Yeah. In 2016 when people were like "hurr durr experts suck, they predicted Hillary would win and she lost", it was exasperating. If a model predicted an outcome with 60-70% certainty, and the less likely scenario happens, model wasn't necessarily bad. That'd be true even if it was a 90/10 split.

The model wasn't bad, just useless.

Worse than useless. It likely impacts election outcomes.

Why useless? People have to attempt to predict the outcomes of elections, and have to do their best.

I would guess that the vast majority of the population do not take meaningful actions based on election prediction (other than "I might [not] need to actually vote").

There are good reasons to have polls and predictions but they are far from necessary.

Just because something isn't useful to everyone, doesn't mean it isn't useful to someone.

The original claim was that election prediction is useless -- are you willing to concede that election prediction isn't useless?

I made no such claim. I merely stated that this particular election prediction was useless.

People who work for political campaigns need to know, businesses and investors might like to plan, etc.

Yes, but it is not "needed" in the current form. It is needed the same way you need to predict how global trends will be in 6 months: very important for a lot of people, but not an actionable information for most.

Highly disagree that it was "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.

Trump winning can happen in a model that gives him a 30% chance and a model that gives him a 5% chance. What was odd was seeing fans of Nate Silver point out the former, but then trying to say that his model was better because it gave Trump a higher probability of winning (or even saying Sam Wang's model was terrible for having Clinton's chance in the high 90's). That could be the case, but it's not necessarily the case, for the exact reasons they just stated.

It isn’t always a lack of will. Sometimes it is lacking a worldview that continually perceives through the lenses of statistical probabilities because most of the time, heuristics are Good Enough. Constantly evaluating upon an ever-shifting, -updating net of probabilities is relatively more cognitively demanding.

Those who do reflexively apply probability assessments however, would do well to also perceive when to accept heuristic Good Enough solutions.

Doesn't matter if they understand the nuance. The lab leak theory takes a back seat for the following reason:

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 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. Failure to do so will result in more issues down the line. It's basic engineering.

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.

And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens. Much easier to believe the 'baddies' have been found and 'brought to justice' than having to face up to the world we live in and our effect on it.

I agree but also disagree. There are too many conflicting interests and I don't think you will ever get a straight answer. People also can't look at the lab leak with a critical eye because they think it makes them look like trump lovers. I standby my original assertion that a country in grief will collectively go through the stages of grief of which denial is the first. Similar to 9/11 when we convinced ourselves that our foreign policy had nothing to do with terrorist attacks and 2008 when we convinced ourselves bailing out failing industries was a good idea. 20 and 10 years later and we changed our tunes on those things. In 2033 we will finally accept that a lab-leak was most likely but only after the other 6 stages...

In 2008 we had to bail out the banks, otherwise everything would have gone under. Indeed, I believe that a defining moment of the GW Bush presidency was when he told the head of the Federal Reserve (I think?) to do whatever was necessary, with GWB providing political cover, and thus 'saved the world'. Where we screwed up was in not bringing to account (i.e. prison) many of the people responsible for letting things get as far as they did. We also used monetary policy too much when fiscal policy (i.e. bailing out Main Street) would have been better.

My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably.

> 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.

What? Why would anyone be punished for an unintentional lab leak? Scientists are also humans that can make mistakes.

But was it negligence? This is the difference between "a mistake" and "manslaughter".

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.

Its not about punishment, its about the 'just world' fallacy where bad things happen because of 'bad' people (whether through malice or incompetence). It allows us to hide from uncomfortable truths - in this case that pathogen spillovers are inevitable, and that our response has been typically woeful.

You can unintentionally harm someone and still be liable for that harm.

If a practicing engineer is ultimatrly responsible for a catastrophic outcome of a design they signed off on, I can see a case for shoddy virologists with bad lab practices being held ultimately responsible for what they ultimately leak.

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.

> practicing engineer

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.

Scientists can definitely make mistakes. What circles around lab leak that's most interesting was the rampant indictments that discussing it made you a conspiracy theorist, which prevented it being discussed or investigated for over a year after the pandemic started. Around that time, the only thing that was acceptable to discuss was zoonotic origins.

The original Lancet article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

The retraction: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens.

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.

>> We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it.

> 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.

If, hypothetically, it did leak from a lab, there are two important things that should happen:

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.

I know, basic engineering, so simple and straightforward right? And when a country says "no", I assume we issue a series of stronger and stronger worded warning letters to them right?

