WEBVTT 00:00:37.040 --> 00:00:39.520 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. 00:00:39.520 --> 00:00:40.720 I am Corey J. 00:00:40.720 --> 00:00:41.680 Mahler. 00:00:41.680 --> 00:00:43.920 And I'm still Woe. 00:00:43.920 --> 00:00:48.320 Today's Stone Choir is going to be the prequel to the beginning 00:00:48.320 --> 00:00:50.800 of our series on the Septuagint. 00:00:50.800 --> 00:00:54.560 It's something we've been talking about for probably about sixteen months now. 00:00:54.560 --> 00:00:58.000 Been excited for a really long time to begin doing these episodes. 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:00.400 We had been holding off waiting for a book to be published 00:01:00.480 --> 00:01:03.600 so that we could release this episode the same time that that 00:01:03.600 --> 00:01:04.800 book had come out. 00:01:04.800 --> 00:01:07.760 Hopefully it's gonna be coming soon, but we're not gonna wait any 00:01:07.760 --> 00:01:11.440 longer. The next episode that we do probably not next week, 'cause 00:01:11.440 --> 00:01:14.400 we're gonna have to do a bunch of final prep to prepare 00:01:14.400 --> 00:01:15.360 that episode. 00:01:15.360 --> 00:01:17.760 We've been working on it for sixteen months, but we want to 00:01:17.760 --> 00:01:21.600 get all our ducks in a row because the Septuagint series is 00:01:21.600 --> 00:01:24.320 going to be the most important thing that Stone Choir ever does. 00:01:24.320 --> 00:01:25.760 And so we gotta get it right. 00:01:25.760 --> 00:01:30.960 We wanna make it enjoyable, listenable, digestible, and understandable. 00:01:30.960 --> 00:01:33.760 And so it's gonna be the 100th episode. 00:01:33.920 --> 00:01:35.360 We'll be beginning of that. 00:01:35.360 --> 00:01:36.800 This is our 99th episode. 00:01:36.800 --> 00:01:40.480 And I call it a prequel because as I was preparing my 00:01:40.480 --> 00:01:45.360 comments in the preamble for the 100th episode, for the Septuagint episode, 00:01:45.360 --> 00:01:48.320 I was going to talk about what we're going to discuss today. 00:01:48.320 --> 00:01:52.400 And once my preparatory comments got probably best about the thirty minute 00:01:52.400 --> 00:01:55.040 mark, I realized this should really probably just be an episode by 00:01:55.040 --> 00:01:57.920 itself. Because what we're going to talk about today doesn't have anything 00:01:57.920 --> 00:01:59.600 to do with Septuagint. 00:01:59.600 --> 00:02:05.600 It has to do with a methodical approach to what we learn 00:02:05.600 --> 00:02:08.320 and how we learn, how the human mind works. 00:02:08.320 --> 00:02:12.080 So the title of the episode is the context window, which is 00:02:12.080 --> 00:02:16.240 a term of art from LLM's large language models or AI. 00:02:16.240 --> 00:02:19.440 We're going to be talking in some detail about how AIs work 00:02:19.440 --> 00:02:22.560 in this specific regard, but this is not a bunch of nerd 00:02:22.560 --> 00:02:25.120 stuff. you don't need to know or care about AI. 00:02:25.120 --> 00:02:26.800 This is about how the human mind works. 00:02:26.800 --> 00:02:31.120 This is about your brain, my brain, how we process information, how 00:02:31.120 --> 00:02:34.640 we store it, how we access it, and how we reason with 00:02:34.640 --> 00:02:35.920 the information that we have. 00:02:37.040 --> 00:02:40.160 This episode is going to be kind of the intersection of the 00:02:40.160 --> 00:02:47.120 genealogy of ideas and the IQ episode, and it's specifically related to 00:02:47.280 --> 00:02:50.000 how much can you hold in your mind at once when you're 00:02:49.920 --> 00:02:51.360 mulling over something? 00:02:51.360 --> 00:02:53.680 And that's really what the context window is. 00:02:53.680 --> 00:02:57.040 For an LLM, the context window is kind of its RAM in 00:02:57.040 --> 00:02:57.360 a way. 00:02:57.360 --> 00:03:01.120 It's its working set of whatever conversation you're having at a given 00:03:01.120 --> 00:03:04.720 time. How much of that conversation can it remember and refer back 00:03:04.720 --> 00:03:08.000 to both what you've said to the AI and what it said 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:08.880 to you? 00:03:08.880 --> 00:03:12.400 Because as long as you stay inside that context window, it can 00:03:12.400 --> 00:03:15.600 have perfect recollection of everything that's been spoken. 00:03:15.600 --> 00:03:19.280 The problem, and the reason for doing this episode, is as soon 00:03:19.280 --> 00:03:23.840 as with an LLM you spill over the maximum extent of that 00:03:23.840 --> 00:03:26.000 context window, it just loses its mind. 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:30.080 It can't remember anything larger than that window. 00:03:30.080 --> 00:03:33.840 And And the human mind works the same way, just fuzzier. 00:03:33.840 --> 00:03:37.280 So you can be having a conversation with someone and you know, 00:03:37.280 --> 00:03:40.320 if the conversation goes on for ten or fifteen minutes, you can 00:03:40.320 --> 00:03:44.640 sort of remember most basic things that they said ten minutes ago, 00:03:44.640 --> 00:03:46.240 maybe. You get the gist of it. 00:03:46.480 --> 00:03:49.440 you couldn't quote a back to them, but you're on the same 00:03:49.440 --> 00:03:51.920 page, because you've been having a back and forth and you can 00:03:51.920 --> 00:03:53.360 sort of understand it. 00:03:53.360 --> 00:03:56.480 So with humans, the context window is fuzzy. 00:03:56.480 --> 00:04:00.160 With computers, it's very fixed. 00:04:00.160 --> 00:04:02.480 The reason that we want to talk about it is a preface 00:04:02.480 --> 00:04:07.280 for the next episode, the Septuagint episode, when we begin that series, 00:04:07.280 --> 00:04:10.560 we are going to be going through about 2,500 years of church 00:04:10.560 --> 00:04:15.040 history. We're going to be presenting numerous facts in order. 00:04:15.040 --> 00:04:17.280 It's going to be another timeline episode. 00:04:17.280 --> 00:04:20.720 A bunch of staccato points about this guy did this at this 00:04:20.720 --> 00:04:25.600 time and it influenced someone else later, someone else chose to either 00:04:25.600 --> 00:04:28.160 follow or to deviate from his path. 00:04:28.160 --> 00:04:30.800 And we just have a series of those events leading up to 00:04:30.800 --> 00:04:35.840 today. And so the Septuagint, when you put all of the facts 00:04:35.840 --> 00:04:41.120 related to that translation of the Bible, as it's commonly referred to, 00:04:41.120 --> 00:04:43.040 you end up with where we are today. 00:04:43.040 --> 00:04:45.840 And the point that we're going to be making in that episode 00:04:45.840 --> 00:04:50.240 is that when you look at the entire timeline, the conclusions that 00:04:50.240 --> 00:04:53.360 we have today about the Septuagint are invalidated. 00:04:53.360 --> 00:04:56.960 The only way to have the current view of the Septuagint that's 00:04:56.960 --> 00:05:01.040 commonly held by pretty much everyone in the Christian church and elsewhere 00:05:01.280 --> 00:05:05.120 is to make mistakes somewhere along the way in the timeline. 00:05:05.120 --> 00:05:08.080 As we've been doing the prep for that episode, we realize that 00:05:08.080 --> 00:05:10.560 this is just it's a huge amount of information. 00:05:10.560 --> 00:05:12.640 And we're gonna be distilling a lot. 00:05:12.640 --> 00:05:16.880 Part of the reason that we've put off releasing the Septuagint series 00:05:16.880 --> 00:05:20.320 until that book was published was we wanted to put something in 00:05:20.320 --> 00:05:20.960 your hands. 00:05:20.960 --> 00:05:23.280 Basically the book is someone's master's thesis. 00:05:23.280 --> 00:05:25.920 It's just the historical aspect of this. 00:05:25.920 --> 00:05:27.280 It's portions of this timeline. 00:05:27.280 --> 00:05:29.040 It's not everything that we're going to talk about. 00:05:29.040 --> 00:05:30.240 It's a subset of it. 00:05:30.240 --> 00:05:33.040 But it's a lot of the really important parts in the specific 00:05:33.040 --> 00:05:35.520 context of church history, which is really vital. 00:05:35.520 --> 00:05:40.880 So So the thrust of the master's thesis about the Septuagint is 00:05:40.880 --> 00:05:42.720 that nothing new is being said. 00:05:42.720 --> 00:05:44.080 This is all settled history. 00:05:44.080 --> 00:05:45.200 It's not controversial. 00:05:45.200 --> 00:05:47.520 It's not some weird new discovery. 00:05:47.520 --> 00:05:49.440 We're not talking about gold tablets here. 00:05:49.440 --> 00:05:52.880 We're just talking about looking at the way the church has historically 00:05:52.880 --> 00:05:58.080 viewed the Septuagint versus the Masoretic text, which is the what we 00:05:58.080 --> 00:05:59.840 call the Hebrew Old Testament. 00:05:59.840 --> 00:06:03.040 And the Septuagint I should have defined for those who aren't familiar, 00:06:03.040 --> 00:06:04.400 the Greek Old Testament. 00:06:05.360 --> 00:06:09.520 We'll give the historical details in the next episode, but as we 00:06:09.520 --> 00:06:13.360 were looking at this huge timeline, we realized we're gonna blow out 00:06:13.360 --> 00:06:14.640 your context window. 00:06:14.640 --> 00:06:16.640 You're not gonna be able to keep it all in your head. 00:06:16.640 --> 00:06:20.400 And that's fine, except that we're going to be telling you new 00:06:20.400 --> 00:06:24.560 conclusions derived from that timeline that will be controversial. 00:06:24.560 --> 00:06:25.360 Unlike the book. 00:06:25.360 --> 00:06:28.160 The book is not controversial, but it's very valuable because it lays 00:06:28.160 --> 00:06:29.280 out the basics. 00:06:29.280 --> 00:06:33.440 Our conclusions are going to be controversial and we don't want to 00:06:33.600 --> 00:06:37.200 seem to be manipulative of people by saying what I'm going to 00:06:37.200 --> 00:06:37.920 say next. 00:06:37.920 --> 00:06:42.000 When we're going through that episode, people are going to have to 00:06:42.000 --> 00:06:44.080 not fight back as we're going through. 00:06:44.080 --> 00:06:47.040 Because what's going to happen is we go through the details of 00:06:47.040 --> 00:06:48.880 the history of the Septuagint. 00:06:48.880 --> 00:06:52.320 If you know a little bit about some detail somewhere along the 00:06:52.320 --> 00:06:55.360 timeline, where one of your favorite theologians has the had this opinion 00:06:56.000 --> 00:06:59.600 about it, you're gonna be shouting at your your phone or however 00:06:59.680 --> 00:07:03.040 you listen to this podcast and saying, well that can't be because 00:07:03.040 --> 00:07:04.560 of this other thing. 00:07:04.560 --> 00:07:06.000 We don't want to brainwash anyone. 00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:06.960 We don't want to blow smoke. 00:07:06.960 --> 00:07:08.960 We're not trying to play any magic tricks. 00:07:08.960 --> 00:07:11.200 So I'll say it here, and I'm going to say it again 00:07:11.200 --> 00:07:12.720 in the next episode. 00:07:12.720 --> 00:07:16.960 When we're going through that very detailed timeline, every time you have 00:07:16.960 --> 00:07:20.000 that impulse, every time you hear something like that's crap, that can't 00:07:19.920 --> 00:07:22.000 be right, this other guy said this. 00:07:22.000 --> 00:07:26.480 Please pause the recording, write it down, either on a piece of 00:07:26.480 --> 00:07:29.200 paper or on your computer, and then put it out of your 00:07:29.200 --> 00:07:32.160 mind. Both of those things are necessary because I don't want you 00:07:32.160 --> 00:07:34.560 to forget what you thought was objectionable. 00:07:34.720 --> 00:07:37.360 Not trying to play a game where you just have to believe 00:07:37.360 --> 00:07:38.240 whatever we say. 00:07:38.240 --> 00:07:39.200 That's despicable. 00:07:39.200 --> 00:07:41.280 It's the last thing that we would ever want. 00:07:41.280 --> 00:07:44.480 But if you were just sitting there stewing because you know we 00:07:44.560 --> 00:07:46.640 You know we have to be wrong because we didn't talk about 00:07:46.640 --> 00:07:47.920 that one thing. 00:07:47.920 --> 00:07:49.360 It's gonna be a long episode. 00:07:49.360 --> 00:07:52.720 We might end up breaking even the timeline into multiple chunks depending 00:07:52.720 --> 00:07:54.880 on how long it gets. 00:07:54.880 --> 00:07:58.800 What we need from you as listeners is to cooperate for the 00:07:58.800 --> 00:08:02.720 duration of the episode and just let us make our case. 00:08:02.800 --> 00:08:06.400 Let us make the entire case without arguing, which is why you 00:08:06.400 --> 00:08:07.920 need to pause and write things down. 00:08:07.920 --> 00:08:10.400 Basically, once again, we're asking you to be jurists. 00:08:10.400 --> 00:08:12.560 If you've ever been on a jury, if you've ever seen jury 00:08:12.720 --> 00:08:18.160 instructions on TV, the judge will say, Don't discuss this amongst yourselves, 00:08:18.160 --> 00:08:20.000 don't look it up on the internet. 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:23.200 You are only to listen to what's presented in court. 00:08:23.200 --> 00:08:26.800 And when you begin your deliberations, then you can talk freely. 00:08:26.800 --> 00:08:30.480 But as long as the court case is open, you have to 00:08:30.480 --> 00:08:33.280 keep an open mind, you have to take in everything that you 00:08:33.280 --> 00:08:37.680 hear, whether it's true or false, and not prejudge, not reach any 00:08:38.000 --> 00:08:40.880 conclusions until the case is closed. 00:08:40.880 --> 00:08:42.800 That's essentially what we're doing here. 00:08:42.800 --> 00:08:46.720 I absolutely want you to take the most critical, brutal approach to 00:08:46.720 --> 00:08:48.480 what we say in the next episode. 00:08:48.480 --> 00:08:49.280 That's fine. 00:08:49.280 --> 00:08:51.440 I want you to write it all down. 00:08:51.440 --> 00:08:55.920 But if you're just convinced at every point, when we're thirty minutes 00:08:55.920 --> 00:08:59.840 into that episode, they'll probably be at least three hours, and you're 00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:03.600 already convinced that we're wrong in the third century because because of 00:09:03.600 --> 00:09:07.040 something that some guy said in the 15th century, you're not being 00:09:07.040 --> 00:09:08.080 a good jurist. 00:09:08.080 --> 00:09:11.920 You've already prejudged based on something you brought in from outside, and 00:09:11.920 --> 00:09:13.440 it's gonna break our case. 00:09:13.440 --> 00:09:16.400 Now again, maybe the case is completely fabricated and we're lying and 00:09:16.400 --> 00:09:17.440 we're trying to play games. 00:09:17.440 --> 00:09:20.800 I don't want you to be misled by our approach. 00:09:20.800 --> 00:09:24.240 So I'm just gonna say flat out, pause the recording and write 00:09:24.240 --> 00:09:27.040 down your objections and then just set them aside. 00:09:27.040 --> 00:09:30.000 Continue listening and know that that piece of paper is going to 00:09:30.000 --> 00:09:30.320 be there. 00:09:30.320 --> 00:09:32.880 You're not going to forget, because you've written it down. 00:09:32.880 --> 00:09:35.520 We're not going to be able to trick you. 00:09:35.520 --> 00:09:37.840 The reason for all of that, and the reason for this episode 00:09:37.840 --> 00:09:42.400 is a preamble, is that the scope of the information we're going 00:09:42.400 --> 00:09:45.760 to be presenting blows out your context window. 00:09:45.760 --> 00:09:48.400 There's more there than you can take in. 00:09:48.400 --> 00:09:51.840 And I was thinking about this in the shower this morning, and 00:09:51.840 --> 00:09:56.400 I realized that this is actually akin to something that happened in 00:09:56.400 --> 00:09:57.840 my childhood. 00:09:57.840 --> 00:10:01.040 Bill Clinton ran for president when I was in high school. 00:10:01.040 --> 00:10:02.720 He was the first Brumer president. 00:10:02.720 --> 00:10:04.480 And so he was young at the time. 00:10:04.480 --> 00:10:07.760 And the fact that he was so young relative to Bob Dole 00:10:08.400 --> 00:10:10.080 was a big deal. 00:10:10.080 --> 00:10:13.920 And there was a lot of discussion at that time by the 00:10:13.920 --> 00:10:17.040 Democrat Party in particular of two things. 