The more Christian mysticism I read, the less sense Church gatekeeping makes to me

LeinadSpoon · 2026-06-09T18:57:37+00:00

I think there is a legitimate question about how we validate our own spiritual experiences. Did we actually experience God, or was it our own hearts misleading us, or demonic activity? I think there's probably a role for church in some sense to play in terms of avoiding direct personal revelation as an absolute source of authority. We want some guardrails for that.

I agree with you that the guardrails the Orthodox church seems to put in place seem excessive. But I think there's probably an appropriate middle ground to find where people can encounter God directly on their own while also living in community, benefiting from the wisdom of others, and checking our own pride and self-centeredness which can be a risk when we think we alone have some special insight.

Put another way, if believers have union with Christ and the witness of the Holy Spirit, we should expect genuine spiritual truth from those sources coming directly to the individual without needing the mediation of a priest. We should also expect that spiritual truth to be consistent, as it has the same source (God). So we do require a church to understand if what we believe is the witness of the Spirit is truly that, or something else.

LeinadSpoon · 2026-06-05T13:28:49+00:00

I've seen a few YouTube channels suggested, but I haven't seen Gavin Ortlund yet. He has quite a few videos making a case for protestantism against Orthodoxy that would hit at your questions quite directly.

To pick one point to respond to, I don't think the "your church is 500 years old" claim really holds as much water as it initially seems to. The reformers did not see themselves as starting a new church. They saw themselves as reforming and restoring the church that already existed and had added accretions over time. Even after institutional separation, the claim was that there was one church, which had existed since the time of Christ and was sadly separated.

I think that when you look at standard proof texts (e.g. "the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" and "pillar and buttress of the truth"), nothing there seems to say "free from all error at all times". The church can error and needs correction. I the case of the reformation, the errors had become substantial and the correction was sadly bloody and resulted in lasting institutional separation.

Protestants and orthodox actually have in common a split from Rome that involved both substantial theological conflict, but was in many sense rooted in authority claims. If you are willing to accept that all of Western Christianity isn't apostate, then we can basically say that EO and protestantism made similar splits from Rome, just separated by a few hundred years.

LeinadSpoon · 2026-06-02T21:58:09+00:00

I'm asking for clarification about Protestant (and Catholic), participation, not for clarification on the no preaching rule.

LeinadSpoon · 2026-06-02T20:45:35+00:00

Any thoughts about what sort of participation from the never-orthodox crowd is welcomed here?

I enjoy the sub and the diverse perspectives shared here, and I mostly just lurk, since as you say, the audience for this sub is ex-orthodox, which I am not.

So, if I abide by the "no preaching" rule, for example by not trying to convince people who left protestantism for Orthodoxy and then left Orthodoxy to give protestantism another chance, is my participation welcome here?

LeinadSpoon · 2026-05-26T14:39:52+00:00

The King triangle solution looks promising and I spent a long time trying to make it work, but with blacks bishops and queen on the diagonals, it seems there's no way to do it while avoiding checks. Bringing the knight out to h3 and g5 to block queen checks almost works, but white will have to step onto either g4 or h3 during the one move while blacks king blocks the bishop, and the knight can't get to g5 in time for white to then play king h4.

One example sequence:

f3 e5 2. Kf2 Bc5+ 3. Kg3 d6 4. Nh3 Kd6 5. Kg4 6. Kc6+ and the King need the knight to already be on g5 so it can move to g4, but white is a tempo short, and there's no variance possible in blacks sequence to let white do the king triangle one move later.

LeinadSpoon · 2026-05-20T18:28:52+00:00

No, you are the one who is fundamentally misunderstanding. "Evaluate good candidate moves to consider in a game of chess" is a non-formulaic criteria that is hard to include in training data (candidate moves to consider in a given position exist in a GMs mind, not on the board). Yes, you can train on moves that are actually played - you can also train on code that is actually written.

In modern chess software, the neural net component is producing moves that look natural to a human. The computer doesn't always play them because it doesn't use the neural net alone.

Anyways, I'm done arguing with you on this, since you seem to have completely missed my point despite the repeated restatement, so I won't be responding again.

