Why Yudkowsky is wrong about "covalently bonded equivalents of biology"

titotal.substack.com Why Yudkowsky is wrong about "covalently bonded equivalents of biology"

confidence level: I am a physicist, not a biologist, so don’t take this the account of a domain level expert. But this is really basic stuff, and is very easy to verify. Recently I encountered a scientific claim about biology, made by Eliezer Yudkowsky. I searched around for the source of the claim,...

This is my article on one of the dumbest and most obviously false claims Yudkowsky has ever made, about biology not using covalent bonds.

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Thanks for all the effort, also that you post these on all the various LW-sphere related places. Interesting to see the various places react.
E: 18 hours later, I notice that on LW your 38 vote score went down to 30 while the amount of votes increased from 17 to 70, and on EA it also dropped from a higher positive (forgot how high) to a sad 9.
- Big Yud himself responded:
  https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aCEAczDuRrZihaLNA/why-yudkowsky-is-wrong-about-covalently-bonded-equivalents?commentId=ea3XoopDbvdmF7JbA
  edit: there's lesswrong thread too: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8viKzSrYhb6EFk6wg/why-yudkowsky-is-wrong-about-covalently-bonded-equivalents
  
  "If you take only the statements where I was vague instead of the ones where I was explicitly wrong and interpret my words in the way that I am now telling you to, you will see that I am right."
  
  Yudkowsky:
  Talking to the general public is hard.
  Multiple commenters on FanFiction.net replying to chapter 23 of HPMOR: Genetics don't work that way. If magic were recessive, then wizard parents would always have wizard kids and there would be no such thing as squibs. Look, I drew the Punnett square....
  
  Don't patronize fans, Yud.
  
  "I'm LessWrong than you're implying!!!"
  
  I must have missed the class in material physics where they explained that all material has a generic "strength" that determine which material can cut which. Is it perhaps abbreviated STR?
  
  Only someone with high INT can discover this brilliant theory. As luck would have it, they have high CHR too!
  
  Unfortunately such characters tend to dump stat WIS.
  
  The so called "experts" say that spider silk is stronger than steel, but steel beams can hold up bridges while I can break a spider web with my little finger. Looks like the "experts" are wrong and spider silk isn't very strong after all - probably because it's made of proteins held together by weak van der Waals forces instead of covalent bonds.
  
  @GorillasAreForEating @mountainriver
  Yes but if you had a five ton, meter wide strand of spider silk…
  
  He never played dwarf fortress confirmed, else he would be talking about shearing, compression, tearing, impact and whatever else values DF uses for materials.
  
  Quoth Yud:
  I'm sort of skeptical that you could write something that works as science communication for a general audience, though lord knows I'm not necessarily succeeding either.
  All the faux modesty of Tommy Tallarico saying "my mother is very proud".
  The key valid ideas to be communicated are [made-up sci-fi bullshit about nanobots]
  
  I reply: Because the strength of the material is determined by its weakest link, not its strongest link. A structure of steel beams held together at the vertices by Scotch tape (and lacking other clever arrangements of mechanical advantage) has the strength of Scotch tape rather than the strength of steel.
  This is sub-childishly false and he opens with it. Unbelievable.
  
  He also writes: "The entire human body, faced with a strong impact like being gored by a rhinocerous horn, will fail at its weakest point, not its strongest point."
  If a rhino comes at Yud, he can use his mighty cranium, which is not his weakest spot, to defend his weak meat parts. Since the rhino horn only impacts his head and not his weak points, his body can not fail, and thus he lives.
  Reminds me of Cyrano de Bergerac's Travel to the Sun, where the protagonist encounters a thin chain carrying a great load. Since all links of the chain were equally strong, it couldn't break as chains always break in there weakest link. De Bergerac had the excuse of writing his sci fi in the 17th century (he also features some pre-Newtonian physics), Yud lacks such an excuse.
  
  There are too many comments in here going for the stringy lean detail and not pointing out magnificent conceptual errors like this
  
  Bone is weaker than diamond, then, because... why?
  Well, partially, IIUC, because calcium atoms are heavier than carbon atoms. So even if per-bond the ionic forces are strong, some of that is lost in the price you pay for including heavier atoms whose nuclei have more protons that are able to exert the stronger electrical forces making up that stronger bond.
  i don't even know where to begin. stay in school, kids
  
  Guy with 4 wiki pages open, determined to win an argument, even if it means stacking shit until the other person stops responding.
  
  this entire response reads like "diamond is the hardest metal" copypasta
  
  "yeah but no also :words:"
  
  "The first concept I'm trying to convey to them is that there's an underlying physical, mechanical reason that flesh is weaker than diamond; and that this reason isn't that things animated by vitalic spirit, elan vital, can self-heal and self-reproduce at the cost of being weaker than the cold steel making up lifeless machines, as is the price of magic imposed by the universe to maintain game balance."
  Eliezer, what kind of mushrooms are you on and can I have some?
  
