about this guy did this at this
time and it influenced someone else later, someone else chose to either
follow or to deviate from his path.
And we just have a series of those events leading up to
today. And so the Septuagint, when you put all of the facts
related to that translation of the Bible, as it's commonly referred to,
you end up with where we are today.
And the point that we're going to be making in that episode
is that when you look at the entire timeline, the conclusions that
we have today about the Septuagint are invalidated.
The only way to have the current view of the Septuagint that's
commonly held by pretty much everyone in the Christian church and elsewhere
is to make mistakes somewhere along the way in the timeline.
As we've been doing the prep for that episode, we realize that
this is just it's a huge amount of information.
And we're gonna be distilling a lot.
Part of the reason that we've put off releasing the Septuagint series
until that book was published was we wanted to put something in
your hands.
Basically the book is someone's master's thesis.
It's just the historical aspect of this.
It's portions of this timeline.
It's not everything that we're going to talk about.
It's a subset of it.
But it's a lot of the really important parts in the specific
context of church history, which is really vital.
So So the thrust of the master's thesis about the Septuagint is
that nothing new is being said.
This is all settled history.
It's not controversial.
It's not some weird new discovery.
We're not talking about gold tablets here.
We're just talking about looking at the way the church has historically
viewed the Septuagint versus the Masoretic text, which is the what we
call the Hebrew Old Testament.
And the Septuagint I should have defined for those who aren't familiar,
the Greek Old Testament.
We'll give the historical details in the next episode, but as we
were looking at this huge timeline, we realized we're gonna blow out
your context window.
You're not gonna be able to keep it all in your head.
And that's fine, except that we're going to be telling you new
conclusions derived from that timeline that will be controversial.
Unlike the book.
The book is not controversial, but it's very valuable because it lays
out the basics.
Our conclusions are going to be controversial and we don't want to
seem to be manipulative of people by saying what I'm going to
say next.
When we're going through that episode, people are going to have to
not fight back as we're going through.
Because what's going to happen is we go through the details of
the history of the Septuagint.
If you know a little bit about some detail somewhere along the
timeline, where one of your favorite theologians has the had this opinion
about it, you're gonna be shouting at your your phone or however
you listen to this podcast and saying, well that can't be because
of this other thing.
We don't want to brainwash anyone.
We don't want to blow smoke.
We're not trying to play any magic tricks.
So I'll say it here, and I'm going to say it again
in the next episode.
When we're going through that very detailed timeline, every time you have
that impulse, every time you hear something like that's crap, that can't
be right, this other guy said this.
Please pause the recording, write it down, either on a piece of
paper or on your computer, and then put it out of your
mind. Both of those things are necessary because I don't want you
to forget what you thought was objectionable.
Not trying to play a game where you just have to believe
whatever we say.
That's despicable.
It's the last thing that we would ever want.
But if you were just sitting there stewing because you know we
You know we have to be wrong because we didn't talk about
that one thing.
It's gonna be a long episode.
We might end up breaking even the timeline into multiple chunks depending
on how long it gets.
What we need from you as listeners is to cooperate for the
duration of the episode and just let us make our case.
Let us make the entire case without arguing, which is why you
need to pause and write things down.
Basically, once again, we're asking you to be jurists.
If you've ever been on a jury, if you've ever seen jury
instructions on TV, the judge will say, Don't discuss this amongst yourselves,
don't look it up on the internet.
You are only to listen to what's presented in court.
And when you begin your deliberations, then you can talk freely.
But as long as the court case is open, you have to
keep an open mind, you have to take in everything that you
hear, whether it's true or false, and not prejudge, not reach any
conclusions until the case is closed.
That's essentially what we're doing here.
I absolutely want you to take the most critical, brutal approach to
what we say in the next episode.
That's fine.
I want you to write it all down.
But if you're just convinced at every point, when we're thirty minutes
into that episode, they'll probably be at least three hours, and you're
already convinced that we're wrong in the third century because because of
something that some guy said in the 15th century, you're not being
a good jurist.
You've already prejudged based on something you brought in from outside, and
it's gonna break our case.
Now again, maybe the case is completely fabricated and we're lying and
we're trying to play games.
I don't want you to be misled by our approach.
So I'm just gonna say flat out, pause the recording and write
down your objections and then just set them aside.
Continue listening and know that that piece of paper is going to
be there.
You're not going to forget, because you've written it down.
We're not going to be able to trick you.
The reason for all of that, and the reason for this episode
is a preamble, is that the scope of the information we're going
to be presenting blows out your context window.
There's more there than you can take in.
And I was thinking about this in the shower this morning, and
I realized that this is actually akin to something that happened in
my childhood.
Bill Clinton ran for president when I was in high school.
He was the first Brumer president.
And so he was young at the time.
And the fact that he was so young relative to Bob Dole
was a big deal.
And there was a lot of discussion at that time by the
Democrat Party in particular of two things.
Rock the vote was a big thing that they were pushing on
MTV, and the motor voter bill was something that Congress passed around
that time.
The specific intent of Rock the Vote and the Motor Voter Bill
was essentially to make every single person in the country a voter,
no matter what, no matter how low information anyone was, in particular
the younger they were and the less they knew, the more important
it was to the Democrats that those people voted.
Historically in the US, voting has been seen as something that's a
duty, but it's a duty to participate in something where if you
get it wrong, you're gonna harm your neighbor.
You can't make a mistake in voting about something because if you
do, your neighbor's going to be hurt, you're going to be hurt,
your family's going to be hurt.
You're choosing usually between two not great options.
But if you pick the wrong one, you're going to make things
worse for both yourself and your neighbor.
And the Democrats have been devoted for very long time to making
things as bad as possible.
And so they wanted as many as low information, low propensity voters
as possible to be participants.
Which is why today, once you're registered to vote, it's basically automatic
and perpetual.
They made it as easy as possible with legislation when I was
a kid, so that once you're registered to vote, it's just sticks
forever. So that it's virtually frictionless for you to go vote.
The reason that's relative to this, this discussion today is that
what happened there and what it we're living in the the aftermath
and the continuum of is end stage egalitarianism where everyone's valuable, everyone's
opinion is valuable, everyone gets a vote because we're all equals.
And so it doesn't matter if the person voting is an 18-year-old
that has no idea what's going on, but they heard a commercial
that sounded like the other guy was really bad.
What happened with this end stage democratic egalitarianism is that the act
of voting itself is described in in religious terms.
They describe it as sacrosanct, and they will basically elevate voting to
the highest moral good, even above
caring about for whom you vote.
It doesn't matter who you vote for, just vote.
You've all heard that said.
That is a religious tenant to say it doesn't matter who you
vote for as long as you vote, because the highest good is
participation. So it occurred to me, and the reason for this is
that when you exclude culpability for getting things wrong, when you exclude
any notion that a man should know what he's doing before he
does something.
When you create an environment inside the voting booth where no sin
can occur, when you vote you are absolutely doing a moral good,
and the only sin that could occur related to voting would be
if someone prevented you from voting, if they discouraged you from voting,
or if they physically prevented you.
That would be the highest sin imaginable in democracy, because your vote
is sacred.
The problem with that is that maybe you're an idiot and you
don't know what you're doing.
And when you step into the voting booth, you've been lied to
for the five minutes that you were paying attention and you end
up voting for the worst of two possible options.
Foolishly, you didn't know any better.
But But what has happened with our society is that we're told
that's fine.
You did the right thing because you voted.
Whatever else, at least you participated.
And even if you got something wrong, you can participate again in
four years or two years, and you can vote in the opposite
direction, that will be good.
