I think people are misreading the post a little. It's a follow on from the old AI x-risk argument: "evolution optimises for having kids, yet people use condoms! Therefore evolution failed to "align" humans to it's goals, therefore aligning AI is nigh-impossible".

As a commentator points out, for a "failure", there sure do seem to be a lot of human kids around.

This post then decides to take the analogy further, and be like "If I was hypothetically a eugenicist god, and I wanted to hypothetically turn the entire population of humanity into eugenicists, it'd be really hard! Therefore we can't get an AI to build us, like, a bridge, without it developing ulterior motives".

You can hypothetically make this bad argument without supporting eugenics... but I wouldn't put money on it.

Thanks, I love these answers! I'll drop a DM on matrix for further questions.

This rather economic recycling allows a living cell to absorb damage that would be catastrophic when you just assume that everything works forever just as you imagined. I don’t have a guess how much more energy would be expended in reassembly of diamondoids, @titotal@awful.systems might have an estimate, but i guess it’s some 1-2 orders of magnitude more

The DMS researchers were estimating something on the order of 5 eV for mechanically dropping a single pair of Carbon atoms onto the surface of diamond. I'm not sure how to directly compare this to the biological case.

If you post on EA forum or LW, you can crosspost automatically to the other one by clicking one button on the publishing page. The sites are run by essentially the same people.

Hmmm, I wonder who benefits from keeping EA chained to an Eliezer Yudkowsky fan forum....

Hey, thanks so much for looking through it! If you're alright with messaging me your email or something, I might consult you on some more related things.

With your permission, I'm tempted to edit this response into the original post, it's really good. Have you looked over Yudkowsky's word salad in the EA forum thread? Would be interested in getting your thoughts on that as well.

Do you have any links to this, out of curiosity? I looked a bunch and couldn't find any successor projects.

what are the other ones?

I guess the rest of the experimental setup that recombines the photon amplitiudes. Like if you put 5 extra beam splitters in the bottom path, there wouldn't be full destructive interference.

when i’m thinking about splitter with pi/4 phase shift, i’m thinking about coupled line coupler or its waveguide analogue, but i come from microwave land on this one. maybe this works in fibers?

I'm not sure how you'd actually build a symmetric beam splitter: wikipedia said you'd need to induce a particular extra phase shift on both transmission and reflection. (I'm fully theoretical physics so I'm not too familiar).

What I think happened is that he got confused by the half mirror phase shifts (because theres only a phase shift if you reflect off the front of the mirror, not the back). Instead of asking someone, he invented his own weird system which gets the right answer by accident, and then refused to fix the mistake ever, saying that the alternate system is fine because it's "simpler".

Obvious reminder: do not assume that anonymous tumblr posts are accurate. (this is the only post the tumblr account made).

Has anyone attempted a neutral unpacking of the mess of claims and counterclaims around Ziz and related parties?

Yeah, I've been writing up critiques for a year or two now, collected over at my substack. I've been posting them to the EA forum and even Lesswrong itself and they've been generally well received.