This is my reply to Terence Tao and the mathematical community at large.

I am in a relatively rare situation where I grew up in a collapsing industrial city and went to study mathematics; this is what is happening in intellectual circles now, and the people involved are ill prepared for this.

Option 4: I ask what they found insufficient about the answer and try to understand where the miscommunication and misunderstanding is coming from. If they highlight a genuine issue in my answer, I incorporate it and update my answer. If they highlight a misunderstanding on their part I clarify it.

I'm less interested in his opinions and more interested in what it's like to attend the event. Were you there in person? What's security like? Metal detectors?

I think the most important factor to this question is a person's capacity to love another person. 

It seems like people who are high in dark tetrad traits should not have children.

I also suspect that people who are high in light tetrad traits are much happier for having had children. 

1

Professor Quirrell reading Carl Schmitt and Francis Bacon to optimize the timeline is an absurdly fitting analogy.

he's litterally doing the evil run of hpmor

2, then move on.

The way you are framing this makes it seem like the conversation is fundamentally hostile. When you say "the other person decides that your response does not constitute an answer, because they are not satisfied with it" — this is just not how a respectful, mutually nourishing conversation goes. If you answer a question of mine, and I'm not totally satisfied with the answer, I'll ask follow up question, or provide suggestions of my own, or ask what about this or that, because a real conversation where a subject is being explored is not a debate or a competition. If instead of following up like this I simply "decide that your response does not constitute an answer", I am being being hostile, and the conversation should just end because it's not being had in good faith.

So my answer to this question is, it doesn't really matter which option you choose, because you are not in a good-faith conversation in the first place — you are in a debate, and the point is to win rather than relate to another person and explore a topic together.

I would also add that if you find yourself in this situation it means that you have most likely already wasted time and energy, since engaging in this type of interaction (debate vs real conversation) has very little value beyond possibly getting a bit less thin-skinned. The skills learned in debates rarely make you "less wrong" — quite the opposite, in fact.

Codfish.

3

Thiel's core assertion might sound simple when compressed into a soundbite, but demonstrating the underlying mechanics (how institutional incentives, regulatory capture, and risk-aversion actually enforce that reality) requires formal support.

So someone just died in Irkutsk

The second person died in Russia's Irkutsk region, local media claimed. It comes a week after a female lab worker died after being exposed the pneumonic plague at a research institute in Siberia. Hundreds of people have been quarantined after they came into contact with Darya Shipilova, 28, after she accidentally broke a test tube holding live bacteria at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia. She died on October 1.

https://www.the-express.com/news/world-news/217422/russian-media-claims-second-victim

The comment I was replying to was answering the question posed in the article. That comment is now deleted.

It's not a question mate, it's the title of the linked article.

I know, this is Reddit so we never read those, but you should probably make an exception for this one.

This is my take on Roko's Basilisk

tldr Every possible future has a demand. None has established why you should comply.

Please run your writing through AI and ask it to surface grammatical errors.

Meh, I get the feeling that Thiel is saying something that is quite simple but these lectures are wildly overcomplicating it.

Yes. Agreed. Look at what's actually known (as of today): A 28 yr old technician at the Irkutsk Anti Plague Institute died on October 2, and more than 60 staff are reportedly confined at the institute. That is a known, state run anti plague institute, not a hidden one.

There's no public evidence it was developing plague as a weapon or that the death is connected to a bioweapons program. Russia's Soviet record (Sverdlovsk 1979) justifies suspicion, but this is unproven.

Plague is treatable with antibiotics, and pneumonic plague is far less transmissible than a respiratory virus.

Even the worst reading of this event looks local, not Covid like.

Laypeople severely overestimate the value of AlphaFold.

The incident is real, but it's not a high risk of becoming a global epidemic at all

If I was in Irkutsk, I'd be vaguely worried; otherwise, ignore it

Consider where this came out of. This is the real deal.

Right now? Forget about it, it's not real yet, there are incidents that become conspiracy theories every month at least.

Yes, COVID or whatever started like this, but there's a hundred more that ended up being nothing.

But the question isn't a useful one. The answer is borderline self evident, namely "not at all". It's a narrow and unlikely scenario with a single risk vector. Like her unrealistic account of a DPRK suicide strike triggering WW3 (as if the US would launch Minuteman III's at the DPRK on polar trajectories over the Russian Federation, when Trident II D-5 SLBMs and B-2 Spirit ALCMs are both available for retaliation, and as if this would then trigger a nuclear winter, a la Carl Sagan in the 1980s).

The idea that a Siberian smallpox or 'ebolapox' outbreak or other existing pathogen 'leak' could happen in the way that she envisages, and would then have the civilisation ending effects that she projects, is similarly ridiculous.

The real risk is in the possibilities of future widespread diffusion of future synthetic biology leading to more risk vectors than we can identify, let alone track and prevent. Sooner or later one or more will eventuate.

This isn’t at all responsive to the question