As long as you're voting, you're always moral.
That's what the I voted stickers are.
The I voted sticker that they hand out is basically like the
ashes that are put on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday.
It is a secular religion saying I have been absolved of my
sins by the virtue of my vote.
What this has to do with context window in all these discussions
we're going to be talking about is that if participation by itself
is the highest moral good, then you are free from any notion
of having to do it well.
You are free from any notion of having to actually know what
you're talking about.
And that is the problem that we see every day on social
media and elsewhere.
And all the social media people, it has many bad things, but
fundamentally it's just people talking to each other.
That's almost always strangers talking to each other where you get to
know people.
But it's fundamentally you just talking to other random people who could
be anywhere on the planet.
The participatory element of social media is exactly like the participatory element
of voting.
As long as you vote, you've done a good thing.
And that's what we see on social media.
As long as you have an opinion and you speak up, you've
done a good thing.
It doesn't matter if you're right or wrong.
It doesn't matter if you have any facts in mind.
All that matters is that you participated.
And so the end stages that on social media is what we
see today is even intelligent Christians give no thought whatsoever when they're
wading into some debate that's maybe been going on for years, arguments
been going on where they've seen one element of a thousand, but
they don't care to learn any of the backstory.
All they care about is, well, I need to have an opinion
about this.
I saw one person do one thing and another person do another
thing. I have to pick a side and I have to make
my voice heard.
This is just basically how we all behave today.
And it's repugnant.
And part of it is that it's the collapse of our own
personal context windows to the last 30 seconds, 15 seconds.
You don't need to know any backstory because if you see one
person do something, you're now free to judge them.
You have all the information you need to make a profound moral
judgment for against that person.
You picked your side, you've declared it, and because you said it
out loud, I voted, I have performed the highest moral good by
stating my opinion on the internet.
That's pretty much what we've been reduced to functionally.
It's very much like the subject in last week's episode where we
talked about how addiction being elevated to an excuse for sin, once
you've psychologized away the notion that sin exists, it just patterns a
behavior, when you're absolved from having to actually behave in a moral
fashion, in a fashion that evaluates your actions, when morality is no
longer a factor, when it's just, well, I'm participating, I I'm an
addict, so of course I do addict things.
I I want to stop being an addict, but you know, uh
there's no moral culpability.
I'm gonna vote, it doesn't matter who I vote for, but I
have to do it because it's important to participate.
I see two guys talking on the internet, I'm gonna make my
voice heard because that's the important thing.
And as long as I do that, I bear no moral culpability
for the degree of ignorance that I've just expressed.
And
when we lay out the entire Sebtuage on argument, it's going to
be so much bigger than anyone's context window that if you take
that approach, if you take the last 15 seconds of whatever we
said and you react indignantly, you're not going to get anything out
of it.
You won't learn anything.
It's going to be a waste of your time.
And I want you to be able to get something out of
it. And that involves this precursor where we say there's this thing
going on in all of our heads.
Again, this isn't about LLMs or AI.
This is about how our brains work.
We have a finite amount of scratch space.
I've been speaking now for eighteen minutes.
You can remember bits and pieces of what I said three, five,
eight minutes ago, but you couldn't verbatim, and that's fine, because I'm
making a series of points, and you're generally coming along.
Next week, next month, the only thing that I care about you
remembering is the notion of the context window that you can only
hold so much in your head at once.
It's why Corey and I often on Stone Choir will repeat things.
We aggravate some of the smarter guys in the audience by repeating
things ad nauseum and we'll often use that explicit term.
We know that we're being redundant because we want it to sink
in. We know that you listen for 90 minutes or two hours,
and maybe only two or three things are gonna actually implant themselves.
We try to make sure it's the things that we we care
about. We try to make sure it's the things that we made
the episode for and not some random joke or something.
So So we're cognizant of the fact that this is how everybody's
brains work.
No matter how smart you are, you have an outer limit to
what you can hold in mind.
But once you realize that you have this personal limitation, it does
begin to have a moral tenor.
Because if you personally can only remember the last five minutes of
a conversation and it's been going on for twenty minutes, think twice
about getting angry about the last thing that a guy said because
maybe it ties back to something you forgot.
And we see this on social media where guys, even when the
text record is right there, when you have post, post, post, post,
and anyone could go back and read all of them, they'll get
mad about something at the end of a thread that's only 15
minutes long because they forgot what was going on earlier.
That's not only a behavioral problem, but it's a moral problem.
Because when you're reaching dire conclusions about something, this guy's evil, this
guy's terrible.
If If you do that with just absolutely no effort whatsoever, but
you do with a clean conscience because hey, I voted, I participated,
I posted, my conscience is clean.
That's a bad thing.
It's a bad place that we've gotten to.
And I don't, I've been on the internet my entire life, basically.
I don't know what discussion was like before the internet, but I
can't imagine it was this stupid.
And the only thing that we can do to try to help
is say, hey, this is a reality.
We can only fit so much in our head.
So if in the course of a discussion or you know, approaching
an idea, you know, if your context window is big enough, it's
not going to be just bigger than a discussion.
It's going to be the last week or the last month of
discussions, because that's what's actually relevant for whatever's being said right now.
We all have these limitations and they're gonna be different for different
people. Some people is gonna be very small and they just can't
keep up with much of anything If that's how God made you,
I can't call you names.
That would be wicked.
All I can do is encourage you to recognize, yeah, I can't
keep up.
And so I'm just gonna step out.
Because I can't in good conscience judge these matters because I'm not
entirely sure what's going on here.
That is an entirely moral and licit position.
It's one that we should hear a lot more of, because it
applies to a lot more people than think.
We have to get away from the notion that I voted, I
posted, my conscience is clean.
That's not a good place to be.
And it causes problems when we try to tackle complicated subjects because
the complexity is not because of some intricacy of interlocking parts.
It's just it's big.
We're going to talk about 2,500 years of church history.
That's a lot to cover.
And all of those pieces are interlocking, they're also sequential.
So as we go through them one by one, it's a simple
case to make.
But when you get out to the twenty five hundred year market,
like I can't I can't fit all that in my head, which
is why I said hanging to explicitly ask people, write down your
objections. Don't forget the things that are confusing.
And I think that at the end of that episode, we will
have either answered those questions to your satisfaction, or in most cases,
you'll realize that the question wasn't really all that relevant.
It seemed important at the time, but once you have the fuller
picture, maybe it just doesn't matter all that much.
The Book of Lamentations was written by the prophet Jeremiah in approximately
five eighty seven BC, right around there, depending on how you number
some of the years.
And the book is a poetic lament about the destruction of Jerusalem
in about five eighty six or five eighty seven BC by the
Babylonians. Of course, as a punishment from God for the apostasy of
the southern kingdom.
The northern kingdom Israel had already been destroyed at this point.
And so in the fifth chapter of this book, one of the
lines, the fourteenth verse, the old men have left the city gate.
Now for some that may seem like a strange statement.
You may not recognize what that's saying.
But tied into what Woe was saying about democracy.
Historically how many matters were handled was the old men of the
city, would meet together in the gate and discuss them.
If you had a problem you would take it to the elders
at the gate and they would render a decision.
That's how things were conducted because there is a certain sort of
wisdom, a degree of wisdom that comes with old age.
It is at least supposed to, obviously not all of the elderly
are wise, but there is wisdom that comes along with length of
years. This is sort of the inversion of what happens with democracy.
