It's because normal people are not equipped to deal with the cherrypicking and manipulative narrative that these kinds of "evidence" papers show. Take the 5G conspiracy for example, 100+ cell phone towers attacked, and workers setting up attacked as well. Lots of testable assertions made, none backed up with any kind of evidence.

I agree normal people aren't well equipped. But when you phrase it that way, you make it sounds like the professionals are well equipped.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI

I remember when I saw a headline that said gene researchers say there is no way the virus was made in a lab.

I'm like oh this should be interesting, they must have done some sort of dating on the mutations. maybe there are markings biologists can look at that are telling signs of natural vs man-made. or compared genomes to ... And there 100% undeniable argument: the virus effects bats and people researching bio weapons would -only- look at virus that effects humans.

I'm like really? are you really that narrow minded and completely devoid of imagination? you think labs are only for making bio-weapons? you think someone making a bio-weapon would limit themselves to just virus that effects humans? that's your full proof thinking?

I'm like wow. wow.

>you really that narrow minded and completely devoid of imagination? you think labs are only for making bio-weapons?

It wouldn't even have to be bio-weapon related. It could just be a genetically altered virus (routine in gain of function research) that escaped a lab due to an accident or carelessness, and was later covered up with the whole wet market story. People who disdain the idea that the virus could be man made are almost always attacking the hypothesis of a deliberate bio-weapon release, which is such a straw man.

It's the whole "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" thing...

but I always like to add, "and don't attribute to stupidity what can be explained by the fundamental complexity of life"

But this could very well be a result of priming people for a consensus (or its opposition) I’m too young to judge but it wasn’t always like this or was it?

depends on what you mean by always, but looking back at how this was handled re: tobacco, leaded gasoline, and climate change (pre 2000) should give you some idea.

As far as I personally can see, it's been like this for a large portion of the 1900s at least.

Galileo says, no it wasn't always like this.

Yes, things have always been this way and if you really want to see just how long, look at speeches and other “news” from Ancient Greece.

The significant difference today is how quickly and widely falsehoods can be distributed and redistributed, and how many different sources this can happen to. Pre Internet, if I started telling my friends about this thing called QAnon, how far and how quickly could it really spread? Not far and not quickly. Today however it can spread across the world in a day and be picked up by every major news outlet. It’s disturbing, and we should all be very concerned.

Curious people can read the posts directly at qmap dot pub.

You argument appears to be that I should focus on a strawman instead of evaluating the evidence.

>It's because normal people are not equipped to deal with the cherrypicking and manipulative narrative that these kinds of "evidence" papers show

I'm pretty sure this is the exact attitude that the poster was describing. You're just blanket dismissing out of mainstream science with accusations of bad faith.

I believe this is "bbut what if baad people cite my article?" defense for what is essentially a form of authoritarian groupthink.

That's because it's exhausting to debunk idiots & those operating in bad faith (often both); it takes several orders of magnitude more work to respond and debunk that unicorns don't exist than it does to post that they do.

It would be inappropriate to infer that the OP was advocating for unicorns.

Consensus should be determined by science, not the other way around. Otherwise, what is the point of science?

edit: "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills." t. redditadmin.txt

This isn't just about science. Conspiracy theorists and unethical people with agendas use documents like this to support their beliefs, and it becomes impossible to refute them. In the age of social media, misinformation and conspiracy theories can cause real damage.

As a recent and somewhat topical example of this, there is an article circling around the internet right now that cites about a dozen studies proving that "masks don't work". If you actually read through the quoted studies you quickly realize that they don't actually support the author's conclusion at all.

But that didn't stop the author from taking a bunch of out of context quotes to make an argument that sounded vaguely scientific - scientific enough for people with a particular agenda to parade it around as if the science was on their side.