00:10:17.040 --> 00:10:19.600 Rock the vote was a big thing that they were pushing on 00:10:19.600 --> 00:10:23.920 MTV, and the motor voter bill was something that Congress passed around 00:10:23.920 --> 00:10:25.200 that time. 00:10:25.200 --> 00:10:28.800 The specific intent of Rock the Vote and the Motor Voter Bill 00:10:29.040 --> 00:10:33.360 was essentially to make every single person in the country a voter, 00:10:33.360 --> 00:10:38.000 no matter what, no matter how low information anyone was, in particular 00:10:38.240 --> 00:10:41.600 the younger they were and the less they knew, the more important 00:10:41.600 --> 00:10:44.880 it was to the Democrats that those people voted. 00:10:44.880 --> 00:10:50.160 Historically in the US, voting has been seen as something that's a 00:10:50.160 --> 00:10:54.880 duty, but it's a duty to participate in something where if you 00:10:54.880 --> 00:10:57.120 get it wrong, you're gonna harm your neighbor. 00:10:57.120 --> 00:11:01.360 You can't make a mistake in voting about something because if you 00:11:01.360 --> 00:11:03.840 do, your neighbor's going to be hurt, you're going to be hurt, 00:11:03.840 --> 00:11:04.960 your family's going to be hurt. 00:11:04.960 --> 00:11:08.560 You're choosing usually between two not great options. 00:11:08.560 --> 00:11:10.800 But if you pick the wrong one, you're going to make things 00:11:10.800 --> 00:11:13.360 worse for both yourself and your neighbor. 00:11:13.360 --> 00:11:18.000 And the Democrats have been devoted for very long time to making 00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:19.520 things as bad as possible. 00:11:19.520 --> 00:11:24.080 And so they wanted as many as low information, low propensity voters 00:11:24.080 --> 00:11:26.240 as possible to be participants. 00:11:26.240 --> 00:11:30.400 Which is why today, once you're registered to vote, it's basically automatic 00:11:30.400 --> 00:11:31.360 and perpetual. 00:11:31.360 --> 00:11:34.080 They made it as easy as possible with legislation when I was 00:11:34.080 --> 00:11:37.360 a kid, so that once you're registered to vote, it's just sticks 00:11:37.360 --> 00:11:41.600 forever. So that it's virtually frictionless for you to go vote. 00:11:41.600 --> 00:11:45.840 The reason that's relative to this, this discussion today is that 00:11:46.800 --> 00:11:50.560 what happened there and what it we're living in the the aftermath 00:11:50.560 --> 00:11:58.080 and the continuum of is end stage egalitarianism where everyone's valuable, everyone's 00:11:58.080 --> 00:12:02.160 opinion is valuable, everyone gets a vote because we're all equals. 00:12:02.160 --> 00:12:06.640 And so it doesn't matter if the person voting is an 18-year-old 00:12:06.640 --> 00:12:09.760 that has no idea what's going on, but they heard a commercial 00:12:09.760 --> 00:12:12.800 that sounded like the other guy was really bad. 00:12:12.800 --> 00:12:18.240 What happened with this end stage democratic egalitarianism is that the act 00:12:18.240 --> 00:12:21.840 of voting itself is described in in religious terms. 00:12:21.840 --> 00:12:27.520 They describe it as sacrosanct, and they will basically elevate voting to 00:12:27.520 --> 00:12:29.760 the highest moral good, even above 00:12:30.640 --> 00:12:32.480 caring about for whom you vote. 00:12:32.480 --> 00:12:34.400 It doesn't matter who you vote for, just vote. 00:12:34.400 --> 00:12:35.920 You've all heard that said. 00:12:35.920 --> 00:12:39.440 That is a religious tenant to say it doesn't matter who you 00:12:39.440 --> 00:12:43.040 vote for as long as you vote, because the highest good is 00:12:43.040 --> 00:12:46.800 participation. So it occurred to me, and the reason for this is 00:12:46.800 --> 00:12:53.760 that when you exclude culpability for getting things wrong, when you exclude 00:12:53.760 --> 00:12:56.880 any notion that a man should know what he's doing before he 00:12:56.880 --> 00:12:58.160 does something. 00:12:58.160 --> 00:13:02.320 When you create an environment inside the voting booth where no sin 00:13:02.320 --> 00:13:06.080 can occur, when you vote you are absolutely doing a moral good, 00:13:06.080 --> 00:13:09.120 and the only sin that could occur related to voting would be 00:13:09.120 --> 00:13:12.640 if someone prevented you from voting, if they discouraged you from voting, 00:13:12.640 --> 00:13:14.240 or if they physically prevented you. 00:13:14.240 --> 00:13:18.560 That would be the highest sin imaginable in democracy, because your vote 00:13:18.560 --> 00:13:19.760 is sacred. 00:13:19.760 --> 00:13:21.920 The problem with that is that maybe you're an idiot and you 00:13:21.920 --> 00:13:22.800 don't know what you're doing. 00:13:22.800 --> 00:13:25.600 And when you step into the voting booth, you've been lied to 00:13:25.600 --> 00:13:28.800 for the five minutes that you were paying attention and you end 00:13:28.800 --> 00:13:32.000 up voting for the worst of two possible options. 00:13:32.000 --> 00:13:34.080 Foolishly, you didn't know any better. 00:13:34.080 --> 00:13:38.160 But But what has happened with our society is that we're told 00:13:38.320 --> 00:13:39.120 that's fine. 00:13:39.120 --> 00:13:41.280 You did the right thing because you voted. 00:13:41.280 --> 00:13:43.520 Whatever else, at least you participated. 00:13:43.520 --> 00:13:46.560 And even if you got something wrong, you can participate again in 00:13:46.560 --> 00:13:49.200 four years or two years, and you can vote in the opposite 00:13:49.200 --> 00:13:50.480 direction, that will be good. 00:13:50.480 --> 00:13:52.560 As long as you're voting, you're always moral. 00:13:52.560 --> 00:13:54.560 That's what the I voted stickers are. 00:13:54.560 --> 00:13:57.760 The I voted sticker that they hand out is basically like the 00:13:57.760 --> 00:14:00.880 ashes that are put on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday. 00:14:00.880 --> 00:14:05.040 It is a secular religion saying I have been absolved of my 00:14:05.040 --> 00:14:08.080 sins by the virtue of my vote. 00:14:08.080 --> 00:14:12.000 What this has to do with context window in all these discussions 00:14:12.160 --> 00:14:17.200 we're going to be talking about is that if participation by itself 00:14:17.200 --> 00:14:20.800 is the highest moral good, then you are free from any notion 00:14:20.800 --> 00:14:22.240 of having to do it well. 00:14:22.240 --> 00:14:25.120 You are free from any notion of having to actually know what 00:14:25.120 --> 00:14:26.560 you're talking about. 00:14:26.560 --> 00:14:30.000 And that is the problem that we see every day on social 00:14:30.080 --> 00:14:31.280 media and elsewhere. 00:14:31.360 --> 00:14:34.560 And all the social media people, it has many bad things, but 00:14:34.560 --> 00:14:36.960 fundamentally it's just people talking to each other. 00:14:36.960 --> 00:14:39.840 That's almost always strangers talking to each other where you get to 00:14:39.840 --> 00:14:40.560 know people. 00:14:40.560 --> 00:14:44.160 But it's fundamentally you just talking to other random people who could 00:14:44.160 --> 00:14:46.480 be anywhere on the planet. 00:14:46.480 --> 00:14:51.760 The participatory element of social media is exactly like the participatory element 00:14:51.760 --> 00:14:52.880 of voting. 00:14:52.880 --> 00:14:54.800 As long as you vote, you've done a good thing. 00:14:54.800 --> 00:14:56.560 And that's what we see on social media. 00:14:56.560 --> 00:14:59.440 As long as you have an opinion and you speak up, you've 00:14:59.440 --> 00:15:00.720 done a good thing. 00:15:00.720 --> 00:15:03.440 It doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. 00:15:03.440 --> 00:15:06.640 It doesn't matter if you have any facts in mind. 00:15:06.640 --> 00:15:09.280 All that matters is that you participated. 00:15:09.280 --> 00:15:12.240 And so the end stages that on social media is what we 00:15:12.240 --> 00:15:17.280 see today is even intelligent Christians give no thought whatsoever when they're 00:15:17.280 --> 00:15:21.120 wading into some debate that's maybe been going on for years, arguments 00:15:21.280 --> 00:15:25.200 been going on where they've seen one element of a thousand, but 00:15:25.200 --> 00:15:27.680 they don't care to learn any of the backstory. 00:15:27.680 --> 00:15:30.240 All they care about is, well, I need to have an opinion 00:15:30.240 --> 00:15:30.800 about this. 00:15:30.800 --> 00:15:33.600 I saw one person do one thing and another person do another 00:15:33.600 --> 00:15:36.160 thing. I have to pick a side and I have to make 00:15:36.160 --> 00:15:37.360 my voice heard. 00:15:37.360 --> 00:15:40.320 This is just basically how we all behave today. 00:15:40.320 --> 00:15:42.560 And it's repugnant. 00:15:42.560 --> 00:15:45.600 And part of it is that it's the collapse of our own 00:15:45.600 --> 00:15:51.120 personal context windows to the last 30 seconds, 15 seconds. 00:15:51.120 --> 00:15:54.240 You don't need to know any backstory because if you see one 00:15:54.240 --> 00:15:56.880 person do something, you're now free to judge them. 00:15:56.880 --> 00:16:00.640 You have all the information you need to make a profound moral 00:16:00.640 --> 00:16:02.320 judgment for against that person. 00:16:02.320 --> 00:16:05.040 You picked your side, you've declared it, and because you said it 00:16:05.040 --> 00:16:09.360 out loud, I voted, I have performed the highest moral good by 00:16:09.360 --> 00:16:11.200 stating my opinion on the internet. 00:16:11.200 --> 00:16:14.800 That's pretty much what we've been reduced to functionally. 00:16:14.800 --> 00:16:17.760 It's very much like the subject in last week's episode where we 00:16:17.760 --> 00:16:23.040 talked about how addiction being elevated to an excuse for sin, once 00:16:23.040 --> 00:16:28.080 you've psychologized away the notion that sin exists, it just patterns a 00:16:28.080 --> 00:16:33.280 behavior, when you're absolved from having to actually behave in a moral 00:16:33.280 --> 00:16:37.360 fashion, in a fashion that evaluates your actions, when morality is no 00:16:37.360 --> 00:16:40.960 longer a factor, when it's just, well, I'm participating, I I'm an 00:16:40.960 --> 00:16:43.040 addict, so of course I do addict things. 00:16:43.040 --> 00:16:45.520 I I want to stop being an addict, but you know, uh 00:16:45.600 --> 00:16:47.200 there's no moral culpability. 00:16:47.200 --> 00:16:49.760 I'm gonna vote, it doesn't matter who I vote for, but I 00:16:49.760 --> 00:16:52.880 have to do it because it's important to participate. 00:16:52.880 --> 00:16:55.760 I see two guys talking on the internet, I'm gonna make my 00:16:55.760 --> 00:16:58.480 voice heard because that's the important thing. 00:16:58.480 --> 00:17:01.680 And as long as I do that, I bear no moral culpability 00:17:01.680 --> 00:17:04.720 for the degree of ignorance that I've just expressed. 00:17:04.720 --> 00:17:05.040 And 00:17:06.560 --> 00:17:11.040 when we lay out the entire Sebtuage on argument, it's going to 00:17:11.040 --> 00:17:14.640 be so much bigger than anyone's context window that if you take 00:17:14.640 --> 00:17:18.000 that approach, if you take the last 15 seconds of whatever we 00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:21.520 said and you react indignantly, you're not going to get anything out 00:17:21.520 --> 00:17:21.760 of it. 00:17:21.760 --> 00:17:22.640 You won't learn anything. 00:17:22.640 --> 00:17:24.640 It's going to be a waste of your time. 00:17:24.640 --> 00:17:28.240 And I want you to be able to get something out of 00:17:28.240 --> 00:17:32.720 it. And that involves this precursor where we say there's this thing 00:17:32.720 --> 00:17:34.160 going on in all of our heads. 00:17:34.160 --> 00:17:36.320 Again, this isn't about LLMs or AI. 00:17:36.320 --> 00:17:38.240 This is about how our brains work. 00:17:38.240 --> 00:17:40.880 We have a finite amount of scratch space. 00:17:40.880 --> 00:17:43.200 I've been speaking now for eighteen minutes. 00:17:43.200 --> 00:17:46.000 You can remember bits and pieces of what I said three, five, 00:17:46.000 --> 00:17:49.600 eight minutes ago, but you couldn't verbatim, and that's fine, because I'm 00:17:49.600 --> 00:17:53.200 making a series of points, and you're generally coming along. 00:17:53.200 --> 00:17:57.520 Next week, next month, the only thing that I care about you 00:17:57.520 --> 00:18:02.080 remembering is the notion of the context window that you can only 00:18:02.080 --> 00:18:03.840 hold so much in your head at once. 00:18:03.840 --> 00:18:07.280 It's why Corey and I often on Stone Choir will repeat things. 00:18:07.280 --> 00:18:10.960 We aggravate some of the smarter guys in the audience by repeating 00:18:10.960 --> 00:18:14.880 things ad nauseum and we'll often use that explicit term. 00:18:14.880 --> 00:18:18.160 We know that we're being redundant because we want it to sink 00:18:18.160 --> 00:18:21.040 in. We know that you listen for 90 minutes or two hours, 00:18:21.040 --> 00:18:24.320 and maybe only two or three things are gonna actually implant themselves. 00:18:24.320 --> 00:18:26.720 We try to make sure it's the things that we we care 00:18:26.720 --> 00:18:29.200 about. We try to make sure it's the things that we made 00:18:29.200 --> 00:18:33.040 the episode for and not some random joke or something. 00:18:33.040 --> 00:18:35.760 So So we're cognizant of the fact that this is how everybody's 00:18:35.760 --> 00:18:36.560 brains work. 00:18:36.560 --> 00:18:39.440 No matter how smart you are, you have an outer limit to 00:18:39.440 --> 00:18:41.280 what you can hold in mind. 00:18:41.280 --> 00:18:45.920 But once you realize that you have this personal limitation, it does 00:18:45.920 --> 00:18:47.440 begin to have a moral tenor. 00:18:47.600 --> 00:18:50.640 Because if you personally can only remember the last five minutes of 00:18:50.640 --> 00:18:55.440 a conversation and it's been going on for twenty minutes, think twice 00:18:55.440 --> 00:18:58.080 about getting angry about the last thing that a guy said because 00:18:58.080 --> 00:19:00.320 maybe it ties back to something you forgot. 00:19:00.720 --> 00:19:04.000 And we see this on social media where guys, even when the 00:19:04.000 --> 00:19:07.120 text record is right there, when you have post, post, post, post, 00:19:07.120 --> 00:19:10.480 and anyone could go back and read all of them, they'll get 00:19:10.480 --> 00:19:13.040 mad about something at the end of a thread that's only 15 00:19:13.040 --> 00:19:16.000 minutes long because they forgot what was going on earlier. 00:19:16.000 --> 00:19:19.200 That's not only a behavioral problem, but it's a moral problem. 00:19:19.200 --> 00:19:23.360 Because when you're reaching dire conclusions about something, this guy's evil, this 00:19:23.360 --> 00:19:24.320 guy's terrible. 00:19:24.320 --> 00:19:28.320 If If you do that with just absolutely no effort whatsoever, but 00:19:28.320 --> 00:19:32.320 you do with a clean conscience because hey, I voted, I participated, 00:19:32.320 --> 00:19:34.560 I posted, my conscience is clean. 00:19:34.560 --> 00:19:35.680 That's a bad thing. 00:19:35.680 --> 00:19:37.360 It's a bad place that we've gotten to. 00:19:37.360 --> 00:19:41.280 And I don't, I've been on the internet my entire life, basically. 00:19:41.280 --> 00:19:45.120 I don't know what discussion was like before the internet, but I 00:19:45.120 --> 00:19:47.760 can't imagine it was this stupid. 00:19:47.760 --> 00:19:49.680 And the only thing that we can do to try to help 00:19:49.680 --> 00:19:51.760 is say, hey, this is a reality. 00:19:51.760 --> 00:19:53.360 We can only fit so much in our head. 00:19:53.840 --> 00:19:57.440 So if in the course of a discussion or you know, approaching 00:19:57.440 --> 00:20:00.400 an idea, you know, if your context window is big enough, it's 00:20:00.320 --> 00:20:02.480 not going to be just bigger than a discussion. 00:20:02.480 --> 00:20:04.720 It's going to be the last week or the last month of 00:20:04.720 --> 00:20:10.080 discussions, because that's what's actually relevant for whatever's being said right now. 00:20:10.080 --> 00:20:13.280 We all have these limitations and they're gonna be different for different 00:20:13.280 --> 00:20:15.840 people. Some people is gonna be very small and they just can't 00:20:15.840 --> 00:20:18.640 keep up with much of anything If that's how God made you, 00:20:18.640 --> 00:20:20.080 I can't call you names. 