Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

Several doctors were discussing it in a WeChat group in December 2019 and were basically arrested and forced to apologise for spreading “misinformation”. The main person who became famous for sounding the alarm (Li Wenjiang, an ophthalmologist) later died of the disease.

Of course. The issue is simply that it needs to happen within the site guidelines, for example this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Commenters here need to learn the difference between posting in the flamewar style and having curious conversation. The issue is not the topic—it's which mode people's nervous systems are functioning in as they discuss it. Here is what to watch for:

(1) One mode is battle mode, in which people use grandiose, aggressive rhetoric to try to defeat an enemy, and take any opportunity they can to twist what the other side says to gain an advantage...

(2) ... and the other is curiosity mode, in which people explore together to find the truth and are interested in what each other are actually saying, thinking, and feeling.

(3) You can tell which mode you're in by sensing into your level of activation while posting. If you're not sure about it yet, or if you're feeling agitated, slow down before posting, set an intention to observe your own state, and it will soon become clear.

Another way of explaining this is the distinction between reflexive and reflective responses: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Reflexive responses are lightning fast, associated with high activation, and oriented towards threat assessment and defense. They come from the fight-or-flight layer that we're all dealing with in ourselves. They're also highly repetitive, because they basically come from cache—that's why we're able to generate them so quickly. The reflexive system is not about responding to or creating anything new. It's there for survival and to prevent the recurrence of past painful experiences.

Reflective responses are slow, come from the drive to explore and learn, and have to do with new responses to new information—which take time to come together. They lead to conversations and outcomes that aren't simply replays of past reactions. They aren't primarily about past traumas and threat defense. In order to function this way, the nervous system needs a certain baseline of safety. One way to get there is simply to wait until the initial wave of reactiveness subsides, and then look around and orient to what's specifically new and interesting in the present situation.

Empathy comes into this too, because the ability to put oneself in the other person's position, instead of quickly scanning their comment for weaknesses to exploit, is a complex process that requires the slower cognitive systems to come online.

The Washington Post has already shifted:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/the-...

It's less what new information has come to light, and more what hasn't. For MERS and for the original SARS, the proximal animal hosts were identified within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, we haven't found that yet. (See my comment history if you're thinking pangolins; they're pretty much abandoned.)

So a year later, despite the considerable effort spent looking for evidence of natural zoonotic origin, we still have nothing. We also have no evidence of lab origin, but that investigation has been thoroughly obstructed--for example, the WIV's private database of viruses went offline in September 2019, and any reporter who approaches the mine where SARS-CoV-2's nearest known relative (RaTG13) was discovered gets turned away by Chinese police.

"Did not see evidence of tampering" is too weak to trust for me.

Military-funded scientific biowarfare research should be different (use different, more advanced, tools) than run-of-the-mill bioinformatics research which US scientists work with. So if the scientist is not working on military research, their guess is as good as: "it was not engineered using common industry-standard known methods". It is misattributing authority, like quoting bio science experts saying "COVID can't be a weapon because the mortality is too low". No, you have zero idea about the military applications of biowarfare. If the scientist really was a military researcher, then they won't disclose signs of tampering to a news outlet or academic journal.

Another is that, for obvious reasons, military research would like to obfuscate its engineering. So it is unlikely they use easily detectable methods for that. It is perfectly possible to breed viruses in a lab, inside natural hosts. Then you won't see any biological markers of tampering, but the virus was still engineered by cross-breeding captured fruit bats or manually creating a zoonotic transmission chain to humans. So even without biological signs of tampering, the lab leak remains plausible.

Playing devils advocate here but… people are so scared of everyone we literally do not go outside anymore. Is that not successful terrorism?