The US isn't capable of preventing its own citizens from acquiring weapons and performing terrorist attacks with them. The idea that we'll be able to enforce controls on labs in foreign countries seems pretty far fetched given that. And as the tech advances, I suspect it will democratize like any other technology so that a lone enthusiast can design their own viruses in a home lab. I'm not particularly an optimist about what it portends.

But it is in the best interest of all countries. Unlike nuclear weapons where the damage can be isolated to one area, highly contagious weapons are impossible to control and will end up hurting themselves as well.

When it scales down to individual bio-hackers though, I feel like that virus is bound to be made.

I suspect the world would be better off if all knowledge of nuclear weapons were eradicated. I doubt on a few levels that the damage can really be isolated given proliferation. Baby Boomers were found to have significantly elevated levels of strontium-90 in their baby teeth attributed just to atmospheric testing. That did result in a treaty to ban the practice, but nuclear weapon research continued and continues today. I doubt any country will willingly stop viral research; especially because there are legitimate medical reasons for such research, though I suspect weapon applications are inextricably intertwined as well.

The issue involves misplaced incentives. Scientists have an incentive to apply for certain grants, and the National Science Foundation and NIH have an incentive to spend their federal funding. Scientists are thus incentivized to draw attention to "black swan" events and ask for funding to prevent these events. And they are incentivized to conduct riskier and riskier research until, let's say, a "human error event" occurs, and here we are.*

*Assuming the lab leak was accidental, rather than intentional

let's remember that the US helped fund this research too https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

And if it comes to light that it was not a natural disaster- that this funding contributed to it- then we should cut off said funding until better protocols, enforcement and accountability are in place

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?

How about ethnic genocide? I guess we won't let that end the relationship either? We totally should though. I'm ready to vote for any candidate that furthers this goal.

Right since covid only effected western countries. If it were "ethnic genocide" it was a pretty shitty one.

I'm pretty sure the person referencing "ethnic genocide" was referring to China's internment and genocide of their Muslim population in western China, not COVID.

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.

I'm pretty sure this qualifies as genocide, because the word "genocide" is in the title.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples

The world has always been joyfully ok with a country killing its own people.

Muslims in Xinjiang are not Han Chinese. You're buying into the propaganda. In any case, the world should not be okay with this.

If you want the US to care, it's probably better not to mention that they're Muslims though. I've noticed they just call them Uyghurs and suspect that's the reason.

then nobody should talk to US

what should your ideal candidate think after reading these?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_genocide

Thankfully I exist in 2023. I would not have supported apartheid for Black Americans.

I would like to remind you that the USA are selling billions in weapons every year to Bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, responsible of the killing of the journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, dismembered in a Saudi consulate in Turkey by killers sent by the prince, who is using those weapons to bomb people in Yemen.

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.

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. This subthread was a noticeable step in that direction and we want the opposite here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949969.)

I'm very sorry to see this. I thought better of HN moderation.

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...

> Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.

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.

no one is going to care if the deaths were "intentional" or negligent.

not Americans.

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's talked about in many circles in the United States, mind. Not one year has gone by without a rant in my sphere about stupid boutique or ulteriorally motived wars, and a pining for the day the U.S. focuses more on solving domestic problems than foreign.

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.

This is probably the most egregious example of "whataboutism" I've seen on HN.

I think you're missing the point.

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.

> 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."

What about "People in the USA are grieving because of China virus created to kill us, but we won't do anything against China because the first step of grief is denial"?

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...)

> what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?

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.

A lot of people seem to think the lab leak premise is the same as the "engineered biological weapon" premise so if that become popular it'll probably only drive a perception of "weak government that betrays the citizens" even more than we've already got...

Lab leak involves bio-engineering because it involves gain of function research. Bio-engineering can be used in a testing setting but it could also be used to make a weapon. I highly doubt China was stupid enough to make a bioweapon and not immunize its citizens first.

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.

A lab leak doesn’t mean gain of function, bio-engineered virus, or other engineering. It just means that the virus was spread via a lab leak.

> 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.

In what way is gain of function not bio-engineering? You're modifying a virus and subjecting it to human-like tissue to observe the results. Lab leak and gain of function are inexplicably tied.

I don't know what point the quote is getting to. I already said it wasn't a bioweapon.

You could bio-engineer a virus without gain of function, I presume. My point was that a lab leak does not also mean bio-engineering.

