Words of Estimative Probability (PDF) https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/ar...
An institution will not have assessments on everything at any point in time. Two different institutions might have didferent assessments for a billion reasons, e.g. they could have done the research at different points in time, the underlying evisence could differ, the interviewed experts could have said different things and so on.
Two different instutions reaching different conclusions is not as surprising as it seems.
If the CIA came out tomorrow and said they were 100% confident it was a lab leak from China we would have no way of knowing if that's based on facts or political propaganda.
Maybe, in 40-50 years we'll get an answer. Until then, it's too politically and strategically useful to keep it up in the air. At least one goal is for people to be arguing about it.
Then you know they are lying.
It makes it a lot more likely that public support for the non-lab leak theories will change once we get the chance to see the government's new evidence though.
Sarin would be classed as chemical, not biological.
It's also worth illustrating that their primary terrorist act killed 15 people, after releasing sarin on 5 different trains during Tokyo's busy rush hour. You would have been more effective just lobbing a single grenade.
It is beneficial to the survival of a virus to infect the largest group that it can. A virus targeted to a small group of people has a large "survival benefit" the moment it can mutate to infect everybody.
In addition, it's really hard to target a biological entity at a specific subgroup of humans. From a biological standpoint, all humans are damn near identical.
Depends on the virus - something with the long incubating periods and frequent lack of symptoms like Covid yes, but something much more quick and deadly (say, Ebola, even though 2-21 days is still potentially slow) could result in quick mass deaths without the opportunity to spread it around.
The more these claims based on minimal new evidence are repeated, the more it seems the virus may have potentially been released by nefarious actors as an attack on the population.
It's not implausable for an entity with knowledge and access to a virus being studied, to release a copy of it in the environment surrounding the lab while maintaining a high degree of deniability.
If that is so, then the question that remains is, much like in the case of Nordstream, which nation state has the most incentive to carry it out?
Previously the 'big lie' was that it was not from a lab. Now that it's assessed to be likely from a lab the new lie is the contention that it was done deliberately? Whose propaganda machine is at work here anyway? The Chinese govt or the US one? Or are they in cahoots now?
seems to me you're still leaving out a very important part of the news, which is that the confidence level is "low".
so right now the US government has multiple theories, none of which it is confident. it's just that of the reports that is not confident in, it might be the least not confident in the lab leak idea.
but the WSJ has decided to throw integrity aside and ignore that part in their headline.
The media gave up on integrity a long time ago, especially with respect to the pandemic. You're just noticing it now?
Confidence, high, low, whatever, it means nothing. No one trusts the govt. or media anymore and no one should.
I suspect many of those are the same ones who are eager to sweep it under the rug, or now turn to conspiracy theory that THIS story is part of a psyop but not the original response from the science/health authorities.
Both headlines are clickbait compared to the content of the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...
Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic?
I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands.
(And while we're on the subject, did anything come of the thing about Pfizer engineering the virus, ostensibly for vaccine research purposes?)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247997
As I noted in my reply at that time, everyone has always agreed that the overall server remained intermittently accessible until Feb 2020. The particular database "was not accessed from outside of the WIV after 12 September 2019", though.
And you seriously believe their claim that it was taken down due to "hacking attempts"? Given the international importance of the subject, is there really no one anywhere in China who can keep a simple database-backed website running? Or could they not share the information in a form that obviously presents no information security risk, like a dump on a flash drive?
Circumstantial evidence is not proof of wrongdoing, but it is reason to ask more questions. Why were those questions censored? Why were they ruled unacceptable "misinformation"? It seems to me that we were asleep at the switch.
I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that the research is and was worth it. But we need to have an accurate accounting of recent events. They tried to completely shut that down. Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.
Please explain to me how position A) is more racist than position B)
A) Scientists all over the world, including Chinese, Americans, and others, made a fundamental misjudgement about the safety of the Wuhan virology lab, or perhaps viral experimentation generally, and the result was a global pandemic
Versus
B) Chinese people eating & trading wild and exotic meat unintentionally caused a global pandemic due to their consumption
Of course, neither theory is racist. That's a word that used to mean something (and I wish it still did!), but is mostly used today to shut down debate in Western countries.
I mean... for several years, the notion that Chinese people are unsanitary was conisdered not racist, while the notion that extremely smart Chinese bioscientists may have covered up a lab accident was considered Asian hating. That sort of double think is worthy of questioning and criticism.
I still get the impression the 'selectively silence misinformation' crowd is still as emboldened as ever, even in the pursuit of science. Despite it repeatedly failing and backfiring.
COVID helped give Reddit-style control of discourse a glean of urgency/respectability and "it's okay because we had good-intentions" continues to be the go-to justification.
I don't know about those specifically, but one of the earliest genetic matches we had is a natural virus called RaTG13 and was studied in the Wuhan lab. I think a closer match has since been found though.
> I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands.
Yes, indirectly through EcoHealth Alliance, hence the "without its own knowledge" part.
I believe the most likely research-related origin involves an unpublished virus. I don't think that's implausible; the WIV was also sampling in Laos, and no research group in the world has published literally everything they're currently working on. Even with no attempt at secrecy, it takes time to write stuff up. It's also possible that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus collected and leaked by the WIV before they were able to sequence it.
As to the grandparent's final question, I'm not aware of any serious claim that Pfizer had anything to do with this. There was a claim that Moderna was somehow involved, based on a genetic sequence that appears both in SARS-CoV-2 and in a pre-pandemic Moderna patent; but that sequence appears in other previously-known organisms too.
What I heard about that was based on supposed leaked information (Project Veritas). Such information going public would obviously be very bad PR, so it would make sense for it to be secret, if it's real. But also, anyone can record a fake interview (and nowadays, somewhat convincingly replace the faces and voices too), so...
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/02/scicheck-no-evidence-pfize...
I'm not aware of anyone developing vaccines targeting laboratory-enhanced viruses. GoF proponents sometimes cite earlier vaccine development as a possible benefit, but even they don't actually fund such work--the mutations that occur in the lab aren't predictive enough of the mutations that will occur in real human spread to justify the speculative investment. The research of concern is pretty much all in academia, basic research with more nebulous intended benefit.
However, a thought experiment, what if their zero-covid program was a test pilot to see a pandemic could be averted on a local scale through govt intervention, so if they unleashed something much more deadly, it'd be contained in the country, but hit other countries worse.
I mean it seems reasonable that if you wanted to launch biological warfare you'd want to be sure there was either a cure, or you could contain it outside the country, from getting into the population. I could also see some despot thinking he was doing a good thing for humanity by unleashing a virus with a 50% kill rate, because of the impact on global warming alone. Scary, that one person could decide to do that, and nobody could stop it, if they did.
A lab doing questionable work with inadequate safety measures hiding a major leak to save face makes way more sense than a supervillain story.
I’m trying to think of anyone involved had a conscience if they would be tallying themselves to be one of the most prolific murderers in history but then that likely wouldn’t happen since first unofficial hazing ritual you do when entering academia is to develop an air of “that’s not me” attitude about things like this.
After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but they willfully don't want to.
There are good reasons to have polls and predictions but they are far from necessary.
The original claim was that election prediction is useless -- are you willing to concede that election prediction isn't useless?
1. First, when many pundits were basically saying there was no chance that Trump would win, Silver was particularly highlighting not just that it was in the realm of possibility, but would not even be very surprising if Trump won (e.g. I think Nate does a good job with his "same probability of a team down by 3 points at the beginning of the 4th quarter coming back to win" to clarify to a lay person that this isn't unusual).
2. When making political predictions based on polling that turn out to be "wrong" (i.e. end up going the way of the < 50% option), it's helpful to think of why this might happen. In Trump's case, it was pretty obvious he was a very different type of politician than what came before, so it's worth thinking whether that difference might result in widespread error in some polls. Also, whenever a race is very close, it's obvious that any small movements one way or the other can affect the outcome. In 2016 Trump lost the popular vote by a substantial margin but won the electoral collage by a significant but not huge amount. In fact, the "all or nothing" way the US electoral college system works has the effect of amplifying smaller differences into larger vote outcomes.
Those who do reflexively apply probability assessments however, would do well to also perceive when to accept heuristic Good Enough solutions.
Lets say it is found out with definite proof that it was a lab leak. Then what? Grandma's dead, china killed her and there is nothing you can do. We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it.
Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.
The first stage of grief is denial.
If this kind of research is so important then maybe the nations of the world should buy a cruise ship and implement extreme isolation protocols between interactions, if that's the only way to safely perform that kind of research. Just as an example.
My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably.
The proximal host is the animal that transmitted the virus to humans. That host was identified for SARS-1 (civet cats) and MERS (camels) within about a year. For example, here's an article from 2003:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/
The reservoir host is the animal in which most of the virus's genome evolved. That host (bats for both) took much longer to identify, through Dr. Shi's work at the WIV.
Since SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to SARS-1, we knew its reservoir host (bats) as soon as it was sequenced. We still don't know its proximal host. The proximal host is the critical question in establishing natural zoonotic origin--no one disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats, just whether its path into humans involved a research accident.