Because by and large, democracy is simply a melee, it is a
free-for-all, and you have everyone participating, so-called, regardless of the level of
information, regardless of the level of experience, and yes, experience does count
for something, regardless of all of these things that were considered important
historically, and that are considered important in Scripture, Scripture doesn't condemn the
old men standing in the gate to render decisions.
In fact, Scripture goes the opposite direction you can think of Leviticus.
You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face
of an old man.
One of the roles of those who have lived a long life
and gained this wisdom is to render solid counsel.
That is not what democracy does.
It does the exact opposite of that.
In fact, if you can just gin up support among the youth,
there's a pretty good chance you can win certain elections.
It may be that you have completely and entirely deceived them because
they don't have this necessary context of a long of a long
life, this wisdom that is gained through length of years, and so
perhaps you win the democratic contest.
But that's not a good thing, and we see the same thing
happening all over the place in our society, social media is obviously
one of the great examples.
This isn't to say that the youth shouldn't have a say, that
their voice shouldn't be heard, but it's to say that it should
be tempered by wisdom.
Because God does highly praise wisdom.
It is a gift from God.
It is something that we as Christians, and just as men, should
value. It's not in the roar of the crowd that you find
truth, that you find justice, that you find sound conclusions.
It's not to say that necessarily those things are at odds, because
of course, the crowd can be led toward the truth almost as
easily as it can be led toward a lie, even though sometimes
lies are more pleasing in their presentation, not in their consequences.
That's how sin tends to work.
Rather, it is to say that just because the crowd approves of
something does not mean that that thing is true or correct or
good or just.
We often see this playing out in the various public fora that
we that we now have a society.
We no longer have a public square, really.
We have a virtual one.
And we call it social media.
It happens to be that different age cohorts have sort of divided
themselves up among the various platforms.
Facebook is now the older generation, X is sort of millennials, plus
or minus a bit, and then you have things like TikTok and
such that are the younger generation.
But by and large, on these platforms, particularly the first and the
third, you don't necessarily see the truth being what is winning out.
There's an ongoing raging battle as it were on X for what
is true and what is not, a little bit more than the
other platforms.
But what you see is things that are attractive, that are flashy.
Those are the things that get the most views.
It's in fact admittedly one of the reasons that I phrase things
the way that I do sometimes, because if you don't capture people's
attention, they are never going to see what you said.
In fact, you have to do that if you want to get
out whatever message it happens to be.
Usually I'm trying to force people to think, which is part of
the purpose of this episode and the podcast more generally.
But I word things the way that I do, so that people
will react to them, because that reaction will at least cause them
to pause for a second and maybe think about what I said.
Which is the goal.
Hopefully they will think about it, and arrive at some sort of
conclusion, assess it in a rational fashion, even in a critical fashion,
instead of just scrolling by it to the next thing that happens
to be shiny or flashy, which is so often what happens with
these systems we've built, because basically it's a dopamine treadmill.
But the issue with
these sorts of systems, with democracy, with things like that, is that
we have That we have abandoned the idea of expertise.
And along with the idea of expertise, we've abandoned, as Wo said,
accountability. Because what do you have if you are the old men
standing in the gate?
Well, you have a certain sort of respectability because you are the
grey head that Scripture commands us to honor, the men before whom
you are supposed to rise, which is to honor these men.
But at the same time you have a degree of accountability.
Not just because of the fact that you are an elder and
you are serving in that office, you're in that position, but also
because you are in a very real sense the ones guiding this
city. And if you guide it poorly, the consequences are disastrous for
you and for your family and for everyone who lives in your
city. In other words, your neighbors, you have a duty, by virtue
of that office, to render correct decisions.
Incidentally, that also means that you have a prior duty not to
seek or to hold that office if you have If you do
not have the capacity to render those proper decisions.
Again, democracy subverts this because the only thing that is considered good
is voting, and the only thing that is considered bad is being
precluded from voting, being excluded from the decision.
Well some men should be excluded from making these decisions, because some
men are in fact incompetent to make certain decisions.
An example that I will often use because it's rather visceral and
it gets the point across quite clearly, if you need open heart
surgery, you are not going to go down to the bus stop
and take a poll as to what method should be used or
how it should be pursued or which sort of products should be
used in the procedure.
No, you go to a doctor who is an expert in open
heart surgery, because the alternative is you're probably going to die.
We all recognize that expertise exists in many fields.
If you want a new suit, you're probably going to go to
a tailor, not an auto mechanic.
Inversely, if your car has a problem, you are probably going to
go to the auto mechanic, not a tailor.
We recognize that this expertise exists in all sorts of fields, and
yet because of the propaganda for democracy, We have been trained to
reject expertise in matters of politics, which is really what we're discussing.
This is the umbrella term, the large sense of politics.
And so we've been told that no, every opinion is relevant, every
opinion is of equal weight, of equal value with regard to political
questions. And that's simply not true.
Because there are men who have dedicated their lives and their talents
to these things, and men who have been given certain gifts by
God, and are able to render good decisions.
Whereas many men, most men in fact are not able to do
so. But the fundamental conceit of democracy is that every man has
an equally valid opinion, and that is simply not true.
It is particularly not true in politics.
Now, of course, there is some nuance with this when it comes
to theological questions, because theologically speaking, the same thing is true.
Not all men have the same level of aptitude, not all men
have been given the same gifts.
Some men are much more competent theologically than others.
That is simply a truth.
However, every man needs to get certain theological questions
right. Now we happen to have safeguards in place, which is great
news. We call them the confessions.
And in fact, the confessions and the creeds, I mean both of
those when I say confessions.
You should know those.
You should hold those dear, you should hold to those, you should
cling to those, because those are the guardrails and any man should
be able to Should be able to understand at least the major
confessions, the major creeds of the church.
Now there are going to be many other issues that most men
will not be able to understand.
The communication of attributes is fairly complicated, is fairly nuanced.
Most men are not going to thoroughly understand that issue, or even
why it necessarily matters.
But do you have to understand it to be saved?
The answer is no.
If you read, believe, and confess the creeds, that is sufficient.
But it doesn't mean that these other theological issues are unimportant.
It simply means that you don't necessarily have to have an opinion
on them.
It is entirely fine to simply say I don't know.
Or even to say I don't care.
Now for some of these issues, perhaps it is worthy of caring
about them, but if you don't have the capacity, then just simply
say I don't know.
That is a fine answer.
It is something that Woe and I are perfectly willing to say
Willing to say on subjects about which we don't know that much.
If you ask me a question about quantum chemistry, I'm probably going
to tell you I don't know, because I don't know that much
about that subject.
It is not my area of expertise.
And I don't consider that I should have an opinion on absolutely
everything. In fact, I have opinions, I have positions only on those
things about which I know something.
Now of course I'm not talking about just matters of taste, because
certainly you can have an opinion with regard to taste, so food
or even clothing, and not necessarily be an expert in either of
those things.
That's a different matter.
We're talking about matters of truth.
When it comes to matters of truth, whether it is a theological
truth or a mathematical truth, or a truth in chemistry or physics,
whatever it happens to be
You don't necessarily have to have an opinion if you don't know
anything about it.
So I have positions theologically, because I understand theology.
I have put in the time and effort to understand the subject,
and God has given me certain gifts so that that time and
effort were not wasted.
However, I don't have those sorts of opinions with regard to every
other field, and so you will notice if you look at the
comments that I have made, whether it's on X or elsewhere here
on the podcast, I generally do not speak about most subjects.
Now partly it's because they're not subjects that are necessarily fit for
this podcast, but it's also because I don't have an opinion on
them, I don't have a position on them, and neither does Woe
for many of them.
