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US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

reuters.com

211–220 of 664 posts

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#211
post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species. FAR FAR FAR more plausible.

Are you serious?

Occam's Razor says the only (non-vet) BSL4 lab in China, studying bat coronaviruses, several miles from known first virus reports, that has had multiple previous virus leaks, with huge information shutdown by China for a year, is the more plausible culprit.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#212

What's weird is that a number of WHO investigation team members a week ago said China was very transparent, cooperative and helpful. Some have tweeted against the NYT who spun the WHO team's accounts into anti-China propaganda. https://mobile.twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/13605511085659... https://mobile.twitter.com/TheaKFischer/status/1360590441817...

Would love to hear more from Thea Fischer, who the WSJ quotes extensively.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are social/political ramifications to seriously consider. Similar to if we had a sudden large radiation hazard and it was unclear if it was some spontaneously emerging phenomenon with essentially no direct human cause, or a power plant/enrichment facility/warhead manufacturer/etc. And beyond that, there are supposedly methods of (even purely scientifically motivated) research that would involve engineer…

The Chinese response to international concerns over the Wuhan virus is very similar to the Soviet Unions response to the same concern over a sudden spike in nuclear radiation. There’s something strange about a government that works so hard to stifle all questions and dissent. It’s like they don’t realize the act of oppression of inquiry raises the level of inquiry even more.

I'm sure they realize it, but what's the alternative for them?

"Yes, come right in, here's our primary source data collected, it concludes that Chernobyl (or WIV lab leak) did happen..."

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#214
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species. FAR FAR FAR more plausible.

Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. A random virus, no. This one, we do. We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to b…

At that point it's just a theory, not a conspiracy theory

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#215
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where in my post it postulates anything about "truth". The entire point of the post is to say, we don't know the truth, but in the balance of probabilities, I wouldn't trust the CCP's version. Did you even read what I wrote, or are you just knee jerking?

I can't see what you're responding to, but if people make an accusation without evidence, the accused party's trustworthiness is kind of irrelevant, right? Fine, you don't trust their denial, but that doesn't affirmatively prove anything either. They could deny killing JFK, as well, and it shouldn't change anything.

There's no accusation. Everything I said in my post is opinion. Please read the original post, in its entirety.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#216
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see what you're responding to, but if people make an accusation without evidence, the accused party's trustworthiness is kind of irrelevant, right? Fine, you don't trust their denial, but that doesn't affirmatively prove anything either. They could deny killing JFK, as well, and it shouldn't change anything.

There's no accusation. Everything I said in my post is opinion . Please read the original post, in its entirety.

I said "people" are making accusations, didn't mean to say you were.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#217
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. A random virus, no. This one, we do. We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to b…

At that point it's just a theory, not a conspiracy theory

It is. But then you descend down the rabbit hole to a government coverup of a release from a secret bioweapons research lab that was intended to target US military members at the 2019 Military World Games in late October in Wuhan. And now it becomes pretty clearly a conspiracy theory.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#218
post #113
post #31

I am yet to see a single piece of evidence which rules out the lab leak hypothesis. Meanwhile the circumstantial evidence in favour of that hypothesis (including China’s behaviour) continues to pile up. We may never discover the truth, but I really hope we do.

>> Meanwhile the circumstantial evidence in favour of that hypothesis (including China’s behaviour) continues to pile up. What circumstantial evidence?

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/02/virologist-explains-his...

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6981198/Analysis-...

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#219
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be "built"? It could have been isolated from bats and studied, and an error / human mistake occurred and it got out. There's a rational reason to study this one, since SARS (1.0) was a big deal in the early 2000's, and anyway why wouldn't you study something you don't fully understand as a matter of course. It's not a stretch if it was found that it leaked from the lab by accident and a cover-up e…

The problem is that an accidental release from a lab has been deliberately conflated with the idea of a bioweapon and labeled a conspiracy theory. Coupled with aggressive propaganda efforts from China, and the fact that the Trump Administration pushed the theory of a lab release (turning the concept into political kryptonite for more than 50% of the US population) its discussion has become verboten.