Without knowing, and a proper investigation, we can't decide. If it was negligence, punishment is used for a variety of reasons. Often, it is the only way to get people to push back against employers.
And fines, are often the only way to get companies to care.
When what you make has the potential to impact billions; no offense, but I expect you to be a bit more hardcore about your adherence to safe practices of your trade.
If this means the only people who end up becoming virologists and doing work that conceivably leads to the creation of pandemic pathogens are the most hardcore mf'ers with a boner for safety, perfectionism , and preserving their own skin; ...I'm actually okay with that.
I'll even sweeten the pot. Lets extend that to Software Engineers and get a PE program for that sorted.
Consistency after all.
Long story short: "Oopsie" as an excuse stops applying when your body count becomes non-zero.
That sounds like a call for professional licensure and personal financial penalties for failures. Ensuring financial ruin for GoF cowgirls and cowboys and their families would be a good start.
The original Lancet article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The retraction: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
In my experience it's rather that "lab leak" means "bad foreigners we're already hating did this to everyone, why won't we nuke them already or something", when the alternative would be to actually think about failing healthcare, vulnerable supply chains, lack of trust in institutions, etc.
"Lab leak" is a cop-out. It should lead to improving procedures in biolabs, but people there are already doing it anyway, because they're smart enough to think about possibilities ("oh, even if it was a wet market issue this time, the next one might be someone here fucking up; let's review the procedures to make that less likely to happen"). For general population, the media and political sphere, it's just a permission to dismiss and ignore any potential fixes ("You say spending more on X would reduce the spread of the virus? It's not like the last one was because of problem with X - it came from a foreign lab, nothing X can do about it!").
"Encroachment on the natural world" is mostly orthogonal to that. We are going to keep encroaching on it anyway, and the way to do it safely is to do those fixes that "lab leak" gives an excuse for not doing.
> If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future
I'm not sure why people choose to assume their simple solutions are somehow insightful. You aren't going to be able to reach into most countries to intervene in any other way than simple sanctions at best. The protocol of "asking country X please knock it off" is not productive, as it's not going to result in any specific change, it hurts trade, and every country is doing it to some degree despite previous agreements on the world stage (basic Game Theory).
This is what the GP described, yet someone still thinks that nobody involved, understands "basic engineering". Very smart people do this kind of work with money and lives at stake. Let's give a little rope to people with big responsibilities, to try to understand the motivations rather than assume they are ignorant.
1- China has suffered more than enough to revaluate protocols around virus handling. The pandemic has done more to undermine confidence in their government than anything else in decades. They've got plenty of reason to be invested in change if change is warranted
2- The US government could put stronger regulations in place around funding companies that turn around and fund foreign labs (such as ecohealth) unless those projects can demonstrate compliance with new, safer protocols. What you call simple sanctions, I call the power of the purse.
All of this happens only if we determine whether the existing protocols, or lax enforcement of them, gave rise to the spread of the virus.
Just shrugging it off and saying "meh, it's hard so why bother" is a recipe for future man-made disasters.
*Assuming the lab leak was accidental, rather than intentional
If it turned out to be not a lab leak, fine, carry on. If it was a lab leak, why on earth should I be complacent about my tax dollars contributing to the next one?
I think their point is that if genocide wasn't enough to motivate us to change our relationship with China, then a revelation about COVID originating from a Chinese lab probably isn't going to do much to move the needle either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202...
Unfortunately people in US don't even know where Yemen is or that there is a war that they are supporting together with a bloody dictator. Because they do not want to intervene directly, if a single US soldier dies, everybody at home will know about this war, started in 2015, with the excuse of the terrorism, it only created newborn real terrorists that have fallen in the hands of Iran and Al-Qaeda. They send drones though, at least 370 thousand people have died, mainly for the consequences of war (famine, lack of drinkable water, diseases, displacement). A war that the US have no intention of stopping.
You know who's doing one of the best jobs in the area? China and Russia. Yes, those China and Russia. They recognize the international recognized government and have no contacts with the factions close to Iran. They also haven't killed or armed anybody. Their diplomacies have been constantly at work together with EU members for a cease-fire. Unlike the US. They know that an unstable Yemen is detrimental for China, even though people are dying, they do not care: there is money to be made.
Thanks for reminding us how dangerous ignorance is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949969.)
What do you have to say to the Uighur women who claim mass rape at the hands of the Chinese State?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-chi...
only Americans were touched by covid I guess...
> The first stage of grief is denial.
At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes.
Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900
The first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China.
They always need someone to blame.
Remember when they went to war with Iraq on fabricated evidence?
Remember when they wen to war with Afghanistan after 9/11, but Afghanistan had no responsibility whatsoever (again!) and 10 years later they handed the country back to Talibans?
Can we consider 9/11 an accident?
Would it be the same to you?
You know when really nobody talks about it?
When it's the US killing people out of negligence and incompetence and sheer arrogance.
Are you aware of this?
Do they talk about it in USA?
They never apologized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
***
can we also talk about this?
I'm quite sure how these poor people died makes a lot of difference for the families of the victims.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes...
***
It's not China fault if during covid in USA Trump was President and people really believed that covid wasn't real and a lot of Americans died with a rate double than my Country which was already hit very hard BTW.
China handled it much better anyway.
It just happens that for some stupid reason, neither the Republican or Democratic parties have a great track record of producing candidates that can manage to walk the line of foreign policy that minimally entangles us with very poorly advised foreign intervention.
Which is made all the more difficult when allies don't do their utmost in terms of defense spending. The U.S. doesn't need to always be the first bunch of people everyone looks to when some autocratic idiot starts rattling the saber again. This may even be made easier if we don't export advanced manufacturing business to places that value human life and time at approximately zero because it makes the quarterly reports look better.
After all, it's way harder to be an autocrat when no one will do enough business with you to keep the military sufficiently in your pocket. Or teach you how to make the machines that make arms or advanced weaponry. Or sell you said arms.
To me the post was answering to someone claiming that
- Americans suffered the consequences of COVID because of China, which is arguably not true, they have handled the pandemic badly because of their own faults, incompetence and hubris (and a President in denial).
- The Americans are at the first stage of grieving over this, because they are obviously victims, while truth is they are often perpetrators that just don't care of the consequences of what they do, because if some non American dies, it's probably because they deserve it. During COVID they proved that they also don't care very much if someone of their own dies, because FREE MARKET OH YEAH! FLY EAGLE OF FREEDOM! Which has honestly been embarrassing, watching from outside.
If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling.
I'm not American, nor do I live in America.
And while I have some sympathy for pointing out "the world is not the US", the majority of the comment was bald whataboutism:
> "At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes. Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900. he first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China."
How does this sound?
It's completely normal to me to answer: well my friend, first of all a leak is a mistake, it's not intentional since, you know, the first who paid where the Chinese themselves, it would be pretty stupid to do it intentionally. But if you really think things go that way because people do not understand who's their enemy (the Chinese who want to kill you by engineering a virus), what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?
Should they cut the links too?
What about what the USA and UK did to Chinese people?
There's a reason why they made a cultural revolution and chose communism, and no, being a "democracy" doesn't make your country automatically better.
Spoiler alert: American people have lost many relatives because of their government.
So maybe it's toward them that they should be angry and ask for a change.
Even if it was a lab leak, the right solution would be cooperation, so that it doesn't happen again (because next time could happen to the US...)
As I said: literally whataboutism. And that is just a distraction tactic used to deflect attention from the issue at hand.
In some limited circumstances it may be a legitimate tactic, for example, when it is relevant to highlight that the person making the accusation has a bias. For the most part, however, even if the person making the accusation is a hypocrite or has double standards, this does not mean that their accusation is false.
https://theconversation.com/whataboutism-what-it-is-and-why-...
It's completely legitimate to have a discussion about US imperialism. But not to try to deflect a discussion about Chinese recalcitrance by deflecting it like this.
The significance of getting people to investigate, and if all things are true, confirm lab leak is that it puts an impetus on the importance of controls and second is a corrective measure for all the people who colluded to suppress lab leak being discussed. I am very interested in seeing those people held accountable in very direct ways, even if they were under false impressions at the time. That starts with all the names on that infamous open letter.
> The October 2021 report said that there was a consensus that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program. But it didn’t settle the debate over whether it resulted from a lab leak or came from an animal, saying that more information was needed from the Chinese authorities.
I don't know what point the quote is getting to. I already said it wasn't a bioweapon.
``` Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2. ```
allegedly, with a very low confidence.
now let's check how Americans handle their military bases.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/06/military-bas...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/23/us-soldiers-...
https://gijn.org/2022/08/22/investigating-toxic-military-bas...
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/11/09/cdc-conduct-h...
https://www.eenews.net/articles/high-levels-of-forever-chemi...
This is not a flamewar, it is what is called "counter reasoning".
There are people claiming that USA (and only USA) suffered because someone else's incompetence, but I lost a friend during COVID in the USA because of the undeniable underestimation (to say the least) that the Presidency of US showed.
He would have lived if he was in China.
So, please, if you have to ban me, do it, publicly, so a record will remain that in this forum criticizing the US leads to a ban.