Because we aren't experts in those things.
Yes, I recognize that I talked about biology and I've talked about
psychology in previous episodes, but I actually do have sufficient training and
knowledge in those fields to speak on them to the extent that
I did.
I'm not going to go beyond
that. Because I don't think that they should be democratized.
I don't think that I should have a say on things about
which I don't know anything.
The fundamental problem with democracy
is that it says that every man should have a say on
the political, when vanishingly few men are experts on the political.
The idea that someone who is eight is eighteen and knows nothing
about politics, and probably just started reading Marx will say for the
most extreme example, the idea that that person should have the exact
same say in politics as a man who has been a statesman
for twenty years, is utterly and completely absurd, and yet that is
what democracy advances.
I want to be very clear.
Again, I am drawing a very
not sort of wall between the two, but a strict delineation between
the political and the theological, because I am in fact saying that
you do indeed have to have opinions on the theological, but only
in so far as they are the core issues of the faith
that are contained in and addressed by the creeds, which is to
say the things you need to know to be saved The other
things the tangential, the ancillary issues, not all of them ancillary, but
some, you do not need to have an opinion on those.
On the other hand, with the political, most men do not need
to have opinions on the political.
Because it is outside their area of expertise.
And it is something that, if they involve themselves, they are probably
going to be doing it to the detriment of their Of their
neighbor and to the detriment of themselves.
Because if you in fact involve yourself in something, it is incumbent
on you to have a certain degree of competence.
Because if you don't have that competence, you are inflicting harm on
others, which is to say that you are sinning.
You should not involve yourself in things about which you do not
have sufficient knowledge to make an accurate assessment.
To engage in a way that is actually helpful to others instead
of harmful to them.
Which is why the very idea of mass democracy, specifically mass democracy
as the worst example, is not only absurd but wicked.
It is an openly evil thing because it asks those who are
least suited to make decisions, to make those very decisions, and to
inflict harm on their neighbor, and in fact to feel like they
have done a good work in doing so.
Because all of the propaganda tells you that if you go and
vote, you've done a good thing, it's your civic duty, which is
incidentally how we used to run the calculation in political science for
how voting was rational, no longer the case, now it's that you
feel good, and I wish I were kidding, but that is actually
what the modern literature says it's the warm fuzzy feeling you get
from participating.
But the propaganda tells you that this is something you should do
and it's a good thing and that you've done this great and
wonderful work if you go and vote.
And that's simply not the case if you don't know why you
voted that way, why you should vote that way, why you should
not have voted another way.
Now of course all of this comes with the practical caveat that
in the modern world we do live under a democratic system presently.
And so, yes, it does matter if you go out and vote.
Because it really is just a headcount.
But you should listen to men who actually know the issues, who
understand the issues, who can say this is the way you should
vote and here is why.
It's important to do that because there's nothing wrong with having leaders.
Every movement has leaders.
Every field has leaders.
And most of the men under those leaders don't understand all of
the actions or all of the reasons for the actions taken by
the leader.
That's entirely fine.
God created hierarchy everywhere.
Children don't have to understand why their parents tell them to go
to bed at a certain time, or why they have to eat
their vegetables, or any of a thousand other things they do.
But it's good if they do them, because God has put that
person in a position of headship, a position of authority, over in
the case of a father over his children, in order to lead
them and guide them for their good.
That's what political leaders are supposed to do.
It's not a bad thing when someone exercises authority or exercises control,
because that has been given to that man by God, and he
is to use it for good.
Now a man who uses it for evil is no longer acting
on behalf of God, and that is a different question we've addressed
in previous podcasts.
But there is nothing inherently wrongful or evil or bad about power
and authority.
In fact, they are goods that come from God, that He has
given to certain men, and it is incumbent on those men to
exercise them in accord with God's desires.
When we look at a system like democracy, which instead of recognizing
the natural hierarchy that God has built into his creation, including among
men, and rejects that, which is what democracy does, instead of looking
at that hierarchy, looking at the design of the system created by
God, and recognizing that natural conclusions flow from it, then we that
we should organize our society in a certain way.
If you reject those things, you wind up with worse outcomes, and
not only do you wind up with worse outcomes, but you wind
up harming your neighbor, you wind up with actively evil outcomes.
Because the system itself is the problem.
And again to tie it back into the discussions that we're having
and leading into the Septuagint episode, the same thing is true with
regard to most discussions.
Because there are going to be men who understand the issues, and
there are going to be men who do not understand the issues,
and there's going to be a spectrum, because there are men who
are experts in the topics being discussed, and there are men who
know nothing about them.
Not all of those men on that spectrum should have equal say.
Because the men who are experts, the men who know more about
subjects should have a greater say, and in fact the men who
know nothing should remain silent, because that is the right thing to
do when you know nothing about the subject.
Now if you happen to have a reasonable question, that's a different
matter. You can ask questions, of course.
But the man who knows nothing about a subject should not stand
up and say, well, I think we should do this, because he
has no reason to advance the position.
The men who have the knowledge also have a duty to use
it in a godly fashion.
Again, this is tying into so many episodes we've done, and there's
a sort of irony here that I brought up with Wo while
we were discussing the topics.
The fact that we're doing context window is the ninety-ninth episode.
Because in a very real way we're drawing on so many previous
episodes that the entirety of the corpus of the podcast is the
context window of this episode.
Is the context window for the things that we are saying, the
positions we're advancing, and indeed what we will be doing in the
Septuagint series.
Now we're not saying that you have to know absolutely everything we
have said in every single podcast, thus far, in every episode thus
far, but it's certainly helpful if you remember the contours and the
major points.
And again, it's one of the reasons that we tend to repeat
the things that we say.
Because if we repeat them, you are more likely to retain them.
That's not an indictment, that's not it shouldn't be heard as an
insult, it shouldn't received as an insult.
That is simply how the human mind works.
It's how my mind works, it's how Woe's mind works, it's how
the mind of every single man ever to live works.
The way that you memorize things is repetition.
I hope we would all remember that from school.
If you learned a foreign language, one of the ways that you
learn it is rote memorization, at least for that core vocabulary, which
is just repetition.
It's flashcards and looking at it in English and then the other
language. That's how we learn.
It's one of the reasons, it's one of the core reasons that
we repeat things so many times in these episodes.
Because we want you to remember the key points.
Because otherwise why are you here?
And otherwise why are we here?
If we're just talking and you aren't actually listening or learning anything,
we're both wasting our time.
We don't want to waste your time and we don't want to
waste our own time.
And so we hope that you take away from these episodes the
core points that we're making in them, which again is why we
repeat them.
Because if it's repeated three, four, five times, you have a much
better chance of remembering it than if it's said once in passing.
And this is not something, again, that is unique to us, that
is unique to really anything when it comes to human endeavors.
Read Scripture.
Things are repeated two, three times, in the same paragraph sometimes in
Scripture. God knows how the human mind works.
God inspired Moses, particularly, if you're looking at the first five books
of Scripture, to write the same thing multiple times in short order,
sometimes spaced, which incidentally we know that spaced repetition is one of
the best ways to remember things Partly because scripture was meant to
be read aloud.
So if you heard something, and then you heard it again a
minute later, and then again a couple minutes after that, you had
a better chance of retaining it, which is vitally important when something
is delivered orally, which is exactly obviously what we're doing with a
podcast, unless you happen to be one of the people who reads
the transcript instead of listens.
So we repeat things so that you will remember them, because otherwise
there's no point.
For us or for you.
