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.

  • @[email protected]English
    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      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???

      • @[email protected]English
        9•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.

        • @[email protected]MEnglish
          10•1 year ago

          It’s like he heard the phrase “flesh-eating bacteria” and decided they would be more scarier if they had tiny knives and forks.

              • @[email protected]English
                9•1 year ago

                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.