There's no better way to prove my point: US is not better than China when their interests and their image is on the line. They would do anything to silent critiques, including killing innocents.
Like they have done to so many people in my Country, for no other reason than being not 100% aligned with their colonial plans.
Please, do what you have to do, I won't stop criticizing the US mentality whenever i deem it necessary. Because, you know, when I was young I was a supporter of the US because they fought against the "single thought", but now they have become it.
If the "hacker news" has become the place where an yet unproven mistake is proof of "incompetence" or worse "a genocidal plan", than HN is no different from VK.
The idea that we would hurt our own economic future out of grief/vengeance is bizarre. So yes, everyone does know what you suggest, and we’re all OK with it.
Anyone can have their own theory of things, but what separates Trump and the "crazies" from the rest of us (including many of those who suspected the lab leak theory was true) is that one group accepted the possibility and investigated that, while the others were running around calling for "china to pay" and beating up random Asian people in the streets at a time when the evidence we had for the the lab leak theory was weaker than the evidence we had for other theories.
Even today, while the evidence is inconclusive, what changed was that we have additional evidence that has raised the level of credibility of the lab leak theory.
"Crazies" went all in regardless of evidence or reason, and for that the pejorative is well earned.
Because they had evidence that made the wet market theory the one most likely to be true, and a lack of stronger evidence for the lab leak theory. Investigating and supporting the theory that is best supported by the evidence you have isn't crazy, it's science.
When you look at all the facts you have, and then ignore that because it doesn't support what you want to be true, and then you act on what you wish was true instead, that's crazy. That's exactly what Trump and many of his supporters were doing.
We have new evidence now that suggests the lab leak theory is more likely than the wet market one, so non-crazy people will support the lab leak theory when they could not (and should not) have before.
sorry but what was evidence supporting wet market theory when this article was published
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/health/coronavirus-animal...
> The new virus seems to have leapt from wildlife to humans in a seafood and meat market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were slaughtered and sold as food.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/science/pangolin-coronavi...
None of these qualify as evidence that you say the claim was based on.
There was a lot of evidence supporting the wet market theory a the time and supporting that it wasn't made in a lab (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) including exposure to the market by early patients (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) and the fact that wet markets have been guilty of spreading similar diseases in the past (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14738798/)
You do realise that when people say it was a lab leak, they don't necessarily mean it was made in a lab. They are merely saying that the origin of the pandemic was a virus escaping the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology via one of the workers/researchers there.
The idea that someone in the lab down the street was accidentally infected with something from the lab and then went to lunch is far more plausible than creatures from thousands of miles away introduced a disease down the street street from a lab working on viruses that are known to be almost identical to the one of interest.
There’s no issue with pursuing all leads, but obviously some are much more plausible than others.
We know that because…?
"Raccoon dogs, marmots, civets, mink, Siberian badgers and many other furry mammals that could have served as intermediate hosts for the SARS-CoV-2 virus were openly, illegally and profitably sold in the market. The wild and farmed animals were documented to be in poor health, and crowded together in their cages."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...
"Live animals that are susceptible to COVID-19 were in the market in December 2019"
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162...
pangolin werent sold at wet markets though ?
> is that one group accepted the possibility and investigated that
I'm not sure what group you mean here, but that was certainly not mainstream media, "The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment. Those spent 100% of the effort on suppressing any possibility of the lab leak theory being seriously considered and investigated and declaring anybody who disagreed "crazies", and 0% of the effort investigating anything. To the honor of the actual scientific community, they managed to fight back and re-legitimize the leak theory, but it took significant time and effort, and significant struggle. And the PR damage (and career damage, etc.) to the people who dared to dissent was already done.
> and beating up random Asian people in the streets
I think mentioning people who considered lab leak theory a viable possibility together with people who beat up Asian people on the street, or even suggesting that there's a connection between the two, they have a common cause, and the former bear any responsibility on the latter - is an extremely dishonest move and you should apologize for making such connection.
> "Crazies" went all in regardless of evidence or reason, and for that the pejorative is well earned.
The "bat soup" propagandists went all in much further than the "crazies" - while the crazies only talked about the possibility of the lab leak (or bioweapon lab, ok) - the non-crazies banned, fired, ruined careers, declared opponents racist, and all that with even less evidence - at least for the lab leak theory there's a lab to leak from. By the time the "bat soup" theory was declared the only truth possible there was nothing to support it evidentially, let alone on the level of the only viable possibility. So "the crazies" earned their name, then "bat soup" propagandists must be named "super crazies on crazy juice while taking crazy pills and bathing in the crazy ocean". Or we can go back to actually discussing the evidence, if anybody is interested in that, of course.
I never said they were the same thing. They are different, but they were both BS conspiracy theories because they were pushed without sufficient evidence to support them and while ignoring stronger evidence for other theories.
> I'm not sure what group you mean here, but that was certainly not mainstream media,
the mainstream media acknowledged that the science was still primarily, and that there were a lot of questions, but they mostly reported on our best understanding of the facts that we have and not on conspiracy theories that ignored our best understanding of the facts that we had.
> "The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment. Those spent 100% of the effort on suppressing any possibility of the lab leak theory being seriously considered and investigated and declaring anybody who disagreed "crazies", and 0% of the effort investigating anything.
Who exactly is the ""The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment"? As you yourself acknowledge scientists and governments continued to investigate the origins of the virus including the possibility of a lab leak to find evidence.
> I think mentioning people who considered lab leak theory a viable possibility together with people who beat up Asian people on the street, or even suggesting that there's a connection between the two, they have a common cause, and the former bear any responsibility on the latter - is an extremely dishonest move and you should apologize for making such connection.
I clearly made a distinction between the people who believed a BS conspiracy theory and acted on it (in some cases by beating asian people) and those who accepted it was possible, and investigated that, but followed the available evidence and supported the theory that best fit the facts that we had.
> By the time the "bat soup" theory was declared the only truth possible
Declared by who? When? There was constant questioning of the origin and acknowledgement that there were multiple conflicting theories in mainstream media. I don't know where you were getting your information from, but it sounds like you weren't paying much attention to what mainstream media was actually saying.
Yet many people insisted that this was the origin.
Of course it had evidence (see https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-origin-bats.html and https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55998157) but there were always questions (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/who-report-says-covid-orig...)
For more exploration of the "no evidence" question, I suggest you read https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...
Except those weren't conspiracy theories but alternative explanations of the known facts supported by at least as much evidence (not much, not conclusive, but neither had the alternative) as their explanation. Which the press tried to de-emphasize in every way possible, and paint it as if there's absolutely no possible legitimacy behind the alternatives. After 3 years of screaming abuse and calling people "conspiracy theorists" we finally arrived at the point where we find their assertions of there being an only valid explanation are not true.
I have no problem with people believing for a while in a theory that later proven to be false or unsupported. I did it myself - believed in experiments and conclusions that failed to reproduce or have been disproven. It happens to much better people than me. I do have a problem with the same people making claims that people who believed in alternative explanations are crazy, racists, idiots, extremists, terrorists, etc. - and not even apologizing afterwards, just saying "well, we believed in the best theory NYT/WaPo described to us, what do you want?" I think they earned at least some epistemic humility.
> Who exactly is the ""The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment"?
Pretty much everybody you regularly seen on TV and in the newspapers discussing those things and making decisions on those things.
> Declared by who? When?
By the media, the politicians and, for a period, by publications such as Lancet. And in much further degree, by the "I fucking love science" crowd which took delight in mobbing the dissenters and calling them all kinds of names. And continues to do so on other questions, btw.
> There was constant questioning of the origin and acknowledgement that there were multiple conflicting theories in mainstream media.
Nope, there wasn't for a long while, until scientists prominent enough that there was no way to silence them started to raise objections. The most prominent event was probably in September 2021, when Lancet published a rebuttal to their February 2020 article flatly declaring any non-nautural-origin theories to be "conspiracy theories". That's when the idea started to regain legitimacy. Until then, it was The Science (TM) that only natural origin is scientific and all the rest is crazy. And if you don't believe me (which you are right to do, I'm just some jerk on the internet), think about it - why would a team of 16 health experts write an article to Lancet demanding "objective, open, and transparent scientific debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2" and arguing that scientists "need to evaluate all hypotheses on a rational basis, and to weigh their likelihood based on facts and evidence, devoid of speculation concerning possible political impacts" - if by then such debate was already happening for all this while and the political impacts did not influence it at all? Were they just bored and were Lancet editors dumb for publishing a letter calling for something that is already being done and stating the obvious? Or maybe it wasn't obvious by then and it wasn't done - and this is what not me, a random internet jerk, but experts serious enough to be taken seriously by the Lancet, were worried about enough to write a collective letter?
> I don't know where you were getting your information from, but it sounds like you weren't paying much attention to what mainstream media was actually saying.
Can you show me an article in NYT or WaPo in the period between February 2020 and September 2021 that describes natural origin and lab leak theories as equal possibilities, each of them could yet be proven true and each of them being legitimate alternatives and areas of scientific enquiry? I admit I do not read every article in these publications (mainly because I consider them mostly be utter garbage and in cases where they raise above that level I usually get a referral from one of the places I trust more) but I am willing to accept evidence if presented to me.