00:20:20.080 --> 00:20:21.440 That would be wicked. 00:20:21.440 --> 00:20:24.080 All I can do is encourage you to recognize, yeah, I can't 00:20:24.080 --> 00:20:24.800 keep up. 00:20:24.800 --> 00:20:26.800 And so I'm just gonna step out. 00:20:26.800 --> 00:20:31.360 Because I can't in good conscience judge these matters because I'm not 00:20:31.760 --> 00:20:33.760 entirely sure what's going on here. 00:20:33.760 --> 00:20:36.240 That is an entirely moral and licit position. 00:20:36.240 --> 00:20:38.560 It's one that we should hear a lot more of, because it 00:20:38.560 --> 00:20:40.800 applies to a lot more people than think. 00:20:40.800 --> 00:20:43.200 We have to get away from the notion that I voted, I 00:20:43.200 --> 00:20:45.120 posted, my conscience is clean. 00:20:45.120 --> 00:20:46.880 That's not a good place to be. 00:20:46.880 --> 00:20:52.000 And it causes problems when we try to tackle complicated subjects because 00:20:52.160 --> 00:20:56.960 the complexity is not because of some intricacy of interlocking parts. 00:20:56.960 --> 00:20:58.320 It's just it's big. 00:20:58.320 --> 00:21:01.200 We're going to talk about 2,500 years of church history. 00:21:01.200 --> 00:21:02.720 That's a lot to cover. 00:21:02.720 --> 00:21:06.000 And all of those pieces are interlocking, they're also sequential. 00:21:06.000 --> 00:21:08.880 So as we go through them one by one, it's a simple 00:21:08.880 --> 00:21:10.080 case to make. 00:21:10.080 --> 00:21:12.880 But when you get out to the twenty five hundred year market, 00:21:12.880 --> 00:21:15.520 like I can't I can't fit all that in my head, which 00:21:15.520 --> 00:21:18.640 is why I said hanging to explicitly ask people, write down your 00:21:18.640 --> 00:21:21.440 objections. Don't forget the things that are confusing. 00:21:21.440 --> 00:21:24.880 And I think that at the end of that episode, we will 00:21:24.880 --> 00:21:28.560 have either answered those questions to your satisfaction, or in most cases, 00:21:28.560 --> 00:21:31.280 you'll realize that the question wasn't really all that relevant. 00:21:31.280 --> 00:21:34.640 It seemed important at the time, but once you have the fuller 00:21:34.640 --> 00:21:37.680 picture, maybe it just doesn't matter all that much. 00:21:39.120 --> 00:21:44.720 The Book of Lamentations was written by the prophet Jeremiah in approximately 00:21:44.960 --> 00:21:48.960 five eighty seven BC, right around there, depending on how you number 00:21:48.960 --> 00:21:50.480 some of the years. 00:21:50.480 --> 00:21:56.880 And the book is a poetic lament about the destruction of Jerusalem 00:21:56.880 --> 00:22:00.880 in about five eighty six or five eighty seven BC by the 00:22:00.880 --> 00:22:06.080 Babylonians. Of course, as a punishment from God for the apostasy of 00:22:06.080 --> 00:22:07.920 the southern kingdom. 00:22:07.920 --> 00:22:12.160 The northern kingdom Israel had already been destroyed at this point. 00:22:12.160 --> 00:22:18.320 And so in the fifth chapter of this book, one of the 00:22:18.320 --> 00:22:23.840 lines, the fourteenth verse, the old men have left the city gate. 00:22:23.840 --> 00:22:27.840 Now for some that may seem like a strange statement. 00:22:27.840 --> 00:22:30.480 You may not recognize what that's saying. 00:22:30.480 --> 00:22:35.760 But tied into what Woe was saying about democracy. 00:22:35.760 --> 00:22:40.000 Historically how many matters were handled was the old men of the 00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:43.840 city, would meet together in the gate and discuss them. 00:22:43.840 --> 00:22:46.480 If you had a problem you would take it to the elders 00:22:46.480 --> 00:22:49.200 at the gate and they would render a decision. 00:22:49.200 --> 00:22:52.560 That's how things were conducted because there is a certain sort of 00:22:52.560 --> 00:22:57.760 wisdom, a degree of wisdom that comes with old age. 00:22:57.760 --> 00:23:01.600 It is at least supposed to, obviously not all of the elderly 00:23:01.600 --> 00:23:06.000 are wise, but there is wisdom that comes along with length of 00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:12.320 years. This is sort of the inversion of what happens with democracy. 00:23:12.320 --> 00:23:17.280 Because by and large, democracy is simply a melee, it is a 00:23:17.280 --> 00:23:24.080 free-for-all, and you have everyone participating, so-called, regardless of the level of 00:23:24.080 --> 00:23:28.880 information, regardless of the level of experience, and yes, experience does count 00:23:28.880 --> 00:23:34.480 for something, regardless of all of these things that were considered important 00:23:34.800 --> 00:23:41.280 historically, and that are considered important in Scripture, Scripture doesn't condemn the 00:23:41.280 --> 00:23:44.320 old men standing in the gate to render decisions. 00:23:44.320 --> 00:23:48.400 In fact, Scripture goes the opposite direction you can think of Leviticus. 00:23:48.400 --> 00:23:51.440 You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face 00:23:51.440 --> 00:23:53.520 of an old man. 00:23:53.520 --> 00:23:56.640 One of the roles of those who have lived a long life 00:23:56.640 --> 00:24:02.880 and gained this wisdom is to render solid counsel. 00:24:02.880 --> 00:24:05.040 That is not what democracy does. 00:24:05.040 --> 00:24:08.080 It does the exact opposite of that. 00:24:08.080 --> 00:24:12.480 In fact, if you can just gin up support among the youth, 00:24:12.480 --> 00:24:15.840 there's a pretty good chance you can win certain elections. 00:24:15.840 --> 00:24:19.920 It may be that you have completely and entirely deceived them because 00:24:19.920 --> 00:24:23.120 they don't have this necessary context of a long of a long 00:24:23.120 --> 00:24:28.240 life, this wisdom that is gained through length of years, and so 00:24:28.240 --> 00:24:32.400 perhaps you win the democratic contest. 00:24:32.400 --> 00:24:35.600 But that's not a good thing, and we see the same thing 00:24:35.600 --> 00:24:39.760 happening all over the place in our society, social media is obviously 00:24:39.760 --> 00:24:41.360 one of the great examples. 00:24:41.360 --> 00:24:44.480 This isn't to say that the youth shouldn't have a say, that 00:24:44.480 --> 00:24:47.600 their voice shouldn't be heard, but it's to say that it should 00:24:47.600 --> 00:24:49.680 be tempered by wisdom. 00:24:49.680 --> 00:24:52.160 Because God does highly praise wisdom. 00:24:52.160 --> 00:24:54.000 It is a gift from God. 00:24:54.000 --> 00:24:57.360 It is something that we as Christians, and just as men, should 00:24:57.360 --> 00:25:03.600 value. It's not in the roar of the crowd that you find 00:25:03.600 --> 00:25:08.560 truth, that you find justice, that you find sound conclusions. 00:25:08.560 --> 00:25:12.240 It's not to say that necessarily those things are at odds, because 00:25:12.320 --> 00:25:15.840 of course, the crowd can be led toward the truth almost as 00:25:15.840 --> 00:25:19.520 easily as it can be led toward a lie, even though sometimes 00:25:19.520 --> 00:25:24.480 lies are more pleasing in their presentation, not in their consequences. 00:25:24.480 --> 00:25:27.520 That's how sin tends to work. 00:25:27.520 --> 00:25:31.200 Rather, it is to say that just because the crowd approves of 00:25:31.200 --> 00:25:35.520 something does not mean that that thing is true or correct or 00:25:35.520 --> 00:25:37.120 good or just. 00:25:37.120 --> 00:25:41.520 We often see this playing out in the various public fora that 00:25:41.520 --> 00:25:43.200 we that we now have a society. 00:25:43.200 --> 00:25:45.600 We no longer have a public square, really. 00:25:45.600 --> 00:25:47.360 We have a virtual one. 00:25:47.360 --> 00:25:49.280 And we call it social media. 00:25:49.280 --> 00:25:53.760 It happens to be that different age cohorts have sort of divided 00:25:53.760 --> 00:25:56.000 themselves up among the various platforms. 00:25:56.400 --> 00:26:01.840 Facebook is now the older generation, X is sort of millennials, plus 00:26:01.840 --> 00:26:05.200 or minus a bit, and then you have things like TikTok and 00:26:05.200 --> 00:26:08.480 such that are the younger generation. 00:26:08.480 --> 00:26:12.240 But by and large, on these platforms, particularly the first and the 00:26:12.240 --> 00:26:17.760 third, you don't necessarily see the truth being what is winning out. 00:26:17.760 --> 00:26:21.040 There's an ongoing raging battle as it were on X for what 00:26:21.040 --> 00:26:23.680 is true and what is not, a little bit more than the 00:26:23.680 --> 00:26:25.280 other platforms. 00:26:25.280 --> 00:26:29.520 But what you see is things that are attractive, that are flashy. 00:26:29.520 --> 00:26:31.840 Those are the things that get the most views. 00:26:31.840 --> 00:26:36.000 It's in fact admittedly one of the reasons that I phrase things 00:26:36.000 --> 00:26:39.920 the way that I do sometimes, because if you don't capture people's 00:26:39.920 --> 00:26:43.440 attention, they are never going to see what you said. 00:26:43.440 --> 00:26:45.920 In fact, you have to do that if you want to get 00:26:45.920 --> 00:26:48.720 out whatever message it happens to be. 00:26:48.720 --> 00:26:52.400 Usually I'm trying to force people to think, which is part of 00:26:52.400 --> 00:26:56.320 the purpose of this episode and the podcast more generally. 00:26:56.320 --> 00:26:59.760 But I word things the way that I do, so that people 00:26:59.760 --> 00:27:03.680 will react to them, because that reaction will at least cause them 00:27:03.680 --> 00:27:08.800 to pause for a second and maybe think about what I said. 00:27:08.800 --> 00:27:09.840 Which is the goal. 00:27:09.840 --> 00:27:12.800 Hopefully they will think about it, and arrive at some sort of 00:27:12.800 --> 00:27:17.360 conclusion, assess it in a rational fashion, even in a critical fashion, 00:27:17.360 --> 00:27:19.920 instead of just scrolling by it to the next thing that happens 00:27:19.920 --> 00:27:23.440 to be shiny or flashy, which is so often what happens with 00:27:23.920 --> 00:27:28.480 these systems we've built, because basically it's a dopamine treadmill. 00:27:28.480 --> 00:27:30.320 But the issue with 00:27:31.440 --> 00:27:36.160 these sorts of systems, with democracy, with things like that, is that 00:27:36.160 --> 00:27:40.960 we have That we have abandoned the idea of expertise. 00:27:40.960 --> 00:27:44.720 And along with the idea of expertise, we've abandoned, as Wo said, 00:27:44.720 --> 00:27:48.400 accountability. Because what do you have if you are the old men 00:27:48.400 --> 00:27:50.080 standing in the gate? 00:27:50.080 --> 00:27:54.880 Well, you have a certain sort of respectability because you are the 00:27:54.880 --> 00:27:59.520 grey head that Scripture commands us to honor, the men before whom 00:27:59.520 --> 00:28:03.520 you are supposed to rise, which is to honor these men. 00:28:03.520 --> 00:28:07.200 But at the same time you have a degree of accountability. 00:28:07.200 --> 00:28:10.160 Not just because of the fact that you are an elder and 00:28:10.160 --> 00:28:13.440 you are serving in that office, you're in that position, but also 00:28:13.440 --> 00:28:16.800 because you are in a very real sense the ones guiding this 00:28:16.800 --> 00:28:22.000 city. And if you guide it poorly, the consequences are disastrous for 00:28:22.000 --> 00:28:25.520 you and for your family and for everyone who lives in your 00:28:25.520 --> 00:28:31.200 city. In other words, your neighbors, you have a duty, by virtue 00:28:31.200 --> 00:28:34.800 of that office, to render correct decisions. 00:28:34.800 --> 00:28:39.840 Incidentally, that also means that you have a prior duty not to 00:28:39.840 --> 00:28:42.160 seek or to hold that office if you have If you do 00:28:42.160 --> 00:28:45.280 not have the capacity to render those proper decisions. 00:28:45.280 --> 00:28:49.920 Again, democracy subverts this because the only thing that is considered good 00:28:49.920 --> 00:28:54.240 is voting, and the only thing that is considered bad is being 00:28:54.240 --> 00:28:58.240 precluded from voting, being excluded from the decision. 00:28:58.240 --> 00:29:02.480 Well some men should be excluded from making these decisions, because some 00:29:02.480 --> 00:29:06.000 men are in fact incompetent to make certain decisions. 00:29:06.000 --> 00:29:09.520 An example that I will often use because it's rather visceral and 00:29:09.520 --> 00:29:13.440 it gets the point across quite clearly, if you need open heart 00:29:13.440 --> 00:29:16.320 surgery, you are not going to go down to the bus stop 00:29:16.320 --> 00:29:19.360 and take a poll as to what method should be used or 00:29:19.360 --> 00:29:23.520 how it should be pursued or which sort of products should be 00:29:23.520 --> 00:29:25.440 used in the procedure. 00:29:25.440 --> 00:29:29.520 No, you go to a doctor who is an expert in open 00:29:29.520 --> 00:29:34.560 heart surgery, because the alternative is you're probably going to die. 00:29:34.720 --> 00:29:39.360 We all recognize that expertise exists in many fields. 00:29:39.360 --> 00:29:42.880 If you want a new suit, you're probably going to go to 00:29:42.880 --> 00:29:45.760 a tailor, not an auto mechanic. 00:29:45.760 --> 00:29:49.040 Inversely, if your car has a problem, you are probably going to 00:29:49.040 --> 00:29:52.240 go to the auto mechanic, not a tailor. 00:29:52.240 --> 00:29:56.960 We recognize that this expertise exists in all sorts of fields, and 00:29:56.960 --> 00:30:01.920 yet because of the propaganda for democracy, We have been trained to 00:30:01.920 --> 00:30:07.120 reject expertise in matters of politics, which is really what we're discussing. 00:30:07.120 --> 00:30:10.960 This is the umbrella term, the large sense of politics. 00:30:10.960 --> 00:30:14.720 And so we've been told that no, every opinion is relevant, every 00:30:14.720 --> 00:30:19.200 opinion is of equal weight, of equal value with regard to political 00:30:19.200 --> 00:30:21.760 questions. And that's simply not true. 00:30:21.760 --> 00:30:25.120 Because there are men who have dedicated their lives and their talents 00:30:25.200 --> 00:30:29.280 to these things, and men who have been given certain gifts by 00:30:29.280 --> 00:30:34.560 God, and are able to render good decisions. 00:30:34.560 --> 00:30:38.240 Whereas many men, most men in fact are not able to do 00:30:38.240 --> 00:30:43.440 so. But the fundamental conceit of democracy is that every man has 00:30:43.440 --> 00:30:48.080 an equally valid opinion, and that is simply not true. 00:30:48.080 --> 00:30:50.960 It is particularly not true in politics. 00:30:50.960 --> 00:30:54.160 Now, of course, there is some nuance with this when it comes 00:30:54.160 --> 00:31:00.400 to theological questions, because theologically speaking, the same thing is true. 00:31:00.400 --> 00:31:04.480 Not all men have the same level of aptitude, not all men 00:31:04.480 --> 00:31:06.080 have been given the same gifts. 00:31:06.480 --> 00:31:11.600 Some men are much more competent theologically than others. 00:31:11.600 --> 00:31:13.600 That is simply a truth. 00:31:13.600 --> 00:31:18.320 However, every man needs to get certain theological questions 00:31:19.280 --> 00:31:23.600 right. Now we happen to have safeguards in place, which is great 00:31:23.600 --> 00:31:27.280 news. We call them the confessions. 00:31:27.280 --> 00:31:30.640 And in fact, the confessions and the creeds, I mean both of 00:31:30.640 --> 00:31:33.600 those when I say confessions. 00:31:33.600 --> 00:31:35.760 You should know those. 00:31:35.760 --> 00:31:39.280 You should hold those dear, you should hold to those, you should 00:31:39.280 --> 00:31:42.800 cling to those, because those are the guardrails and any man should 00:31:42.720 --> 00:31:46.800 be able to Should be able to understand at least the major 00:31:46.800 --> 00:31:50.400 confessions, the major creeds of the church. 00:31:50.400 --> 00:31:54.320 Now there are going to be many other issues that most men 00:31:54.320 --> 00:31:56.320 will not be able to understand. 00:31:56.320 --> 00:32:02.400 The communication of attributes is fairly complicated, is fairly nuanced. 