Well that's not surprising, we're trending towards a world of increase tightening of the exchange of data, fact checking, labels of "conspiracy", and there will of course be fallout that people will see in retrospect. Today the mainstream view is to knock the non-mainstream views out of acceptable discourse. I would say with QAnon and vaccine shennanigans, a lot of people support that. At some point something important will be covered up (such as during a war) and they won't be so gung ho. So swings the pendulum.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are "working with what they have", then they should not speak from a position of authority. Authority is derived from something being something that everyone has . In the past, achieving that goal practically guaranteed authenticity to within a comfortable enough quanta for everyone to work with. With more advanced remote sensing equipment, the decreased cost to publish, reach one can attain for relatively li…

How's you do things, if you had a blank slate?

That's actually a fairly hard question I haven't completely been able to find a way out of that doesn't lead to SSDD.

On the one hand, there's a part of me that imagines a world of completely neutral sensor grids that absolutely everyone is able to tap into for reading from, no questions asked, no restrictions. Anyone can see anything, from anywhere, period.

Imagine this was set up and anyone who knew how to insert state into the system just got disapoofed.

So you now have a reality where we're all capable of receiving the exact same information, and operatinng on it as we desire. The Executive decision of free will literally becomes what or where to pay attention to or where to invest your effort.

However, this ideal setup wouldn't last 15 minutes before nodes started to organize into meta-blocks devoting their cycles to getting other undecided nodes to devote their cycles where the meta-group thinks that attention is best directed. This creates information asymmetry, which enables perception management. To hell with mentioning or lining out for the Undirected that there are alternatives or an opportunity cost.

So even in the most ideal case where all the hard work is done to make it so everyone, everywhere can magically remote sense the same data, I can't architectually guarantee a proof against perception management.

Let us now shift to the opposite side of the spectrum.

You only have your own eyes, and your only means of long range remote sensing is by dedicating other people to head over there and collect it, and report back. Magically assume everyone is okay with these individuals doing so with no strings attached. (That never happens, but lets's assume). Also assume these people are selfless and amazingly perfectly rerceptive with a talent for getting across aspects of what they see.

You end up at the same problem. The hand that sets the bounds or priorities of those people collecting information represents the true seat of power, and de facto perception management. In a centralized system, you'd confer godlike power over the lower rungs to the people at the top.

The only way I can see it working out in some modicum of a better way is to ensure distributed sourcing of prioritization decisions. I.e. localized populations of these metaphorical informational go getters, with priorities set as some function arrived at by the consuming population.

Then again, you run into the problem of our current media/press edifice: the audience picks the facts by collective editorial discretion, and furthermore, you emergently get meta-nodes that pop up and rate authoritativeness by how often similar renderings of the same inputs pop up. Those meta-nodes, and the consumers of information feed into an overall balancing act. The meta-nodes try to build audiences by tailoring the facts they provide for maximized odds of acceptance by their influenced audience.

So in no way do I find any way to reconcile a system that includes authoritative weighting that results in a low probability of perceptual management arising. It's an emergent property of any network medium of information propagation.

This suggests, given it's inevitability of arising, we need to thoughtfully structure something around, enshrining information propagation as a first order infrastructure (which we kind of already have), but also relegating some form of negative outcome to poor performance as a neutral information propagator, which again, we already have. People are starting to distrust media outlets and other authoritative sources due to the bad information received, just as Nation's are apparently placing the WHO's credibility at arms length due to their proven unwillingness to research theories that reflect poorly on their subject.

So yeah. We got what we've got, and with a blank slate we'll end up in the same place even with a massive change to the fundamental architecture of human social consciousness.

It seems to stem from some some deeper intrinsic instinctual underpinning of successful life forms that I"m not really good at imagining outside of.

A lot of words to say I don't know I guess, but I gave it the good old college try.

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