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.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsMEnglish
    11·
    10 months 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.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          10 months 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.