This is my article on one of the dumbest and most obviously false claims Yudkowsky has ever made, about biology not using covalent bonds.
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.
Big Yud himself responded:
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.
He never played dwarf fortress confirmed, else he would be talking about shearing, compression, tearing, impact and whatever else values DF uses for materials.
“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?
Garynita musgyraxia shrooms. Very rare, only grows on moldy first edition dnd books.
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)
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.
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.
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.