I started writing a rebuttal to this article, but as I was carefully reading through the details of the nth study to see if it actually matched what the author claimed, I realized I was just massively wasting my own time. The people spreading the article around don't actually care, they never read those studies and they never will. They just wanted something scientific-looking to cite that backs up their pre-existing opinions.

> Conspiracy theorists and unethical people with agendas use documents like this to support their beliefs, and it becomes impossible to refute them

This should give you a very hard pause and rethink. If it becomes impossible to refute unethical people because they have sources to back them up how do you know that anyone who has ever used scientific evidence in any shape or form was doing it ethically? Maybe they were just very good at citing sources?

Secondly, most ethics (except perhaps honesty) is fundamentally consensus driven. Science is supposed to be orthogonal to consensus. Thus, if one wants to be an honest scientist, one must accept possibility that one's work might be used for unethical ends. And honesty, to remind you, is an ethical position.

Is there any real reason you created this account solely for this post?

I find it hard to believe you're an epidemiologist trying to stay anonymous here.

> it's frustrating that the current culture in science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."

That current culture of science has gradually driven me toward skepticism. Unless I see converging evidence from various independent sources, a claim is just a big "maybe". How many of the claims have been peer reviewed, or replicated (when everyone is busy publishing their own papers, or competing to make the news, or signing book deals)? How much of what is repeated by those with a platform just a gambit, riding on the reputation of those claiming it first? How much is just unchecked assumptions (e.g. that others will have certainly verified the claims)? As you start looking closer, the level of imposture and bullshit is just too high. Scientists are as human as anyone, with everything it implies.

Something I put together about 10 years ago: https://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-abou... "Here are some related broad quotes on social problems in science, some of which relate to competition for funding. ..."

See especially from Marcia Angell: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-co... "The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."

And, from the 1990s, from David Goodstein, who was Vice Provost of Caltech then, here is part of why thing have gotten that way: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."

"You better agree with consensus" has always been the current culture in science. It's nothing to do with science itself -- just human emotionality. We don't change unless we have to, unless there's overwhelming evidence that we need to.

That is antithetical to the principles of science, but it depends on what area of science you operate in.

To take the spectrum of shades of grey: - white would be math - first hint of grey with physics - greyer all they way down to biology where every different field has their own bar graphs

You're a lunatic if you say 2+2=5, to return to the cases in point, it's been done, it's been dusted (mostly), and there's going to be a lot more work to do in the future to clear it up but people will always want to see the 'missing link' or proof that there was no leakage (deliberate or otherwise) from the lab.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

If you make a claim that's wildly diverging from established consensus, yes, you're required to bring overwhelming evidence. Because the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the claim being wrong.

There's no point in relitigating everything from first principles unless you can make it extremely clear it's worth the effort.

I would go a step further: The odds of any claim being wrong are overwhelming, regardless of whether it is endorsed by the consensus or not, whether it is ordinary or extraordinary. Brains are not truth-making machines.

Anyhow, I'm not sure what is extraordinary about biowarfare labs making biowarfare agents. It's actually quite ordinary.

Read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."

Always how it has been, since beginning of the thing we call "science."

Yeah but maybe the fact that science and politics and media have become so interwoven and in some cases march to the same drum, it does feel like something is quantitatively different about science in 2020.

Agree both that 2020 is completely effed and that important issues from political perspective right now are unusually science driven.

Having to go through the process Kuhn describes but where both the brains involved in paradigm transition are not trained in evidence, and, the accumulating evidence is...people dying from COVID...is just so grim.

> "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."

Isn't that the whole point of science? Big claims require big proof. What standard are you proposing be used instead?

Or are you leaning on the "better" in that sentence in the sense of coercion? As in, you're saying that arguments without overwhelming evidence that contradict established consensus are being suppressed?

If so, how? This garbage is being circulated endlessly. There's not a virologist in the world who isn't aware of it. It's not suppressed. It's just wrong.