This just isn't true. There wasn't anywhere near as much evidence for the lab leak theory as their was for a natural origin which is why the lab leak theory was determined to be unlikely compared to other theories. Even the people who were pushing the conspiracy theory admitted to the lack of evidence.
Tom Cotton, one of the first in politics to push the theory, said himself: "Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says" (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/coronavirus-cotton-f...)
For example there is an early article from a 'low credibility' right biased news website (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-mail/) The Daily Mail, and even they had a microbiologist explain: "at this point there's no reason to harbour suspicions' that the facility had anything to do with the outbreak, besides being responsible for the crucial genome sequencing that lets doctors diagnose it" (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...)
Same story with this article which was pushing the bio-weapon theory. (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus...). It also stated that evidence was incredibly weak without dismissing it entirely: "In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident."
Meanwhile, other theories being talked about at the time were supported by actual science such as genome analysis (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) and note that here too they weren't totally dismissing any other theories either, only presenting the best evidence we had saying:
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here...More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."
> The most prominent event was probably in September 2021, when Lancet published a rebuttal to their February 2020 article flatly declaring any non-nautural-origin theories to be "conspiracy theories".
The opinion piece February did not flatly declare every non-natural origin theory to be a conspiracy. What it said was "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." which is very different from saying that all theories of a non-natural origin are by definition conspiracy theories. Those same authors made that explicit in a followup article (July 21) saying: "Careful and transparent collection of scientific information is essential to understand how the virus has spread and to develop strategies to mitigate the ongoing impact of COVID-19, whether it occurred wholly within nature or might somehow have reached the community via an alternative route, and prevent future pandemics." They did not dismiss that other options were possible. They were just saying "We want evidence, not conjecture"
> Can you show me an article in NYT or WaPo in the period between February 2020 and September 2021 that describes natural origin and lab leak theories as equal possibilities, each of them could yet be proven true and each of them being legitimate alternatives and areas of scientific enquiry?
They weren't equally supported by the evidence, but there are certainly cases where articles on those (left-biased) sites made it clear that a lab leak was possible and that the origin of the virus was not certain.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/covid-lab-leak-fa...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/27/medias-de...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/30/scientist...
I feel a lot of mental gymnastics here. "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" does exactly this - declares that non-natural-origin theories are conspiracy theories. And it has been widely seen and used as such.
Out of your links: 1. only reports some scientists call for investigating the possibility of lab leak theory, hurrying to emphasize it's "unlikely" and there's no "new evidence". But at least the possibility of research is discussed - so maybe September 2021 is not the turning point, but May 14, 2021 letter to Science was? I think that would be more correct timeframe. 2. talks about "engineering" hypothesis proponent (and his rejection of it ) and is pretty dismissive of lab leak theory, though admits the possibility (month after May 2021) 3. opinion piece which pretty much confirms what I said about "the media has scorned the idea of an accidental lab release as a far-flung conspiracy theory, declaring it “debunked,” “dangerous” or “doubtful.”" and argues for lab leak hypothesis - also 27 May 2021 (weird coincidence, not sure what to think about it, especially given it's 1 day after Biden's order to research the origins of covid) and 4. is basically reporting lab leak theory is now legit, but also says it only happened "in recent weeks" (on May 30, that'd be about two weeks since May 14). I wonder what changed in those "recent weeks" - it doesn't mention any new evidence - so either it still has absolutely no evidence as before, but somehow now it's important to research if though it hasn't been for more than a year - or there's still some evidence which existed all that time but wasn't explored? Also, if that all only happened in "recent weeks" - what happened in many weeks before? You claim both theories were duly and equally investigated - then what exactly happened in "recent weeks" and what all these scientists are calling for if it has been already happening for a year anyway? Why the "leading scientist" needs to "call" for investigating the lab leak theory, if, as you claim, it already was being properly investigated?
I can see how you'd read it that way, but remember that at that time, there were several conspiracy theories going around. Some were saying it came from the lab, some said it was designed in America, or that it was a bio-weapon and and released intentionally etc. "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" is not the same as "strongly condemn every theory suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" - and again, the same authors did clarify that in the follow up.
It might help if you build a time line of events.
conspiracy theories were going around pretty much immediately, but I mostly saw them spreading in January and and February of 2020. At the time, there wasn't any evidence for it besides "A lab exists" and "We don't like China", while evidence that it jumped to humans from animals was growing.
By March 2020 however it was discovered that China had hidden the first cases of the virus, meaning the outbreak had started ~20 days before they reported it to the WHO and they'd been pressuring doctors to stay quiet. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-wu...) Still, this was not evidence of a lab leak, but it sure caused people to lose trust in China and fueled the theory.
A year later, the lab leak theory was starting to be taken much more seriously because there had been new evidence (although mainly circumstantial). March was when a lot of it happened:
- A new report that some scientists at the Wuhan lab had gotten sick, but China said they tested negative for the virus. (https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/who-team-scientis...).
- The WHO released their report (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-...) but people were already skeptical (https://www.state.gov/joint-statement-on-the-who-convened-co...) and the world was yelling at china for being secretive (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/who-wuhan-tedros-lab/20...)
Then in May 2021 it was discovered that three researchers from the lab had been sick and sent to hospital before the virus was reported to the WHO (https://nypost.com/2021/05/23/three-wuhan-lab-workers-were-h...). It looked pretty suspicious, but we still couldn't say that they had covid and naturally China said it was all lies (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1224284.shtml) but they'd basically lost all credibility by then. There was also this article (https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...) which got walked back a bit later (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-06-08/nobel-laur...)
The lab leak theory started out as nothing but a wild conspiracy theory without evidence, some of it was very clearly fueled by anti-Chinese sentiment and some of it was straight up crazy talk (like it being a US manufactured bio-weapon) and all of that never really let up. It fueled attacks on innocent Asian Americans and tainted the theory from the start. It made sense for most of the research to follow the evidence that we had, and for people to be wary about the wild and harmful claims people had been making.
I wasn't the idea of a lab leak that bothered people (outside of china anyway), it was how aggressively the theory was pushed without evidence, and all while ignoring what our best evidence suggested that concerned people. We can see that's true because once evidence (even weak evidence) started to emerge suggesting a lab leak more and more people started to ask for further investigation and this time with good cause!
Gradually over the years, the official story (stories really) coming out of china fell apart and new evidence (although not hard evidence) started to come forward. Again, nothing solid, but China wasn't exactly being helpful.
Research continued as best as it could though with reporters and scientists looking wherever the evidence took them and both the trump and biden administrations investigating to the best of their ability.
Natural-origin theories came and went, with varying degrees of confidence, but we never got a conclusive answer on the natural-origin side of things either. It did not appear to be engineered or lab-grown as some people had claimed, that was investigated, but there was never really a smoking gun.
Now, the government says we have new intelligence that is still not conclusive but makes the possibility of a lab leak the more likely scenario. I haven't seen that evidence, but I'm inclined to believe it until I see otherwise. I hope whatever new data we have gets out so that it can be researched. In any case, people who was spouting off lab leak theories, even the more sensible theories, in the early months of the pandemic shouldn't feel vindicated. Their suspicions were not based on evidence or reached through investigation of the facts. I don't think it hurt the investigation too much though, since the information we need is in China's hands, but it did hurt a lot of people.
No, they're not. The people who pushed the lab leak hoax originally (and as evidenced by several redcap troll accounts in this thread) all believed that covid-19 was engineered in a lab and released by the chinese government to harm them personally.
Even if it ends up being a case where a natural virus was studied in a lab and accidentally released, it does not validate their views.
As I said, that environment makes it hard to separate the legit, well-informed, grounded people who also advance real evidence of a lab leak.
My point was that they very loud, very nutty lab leak enthusiasts discredit legit discussion of the real possibility. I think you may have illustrated my point.
I personally thought the rumors launched by the Chinese government were highly suspicious (references to an armed forces games and Ft. Detrick) and the alternative hypothesis just pointed at the same rather distant bats & viruses that the local lab systematically collected and cultivated. Really, in the end, the actual head-scratcher and scandal is why "we" in the western world looked so often for thought and action leadership, to China on this topic. It's strange that our own leaders were unable to tell what was credible, or even what kind of social action or persuasion was consistent with western values. We all became "China" for two years, and I for one remain confused by that recent period in history.
Evaluating an empirical claim based on the aggregate character of those who are supporting it rather than actual steelmanned arguments is poor epistemic hygiene. It's a commonly-used justification for tribal epistemic closure - "the red tribe has lower IQ than average, therefore they are wrong in every disagreement with the blue tribe."
There's an equally-negative opposite of a "conspiracy nut" here - something like "sheeple".
One wouldn't predict that to be the case with all of the scientists here. But given that it is, perhaps we can't fault the American people if they don't understand the nuance.
The truth is that "low confidence" is only meaningful in the context of COVID's origin if it is possible that a conclusion can be made with "high confidence". That doesn't seem to be possible.