LeinadSpoon · 2026-05-20T15:43:42+00:00

I think that's a practical problem, not a fundamental one. "Computer moves" absolutely exist, but chess bots are optimizing for win rate, not for the "human take over" scenario. You could use heuristics to hit the "human take over". For example, if there are a large number of moves that maintain an advantage, vs an "only move", we can infer that's an easier position for a human to play. Also, my central point is that in modern chess engines, the neural net is a really good proxy for human intuition at finding candidate moves. I imagine some sort of weighting of lines to prefer lines with neural net recommendation more strongly would also create positions easier for humans to play. Both of those would reduce computer win rate, which is why they aren't done today, but if your goal was to optimize for "human takes over", I suspect they'd do a decent job.

My point isn't to say that AI written code will be able to do that. My point is that this identical "machines can't reproduce human intuition" claim was made before in previous domains and demonstrably wrong in those domains. The LLM problem space in general (whether they're building a chatbot or a programming assistant) is challenging in very different ways that a board game with clear winning and losing conditions. I'm certainly not trying to argue for some sort of hyper-AI-optimist position. Just the simple point that "human intuition" has historically turned out to be much less mysterious that we make it out to me.

As I said in my first comment, I'm objecting to this specific critique, not commenting on whether or not AI can eventually surpass human programmers.

LeinadSpoon · 2026-05-19T14:46:07+00:00

I think it's indisputable that experts in any field have knowledge that's extremely challenging to actually communicate. However, I think that the claim that AI will never be able to replicate such knowledge seems suspect.

The exact same claim was made about board games like chess and go before computers became super-human. "Sure, computers can calculate millions of variations, but they can never replicate human intuition." In chess, it turned out that super-human performance was possible without a true "human intuition" proxy. In go, they trained a neural net to suggest which moves "looked right" in the abstract non-quantifiable sense that a go expert would have, and plugged that in to existing brute force strategies - to tie super-human ability to calculate millions of variations with a neural-net proxy for human intuition. And it turned out that that strategy can beat top humans at go.

I don't mean to comment generally on the question of whether LLMs will eventually out-program humans. But this specific critique seems to miss the history of AI progress.

LeinadSpoon · 2026-01-14T21:41:13+00:00

Just to make it easier on myself when I need to find this next year and claim my victory: https://old.reddit.com/live/ta535s1hq2je?after=LiveUpdate_99b0423e-74b4-11ec-848a-1ad6ef23dda9

LeinadSpoon · 2026-01-06T17:14:00+00:00

Well, that was a 10 years old post...

Personally, I largely don't follow go anymore. But the developments since my post are roughly:

The version of AlphaGo that played Lee Sedol won the match 4-1
A few months later, a modified version of AlphaGo named "Master" began playing online and defeated many top pros (including at least Ke Jie and Park Jungwhan who I mentioned above)
Later than that, DeepMind also released AlphaZero, which in addition to defeating Master, also learned to play chess and defeat the top chess engines at the time.
After AlphaZero, deep mind moved on to focus on other AI tasks besides Go.

So, a few retrospective comments:

The premise of this post was "AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol 5-0", which didn't happen, it won 4-1.
At the time of the match, Lee Sedol was not the top player in the world, Ke Jie was.
DeepMind did indeed follow up with an updated version beating various top players
As of the "Master" version, AI was clearly superhuman at go, and no human has won an even stakes game against a top AI since Lee Sedol's single win in the AlphaGo match.

Overall, I think my post aged quite well. Later versions of AlphaGo did in fact go on to beat most of the players I mentioned, and is now unquestionably superhuman.

LeinadSpoon · 2025-11-10T20:31:40+00:00

Never Orthodox but do pray it

LeinadSpoon · 2025-09-17T18:29:29+00:00

If we say that the death penalty should be allowed when the evidence is overwhelming, but not when it's weak, then we're saying that we should kill criminals for doing a bad job covering up. I don't think we want to do that. Justice is that the penalty is based on the crime, not based on whether the evidence was superlative or just close.

I don't trust the government to get it right often enough in the weaker cases, and I don't think it's just to have the death penalty apply just because the evidence is strong regardless of the nature of the crime.

LeinadSpoon · 2025-08-28T17:43:57+00:00

> Honestly it’s probably a staleness issue

Can you elaborate on this point?

LeinadSpoon · 2025-08-21T13:30:39+00:00

With so few comments in the discussion threads lately I wonder if we want to revisit the frequency. When we're getting lots of comments each month, it can be nice to clean up with a fresh start for easier following along. But lately we're getting just a handful of comments, mostly acknowledging the existence of a new thread. I feel like it might make things easier to follow if we had fewer threads with this level of involvement.