For the sake of argument, something like Einstein's special relativity had little to no evidence backing it up, but was still accepted simply because it provided a more elegant explanation of several concepts. Of course it also had a few weird, testable, consequences that where later confirmed experimentally.

All this is just to illustrate that it's not always easy to prove something right away with large amounts of experimental evidence. However if we consider the 'elegance' of a theory proof then we've abandoned subjectivity. It is a bit of a limitation of experimental science that it cannot determine the prior probability, which therefore must be assessed by evaluating the theory itself, which can only be done by experts, who are fallible.

When little to no experts seem to accept a theory then it's usually a bad sign though.

Einstein's special relativity had lots of evidence backing it up in that existing (Galilean) relativity was completely at odds with electromagnetism. The speed of light is constant, Newton was wrong.

In this situation there is no smoking gun to prove it was made in a lab.

I don't disagree but as this article shows you can probably find a few smoking guns if you look hard enough. However this would be evidence to support a theory that on the face of it doesn't seem to be give that good an explanation. Certainly not as good as the natural outbreak of a coronavirus pandemic, which was considered likely enough to fund the lab involved with the supposed creation of the virus. Asking for more smoking guns is not really all that helpful, in my opinion, when the theory itself is still rather shaky.

I guess this still boils down to 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', but interpreted differently from the way the comment I replied to was using it (which implied that it meant you'd need more proof if you went against the current consensus).

> Einstein's special relativity had lots of evidence backing it up

Yes, it immediately solved several outstanding anomalies. GP should have brought up Einstein’s general relativity as something that had little evidence to back it up initially.

The paper is presenting a handful of smoking guns all at once.

If you’re an expert in this field and can elaborate, I would love to read more. I’ve read the paper, but as a layman it’s difficult to discern why something is a “smoking gun” vs nature at work.

I’m not an expert. The entire content of the paper is the exposition of a series of four published studies, with Wuhan researchers involved, that took a coronavirus and enhanced its ability to infect the human respiratory system, through the mechanisms we are seeing in action now. They argue that these characteristics are known to be originated in the lab, from these previous papers.

> Isn't that the whole point of science?

No, Carl Sagan's famous "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is certainly not the whole point of science. At best it's merely a useful heuristic for judging how much effort to put into researching a particular claim.

Trying to use that argument as the basis for science is highly problematic because how do you know what constitutes an "extraordinary claim" ? Claims can only be evaluated against the current state of scientific knowledge, which is itself in a state of constant evolution and which has also undergone and will continue to undergo many revolutions.

The core of science is the use of repeatable methods which can be verified by anyone (so very similar in spirit to open source software). The gold standards for such methods are random controlled experiments and rigorous mathematical proofs. However in many fields these methods aren't available and weaker ones must be used. Then you can certainly get into much discussion on the strength of the methods used as well as the interpretations of the results.

You're picking on my hyperbole, not my point. I agree with everything you wrote. It's not relevant to this topic.

the papers make a lot of specific arguments. if you have evidence against those arguments, you can say this point is wrong, here is the evidence against it, therefore that claim is likely wrong. Thats science.

Your method comes off as: thats not the consensus, thus you are wrong.

You're missing the point of "consensus". The value of having a scientific consensus of trusted sources is precisely that we don't have to all individually read random conspiracy nonsense and come up with counterarguments on our own. We can trust the experts.

So if you come by with a theory that isn't supported by those experts, the burden is on YOU to convince people, not me.

Now I know you're going to come right back and tell me why, this time, after the last thousand tries, the consensus really is wrong and the conspiracy nuts are actually believing in a REAL conspiracy this time. And again I'll rely on my general sense of statistics to tell me who to trust.

> The value of having a scientific consensus of trusted sources is precisely that we don't have to all individually read random conspiracy nonsense and come up with counterarguments on our own. We can trust the experts.

This sounds like a priesthood. Don’t consider evidence from rando papers. Instead, simply trust the consensus view of these certain, special people who have been blessed as truth-knowers and wear the right robes and hats.