Certainly not in the other direction if some agencies are concluding at this stage, even with "low confidence", that COVID was lab leaked. Further, certainly "low confidence" doesn't imply that the inverse conclusion is likely true.
The NYT's choice to over-emphasize the relatively meaningless "confidence score" is understandable given its prior investment in other views.
Rigid historical narratives have been built on less than low confidence intelligence conclusions. A conclusion is the conclusion when one has to be made regardless.
In the case of COVID, a conclusion as to its origin has to be made and yet the scientific evidence isn't likely to get better for either possibility. Short of confessions.
Not by the strictest definition of "likely", no, but it certainly does imply there's a high enough likelihood of spreading from the wild that a lab leak isn't conclusive. It's not meaningless nor even "relatively meaningless": it's just very difficult to tell where a given virus came from unless there's a smoking gun, and any conclusion in any direction is going to be shaky.
As someone who does understand statistics, it's made me dislike Nate Silver even more than if I didn't. It's been sad to watch his metamorphoses over the years from an interesting numbers guy with nuanced discussions on polling and models, to becoming the exact kind of pundit and talking head he used to make fun of. There's still a little bit of statistics on his site, but the overwhelming majority of content is the same trite punditry you'll find on pretty much any political blog.
Exactly. His models are still outstanding. Ironically, I think the signal from his models gets lost in all the noise around the filler content on his site.
I've never read his blog and care stuff all about his political polling predictions.
And that's why media use these headlines (dark patterns?) and politicians keep making fake promises and get reelected.
#SAD
Then when they are taken to court for outright bullshitting, that's when they point out the "nuance."
[] rephrased as their wording was a bit unfair to those that consume large amounts of fast food.
One of the better data scientists I've worked with explained to me that his entire job was 'quantifying uncertainty', and after working in the field I definitely believe it. You could play around with RStan for the weekend and gain an intuition for how evidence changes hypothesis and how a hypothesis could be the "most likely" but still "unlikely" in an absolute sense, all with tremendous uncertainty in your prediction.
Still, when you try to communicate the results of a model, uncertainty is simply hard to communicate when people are interest in using your analysis for a snap decision, and the uncomfortable truth is "we can't tell you" is a fine modeling result.
I linked a video above that explains it very simply.
There isn't much nuance to it at all.
It would be nice to see the confidence score as a numerical number in order to understand how much lead this theory has to the second most likely origin theory.
So it ultimately depends on how you weight the 75% of groups that don't think there's evidence that it leaked from a lab.
Many, even some in this thread, are eager to minimize this story if they participated in ridiculing the fringe voices who kept questioning the official narrative. Better to have this quickly fade into oblivion lest they be outed as having placed their blind faith in false prophets. But Pepperidge farm remembers
At the time it was a BS conspiracy theory. There was some evidence for it, and some evidence against it and it happened that the evidence we had at the time was stronger for the non-lab leak theories.
That's what changed right now. We have new evidence that puts the lab leak theory above the others. Back when Trump was demanding that "China pay" and people were beating up random Asians who were just walking down the street, that wasn't true. Just because we today have the evidence to support the lab leak theory, that doesn't justify Trump's claims or the "blind faith" of his followers who rejected the available evidence to support what they wanted to be true.
I've seen huge family fights over this very issue and not one person involved was a Trump supporter or a conspiracy theorist but then the names get thrown around because somebody didn't toe somebody else's ideological line.
Unfortunately, random Asian people getting brutalized when they're going about their daily business has been a long-standing problem in a number of cities. Is there any evidence to suggest that the people perpetrating these crimes were even aware of Trump's words, let alone motivated by them, rather than this just fitting the usual pattern of criminality combined with a generalized ethnic resentment?
It increased after the pandemic (https://abcnews.go.com/US/hate-crimes-asians-rose-76-2020-am... and https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-hate-crimes-against-c...). It's hard to get data on people's motivations for crimes, but we can very clearly see drastic shifts in trends and this was trending higher than the baseline "generalized ethnic resentment" you'd expect to see normally.
increases
anti black - 50%
anti white - 30%
anti asian - 75%
"Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says" - Tom Cotton
"at this point there's no reason to harbour suspicions' that the facility had anything to do with the outbreak, besides being responsible for the crucial genome sequencing that lets doctors diagnose it" (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...)
"In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident." (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus...)
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807...
https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-top-diplomat-expects-ne...
Here's their overview of some of the stuff their National Laboratories have done: https://www.energy.gov/articles/75-breakthroughs-americas-na...
1: https://www.energy.gov/articles/what-stranger-things-didnt-g...
Are these people who are owed a serious apology the ones who actually attacked Asian-Americans? Or simply the ones who stoked racial animus prompting others to attack them?
No one is gonna apologize to you if you are unable to parse information
From the article:
> The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak
People used to be called racist for saying this!
So at first it did look like just plain ol' xenophobic politics to me. Only one party, the party that politically campaigned on xenophobia, was the one spreading the theory widely on their mainstream media.
I'm more than happy to accept lab leak theories from actual researchers who understand how to analyze outbreaks and not politicians trying to score points with voters. It just wasn't that at the beginning, probably because the researchers had to take the time to come to their conclusions.
They have "low confidence" that it was a lab leak (there might not even be a physical way to prove that conclusively), but they have higher confidence in that theory than in any other theory or possibly even than in all other theories combined. When evidence pointing to your previous belief being untrue makes you more confident in your previous belief, you're in When Prophecy Fails territory.
-----
edit:
Just wanted to add this wikipedia quote because it makes me sad...
\* 12:05 am. December 21. No visitor. Someone in the group notices that another clock in the room shows 11:55. The group agrees that it is not yet midnight.
Reductio ad absurdum won't work here. There are ways to test a "low confidence" theory, and re-evaluate its confidence level. This is called science.
Science isn't a magic wand, its a process, and honestly assuming we do get access an investigation like this most likely wouldn't even involve the scientific method at all. If science was enough to determine the origin given current available knowledge it probably would've been solved already.
But while this helps the CCP party save face, it doesn't help to move on with the investigation. It's not even about the blame. We investigate air crashes in such detail so we can prevent them from happening again. Of course with an even bigger event like this we should do the same.
The pandemic has happened and no kind of blame or money can revert it. But we can try to learn everything about it that we can to stop the next one. I'm sure it was an accident but we need to know what happened.
For this reason I really think China should cooperate with the investigators.
Finding and fixing a problem is exactly what needs to happen here too.
I’m sure air crash investigations would resolve many safety issues completely unrelated to the actual cause of a crash.
But the US could perhaps push for openness considering they contributed financially. Though I suspect they already have and failed.
All of the theories had the properties of being convenient darlings of some pre-existing political faction.
The most responsible thing is to claim ignorance on the origin story unless you have genuine, credentialed, expertise and analytical training for it and even then, those people choose their audiences and presentation carefully because of the unintended consequences.
Many people refused to fuel speculation on topics their unqualified to comment on - their nonparticipation however, was by definition, absent and invisible.
Finally, what do we do with the info? Is it just a, 'oh well, that's interesting'?
There's a specific American racist connection with blaming Chinese immigrants for disease that goes back to the era of the Chinese exclusion act of the 1880s. There were riots attacking chinatowns and doing ethnic cleansing with lynchings and mass destruction in Denver, Tacoma, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Eureka, Seattle and others throughout the 1880s.
Eugenicist texts of the early 1900s claimed Asians were disease carriers as well.
The general public's relationship with this stuff has only really been ugly and I can't stand here in 2023 pontificating absolute free speech and pretend like these types of narratives won't become tools of violence and racism in the hands of scammers and hatemongers.
Additionally it seems like you are advocating removing free speech? Friend you are sitting here actively campaigning for a 1984 style society. Not sure I have ever seen this one before; well done.
no.
> Really?
no.
> You would rather the government conceal information about a virus that killed millions of people because it might make some people upset with Asians?
no.
> Additionally it seems like you are advocating removing free speech?
no.
The personal responsibility for the liberty of speech includes considering the reaction of people.
You said no to all my questions and then with your last paragraph again seemed to advocate for what I said.
Like, are you seriously going to pretend that you mean the same thing by the "reasonable consideration for the reaction of people" when that's exactly what you've been debating with dozens of people in this thread. Give me a break. It's bad faith, highschool kid that just read ayn rand style posting.
Considering possible eisegesis is one of the primary ways responsible experts with an audience police their speech.
It's probably impossible to both effectively communicate complex ideas and defend against all potential eisegesis. I wouldn't be surprised if enlightenment era philosophers talked about this. I'll readily admit their literature are beyond my patience so forgive me for my ignorance
Which is exactly what I said op was saying in the first place and you and he reacted like I physically attacked you. From my perspective you are being needlessly obtuse not understanding what I am saying. The thought of not telling the truth and willingly advocate for the government to just ignore or not share the root cause of a pandemic that killed millions is anathema to me. I literally cannot wrap my head around it. How can you take the position that it's best not to know because some rogue elements could take it badly?