00:32:02.400 --> 00:32:06.240 Most men are not going to thoroughly understand that issue, or even 00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:08.320 why it necessarily matters. 00:32:08.320 --> 00:32:11.120 But do you have to understand it to be saved? 00:32:11.200 --> 00:32:13.120 The answer is no. 00:32:13.120 --> 00:32:18.720 If you read, believe, and confess the creeds, that is sufficient. 00:32:18.720 --> 00:32:23.600 But it doesn't mean that these other theological issues are unimportant. 00:32:23.600 --> 00:32:27.040 It simply means that you don't necessarily have to have an opinion 00:32:27.040 --> 00:32:28.400 on them. 00:32:28.400 --> 00:32:33.200 It is entirely fine to simply say I don't know. 00:32:33.200 --> 00:32:35.680 Or even to say I don't care. 00:32:35.680 --> 00:32:39.360 Now for some of these issues, perhaps it is worthy of caring 00:32:39.360 --> 00:32:42.800 about them, but if you don't have the capacity, then just simply 00:32:42.800 --> 00:32:43.760 say I don't know. 00:32:43.760 --> 00:32:45.440 That is a fine answer. 00:32:45.440 --> 00:32:47.680 It is something that Woe and I are perfectly willing to say 00:32:47.760 --> 00:32:52.000 Willing to say on subjects about which we don't know that much. 00:32:52.000 --> 00:32:57.040 If you ask me a question about quantum chemistry, I'm probably going 00:32:57.040 --> 00:33:00.560 to tell you I don't know, because I don't know that much 00:33:00.560 --> 00:33:01.760 about that subject. 00:33:01.760 --> 00:33:04.960 It is not my area of expertise. 00:33:04.960 --> 00:33:09.760 And I don't consider that I should have an opinion on absolutely 00:33:09.760 --> 00:33:13.920 everything. In fact, I have opinions, I have positions only on those 00:33:13.920 --> 00:33:15.840 things about which I know something. 00:33:15.840 --> 00:33:18.880 Now of course I'm not talking about just matters of taste, because 00:33:18.880 --> 00:33:23.280 certainly you can have an opinion with regard to taste, so food 00:33:23.280 --> 00:33:27.280 or even clothing, and not necessarily be an expert in either of 00:33:27.280 --> 00:33:27.760 those things. 00:33:27.760 --> 00:33:29.360 That's a different matter. 00:33:29.360 --> 00:33:30.720 We're talking about matters of truth. 00:33:31.840 --> 00:33:34.960 When it comes to matters of truth, whether it is a theological 00:33:34.960 --> 00:33:38.720 truth or a mathematical truth, or a truth in chemistry or physics, 00:33:38.720 --> 00:33:39.600 whatever it happens to be 00:33:40.560 --> 00:33:43.920 You don't necessarily have to have an opinion if you don't know 00:33:43.920 --> 00:33:45.360 anything about it. 00:33:45.360 --> 00:33:50.080 So I have positions theologically, because I understand theology. 00:33:50.080 --> 00:33:53.200 I have put in the time and effort to understand the subject, 00:33:53.200 --> 00:33:56.480 and God has given me certain gifts so that that time and 00:33:56.480 --> 00:33:58.720 effort were not wasted. 00:33:58.720 --> 00:34:04.080 However, I don't have those sorts of opinions with regard to every 00:34:04.080 --> 00:34:07.120 other field, and so you will notice if you look at the 00:34:07.120 --> 00:34:10.080 comments that I have made, whether it's on X or elsewhere here 00:34:10.080 --> 00:34:15.840 on the podcast, I generally do not speak about most subjects. 00:34:15.840 --> 00:34:19.200 Now partly it's because they're not subjects that are necessarily fit for 00:34:19.200 --> 00:34:23.200 this podcast, but it's also because I don't have an opinion on 00:34:23.200 --> 00:34:26.000 them, I don't have a position on them, and neither does Woe 00:34:26.080 --> 00:34:27.200 for many of them. 00:34:27.200 --> 00:34:29.920 Because we aren't experts in those things. 00:34:29.920 --> 00:34:33.040 Yes, I recognize that I talked about biology and I've talked about 00:34:33.040 --> 00:34:38.000 psychology in previous episodes, but I actually do have sufficient training and 00:34:38.000 --> 00:34:41.680 knowledge in those fields to speak on them to the extent that 00:34:41.680 --> 00:34:43.120 I did. 00:34:43.120 --> 00:34:44.400 I'm not going to go beyond 00:34:45.280 --> 00:34:50.240 that. Because I don't think that they should be democratized. 00:34:50.240 --> 00:34:53.440 I don't think that I should have a say on things about 00:34:53.440 --> 00:34:55.600 which I don't know anything. 00:34:55.600 --> 00:34:57.600 The fundamental problem with democracy 00:34:58.720 --> 00:35:01.280 is that it says that every man should have a say on 00:35:01.280 --> 00:35:06.880 the political, when vanishingly few men are experts on the political. 00:35:06.880 --> 00:35:12.560 The idea that someone who is eight is eighteen and knows nothing 00:35:12.560 --> 00:35:16.880 about politics, and probably just started reading Marx will say for the 00:35:16.880 --> 00:35:21.280 most extreme example, the idea that that person should have the exact 00:35:21.280 --> 00:35:24.560 same say in politics as a man who has been a statesman 00:35:25.040 --> 00:35:30.000 for twenty years, is utterly and completely absurd, and yet that is 00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:34.000 what democracy advances. 00:35:34.000 --> 00:35:36.320 I want to be very clear. 00:35:36.320 --> 00:35:39.200 Again, I am drawing a very 00:35:40.160 --> 00:35:45.680 not sort of wall between the two, but a strict delineation between 00:35:46.000 --> 00:35:50.160 the political and the theological, because I am in fact saying that 00:35:50.160 --> 00:35:54.240 you do indeed have to have opinions on the theological, but only 00:35:54.240 --> 00:35:57.280 in so far as they are the core issues of the faith 00:35:57.600 --> 00:36:00.880 that are contained in and addressed by the creeds, which is to 00:36:00.880 --> 00:36:04.320 say the things you need to know to be saved The other 00:36:04.320 --> 00:36:09.760 things the tangential, the ancillary issues, not all of them ancillary, but 00:36:09.760 --> 00:36:13.440 some, you do not need to have an opinion on those. 00:36:13.440 --> 00:36:16.720 On the other hand, with the political, most men do not need 00:36:16.720 --> 00:36:19.200 to have opinions on the political. 00:36:19.200 --> 00:36:21.920 Because it is outside their area of expertise. 00:36:21.920 --> 00:36:26.240 And it is something that, if they involve themselves, they are probably 00:36:26.240 --> 00:36:28.320 going to be doing it to the detriment of their Of their 00:36:28.320 --> 00:36:30.800 neighbor and to the detriment of themselves. 00:36:30.800 --> 00:36:35.200 Because if you in fact involve yourself in something, it is incumbent 00:36:35.200 --> 00:36:38.320 on you to have a certain degree of competence. 00:36:38.320 --> 00:36:41.920 Because if you don't have that competence, you are inflicting harm on 00:36:41.920 --> 00:36:45.280 others, which is to say that you are sinning. 00:36:45.280 --> 00:36:49.920 You should not involve yourself in things about which you do not 00:36:49.920 --> 00:36:54.560 have sufficient knowledge to make an accurate assessment. 00:36:54.560 --> 00:36:57.920 To engage in a way that is actually helpful to others instead 00:36:57.920 --> 00:37:00.320 of harmful to them. 00:37:00.320 --> 00:37:06.400 Which is why the very idea of mass democracy, specifically mass democracy 00:37:06.480 --> 00:37:10.640 as the worst example, is not only absurd but wicked. 00:37:10.640 --> 00:37:14.160 It is an openly evil thing because it asks those who are 00:37:14.160 --> 00:37:19.120 least suited to make decisions, to make those very decisions, and to 00:37:19.120 --> 00:37:22.000 inflict harm on their neighbor, and in fact to feel like they 00:37:22.000 --> 00:37:24.400 have done a good work in doing so. 00:37:24.400 --> 00:37:27.600 Because all of the propaganda tells you that if you go and 00:37:27.600 --> 00:37:31.200 vote, you've done a good thing, it's your civic duty, which is 00:37:31.200 --> 00:37:35.040 incidentally how we used to run the calculation in political science for 00:37:35.040 --> 00:37:38.960 how voting was rational, no longer the case, now it's that you 00:37:38.960 --> 00:37:41.600 feel good, and I wish I were kidding, but that is actually 00:37:41.600 --> 00:37:44.640 what the modern literature says it's the warm fuzzy feeling you get 00:37:44.640 --> 00:37:46.240 from participating. 00:37:46.640 --> 00:37:50.480 But the propaganda tells you that this is something you should do 00:37:50.560 --> 00:37:54.560 and it's a good thing and that you've done this great and 00:37:54.560 --> 00:37:57.920 wonderful work if you go and vote. 00:37:57.920 --> 00:38:01.760 And that's simply not the case if you don't know why you 00:38:01.760 --> 00:38:05.440 voted that way, why you should vote that way, why you should 00:38:05.440 --> 00:38:07.360 not have voted another way. 00:38:07.360 --> 00:38:11.520 Now of course all of this comes with the practical caveat that 00:38:11.520 --> 00:38:16.720 in the modern world we do live under a democratic system presently. 00:38:16.720 --> 00:38:20.240 And so, yes, it does matter if you go out and vote. 00:38:20.240 --> 00:38:22.880 Because it really is just a headcount. 00:38:22.880 --> 00:38:25.680 But you should listen to men who actually know the issues, who 00:38:25.680 --> 00:38:29.360 understand the issues, who can say this is the way you should 00:38:29.360 --> 00:38:31.600 vote and here is why. 00:38:31.600 --> 00:38:36.080 It's important to do that because there's nothing wrong with having leaders. 00:38:36.080 --> 00:38:38.560 Every movement has leaders. 00:38:38.560 --> 00:38:40.480 Every field has leaders. 00:38:40.480 --> 00:38:44.400 And most of the men under those leaders don't understand all of 00:38:44.400 --> 00:38:47.920 the actions or all of the reasons for the actions taken by 00:38:47.920 --> 00:38:49.040 the leader. 00:38:49.040 --> 00:38:50.240 That's entirely fine. 00:38:50.240 --> 00:38:53.760 God created hierarchy everywhere. 00:38:53.760 --> 00:38:56.960 Children don't have to understand why their parents tell them to go 00:38:56.960 --> 00:38:59.600 to bed at a certain time, or why they have to eat 00:38:59.600 --> 00:39:03.360 their vegetables, or any of a thousand other things they do. 00:39:03.600 --> 00:39:07.040 But it's good if they do them, because God has put that 00:39:07.040 --> 00:39:11.120 person in a position of headship, a position of authority, over in 00:39:11.120 --> 00:39:14.720 the case of a father over his children, in order to lead 00:39:14.720 --> 00:39:16.960 them and guide them for their good. 00:39:16.960 --> 00:39:20.240 That's what political leaders are supposed to do. 00:39:20.240 --> 00:39:25.520 It's not a bad thing when someone exercises authority or exercises control, 00:39:25.520 --> 00:39:28.720 because that has been given to that man by God, and he 00:39:28.720 --> 00:39:30.400 is to use it for good. 00:39:30.400 --> 00:39:33.200 Now a man who uses it for evil is no longer acting 00:39:33.200 --> 00:39:36.000 on behalf of God, and that is a different question we've addressed 00:39:36.000 --> 00:39:37.920 in previous podcasts. 00:39:37.920 --> 00:39:42.720 But there is nothing inherently wrongful or evil or bad about power 00:39:42.720 --> 00:39:44.080 and authority. 00:39:44.080 --> 00:39:47.920 In fact, they are goods that come from God, that He has 00:39:47.920 --> 00:39:51.120 given to certain men, and it is incumbent on those men to 00:39:51.120 --> 00:39:55.440 exercise them in accord with God's desires. 00:39:55.440 --> 00:40:02.160 When we look at a system like democracy, which instead of recognizing 00:40:02.160 --> 00:40:07.040 the natural hierarchy that God has built into his creation, including among 00:40:07.040 --> 00:40:13.200 men, and rejects that, which is what democracy does, instead of looking 00:40:13.200 --> 00:40:18.080 at that hierarchy, looking at the design of the system created by 00:40:18.080 --> 00:40:22.560 God, and recognizing that natural conclusions flow from it, then we that 00:40:22.560 --> 00:40:26.160 we should organize our society in a certain way. 00:40:26.160 --> 00:40:29.600 If you reject those things, you wind up with worse outcomes, and 00:40:29.600 --> 00:40:32.640 not only do you wind up with worse outcomes, but you wind 00:40:32.640 --> 00:40:36.480 up harming your neighbor, you wind up with actively evil outcomes. 00:40:36.640 --> 00:40:40.480 Because the system itself is the problem. 00:40:40.480 --> 00:40:43.600 And again to tie it back into the discussions that we're having 00:40:43.760 --> 00:40:49.040 and leading into the Septuagint episode, the same thing is true with 00:40:49.040 --> 00:40:51.200 regard to most discussions. 00:40:51.840 --> 00:40:56.000 Because there are going to be men who understand the issues, and 00:40:56.000 --> 00:40:58.480 there are going to be men who do not understand the issues, 00:40:58.480 --> 00:41:01.120 and there's going to be a spectrum, because there are men who 00:41:01.520 --> 00:41:04.240 are experts in the topics being discussed, and there are men who 00:41:04.240 --> 00:41:06.240 know nothing about them. 00:41:06.240 --> 00:41:10.800 Not all of those men on that spectrum should have equal say. 00:41:10.800 --> 00:41:14.160 Because the men who are experts, the men who know more about 00:41:14.160 --> 00:41:18.240 subjects should have a greater say, and in fact the men who 00:41:18.240 --> 00:41:22.160 know nothing should remain silent, because that is the right thing to 00:41:22.160 --> 00:41:24.640 do when you know nothing about the subject. 00:41:24.640 --> 00:41:28.080 Now if you happen to have a reasonable question, that's a different 00:41:28.080 --> 00:41:31.360 matter. You can ask questions, of course. 00:41:31.360 --> 00:41:34.320 But the man who knows nothing about a subject should not stand 00:41:34.320 --> 00:41:37.520 up and say, well, I think we should do this, because he 00:41:37.520 --> 00:41:40.880 has no reason to advance the position. 00:41:40.880 --> 00:41:46.480 The men who have the knowledge also have a duty to use 00:41:46.480 --> 00:41:48.560 it in a godly fashion. 00:41:48.560 --> 00:41:52.320 Again, this is tying into so many episodes we've done, and there's 00:41:52.320 --> 00:41:55.440 a sort of irony here that I brought up with Wo while 00:41:55.440 --> 00:41:57.520 we were discussing the topics. 00:41:57.520 --> 00:42:01.520 The fact that we're doing context window is the ninety-ninth episode. 00:42:01.520 --> 00:42:05.040 Because in a very real way we're drawing on so many previous 00:42:05.040 --> 00:42:09.360 episodes that the entirety of the corpus of the podcast is the 00:42:09.360 --> 00:42:12.400 context window of this episode. 00:42:12.400 --> 00:42:15.680 Is the context window for the things that we are saying, the 00:42:15.680 --> 00:42:19.040 positions we're advancing, and indeed what we will be doing in the 00:42:19.040 --> 00:42:21.520 Septuagint series. 00:42:21.520 --> 00:42:24.720 Now we're not saying that you have to know absolutely everything we 00:42:24.720 --> 00:42:28.880 have said in every single podcast, thus far, in every episode thus 00:42:28.880 --> 00:42:33.040 far, but it's certainly helpful if you remember the contours and the 00:42:33.040 --> 00:42:34.000 major points. 00:42:34.000 --> 00:42:36.560 And again, it's one of the reasons that we tend to repeat 00:42:36.560 --> 00:42:38.720 the things that we say. 00:42:38.720 --> 00:42:43.520 Because if we repeat them, you are more likely to retain them. 00:42:43.520 --> 00:42:47.040 That's not an indictment, that's not it shouldn't be heard as an 00:42:47.040 --> 00:42:49.280 insult, it shouldn't received as an insult. 00:42:49.280 --> 00:42:51.680 That is simply how the human mind works. 00:42:51.680 --> 00:42:54.960 It's how my mind works, it's how Woe's mind works, it's how 00:42:54.960 --> 00:42:57.600 the mind of every single man ever to live works. 00:42:57.600 --> 00:43:01.040 The way that you memorize things is repetition. 00:43:01.040 --> 00:43:03.600 I hope we would all remember that from school. 00:43:03.600 --> 00:43:06.080 If you learned a foreign language, one of the ways that you 00:43:06.080 --> 00:43:10.240 learn it is rote memorization, at least for that core vocabulary, which 00:43:10.240 --> 00:43:11.280 is just repetition. 