jononomo

What is the false premise?

Just read the book. If it is so terrible then you can write a review demolishing it.

And I'm not opposed to doing research, of course (hard to believe I have to clarify this)

In fact I want people to research the question of the origin of life as rigorously and exhaustively as possible because it is just going to make it that much more obvious that life was designed by God.

I have absolutely no fear that this "gap" is going to do anything but widen.

Ok, I'm not sure whether you're reading this or not, but check out this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=40627548

Is that an interaction that is worthy of a ban?

I feel that what often happens is that I make a non-flame-war comment, and then someone comes in and uses passive but extremely aggressive language against me, and then I am forced to either retreat or to hold my own.

I look like the bad guy, but the other guy is actually the unreasonable one.

You are a world-class moderator so I have no problem with your judgment!

Yes, I bite the bullet on the god of the gaps when it comes to the origin of life.

Sheesh, as chance would have it the most recent Revero podcast has more information about alleviating Crohn's and IBS through the carnivore diet.

I recommend that you try the carnivore diet yourself. It really is a panacea, and I don't use that term lightly.

Have you read a book called The Stairway to Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check by Tan & Stadler? You can find it on Amazon. It's pretty short and will get you thinking rigorously about the problem.

As a biologist, how do you account for the existence of life?

First of all "dietitians" just spout the conventional wisdom and are not known for their acerbic wit.

And yes, I recommend eliminating fruite, vegetables, whole grains, and plant-based proteins. All the nutrients you need are contained in animals. Beef liver, eggs, and sardines are the three most nutrient-dense foods on Earth.

Anyone can simply try this diet for themselves (please give it at least six weeks, but ideally 12 weeks). I promise you that you will thrive.

Please read The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz to get the "science on saturated fat and CVD". You will find that it supports my perspective. Phenomenal book -- deeply researched over ten years and well-written.

First, Dr. Ken Berry has not had his medical license revoked.

Second, Dr. Shawn Baker got involved in a dispute with a hospital system because he began curing people through the carnivore diet rather than through extremely expensive surgery (he is an orthopedic surgeon). This led to the hospital system losing a lot of money. They insisted that he stop curing people, but Dr. Baker refused. They retaliated against him by getting a fraudulent fellow to badmouth his work and get his license revoked. He then went to court and won and his name was cleared completely.

As for your claim that there is no evidence to back up the fact that humans were healthier before 12,000 years ago, what about the fact that they were taller and had fewer dental caries and larger brains? Also, my point was not that humans were healthier then (although they were) but that the carnivore diet was the diet that human beings literally evolved on.

The carnivore diet is the ultimate elimination diet. The strict version (in which you eat nothing but ribeye steak) is nutritionally 100% complete and there are people who have been thriving on this diet for over a decade now. Meat is the food that human beings evolved on. Just try it and see for yourself.

My advice to you would be to get off your high horse and maybe learn something for once. You are also not their doctor, so I don't understand why you think you should contribute to this discussion.

If you want evidence that the carnivore diet (I don't promote the keto diet) will reduce inflammation in patients with IBD then I can point you to a dozen stories of people who have cured their IBD through a carnivore diet. But you are just going to dismiss the evidence as anecdotal (nevermind that the anecdotes are endlessly accumulating) and not credible because you already have your mind made up.

If I were you I would actually try a carnivore diet for 90 days before making any more pronouncements, because I can assure you that YOU ABSOLUTELY DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.

The fact that people have been so brainwashed into thinking that eating red meat is by definition a bad thing is a severe problem in our society and it is people like you who are contributing to our epidemic of chronic disease.

I honestly find it hard to believe that you would post that comment with such confidence. Who do you think you are?

Don't judge a book by its cover.

Beef-only is the ultimate elimination diet. You literally eliminate absolutely everything except beef.

And beef contains 100% of the nutrients you need in order to thrive in life.

There are people who have literally eaten nothing but ribeye steaks for over ten years now.

Also, consider the fact that agriculture is only about 12,000 years old, but human beings have been living on Earth for about 200,000 years (in our current form -- a couple million if you include Homo Erectus and the other variations). We were basically 99% meat-eaters for the vast vast majority of human history.

I follow a diet that is basically 100% beef, eggs, salmon, and milk (planning to cut out the milk) and I can assure you that it is the easiest possible diet for your digestive system. (For one thing, you completely stop farting.). You have never known poops so small, easy, and quick (because 99% of what you eat is simply absorbed - this diet has no fiber).