> It seems like both op and you are saying the truth is not important because it could lead to "excessively racialized and polarized reactions".
The truth... you act like there's a wholesale ban on truth. I think you are again mischaracterizing what is actually the media trying to not whip people up into a frenzy. People get whipped up into frenzies, you should probably check out some history. Maybe something on WWII. I'd recommend, Century of The Self, a great documentary that shows what kind of frenzies people get whipped up into when you have politicians using demagoguery to advance their agendas. You don't see how the entire past 3 years isn't completely different if every news paper is running with the headline "CHINESE VIRUS LEAK"? You are going to pretend, the same populace which was incapable of handling any actual discourse on the pandemic response, vaccination, etc, is going to just have a rational response? Regardless of where the virus came from, of which there is plenty literature available for the curious and literate, your perspective here seems childish at best.
>Which is exactly what I said op was saying in the first place and you and he reacted like I physically attacked you. From my perspective you are being needlessly obtuse not understanding what I am saying. The thought of not telling the truth and willingly advocate for the government to just ignore or not share the root cause of a pandemic that killed millions is anathema to me. I literally cannot wrap my head around it. How can you take the position that it's best not to know because some rogue elements could take it badly?
This is childishly naive. It's not rogue elements. The US president at the time was an actual demagogue.
Your entire approach to this is arrogant. You have decided that based on your superiority and judgement that your mental inferiors are too simple to handle the truth and thus it should not be revealed. While I dislike him, Trump was a democratically elected president.
"your perspective here seems childish at best" This appears to be your approach to your fellow citizens, you are right and every one else is a child. You come off just as narcissist as Trump. Grow up friend, realize there is nothing special about you, you are just as intelligent and naive as your fellow man.
I didn't make any decisions and you are incredibly foolish for even pretending that's the case. More of your false narrative creation that justifies your bullshit grievance-complex self-victimization. I don't edit any newspapers, I don't work in any government's health complex. I'm an IP attorney. Get a grip.
> This appears to be your approach to your fellow citizens, you are right and every one else is a child.
No, not sure why you are equivocating like that. As I pointed out, anyone who is interested is free to access all the literature on this. I did, you did.
>Grow up friend, realize there is nothing special about you, you are just as intelligent and naive as your fellow man.
Maybe read my post first and then get back to me.
You're welcome!
:)
I think I've proven my point. I'll call the game now. All the best:)
This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.
In big enterprises usually solving the problem is secondary to finding who the culprit is so that all future problems can be blame on that department.
China and the US are both like big enterprises. None of them is actually focused on making sure all the problems that happened will not happen again. People are just focused on blaming their domestic shit on the other.
China releases a strategy paper on US hegemony, US brings the lab leak theory back into the spotlight. It doesn't really matter if there was valid research on that theory. The fact that the major newspapers come out with it 1 day after China releases their stuff, shows you it's political.
It may be right, it may be wrong, an unintended leak has always been a very likely on the list for me. It's not like lack of security in labs hasn't been an issue in the US, in China and in a bunch of labs in Europe for that matter. Probably other countries are way worse.
The point isn't whether it's right or wrong, the point is that the goal isn't to solve the problem, but exclusively to assert blame.
At a practical level I don’t think there’s much difference between the lab link being a 7% chance vs a 70% chance. What’s more concerning is the potential of future leaks and what responses they might result in. The possibility that local officials get in CYA mode over a possible lab leak of a more dangerous virus is seriously concerning.
None that I've seen.
And the possibility of a future leak is probably unrelated to the possibility of this one having been a leak.
Which has little to do with the existence of said evidence. I’ve never seen direct evidence for the year Columbus sailed.
Anyway, many things that would make future leaks less likely also make past leaks less likely. The types of experiments being conducted and the types of labs those experiments are conducted in. Oversight, funding, and systems for reporting safety issues etc etc.
But that is a lie. From the article:
“The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory.”
DoE does a lot of civilian stuff now (electrical grid, cybersecurity, etc.) but it's kind of an add-on. The first couple of national labs - places like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge - are historically related to the nuke mission.
The considerations were:
— there were random attacks on Asians
- public health officials and scientists were worried about an anti science backlash
- virologists were really worried about a backlash against virology
— relations with China had not yet deteriorated to their current levels and government leaders didn’t want to antagonize them
So there was a semi-coordinated effort by government officials and the scientific establishment to put the lab leak theory beyond the pale. The middlebrow media either wittingly or unwittingly went along for the ride. Their readership ate it up.
But my sense was that the agenda behind the lab leak family of theories was to lay blame at some human or humans for the events of the pandemic, which to me seems like a fairly futile endeavor. One of my questions for these people has always been this: say their darkest theories are correct; what am I supposed to do about that? It seems that the best course of action was to wear masks, socially isolate as much as possible, and get vaccinated and keep getting vaccinations as new strains appear.
Lab leak was always a better theory. There were what hundreds? thousands? of wet markets across China and two bsl-4 labs. Given that the virus arose in a city with a wet market and a bsl-4 lab, the prior should be that it had to do with the lab and not the wet market. That could be overcome with evidence, of course, but it is not some out there idea.
What are you supposed to do about it? Maybe nothing. But if you are an establishment figure, certainly don’t lie about it and further destroy our society’s trust in experts.
Specifically, the talking point put out to the media that lab leak is highly unlikely is wrong and was unreasonable based on what they knew at the time.
I think that shading of the truth was arrogant and pernicious.
From the memory of this conspiracy-minded non-scientist:
- The signers declared no conflict of interest, but their lives would be made substantially more complicated and less lucrative by any increase in/scrutiny of biohazard control. One signer worked at or with the lab in question.
- The letter dismissed (VERY early and without any evidence to speak of) out of hand the possibility of a lab leak.
- The letter was picked up by the media and influenced public discussion and scientists’ opinions significantly.
According to the search I just did, Peter Daszak has recently been booted from investigations of this matter by the US government. He stands to gain and lose enormously depending on the future of virology research. This includes (iirc) the ‘ban’ on gain of function research, and the current loophole that taking an animal virus and changing it to be infectious to humans does not count as gain of function. There is much more to this story but that’s all I can remember with confidence.
Additionally, I would like to note that I’ve seen some solid-looking science tracing the outbreak to the wet market, but nobody seems to ever mention that lab workers have been (iirc) caught selling lab animals to wet markets in China in the past.
(Note again: I am not a scientist and I am conspiratorially-minded)
Whose nuts are you picking? And, for God's sake, why?!
Bubonic plague and polio both predate the existence of writing, and may well predate even agriculture.
- Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent
- Was being studied in a lab and escaped
- Found its way into a wet market near said lab
For what it's worth, your scenario seems to me the most probably by far. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, since China has done it's best to destroy all evidence (we should be careful not to take that fact as evidence for one theory or another though).
Suppose a lab worker went to a cave hundreds of miles away and collected a bunch of bats. Those bats were returned to the lab. At some point a different lab worker exposed himself to one of the bat carcasses and caught proto-Covid-19. Three days later he stopped at the wet market on the way home from work to pick up dinner and infected patients 1-5.
In what way is the lab in this scenario superfluous? If it had better and enforced protocols for handling potentially infected specimens there would have been no pandemic.
The ground zero wet market in Wuhan is several miles away from the virology lab, and across the river.
The simplest explanation is that one of the 11 million Wuhan residents who do not work at that particular lab brought it to the wet market. It was right before spring festival, lots of people traveling.
Inserting "possible" events that loop in the virology lab while all of the initial infections were nowhere close to it, with no evidence, is just trying to keep "lab leak" alive. Sure, it's possible! We could assume it was lab workers somewhere in the chain, or assume the CIA, we can assume whatever we want.
Why the need to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks?
I can't prove a negative, you believe what you want.
Second, COVID-19's furin cleavage site is unique from all other coronaviruses and that is what allows it to bind so well in humans. A new preprint (not full reviewed, Oct 2022) is interesting from a genomics perspective on this being a potential bioengineering marker[1].
I think just because Orange man called it out early on, it immediately became a non-starter for most people. A coronavirus lab just mere miles from a wet market where it supposedly bloomed, and contrary to finding other zootonic sources of other viruses relatively soon, none has been found at all in the past two-plus years. The wiping of databases by China; the involvement of US/Europpean/Russian agencies in the Wuhan lab; the whole NIH/Fauci mess with funded research there in gain of function or whatever you want to call it research, and it is unlikely?
Common sense has left the room during the political divisiveness these past years. I do believe over the years more evidence will come out proving a lab leak given the advances in genomics, intentionally slow drip feed of documents, and the sheer number of factors pointing towards this. I do believe it was an accident, and not a bioweapons thing, and originated from the Wuhan lab. Lab leaks are more common than people think, and having worked in China for over 7 years, I can imagine this was not your movie rendition of a BSL-4 lab, but one with a lot of warts. I say this about other countries too. I did some work for an aerospace robotics lab and I was dreaming of the BSL-4 suits and all, and what I found was a normal shop with out of tolerance machinery. This was in the U.S.
[1] https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/preprint-covid-19-shows-f...