00:43:11.280 --> 00:43:14.160 It's flashcards and looking at it in English and then the other 00:43:14.160 --> 00:43:16.560 language. That's how we learn. 00:43:16.560 --> 00:43:18.960 It's one of the reasons, it's one of the core reasons that 00:43:18.960 --> 00:43:22.320 we repeat things so many times in these episodes. 00:43:22.320 --> 00:43:25.520 Because we want you to remember the key points. 00:43:25.520 --> 00:43:27.360 Because otherwise why are you here? 00:43:27.440 --> 00:43:29.840 And otherwise why are we here? 00:43:30.080 --> 00:43:35.040 If we're just talking and you aren't actually listening or learning anything, 00:43:35.040 --> 00:43:37.200 we're both wasting our time. 00:43:37.200 --> 00:43:39.440 We don't want to waste your time and we don't want to 00:43:39.440 --> 00:43:40.800 waste our own time. 00:43:40.800 --> 00:43:44.240 And so we hope that you take away from these episodes the 00:43:44.240 --> 00:43:47.600 core points that we're making in them, which again is why we 00:43:47.600 --> 00:43:48.800 repeat them. 00:43:48.800 --> 00:43:52.800 Because if it's repeated three, four, five times, you have a much 00:43:52.800 --> 00:43:56.960 better chance of remembering it than if it's said once in passing. 00:43:56.960 --> 00:44:00.160 And this is not something, again, that is unique to us, that 00:44:00.160 --> 00:44:04.960 is unique to really anything when it comes to human endeavors. 00:44:04.960 --> 00:44:06.800 Read Scripture. 00:44:06.800 --> 00:44:11.440 Things are repeated two, three times, in the same paragraph sometimes in 00:44:11.440 --> 00:44:14.800 Scripture. God knows how the human mind works. 00:44:14.800 --> 00:44:18.720 God inspired Moses, particularly, if you're looking at the first five books 00:44:18.720 --> 00:44:24.080 of Scripture, to write the same thing multiple times in short order, 00:44:24.080 --> 00:44:27.680 sometimes spaced, which incidentally we know that spaced repetition is one of 00:44:27.680 --> 00:44:31.600 the best ways to remember things Partly because scripture was meant to 00:44:31.600 --> 00:44:33.040 be read aloud. 00:44:33.040 --> 00:44:35.600 So if you heard something, and then you heard it again a 00:44:35.600 --> 00:44:38.800 minute later, and then again a couple minutes after that, you had 00:44:38.800 --> 00:44:42.640 a better chance of retaining it, which is vitally important when something 00:44:42.640 --> 00:44:47.120 is delivered orally, which is exactly obviously what we're doing with a 00:44:47.120 --> 00:44:50.640 podcast, unless you happen to be one of the people who reads 00:44:50.640 --> 00:44:53.200 the transcript instead of listens. 00:44:53.200 --> 00:44:57.280 So we repeat things so that you will remember them, because otherwise 00:44:57.440 --> 00:44:58.640 there's no point. 00:44:58.640 --> 00:45:00.560 For us or for you. 00:45:01.920 --> 00:45:06.400 I'm gonna give you a brief lesson on LLMs or AI, and 00:45:06.400 --> 00:45:09.520 the point again is not to nerd out or give you any 00:45:09.520 --> 00:45:11.600 reason to care about technology. 00:45:11.600 --> 00:45:14.160 This is an example I'm giving, as I said, this is how 00:45:14.160 --> 00:45:15.280 our brains work. 00:45:15.280 --> 00:45:18.160 Just Corey was talking about repetition. 00:45:18.160 --> 00:45:22.400 The reason that I have found LLM's particularly interesting is I'm learning 00:45:22.400 --> 00:45:23.920 um more about myself. 00:45:23.920 --> 00:45:25.360 I'm learning more about you. 00:45:25.360 --> 00:45:30.080 I'm learning more about being human by watching how they're trying to 00:45:30.080 --> 00:45:34.080 tune these machines to think like humans and think it's in scare 00:45:34.160 --> 00:45:38.000 quotes there because it's not thought the way we think of thought, 00:45:38.000 --> 00:45:40.800 but there is something akin to reasoning. 00:45:40.800 --> 00:45:44.560 And there are places where it's absolutely an effective reasoning engine. 00:45:44.560 --> 00:45:46.560 There's an example I'll give here in a little bit. 00:45:47.520 --> 00:45:53.120 So when we're talking about LLMs and we're talking about context window, 00:45:53.120 --> 00:45:55.920 I'm just going to give you a few brief technical details. 00:45:55.920 --> 00:45:57.680 Again, this is about us. 00:45:57.680 --> 00:46:02.560 What they're trying to do with these machines, with these robots, is 00:46:02.560 --> 00:46:06.240 to fit a version of the human brain in a software so 00:46:06.240 --> 00:46:07.760 you can run on a computer. 00:46:07.760 --> 00:46:09.440 There are two elements to that. 00:46:09.440 --> 00:46:12.160 There is the training of the model, which is going to be 00:46:12.160 --> 00:46:15.360 based on the corpus of whatever data they can get their hands 00:46:15.360 --> 00:46:19.360 on. And for a human, the comparable notion would be basically your 00:46:19.360 --> 00:46:20.240 entire life. 00:46:20.240 --> 00:46:24.000 Everything you have ever been exposed to, everything you've ever learned, everything 00:46:24.000 --> 00:46:27.760 you've ever studied gets compressed into your brain somehow and some of 00:46:27.760 --> 00:46:28.720 it sticks. 00:46:28.720 --> 00:46:32.640 With an LLM, the model that you will run, and that's why 00:46:32.640 --> 00:46:35.680 they have specific names, some of them I've downloaded and I run 00:46:35.680 --> 00:46:38.160 locally, one of the ones that I use the most often, because 00:46:38.080 --> 00:46:41.680 it's the best right now, is Llama three point three. 00:46:41.680 --> 00:46:43.920 In one month it's going to be obsolete because they're about to 00:46:43.920 --> 00:46:45.120 release Llama four. 00:46:45.120 --> 00:46:47.040 It's going to be way better, it's probably going to be smaller, 00:46:47.040 --> 00:46:49.440 faster, it's going to do everything better. 00:46:49.440 --> 00:46:52.400 But the underlying technology is more or less the same. 00:46:52.400 --> 00:46:56.640 They take a huge corpus of whatever information they could get without 00:46:56.720 --> 00:47:01.840 regard to copyright, they stuff it into a file, they perform lots 00:47:01.840 --> 00:47:04.320 of complicated math on it to essentially 00:47:05.520 --> 00:47:09.360 summarize all human knowledge as best they can. 00:47:09.360 --> 00:47:11.440 And it works incredibly well. 00:47:11.440 --> 00:47:14.000 I when I was talking about this stuff a year and two 00:47:14.000 --> 00:47:16.800 years and three years ago, I didn't think it was going to 00:47:16.800 --> 00:47:18.160 get as far as it has today. 00:47:18.160 --> 00:47:20.080 They're doing a really good job. 00:47:20.080 --> 00:47:23.280 And that's both a wonderful thing and a terrifying thing. 00:47:23.280 --> 00:47:27.360 But for today's episode, we're just talking about kind of the machinery. 00:47:27.360 --> 00:47:30.960 Once that model is locked in, once you have your you know 00:47:31.120 --> 00:47:35.760 Lama 3, the one that I run is about 70 gigabytes, that 00:47:35.920 --> 00:47:38.240 is a fixed thing, unlike your brain. 00:47:38.240 --> 00:47:41.120 Your brain is always accumulating new knowledge. 00:47:41.120 --> 00:47:45.280 These models, when they're locked in for training, they're done. 00:47:45.280 --> 00:47:47.360 They don't change anymore. 00:47:47.360 --> 00:47:49.040 And then they're run at runtime. 00:47:49.040 --> 00:47:50.320 And so that's the difference. 00:47:50.320 --> 00:47:53.440 When you have a brain, your brain's always on, it's always learning, 00:47:53.440 --> 00:47:54.880 and it's always running. 00:47:54.880 --> 00:47:58.640 So you're talking, you're thinking, you're ingesting, whatever. 00:47:58.640 --> 00:47:59.280 You are 00:48:00.240 --> 00:48:03.840 not discrete parts the way this is. 00:48:03.840 --> 00:48:07.360 When a model like Llama 3 or Llama 4 gets locked in, 00:48:07.360 --> 00:48:08.960 it's not going to change anymore. 00:48:08.960 --> 00:48:13.040 No new information can be added to it, which is what makes 00:48:13.040 --> 00:48:17.360 the conversational context a very different aspect of how they operate. 00:48:17.360 --> 00:48:19.360 And that's when they're actually being used. 00:48:19.360 --> 00:48:22.720 When all this information is stuffed into the model and it's put 00:48:22.720 --> 00:48:27.600 in a file, then your LLM provider, maybe if you're running it 00:48:27.600 --> 00:48:32.160 locally, I'm using LM Studio, which is cross-platform, I recommend it if 00:48:32.160 --> 00:48:36.400 you can run it on your machine When you're actually interacting with 00:48:36.400 --> 00:48:41.280 an LLM, the conversation is what has this context window that I 00:48:41.280 --> 00:48:42.640 talked about earlier. 00:48:42.640 --> 00:48:48.000 And the context window is another very distinct aspect of how we 00:48:48.000 --> 00:48:53.440 interact with each other because it's unrelated directly to knowledge in the 00:48:53.440 --> 00:48:54.480 broad sense. 00:48:54.480 --> 00:48:59.600 The context window is just whatever has happened recently. 00:48:59.600 --> 00:49:03.520 And so, say for example, I fire up Llama three, I ask 00:49:03.520 --> 00:49:07.120 it a question about the Septuagint, and it gives me an answer. 00:49:07.120 --> 00:49:09.280 I ask a follow-up question, it gives me another answer, I ask 00:49:09.440 --> 00:49:11.120 another follow-up question. 00:49:11.120 --> 00:49:15.920 The context window for that session, that one chat, is going to 00:49:15.920 --> 00:49:21.040 be whatever conversation has occurred between me and the robot. 00:49:21.040 --> 00:49:25.120 For the duration of that conversation, it has perfect recollection, as I 00:49:25.120 --> 00:49:27.920 said earlier, of everything in the conversation. 00:49:27.920 --> 00:49:30.720 But it knows nothing about any previous conversations. 00:49:30.720 --> 00:49:32.160 Each chat is a separate chat. 00:49:32.160 --> 00:49:34.480 It forgets perfectly every time. 00:49:34.480 --> 00:49:37.360 Because the file, the model, is unchanging. 00:49:37.360 --> 00:49:39.200 It's fixed in space and time. 00:49:39.360 --> 00:49:41.840 Because versioning, it just it doesn't go anywhere. 00:49:41.840 --> 00:49:43.200 It's read-only. 00:49:43.200 --> 00:49:45.040 The conversations are ephemeral. 00:49:45.040 --> 00:49:47.600 So you can have one conversation after another and they don't flow 00:49:47.600 --> 00:49:48.400 into each other. 00:49:48.400 --> 00:49:50.960 And the context window is the limit. 00:49:50.960 --> 00:49:56.400 The reason that the context windows are there is that the inference 00:49:56.400 --> 00:50:00.240 process, which is what this part of the LLM interaction is called, 00:50:00.240 --> 00:50:03.840 is very expensive to get the information back out of that model 00:50:04.080 --> 00:50:08.480 at runtime and then to incorporate new information with your question and 00:50:08.480 --> 00:50:12.320 its answer and your feedback takes a lot of memory. 00:50:12.320 --> 00:50:16.240 It takes additional memory and additional computation and there's a hard limit 00:50:16.240 --> 00:50:19.760 for every model about how much context window they can have. 00:50:19.760 --> 00:50:23.280 As I said earlier, as soon as you exceed the context window 00:50:23.280 --> 00:50:26.640 for your chat, it's going to begin to lose its mind. 00:50:26.640 --> 00:50:29.440 And it's going to do one of a couple things. 00:50:29.440 --> 00:50:34.160 The typical simple solution is truncation, where it will either forget the 00:50:34.160 --> 00:50:37.360 beginning of the conversation or it will forget the middle of the 00:50:37.360 --> 00:50:41.120 conversation. So if it forgets the beginning of the conversation, it'll remember 00:50:41.120 --> 00:50:44.000 the last, you know, thousands of words that you've had back and 00:50:44.000 --> 00:50:48.320 forth, but it won't remember how you started the chat, which can 00:50:48.320 --> 00:50:52.320 cause conversation to get very confusing if you keep going, because once 00:50:52.320 --> 00:50:56.080 it's forgotten how the conversation began, it might start repeating itself or 00:50:56.080 --> 00:51:01.280 it might start talking about totally unrelated things suggested by the most 00:51:01.280 --> 00:51:06.320 recent context, but without regard for the initial context. 00:51:06.320 --> 00:51:10.240 So one of the other methods is truncation in the middle, where 00:51:10.240 --> 00:51:13.280 it will remember the beginning of the conversation, or remember the recent 00:51:13.280 --> 00:51:16.400 part, and it just throws out some portion of the middle because 00:51:16.400 --> 00:51:21.200 that's less likely to influence what it's going to say next. 00:51:21.200 --> 00:51:27.040 Another method, a third method, is key value quantization, where they basically 00:51:27.040 --> 00:51:31.040 compress the conversation in real time the same way that the chat 00:51:31.040 --> 00:51:32.800 itself is compressed. 00:51:32.800 --> 00:51:35.600 And this compression is lossy. 00:51:35.840 --> 00:51:38.480 There are two different types of compression on computers. 00:51:38.480 --> 00:51:40.960 One is lossless and the other is lossy. 00:51:40.960 --> 00:51:42.960 You've all interacted with zip files. 00:51:42.960 --> 00:51:46.960 That's a lossless compression, where you take a file, you zip it, 00:51:46.960 --> 00:51:49.120 it gets a lot smaller, you can email it to somebody, put 00:51:49.120 --> 00:51:50.640 it on a drive or whatever. 00:51:50.640 --> 00:51:53.760 And then when you unzip it, you get exactly the same file. 00:51:53.760 --> 00:51:56.480 Byte for byte, bit for bit, it's identical. 00:51:56.480 --> 00:51:59.520 That's lossless compression. 00:51:59.520 --> 00:52:02.960 The other type of compression is lossy compression. 00:52:02.960 --> 00:52:07.440 This would be things like images, and JPEGs are a good example, 00:52:07.440 --> 00:52:10.880 or audio files, like the one you're listening to now. 00:52:10.880 --> 00:52:15.360 The audio file of this podcast is several gigabytes when Corey is 00:52:15.360 --> 00:52:18.800 editing it because it's uncompressed on his machine. 00:52:18.800 --> 00:52:22.320 When he finishes mastering it and he outputs it for the podcast 00:52:22.320 --> 00:52:25.360 services, it's compressed as an MP4. 00:52:25.360 --> 00:52:31.520 That is a lossy perceptual encoding process where it throws away data, 00:52:31.520 --> 00:52:35.280 but it throws away things that the human ear typically can't hear. 00:52:35.280 --> 00:52:38.960 And some people have noticed that the audio quality on our podcast 00:52:38.960 --> 00:52:41.520 is a lot higher than some others because we use a higher 00:52:41.520 --> 00:52:44.400 bitrate. But even at that it's still compressed. 00:52:44.400 --> 00:52:47.920 And the difference in bitrate is that is literally how much is 00:52:47.920 --> 00:52:49.120 being thrown away. 00:52:49.120 --> 00:52:52.720 The more of the original signal you throw away, the further it 00:52:52.720 --> 00:52:55.680 gets from the purity of the first form. 00:52:55.680 --> 00:53:00.640 So there's no way to reconstruct the original uncompressed version of this 00:53:00.640 --> 00:53:03.440 podcast from the file that you get, but it's close enough that 00:53:03.440 --> 00:53:04.720 it doesn't matter. 00:53:04.720 --> 00:53:08.400 That's pretty much what LLM's try to do with this huge corpus 00:53:08.400 --> 00:53:09.440 of human knowledge. 00:53:09.440 --> 00:53:14.320 They're compressing it by throwing away redundant bits of information, but they 00:53:14.320 --> 00:53:19.200 try to use very fancy methodologies to preserve the relationships between words. 00:53:19.200 --> 00:53:22.000 So So it doesn't throw away anything important. 00:53:22.000 --> 00:53:26.480 And in the middle of a conversation, if an LM quantizes the 00:53:26.480 --> 00:53:30.080 conversation, so it doesn't truncate, but it just starts to compress it. 00:53:30.080 --> 00:53:31.840 It compresses in the same way. 00:53:31.840 --> 00:53:35.120 It starts to throw away things that might be redundant. 00:53:35.120 --> 00:53:37.600 And the end result is that it just gets fuzzier. 00:53:37.600 --> 00:53:39.200 It might work just fine. 00:53:39.200 --> 00:53:40.800 It might work very poorly. 00:53:40.800 --> 00:53:43.520 The longer it goes and the more it has to quantize, the 00:53:43.520 --> 00:53:46.480 more it has to compress, the worse it's going to get because 00:53:46.480 --> 00:53:48.160 the more it's throwing away. 00:53:48.160 --> 00:53:50.720 And this is similar to how the human mind works. 