With how often Yud and co invoke diamondoid bacteria or molecular nanotech, some scholarly rebuttals, particularly of how it is analogized to life would be good for the acid levels of my stomach
There mostly aren’t any beyond the Smalley debates because it’s just so fucking dumb no chemist takes it seriously enough to bother.
This was posted at old SneerClub a few months ago.
I had a dive into Nanosystems recently, arguing that it gets power dissipation wrong and inappropriately uses equilibrium statistical mechanics for error calculations. It’s public (Appendix C here) but I’ve avoided spreading it around widely—I didn’t give Drexler a chance to comment beforehand, and generally I’d prefer to avoid spending more time thinking about this
if I’m not getting paid. The specifics are about the proposed nanomechanical computer, which doesn’t bear directly on diamondoid bacteria or analogies to life, but if this kind of thing interests you, take a look.