It's absolutely possible that the epicenter wet market was on a particular lab worker's way home and that's how the spread started. Also possible that someone who lived in the countryside, contracted it from an animal, and went to Wuhan to visit family for spring festival.
That biomarker stuff is interesting and I'll have to take the biologists' word for it. If it looks and quacks like a bio weapon, that is evidence. "Some people generally study viruses across town" is a lot weaker.. it's like automatically blaming Columbia University for an infection in Brooklyn because they have bio labs.
Yes there are a lot of places to buy food, but wet markets are a special type of place to buy food. The wet market in question is right across the river from the WIV, which coincidentally(?) studies coronaviruses and was conducting studies prior to the outbreak.
From a 7 June 2021 paper [1]:
Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. We note that no pangolins (or bats) were traded, supporting reformed opinion that pangolins were not likely the spillover host at the source of the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The other human coronaviruses came from bats mainly. The WIV had bats from a location known to have coronaviruses. Scientists now wear masks when bat hunting in caves, but before COVID-19 they typically did not (I'll dig up the reference later). No bats were sold at the Wuhan wet market. The US/NIH/Fauci and other world players have a stake in the WIV of some sort. They were doing research on coronaviruses, and they were manipulating the virus. Documents before 2019 asking for approval to conduct such research are in the public record.
Almost everyone thinks this is true. Even the most fringy people don’t seem to be claiming that a virus was synthesized from scratch.
Found its way into a wet market near said lab
Ditto for this one. It’s pretty clear that there was a cluster of people early on that were infected in or near the market.
—-
The distinction between the lab leak and non-lab leak theory is whether the lab had anything at all to do with the chain of transmission.
If patient zero caught the virus in the lab or from a vector that was once in the lab, that’s lab leak. It’s apologists for the lab that want to conflate lab leak and bioweapon in order to dismiss the former as a nutty conspiracy theory.
And if a lab worker had become infected while field sampling bats and they - not the samples - brought the infection to Wuhan?
And if a lab worker had become infected while field sampling captive farmed "wild" animals and they - not the samples - brought the infection to Wuhan?
And if a lab worker had become infected while buying a captive farmed "wild" animal for dinner?
Aint this the dang truth.
Ah, the ol' litigating my personal grievances with society at large, with a particular individual that has nothing to do with it at all...
It's just a theory. Totally crackpot.
I mean come on they totally found the animal that came from to support the zoonotic origin theory.
Oh wait, they have yet to identify a spillover animal.
Anyone with common sense notice the lab leak is the most likely scenario here. But sure go ahead and continue to defend the honor of the CCP, an organization that is shortly going to be sending lethal weaponry including suicide drones to Vladimir Putin so he can murder Ukrainian civilians with impunity.
"Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on mink farms between humans and mink and back to humans"
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5901
Not what you meant?
How long did it take to definitively identify the natural reservoir of the 2003 SARS virus?
No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan. The article you posted regarding minks has absolutely nothing to do with an original source of spillover. It's simply documenting the common pandemic phenomenon of humans infecting mammals with covid, and, wow, the minks infecting humans with the same virus that is already evolved to infect human ACE2 receptors.
You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis. The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away, despite:
Location is 1000km away from the known horseshoe bat populations in Yunnan that are SARS reservoirs. Emergence was during late autumn/early winter when local bats are already hibernating. Emergence was in the middle of a cosmopolitan metropolis where the locals don't eat bats. Chinese Communist Party immediately blocked any investigations and never even pretended to want to restore records that were deleted, despite the prospect of being vindicated by a zoonotic origin being found. CCP currently, rather than attempt to continue to claim a non-existent zoonotic origin, has now claimed a US-based lab leak is at fault. Multiple NIH grants specifically mention humanized mouse models with human ACE2 receptors lining air passages, and conducting serial passage of wild-type bat-borne SARS in research being conducted by grant recipient in Wuhan lab. (There was an intermediate host, it was a genetically modified mouse model, and long since disposed of.)
Humanized mouse models can be purchased from any reputable bio supplier: https://www.criver.com/products-services/research-models-ser...
Where did I say that?
I'll take your word for it. (A long "few years" — "The virus originally came from horseshoe bats, though that wasn’t conclusively determined until 2017".)
"No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan" likely because —
"Unlike with SARS, however, there were no opportunities to sample the markets to look for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2. Chinese authorities closed and cleared out the markets soon after the epidemic started, citing public-health concerns, and banned all wildlife trade on 26 January 2020. Eating and trading wild animals were permanently banned in February 2020. Samples at the market to test for SARS-CoV-2 were not taken until months later. The virus was found in the drains of the market, but there were no live animals to test."
"The tick study that documented the sale of illegal animals in the Huanan market observed, however, that the sellers were not too concerned about law enforcement, and that plainly illegal animals were openly sold. It is unclear whether any of the animal traders engaged in illegal wildlife commerce have been since found, fined or punished. The swift clear-out of the market may have been intended to protect them as well as the law-enforcement officers and local politicians who had looked the other way."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...
Commonplace criminality or sinister super secret science scandal?
I was surprised to find, at CNN, of all places, something that actually sounds credible: "https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan..."
"A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion."
That's a far cry from "shitty theory".
A "shitty" theory is one which completely lacks evidence supporting it and/or has far more evidence that contradicts it. The covid lab leak theory is not "shitty" by either metric.
What those phrases mean is that the lab leak is simply the least crappy theory.
- No idea for either solution and we'll never know - 70% chance
- Lab leak - 20% chance
- Occurred in nature - 10% chance
In that case, you could say that the most likely answer is "lab leak" if you must have an answer, but it's very "low confidence." I don't know what the actual odds are, it's just made up for demonstration.
Its fairly standard SOP. If you don't know what it means that video explains it fairly well.
Plus "none of the above" is always an option. You could have 3 theories that all have very little supporting evidence - one of those theories could be the most likely of all the actual theories, but "none of the above" could be just as likely if the best theory is still weak.
That's the nuance.
Saying COVID evolved from nature is sort of a catch all. It's like saying all possible theories in aggregate except for the lab leak theory.
For example: What are the chances of anyone but you winning the lottery? Quite high.
So when they say low confidence of the lab leak theory it most likely means it's a crap theory.
Low confidence means inability to prove or disprove. That is it.
Edit: extrapolating further about this is just a Rorschach test.
I have a low bar for crap theory. As long as it doesn't have evidence that confidently supports it, it's crap.
The other guy has a high bar for crap theory. A theory without any evidence, to him, is not crap.
It's like arguing over what temperature is hot and what temperature is cold. Pointless. An Eskimo has a different definition of cold and hot then say some guy who lives in a desert. Put them in the same place and let them debate about whether the current temp is hot or cold... That argument ends up being an argument about vocabulary. What is the definition of hot or cold?
Who fucking cares? That is my point.
It absolutely, literally isn't.
The headline says the lab leak is the most likely origin. The lab theory being the least shitty theory absolutely doesn't make it a likely origin: it is purely a statement about the information we have (rather lack thereof) on origins, not on the likelihood of any of those. Likelihood of origin doesn't even come into it given the current state of theories.
I read about CIA false flags in Cuba. Nordstream didn't blow itself up because the pipe was angry it allowed .de and .ru to engage in commerce.
I guess a rogue western intelligence group bribed or compelled a Chinese lab worker to sabotage something.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rfk-ope...
"The CIA had been plotting to assassinate Castro since the summer of 1960, even before John Kennedy was elected. A congressional investigation of the CIA later uncovered eight separate plots of varying ridiculousness between 1960 and 1965."
It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins.
That's how you read it. GP is reading "most likely" as statement of absolute likelihood, making it false here, because the most likely thing is "any of the possibilities not under consideration", which takes most of the probability mass.
IMO, GP's interpretation is the one that most people take for "most likely" statements, which in our opinion makes this headline a blatant lie.
Anyway, a different way of putting my point is: "most likely" modifies meaning of the thing it attaches to. "Lab leak [is the] most likely origin of" strongly suggests the absolute take. Relative take would be phrased "Lab leak [is the] most likely of hypotheses proposed for the origin of", or something to that effect - that is, attaching "most likely" to the body of proposed explanations (which, by definition, excludes "anything else not on this list" as an option), not to the origin itself.
A yet different way: NYT is doing the equivalent of me putting some object under a color detector, and announcing "Blue most likely color of Object", without mentioning that my color detector consists of separate R, G, and B color sensors, and that I'm just reporting which sensor gave the highest reading. Most people would read my announcement as "Object is some shade of blue, unless their machine is broken or something", whereas the object itself could be purple, or white, or yellow, or near-black, or any other color that just has "B" component stronger than "G" and "R".
The story is that the DOE determined a lab leak is the most likely origin. And that’s exactly what the headline says.
Did they decide it’s only marginally more likely than other theories? Perhaps, but the headline remains true.
This is not complicated.
Its best understood after watching and grokking this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc
Putting what is being said in the correct context, outlined in that video, which is how government typically operates.
Its pretty clear what they mean to any educated rational reader what was meant. The characterization you made is poor and doesn't aptly apply.
