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Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

rootclaim.com

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Re: Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

#271

Post by sargun »

consumer451 wrote: post #154
purplecats wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why that date

Not gp, but to me it seems common and smart to put an expiration date on all financial offers. That's the simplest explanation at least. This rootclaim.com process is new to me, there could certainly be other explanations. Kudos to purplecats for making that offer as well, assuming this whole thing is on the up and up. edit: below was my post when it was first upvoted, prior to edit. > Not gp, but to me it seems smar…

It’s to avoid wasting time, to create a sense of urgency, and to avoid putting myself in an awkward situation where I have to say no due to changed circumstances.

Re: Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

#272

Post by GlenTheMachine »

casion wrote: post #251
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about Bayesian analysis is that you have to make your priors explicit. That’s what this is, a prior. It doesn’t have to have a derivation; it can just be a guess. The important thing is that you’re writing your guess down so everyone can see it. You can then also do a sensitivity analysis to figure out how much your conclusions change if you modify your priors. So if you, the reader, think the priors a…

The major issue here is that the sensitization of priors can be a marketing ploy. It's very easy to "make guesses" that present your conclusion, throw in a paltry amount of money, then make bank off the publicity. This possibility poisons the well for the entire process. If they can make money off this even if they are completely off-base, then it's not rational to build up the trust necessary in their process to eng…

It’s not clear to me how they make money other than by winning their bets. What am I missing?

Re: Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

#273

Post by cloverich »

kmm wrote: post #208
happytoexplain wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>consist largely of _extremely_ strong opinions Really? I usually see a lot of plain disagreement based on reasonable lines of thinking, but only a very small proportion of "_extremely_ strong" wording. Are you sure you're not just interpreting a multitude of similar opinions as creating a feeling of that opinion being "extremely strong"? Or that you're not just thinking of the cases where people are responding to th…

It's of course just more anecdotal evidence, but in my experience if you dare to mention the possibility of the virus being man-made on Reddit, regardless of the nuance and sources you add, you will get torn to shreds. This is not just me being salty about reactions to my own comments, I've personally never made a comment on the origin of the covid on Reddit, as I don't feel like I have anything of value to add yet.…

the political context is that one Trump / far right angle is to play up Chinas fault and use it as a weapon to discount the USs otherwise poor handling of the outbreak. I have several friends and family who think this way, and are nearly offended at the suggestion that eg Trump making fun of Biden wearing a mask is innapropriate. My general view is i am less concerned with the origins and more concerned with our preparedness for the next outbreak. So while i am not one of those down voters you speak of, i do legitimately fear that if it does turn out to be lab made, the far right will win back ground and we won’t see any meaningful progress towards bolstering out defense against the inevitable next outbreak.

Re: Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

#274

Post by sargun »

avmich wrote: post #178
Torwald wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please clarify your date format. Is that 1st of March or the day before 4th of January? According to my European sentiment it's the 3rd of January, is that correct?

Most often I see this as an example of ISO 8061 date, https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html . "Looking for an unambiguous calendar-and-clock format that is internationally understood? It’s time for ISO 8601." "ISO 8601 tackles this uncertainty by setting out an internationally agreed way to represent dates: YYYY-MM-DD For example, September 27, 2012 is represented as 2012-09-27."

Yep. Although I don’t use ISO8601 for time stamps when communicating online (for 2021-03-01T00:00Z is more confusing to me than 2021-03-01 16:00 PST8PDT), it’s easier to use for dates when discussing in an online forum where people may be from outside of the US.

Re: Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

#275

Post by grzm »

sargun wrote: post #274
avmich wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most often I see this as an example of ISO 8061 date, https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html . "Looking for an unambiguous calendar-and-clock format that is internationally understood? It’s time for ISO 8601." "ISO 8601 tackles this uncertainty by setting out an internationally agreed way to represent dates: YYYY-MM-DD For example, September 27, 2012 is represented as 2012-09-27."

Yep. Although I don’t use ISO8601 for time stamps when communicating online (for 2021-03-01T00:00Z is more confusing to me than 2021-03-01 16:00 PST8PDT), it’s easier to use for dates when discussing in an online forum where people may be from outside of the US.

nit: ISO8601 permits offsets: you don't need to always use UTC/Z. 2021-03-01T16:00-0800 works just fine.