I'm gonna give you a brief lesson on LLMs or AI, and
the point again is not to nerd out or give you any
reason to care about technology.
This is an example I'm giving, as I said, this is how
our brains work.
Just Corey was talking about repetition.
The reason that I have found LLM's particularly interesting is I'm learning
um more about myself.
I'm learning more about you.
I'm learning more about being human by watching how they're trying to
tune these machines to think like humans and think it's in scare
quotes there because it's not thought the way we think of thought,
but there is something akin to reasoning.
And there are places where it's absolutely an effective reasoning engine.
There's an example I'll give here in a little bit.
So when we're talking about LLMs and we're talking about context window,
I'm just going to give you a few brief technical details.
Again, this is about us.
What they're trying to do with these machines, with these robots, is
to fit a version of the human brain in a software so
you can run on a computer.
There are two elements to that.
There is the training of the model, which is going to be
based on the corpus of whatever data they can get their hands
on. And for a human, the comparable notion would be basically your
entire life.
Everything you have ever been exposed to, everything you've ever learned, everything
you've ever studied gets compressed into your brain somehow and some of
it sticks.
With an LLM, the model that you will run, and that's why
they have specific names, some of them I've downloaded and I run
locally, one of the ones that I use the most often, because
it's the best right now, is Llama three point three.
In one month it's going to be obsolete because they're about to
release Llama four.
It's going to be way better, it's probably going to be smaller,
faster, it's going to do everything better.
But the underlying technology is more or less the same.
They take a huge corpus of whatever information they could get without
regard to copyright, they stuff it into a file, they perform lots
of complicated math on it to essentially
summarize all human knowledge as best they can.
And it works incredibly well.
I when I was talking about this stuff a year and two
years and three years ago, I didn't think it was going to
get as far as it has today.
They're doing a really good job.
And that's both a wonderful thing and a terrifying thing.
But for today's episode, we're just talking about kind of the machinery.
Once that model is locked in, once you have your you know
Lama 3, the one that I run is about 70 gigabytes, that
is a fixed thing, unlike your brain.
Your brain is always accumulating new knowledge.
These models, when they're locked in for training, they're done.
They don't change anymore.
And then they're run at runtime.
And so that's the difference.
When you have a brain, your brain's always on, it's always learning,
and it's always running.
So you're talking, you're thinking, you're ingesting, whatever.
You are
not discrete parts the way this is.
When a model like Llama 3 or Llama 4 gets locked in,
it's not going to change anymore.
No new information can be added to it, which is what makes
the conversational context a very different aspect of how they operate.
And that's when they're actually being used.
When all this information is stuffed into the model and it's put
in a file, then your LLM provider, maybe if you're running it
locally, I'm using LM Studio, which is cross-platform, I recommend it if
you can run it on your machine When you're actually interacting with
an LLM, the conversation is what has this context window that I
talked about earlier.
And the context window is another very distinct aspect of how we
interact with each other because it's unrelated directly to knowledge in the
broad sense.
The context window is just whatever has happened recently.
And so, say for example, I fire up Llama three, I ask
it a question about the Septuagint, and it gives me an answer.
I ask a follow-up question, it gives me another answer, I ask
another follow-up question.
The context window for that session, that one chat, is going to
be whatever conversation has occurred between me and the robot.
For the duration of that conversation, it has perfect recollection, as I
said earlier, of everything in the conversation.
But it knows nothing about any previous conversations.
Each chat is a separate chat.
It forgets perfectly every time.
Because the file, the model, is unchanging.
It's fixed in space and time.
Because versioning, it just it doesn't go anywhere.
It's read-only.
The conversations are ephemeral.
So you can have one conversation after another and they don't flow
into each other.
And the context window is the limit.
The reason that the context windows are there is that the inference
process, which is what this part of the LLM interaction is called,
is very expensive to get the information back out of that model
at runtime and then to incorporate new information with your question and
its answer and your feedback takes a lot of memory.
It takes additional memory and additional computation and there's a hard limit
for every model about how much context window they can have.
As I said earlier, as soon as you exceed the context window
for your chat, it's going to begin to lose its mind.
And it's going to do one of a couple things.
The typical simple solution is truncation, where it will either forget the
beginning of the conversation or it will forget the middle of the
conversation. So if it forgets the beginning of the conversation, it'll remember
the last, you know, thousands of words that you've had back and
forth, but it won't remember how you started the chat, which can
cause conversation to get very confusing if you keep going, because once
it's forgotten how the conversation began, it might start repeating itself or
it might start talking about totally unrelated things suggested by the most
recent context, but without regard for the initial context.
So one of the other methods is truncation in the middle, where
it will remember the beginning of the conversation, or remember the recent
part, and it just throws out some portion of the middle because
that's less likely to influence what it's going to say next.
Another method, a third method, is key value quantization, where they basically
compress the conversation in real time the same way that the chat
itself is compressed.
And this compression is lossy.
There are two different types of compression on computers.
One is lossless and the other is lossy.
You've all interacted with zip files.
That's a lossless compression, where you take a file, you zip it,
it gets a lot smaller, you can email it to somebody, put
it on a drive or whatever.
And then when you unzip it, you get exactly the same file.
Byte for byte, bit for bit, it's identical.
That's lossless compression.
The other type of compression is lossy compression.
This would be things like images, and JPEGs are a good example,
or audio files, like the one you're listening to now.
The audio file of this podcast is several gigabytes when Corey is
editing it because it's uncompressed on his machine.
When he finishes mastering it and he outputs it for the podcast
services, it's compressed as an MP4.
That is a lossy perceptual encoding process where it throws away data,
but it throws away things that the human ear typically can't hear.
And some people have noticed that the audio quality on our podcast
is a lot higher than some others because we use a higher
bitrate. But even at that it's still compressed.
And the difference in bitrate is that is literally how much is
being thrown away.
The more of the original signal you throw away, the further it
gets from the purity of the first form.
So there's no way to reconstruct the original uncompressed version of this
podcast from the file that you get, but it's close enough that
it doesn't matter.
That's pretty much what LLM's try to do with this huge corpus
of human knowledge.
They're compressing it by throwing away redundant bits of information, but they
try to use very fancy methodologies to preserve the relationships between words.
So So it doesn't throw away anything important.
And in the middle of a conversation, if an LM quantizes the
conversation, so it doesn't truncate, but it just starts to compress it.
It compresses in the same way.
It starts to throw away things that might be redundant.
And the end result is that it just gets fuzzier.
It might work just fine.
It might work very poorly.
The longer it goes and the more it has to quantize, the
more it has to compress, the worse it's going to get because
the more it's throwing away.
And this is similar to how the human mind works.
We don't remember things perfectly, we remember bits and pieces.
And as Corey said, like typically when we learn, we remember the
contours of things.
So you can't reconstruct a conversation, but you have the gist of
it, hopefully.
If you're paying attention, even keep up, you have the general idea
of what was said, you could probably spit back a few things
that were said, maybe close to verbatim, enough to you get the
point. And that's sufficient.
If you get the contours, you don't need the rest.
And that's one of the beautiful things about the way Gone engineered
our minds.
We don't have to be perfect recorders like a camera with with
perfect recollection of everything all the time.
That would be almost horrifying for the few people who have it.
It's kind of hard on 'em.
It's nice to have some degree of forgetting, but at the same
time you don't want to forget stuff that's important.
In the conversation with an LLM in the context window, as long
as you stay inside that window, and so it's the windows are
measured in tokens that are basically like pieces of words.
So you're just talking about in terms of words.
Say that the window for a model is 100,000 words.