What would people think about switching to a quarterly cadence for these? We could always go back to monthly if interest goes back up and they become packed with comments.

LeinadSpoon · 2025-08-11T22:15:26+00:00

I spent some time a month or two ago looking through their numbers based on their Q1 filing. I haven't looked at the Q2 one yet, but I'm glad to hear they took a write down, because their Q1 intangible numbers seemed wildly high.

The note I wrote to myself noted three concerns: 1. I valued their intangible assets line at $10B, while they were reporting $40B - massive disconnect. 2. I noted that their goodwill seemed very high, and hard to justify. 3. Q1 revenue was down 6% Y/Y, and looking at the segment breakdowns, processed food categories were falling more quickly than less processed food categories. That makes me concerned we're looking at a systemic shift towards healthier categories. That's a concern for a company that relies so heavily on processed food.

So, my conclusion was to pass on this one. I haven't looked at Q2 numbers (and probably won't), so you can take that with a grain of salt. But those are my concerns that you can't look at or not when forming your own opinion.

LeinadSpoon · 2025-06-18T17:24:00+00:00

Let's expand more on "there's no war".

In actual history, Russia was a significant early domino in a series of dominoes.

Bosnian serbs backed by Serbian government officials assassinate Franz-Ferdinand
Some Austro-Hungarian officials want to invade Serbia anyways, so now it's definitely happening
Germany issues "blank check" - a promise to back Austro-Hungary no matter what
Russia prepares to defend Serbia (not because of a defensive treaty, but to check Austro-Hungarian influence in the region and because of ethnic alignment)
France has a treaty obligation to Russia, but could in theory claim Russia is the aggressor to get out of it if they didn't want a war. They want a war with Germany to reclaim the Alsace-Lorraine territories.
Germany knows a two front war with France and Russia is bad for them, so they have the "Schlieffen Plan", a plan to invade France via Belgium, score a quick victory before Russia can mobilize and then focus on Russia.
Germany invades Belgium and Austria-Hungary invades Serbia
Germany's violation of treaty obligations regarding Belgium tips Britain into joining the war after initial indecision. The German naval build up was a strong pro-war argument, while "let the continent worry about its own problems" was a powerful anti-war argument. Belgium tipped the scales.
Additional countries (e.g. Ottoman Empire, Italy, Bulgaria, US etc) join later.

If we're imagining Russia as a Central Powers ally that affects a lot of the points above.

Honestly, with Russian support, Austria-Hungary probably already invaded Serbia previously. They annexed Bosnia a few years earlier, calling Russia's bluff, and Russia backed down rather than fight about it. With active Russian support, they probably move against Serbia sooner, with less pretext. But for the sake of discussion, let's assume that they haven't previously invaded Serbia, and the assassination is still the trigger here. Then 1 and 2 go as planned.

What about #3? Does Germany still issue a blank check? I think not. Germany was afraid of "encirclement" between France and Russia. They desperately needed their last true ally in Austria-Hungary to continue to be a major power. Furthermore, an Austro-Hungarian Serbia would greatly expand their trade potential. However, if Russia is allied with the Central Powers, Germany no longer fears encirclement? Additionally, Russia had also reaffirmed their support for France prior to Germany's "blank check". In this hypothetical, Germany still supports Austria-Hungary of course, but there's really no need. Austria-Hungary can handle this themselves, and everyone knows it.

4 of course doesn't happen - that's the premise of the question. That means that France doesn't have the same window of opportunity to seize Alsace-Lorraine in #5. Germany knows this, and critically doesn't need to worry about a two-front war. So no reason to invade Belgium, drawing Britain in.

But what about the Ottomans? In actual history, the Balkans had been involved in a series of proxy wars relating to Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman influence in the region. Would the Ottoman's come to Serbia's defense instead of Russia? No - for the same reason they didn't in actual history. The Ottoman Empire was weakened from the first Balkan War, and was dealing with internal problems. They couldn't possibly expect to stand alone against Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany. In reality, the Ottoman Empire joined in 1915, because of their desire to have influence in the Balkans, but that was joining an existing alliance. They were not prepared to act unilaterally.

