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Comment by mabramov on Why Yudkowsky is wrong about "covalently bonded equivalents of biology" · 2023-12-06T16:12:58.276Z · LW · GW

That doesn't seem like the right analogy. The bonds are forced to fold over themselves because electrons repel each other and don't want to touch. So the natural structures are mostly tetrahedral structures. Think of the vertices of a tetrahedron having edges that shoot towards and meet at the centre and you will see that these form 109° angles. When you imagine a bunch of these connected, you will see that they all start folding over themselves and will need to take up the same space which, is not possible because the electrons will repel. So you get distortions and all kinds of stuff to push them away and then it's all complicated by a bunch of weak forces. The primary thing giving structure is this long string of covalent bonds.

Also, "forces in the lipid layer surrounding cells" are not proteins

Comment by mabramov on Bet On Biden · 2020-11-04T21:13:27.224Z · LW · GW

I just made my account but I want to remind everyone that you cannot make inferences on how good your prediction (or how good of a bet this was) based on one data point (how this election turned out). If you want to dig deep into the odds that every state was given, you can start to make a case, but anyone with the gut reaction that since the election was close, this was a bad bet, are wrong.