I want to disagree with you and say it doesn’t matter, but you’re definitely right hiding bad situations is in the playbook of the authoritarian and should have no place in our society.

It matters in the same way that understanding why a plane crashed matters. If you can't figure out why a plane crashed then you can't improve flight safety much.

This is a helpful apolitical perspective. We need to improve social safety. But the pandemic is different in scope. It's not that the plane crashed. Rather, our technology "may have" allowed us to accidentally make a pandemic. It's as if no plane crash had ever occurred before, and now we made one happen. If we understand what really happened, we might see this event as bringing us into a new era in our evolution. The fact that we can imagine this to be the case even while firmly denying it to be what happened it's a firm sign that the times have changed.

I'm curious if you would expand on your last two sentences. They sound interesting but I don't quite grasp it.

That’s because it’s a mechanical device owned by a single large international company.

You can’t “engineer away” a virus.

The airplane analogy only makes sense of you say the result of investigation is to apply international sanctions against countries who continue to manufacture unsafe aircraft and fly them domestically…

…but, you have a) arguably no business telling them what to do in their own country and b) how are you even going to know, since those aircraft never visit your country?

Ie. yeah, great concept, but it’s so disparate from what we’re actually talking about it’s meaningless in this context.

It won’t fix things, or make things better knowing where it came from.

The only wins will be ideological.

>You can’t “engineer away” a virus.

If the virus is caused by risky research, you can stop doing risky research.

>arguably no business telling them what to do in their own country

Aren't there international standards for dealing with viruses? Also, some of the research in the Wuhan lab was funded by the US. So the US did have business telling them what to do in some cases regardless of international standards.

The genie is out of that bottle - the research has been done, and can be replicated by less honest actors. Under these circumstances, continuing this kind of research to understand how to combat viruses created by rouge actors might be the right thing to do.

By figuring out how it leaked, you can fix gaps in lab safety processes.

We have always been at war with Eurasia

*Eastasia.

I'm crushed that it is too late to ninja edit my comment

> I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened).

You're not wrong, but I think what you're missing is that the risky research was funded (in part) by the us federal government, and no one voted for that in the first place. So even if we were all enlightened, what could we change? So many people still don't even know that there was a lab studying coronaviruses in wuhan.

People voted for it indirectly and if they knew that the virus originated because of that (I’m not saying it did, I have no idea) it would allow them to pressure politicians in insuring it never happens again.

They voted for it via representative democracy. If it comes out that there was a leak and politicians still want to fund this kind of thing, then they'll get less votes.

You could highlight all the research being conducted in future so more stakeholders can weigh in on the risks. You can raise the requirements for conducting such research, or in extreme cases prevent it from being done. The assumption that “nothing can be done” has to be the worst approach, given the multitude of alternatives. Simply trying increases the odds that improvements are found.

Nobody votes for most things in a representative democracy. I don't think you'd be surprised to know that bad press is effective at changing behavior.

The notable exception is Donald Trump, whose superpower is that shame causes him to double down. He's the kryptonite for a representative democracy. Just because of that, I'll never understand why people voted him in.

Transparency is the most important tool in becoming a better society.

I definitely agree that there's good reason to know what actually happened, if for nothing else for the sake of long term trust in institutions. Instead of group, something more like organizations and institutions with the ability to investigate and hold people accountable would probably be more accurate.

That's such a diffuse benefit that you'd need to compare it to other things that benefit literally everyone alive - for example, the environment which sustains our existence - to determine how effective a motivator that is.

It's not looking great.

> I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened).

I really don't think so. Knowing what actually happened makes no difference. What is important is knowing what problems exist and what can possibly happen as a consequence of them.

>"I really don't think so. Knowing what actually happened makes no difference. What is important is knowing what problems exist and what can possibly happen as a consequence of them."

Doing a root cause analysis is useful, because it provides you with information about certain modes of failure and their causes. Ignoring past failures, and using a 'tabula rasa' approach will deprive decision-makers of valuable information, and lead to repeating past errors.