By that definition, any headline of any article will be clickbait to someone just by them saying so regardless of any truth in the matter. People lie every day.
If you are looking at 'reading' articles, its kind of expected that you will read them if you choose to do so. Complaining about it doesn't change any meaningful thing.
I really don't understand the point you were trying to communicate.
Is it that you want someone to just tell you everything to believe, without needing to critically think at all?
People lie, so it sounds like you want something that will never come to pass, and trying to make it come to pass would only create a negative outcome for you, those close to you, and anyone else that happened to be within your sphere of influence, at least given a sufficient amount of time.
For the past couple thousand years of history exploitation has been the norm in various forms.
Did I completely misread what you meant (but didn't say?). Could you clarify?
You'd probably, for example, find that charities studying/helping poverty are often found near where lots of poor people live - yet you wouldn't blame charities for creating poverty.
Then they should have built the lab 800 KM south west in Yunnan. The lab is there for the same reason we have labs in NYC major regional hub with many universities, the lab has been there since the 1950s. Researchers had to travel to places like Yunnan and Laos to collect samples.
I've said it was a lab leak from about month two of the pandemic.
Any sane person hearing me say this should assume I have low confidence as the sort of evidence necessary to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt is information a random hn commentor could not possibly have.
Unfortunately, even expressing that you thought it likely it was a lab leak was enough to get my accounts banned on several social media.
So if you 'said it was a lab leak', but expected people to know you really mean "based on the extremely limited information I have on the situation, it don't feel the possibly of it being a lab leak can not be entirely discounted", then you've communicated poorly.
You've said in this comment that "you thought it likely it was a lab leak". Again, that's not the words of someone with low confidence in their theory.
Then we have to come to your motives in espousing such a theory. What was your point in saying that then and now? Is it that you think the world in general should work towards better lab practices? If so why not say that instead. Why do you want people to know you think it was from a particular lab?
Just saying what you're saying sounds a lot like an anti-China dog-whistle, especially in the environment in which you're saying it.
Yes, if the virus were engineered or even just leaked from a wild source kept in the lab, we deserve to know, for a multitude of reasons.
Sorry, but if this is your best effort at explaining that post, then there is something deeply wrong with you.
The fact the chances of it being a lab leak are so high does mean something, and I'd like to see those odds be lower for any future scenario, but to think that implies we can say with confidence "that's what happened" is, as was clearly stated, wrong.
That we're in a world where the pandemic was caused by scientists and natural immunity is the only thing that's worked at slowing the rate of infection is not something they can process.
"Most likely" might be technically true - in the sense that there might be a 2% chance it was that, but there's a hundred other possibilities each with lesser probability, so that one is on top. But it's not really likely at all. So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that, which nobody will.
(don't focus on the actual number, that's just for illustration.)
> But it's not really likely at all.
Is that what low confidence means in this context? After digging, I finally found a news site that said something that sounds credible: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan...
"Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion."
That's a far cry from your made-up definition, which is, to be honest, likely motivated by your own partisan biases.
> So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that
This news story was broken by the NYT, probably the most leftwing major print media company in the world. I'm pretty sure they have nothing to gain by misleading people into thinking the lab leak theory is more likely to be true than not, especially given their previous stances: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-.... On the contrary, they risk offending their payer base by reporting the truth in this instance.
Let's face it. Your partisan side lost this one. They worked hard to suppress and censor anyone who dared claim the lab leak theory was plausible. They were wrong. And they were evil to do the censoring in the first place. Take your loss and move on.
To recap, you assumed "low confidence" means "highly unlikely", which is false. The 2% number you chose, is, let's say, very illustrative of the mistake that you made.
However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US, I want to believe them but they just shot 3 balloons in hysterical panic that were just their own weather balloons just because we sent 1... so sometimes they seem to be wrong and we should keep an open mind.
The best would be that a bat shat on a pangolin a lab worker ate before going to work, he sneezed around and contaminated all his colleagues who spread it around and poom: wild bat + pangolin traffic + lab leak all together lol Now that we can all agree, what has changed ?
Surely we re not agreeing that China was making weapons or leaked voluntarily, so beyond us being weasels unable to accept we screwed up, not sure why we drag on: we ll never say we screwed up, the US will never entirely accept we didnt screw up, what then?
The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted more than the autocratic Chinese communist party that is accountable to absolutely no one.
No. Where were checks and balances when a coup attempt happened? Or before that, when a sitting US president committed multiple crimes, including influence peddling, and got away with it? Or when Guantanamo was established and random people were kidnapped and tortured because of their name or watch? Or when the US president decided to murder a US citizen without due process? Or when it was decided to implement dragnet surveillance of the whole Internet? Or when it was decided to spy on allies? Just because we later learned about some of those transgressions doesn't in any way make the US government and it's various entities trustworthy. Yes, it's better than the authoritarian regime in China, sure, but that doesn't equal actual trust.
But, Im not saying the department of energy is the CIA, Im saying it s made of the same american citizens who can fear us sometimes to the point of sending million-dollar missiles towards canadian weather balloons, see ? It's a matter of belief for me: are they objective and we screwed up, or are they hysterical and we dont know really? A democracy can absolutely elect lunatics if the population is afraid, as well.
Im certainly not saying the communist party is better, so not sure why you brought it up. Maybe part of the general hysteria, you think criticizing the US is a sort of patriotic duty for me or something, and Im like a red communist spouting Mao like a demented on the streets... but we can be anti communist in China and not impressed at all by the US general performance.
There is a way, or there would be a way had this not been in an autocratic country. A developed and free nation would have formed an independent enquiry and be given access to the lab, its staff and documents. That would have had a high likelihood to either find the cause there or rule it out with some certainty.
But this is China, and for some reason some people don't want to admit that it's a repressive dictatorship with no regard for human life, justice and transparency.
> Low confidence generally means questionable or implausible information was used, the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or significant concerns or problems with sources existed [1]
I would go on to talk about how the US invaded countries with zero confidence but...
The New York Times essentially serves as a PR firm for powerful corporations, billionaires, big pharma, government, elites, military industrial complex, etc. They aren’t going to damage their reputation further by admitting that they knew this all along but intentionally misrepresented and/or hid the facts.
I recall Jon Stewart went on the Stephen Colbert show maybe a year ago and talked about this. He got totally slammed and called a “conspiracy theorist” and all the other names that people who question official narratives get these days.
Also always be wary of anonymous sources.
The connections to eco health alliance were all laid out a long time ago
It wasn't that long ago that just asking the question - or questioning the then narrative - was positioned as a threat to the democracy, racist (i.e., anti China), conspiracy theory, etc.
Low confidence based on available data is 100x better than high confidence based on nothing but some backroom creative thinking, and a mindless media entourage willing to parrot anything tossed in front of them.
It felt like 1984 then; this only magnifies that. And yet, still not an ounce of accountability. That's the lede.
Questioning whether the virus emerged organically or came from a lab leak? That was equivalent to claiming the government is run by lizard people and the earth is flat. That's a public shaming and banning with prejudice.
We can't just flip a button and undo the "programming" and glorification of group think. The step in the wrong direction can't be reversed.
These qualifications seem to me to be in conflict. If there's low confidence about the most likely cause, then does that imply that there's low confidence about every possible cause? Could there be high confidence in the least likely cause? That, too, seems contradictory to me.
you're analyzing this like it's the press sensationalizing. This is an establishment walking back what they've said in the past, and allowing a pov that this same press and govt literally censored. We shouldn't expect they're going to scream "we were completely wrong because we were biased".
They're now admitting that there is no evidence at all for the hypothesis they've been treating as gospel, and admitting the evidence better fits lab leak (a view we know from Fauci's emails was floated early on and suppressed). That's saying a lot.
We'll still have to wait for "not natural in origin", but that's coming too.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but have the people here on HN who are poo-pooing this also taken stands in the past that allowing this would be a climbdown from? Because I remember when it wasn't allowed to discuss lableak here on HN either.
Yes, let me quote Zola, "J'accuse!"
新型コロナの起源、研究所から流出の可能性高い＝米エネルギー省
To retranslate back to English as a relatively direct translation
The cause of COVID, there is a high possibility it spread from a lab.
Notably missing are something like 一番, to mean most. This title is in absolute terms. The reason I found this in the first place was because a Japanese colleague was surprised that it did come from a lab! after an initial moment of doubt before accepting it because WSJ is reputable.
I sent the news deck an email pointing it out but do expect it's intentional. Reading as absolute rather than relative is likely "correct" and a great example of misinformation from the WSJ. Presumably reputable news sources just don't exist anymore, or perhaps they never did :(
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/27/...
Here's the NYT's headline: Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says
And then the sub-head (or dek, if you want to sound like you're in the know): The conclusion, which was made with “low confidence,” came as America’s intelligence agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus.
So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cause,' and a confidence score: 'low'.
The NYT goes on to say:
Some officials briefed on the intelligence said that it was relatively weak and that the Energy Department’s conclusion was made with “low confidence,” suggesting its level of certainty was not high. While the department shared the information with other agencies, none of them changed their conclusions, officials said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/us/politics/china-lab-lea...