After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself.
When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.”
And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-...
This literally happens every goddamn time. Natural explanation is simpler.
NO it doesn't. Just because some theories LATER turned out to be wrong does not mean that we automatically dismissing this or that theory. It really doesn't matter if the "lab leak theory" is later on definitively discredited. To me thats not the point. The point is whether or not there was any justification for not only ignoring but actively removing it from discourse urgently as was done at a time when no one knew anything for certain.
Any scientist worth his/her salt shouldn't dismiss any theory outright without having hard data to back it up.
- There's strong evidence that it's not bioengineered; scientists used very strong and convincing language here.
- There was initially hope of finding the zoonotic reservoir; scientists used couched language here to subtly detangle a natural virus vs. a natural virus that had adapted to passage in cell culture in a lab, and had priors assuming a zoonotic source would be found.
Guess which language journalists glommed onto.
It makes sense they are so against the idea, no one wants to be associated with/partially responsible for the death of 4 million + people worldwide, nor do they want to have their careers ruined.
The other thing is that this case seems different? It's not some vague accusation based on some xenophobic idea of "The Other" or a geopolitical adversary, or a threatening location -- for instance, a US military rival, or a military base -- but rather a large lab specifically focused on experimental virology research. Even more specifically, it's a lab that has been involved in genetically manipulating closely related viruses to be more virulent. There's been suspicious coverup activity by multiple parties, which in itself is not evidence, but I think raises some "worthy of investigation" rationale, and also has been a serious ethical problem in itself regardless of the actual SARS-CoV-2 origin.
I guess in short, yes, there's always conspiracy theories. But this time is different. I don't really see this situation as comparable to other situations, because the evidence justifying serious consideration is so specific.
Personally, I think the train has left the station on ever figuring out what really was the source. This delay in itself seems suspicious to me but I don't know that I'll ever really feel confident about any particular explanation.
As for "simpler", I think that depends on your subjective opinion. I personally think that the perspective that the "natural explanation" is simpler is naive, and underestimates human behavior, especially in our time.
Take Ebola: is it really irrational for non-white, non-Euroamericans to be suspicious of health care workers given, for instance, what happened at Tuskegee and in the search for Osama Bin Laden? There's a reasonable argument that it is irrational, but also a reasonable argument it's not irrational. Turn it around. What's simpler?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor
Razor's aren't scientifically rigorous theorems. Feel free to use them but don't argue by them in a public forum, it's disingenuous to truth.
> "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory...
It never occurred to these people that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats there is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling.
The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on?
Originally, trust in scientists was not required. Because anyone could have repeated the experiment and should see results consistent with what the scientists were saying.
This is where the credibility of science come from and it made people's trust in science grow to a kind of blind faith. But then some point, experiments became too large to be attempted by anyone. This along with entities like "consensus" and "reputation", that can reject any conflicting results, enabled entities that control all of these to have a veto power on scientific truth.
This is our current situation. And I am not sure people recognise the true danger of this situation. This is the kind of power that in holy men held in ancient times, where you could make people to do mass murders and other atrocities in the name of god. So I think it is very dangerous. It might not be that bad as of now, but we are in that path.
One solution to this problem is to recognise and reduce the trust in "science" that is a result such collaboration.
May be we can do it by using a measure of how easily verifiable a result is. For example, if something is verifiable by anyone in this planet, it should have a measure of 1. And if it is only verifiable by a single entity, then it should have a measure of zero. If it is verifiable by a few entities, then it should be somewhere between.
1. Being able to replicate a study is necessary but not sufficient for the conclusions to be correct. Scientists pump out a lot of studies that are just doing stats on public data sets. These should be easily replicable, but the conclusions may still be nonsensical if the analysis isn't done right (and a lot aren't done right), or if the scientific work itself contains fraud or logic errors (and a lot do).
2. There are no incentives for scientists to make their work replicable. Their salary does not depend on it. Their salary isn't going to depend on it, because the scientific institutions are all basically dependent on funding by governments or rich benefactors who aren't paying attention - funding "science" is not a means to an end but the end in and of itself for these groups, and thus they aren't particularly motivated to double check the quality of what gets released.
Consider the above problem: scientists were deceiving people because they thought helping Trump is the same thing as helping "racists". Scott Alexander did a very thorough analysis of this where he pointed out that Trump is not, in fact, racist and a lot of the claims that his followers are don't make any sense [1]. If self-proclaimed scientists can't do even basic sanity checks on their own beliefs like that, you can imagine how much they struggle with more complicated claims.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...
May be I didn't make myself clear. I only meant to include actual experiments, in the context. So it will only involve procedures that include collecting raw data from nature.
Mostly agree with the rest of your comment.
Consider that the normal 'street' definition of people doing experiments on nature would mean the following fields aren't scientific:
1. Computer science
2. Economics
3. Climatology
I'd personally be fine with all three being considered un-scientific or even defunded, even though I quite enjoy reading computer science papers. It's more of an engineering discipline in my view and the attempts to make it seem scientific mostly just obfuscate things.
And most people would be fine with economics not being a science.
The live wire is of course climatology. These people don't do experiments, they just compile data and analyze it. Good luck convincing people that climatology isn't a science, even though you may be in the right about it!
And now in mid-2021, one of the few things that we know for sure is that some of the key scientists in the "It must be natural" camp have ties with the WIV and thus a strong conflict of interest that they did not disclose.
And then of course, there is the fact that China is blocking all research. Is that only China being China?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
More info on the same topic: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/under-fire-lancet-...
It's like when some out-of-control company creates a superfund site through gross negligence of industrial byproduct handling and then goes "idk cancer gonna cancer. you can't link that to us!".