More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

Re:More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins by smallnamespace on Monday May 17, 2021 @11:05PM (#27190842)

> It's absurd that this is almost never talked about anywhere

FYI, this really doesn't match my experience. I got curious and Googled about the lab's location myself about a year ago, not long after the outbreak, and found the hypothesis tantalizing, even in the absence of hard evidence.

I've seen ongoing discussion about this since then on various blogs and on Twitter.

As a more meta-comment, we're all in tiny, personalized information silos nowadays based on the sites and communities we frequent. Even a pseudo-public forum like Twitter is not really public - you only see the slice that you follow.

IMO 'nobody is talking about it' is more about how you've curated your own info-stream, rather than about the world at large.

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Re:More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins by divbzero on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @01:31AM (#27191541)

To add one more data point, for the past year I’ve been following this story passively — reading articles I’ve come across but never searching actively — and this is the first I’ve heard of the coincident location of the Wuhan CDC.

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Re:More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins by sitkack on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @02:37AM (#27191844)

Replying to you and @smallnamespace, not only are we in extremely small silos, you can realize how small the silo is by

1) taking sporadic notes, but not full urls

2) attempting to follow your same trail again

I often find I can't even, with knowledge of what I read/saw find the same sources again, using the same tools and sites without basically taking detailed notes. The idea that information is public and can be connected in the same way is preposterous, but only via experience.

If you have an insight, or a linkage between facts and events, please document it in a way that is shareable and findable. I too saw the ad for the virologist post-doc position in the Wuhan lab. I think lab escape of either a wild virus or a slightly modified one is likely. It doesn't mean that it is nefarious.

I think a full text and graphical log of the research process would be highly productive.

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Re:More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins by trompetenaccoun on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @11:59AM (#27196485)

That's important advice. The thought of documenting anything didn't even cross my mind in the early days of the pandemic. It was all so blatantly suspicious that I had no doubt large news outlets would report on it any day, and then there would be international pressure for a proper investigation. But that day never came. Instead they started spreading the bat-eating story after Chinese state media claimed the virus originated in the market, without evidence. People don't even eat bat in Wuhan. And when that got questioned they switched to pangolins. To this day no such link was found. And the Wuhan CDC lab was never investigated.

There's so much distraction, hysteria and extremely questionable science reporting. Without having in depth knowledge about Mainland China, I'm not sure if I'd not fallen for some of the misinformation as well. So yes, it's extremely important people document what they see and understand, and share it with other in a way that makes it easily accessible. When many journalists do a bad job at fact checking and questioning their sources, we have to be better than that, else we just contribute to the noise.

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Re:More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins by Anapologetos on Wednesday May 19, 2021 @09:37AM (#27208371)

@sitkack

Check out Hunchly - https://www.hunch.ly/

"Hunchly automatically collects, documents, and annotates every web page you visit."

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