Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag...
by vikingerik on Monday February 27, 2023 @04:29PM
(#34962121)
I said don't focus on the number, I was simply using 2% as an illustration for how such a headline can be constructed to be misleading. Since you didn't read my post I won't read the rest of yours.
Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag...
by PathOfEclipse on Monday February 27, 2023 @05:12PM
(#34962678)
You say "don't focus on the number", and then say in the same sentence "it's for illustration." Well, if you pick a terrible number, don't you think that affects the quality of your illustration? See, your illustration was as bad as the number you pulled out of a hat to construct it, but if you refuse to learn from criticism when presented to you, then I'm certainly not going to waste any more time on you either.
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.
> 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.