I think the whole premise that arbitrary priors and dreaming up probabilities and then washing them all together isn't applicable to a unicorn type event.

But why do you think it is important to prove a lab leak?

> But why do you think it is important to prove a lab leak?

Perhaps because it is slightly interesting what caused the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu? Because millions of people died? Because knowing the cause could perhaps prevent something similar happen again? Perhaps prevent millions of deaths?

I'm astonished by this question.

Sure but what if it just isn't knowable?

Historians are still finding out things that happened hundreds of years ago. Do you really think the origins of Covid are lost in the mists of time?

Yes, why do you not? Or why do you need it so bad? You can do whatever you were going to do anyway.

I'd ask the inverse question to you - why would you think it is unimportant to determine the cause of things that happen in the world?

I don't

You can't in one comment complain about investigations using "made up priors" and then in another complain that we are investigating something which could actually provide a measured prior.

Could! But hasn't... Otherwise yes good points. I don't see how they measure all the rest of the probabilities and the article seems to be designed to settle arguments among dumb people or something? It is not even remotely scientific.

> I think the whole premise that arbitrary priors and dreaming up probabilities and then washing them all together isn't applicable to a unicorn type event.

Now I believe you said it. Maybe not exactly "made up priors" so pardon me for the misquote. But I'd be interested to see if you can make a distinction.

I remember when this was first released, everyone clowned on it (including me) for a few reasons the biggest one being the classic problem with these sorts of Bayesian analyses. That being, the individual weights per piece of evidence are pretty arbitrary.

Meanwhile, it seems quite likely to have produced the correct results so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lol. Not how facts work! I mean, people on here claiming I'm a China troll and hell they probably did do it, but we'll never be able to prove it either way, and more importantly it doesn't matter for us to make changes and to hold China accountable for all kinds of things.

Regardless of the merits of the lab leak theory, David Martin is a NWO-level conspiracy theorist who thinks that Pfizer colluded with Bill Gates and the US government and infected the whole world with a virus, on purpose, just to push their vaccine on people. The conference that you allude to has nothing to do with the European union. It was organized by two equally nutty far right EU-politicians in one of the parliament's public rooms to give a false legitimacy to their "conference" and mislead people to think that it was an official event.

He seems to have worked on projects that are questionable in importance / authenticity but likely to have made profits. Claiming that the video filmed in EU was from an "official EU conference" would be uniformed or mispresenting him, indeed. But I think it's worth watching; Phizer's patent application and other claims he made are interesting and haven't been repeated elsewhere (from my perspective).

> If you find any faults that can really change the results in the analysis Rootclaim made, I would be interested.

This is an interesting way to analyze the problem but the set of criteria and weights applied at each step are made up.

The flaw is that you can use this form of analysis to reach any conclusion you want.

For example, the "Already well adapted" section -- a "2x" factor for lab escape. We wouldn't even be thinking about this virus if it wasn't well adapted to spread among humans. So that's baked into the ground and isn't a factor of anything.

Then take "Furin cleavage" -- a whopping 8x factor for lab escape relative to zoonotic. This is the same thing as already well adapted, so now we've got a combined 16x for something that should be 1x.

The weight for "Chimera" -- another whopping 8x for lab escape relative to zoonotic -- seems really high for something that is found both in nature and in labs that merely "seems less likely to combine in nature". We should probably be arguing about whether this is 1.5x or 2x.

The real conclusion is we don't know. The Chinese probably do, but it would be a very closely guarded secret and obviously they would never admit to a lab leak. I lot of people hate ambiguity and want an answer, but in this case it doesn't seem that we are going to get one.

> it would be a very closely guarded secret and obviously they would never admit to a lab leak

A complicating factor is that some (much?) of the funding came from the US. Which means admitting to a leak is against the interest of not only Chinese but also the US government which would have a hell of a time explaining to taxpayers how pandemic was engineered on their money doing research banned in the US. (Though I don't think US government played any part in resisting the research tbh, CCP probably did all that at their accord.)

I think all in all we shouldn't give up, and even if we don't find the actual data I don't see the world can be okay without big fat follow up over not some lab making a mistake (humans make those) but all obstruction of research into the origins of what could have been an extinction level event if the virus was a bit better engineered, whether it came from Chinese communist party or US scientists scared for grant money.

This is a good perspective there is a lot that can be done wether the leak can be proven or not.

Idea:

Community / site for collective truth-seeking. Possibly integrated with Metaculus.

One can submit new pieces of evidene which would be commentable (in threads), votable, and programmable (to toggle / affect of other submitted evidence threads).

Users can adjust the weights, vote on them (to generate a certain consensus / prediction), and even toggle of pieces of evidence manually.

The site automatically gives the probabilities for different scearions. I don't have an instant vision on how "all" possible scenarios would be chosen.

Neat idea, if you can keep it from getting gamed.

It sounds a little like this RootClaim (I just learned about here) https://www.rootclaim.com/how-rootclaim-works but with the users adjusting & voting on weights?

This is a strawman demonstrator I'm wware of w r t origins probability surveying & calculation. https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/18631

It's intended for any one user to evaluate ther priors and see how they stack up all together. like that your idea woukd aggregate & have comments & a voting mechanism,

resistance to manipulation can probably come from things like more substantial evidence + personal reputation or identity confirmation.

By the way, why do people weigh zoonotic spillover so high relatively to lab leak accident? There were lab leaks before even in Beijing, eg. of the original SARS when it was researched. That SARS kills faster so it didn't get to infect too many people... And that's only what's documented, considering it's China there could've been any number of other times.

Intentional leak chance is low but accidental leak is so likely it's surprising this pandemic didn't happen before considering security practies that were known and raised questions before the pandemic. But everyone magically forgets about it. All because some US scientists wanted grant money too much and so laughed everyone who disagrees out of the room.

That Rootclaim analysis seems sloppy as hell. From the "Show More" of the outbreak location section:

>Thus, the ratio of zoonotic:bioweapon:zoonotic collection:modified lab escape is 2:5:100:50, or a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 50x, a bioweapon origin by 20x, and a lab escape by 0.5x.

Those aren't the same ratio.

>To account for the possibility that there is a yet unidentified reason why Wuhan is a more likely location for a zoonotic outbreak, these numbers are generously adjusted to a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 20x and a bioweapon origin by 15x, with lab escape remaining at 0.5x.

But what they actually apply is a reduction of a zoonotic origin by 20x and a bioweapon origin by 15x, with zoonotic collection at 2x. Which isn't the result of applying that adjustment to either of the original ratios, so apparently they've just applied the lab escape factor to wrong category

This sort of thing is only going to give more ammunition to people saying STEM students must take ethics/reasoning/philosophy courses :)

Is that supposed to sound like a bad idea?

This David Martin?

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-covid-vaccine/f...

2023-06-15-01-22

Also consistent with:

https://public.substack.com/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid...