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The Lab Leak Hypothesis

nymag.com

231–240 of 244 posts

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main point here is that the lab escape hypothesis has been hitherto dismissed out of hand when it ought not to be. I agree that the natural zoonotic contamination hypothesis is more plausible to begin with, but since it has not been confirmed (as in: no natural reservoir has been identified), the less plausible but nonetheless not implausible lab escape hypothesis should still be on the table.

The President of the United States is on record as saying it came from a lab. I’m not sure how that translates to “dismissed out of hand”.

Dismissed by the intelligentsia, like everything he says. Usually they are right to do so, but occasionally I think there is a touch of "orange man bad" syndrome.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#232
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The third most common death from firearms in the USA is accidental discharge. What is the fourth most common death from firearms in the USA?

I'm not sure what the second would be. The first is presumably "deliberate discharge," and then...?

Yeah, I just found that statement so weird that I had to reply.

If I had to guess first and second are deliberate suicide and deliberate homicide. But I suspect there's a huge fall from those numbers to what is the third and presumably last rank.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#233
post #230
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First there is plenty of evidence on the marriage thing with the most well documented being marriage subsidies and propaganda, the Wikipedia link was for context and the quote. Anyway, a 60% drop in births isn’t part of a wider national trend, this is extremely targeted.

The 60% drop is not part of a wider national trend only because national birth rates started dropping when the government first implemented birth control policies in the 1960s: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CBRT.IN?view=cha... Xinjiang is slightly lagging behind, but it's very much the same policies in play. In the New York Times article I linked above, it is mentioned that "From 1980 to 2014, according…

National birth rates where 13 in 2016 vs 9.3 in Beijing demonstrating it’s a poor fit for national trends. It’s an interesting spin attempt, but clearly fails even when looking at the data you provided.

In terms of IUD rates. 324 million IUD’s over 34 years vs a current population of 1.4 billion don’t on their own get 60% drop in birth rates. Further, it isn’t like Xinjinang was completely outside of the national trends and suddenly caught up, this is clearly deliberate genocide based on openly available data.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "likely vector" would be the millions of peasants living near bat caves in rural China (who actually have already been shown to have antibodies to bat viruses). And some of whom traveled to the market. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296... So I would upgrade that quite a bit from "moderate-low." (One of the researchers in this NPR article seems to rate it as an obvious suspect, so I'd ca…

According to the article, the bat caves are nearly a thousand miles away. It seems unlikely peasants were traveling a thousand miles for the purpose of visting the market. It also presents some reasons why bat viruses on their own were unlikely to become as contagious as COVID, citing the example of RaTG13's discovery. So the "zoonotic transfer from bats" theory requires an extraordinary new strain (possible!) to tra…

It’s too late to edit, but I’d like to ask downvoters to respond instead of downvoting. The submission references and contradicts the information provided in the GPs link and discusses how the politicization of the origin led to these organizations making much stronger statements than the evidence warranted. I cited some of the information the OP mentions that contradicts assertions made by the GP.

If I am wrong or misinformed, I would like to know it. The submission is an excellent article. I have no dog in this fight but it did shift the needle of uncertainty for me, particularly when I learned about prior leaks and the suppression of investigations in China. It’s a long article but worth the read.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth of a story does not depend on the credibility of its narrator. To assert otherwise is the definition of ad hominem . Claims asserted may nonetheless be untrue or may not be as strong as claimed. But that requires careful, critical examination. I'm perplexed by this reaction, as if reading something with a critical eye is impossible. Or, worse, that reading something by someone without a particular status or…

> The truth of a story does not depend on the credibility of its narrator. It actually does. I'm going to respect the opinions of serious scientists, doctors, journalists, lawyers, etc on topics of their expertise. > But that requires careful, critical examination. That was my whole point. By stating claims as an elaborate story that requires time investment as a reader, with a lot of flourish from a professional wri…

> > The truth of a story does not depend on the credibility of its narrator. > > It actually does. I'm going to respect the opinions of serious scientists, doctors, journalists, lawyers, etc on topics of their expertise.

No, this is just wrong. If a homeless person tells you that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, this is just as true as if a Stanford physics professor says it, despite the latter having much more credibility than the former. The truth of a statement is independent of the speaker.

