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The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

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Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#441

Post by tnzm »

pmoriarty wrote: post #431
ravenstine wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really interesting to see this shift in sentiment that HN users have towards the media and journalism. A couple of years ago this comment wouldn't have made it to the top of the page, and it may have even been grayed out. This isn't something I'm celebrating, though. It's not a sign of a successful state when everyone is losing confidence in the press.

It would serve us well to distinguish between different types of media critiques. One the one hand, there's the critique that media institutions are becoming more commercialized, dumbed-down, and turned in to infotainment, where serious discussion and inquiry is thrown out the window in favor of shouting matches and sensationalism. There's another critique that media is in service or left-wing, right-wing, capitalist…

That comment might as well seem to be a camel, but what it is an indictment of the exact same conflation that you conclude with. The fact that you are correctly able to make equivalent distinctions (more or less) in the paragraphs preceding that conclusion reeks of bad faith.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#442

Post by pmoriarty »

caseysoftware wrote: post #440
pmoriarty wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would serve us well to distinguish between different types of media critiques. One the one hand, there's the critique that media institutions are becoming more commercialized, dumbed-down, and turned in to infotainment, where serious discussion and inquiry is thrown out the window in favor of shouting matches and sensationalism. There's another critique that media is in service or left-wing, right-wing, capitalist…

> The grandparent comment seems to be a critique of the third category, where they seem to want the mainstream media to give more air time to conspiracy theories in direct contravention to the consensus of the scientific community: which is that SARS-CoV-2 came from nature, not from a lab. My actual criticism was closer to your first category: "where serious discussion and inquiry is thrown out the window in favor of…

What's more sensationalistic: that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin or that it was lab made?

Sensationlism is squarely on the side of the conspiracy theores.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#443

Post by thu2111 »

allturtles wrote: post #382
thu2111 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did but the article is very poorly written. The explicit statement that Nicholas Wade is not a racist appears both as the first sentence - unquoted i.e. this is not reported speech but a statement by the article author - and in the abstract at the top, also not in quotes. But then it starts by mis-representing his argument by saying he "explains why white people are better because of their genes" and in the very ne…

It's not poorly written, it's a rhetorical use of irony. Like Mark Antony repeatedly asserting that Brutus and Cassius are "honorable men" as he describes how they brutally and unjustly murdered Caesar.

Irony is not sarcasm! There's nothing ironic about the way the article is written, especially as it's such an incendiary accusation to begin with - the very place one should not be using neither irony nor sarcasm. Such topics need to be treated with great gravity.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#444

Post by chipotle_coyote »

thu2111 wrote: post #209
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're citing an article that literally has as its first sentence, "Nicholas Wade is not a racist". As citations go that's not very convincing. I'm not sure you read past the first sentence of that article, since the second sentence makes it clear that Nicholas Wade is the one making the claim he's not racist. "It's not prejudice; it's science." It's pretty clear the reviewer -- in Scientific American, which I beli…

I did but the article is very poorly written. The explicit statement that Nicholas Wade is not a racist appears both as the first sentence - unquoted i.e. this is not reported speech but a statement by the article author - and in the abstract at the top, also not in quotes. But then it starts by mis-representing his argument by saying he "explains why white people are better because of their genes" and in the very ne…

> you put that statement in quotes to imply that Wade is the one who said it, but in fact, it's the article author who wrote that statement, not Wade!

No, I put it in quotes to indicate that it was a quote. And yes, allturtles is correct that the author was engaging in a rhetorical device here, and is clearly (at least, it's clear to me) asserting that, yes, Wade's thesis was essentially racist. I don't think we're going to get anywhere continuing this, though, so let's just agree to disagree.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#445

Post by [deleted] »

thu2111 wrote: post #443
allturtles wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not poorly written, it's a rhetorical use of irony. Like Mark Antony repeatedly asserting that Brutus and Cassius are "honorable men" as he describes how they brutally and unjustly murdered Caesar.

Irony is not sarcasm! There's nothing ironic about the way the article is written, especially as it's such an incendiary accusation to begin with - the very place one should not be using neither irony nor sarcasm. Such topics need to be treated with great gravity.

[deleted]

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#446

Post by moralestapia »

unanswered wrote: post #333
shoto_io wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I can relate to that. Most of 2020 we were focused on fighting the aftermath of the crisis. Now that things slowly are getting back to normal, at least in some Western countries, our focus shifts to the origins. I was also very skeptical in the beginning about the escape theory tbh. But after reading a couple of pieces I’m opening up to the possibility.

And how does this justify moral superiority to those of us who understood from the beginning that the lab hypothesis was the most likely? Or was that not true until you decided it was true?

I remember a year ago you couldn't even MENTION the possibility of COVID having an artificial origin without being labelled a crazy conspiracy theorist.

Funny how "smart and educated" people can be so dumb and close-minded in reality.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#447

Post by thomascgalvin »

caseysoftware wrote: post #390

I think the media successfully conflated four separate questions: a) Did it form in nature or in a lab? b) Did it become more communicable via nature or via the lab? c) Did it make it to humans through nature (or wet market) or via the lab? d) If it came from the lab was it on purpose or an accident? as simply "OMG IT CAME FROM A LAB" and then claimed it's all a conspiracy theory. The media as a whole shot themselves…

> The media as a whole shot themselves in the foot on this one and we'll all be worse off for it.

Science reporters don't generally understand science, and nuanced takes don't generate clicks. The "media" is the absolute worst place for this discussion to take place.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#448

Post by unclebucknasty »

epistasis wrote: post #355
unclebucknasty wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do we know that the virus [wasn't]...simply detected in Wuhan because of the fact that there are experts in coronaviruses who reside there? Even if true, that would not explain the elaborate story, regarding the wet market there and species-jumping. Also, seems unlikely, as there'd have to be reason to suspect a new virus was circulating at scale that required investigation by these scientists, which could have…

What you misleadingly call an "elaborate story" is exactly the common story of how new disease emerges. It was even in the Sodergbergh movie Contagion from 2011.

If you don't like the word "elaborate" then feel free to choose another word. The point is that it's a detailed story about a specific time and place that they're claiming to be ground zero, and there's no evidence to support it. In fact, they've yet to find the natural reservoir for the virus to be able to definitively claim that it originated in another species, let alone that it did so through a specific species that existed in that specific place, then jumped. So, there's an obvious disconnect in the official story. What would you prefer to call it?

And, that it's a "common story" of how new diseases emerge has exactly zero bearing on whether this specific disease so evolved. You must know that form of argument is just syllogistically unsound.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#449

Post by [deleted] »

pmoriarty wrote: post #442
caseysoftware wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The grandparent comment seems to be a critique of the third category, where they seem to want the mainstream media to give more air time to conspiracy theories in direct contravention to the consensus of the scientific community: which is that SARS-CoV-2 came from nature, not from a lab. My actual criticism was closer to your first category: "where serious discussion and inquiry is thrown out the window in favor of…

What's more sensationalistic: that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin or that it was lab made? Sensationlism is squarely on the side of the conspiracy theores.

[deleted]

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#450

Post by [deleted] »

followtheplot wrote: post #294

"... proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence." "The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities." This is a fantastic article, but amazingly almost all of it is year-old news. Most of this was known in March 2020, and nearly all of it by the end of 2020. How does it take so long for the trut…

[deleted]
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