And this sounds like a description you read in a comic book somewhere.

You missed some elements: that "priesthood" isn't a unified block, it's a gaggle of independent thinkers (some of them my friends and family) with a thousand year history of argumentation, refutation, and adjustment of theory. The "priesthood" gets it right, eventually, every time. Yeah, I'll trust that "priesthood".

Unreviewed papers pushed by conspiracy nuts on the internet, on the other hand, don't exactly have that record to back them. They demand that non-experts "read it for themselves" precisely because they can't convince anyone who matters.

I think there's a two way problem. The current state of public discourse on science in the U.S. is very skewed from scientific consensus. For example a YouGov poll found that 49% of Americans think that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab.

This kind of skew between public perception and scientific consensus can create a siege mentality, because it's easy to find someone who has been convinced by some media subculture that something is self-evidently true in spite of reams of evidence to the contrary. As in the vaccination-autism connection situation, all it can take is one scientific study, subsequently debunked, to give an entire movement the validation they need to completely ignore an enormous consensus with plenty of data to back it up.

BTW (need to add this disclaimer on the internets, I often forget) I'm not disagreeing with you, just riffing off your comment with some more thoughts.

What are the “reams of evidence” that the virus did not come from a lab?

True, that was a poor argument on my part. I should say, lack of evidence that it did. Which weakens my argument, so thanks for pointing it out.

Anti-vaxxers is a pretty small movement according to polls, compared to the attention they've been getting (ten percentish). And it's certainly not just a US thing. More people probably believe in astrology.

I'm not a virologist (nor a conspiracy theorist, by the way), but every time I read articles about the origin of covid being settled, I feel like the writer is trying to push an agenda. Yes they give perfectly sound logical reasoning, sure, but that's all it is. The counter view obviously will continue to be driven by the location of the origin.

Edit: and by the way, the autism-caused-by-vaccines theory is not solely the result of a bad study getting too much attention. It is similarly the result of people making conclusions from big coincidences. In this case the onset of autism (at least the age when symptoms get bad) is commonly around the same age that children get vaccinated. The study didn't just make that idea up, they were trying to validate a belief that was already held relatively widely.

It's not just weak, it's incoherent and seemingly written by someone who misunderstood some wikipedia articles on virology.

There's a difference between someone trying to seriously assess the possibility of lab origins for SARS-CoV-2 and whatever GPT-3 generated nonsense this post is.

How many times has a single scientist been chastised by the broader scientific community at first and then their original idea finally accepted as the truth?

Sometimes ideas initially can seem crazy because they're unfamiliar I guess.

I suppose in this case, I oppose this idea because it sounds kind of scary.

How many times has a single scientist been chastised by the broader scientific community at first and then their original idea finally rejected as false?

Almost always. Have you met reviewer number 2? I suppose he's right most of the time, and feels vindicated as a result. I'm just troubled by the the modulus, the work of merit, rare and precious as it is, that suffers from the statistically justified bias for false negatives.

I can certainly understand opposing an idea for diverse reasons, valid or invalid, but I can't understand how it is that some people seem to feel that opposing ideas on the basis of the balance of their features, rather than digging into the conditional structure and examining their merits and demerits, is something to be proud of, rather than ashamed. I consider that many of that group may have been anti-maskers as well, and that eventually evolution will take care of it, but I probably won't see the benefit of that.

You're free to present crazy-sounding arguments in day-to-day conversation, but a journal isn't the place to present crazy arguments. Journals are where you present overwhelming evidence or replicate/falsify existing results.

Journals are where scientists present any sort of evidence that is backed by sound reasoning, meta-studies are where overwhelming evidence tends to be presented.

If it were any other way, then where would scientists publish underwhelming evidence that is crucial for accumulation in order for overwhelming evidence to appear?

>current culture in science

It's been that way for a long time, with Kuhn writing a whole book on it

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_...