SneerClub

I've been looking through the replies in the crossposts. It illustrates your gullibility filter point completely.

Also, if you need validation, you are a fantastic science communicator. You take research that isn't accessible to me and present it in a form I can understand. You also provide enough disclaimers about gaps in your knowledge when you might be glossing over details while providing me with inroads to research those details themselves. You dispel fear and confusion stemming from the unknown while inspiring me to discover more.

Yud doesn't do any of those things and often does the opposite, but let's forget about him for a moment. Good article!

Organic chemist there

The paragraph about gullibility resonates strongly with me. One of the first things in organic chemistry (a course I repeatedly failed) is that carbon doesn't behave like the ions which we normally manipulate in undergraduate chemistry laboratories. Instead, carbon is like a Lego brick or K'Nex connector, with four ports which clip together in a variety of configurations. This is used to explain many quirks of biology, like why diamond or nanotubes can't be easily produced by enzymatic processes; as you explain, carbon's bonding process makes it very difficult to put into place atomically, and instead we need some sort of external force like immense pressure or heat to reconfigure large masses of carbon into carbon-only structures.

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.

It was in high school that I last learned about the different types of bonds. This one article actually gave me a better education than chemistry class, if I'm going to be very honest. (Though to be fair to my chemistry class, I probably wouldn't have the foundational knowledge to understand what was going on otherwise, so I'll give you both credit)

When, arguing with people like yudkowsky, you can never decisively 'win' or change his mind, because he and other doomers can quickly retreat to the classic hole: "You can't prove X is impossible!! Nature isn't already perfectly optimal!!!" Searching for some kind of "hard limit" on how nature or technology can evolve will always end up empty handed. Lots of really awful things are possible. (Lots of super fascinating things are also possible.) Searching for some singular hard reason why nature as it is, is totally safe from future threats or change will always end up empty handed.

Capability, is not interesting. Capability, is not the real test. Economics, is the real master of it. And specifically, the open system economics of the entire environment in which something is embedded. It's why the Voyager, a technology planned, built, and launched with 80 year old techniques and knowledge is SOTA for space exploration and contribution to science, and Starship is still just a huge dark hole for money and talent.

if I want to understand historical biology, I do not go looking for the alien intelligence and engineering capability that built it, I look for the environmental forces that contributed to, and eventually supported the homeostasis of, it.

Quoth Yud:

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.

Ribosomes ... make proteins.