00:53:50.720 --> 00:53:53.920 We don't remember things perfectly, we remember bits and pieces. 00:53:53.920 --> 00:53:57.440 And as Corey said, like typically when we learn, we remember the 00:53:57.440 --> 00:53:58.800 contours of things. 00:53:58.800 --> 00:54:02.240 So you can't reconstruct a conversation, but you have the gist of 00:54:02.240 --> 00:54:02.960 it, hopefully. 00:54:02.960 --> 00:54:05.840 If you're paying attention, even keep up, you have the general idea 00:54:05.840 --> 00:54:09.200 of what was said, you could probably spit back a few things 00:54:09.200 --> 00:54:12.560 that were said, maybe close to verbatim, enough to you get the 00:54:13.040 --> 00:54:14.560 point. And that's sufficient. 00:54:14.560 --> 00:54:17.600 If you get the contours, you don't need the rest. 00:54:17.600 --> 00:54:20.320 And that's one of the beautiful things about the way Gone engineered 00:54:20.320 --> 00:54:21.200 our minds. 00:54:21.200 --> 00:54:24.960 We don't have to be perfect recorders like a camera with with 00:54:25.120 --> 00:54:27.440 perfect recollection of everything all the time. 00:54:27.440 --> 00:54:30.880 That would be almost horrifying for the few people who have it. 00:54:30.880 --> 00:54:32.240 It's kind of hard on 'em. 00:54:32.240 --> 00:54:35.200 It's nice to have some degree of forgetting, but at the same 00:54:35.200 --> 00:54:37.920 time you don't want to forget stuff that's important. 00:54:38.240 --> 00:54:43.520 In the conversation with an LLM in the context window, as long 00:54:43.520 --> 00:54:47.200 as you stay inside that window, and so it's the windows are 00:54:47.280 --> 00:54:49.920 measured in tokens that are basically like pieces of words. 00:54:49.920 --> 00:54:52.080 So you're just talking about in terms of words. 00:54:52.080 --> 00:54:56.800 Say that the window for a model is 100,000 words. 00:54:56.800 --> 00:54:58.720 That's a long conversation. 00:54:58.720 --> 00:55:01.360 That's a longer conversation than you have with most people most of 00:55:01.360 --> 00:55:02.080 the time. 00:55:02.080 --> 00:55:04.800 But it's enough room that you can paste in a document. 00:55:04.800 --> 00:55:07.440 You can ask questions about the document as not too long. 00:55:07.440 --> 00:55:10.160 You can go for a while before it runs out of context. 00:55:10.160 --> 00:55:13.200 And as long as you stay inside the context window of that 00:55:13.200 --> 00:55:16.160 AI, it's gonna remember perfectly. 00:55:16.160 --> 00:55:17.600 People don't work that way. 00:55:17.600 --> 00:55:19.840 But we work similarly. 00:55:19.840 --> 00:55:24.880 What I mean is this, in conversation, one-on-one conversation, not when you're 00:55:24.800 --> 00:55:28.880 talking about the expertise of things you've known forever, just you're sitting 00:55:28.880 --> 00:55:32.560 down cold with a total stranger and you have some back and 00:55:32.560 --> 00:55:35.040 forth where you're getting to know each other. 00:55:35.040 --> 00:55:38.720 If you have no priors, no shared priors with that person, you're 00:55:38.720 --> 00:55:40.960 probably gonna be trying to establish them first of all when you 00:55:40.960 --> 00:55:43.760 try to get to know someone but your context is going to 00:55:43.760 --> 00:55:47.200 be limited to the conversation you're having with each other. 00:55:47.200 --> 00:55:50.720 Your context is going to be limited to what they have said 00:55:50.720 --> 00:55:52.080 and what you have said. 00:55:52.080 --> 00:55:54.960 You don't have any prayer context because you just met them. 00:55:54.960 --> 00:55:57.520 On the other hand, say you met them yesterday, you met somebody 00:55:57.520 --> 00:55:59.600 at the coffee shop, you go back the next day at the 00:55:59.600 --> 00:56:01.520 same time, they're both there. 00:56:01.520 --> 00:56:07.040 If you have a decent memory, your context for today's conversation is 00:56:07.040 --> 00:56:09.280 going to conclude some what you heard yesterday. 00:56:09.280 --> 00:56:11.520 You know, maybe they said that their pet was sick. 00:56:11.520 --> 00:56:14.160 And so today you ask them about their pet. 00:56:14.160 --> 00:56:17.040 And it's not simply it's a biographical detail that oh I know 00:56:17.040 --> 00:56:20.160 that there's a a pet for this person, but they expressed something 00:56:20.160 --> 00:56:23.520 that was important, you remember that, and you incorporate it into today's 00:56:23.520 --> 00:56:28.800 conversation. So your context window is expanded the more you talk to 00:56:28.800 --> 00:56:31.200 them. But you're not going to remember everything perfectly. 00:56:31.200 --> 00:56:32.720 You maybe forget their birthday. 00:56:32.720 --> 00:56:35.440 Some people are really good at that, some people are really bad. 00:56:35.440 --> 00:56:38.320 You're going to remember some details, you're going to forget others. 00:56:38.320 --> 00:56:41.360 And some of that's compressing, and some of it's just it's falling 00:56:41.360 --> 00:56:42.800 out of your context window. 00:56:42.800 --> 00:56:44.400 And that's how people work. 00:56:44.400 --> 00:56:45.520 It's how our minds work. 00:56:45.520 --> 00:56:46.480 It's not a defect. 00:56:46.480 --> 00:56:48.400 It's not, oh, you're stupid. 00:56:48.400 --> 00:56:49.680 You just don't remember everything. 00:56:49.680 --> 00:56:52.640 Why would you remember every single thing about some total stranger, even 00:56:52.640 --> 00:56:53.280 if you liked them? 00:56:53.280 --> 00:56:57.760 Like it's you have more important things to spend your limited faculties 00:56:57.760 --> 00:57:02.000 on. The reason that this is a problem for us as men 00:57:02.160 --> 00:57:06.640 living today is as I framed the beginning of this discussion. 00:57:06.640 --> 00:57:12.160 Because participation itself has become the ultimate moral good, we no longer 00:57:12.160 --> 00:57:16.320 give any regard for how much context we have for any given 00:57:16.320 --> 00:57:19.040 situation before we weigh in. 00:57:19.040 --> 00:57:19.200 So 00:57:20.240 --> 00:57:24.160 you might only have a few pieces of information, particularly when you 00:57:24.160 --> 00:57:27.840 see, say, some online fight, which Corey and I are involved in 00:57:27.840 --> 00:57:29.200 more than most people. 00:57:29.200 --> 00:57:33.120 And most people think that we must be really terrible jerks because 00:57:33.120 --> 00:57:35.600 these fights are always occurring. 00:57:35.600 --> 00:57:40.240 And by itself, that's not an unreasonable conclusion, but what is it 00:57:40.240 --> 00:57:44.480 missing? It's missing every bit of every conversation that we've ever had 00:57:44.480 --> 00:57:48.640 with these people with whom there's some sort of fight or disagreement. 00:57:48.640 --> 00:57:51.280 And as I've said before, I don't want anyone else to care 00:57:51.840 --> 00:57:55.200 about online drama or to feel bad for us because people say 00:57:55.200 --> 00:57:56.000 mean things. 00:57:56.000 --> 00:57:56.640 I don't care. 00:57:56.640 --> 00:57:57.840 I don't want you to care. 00:57:57.840 --> 00:58:02.160 But it is a specific example of someone getting some tiny piece 00:58:02.160 --> 00:58:02.880 of context. 00:58:02.880 --> 00:58:07.520 They see a screenshot of Corey said this and someone else said 00:58:07.520 --> 00:58:09.840 that, and then Corey responded with this. 00:58:09.840 --> 00:58:13.200 And you see that, and your context is limited to you know 00:58:13.600 --> 00:58:18.240 50, 100 words, and you make a profound exacting moral judgment on 00:58:18.320 --> 00:58:21.920 exactly what happened, and you're gonna have a very strongly held opinion, 00:58:21.920 --> 00:58:23.280 maybe for the rest of your life. 00:58:23.280 --> 00:58:25.840 You're gonna think Corey is a terrible guy or he's a great 00:58:25.840 --> 00:58:28.480 guy or whatever, but you don't know what happened before. 00:58:28.480 --> 00:58:30.880 You don't know how the conversation started. 00:58:30.880 --> 00:58:33.360 You don't know if those guys ever talked before. 00:58:33.360 --> 00:58:37.760 You don't know how many times the specific subject that they were 00:58:37.760 --> 00:58:42.240 debating or discussing or arguing has come up in other contexts where 00:58:42.800 --> 00:58:45.840 you know You know, other aspects of what Corey is saying or 00:58:45.840 --> 00:58:47.680 I'm saying it's it's not even about us. 00:58:47.680 --> 00:58:51.280 It's just when we're online, we see these things happening and they're 00:58:51.280 --> 00:58:55.280 drive-bys. You just see something flip by for 30 seconds, you make 00:58:55.280 --> 00:58:58.080 a judgment, and sometimes you weigh in. 00:58:58.080 --> 00:59:02.560 And our admonition here for this is that when your context is 00:59:02.560 --> 00:59:06.800 so small that you really have no idea what's going on, if 00:59:06.800 --> 00:59:10.480 your highest moral good is participation, then yeah, with a clean conscience, 00:59:10.480 --> 00:59:12.400 you're gonna weigh in and say, What a jerk. 00:59:12.400 --> 00:59:13.440 This guy's going to hell. 00:59:13.440 --> 00:59:14.800 Can you believe he said that? 00:59:14.800 --> 00:59:16.400 Which happens all the time. 00:59:16.400 --> 00:59:19.120 And it's completely absurd and it's unchristian. 00:59:19.120 --> 00:59:22.160 But I'm concerned as much about the absurdity as anything. 00:59:22.160 --> 00:59:26.320 Like the unchristian part is dire, but the fact that absurdity is 00:59:26.320 --> 00:59:30.960 leading to unchristian behavior shows to me what time it is. 00:59:30.960 --> 00:59:34.240 It's not that there's some dedication to evil by these people. 00:59:34.240 --> 00:59:35.680 It's just that they don't care. 00:59:35.680 --> 00:59:36.640 Why should they care? 00:59:36.640 --> 00:59:39.200 They did the right thing by making a comment. 00:59:39.200 --> 00:59:42.000 And therefore I voted my conscience is clean. 00:59:42.000 --> 00:59:43.040 It's silly. 00:59:43.040 --> 00:59:47.520 And so the purpose, the lesser purpose of this episode in highlighting 00:59:47.760 --> 00:59:51.280 context windows is to get you to just think about the fact 00:59:51.280 --> 00:59:54.160 that you only know so much about any given situation. 00:59:54.160 --> 00:59:57.280 You know, the juror example is a prime one. 00:59:57.280 --> 01:00:01.360 Both sides in a civil or a criminal trial, especially a criminal 01:00:01.360 --> 01:00:05.840 trial, and the judge, there are very strict rules governing what can 01:00:05.840 --> 01:00:07.440 be entered into evidence. 01:00:07.440 --> 01:00:12.080 They control the context window for the entire jury deliberation. 01:00:12.080 --> 01:00:16.240 And the rules that are set forth are that you are to 01:00:16.240 --> 01:00:21.120 have nothing inside your deliberation context beyond what is introduced as evidence 01:00:21.120 --> 01:00:22.160 in court. 01:00:22.160 --> 01:00:24.560 And you are not to forget anything. 01:00:24.560 --> 01:00:28.080 Everything that's there that was admissible, you should consider. 01:00:28.080 --> 01:00:30.800 And as a juror, consideration means weighing it. 01:00:30.800 --> 01:00:33.920 So you may consider evidence and say, I disregard that entirely. 01:00:33.920 --> 01:00:35.600 I think that person was a liar. 01:00:35.600 --> 01:00:37.680 I think that that testimony was false. 01:00:37.680 --> 01:00:39.040 I think it was shoddy. 01:00:39.040 --> 01:00:42.000 That in you as a trier of fact, as a juror, that's 01:00:42.000 --> 01:00:43.120 your job. 01:00:43.120 --> 01:00:45.040 But you should at least consider all of it. 01:00:45.040 --> 01:00:47.520 You are not free to say, I'm not gonna I I didn't 01:00:47.440 --> 01:00:48.960 even listen to what that guy said. 01:00:48.960 --> 01:00:51.040 That would be jury malfeasance. 01:00:51.040 --> 01:00:54.960 You can't just sleep while someone's testifying if you don't find him 01:00:54.960 --> 01:00:59.440 interesting. You can consciously judge he's not interesting, but you can't just 01:00:59.440 --> 01:01:00.400 disregard it. 01:01:00.400 --> 01:01:03.920 You can't throw away that context because in the purpose of a 01:01:03.920 --> 01:01:08.000 trial, it's then determined by the system to be key. 01:01:08.000 --> 01:01:11.680 And so this notion of context windows pops up all the time. 01:01:11.680 --> 01:01:16.080 And in the case of a jury trial, there are rules and 01:01:16.080 --> 01:01:19.360 you're gonna be professional about it, hopefully, pretty much anyone listening to 01:01:19.360 --> 01:01:22.400 this to this would be, but you're not going to be as 01:01:22.400 --> 01:01:25.680 cavalier as you would be in other situations, like saying that someone's 01:01:25.680 --> 01:01:28.560 going to hell because you saw a screenshot on the internet. 01:01:28.560 --> 01:01:32.560 And I think that that's not the standard the Christians should be 01:01:32.560 --> 01:01:34.320 holding ourselves up to. 01:01:34.320 --> 01:01:38.800 If you don't know everything, you can find something questionable. 01:01:38.800 --> 01:01:39.760 That's fine. 01:01:39.760 --> 01:01:43.280 As Corey said, he posts things and I post things to get 01:01:43.280 --> 01:01:47.760 people to think in getting people to think often involves raising questions 01:01:47.760 --> 01:01:51.600 in their minds, to challenge assumptions, to use a word in a 01:01:51.600 --> 01:01:55.440 way that they haven't considered before, and to make you think it's 01:01:55.440 --> 01:01:58.640 fun for us to do that because it's valuable and it's fun 01:01:58.640 --> 01:02:00.640 because it's beneficial. 01:02:00.640 --> 01:02:05.920 It helps people to be better citizens, better Christians, just better thinkers, 01:02:05.920 --> 01:02:09.440 to actually spend a little bit of time with metacognition thinking about 01:02:09.440 --> 01:02:11.840 thinking and taking this stuff seriously. 01:02:11.840 --> 01:02:16.640 Not disregarding the fact that your context window is thirty seconds long 01:02:16.800 --> 01:02:18.400 for some given interaction. 01:02:18.400 --> 01:02:21.280 Take seriously the fact that you don't know squat, and you should 01:02:21.280 --> 01:02:22.480 keep your mouth shut. 01:02:22.480 --> 01:02:25.200 That's a perfectly fine conclusion to reach. 01:02:25.200 --> 01:02:27.040 And it should be everyone's default. 01:02:27.040 --> 01:02:30.640 I don't know enough to comment is a perfectly it should be 01:02:30.640 --> 01:02:31.520 the default. 01:02:31.520 --> 01:02:34.800 Someone wants you to condemn someone or to argue about something or 01:02:34.800 --> 01:02:36.480 to what do you think about this? 01:02:36.480 --> 01:02:38.080 If you don't know, say I don't know. 01:02:38.080 --> 01:02:39.760 And if you don't think it's worth your time, say I'm not 01:02:39.760 --> 01:02:41.600 gonna let that into my context window. 01:02:41.600 --> 01:02:42.720 I mean, don't talk like that. 01:02:42.720 --> 01:02:44.320 But you know what I mean. 01:02:44.320 --> 01:02:48.800 If it's not worth your time to consider the evidence, okay, great, 01:02:48.800 --> 01:02:50.560 but you don't get to have an opinion. 01:02:50.560 --> 01:02:52.560 This is something I've said repeatedly. 01:02:52.560 --> 01:02:56.000 I don't expect anyone to agree with us or listen to us, 01:02:56.000 --> 01:03:00.000 but if you have no interest in our argument, you're not in 01:03:00.000 --> 01:03:03.280 a position to render judgment. 01:03:03.520 --> 01:03:10.160 Technically speaking, a context window applies only to an individual or to 01:03:10.160 --> 01:03:13.360 a machine to which a context window is relevant, which is to 01:03:13.360 --> 01:03:16.160 say an LLM or a so-called AI. 01:03:16.160 --> 01:03:16.800 However, 01:03:17.680 --> 01:03:23.440 there is a very similar thing that plays out with human organizations 01:03:23.440 --> 01:03:25.440 and even civilizations. 01:03:25.440 --> 01:03:29.600 There is a sort of context window for those as well. 01:03:29.600 --> 01:03:33.680 Because in the case of an organization, you are going to have 01:03:33.680 --> 01:03:36.960 a certain history for that organization, assuming it's been around long enough 01:03:36.960 --> 01:03:38.320 to have such a thing. 