I am a former mathematician now working a regular job (not affiliated with OpenAI). Just speaking for myself, I find this statement deeply embarrassing and at odds with the spirit of open inquiry for which the community of mathematics has (nearly) always been a standard bearer.
The author seems to be arguing that it is biologically impossible or something to have a virus with the same transmission properties as COVID but higher virulence. I don't understand what principle he is invoking to make this claim.
Because fatality and virulence stand in fundamental tension with each other when it comes to epidemiology. You can't magic that tension away or just invent other incompatible properties of a hypothetical virus (stealth, latency, virulence, fatality, etc etc etc) just because you want to tell a ghost story. Biology: (immunology, cell biology, virology) impose constraints!
I'm like the Japanese soldier who kept fighting into the 1970s on this, but actually signalling is about taking costly action. When people call something virtue signalling what they usually mean is that it's cheap talk, but this is wrong. The whole point of signalling is that it's costly. A more correct application of virtue signalling would be something like those people who contort their lives to genuinely try to produce zero garbage. This is a truly costly action, but it is signalling in the sense that it is more about showing that one cares by being effortful than actually doing something effectual.
> The whole point of signalling is that it's costly
No, it costs nothing to change your twitter icon to the Ukraine flag or make a video about some moral cause, or change your language due to the next political language policing. None of those things are costly.
> When people call something virtue signalling what they usually mean is that it's cheap talk, but this is wrong. The whole point of signalling is that it's costly.
What? Signaling is not costly. It’s literally a display, a signal.
I have a graduate degree in mathematics. AI models can absolutely help you do research math in 2026. I recently asked chatGPT to prove a result which I know to have been published in Advances in Mathematics (a pretty good, but not top tier, journal) this year, and it gave a correct proof which was completely distinct from the one that was published.
I got my mortgage at 2.5% interest. The mortgage was about equal to all of the cash I had before buying, and I'm pretty sure I could (and should) have gotten a much larger mortgage before buying. Mortgages are essentially the only way for ordinary people to access that kind of credit. That's why buying a house is such a good deal. No one's lending an ordinary 30-year-old hundreds of thousands of dollars at 2.5% interest to plow into the S&P 500.
Of course, this kind of credit is _incredibly_ risky. People don't think of it this way, but a mortgage is essentially a massively leveraged bet on your local housing market. Which is already gives your risk profile an incredible lack of diversity. The most valuable thing you "own" in the time of your life when you buy a house is usually your future earnings potential, and your house will be the second most valuable thing you own. The thing is, both of these things are highly correlated with your local economy, so buying a house doubles down on your already high exposure to local economic conditions. People think of owning a home as a kind of boring, safe, low risk/low reward investment, but it's really exactly the opposite.
This conflates rigor with proof. Proof is the solve to the argument you are making. Rigor is how carefully and correctly the argument is made. You can understand something without rigor but you cannot prove it.
> You can understand something without rigor but you cannot prove it.
I think I disagree. There are formal proofs and informal proofs, there are rigorous proofs and less rigorous proofs. Of course, a rigorous proof requires rigor, but that’s close to tautological. What makes a proof is that it convinces other people that the consequent is true. Rigor isn’t a necessary condition for that.
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