Documents show scientist calling lab leak likely after paper claiming opposite

Re:Documents show scientist calling lab leak likely after pa... by sdwr on Friday July 14, 2023 @12:11AM (#36719399)

I've believed the lab leak was likely at least since the Atlantic (?) expose of the lab came out.

Disheartening but not unsurprising to see political concerns + firefighting trump the truth.

Threading the needle between naivety, skepticism and conspiracy thinking is tricky. There's a tradeoff between being lazy + letting existing patterns think for you, vs doing the hard work of questioning.

Someone like Scott from SSC lands in the hard-working but naive box for me. Typical reddit (and HN) posts are lazy and skeptical.

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Re:Documents show scientist calling lab leak likely after pa... by rhaway84773 on Saturday July 15, 2023 @02:44AM (#36734225)

There is no evidence for the lab leak theory.

Even if it was a lab leak, I think it’s fairly uncontroversial that the null hypothesis cannot be that there was a lab leak.

So the burden of proof lies on proving the lab leak. And there is very little to no evidence that it was other than “here’s a few unlikely things that happened”.

However, if we used that standard to examine airplane crashes, for example, accidental airplane crashes wouldn’t exist. Because for an airplane crash to happen a lot of highly unlikely things need to go wrong in highly unlikely ways at the same time.

Similarly for a once in a century global pandemic to happen, a lot of things need to go wrong in a lot of unexpected ways.

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