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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I've been looking through the replies in the crossposts. It illustrates your gullibility filter point completely.
Also, if you need validation, you are a fantastic science communicator. You take research that isn't accessible to me and present it in a form I can understand. You also provide enough disclaimers about gaps in your knowledge when you might be glossing over details while providing me with inroads to research those details themselves. You dispel fear and confusion stemming from the unknown while inspiring me to discover more.
Yud doesn't do any of those things and often does the opposite, but let's forget about him for a moment. Good article!
- Thanks! I strive for accuracy, clarity, humility, and good faith. Aka, everything I learned not to do from reading the sequences.

Organic chemist there
- Hey, thanks so much for looking through it! If you're alright with messaging me your email or something, I might consult you on some more related things.
  With your permission, I'm tempted to edit this response into the original post, it's really good. Have you looked over Yudkowsky's word salad in the EA forum thread? Would be interested in getting your thoughts on that as well.
  
  my DMs are open, but lemmy's DMs seem to be janky, matrix should be more reliable
  I’m tempted to edit this response into the original post
  no issues with that
  Yudkowsky’s word salad
  i'll have a closer look tomorrow, for now i'd just say that that steel chain protein analogy is okay, however if you wanted to convey directionality of hydrogen bonds, then every link is magnetized, and really these links are not welded shut, but instead bolted, so you can disassemble them and put them together again with some effort. continuing this analogy, diamondoids would be elaborate welded assembly of stiff H-beams or something like that
  i see that EY tries to "get" materials science from first principles, in true aristotelian fashion, never reading first year BSc level chemistry textbook, fails badly and can't even comprehend that he can be wrong. in other words, another tuesday
  
  Have you looked over Yudkowsky’s word salad in the EA forum thread? Would be interested in getting your thoughts on that as well.
  update 2: i'm not doing that, he sounds like a straight up cultist in this one
  
  update 3: unfortunately i had some time to look back at this, and the longer i thought about that "bacteria but stiffer" thing the more aggressively stupider entire thing becomes. get yourself a mean drink like i did, because it's long. for your sneering pleasure (and if you want to use it, just rephase relevant bits it'll be shorter):

The paragraph about gullibility resonates strongly with me. One of the first things in organic chemistry (a course I repeatedly failed) is that carbon doesn't behave like the ions which we normally manipulate in undergraduate chemistry laboratories. Instead, carbon is like a Lego brick or K'Nex connector, with four ports which clip together in a variety of configurations. This is used to explain many quirks of biology, like why diamond or nanotubes can't be easily produced by enzymatic processes; as you explain, carbon's bonding process makes it very difficult to put into place atomically, and instead we need some sort of external force like immense pressure or heat to reconfigure large masses of carbon into carbon-only structures.
- Permanently Deleted
- I suppose when talking about science to a popular audience it can be hard not to make generalizations and oversimplifications and if it's done poorly that oversimplification can cross over into plain old inaccuracy (if I were to be charitable to Yud I would say that this is what happened here).
  To wit: even the "K'nex connector with 4 ports" model of carbon doesn't really explain the bonding of aromatic molecules like benzene or carbon nanotubes; I've likewise seen people confidently make the generalization "noble gases don't react", apparently unaware of the existence of noble gas compounds.

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."
  
  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?
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  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?
  
  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?

When, arguing with people like yudkowsky, you can never decisively 'win' or change his mind, because he and other doomers can quickly retreat to the classic hole: "You can't prove X is impossible!! Nature isn't already perfectly optimal!!!" Searching for some kind of "hard limit" on how nature or technology can evolve will always end up empty handed. Lots of really awful things are possible. (Lots of super fascinating things are also possible.) Searching for some singular hard reason why nature as it is, is totally safe from future threats or change will always end up empty handed.
Capability, is not interesting. Capability, is not the real test. Economics, is the real master of it. And specifically, the open system economics of the entire environment in which something is embedded. It's why the Voyager, a technology planned, built, and launched with 80 year old techniques and knowledge is SOTA for space exploration and contribution to science, and Starship is still just a huge dark hole for money and talent.
if I want to understand historical biology, I do not go looking for the alien intelligence and engineering capability that built it, I look for the environmental forces that contributed to, and eventually supported the homeostasis of, it.

Quoth Yud:
Algae are tiny microns-wide solar-powered fully self-replicating factories that run on general assemblers, "ribosomes", that can replicate most other products of biology given digital instructions.
Ribosomes ... make proteins.
- and not even finished proteins

It was in high school that I last learned about the different types of bonds. This one article actually gave me a better education than chemistry class, if I'm going to be very honest. (Though to be fair to my chemistry class, I probably wouldn't have the foundational knowledge to understand what was going on otherwise, so I'll give you both credit)

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