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.
Also searchable by its other title "God of the Gaps Volume 6,000 - Forget the Other 5999, This Time We're Really Sure, Can You Stop Doing Research Now Please"
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.
No. But I feel like it is unlikely I'll find much value in it. Part 1 being on the Venter work does NOT inspire confidence at all. Not to dismiss them - they're great I've worked with them on a couple projects - but it frankly doesn't have anything to do with abiogenesis. The other fact that lots of creationists like it doesn't bode well either.
Like, of COURSE the Venter cell looks too complicated to originate from raw chemicals! The lineage it evolved from was far more complex, and Mycoplasma underwent minimization. Minimal life also does not equal simple life, or life that was most probable to arise from chemicals. Just a stupid premise, really.
It’s hard to see how it would be evidence based if the evidence’s premise is fundamentally flawed - just in such a niche way that people not in my field wouldn’t be able to see it. They’re kinda preying on the fact that people like you can’t see it, and that’s sad.
The false premise is that the religious explanation is the default or incumbent explanation, which must then be bettered or countered by "challenger" explanations such as science. It tries to frame the argument with religion as the "defending champion" for challengers to somehow unseat ("atheists need to explain how...").
In reality, of course, religious explanation has no such presumptive default or incumbent status. Religious explanations are just one of many potential explanations for how the world works and compete on equal terms with any other. And when the religious explanation really just boils down to some variant of "god did it", it becomes very obvious how inadequate that is compared to even the worst scientific attempts.
Related: religious apologists constantly try to pretend that criticisms or problems identified with scientific explanations somehow count as points in favor of their religious alternative. This is also a false idea. It is not a debate, where pointing out flaws in your opponent's argument helps yours "win". It is a search for truth, and finding fault with another theory does nothing at all to enhance your own.
Breaking the site guidelines like this will get your account banned on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, or how badly someone else is behaving.
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.
If you want to be a theist why stop at Christianity? Why prefer one religion over the other? Theism has existed thousands of years before Christ appeared and these theists had wildly different ideas about almost everything than what Christ taught. Makes you think, who is right?
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 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").
In Judaism, the answer to that question is that God asked each nation to accept His commandments, but they each had cultures that were incompatible, and refused.
When He asked the Jews, they agreed unconditionally.
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.
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.
The two mix well in one direction, but not the other, in my experience.
Think of it like this: Weed * alcohol. (how intoxicated you feel)
Too much alcohol, you puke, feel like crap, black out, bad stuff. Too much weed, you're a little fried mentally, but fine. The consequence of this is if you drink to a point where you're drunk, but not at your limit, then you smoke weed, it gets you past your limit immediately.
Smoke, then drink, though? Now, you get drunker quicker, sure, but you feel it, so you stop before it's too much...assuming you know how to control yourself.
That being said, doing both with reckless abandon is worse than just drinking with reckless abandon. It makes the stupid drunk things you do even dumber.