Note that there is no truly satisfactory "literature" on ANY diet, because double-blind randomized controlled trials that are of a long enough duration and over a large enough sample size are basically impossible to conduct. The human body is the most complex thing that we know of in the universe.

However, you can follow the work of Dr. Ken Berry or Dr. Shawn Baker to learn more about the carnivore diet -- they've been neck deep in it for years. And the anecdotal evidence is becoming overwhelming -- check ou the success stories at the carnivore.diet website.

So much cope in the comments from people who don't want to face the fact that human beings are special in a way that materialism cannot explain.

I bite the bullet on the god of the gaps

That is an obvious of post-hoc rationalization. It appears no where in Scripture or in any other culture's history or mythology. And even if it were true, it still doesn't amount to more than "the Jews are just better", which is just a pathetic theology.

Because Christianity is the theistic system that makes the most sense.

PG described it as a good thing -- apparently that is now a question ("what have you hacked?) that they ask people who want to join Y Combinator.

A good example is the multiverse hypothesis. It is the only way to avoid theism if you are a physicist, but it is also ludicrously extravagant and states as it's first principle that evidence for it cannot be detected (because all the things we can detect are in our universe).

But if the need to avoid theism counts as evidence, then I guess you're stuck with the multiverse.

The best example is the existence of life. The question of the origin of life truly is the only interesting question because without life no other questions even arise.

But we can do biochemistry and microbiology at a high level now and the evidence for life having been designed is overwhelming to the point of being staggering. We found a freaking a *code* at the bottom of it all, for !*$%&@ sake!

Note that the entire Darwinian story assumes the existence of life. So you can't appeal to "evolution" to bail you out because evolution depends on reproduction and survival and so on, and none of that happens prior to the existence of life. (Read The Stairway to Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check by Tan & Stadler if you want the reality check good and hard).

People will commonly start throwing in big words at this point: abiogensis! protobiotic vesicles! bioenergetic pathways! abiotic polymerization! but it is all just designed to snow you into submission.

Physics rules out atheism, and the existence of life rules out deism. So we're stuck with theism.

The move from theism to specifically Christian theism can also be made, but I'm not going to do it here.

I will say, however, that unless Christianity is true Judaism doesn't make any sense, because Judaism lacks a universal cosmology (it simply can't answer the question "why didn't God choose all people").

From the perspective of Christianity Judaism make sense (the Jews are chosen in the sense that through the Jews comes salvation for all people), but Judaism doesn't make sense from the perspective of just Judaism.

I would recommend Darwin on Trial by Phillip Johnson. A short and extraordinarily limpid book. Reading it is like drinking a cool glass of water.

I also like everything written by Stephen C Meyer. As far as I am concerned Meyer is the world's leading historian and philosopher of science.

Paul Graham has said that one of the things he likes best about Sam Altman is that he figures out ways to "hack" things, and specified that he didn't mean programming, but rather systems, institutions, people, etc.

As for me, I'd prefer to see Paul Graham running Open AI.

Probably Christian apologetics. It is clear to me that science is incompatible with atheism and supports the Christian worldview, but this does not seem to be widely understood.

Isn't there some kind of law against companies extorting the customers and being evasive about their terms of service and their prices?

I don't need multi-region.

Wow, they must have spent $1 million to make that wallpaper but now you could do it in 15 seconds with ChatGPT.

I use ChatGPT for coding constantly and the 52% error rate seems about right to me. I manually approve every single line of code that ChatGPT generates for me. If I copy-paste 120 lines of code that ChatGPT has generated for me directly into my app, that is because I have gone over all 120 lines with a fine-toothed comb, and probably iterated 3-4 times already. I constantly ask ChatGPT to think about the same question, but this time with an additional caveat.

I find ChatGPT more useful from a software architecture point of view and from a trivial code point of view, and least useful at the mid-range stuff.

It can write you a great regex (make sure you double-check it) and it can explain a lot of high-level concepts in insightful ways, but it has no theory of mind -- so it never responds with "It doesn't make sense to ask me that question -- what are you really trying to achieve here?", which is the kind of thing an actually intelligent software engineer might say from time to time.

Interesting that there hasn't been much decline in alcohol consumption as marijuana use has skyrocketed -- and the two don't mix well.