This is not a "rebuttal". This is terrible.

Rasmussen asserts things she could not possibly know (e.g. the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter), and focuses on a corner of the article (a side debate about RaTG13 and the physical proximity of it to Wuhan), while completely brushing off the core argument of the piece: the authors of these papers have not demonstrated that the early infections at the market came from animals.

That's the whole ballgame. Rasmussen spends a lot of words setting up and knocking down straw men, but there's nothing else here. To make it worse, she is rude, dismissive, profane and needlessly aggressive. As a former researcher, if a high-profile reporter published a piece questioning my research in a polite and civil manner, I'd like to think I'd be mature enough to engage with that person constructively in a public forum.

Not sure if you read it, but in the New York Magazine article by Nicholson Baker [0], that the rest of the press really hammered them for publishing, there is one bit that I still find really persistently interesting.

He's talking about the lab's lead coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli:

Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.”

If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab.

It's reminiscent of the idea that the CIA were so jumpy about the JFK and RFK assassinations not because they know they did them, but that their fingers were in so many pies with so many undesirables that they didn't know they weren't involved.

I don't think we'll ever know for sure, and I think it's a vanishingly unlikely idea that there was any malice. But an accidental escape? There are viruses named after accidental escapes. They happen.

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...

I find quotes like this uninteresting, because it's also exactly the sort of thing you would say if you were trying to cover up such a mistake. It carries no information.

But on the flip side, the logic used by Baker is more than a little silly. I don't need Shi's quote to make me wonder if an outbreak of a mysterious viral pathogen might just be related to the viral pathogen research center down the street. I don't have a problem with the piece, but Baker was really reaching here.

There's so much sloppy reasoning around all of this stuff, on both sides. It's exhausting to wade into it, but seeing Rasmussen behave the way she did on that twitter thread is just...unprofessional.

> I find quotes like this uninteresting, because it's also exactly the sort of thing you would say if you were trying to cover up such a mistake. It carries no information.

It carries a fair bit of information, when you consider that Shi is not really free to say what she wants. She has to say what they want her to say. That is a carefully crafted state-sponsored message, with all that entails. It's the Chinese state making a denial with the smallest surface area they can make, which is kind of unusual.

But at any rate, Baker's point in context is not that Shi is engaging in a coverup. Nor is his point that until she said that nobody thought to look, or that it gives permission to do so.

His point is not about Chinese science at all, so much as about Western science journalism. He's saying to other journalists, look, you can't just breezily let the world's science contributors dismiss this as fantasy along with the bioweapons nonsense, or let anyone shut it down as taboo. (When this article was written, this was dismissed by really most of the science-journalism complex as wild speculation.) He means, if Shi is saying that, it's a legitimate inquiry and it specifically invites that inquiry.

I can't tell if you simply skipped over words while reading her response or if you simply brought personal bias into your reading.

First, you quote her as stating: "the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter." But her actual tweet notes "To have the virus originate at the lab under any circumstances, the lab has to have the fucking virus!" That seems to be a logical conclusion, which your framing dismisses.

Rasmussen continues by stating "Not only did they not have intact, infectious, replication competent RaTG13–which, again, is not SARS-CoV-2–at WIV, there’s no evidence they had any ancestral proto-SC2 virus." The first point was explained by the tweets above that one, and the second point is clear. There is no evidence that they had the virus, so any argument that there was a lab leak requires them to have the virus in the first place, going back to her first axiom at the beginning of the tweet.

But the bigger issue here seems to be one of framing. Yglesias frames the preprint in the context of the press response to it, and not so much the actual contents. The abstract clearly states: "Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic." Note the lack of any mention of a lab leak here, or anywhere else in the preprint. Rasmussen's rebuttal is done in the frame of the conclusions of her research, which Yglesias misinterprets as a paper trying to disprove the lab leak theory.

Considering that he cites those figures as from the New York Times instead of from the appendix of the preprint, it seems pretty clear that Yglesias is responding to the New York Times article and probably didn't even read the actual preprint.

