Here is an explanation of my problems with each of Yudkowskys claims. I thought this was fairly obvious from the post, but perhaps it needed more explaining. I will go from most to least wrong.
human technology figuring out how to use covalent bonds and metallic bonds, where biology sticks to ionic bonds and proteins held together by van der Waals forces
This is just straight up, explicitly false. Biology does not “stick to ionic bonds and proteins”. As I pointed out, biology is made up of covalent bonds at it’s very core, and uses them all the time.
covalently bonded equivalents of biology where instead of proteins that fold together and are held together by static cling, you have things that go down much sharper potential energy gradients and are bundled together
The phrase “covalently bonded equivalents to biology” implicitly states that biology is not covalently bonded. This is false.
I have mostly shifted to trying to talk about “covalently bonded” bacteria
The context of this claim is that Yudkowsky is trying to come up with a new name for deadly Drexler-style nanomachines. He has chosen “covalently bonded bacteria”, implying that “covalently bonded bacteria” and normal bacteria are different things. Except that’s not true, because bacteria is completely full of covalent bonds.
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.
Okay, I just saw this one, but ribosomes are not “general” assemblers, and they cannot replicate “most other products of biology”. They do literally one thing, and that is read instructions and link together amino acids to form proteins.
For the next two. let’s establish the principle that if you say “X is held together by Y instead ofZ”, you are implicitly making the statement that “X is not held together by Z”, or perhaps that “Z is irrevelant compared to Y when talking about how X is held together”. Otherwise you would not have used the word instead of. Would you utter the phrase “animal bodies are held together by flesh instead of skeletons?”
proteins bound together by weak van der Waals forces instead of strong covalent bonds
This implicitly makes the statement “proteins are not held together by strong covalent bonds”, which is false. Or it could be saying “strong covalent bonds are irrelevant compared to van der waals forces when talking about how proteins are held together”, which is also false.
even though the proteins are held together by van der Waals forces rather than covalent bonds, which is why algae are far less tough than diamond
“rather than” means the same thing as “instead of”, and therefore makes an implicitly false statement for the reason I said in the last quote.
proteins are held together by van der Waals forces that are much weaker than covalent bonds
Actually, this one is defensible, because it didn’t use the phrase “instead of”. I would still prefer more qualifying terms such “the weakest link”. If this had been the only statement, I would not have written this post.
Here is an explanation of my problems with each of Yudkowskys claims. I thought this was fairly obvious from the post, but perhaps it needed more explaining. I will go from most to least wrong.
This is just straight up, explicitly false. Biology does not “stick to ionic bonds and proteins”. As I pointed out, biology is made up of covalent bonds at it’s very core, and uses them all the time.
The phrase “covalently bonded equivalents to biology” implicitly states that biology is not covalently bonded. This is false.
The context of this claim is that Yudkowsky is trying to come up with a new name for deadly Drexler-style nanomachines. He has chosen “covalently bonded bacteria”, implying that “covalently bonded bacteria” and normal bacteria are different things. Except that’s not true, because bacteria is completely full of covalent bonds.
Okay, I just saw this one, but ribosomes are not “general” assemblers, and they cannot replicate “most other products of biology”. They do literally one thing, and that is read instructions and link together amino acids to form proteins.
For the next two. let’s establish the principle that if you say “X is held together by Y instead of Z”, you are implicitly making the statement that “X is not held together by Z”, or perhaps that “Z is irrevelant compared to Y when talking about how X is held together”. Otherwise you would not have used the word instead of. Would you utter the phrase “animal bodies are held together by flesh instead of skeletons?”
This implicitly makes the statement “proteins are not held together by strong covalent bonds”, which is false. Or it could be saying “strong covalent bonds are irrelevant compared to van der waals forces when talking about how proteins are held together”, which is also false.
even though the proteins are held together by van der Waals forces rather than covalent bonds, which is why algae are far less tough than diamond
“rather than” means the same thing as “instead of”, and therefore makes an implicitly false statement for the reason I said in the last quote.
Actually, this one is defensible, because it didn’t use the phrase “instead of”. I would still prefer more qualifying terms such “the weakest link”. If this had been the only statement, I would not have written this post.
I agree that “biology sticks to ionic bonds and static cling” was badly put because lignin, and I’ll retire that one.