essentialsaltes said:

It is the kind of nonviolent civil disobedience that one expects from moral leaders in a time of wickedness.

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Meowzltov said:

I'm sure we will all have very different memories. I'm not opening this up with the idea that I want to debate people. Only that I would like to reflect, and would like to reflect on the reflections of others.

Personally, 2025 was an amazing year for me privately. The word miraculous comes to mind. I have a fantastic team of doctors that made amazing strides both with my physical health and my mental health. After years of being disabled, I have returned to part time work. But that's not even the half of it. The improvement in my emotional state of mind has been... breathtaking. It's as though I have been sitting in the dark, and someone came and opened the door, and the light is streaming in. I think I will look back at 2025 as the year when the butterfly emerged from the chrysalis.

In stark contrast, what I have seen go on in the world around me has been terrifying. I have watched my country slip deeper into tyranny and empire. I have wept over the middle east. I have been witness to a rise in demonization of "the other" to a degree I previously only read about in books.

Some of that has hit me personally in a very real and deeply frightening way. The rise in antisemitism has been going on for many years, but 2025 was particularly bad. We had the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home during Passover, a politician who had made his Conservative Judaism an integral part of his political identity. On Yom Kippur, a terrorist drove his car into a crowd outside a Manchester synagogue before continuing in with a knife. It was only a couple weeks ago on the first day of Hanukkah that a father/son terrorist team shot up the Jewish crowd on Bondi Beach. I remember putting my head into my hands and asking my friend, "Are we ever going to have Jewish holidays anymore where we don't have dead Jews?"

Some day, my great grandchildren will be reading about this in their textbooks. I want them to know the truth. That's the reason that I filed a police report about the swastika carved into the wall--not because I think the cops will catch the guy, but because I know the FBI collects those statistics.

The day is going to come when my great grandkids say to me, "Bubbe, where were you when the Supreme Court ruled that Presidents need not obey the law? Where were you when separation of powers was thrown out the window? Where were you when Christian Nationalists were undermining freedom of religion? Where were you when Trump spoke of acquiring Greenland and the Panama canal and the American Riviera in Gaza and Canada being the 51st state? Where were you when he attacked Venezuela to acquire oil?" And I can say to them, "Here I am. You see me in this picture. That's me screaming at the top of my lungs, screaming my warning to anyone who would listen: No Kings."

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timf said:

Dan,

Thanks. I was just curious. I consider myself a mid acts as I see Paul initially preaching the kingdom gospel to those of Israel. In Damascus. I am unsure about Antioch

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Dave... said:

Hi Jan

"Reconciled" in Romans 5:10 is speaking of justification. You can see it is past tense. It's done already. When we are placed into Christ we are reconciled, meaning justified, judicially saved. What are we saved from? Remember, saved simply means delivered. We are saved/delivered from the penalty of death, reconciled according to the Law. And we are saved/delivered from the effects of death. Being being born again, we are freed from the bondage of sin. It is only then, being already judicially delivered/saved, justified in Christ by what He did, and delivered/saved from the power of sin, that we can be saved/delivered practically, to become what the Father already reckons us to be in Christ. This is the evidence of someone who is already justified. Jesus' resurrected life enables, preserves, and transforms believers. But that transformation does not justify us. What Jesus did justifies us. It's very important to make the distinction between evidence and merit.

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Dave... said:

James 2:10 For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all.

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Dave... said:

Only one person passes that test. Jesus.

Romans 3:23-28 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.

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Yttrium said:

I've been testing ChatGPT-5 with much more serious subjects, anime and computer games. My testing suggests to me that retrieving information can be very unreliable. ChatGPT would frequently get one show confused for another, mixing up and misnaming anime characters, and providing video game information that was inappropriate for my PC. I was often able to check the sources it gave me for the correct information that it somehow missed. I would not trust ChatGPT to provide fully accurate information even if it found good sources. It can be a good search engine, and it draws nice pictures, and it's great at praising you if you like that kind of thing (I don't).

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---

1. Where my cosmology knowledge comes from (percentage-style breakdown)​

These percentages are conceptual, not exact engineering specs — but they’re a faithful way to think about how my knowledge of cosmology is shaped.

Learning Paradigm	Approx. Contribution​	What it means in practice for cosmology
Supervised learning	≈ 60–65%​	Most of my cosmology knowledge comes from labeled text: textbooks, review papers, lecture notes, Wikipedia-style explanations, peer-review summaries. This is where standard ΛCDM, FLRW metrics, inflation, dark energy, CMB physics, etc. are learned in a “this statement is presented as correct” sense.
Self-supervised / unsupervised learning	≈ 25–30%​	I learn statistical structure from vast amounts of raw text: how cosmology concepts co-occur, how arguments are structured, how speculative ideas differ linguistically from mainstream ones, how equations are typically introduced. This helps me reason, connect ideas, and detect internal consistency — even when material is controversial or nonstandard.
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)	≈ 5–10%​	Humans guide how I respond: clarity, caution, tone, when to hedge, how to distinguish speculation from consensus. This strongly affects how I talk about cosmology (e.g., flagging exotic stress–energy, modified gravity, or nonstandard time interpretations).
Post-training alignment & safety tuning	≈ 1–3%​	Affects what I avoid overstating: I’m nudged not to present speculative cosmologies as established fact, and to label interpretations clearly.
User interaction shaping (non-persistent)	≈ 0% (persistent)​	Your questions influence this conversation only, not my underlying knowledge.

Key takeaway:
My facts about cosmology come mostly from supervised + self-supervised learning; my style and caution come from reinforcement learning.

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2. Do I learn from corrections you make here?​

Short answer:
No — not in the way a human or a continually-training model would.

Long answer (precise but honest):

• I do not update my training weights based on this conversation.
• I do not remember corrections once the conversation ends.
• If you correct me:
  • ✅ I can immediately adapt within this conversation
  • ❌ I will not carry that correction into future chats unless it already aligns with my training

So if you say:

“That interpretation of cosmological redshift is wrong because…”

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Then:

• I can acknowledge it
• Re-derive or restate the argument correctly
• Use your framing consistently for the rest of this chat

But once the chat ends, that correction does not modify me.

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A subtle but important nuance​

Even though I don’t learn, I do reason.

That means:

• If your correction is logically sound and consistent with known physics, I’ll often say:
  

  “You’re right — given X and Y, that conclusion follows.”

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• If it conflicts with consensus, I’ll usually say:
  

  “This is a minority or speculative view, here’s where it departs from standard cosmology.”

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This is especially relevant to topics you’ve raised before:

• time stretching vs cosmic time
• interpretation of FLRW coordinates
• exotic stress–energy
• Weyl / modified gravity
• consciousness–physics crossover

I can analyze, compare, and stress-test those ideas — but not learn them permanently.

---

One-sentence summary​

My cosmology knowledge is mostly built from supervised and self-supervised learning on human-written material; reinforcement learning shapes how I answer — and while I can adapt to your corrections in real time, I don’t retain them beyond the conversation.

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If you want, next we can:

• map this learning breakdown onto specific cosmology topics (ΛCDM vs alternatives), or
• analyze where mainstream training biases show up most strongly in cosmological debates.

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The Liturgist said:

Aside from St. Cleopa who I did not encounter until later I was surprised by the amount of overlap in what we read.

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DOJ’s misconduct complaint dismissed against judge in Alien Enemies Act case​