Re: Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

#276

Post by SpaceRaccoon »

rcpt wrote: post #260
SpaceRaccoon wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything that I've read suggests the bats from which the virus likely originated can only be found hundreds of kilometers away, so it must have been brought into Wuhan somehow. Either for food, or for research, unless you can propose another explanation? > The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats w…

With asymptomatic transmission the virus likely would have spread unnoticed in the town that was encroaching on bats for a while before someone brought it to Wuhan.

What makes that equally or more likely?

The concentration of early cases in Wuhan, hundreds of kilometers of away, would imply that the asymptomatic traveler(s) only traveled to one city, and didn't infect any other people along the way.

It's possible, but you have to consider the probability of all these events, hence the Bayesian analysis performed here.

Re: Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

#277

Post by loceng »

meowface wrote: post #97
dash2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the problem with this startup is that the high-minded Bayesianism of their model is going to run up against the crass incentive to make exciting, media-friendly claims. Their track record doesn't seem that rigorous either, they just list a few (like 5) cases where evidence has later supported them: https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim_track_record

Their track record seems neither compelling nor skepticism-worthy, I think, often because a lot of their conclusions lined up with already widely accepted hypotheses (e.g. that MMR vaccines don't cause autism and that MH17 was shot down by DNR), and a lot of the controversial things naturally remain unknown. The most interesting - where public opinion was against and Rootclaim was for, and it was later shown Rootclai…

Re: Bret Weinstein - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug

Re: Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

#278

Post by twicetwice »

skinkestek wrote: post #104

One thing I wonder is: How did the UK virus suddenly get 17 mutations at once if it's not a new engineered release by someone? I'm not a biologist, but that part had me wondering. Any biologists here who want to explain for a layman?

I'm not a biologist either, but I've been told recently by someone who's likely to know what he's talking about (albeit also likely to be a bit "rah-rah Britain") that the UK is doing far more genetic sequencing of the virus than the rest of the world, which would explain why it gets noticed more in the UK.

Re: Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

#279

Post by bingojess »

Someone1234 wrote: post #250
eloff wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I initially thought having a big bio lab in the city where the pandemic started, in a country with a history of managing security in their bio labs poorly, in a lab known for studying sars like coronaviruses, including gain of function research to better bind to human ace2 receptors was just too many coincidences. You have to admit it's believable. But then when you realize how many people in rural China have b…

The whole lab thing is people getting cause and effect mixed up, the lab is there because novel coronaviruses keep happening in that region, but because all people know is that COVID-19 is new (and none of the history) they immediately jump to that the lab specializing in this type of disease at the epicenter is too big of a coincidence to ignore (rather than it being there exactly because it is a common epicenter).…

In the article there isn't any discussion of cause and effect, it is a probabilistic model. Eg. being near a virus lab makes it more likely it's a lab escape, being 1000km away from the main zoonotic reservoirs (bat populations) in China make it less likely it's of zoonotic origin. This is not to say it's impossible as researchers do travel 1000km from Wuhan to get samples from bats. I'll not comment on the probabilities they assigned to each hypothesis (they may very well be discounting the likelihood of zoonotic origins too heavily) but that is the approach they took.

Re: Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it

#280

Post by nobodyandproud »

sunderr wrote: post #199
nobodyandproud wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I personally don’t want to lend any credence to bat-shit crazy conspiracy theories, especially in a public forum. I’m a complete nobody, but the internet has a way of amplifying things.

I'm not convinced anyone has good evidence for this particular claim at this time, but labeling it "batshit crazy" is premature. Michael Osterholm, a respected epidemiologist, explains in his book "Deadliest Enemy" his belief ("no doubt in his mind") that the 1977 Russian flu was released from a bioweapons lab. If it happened before there isn't any reason it couldn't happen now. EDIT: I misspoke slightly by referring…

You didn’t misspeak “slightly”. At least in intent, there’s a world of difference between a vaccine study and bioweapon study.
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