01:03:38.320 --> 01:03:41.920 So think a very old corporation or law firm or even a 01:03:41.920 --> 01:03:43.840 country. Certain things 01:03:44.720 --> 01:03:50.160 that are past a certain age are going to simply be forgotten. 01:03:50.160 --> 01:03:53.600 They are going to fall out of the context window. 01:03:53.600 --> 01:03:59.680 But by and large, human organizations and civilizations tend to do what 01:03:59.680 --> 01:04:03.520 Woe described as dropping things out of the middle. 01:04:03.520 --> 01:04:07.680 Because by and large, we all know in the US context, the 01:04:07.680 --> 01:04:08.240 United States 01:04:09.120 --> 01:04:15.120 is founded upon the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. 01:04:15.120 --> 01:04:19.680 If you start asking people specifics about the years between that and 01:04:19.680 --> 01:04:23.040 today, things start to get a little fuzzy. 01:04:23.040 --> 01:04:26.880 Because by and large, how we work in these contexts is we 01:04:26.880 --> 01:04:28.720 drop things out of the middle. 01:04:28.720 --> 01:04:32.320 We don't remember those specifics. 01:04:32.320 --> 01:04:36.400 Because obviously, the beginning is one of the most important parts of 01:04:36.400 --> 01:04:40.800 an organization or a country or a civilization, whatever it happens to 01:04:40.800 --> 01:04:45.440 be. And what is happening presently is important because that dictates what 01:04:45.440 --> 01:04:48.240 will or will not happen in the Happen in the future, but 01:04:48.240 --> 01:04:51.120 some of the things in the middle are perhaps not as important 01:04:51.280 --> 01:04:54.480 or at least not considered as important, they tend to start falling 01:04:54.480 --> 01:04:56.720 out of memory. 01:04:56.720 --> 01:05:01.280 Key points will be retained, certain particular important events. 01:05:01.280 --> 01:05:03.760 Most people know that we had a civil war. 01:05:03.760 --> 01:05:06.640 Things like that tend to be remembered. 01:05:06.640 --> 01:05:10.720 Now if you ask people about the war we had with Mexico, 01:05:10.720 --> 01:05:14.320 they're probably going to know less about that than the Civil War. 01:05:14.320 --> 01:05:18.480 And so there's this same sort of concept with regard to 01:05:19.440 --> 01:05:24.800 creations of human beings, whether a corporation or a country or a 01:05:24.800 --> 01:05:29.840 civilization, something similar to a context window. 01:05:29.840 --> 01:05:33.040 And when we talk about the Septuagint as we will be doing 01:05:33.040 --> 01:05:39.520 in the upcoming series, we are dealing in a civilizational context window, 01:05:39.520 --> 01:05:43.600 and also in an organizational context window, because we're dealing with the 01:05:43.600 --> 01:05:48.640 church. And we do mean uppercase C church in this case, because 01:05:48.640 --> 01:05:51.680 we are going to be dealing with the ancient church, we're going 01:05:51.680 --> 01:05:53.680 to be dealing with Rome, we're going to be dealing with the 01:05:53.680 --> 01:05:59.040 Reformation, we're going to be dealing with certain organizations after the Reformation, 01:05:59.040 --> 01:06:02.960 and also some tangentially related bodies. 01:06:02.960 --> 01:06:10.000 This civilizational context window is vitally important because in order to draw 01:06:10.000 --> 01:06:15.680 the right conclusions, you really need to have the entirety of this 01:06:15.680 --> 01:06:18.320 particular timeline in mind. 01:06:18.320 --> 01:06:21.440 It's one of the reasons that Woe said to write things down 01:06:21.440 --> 01:06:26.880 with your objections, your questions, your considerations, and then put them aside. 01:06:26.880 --> 01:06:31.360 Because you need to try to retain the timeline in your mind. 01:06:31.360 --> 01:06:33.360 Now you may not be able to do that. 01:06:33.360 --> 01:06:36.800 Most men will not be able to do that because again, we're 01:06:36.800 --> 01:06:39.680 talking about quite a lot of years here, and there's a lot 01:06:39.680 --> 01:06:41.680 of information. 01:06:41.680 --> 01:06:44.960 But you will be able to retain enough to make an assessment, 01:06:44.960 --> 01:06:47.520 and I will summarize it at the end of the episodes as 01:06:47.520 --> 01:06:53.760 I usually do, to help you along with drawing those conclusions. 01:06:53.760 --> 01:06:57.760 The reason that it is important to have the entirety of this 01:06:57.760 --> 01:07:02.720 context window is related to what Woe said about social media. 01:07:02.720 --> 01:07:06.480 This comes up with certain posts all the time. 01:07:06.480 --> 01:07:09.280 You could pick any of a handful of dozens of posts from 01:07:09.280 --> 01:07:14.320 either of us, if you don't understand the context, you may very 01:07:14.320 --> 01:07:16.400 well draw wrong conclusions. 01:07:16.400 --> 01:07:21.200 Now often the post stands alone, but the context adds something to 01:07:21.200 --> 01:07:25.520 it. When it comes to the issue of the Septuagint, we are 01:07:25.520 --> 01:07:28.640 going to lay out the case that you need to know this 01:07:28.880 --> 01:07:33.360 historical context, you need to know the fullness of this timeline, why 01:07:33.360 --> 01:07:38.880 things happened, when they happened, who caused them to happen, the consequences 01:07:38.880 --> 01:07:41.440 of those things happening, etc. 01:07:41.520 --> 01:07:45.920 etc. All of these things matter because they lead up to where 01:07:45.920 --> 01:07:50.320 we are today and what we should do with that information. 01:07:50.320 --> 01:07:56.240 Now, if you only have the context of today, in maybe a 01:07:56.240 --> 01:07:59.840 couple of decades, or even a century, maybe you have a context 01:07:59.840 --> 01:08:03.840 window that goes back into the middle of the nineteen hundreds, maybe 01:08:03.840 --> 01:08:06.960 two centuries back into the eighteen hundreds, say. 01:08:06.960 --> 01:08:12.480 That is going to be insufficient to draw accurate conclusions, because you 01:08:12.480 --> 01:08:15.680 are going to be missing things that happened thousands of years ago 01:08:16.560 --> 01:08:19.360 that are relevant to us today. 01:08:19.360 --> 01:08:21.840 And now there are those who will think, oh, it happened two 01:08:21.920 --> 01:08:22.800 thousand years ago. 01:08:22.800 --> 01:08:24.400 How relevant could it be? 01:08:24.400 --> 01:08:27.440 I would encourage you to think about that statement for a moment 01:08:27.440 --> 01:08:30.400 before advancing it. 01:08:30.400 --> 01:08:36.160 Because as Christians, something that happened two thousand years ago is fairly 01:08:36.160 --> 01:08:38.400 relevant to our interest today. 01:08:38.400 --> 01:08:39.040 In fact, happened 01:08:40.240 --> 01:08:43.760 fairly close to exactly two thousand years as we sit here now 01:08:43.760 --> 01:08:47.840 in twenty twenty five. 01:08:47.840 --> 01:08:51.520 It is not to say that you need to know everything that 01:08:51.520 --> 01:08:56.560 happened in history To have a true and living faith in Christ, 01:08:56.560 --> 01:08:58.400 a salvific faith. 01:08:58.400 --> 01:09:00.240 We are not advancing that. 01:09:00.240 --> 01:09:03.600 We are never going to advance that in the entirety of the 01:09:03.600 --> 01:09:07.360 Septuagint series because that is not the point, it is not even 01:09:07.360 --> 01:09:11.680 among the points that we will be making. 01:09:11.680 --> 01:09:15.200 The points we will be making are related to what we should 01:09:15.200 --> 01:09:19.840 be doing as Christians, where things have gone astray in the past, 01:09:19.840 --> 01:09:24.320 how we can address them today, and why those things happened and 01:09:24.320 --> 01:09:27.840 why we should do certain things in response. 01:09:27.840 --> 01:09:32.960 You can use an existing translation of scripture and come to a 01:09:32.960 --> 01:09:34.880 saving faith in Christ. 01:09:34.880 --> 01:09:39.920 Again I highly recommend, as should any Christian, the guardrails that are 01:09:39.920 --> 01:09:42.480 the creeds that are the confessions. 01:09:42.480 --> 01:09:46.800 Our faithful ancestors have drawn those up and used them and passed 01:09:46.800 --> 01:09:50.720 them down to us to protect us from certain issues that arose 01:09:50.720 --> 01:09:53.040 in the church. 01:09:53.040 --> 01:09:56.560 We are going to point out another issue that arose in the 01:09:56.560 --> 01:10:01.600 church and should have been addressed in centuries past but was not. 01:10:01.600 --> 01:10:09.440 It matters that you understand that context window of thousands of years. 01:10:09.440 --> 01:10:13.200 That is again why Woe said to write things down. 01:10:13.200 --> 01:10:16.240 That is a long time, that is a lot of information that 01:10:16.240 --> 01:10:18.080 we will be presenting. 01:10:18.400 --> 01:10:21.200 You do not have to hold all of it in your mind, 01:10:21.200 --> 01:10:25.040 thankfully. God has given us the ability to write things down. 01:10:25.040 --> 01:10:27.520 At least now we have universal literacy. 01:10:27.520 --> 01:10:30.960 Say what you will about it, whether it has been on balance 01:10:31.040 --> 01:10:32.000 good or bad. 01:10:32.000 --> 01:10:34.000 Most of us know how to read and write. 01:10:34.000 --> 01:10:35.440 So you can take notes. 01:10:35.440 --> 01:10:38.800 You don't have to hold the entirety of it in your mind 01:10:38.800 --> 01:10:42.720 because you can look back at your notes and make that assessment 01:10:42.720 --> 01:10:48.400 deliberately. You can deliberate on what we have presented and what conclusions 01:10:48.400 --> 01:10:51.760 you should draw from it. 01:10:51.760 --> 01:10:56.480 That is why context window matters because if you do not have 01:10:56.480 --> 01:11:02.000 a sufficient context window, you will draw inaccurate conclusions because you are 01:11:02.000 --> 01:11:05.920 doing it based on insufficient information. 01:11:05.920 --> 01:11:11.840 For instance, I can give a simple, perhaps one could say, extreme 01:11:11.920 --> 01:11:15.680 example, but a very simple example to draw this out. 01:11:15.680 --> 01:11:21.200 If If introduced into evidence in a criminal case for assault, battery, 01:11:21.200 --> 01:11:24.720 whatever it happens to be, it's probably assault given most jurisdictions, but 01:11:24.960 --> 01:11:30.080 a criminal case for criminal assault, and you have a video that 01:11:30.080 --> 01:11:33.920 starts in the middle of a fight, and all you see is 01:11:34.240 --> 01:11:39.760 Man B, punch man A and knock him unconscious. 01:11:39.760 --> 01:11:43.360 You should probably have some questions. 01:11:43.520 --> 01:11:46.480 Why do I not have the rest of the video? 01:11:46.720 --> 01:11:52.560 Why do I not know what happened before this particular incident, before 01:11:52.560 --> 01:11:53.920 this punch? 01:11:53.920 --> 01:11:57.680 Why do I not know what led up to this moment? 01:11:58.240 --> 01:12:03.360 Why have I not been given sufficient context to make an informed 01:12:03.360 --> 01:12:09.040 decision? Because if all you saw was one man punch another, well 01:12:09.120 --> 01:12:12.240 that's wrongful because you aren't supposed to assault other people. 01:12:13.040 --> 01:12:18.160 However, if in the previous thirty seconds of the video, not introduced 01:12:18.160 --> 01:12:21.680 into evidence, this is a bad judge in the hypothetical, but in 01:12:21.680 --> 01:12:26.720 the previous thirty seconds, as it turns out, it wasn't man B 01:12:26.880 --> 01:12:30.640 starting the fight with man A, it was man A running up 01:12:30.640 --> 01:12:32.400 and punching man B. 01:12:32.400 --> 01:12:35.680 And so man B was in fact defending himself against Man A. 01:12:35.680 --> 01:12:37.600 Well, that changes matters. 01:12:37.600 --> 01:12:40.880 Because now you have the full context window, and now you can 01:12:40.880 --> 01:12:45.520 draw an accurate conclusion, whereas you could not do that before. 01:12:45.520 --> 01:12:50.720 You need to have an adequate context in order to draw accurate 01:12:50.720 --> 01:12:56.320 conclusions. It is not necessarily a complete context, because a complete context 01:12:56.320 --> 01:12:59.360 would be a perfect history of the world all the way back 01:12:59.360 --> 01:13:00.640 to creation. 01:13:00.640 --> 01:13:04.240 No man has that, no man could hold that in his head. 01:13:04.240 --> 01:13:09.200 What you need to know are the facts that are salient to 01:13:09.200 --> 01:13:10.400 the issue. 01:13:10.400 --> 01:13:17.120 The things that are necessary to know to draw accurate conclusions given 01:13:17.120 --> 01:13:18.720 the context. 01:13:18.720 --> 01:13:21.760 That is what we are going to endeavor to present in the 01:13:21.760 --> 01:13:23.760 Septuagint series. 01:13:23.760 --> 01:13:29.920 The necessary context to draw accurate conclusions about the Septuagint, about the 01:13:29.920 --> 01:13:35.120 Masoretic text, and about this particular part of church history. 01:13:35.120 --> 01:13:38.000 And it's only this particular part of church history. 01:13:38.240 --> 01:13:40.960 We're not arguing over the 01:13:41.920 --> 01:13:45.600 problems between Rome and the Protestants. 01:13:45.600 --> 01:13:48.560 We're not arguing about the problems between Rome and the East. 01:13:48.560 --> 01:13:52.480 Some of these things will come up tangentially, but we're not addressing 01:13:52.480 --> 01:13:55.600 them as the problems themselves. 01:13:55.600 --> 01:14:00.400 It is again the context that matters and the salient facts. 01:14:00.400 --> 01:14:04.480 So for instance, in the hypothetical that I gave you about a 01:14:04.480 --> 01:14:09.040 man who is actually defending himself not assaulting the other man, assaulting 01:14:09.040 --> 01:14:15.920 him but justified because it's self-defense, it would not be relevant, necessarily, 01:14:15.920 --> 01:14:18.960 that the two men are married, not to each other, but to 01:14:18.960 --> 01:14:21.360 other women, or unmarried. 01:14:21.360 --> 01:14:23.520 That's not necessarily relevant. 01:14:23.520 --> 01:14:27.360 And so when you're talking about a particular issue, it is the 01:14:27.360 --> 01:14:31.040 salient facts, the facts that are relevant to the issue at hand 01:14:31.040 --> 01:14:32.080 that matter. 01:14:32.080 --> 01:14:35.120 That is what we will be addressing in the timeline and in 01:14:35.120 --> 01:14:37.200 the Septuagint series. 01:14:37.200 --> 01:14:38.720 Because the question 01:14:40.160 --> 01:14:45.840 essentially is what is the Masoretic text and what is the Septuagint, 01:14:45.840 --> 01:14:47.600 what is the Greek text? 01:14:47.600 --> 01:14:51.360 Which one is Scripture? 01:14:51.360 --> 01:14:55.920 The information that you need to answer that are the relevant facts 01:14:55.920 --> 01:15:00.240 about that question and the relevant parts of church history and in 01:15:00.240 --> 01:15:04.720 fact world history that lead up to that that contribute to it? 01:15:04.720 --> 01:15:07.360 It's not all of the other fights that have happened in the 01:15:07.360 --> 01:15:11.440 history of the church, it's not all of the differences politically between 01:15:11.440 --> 01:15:15.360 Rome and the Protestants or even theologically between them. 01:15:15.360 --> 01:15:19.520 It is only those things that are relevant to this specific question. 01:15:19.520 --> 01:15:22.640 Which is to say, don't get lost in the weeds. 01:15:22.640 --> 01:15:26.000 Focus on the core issue, which we will focus on the core 01:15:26.000 --> 01:15:27.440 issue as well. 01:15:27.440 --> 01:15:28.720 Take notes. 01:15:28.720 --> 01:15:33.040 Recognize that yes you may have questions, we will probably address them 01:15:33.040 --> 01:15:34.720 as the series progresses. 01:15:34.720 --> 01:15:37.520 If we do not, by all means, please feel free to ask 01:15:37.520 --> 01:15:42.240 them. These are important issues that we are going to be addressing, 01:15:42.240 --> 01:15:46.720 and you need to have an adequate context window in order to 01:15:46.720 --> 01:15:52.000 draw those sound conclusions, but in order to acquire that context window, 01:15:52.000 --> 01:15:55.840 you need to set aside those objections and listen to the fullness 01:15:55.840 --> 01:15:58.000 of the case that we will be presenting. 01:15:58.000 --> 01:16:01.280 It is the same thing that you do as a juror. 01:16:01.280 --> 01:16:04.800 Because you listen to one side present his full case, you listen 01:16:04.800 --> 01:16:08.240 to the other side present his full case, and then you render 01:16:08.240 --> 01:16:11.360 a decision based on the evidence presented. 01:16:11.360 --> 01:16:13.840 That is what we're asking you to do because that is your 01:16:13.840 --> 01:16:15.920 Christian duty as a man. 01:16:16.640 --> 01:16:20.800 This is not necessarily something that is going to be a salvation 01:16:20.800 --> 01:16:25.040 issue, which is something we have to address ad nauseum because it 01:16:25.040 --> 01:16:29.760 comes up so much, particularly from the adversaries and the enemies. 01:16:30.240 --> 01:16:33.520 But not everything in life is a salvation issue. 01:16:33.520 --> 01:16:37.120 Some things matter because they are matters of the truth, and the 01:16:37.120 --> 01:16:41.200 truth does matter, because the truth flows from God. 01:16:41.200 --> 01:16:43.920 Again it is one of the transcendentals. 01:16:43.920 --> 01:16:48.720 That is why the issue of the Masoretic text versus the Septuagint 01:16:48.800 --> 01:16:52.160 matters so much, because it is a matter of truth. 01:16:52.160 --> 01:16:56.000 You can read the Masoretic text and come to a saving faith 01:16:56.000 --> 01:16:56.560 in Christ. 01:16:56.560 --> 01:16:59.680 You can be a Christian and have only the ESV or the 01:16:59.680 --> 01:17:03.520 KJV or the NASB at your disposal. 01:17:03.520 --> 01:17:08.240 You can be a Christian without ever knowing the Septuagint exists. 01:17:08.240 --> 01:17:12.320 But that isn't the question we're asking, and it isn't the question 01:17:12.320 --> 01:17:14.400 we will be answering. 01:17:14.400 --> 01:17:17.520 Because the question is, what is the truth? 01:17:17.920 --> 01:17:20.400 How has God preserved his word? 01:17:20.400 --> 01:17:24.320 What should we do as Christians? 01:17:24.320 --> 01:17:26.720 Don't get off into the weeds. 01:17:26.720 --> 01:17:30.800 Don't let people confuse you and befuddle you with questions that are 01:17:30.800 --> 01:17:35.840 ancillary at best or tangential or even irrelevant. 01:17:35.840 --> 01:17:38.240 Focus on the core issue. 01:17:38.240 --> 01:17:42.560 This is going to be probably the most controversial series that we 01:17:42.560 --> 01:17:44.800 will ever do on this podcast. 01:17:44.800 --> 01:17:48.720 And also, as Wo said, the most important one. 01:17:48.720 --> 01:17:51.600 Because it is an issue that strikes at the heart of church 01:17:51.600 --> 01:17:55.920 history. Again, it is not an issue of salvation, but it is 01:17:55.920 --> 01:17:59.280 an issue of the utmost importance to Christians, because it is a 01:17:59.680 --> 01:18:03.840 matter of God's truth, it is a matter of God's word, and 01:18:03.840 --> 01:18:07.840 we should be absolutely uncompromising when it comes to the things of 01:18:07.840 --> 01:18:08.160 God 01:18:09.920 --> 01:18:10.240 I 01:18:10.240 --> 01:18:14.000 want to reiterate just one additional point. 01:18:14.000 --> 01:18:18.400 When we go through the matters of the Septuagint, when we go 01:18:18.400 --> 01:18:22.720 through this history, as we go along, as like the reason for 01:18:22.720 --> 01:18:27.360 iterating through these historical events is that we're going to be pointing 01:18:27.360 --> 01:18:30.240 out all the things that everyone got wrong. 01:18:30.240 --> 01:18:34.720 And the conclusion is that everyone got this question wrong. 01:18:34.960 --> 01:18:38.800 That sounds like a scandalous, incredibly egotistical thing to say, so I'm 01:18:38.720 --> 01:18:41.200 just gonna say it straight up. 01:18:41.200 --> 01:18:45.680 But in the context of this discussion of the context widow, when 01:18:45.680 --> 01:18:48.560 we point to their errors, we're gonna be pointing out that they 01:18:48.560 --> 01:18:51.200 were very minor errors in most cases. 01:18:51.200 --> 01:18:54.160 They made the most intelligent errors possible. 01:18:54.160 --> 01:18:58.320 They made the reasonable errors in their moment, because their context window 01:18:58.320 --> 01:19:01.360 was not as large as it should have been to reach the 01:19:01.360 --> 01:19:02.640 right conclusions. 01:19:02.640 --> 01:19:05.280 And that's part of the reason for introducing the concept here is 01:19:05.280 --> 01:19:06.560 a separate episode. 01:19:06.560 --> 01:19:09.760 Because while this is the prequel to the Septuagint episode, this applies 01:19:09.760 --> 01:19:10.880 all the time. 01:19:10.880 --> 01:19:16.000 But in the specific case of the timeline narrative of the Septuagint 01:19:16.240 --> 01:19:19.120 from twenty five hundred years ago until today. 01:19:19.120 --> 01:19:25.040 The mistakes were small, they seemed entirely innocent, they seemed entirely reasonable. 01:19:25.040 --> 01:19:29.200 Given the knowledge that they have and the situations that they were 01:19:29.200 --> 01:19:33.440 in in the previous judgments of their fathers in the faith, they 01:19:33.440 --> 01:19:38.560 were reasonable decisions, but they were not reasonable in the full context 01:19:38.560 --> 01:19:39.600 of the question. 01:19:39.600 --> 01:19:41.520 And that's why we're saying that they made mistakes. 01:19:41.520 --> 01:19:44.240 So we're gonna go through and we're gonna demonstrate that case by 01:19:44.240 --> 01:19:48.160 case. But the other reason for specifically highlighting the notion of context 01:19:48.160 --> 01:19:52.160 window and of giving you explicit directive to write down all of 01:19:52.160 --> 01:19:55.760 your objections and then set them aside is that we're going to 01:19:55.760 --> 01:19:57.120 make you angry. 01:19:57.120 --> 01:20:00.000 If you know anything about this, you're going to get frustrated, you're 01:20:00.000 --> 01:20:03.440 going to be offended, you're going to think we're saying one thing 01:20:03.440 --> 01:20:06.400 when we're saying another, because you're going to think that as we're 01:20:06.400 --> 01:20:10.000 going along at each step, they were picking some side. 01:20:10.000 --> 01:20:15.920 One of the obvious examples, during the Reformation itself, one of the 01:20:15.920 --> 01:20:21.200 reasons that the reformers went against the Septuagint was they wanted to 01:20:21.200 --> 01:20:24.960 get rid of the Apocrypha, and it was something that the Roman 01:20:24.960 --> 01:20:27.280 Church was using against them. 01:20:27.280 --> 01:20:31.920 And so rather than debating on the merits, they chose instead to 01:20:31.920 --> 01:20:34.080 do what they believed was a reasonable thing and just go back 01:20:34.080 --> 01:20:36.560 to the Hebrew because they thought it was older. 01:20:36.560 --> 01:20:39.360 It wasn't older, but they didn't know that at the time. 01:20:39.360 --> 01:20:42.080 They had fallen into a trap that had been laid for them 01:20:42.080 --> 01:20:46.480 a thousand years prior, and they weren't questioning those givens as they 01:20:46.480 --> 01:20:49.440 were dealing in the moment of you know Luther and the others 01:20:49.440 --> 01:20:50.720 versus Rome. 01:20:50.720 --> 01:20:53.280 They were having a fight, and it was a real fight where 01:20:53.280 --> 01:20:56.320 lives were on the line, they were under stress. 01:20:56.320 --> 01:20:58.000 It wasn't a stupid decision. 01:20:58.000 --> 01:21:01.360 So when we say that they were wrong, we're not saying that 01:21:01.360 --> 01:21:03.200 we're smarter or better than them. 01:21:03.200 --> 01:21:05.680 We're not saying that they were dumb or faithless. 01:21:05.680 --> 01:21:09.040 We're saying they made a small error in the moment and it 01:21:09.040 --> 01:21:10.640 had long-term consequences. 01:21:10.640 --> 01:21:12.960 As so many errors in our lives do. 01:21:12.960 --> 01:21:15.840 You make some dumb mistake ten years ago and it comes back 01:21:15.840 --> 01:21:17.600 to haunt you for some reason. 01:21:17.600 --> 01:21:19.440 We understand that this happens. 01:21:19.440 --> 01:21:21.920 And when you're a parent raising a child, you try to impress 01:21:21.920 --> 01:21:25.120 upon them, look, don't sweat the small stuff because you think you're 01:21:25.120 --> 01:21:27.040 making some small mistake now. 01:21:27.040 --> 01:21:29.520 It could derail things later on. 01:21:29.520 --> 01:21:32.480 This is not alien to any of us. 01:21:32.480 --> 01:21:37.040 So our claim that these men made mistakes as they went along, 01:21:37.040 --> 01:21:40.320 although it's going to be offensive and it's going to be scandalous, 01:21:40.320 --> 01:21:42.240 it's entirely reasonable. 01:21:42.320 --> 01:21:46.080 Doesn't mean we're right, but it's not an unreasonable thing to claim. 01:21:46.080 --> 01:21:49.520 And so as we make the case, again, it's going to take 01:21:49.520 --> 01:21:50.880 the entire case. 01:21:50.880 --> 01:21:55.600 When we look at the moment of Luther choosing to translate from 01:21:55.600 --> 01:21:59.600 the Hebrew rather than the Septuagint, if you hear us saying just 01:21:59.600 --> 01:22:03.360 in that one tiny vignette, forget the entire context window and just 01:22:03.360 --> 01:22:06.720 collapse that context window down to the three months that he was 01:22:06.720 --> 01:22:09.680 doing that, however long it was. 01:22:09.680 --> 01:22:12.880 If we are sitting here today and saying Luther was wrong for 01:22:12.880 --> 01:22:19.440 using the Hebrew instead of the Septuagint, the knee-jerk small context window 01:22:19.440 --> 01:22:22.480 response from the listener is going to be: Well, you're siding with 01:22:22.480 --> 01:22:25.440 Rome and you're choosing the Apocrypha. 01:22:25.440 --> 01:22:27.040 None of that's the case. 01:22:27.040 --> 01:22:30.080 One of the other salient aspects of this conversation is that the 01:22:30.560 --> 01:22:34.160 canon is separate from the textual source. 01:22:34.160 --> 01:22:38.960 It's entirely possible to say that the textual source of the Septuagint 01:22:39.200 --> 01:22:45.840 is inspired by God and also separately to say, separate but related, 01:22:45.840 --> 01:22:51.040 that the canon of scripture that is breathed out by God includes 01:22:51.040 --> 01:22:53.920 certain books and excludes other books. 01:22:53.920 --> 01:22:55.440 That's a separate conversation. 01:22:55.440 --> 01:23:00.720 It's related, but we're not choosing sides with regard to the canon. 01:23:00.720 --> 01:23:03.200 That's another thing I'll say here and we'll say it again later. 01:23:03.200 --> 01:23:04.640 This isn't about the canon. 01:23:04.640 --> 01:23:07.200 This is not about which books are inspired. 01:23:07.200 --> 01:23:11.120 This is about the textual source that's used for Scripture itself. 01:23:11.120 --> 01:23:15.600 Having reduced the sources that are acceptable for Christians to the Greek 01:23:15.600 --> 01:23:18.880 corpus, then you have the discussion that went on for fifteen hundred 01:23:18.880 --> 01:23:22.160 years up to Luther's day, which books are canon? 01:23:22.160 --> 01:23:26.560 It wasn't until Council of Trent that the West officially made the 01:23:26.560 --> 01:23:29.760 books of I think seventy-three books that the Romanists have as their 01:23:29.920 --> 01:23:31.680 canon. There was no official canon. 01:23:31.680 --> 01:23:34.800 So when Luther was having that debate at the time, it was 01:23:34.800 --> 01:23:37.520 just a continuation of a longstanding one. 01:23:37.520 --> 01:23:41.040 And that debate was not based upon the textual source. 01:23:41.040 --> 01:23:43.040 It was a separate conversation. 01:23:43.040 --> 01:23:45.120 So the reason I'm highlighting this now is that this is a 01:23:45.120 --> 01:23:48.320 sort of fight that when you're listening in the coming weeks, you're 01:23:48.320 --> 01:23:49.440 gonna want to pick the fight. 01:23:49.440 --> 01:23:52.000 Oh, he's he said Luther's wrong about the Septuagint. 01:23:52.000 --> 01:23:53.520 He must like the Apocrypha. 01:23:53.520 --> 01:23:54.640 We didn't say that. 01:23:54.640 --> 01:23:56.320 That's what the context window is. 01:23:56.320 --> 01:24:00.080 When you hallucinate something that we didn't say and then make a 01:24:00.080 --> 01:24:02.960 judgment based on it, you're doing what an LLM does. 01:24:03.520 --> 01:24:06.000 You're doing what one of these stupid robots does. 01:24:06.000 --> 01:24:08.320 And they're better at it than people are at this point. 01:24:08.320 --> 01:24:12.320 I've taken to l having people make stupid comments on X. 01:24:12.320 --> 01:24:14.480 I feed them to an LLM and then just spit out the 01:24:14.480 --> 01:24:16.320 screenshot explaining what they got wrong. 01:24:16.560 --> 01:24:21.840 Because a pure reason engine that actually understands English better understands the 01:24:21.840 --> 01:24:25.520 situation than someone who claims to be a Christian while he's spitting 01:24:25.520 --> 01:24:28.800 venom as someone who should be a Christian brother. 01:24:28.800 --> 01:24:32.080 This stuff is a problem in general, which is why the context 01:24:32.080 --> 01:24:36.320 window stands alone as this episode by itself apart from the Septuagint. 01:24:36.320 --> 01:24:37.760 This happens all the time. 01:24:37.760 --> 01:24:40.000 But as I said at the beginning, this would have been a 01:24:40.000 --> 01:24:43.600 much too lengthy preamble, even in the very shortened version, it would 01:24:43.600 --> 01:24:48.960 have derailed the content of the first historical Septuagint episode. 01:24:48.960 --> 01:24:52.080 If you believe us, if you trust us not to be complete 01:24:52.400 --> 01:24:56.800 liars and demoniacs, then you can take your notes of your objections, 01:24:56.800 --> 01:24:58.320 you can refer to them later. 01:24:58.320 --> 01:25:01.760 If we didn't address your objections, or if you find your objections 01:25:01.760 --> 01:25:04.640 are still relevant in your mind, we're happy to hear. 01:25:04.640 --> 01:25:08.000 We're not gonna go back and edit the episode, but we'll listen. 01:25:08.000 --> 01:25:10.400 Maybe it's something we addressed down the road. 01:25:10.400 --> 01:25:14.640 We found that it's one of the most important things that's ever 01:25:14.640 --> 01:25:16.160 happened to the church. 01:25:16.160 --> 01:25:17.680 It's a grandiose claim. 01:25:17.680 --> 01:25:21.120 Feel free to laugh or scoff or get mad at us. 01:25:21.120 --> 01:25:24.080 When we make the case, then you're really going to get mad 01:25:24.240 --> 01:25:26.560 because you're going to hear us saying things that are going to 01:25:26.560 --> 01:25:30.880 criticize your very favorite theologian, whoever he is, he was wrong about 01:25:31.520 --> 01:25:33.200 this by some degree. 01:25:33.200 --> 01:25:34.960 We're not saying he's stupid. 01:25:34.960 --> 01:25:38.080 We're not saying he's faithless, not saying he's in hell. 01:25:38.080 --> 01:25:40.320 We're saying he got a detail wrong. 01:25:40.320 --> 01:25:43.360 And in some cases, we'll be able to explain exactly why he 01:25:43.360 --> 01:25:48.160 got it wrong because his context window was collapsed to 500 years 01:25:48.320 --> 01:25:52.080 instead of 2,000 years as it should have been 500 years ago. 01:25:52.080 --> 01:25:53.680 That's how these things work. 01:25:53.680 --> 01:25:57.520 If you don't examine your priors, if you're just marching merrily along, 01:25:57.520 --> 01:26:02.000 trusting the judgment of past generations, if they're right, you're in great 01:26:02.000 --> 01:26:05.200 shape. If they made a mistake, you're going to inherit that mistake 01:26:05.200 --> 01:26:07.120 and be stuck with the consequences. 01:26:07.120 --> 01:26:11.520 The story of the Septuagint is a story of men making mistakes 01:26:11.520 --> 01:26:18.240 piece by piece, small course deviations, culminating in the Western Church abandoning 01:26:18.240 --> 01:26:21.040 the source of scripture that God gave us. 01:26:21.040 --> 01:26:26.240 The Bible of Jesus, the Bible of the Apostles, the Bible of 01:26:26.240 --> 01:26:29.760 the Council of Nicaea, the Bible of the first four hundred years 01:26:29.760 --> 01:26:32.800 of the Christian Church was entirely Greek. 01:26:32.800 --> 01:26:35.120 That is the case that we're going to be making, and that 01:26:35.120 --> 01:26:39.600 has profound implications for the future of the church.