In fact, your causality is exactly backwards. Credibility depends (in part) on someone stating the truth repeatedly.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SARS has leaked from Chinese labs multiple times. And the only lab in the world specializing in coronaviruses was ~1000 ft away from the first cases. The leaked US diplomatic cables urge the US to help China with this very lab because biosecurity there was so concerning to visiting scientists. It's also the only BSL4 lab in China. In addition the head of that lab has published numerous papers about generic engineerin…

> SARS has leaked from Chinese labs multiple times. And the only lab in the world specializing in coronaviruses was ~1000 ft away from the first cases. The leaked US diplomatic cables urge the US to help China with this very lab because biosecurity there was so concerning to visiting scientists. It's also the only BSL4 lab in China. In addition the head of that lab has published numerous papers about generic engineer…

Use DuckDuckGo if you ever want to search for something controversial since they don't filter their results like Google.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Unfortunately public health researchers/biologists have very little credibility at this point so appeals to their authority won't work. In particular arguments of the form "we need more evidence" look weak given how many enormous leaps of faith the supposedly scientific establishment has been willing to make on the basis of no evidence at all for the past year, e.g. masks, lockdowns, asymptomatic infection (app…

I just indicated that I have spent much of my life thinking about these things. You don't have to believe that this gives me any insight, but like I said it might help you understand that I'm not just parroting some theory I've read, I'm working on it directly. I understand your concerns about public health research. Have you thought about it could be done better? Curious what you think. Computer science papers have…

Not reliably sharing source code is a big problem in health modelling too, it's an issue across academia. The last set of CS papers I read did all publish their code though, at least for the ones where I cared to look. Perhaps this problem is fading away with time.

Yeah, places like DeepMind or OpenAI don't, partly because their papers are extended press releases rather than precise descriptions of how to recreate their results. OK, that's fine, they aren't academia so they're paying for their own work. If they choose to write a paper at all it's a pure bonus over what's basically expected of them. For government funded research it's different of course.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what could be done better and how. The problem is there's this overwhelming number of problems that track back to a few root causes that are basically intractable in the current social environment. Take bogus citations, or use of obsolete data. Completely standard in epidemiology to write papers that use values for IFR or other key variables that are 8 months old when far more up to date data is available. Or what about claims with citations in which the cited paper doesn't support the claim being made, or even contradicts it. I never see this in CS papers. I've seen it regularly whilst reading epi papers. Or papers where the key claim in the abstract is just fraudulent, like the Flaxman claims about the efficacy of lockdowns which just assumed its own conclusions in the construction of the model, and relied on assigning Sweden a ludicrously huge country-specific fudge factor in the model (4000x). Right, and the fact that this was done wasn't mentioned anywhere in the paper nor supplementary materials ... you had to read the code to find it (at least the code was open that time!).

You can tut and say well that shouldn't have happened, but of course there will be people who are tempted to dress up their chosen conclusion in the clothes of science. The question is really what mechanisms are responsible for detecting and preventing a fall in standards. But in science the only such mechanism is peer review and journals, which are hardly effective. Everyone is a part of the same system with the same incentives and there are no penalties for incorrect work, so bad papers are getting published in Nature and Science all the time, especially when aligned with the prevailing ideology of these institutions. University administrators are responsible in theory, or maybe granting bodies, but same problem: none of them have any stake in output quality. Ultimately to fix these problems you need to tie the rewards in academia to the correctness of results, but academia isn't culturally anywhere near ready to even think about that. Academic freedom implies the freedom to be wrong your entire career, of course.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#238
post #103
post #80

Back in March or so, I wrote a comment about this [1], citing some even earlier (January 2020-ish) HN commentary. My conclusion: Lab leak's not inconsistent with the evidence, but there's no smoking gun. China's behavior is highly suggestive of guilt -- the moving location on Google Maps, destroying records, and not permitting any outside investigation. However, China could actually be completely innocent and just do…

I can't imagine the US government letting the Chinese government come in to investigate, so that's not the strongest argument My view for China's actions is that they're likely by individual bureaucrats trying to hide their own incompetence from everyone

I can completely see an team of international scientists coming to the US to investigate the origins of an outbreak.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#239
post #7

Months ago, everyone talking about this hypothesis was denounced as an evil right wing racist conspiracy theorist, mostly because the people who came to that conclusion were generally right wing racist conspiracy theorists. What does this say about the appropriate credibility update for right wing racist conspiracy theorists?

I heard a lot of people discussing this possibility including liberals and leftists, but there was and still is a taboo against discussing it publicly. Most of the public articles I saw on it were sensationalistic pieces from far-right news sources, and I flagged those. I upvoted one sanely written scientific paper on the subject, and posted this because it was also not sensationalistic. The problem is that if we dis…

[deleted]

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#240
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SARS has leaked from Chinese labs multiple times. And the only lab in the world specializing in coronaviruses was ~1000 ft away from the first cases. The leaked US diplomatic cables urge the US to help China with this very lab because biosecurity there was so concerning to visiting scientists. It's also the only BSL4 lab in China. In addition the head of that lab has published numerous papers about generic engineerin…

Are you referring to the 1976 or 1977 influenza? There is evidence of a lab leak or other human origin for the 1977 strain but the original source was never definitively identified. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/ https://mbio.asm.org/content/6/4/e01013-15.full

Sorry 1977 you are correct
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