I heard that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had inserted furin cleavage sites into random types of viruses in the past and that SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses for having a furin cleavage site, but this[0] says otherwise:

``` Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2. ```

0: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/

Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance. They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus while doing something they should never have been doing: gain-of-function research. We need to stop that research, and we can't let them defend it with any nonsense excuses.

> Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance. They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus

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...

Would you please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar? You have a long history of doing this on HN. I don't want to ban you again but if you keep this up, we'll have to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't know what you're talking about.

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.

This sort of fulminating rhetoric is obviously not what HN is for. We've banned you for it many times and if you don't stop, we'll have to ban you again. It has nothing to do with criticizing the US or any other country or thing; it has to do with not following the site rules and consistently violating the intended spirit of the place. Plenty of other commenters manage to be critical without doing that, and that's fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you suggesting that a more correct course of action would be some kind of punitive retribution so those of us who survived suffer in the hopes that those most responsible suffer a little more than we do?

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.

It's pretty sickening that a coronavirus lab in China that the US was completely involved with both financially and through scientific cooperation can be reframed as more nationalistic anti-China bullshit. The US isn't keeping things peaceful with China for the sake of trade relations, it's actually threatening China constantly. The US is keeping quiet about the lab leak theory because it was just as responsible for that lab as China was, and it wants to distract from that fact.

It's not like any other options have high confidence. All theories are low confidence right now because there is no conclusive proof for either. But if you support some, you are the defender of science, and if you support another, you are a filthy conspirologist and get banned from social media. Try explaining that to 95% of the American populace.

I think it has more to do with the fact that one opinion is supported by more conspiracy nuts. Doesn’t mean it isn’t the right answer, but having lots of crazies insisting it is the only possible answer makes more grounded people less credible in the eyes of others.

Are the pejoratives really necessary? From the beginning the "lab leak" theory satisfied Occam's Razor more than the convoluted "wet market" theory or the "pangolin" theory. Meanwhile, a lot of departments at a lot of universities got a lot of funding to pursue their pet theories.

At the time trump and his people were first pushing lab leak/bio-weapon conspiracies it was without evidence (and Occam's Razor isn't evidence), and worse the actual evidence we did have at the time suggested it wasn't leaked from a lab. That didn't stop the "crazies" from insisting it was true though.

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.

how were the people pushing wet market theory not "crazies" also then.

> how were the people pushing wet market theory not "crazies" also then.

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.

> Because they had evidence that made the wet market theory the one most likely to be true

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.

Your own links contain the evidence you're looking for. Your pangolin link mentions one paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.939207v1....

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/)

> There was a lot of evidence supporting the wet market theory at the time and supporting that it wasn't made in a lab

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.

You’re over-generalizing on “people”. The majority, or at least loudest, of the lab leak proponents also say it was a Chinese-designed bioweapon intentionally released in China to attack the US. They have been moving goalposts, but your more reasonable take is not at all universal.

Except neither bats nor pangolins were sold at the market. That probably should have been one of the first things to check before spending, undoubtedly, millions of dollars.

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.

> Except neither bats nor pangolins were sold at the market.

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...

> Your own links contain the evidence you're looking for. Your pangolin link mentions one paper

pangolin werent sold at wet markets though ?

The lab leak theory folks had plenty of evidence. The evidence the dept of energy cities is identical to what the supposed conspiracy theorist have said for months / years.

Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories, and conflating them means you don't actually bother to learn the argument of the opposing side(s), before dismissing them as "crazies". I think if you attempt to have serious discussion the minimum you should do is to learn what the disagreement is about. If you don't bother to do even that, then what's the point in it? Just booing the outgroup one more time?

> 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.

> Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories, and conflating them means you don't actually bother to learn the argument of the opposing side(s), before dismissing them as "crazies".

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.

The bat origin also had no evidence given that the bats that naturally carry this kind of corona virus are not endemic to Wuhan and are not regularly consumed.

Yet many people insisted that this was the origin.

> The bat origin also had no evidence

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...)

Congratulations, you have just discovered why almost every claim "there's no evidence about X" is false. Almost every conspiracy theory - and surely almost every side of a scientific debate - has some evidence behind it. Maybe inconclusive evidence, maybe bad evidence, maybe very weak evidence, maybe even evidence later proven to be false or fake - but there's almost always at least something. The reason is simple - the number of possible theories is infinite, but people's attention is finite. So even the dumbest, most gullible person would select the theories to believe in somehow - and those that have zero evidence to lean on would rarely make the cut, because there's just too many of them, so the probability of any of them to land any significant number of supporters is practically zero. Thus, the theories you've heard about likely to have at least some evidence - but there are questions, as you correctly noted. For bad theories, there would be very small and bad evidence and very large and hairy questions. It's not a 100% rule - hence I say "almost" - but it is very often the case.