> But her actual tweet notes "To have the virus originate at the lab under any circumstances, the lab has to have the fucking virus!" That seems to be a logical conclusion, which your framing dismisses.

No, it doesn't. The point I was making is that she can't know what she's claiming to know (and also that she was being incredibly rude).

> Rasmussen continues by stating "Not only did they not have intact, infectious, replication competent RaTG13–which, again, is not SARS-CoV-2–at WIV, there’s no evidence they had any ancestral proto-SC2 virus." The first point was explained by the tweets above that one

The tweets prior to this one in no way support that assertion. In those tweets, she makes a hand-wavy claim that RaTG "is not ancestral" to SARS-CoV2 (this is Not Even Wrong -- it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of phylogeny), and further, that it could not become SARS-CoV2 "even through engineering", which is a truly bizarre, bold claim. Then she advances that the Laos viruses are somehow better in this respect, even though they are also separated from SARS-CoV2 by many mutations, and have the same basic problems.

What Rasmussen is doing here is trying to assert that because "there's no evidence that they had RaTG13", it means that they didn't have it, and Yglesias must be wrong. But that's the whole question. It's a truism.

Did they have it? We don't know. The Chinese aren't saying, and as far as I know, Angie Rasmussen didn't work at the Wuhan lab, so she can't pretend to know either.

> The abstract clearly states: "Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic."

Yeah, abstracts say lots of things that are unsupported by the data below them. They don't prove those claims, and the use of the words "dispositive evidence" is the sort of phrasing that should make any scientist skeptical, unless said evidence involves a warm body and a smoking gun.

Somewhat undermined by restricting to an approved list (only those she follows in addition to Yglesias) who can reply to the rebuttal.

Nope, I can see why she did that.

First off, this topic attracts the Wrong People as well. By the Wrong People I mean terrifying crazy people who will never leave you alone, not merely people with wrong opinions.

Second: she's a woman in science on Twitter. The appalling sexist hate she will absolutely trigger by simply speaking up warrants at least throwing the switch so it can't be seen. This is why so many women writing for newspapers now ask for the comments to be switched off on their articles, too. Because it is endless and soul-damaging.

> but I can't help but feel if you can't deal with the attention appearing/posting things publicly gets you

Deal with it by not being female, maybe?

I mean, I think your idea makes sense in principle. But the nature of the attention is not irrelevant: there is good data that shows that women encounter both the lion's share of online abuse, and also much worse abuse on every level than men, even on non-gender-related topics.

The raw truth of the world is that women in any sphere of influence but perhaps particularly in science and politics get so much more abuse of so much more vile a nature, that we should probably be forgiving of their wish to ultimately just be able to speak without having it shoved in their faces.

>Deal with it by not being female, maybe?

That would imply that women are inherently more socially inept than men.

>there is good data that shows that women encounter both the lion's share of online abuse, and also much worse abuse on every level than men, even on non-gender-related topics.

Is there? Such as? I'm not being glib, I'm honestly asking. I doubt it, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

>perhaps particularly in science and politics get so much more abuse of so much more vile a nature

I think you're exaggerating and losing perspective of just how terrible the world is.

>we should probably be forgiving of their wish to ultimately just be able to speak without having it shoved in their faces.

If you want to, feel free. When someone shuts off others' ability to respond, what it says to me is either that they're not confident enough in their words to defend them (so why did they bother?), or that I should listen to them, but they are important enough not to have to reciprocate that courtesy. Why should I listen in either case?

> That would imply that women are inherently more socially inept than men.

This is absurd. I'd retract it if I'd said it.

> Is there? Such as? I'm not being glib, I'm honestly asking. I doubt it, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

Pick one -- the last two are interesting.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/oct/18/women-on-rea...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/25/yvette-co...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/datablog/ng-interacti...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/how-we-an...

> I think you're exaggerating and losing perspective of just how terrible the world is.

I think you're being rude.

>I think you're being rude.

I'm sorry you think that. I'm not trying to be.