  If I were inclined to be charitable, I'd wonder who he was talking to that honestly thought in terms of "elan vital" and "game balance". Like, take the question "Why is flesh soft and diamond hard?", and ask somebody without a science background. I'd guess that the typical response would go something like, "I'unno, it just is." Or, "I've never thought about it, why?" Or, "Heh heh heh, you said hard". I suspect that Yud is making up a layperson of his own invention, a mythical audience upon whom his Educate spell is perfectly effective. He refuses to admit any challenge to his mental model of how the process of explanation works.
  
  It’s a technique he uses to get you, the reader, to understand that you aren’t the person who thinks in terms of elan vital.
  In one of his essays on quantum phenomena and personal identity he does it with time. He explains something like if you think time in the universe works in the sense of clock time, then you just don’t have a clue about physical reality, so when he gets to his next point it stands in contrast to the straw layman. But his readers are obviously already the sort of people who do know that, because they’re nominally smart, education-enthusiastic western(ised) nerds, even if they understand next to nothing about how this works out in real physical theory.
  So the strawman doesn’t just create a favourable contrast for Yudkowsky’s argument, it constructs them as smart and different from lay people - it isn’t a one-shot effect, it builds as he starts small and piles on increasingly esoteric speculations (even if this is the first “mind = blown” blog post they’ve ever read from this weird guy).
  
  I’ve seen that work in persuasive writing, but it requires that the straw layman is at least vaguely plausible. Do LW’s readers really imagine a plausible normie with “vital forces from the æther as divine balance” as an explanation for the concepts of hardness and softness? I know they have no faith in people they call NPCs, but come on.
  
  I’ve been saying this more often lately, but LessWrong gets its readers in, by and large, at the absolute bottom rung of intellectual thought, they don’t know anything else
  You have to interpret somebody getting into LessWrong as just graduating from Cracked or Newgrounds in the mid-2000s
  
  LessWrongers don't have a sense of a "vaguely plausible normie" that is calibrated in a grounded way (by trying to teach the Intro for Non-Majors courses, trying to explain to relatives and high-school friends what you do for a living, etc.). Instead, they have a concept constructed to set them apart and above. The normie is the ideal rube, the complete inverse of the sophisticate that the LessWronger aspires to be or believes themselves to have become.
  
  Garynita musgyraxia shrooms. Very rare, only grows on moldy first edition dnd books.
  
  @Soyweiser Oh right, thac0 and the system where elan vital is what makes something hard.
  something something flesh golems and hardness and I'll see myself out.
  
  trumpian
  
  Okay that's so much word vomit, and I know next to nothing about biology and medicine so I have to ask: is any of this actually relevant to pandemics, virulence, lethality or whatever was his initial point?
  
  His argument, as I understand it, is that he knew about the covalent bonds between proteins but didn't mention them because he was simplifying things for a lay audience, and that those covalent bonds don't matter because they aren't the "load bearing" elements in flesh.
  There are two problems I see
  His earlier statements suggest he actually had no knowledge of that whatsoever
  I think his revised explanation is still wrong, because the extracellular matrix that holds cells together and connective tissue are composed largely of proteins that have these covalent crosslinks and rely on them for strength. When you tear a ligment it's not just van der waals and hydrogen bonds being broken, those alone would be far too weak.
  
  What I mean specifically is, he wrote:
  The nanomachinery builds diamondoid bacteria, that replicate with solar power and atmospheric CHON, maybe aggregate into some miniature rockets or jets so they can ride the jetstream to spread across the Earth's atmosphere, get into human bloodstreams and hide, strike on a timer.
  Would "diamondoid bacteria" be inherently, significantly better at killing us? Or wait is he imagining the bacteria literally slashing at us???
  
  From what I could understand is that he talks about diamondoid (and these other things) just because he has read one book about the subject. ‘Nanosystems’ by Drexler apparantly. (Never read it, can't say anything about it).
  I'm not sure Yud is really engaging with what is being said vs just going on and on about how AGI can kill us all via nanomachines (son), because handwave theory something.
  
  It's like he heard the phrase "flesh-eating bacteria" and decided they would be more scarier if they had tiny knives and forks.
  
  The worst part is when they start to season you with salt and pepper...
  
  Pepper’s okay, but salt has a crystalline structure so if it gets near our weakly bonded meat sacks we are instantly defeated.
  
  Fun fact, as the agi is trained on the internet as long as we keep chatting about how we are weak to salt, it will eventually think we are like snails, making any malicious agi easy to spot.

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