This is a linkpost for https://open.substack.com/pub/titotal/p/why-yudkowsky-is-wrong-about-covalently?r=1e0is3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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.

The quotes:

I’m going to show the various versions of the claim I found below, with the relevant sentences bolded:

To plausibly argue that “humans” were intelligently designed, you’d have to lie about the design of the [...]

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First published:
December 6th, 2023

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8viKzSrYhb6EFk6wg/why-yudkowsky-is-wrong-about-covalently-bonded-equivalents

Linkpost URL:
https://open.substack.com/pub/titotal/p/why-yudkowsky-is-wrong-about-covalently?r=1e0is3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

[Linkpost] “Why Yudkowsky is wrong about ‘covalently bonded equivalents of biology’” by titotal

LessWrong (30+ Karma)