That's a long conversation.
That's a longer conversation than you have with most people most of
the time.
But it's enough room that you can paste in a document.
You can ask questions about the document as not too long.
You can go for a while before it runs out of context.
And as long as you stay inside the context window of that
AI, it's gonna remember perfectly.
People don't work that way.
But we work similarly.
What I mean is this, in conversation, one-on-one conversation, not when you're
talking about the expertise of things you've known forever, just you're sitting
down cold with a total stranger and you have some back and
forth where you're getting to know each other.
If you have no priors, no shared priors with that person, you're
probably gonna be trying to establish them first of all when you
try to get to know someone but your context is going to
be limited to the conversation you're having with each other.
Your context is going to be limited to what they have said
and what you have said.
You don't have any prayer context because you just met them.
On the other hand, say you met them yesterday, you met somebody
at the coffee shop, you go back the next day at the
same time, they're both there.
If you have a decent memory, your context for today's conversation is
going to conclude some what you heard yesterday.
You know, maybe they said that their pet was sick.
And so today you ask them about their pet.
And it's not simply it's a biographical detail that oh I know
that there's a a pet for this person, but they expressed something
that was important, you remember that, and you incorporate it into today's
conversation. So your context window is expanded the more you talk to
them. But you're not going to remember everything perfectly.
You maybe forget their birthday.
Some people are really good at that, some people are really bad.
You're going to remember some details, you're going to forget others.
And some of that's compressing, and some of it's just it's falling
out of your context window.
And that's how people work.
It's how our minds work.
It's not a defect.
It's not, oh, you're stupid.
You just don't remember everything.
Why would you remember every single thing about some total stranger, even
if you liked them?
Like it's you have more important things to spend your limited faculties
on. The reason that this is a problem for us as men
living today is as I framed the beginning of this discussion.
Because participation itself has become the ultimate moral good, we no longer
give any regard for how much context we have for any given
situation before we weigh in.
So
you might only have a few pieces of information, particularly when you
see, say, some online fight, which Corey and I are involved in
more than most people.
And most people think that we must be really terrible jerks because
these fights are always occurring.
And by itself, that's not an unreasonable conclusion, but what is it
missing? It's missing every bit of every conversation that we've ever had
with these people with whom there's some sort of fight or disagreement.
And as I've said before, I don't want anyone else to care
about online drama or to feel bad for us because people say
mean things.
I don't care.
I don't want you to care.
But it is a specific example of someone getting some tiny piece
of context.
They see a screenshot of Corey said this and someone else said
that, and then Corey responded with this.
And you see that, and your context is limited to you know
50, 100 words, and you make a profound exacting moral judgment on
exactly what happened, and you're gonna have a very strongly held opinion,
maybe for the rest of your life.
You're gonna think Corey is a terrible guy or he's a great
guy or whatever, but you don't know what happened before.
You don't know how the conversation started.
You don't know if those guys ever talked before.
You don't know how many times the specific subject that they were
debating or discussing or arguing has come up in other contexts where
you know You know, other aspects of what Corey is saying or
I'm saying it's it's not even about us.
It's just when we're online, we see these things happening and they're
drive-bys. You just see something flip by for 30 seconds, you make
a judgment, and sometimes you weigh in.
And our admonition here for this is that when your context is
so small that you really have no idea what's going on, if
your highest moral good is participation, then yeah, with a clean conscience,
you're gonna weigh in and say, What a jerk.
This guy's going to hell.
Can you believe he said that?
Which happens all the time.
And it's completely absurd and it's unchristian.
But I'm concerned as much about the absurdity as anything.
Like the unchristian part is dire, but the fact that absurdity is
leading to unchristian behavior shows to me what time it is.
It's not that there's some dedication to evil by these people.
It's just that they don't care.
Why should they care?
They did the right thing by making a comment.
And therefore I voted my conscience is clean.
It's silly.
And so the purpose, the lesser purpose of this episode in highlighting
context windows is to get you to just think about the fact
that you only know so much about any given situation.
You know, the juror example is a prime one.
Both sides in a civil or a criminal trial, especially a criminal
trial, and the judge, there are very strict rules governing what can
be entered into evidence.
They control the context window for the entire jury deliberation.
And the rules that are set forth are that you are to
have nothing inside your deliberation context beyond what is introduced as evidence
in court.
And you are not to forget anything.
Everything that's there that was admissible, you should consider.
And as a juror, consideration means weighing it.
So you may consider evidence and say, I disregard that entirely.
I think that person was a liar.
I think that that testimony was false.
I think it was shoddy.
That in you as a trier of fact, as a juror, that's
your job.
But you should at least consider all of it.
You are not free to say, I'm not gonna I I didn't
even listen to what that guy said.
That would be jury malfeasance.
You can't just sleep while someone's testifying if you don't find him
interesting. You can consciously judge he's not interesting, but you can't just
disregard it.
You can't throw away that context because in the purpose of a
trial, it's then determined by the system to be key.
And so this notion of context windows pops up all the time.
And in the case of a jury trial, there are rules and
you're gonna be professional about it, hopefully, pretty much anyone listening to
this to this would be, but you're not going to be as
cavalier as you would be in other situations, like saying that someone's
going to hell because you saw a screenshot on the internet.
And I think that that's not the standard the Christians should be
holding ourselves up to.
If you don't know everything, you can find something questionable.
That's fine.
As Corey said, he posts things and I post things to get
people to think in getting people to think often involves raising questions
in their minds, to challenge assumptions, to use a word in a
way that they haven't considered before, and to make you think it's
fun for us to do that because it's valuable and it's fun
because it's beneficial.
It helps people to be better citizens, better Christians, just better thinkers,
to actually spend a little bit of time with metacognition thinking about
thinking and taking this stuff seriously.
Not disregarding the fact that your context window is thirty seconds long
for some given interaction.
Take seriously the fact that you don't know squat, and you should
keep your mouth shut.
That's a perfectly fine conclusion to reach.
And it should be everyone's default.
I don't know enough to comment is a perfectly it should be
the default.
Someone wants you to condemn someone or to argue about something or
to what do you think about this?
If you don't know, say I don't know.
And if you don't think it's worth your time, say I'm not
gonna let that into my context window.
I mean, don't talk like that.
But you know what I mean.
If it's not worth your time to consider the evidence, okay, great,
but you don't get to have an opinion.
This is something I've said repeatedly.
I don't expect anyone to agree with us or listen to us,
but if you have no interest in our argument, you're not in
a position to render judgment.
Technically speaking, a context window applies only to an individual or to
a machine to which a context window is relevant, which is to
say an LLM or a so-called AI.
However,
there is a very similar thing that plays out with human organizations
and even civilizations.
There is a sort of context window for those as well.
Because in the case of an organization, you are going to have
a certain history for that organization, assuming it's been around long enough
to have such a thing.
So think a very old corporation or law firm or even a
country. Certain things
that are past a certain age are going to simply be forgotten.
They are going to fall out of the context window.
But by and large, human organizations and civilizations tend to do what
Woe described as dropping things out of the middle.
Because by and large, we all know in the US context, the
United States
is founded upon the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
If you start asking people specifics about the years between that and
today, things start to get a little fuzzy.
Because by and large, how we work in these contexts is we
drop things out of the middle.
We don't remember those specifics.
Because obviously, the beginning is one of the most important parts of
an organization or a country or a civilization, whatever it happens to
be. And what is happening presently is important because that dictates what
will or will not happen in the Happen in the future, but
some of the things in the middle are perhaps not as important
or at least not considered as important, they tend to start falling
out of memory.