Link 1: The article is light on methodology, and in any case it seems to be categorizing as "abuse" conversations between person A and person B about person C, who is not participating in the discussion. I.e. me telling you "I think emperor Hirohito was kind of a wimp" would be abuse, apparently.

Link 2: Even worse. It's only counting uses of specific words without regard for context. Just uttering the word "slut" is misogynistic? So my previous sentence is misogynistic?

Link 3: I have no tears to shed for any negative attention any politician gets. That's part of the job description. If they can't deal with it they really should have picked a different profession.

Link 4: As a statistical data point it's interesting, but one should be careful about what conclusions to draw from it. They only counted blocked comments. We don't really know what those comments contained (although we're invited to assume they were misogynistic and abusive towards the writer). We don't know what the specific topics the articles in question were about. For example, could it be that women tend to write more often about controversial topics, for whatever reason? We don't know if all articles are subjected to the same amount of moderation. If articles A and B have the same number of comments, but B has twice as many blocked comments, and twice as many people moderating it, they might not be so lopsided as it appears.

To be clear, I'm not denying that women probably do get more negative attention online. There's probably a fair bit of overlap between being loud and annoying and hating women. I just think these stats are garbage, except for link 4.

I think there are two reasonable positions that aren’t contradictory:

1) public figures should anticipate public attention; 2) women and other minorities receive order of magnitude more harassment online when they become public figures

In this perception it seems reasonable to be a woman in public, anticipate more harassment, and operate in public appropriately. After all, she’s not legally obligated to open her replies (and people can qrt or screenshot if they want to engage).

>she’s not legally obligated to open her replies

Obviously not. I'm not talking about what's legal or illegal, I'm talking about being courteous by engaging with other's responses to you. Yes, some people will not be courteous back, but by disabling the ability to reply you're shutting everyone out.

People can quote retweet or screenshot if they want to engage. This isn’t a locked account or one that has most of Twitter blocked or something, so they’re clearly not shutting everyone out.

You can always send a rebuttal to a relevant journal

Do they actually? Has this been proven? I know that I'm just supposed to take any anecdotes about race and gender as unquestionable truth, but I just don't.

You know thanks to your inquiry I did some cursory googling and while it seems women claim to receive about similar amounts of harassment, the nature of the harassment is generally much more focused and experienced as much more distressing than men (for example, women experience more sexual harassment and rape threats online, while men receive more generically offensive or insulting language). I guess in this case the adjustment can be that women can anticipate more rape threats and sexual harassment and act appropriately. Thanks for pushing me to do some more research about it.

If you really care, there are plenty of ways to research now that everyone has the internet. Next time you have this argument, you'll be armed with information.

It’s fantastic performance art to be posting this sentiment to a public forum using an anonymous account you just created.

Are you accusing me of hypocrisy? The way to avoid negative attention is by being anonymous. People who specifically avoid being anonymous want to have a reputation. When they turn around and moan about being insulted they're trying to have their cake and eat it too: they want only the positive attention attached to their identity and none of the negative attention. That's just not how the world works.

You also probably have no idea the volume of attention that being openly female gets you on the internet.

Why would anyone have "no idea" about this? We're literally surrounded by women - moms, sisters, friends, wives - our entire lives. This is not some secret knowledge that men cannot grasp. Men know the score here, and have even intervened for our sisters or nieces when needed. I see stuff like this all the time online, it's absurd. Who do you think I spend most of my time with? Women. I came from a woman.

Because they don't have the lived experience? Go give it a try. Its an eye-opener.

I'm well aware. One chooses how to present oneself. Do you know if I'm a woman? Do you think you don't know by accident? If I want my ideas to be heard they should be the focus of my communication, not any part of my identity.

That's not a thing that you can do on twitter where your gender is already public. It's not her that would be intentionally entangling her gender with the ideas that she's expressing, it's her that wouldn't be able to escape her gender being entangled with the ideas that she's expressing.

I'd venture to say that most racial/ethnic minorities try to stay within the pseudoanonymous assumption that everybody on the internet is a white man as long as possible. If you're posting on the internet as a public person, that's not an option.