I was asked to respond to this comment by Eliezer Yudkowsky. This post is partly redundant with my previous post.

Why is flesh weaker than diamond?

When trying to resolve disagreements, I find that precision is important. Tensile strength, compressive strength, and impact strength are different. Material microstructure matters. Poorly-sintered diamond crystals could crumble like sand, and a large diamond crystal has lower impact strength than some materials made of proteins.

Even when the load-bearing forces holding large molecular systems together are locally covalent bonds, as in lignin (what makes wood strong), if you've got larger molecules only held together by covalent bonds at interspersed points along their edges, that's like having 10cm-diameter steel beams held together by 1cm welds.

lignin (what makes wood strong)

That's an odd way of putting things. The mechanical strength of wood is generally considered to come from it [...]

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First published:
December 11th, 2023

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XhDh97vm7hXBfjwqQ/re-yudkowsky-on-biological-materials

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.