Key points will be retained, certain particular important events.
Most people know that we had a civil war.
Things like that tend to be remembered.
Now if you ask people about the war we had with Mexico,
they're probably going to know less about that than the Civil War.
And so there's this same sort of concept with regard to
creations of human beings, whether a corporation or a country or a
civilization, something similar to a context window.
And when we talk about the Septuagint as we will be doing
in the upcoming series, we are dealing in a civilizational context window,
and also in an organizational context window, because we're dealing with the
church. And we do mean uppercase C church in this case, because
we are going to be dealing with the ancient church, we're going
to be dealing with Rome, we're going to be dealing with the
Reformation, we're going to be dealing with certain organizations after the Reformation,
and also some tangentially related bodies.
This civilizational context window is vitally important because in order to draw
the right conclusions, you really need to have the entirety of this
particular timeline in mind.
It's one of the reasons that Woe said to write things down
with your objections, your questions, your considerations, and then put them aside.
Because you need to try to retain the timeline in your mind.
Now you may not be able to do that.
Most men will not be able to do that because again, we're
talking about quite a lot of years here, and there's a lot
of information.
But you will be able to retain enough to make an assessment,
and I will summarize it at the end of the episodes as
I usually do, to help you along with drawing those conclusions.
The reason that it is important to have the entirety of this
context window is related to what Woe said about social media.
This comes up with certain posts all the time.
You could pick any of a handful of dozens of posts from
either of us, if you don't understand the context, you may very
well draw wrong conclusions.
Now often the post stands alone, but the context adds something to
it. When it comes to the issue of the Septuagint, we are
going to lay out the case that you need to know this
historical context, you need to know the fullness of this timeline, why
things happened, when they happened, who caused them to happen, the consequences
of those things happening, etc.
etc. All of these things matter because they lead up to where
we are today and what we should do with that information.
Now, if you only have the context of today, in maybe a
couple of decades, or even a century, maybe you have a context
window that goes back into the middle of the nineteen hundreds, maybe
two centuries back into the eighteen hundreds, say.
That is going to be insufficient to draw accurate conclusions, because you
are going to be missing things that happened thousands of years ago
that are relevant to us today.
And now there are those who will think, oh, it happened two
thousand years ago.
How relevant could it be?
I would encourage you to think about that statement for a moment
before advancing it.
Because as Christians, something that happened two thousand years ago is fairly
relevant to our interest today.
In fact, happened
fairly close to exactly two thousand years as we sit here now
in twenty twenty five.
It is not to say that you need to know everything that
happened in history To have a true and living faith in Christ,
a salvific faith.
We are not advancing that.
We are never going to advance that in the entirety of the
Septuagint series because that is not the point, it is not even
among the points that we will be making.
The points we will be making are related to what we should
be doing as Christians, where things have gone astray in the past,
how we can address them today, and why those things happened and
why we should do certain things in response.
You can use an existing translation of scripture and come to a
saving faith in Christ.
Again I highly recommend, as should any Christian, the guardrails that are
the creeds that are the confessions.
Our faithful ancestors have drawn those up and used them and passed
them down to us to protect us from certain issues that arose
in the church.
We are going to point out another issue that arose in the
church and should have been addressed in centuries past but was not.
It matters that you understand that context window of thousands of years.
That is again why Woe said to write things down.
That is a long time, that is a lot of information that
we will be presenting.
You do not have to hold all of it in your mind,
thankfully. God has given us the ability to write things down.
At least now we have universal literacy.
Say what you will about it, whether it has been on balance
good or bad.
Most of us know how to read and write.
So you can take notes.
You don't have to hold the entirety of it in your mind
because you can look back at your notes and make that assessment
deliberately. You can deliberate on what we have presented and what conclusions
you should draw from it.
That is why context window matters because if you do not have
a sufficient context window, you will draw inaccurate conclusions because you are
doing it based on insufficient information.
For instance, I can give a simple, perhaps one could say, extreme
example, but a very simple example to draw this out.
If If introduced into evidence in a criminal case for assault, battery,
whatever it happens to be, it's probably assault given most jurisdictions, but
a criminal case for criminal assault, and you have a video that
starts in the middle of a fight, and all you see is
Man B, punch man A and knock him unconscious.
You should probably have some questions.
Why do I not have the rest of the video?
Why do I not know what happened before this particular incident, before
this punch?
Why do I not know what led up to this moment?
Why have I not been given sufficient context to make an informed
decision? Because if all you saw was one man punch another, well
that's wrongful because you aren't supposed to assault other people.
However, if in the previous thirty seconds of the video, not introduced
into evidence, this is a bad judge in the hypothetical, but in
the previous thirty seconds, as it turns out, it wasn't man B
starting the fight with man A, it was man A running up
and punching man B.
And so man B was in fact defending himself against Man A.
Well, that changes matters.
Because now you have the full context window, and now you can
draw an accurate conclusion, whereas you could not do that before.
You need to have an adequate context in order to draw accurate
conclusions. It is not necessarily a complete context, because a complete context
would be a perfect history of the world all the way back
to creation.
No man has that, no man could hold that in his head.
What you need to know are the facts that are salient to
the issue.
The things that are necessary to know to draw accurate conclusions given
the context.
That is what we are going to endeavor to present in the
Septuagint series.
The necessary context to draw accurate conclusions about the Septuagint, about the
Masoretic text, and about this particular part of church history.
And it's only this particular part of church history.
We're not arguing over the
problems between Rome and the Protestants.
We're not arguing about the problems between Rome and the East.
Some of these things will come up tangentially, but we're not addressing
them as the problems themselves.
It is again the context that matters and the salient facts.
So for instance, in the hypothetical that I gave you about a
man who is actually defending himself not assaulting the other man, assaulting
him but justified because it's self-defense, it would not be relevant, necessarily,
that the two men are married, not to each other, but to
other women, or unmarried.
That's not necessarily relevant.
And so when you're talking about a particular issue, it is the
salient facts, the facts that are relevant to the issue at hand
that matter.
That is what we will be addressing in the timeline and in
the Septuagint series.
Because the question
essentially is what is the Masoretic text and what is the Septuagint,
what is the Greek text?
Which one is Scripture?
The information that you need to answer that are the relevant facts
about that question and the relevant parts of church history and in
fact world history that lead up to that that contribute to it?
It's not all of the other fights that have happened in the
history of the church, it's not all of the differences politically between
Rome and the Protestants or even theologically between them.
It is only those things that are relevant to this specific question.
Which is to say, don't get lost in the weeds.
Focus on the core issue, which we will focus on the core
issue as well.
Take notes.
Recognize that yes you may have questions, we will probably address them
as the series progresses.
If we do not, by all means, please feel free to ask
them. These are important issues that we are going to be addressing,
and you need to have an adequate context window in order to
draw those sound conclusions, but in order to acquire that context window,
you need to set aside those objections and listen to the fullness
of the case that we will be presenting.
It is the same thing that you do as a juror.
Because you listen to one side present his full case, you listen
to the other side present his full case, and then you render
a decision based on the evidence presented.
That is what we're asking you to do because that is your
Christian duty as a man.
This is not necessarily something that is going to be a salvation
issue, which is something we have to address ad nauseum because it
comes up so much, particularly from the adversaries and the enemies.
But not everything in life is a salvation issue.
Some things matter because they are matters of the truth, and the
truth does matter, because the truth flows from God.
Again it is one of the transcendentals.
That is why the issue of the Masoretic text versus the Septuagint
matters so much, because it is a matter of truth.
