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, and found that he has been repeating versions of the claim for over a decade and a half, including in “the sequences” and his TED talk. In recent years, this claim has primarily been used as an argument for why an AGI attack would be extremely deadly. I believe this claim is factually incorrect.

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

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsMEnglish
        15·
        1 year ago

        “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.”

      • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        1 year ago

        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?

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          1 year ago

          Only someone with high INT can discover this brilliant theory. As luck would have it, they have high CHR too!

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          1 year ago

          He never played dwarf fortress confirmed, else he would be talking about shearing, compression, tearing, impact and whatever else values DF uses for materials.

        • GorillasAreForEating@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          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.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsMEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        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]

      • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          1 year ago

          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.

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        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

        • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Guy with 4 wiki pages open, determined to win an argument, even if it means stacking shit until the other person stops responding.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsMEnglish
          9·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            1 year ago

            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).

              • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systemsEnglish
                7·
                1 year ago

                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

              • blakestacey@awful.systemsMEnglish
                5·
                1 year ago

                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.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        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?

        • GorillasAreForEating@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          1 year ago

          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

          1. His earlier statements suggest he actually had no knowledge of that whatsoever

          2. 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.

          • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            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???

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              8·
              1 year ago

              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.