For more exploration of the "no evidence" question, I suggest you read https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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...

> 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

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 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.

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.

The rightmost political commentators in the US almost universally entertained the lab leak theory in the same breath as the bioweapon idea. The implicit or explicit accusation was that there was no other reason to be working with viruses. People love a good mad-scientist story and those without an understanding of public health research, or a xenophobic disbelief that science is even conducted in China, ate it right up.

> Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories

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.

"Even if it's proved we are wrong, we were right because bad people partially agreed with our opponents". Makes sense.

What pejoratives? There are literally conspiracy nuts out there who strongly support the lab leak theory, mostly because China was the enemy du jour before drag queens. There is a lot of absolutely batshit stuff out there, including Trump himself accusing China of intentionally launching covid as a “bioweapon”.

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.

Or, one theory was supported by a rather unfashionable red-haired politician. Otherwise you're simply making a circular statement that the NYT did not agree originally, so it makes sense for everyone who considers their pages to be the arbiter of fact, to fall in line.

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.

Well, if you ban and ostracize people for supporting some idea, then a lot of supporters for this idea would be people who are not afraid of being banned and ostracized - and this category of people has a lot of conspiracy nuts, because they have nothing to lose anyway. You can not use the consequence of the suppression policy as a justification of the same suppression policy.

>I think it has more to do with the fact that one opinion is supported by more conspiracy nuts.

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".

I agree. And yet that is human nature and I hope it is not surprising and inexplicable.

You have been taught to associate the lab leak theory with low status conspiracy theorists. Your emotional mind has then sought to achieve higher status by siding with the non crazy people. As someone that is not easily swayed it is absolutely stunning to see how social dynamics sway people's opinions. As a younger person I just did understand how the opinions of the people I interacted with were driven by pure emotion, as this is something I fought with before I reached adolescence. I assumed everyone else had. Even those who claim to be 'scientific' are not in pursuit of truth, but social status. This whole thread is just one giant cope by the people who have sided with authority in search of status. They see that the gain in status they achieved through their allegiance being threatened and attack the facts by obfuscating them. DOE thinks it's the most likely scenario, they're not confident, but it's the best they can come up with. The FBI has done the same. That means intelligent rational people in receipt of all the facts have come to a conclusion you cast out and ridiculed in your dopaminergic dash for upvotes. Be better.

Part of the problem might be that commentators are going to want to willfully conflate intelligence "confidence" with a more pseudo science-y sounding "confidence score" that sounds like a bastard hybrid of research critique and statistics.

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.

> Further, certainly "low confidence" doesn't imply that the inverse conclusion is likely true.

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.

> 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.

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.

I still respect his models, but I think the rest is the kind of stuff you’re expected to do as part of a media organization.

> I still respect his models, but I think the rest is the kind of stuff you’re expected to do as part of a media organization.

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 enjoyed "The Signal and the Noise" I think its focus on the problems of fitting models to noise is something that should be more widely understood and he did that really quite well. It's a while ago but I think it was the massive failures of earthquake predictions was how he did it and it was convincing and readable.

I've never read his blog and care stuff all about his political polling predictions.

"The Signal and the Noise" is a great book and it definitely impacted some of the most important choices I made around my career. I think that's part of the reason I'm so annoyed that Nate Silver has gone so far down the punditry rabbit hole.

> Good luck getting 95% of the American populace to understand any of that nuance.

And that's why media use these headlines (dark patterns?) and politicians keep making fake promises and get reelected.

#SAD

…and their votes count equally to yours. Isn't democracy grand?

Correct, that's why the title is written in such a way, to ensure that they don't understand it

Good luck? The whole point of that headline is to get the American populace to completely miss all the nuance and hate china more then they already do.

Then when they are taken to court for outright bullshitting, that's when they point out the "nuance."

My teenager brings up the A&W 1/3lb burger failure when I rant how people are choosing “math ignorance.” Kid’s point being that “fast food lovers[] would never let math intentionally get between them and greater amounts of fast food by choice, and that people simply that dumb.” I’ve dubbed it Hanlon’s Burger.

[] rephrased as their wording was a bit unfair to those that consume large amounts of fast food.

What most people really struggle with is uncertainty, and they lack the conceptual framework (distributions) and working understanding of how those distributions behave under various scenarios.

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.

Its really not that hard, I don't see how you can have such a negative attitude.

I linked a video above that explains it very simply.

There isn't much nuance to it at all.