You can read the Masoretic text and come to a saving faith
in Christ.
You can be a Christian and have only the ESV or the
KJV or the NASB at your disposal.
You can be a Christian without ever knowing the Septuagint exists.
But that isn't the question we're asking, and it isn't the question
we will be answering.
Because the question is, what is the truth?
How has God preserved his word?
What should we do as Christians?
Don't get off into the weeds.
Don't let people confuse you and befuddle you with questions that are
ancillary at best or tangential or even irrelevant.
Focus on the core issue.
This is going to be probably the most controversial series that we
will ever do on this podcast.
And also, as Wo said, the most important one.
Because it is an issue that strikes at the heart of church
history. Again, it is not an issue of salvation, but it is
an issue of the utmost importance to Christians, because it is a
matter of God's truth, it is a matter of God's word, and
we should be absolutely uncompromising when it comes to the things of
God
I
want to reiterate just one additional point.
When we go through the matters of the Septuagint, when we go
through this history, as we go along, as like the reason for
iterating through these historical events is that we're going to be pointing
out all the things that everyone got wrong.
And the conclusion is that everyone got this question wrong.
That sounds like a scandalous, incredibly egotistical thing to say, so I'm
just gonna say it straight up.
But in the context of this discussion of the context widow, when
we point to their errors, we're gonna be pointing out that they
were very minor errors in most cases.
They made the most intelligent errors possible.
They made the reasonable errors in their moment, because their context window
was not as large as it should have been to reach the
right conclusions.
And that's part of the reason for introducing the concept here is
a separate episode.
Because while this is the prequel to the Septuagint episode, this applies
all the time.
But in the specific case of the timeline narrative of the Septuagint
from twenty five hundred years ago until today.
The mistakes were small, they seemed entirely innocent, they seemed entirely reasonable.
Given the knowledge that they have and the situations that they were
in in the previous judgments of their fathers in the faith, they
were reasonable decisions, but they were not reasonable in the full context
of the question.
And that's why we're saying that they made mistakes.
So we're gonna go through and we're gonna demonstrate that case by
case. But the other reason for specifically highlighting the notion of context
window and of giving you explicit directive to write down all of
your objections and then set them aside is that we're going to
make you angry.
If you know anything about this, you're going to get frustrated, you're
going to be offended, you're going to think we're saying one thing
when we're saying another, because you're going to think that as we're
going along at each step, they were picking some side.
One of the obvious examples, during the Reformation itself, one of the
reasons that the reformers went against the Septuagint was they wanted to
get rid of the Apocrypha, and it was something that the Roman
Church was using against them.
And so rather than debating on the merits, they chose instead to
do what they believed was a reasonable thing and just go back
to the Hebrew because they thought it was older.
It wasn't older, but they didn't know that at the time.
They had fallen into a trap that had been laid for them
a thousand years prior, and they weren't questioning those givens as they
were dealing in the moment of you know Luther and the others
versus Rome.
They were having a fight, and it was a real fight where
lives were on the line, they were under stress.
It wasn't a stupid decision.
So when we say that they were wrong, we're not saying that
we're smarter or better than them.
We're not saying that they were dumb or faithless.
We're saying they made a small error in the moment and it
had long-term consequences.
As so many errors in our lives do.
You make some dumb mistake ten years ago and it comes back
to haunt you for some reason.
We understand that this happens.
And when you're a parent raising a child, you try to impress
upon them, look, don't sweat the small stuff because you think you're
making some small mistake now.
It could derail things later on.
This is not alien to any of us.
So our claim that these men made mistakes as they went along,
although it's going to be offensive and it's going to be scandalous,
it's entirely reasonable.
Doesn't mean we're right, but it's not an unreasonable thing to claim.
And so as we make the case, again, it's going to take
the entire case.
When we look at the moment of Luther choosing to translate from
the Hebrew rather than the Septuagint, if you hear us saying just
in that one tiny vignette, forget the entire context window and just
collapse that context window down to the three months that he was
doing that, however long it was.
If we are sitting here today and saying Luther was wrong for
using the Hebrew instead of the Septuagint, the knee-jerk small context window
response from the listener is going to be: Well, you're siding with
Rome and you're choosing the Apocrypha.
None of that's the case.
One of the other salient aspects of this conversation is that the
canon is separate from the textual source.
It's entirely possible to say that the textual source of the Septuagint
is inspired by God and also separately to say, separate but related,
that the canon of scripture that is breathed out by God includes
certain books and excludes other books.
That's a separate conversation.
It's related, but we're not choosing sides with regard to the canon.
That's another thing I'll say here and we'll say it again later.
This isn't about the canon.
This is not about which books are inspired.
This is about the textual source that's used for Scripture itself.
Having reduced the sources that are acceptable for Christians to the Greek
corpus, then you have the discussion that went on for fifteen hundred
years up to Luther's day, which books are canon?
It wasn't until Council of Trent that the West officially made the
books of I think seventy-three books that the Romanists have as their
canon. There was no official canon.
So when Luther was having that debate at the time, it was
just a continuation of a longstanding one.
And that debate was not based upon the textual source.
It was a separate conversation.
So the reason I'm highlighting this now is that this is a
sort of fight that when you're listening in the coming weeks, you're
gonna want to pick the fight.
Oh, he's he said Luther's wrong about the Septuagint.
He must like the Apocrypha.
We didn't say that.
That's what the context window is.
When you hallucinate something that we didn't say and then make a
judgment based on it, you're doing what an LLM does.
You're doing what one of these stupid robots does.
And they're better at it than people are at this point.
I've taken to l having people make stupid comments on X.
I feed them to an LLM and then just spit out the
screenshot explaining what they got wrong.
Because a pure reason engine that actually understands English better understands the
situation than someone who claims to be a Christian while he's spitting
venom as someone who should be a Christian brother.
This stuff is a problem in general, which is why the context
window stands alone as this episode by itself apart from the Septuagint.
This happens all the time.
But as I said at the beginning, this would have been a
much too lengthy preamble, even in the very shortened version, it would
have derailed the content of the first historical Septuagint episode.
If you believe us, if you trust us not to be complete
liars and demoniacs, then you can take your notes of your objections,
you can refer to them later.
If we didn't address your objections, or if you find your objections
are still relevant in your mind, we're happy to hear.
We're not gonna go back and edit the episode, but we'll listen.
Maybe it's something we addressed down the road.
We found that it's one of the most important things that's ever
happened to the church.
It's a grandiose claim.
Feel free to laugh or scoff or get mad at us.
When we make the case, then you're really going to get mad
because you're going to hear us saying things that are going to
criticize your very favorite theologian, whoever he is, he was wrong about
this by some degree.
We're not saying he's stupid.
We're not saying he's faithless, not saying he's in hell.
We're saying he got a detail wrong.
And in some cases, we'll be able to explain exactly why he
got it wrong because his context window was collapsed to 500 years
instead of 2,000 years as it should have been 500 years ago.
That's how these things work.
If you don't examine your priors, if you're just marching merrily along,
trusting the judgment of past generations, if they're right, you're in great
shape. If they made a mistake, you're going to inherit that mistake
and be stuck with the consequences.
The story of the Septuagint is a story of men making mistakes
piece by piece, small course deviations, culminating in the Western Church abandoning
the source of scripture that God gave us.
The Bible of Jesus, the Bible of the Apostles, the Bible of
the Council of Nicaea, the Bible of the first four hundred years
of the Christian Church was entirely Greek.
That is the case that we're going to be making, and that
has profound implications for the future of the church.