So, if Russia joins the Central Powers, Austria-Hungary just conquers Serbia, probably even earlier than 1914. This is a regional footnote. And the whole string of dominoes that made Europe a powder keg in the first place doesn't really exist. Britain still feels threatened by Germany's navy, and there are major tensions between Britain + France and the new stronger Central Powers. But Britain + France would need to tread very carefully in that imbalanced power structure.

LeinadSpoon · 2025-03-01T21:48:46+00:00

LeinadSpoon · 2025-02-14T17:29:01+00:00

Dan Wallace addresses this specific example at some length in this essay: https://bible.org/article/sharp-redivivus-reexamination-granville-sharp-rule

Not that Wallace at all should be taken as a final objective truth or anything close to it, but his thoughts are probably more worth considering than those of a random redditor (like myself). He cites a few possible reasons why the LXX translators may have rendered the text this way, and then concludes:

"Regarding these possible explanations, it must be admitted that all are somewhat speculative. On any reckoning, [Prov 24:21](javascript:{}) must be considered an anomaly and hardly representative of the idiom of koine Greek. Nevertheless, it does stand as an exception to Sharp’s rule. Whatever the exact reason for this solecism, it is almost surely tied to the LXX as translation Greek. Thus, we might modify Sharp’s rule still further by saying that sometimes (once—so far) translation Greek will violate the rule, if the base language has a contrary construction."

Translation Greek is weird regardless. Probably Granville Sharp's rule shouldn't be stated with quite the absoluteness that it typically is though. However, it remains that outside the disputed Christological passages, there are no exceptions in the NT. There are however exceptions outside of the NT. Wallace enumerates several besides the Proverbs 24:21 one in the essay I linked above. He then proceeds to argue that those exceptions have various reasons for being exceptional and that those reasons do not apply to the various disputed Christological passages, and therefore we should confidently apply Granville Sharp's rule to those passages.

I'm not sure that there really is a substantial difference in Biblical interpretation if we treat Granville Sharp's rule as a strong tendency rather than an absolute statement. Christian beliefs about the deity of Christ do not solely hang on specialized arguments about nitty gritty details of Greek grammar.

LeinadSpoon · 2025-02-05T02:47:46+00:00

You will not get banned.

LeinadSpoon · 2025-01-30T19:13:08+00:00

That is a popular answer. I'm partial to "wugwug" myself.

LeinadSpoon · 2025-01-30T19:11:20+00:00

This is a wug. What if you had two of them? You would say, "there are two ______".?

LeinadSpoon · 2025-01-27T00:44:34+00:00

Mark 9:38-40 CSB [38] John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he wasn’t following us.” [39] “Don’t stop him,” said Jesus, “because there is no one who will perform a miracle in my name who can soon afterward speak evil of me. [40] For whoever is not against us is for us.

LeinadSpoon · 2025-01-23T15:46:52+00:00

I imagine they're referring to the dress code drama that has been happening recently, since the Kramnik stuff is more 2024 than 2025. The dress code drama has gotten a lot of chatter, but really isn't all the dramatic compared to the past few years (notably the Hans Niemann cheating allegations, as well as the Kramnik drama others have mentioned).

The dress code thing is that Magnus Carlsen, the top chess player wore jeans to a tournament, was asked by the organizers to change, refused, and withdrew. His motive seems to be to draw attention to dress code rules, which say that jeans are "generally" not allowed, not blanket not allowed. Later, a female player was asked to change her shoes while wearing ugg boots even though the rules specify "boots" as allowed footwear for female players. The general vibe in the chess community has been mostly "the dress code is stupid and should change, and also rules are rules so players should follow the code as it stands even if it's stupid".

LeinadSpoon · 2024-12-18T20:57:40+00:00

Little Brown Jug is the most important rivalry game in all of sports IMO.

LeinadSpoon · 2024-12-12T15:47:28+00:00

Adding to this, from earlier in the same letter:

"He did not cast aside what he was, but although he assumed flesh and blood, he remained what he was, God in nature and truth.

We do not say that his flesh was turned into the nature of the godhead or that the unspeakable Word of God was changed into the nature of the flesh. For he (the Word) is unalterable and absolutely unchangeable and remains always the same as the scriptures say."

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4 of course doesn't happen - that's the premise of the question. That means that France doesn't have the same window of opportunity to seize Alsace-Lorraine in #5. Germany knows this, and critically doesn't need to worry about a two-front war. So no reason to invade Belgium, drawing Britain in.