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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#461

Post by throwawayboise »

bialpio wrote: post #447
jkhdigital wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the difference? I suppose it is possible that the Wuhan bat hunters found this virus occurring naturally and just, you know, kept it around without telling anyone...

There is a huge difference! For one, suggesting it was man-made lends credibility to the conspiracy theory crowd ("plandemic", "they manufactured it to enslave you", etc), which is probably why the press over-indexed on debunking it. Also, it could imply that there was some intent behind it appearing when and where it did, when there may have been none (Hanlon's razor applies until a proof to the contrary appears). M…

If the virus was man-made, then its release was either accidental or deliberate. Both of these possibilites need to be allowed until disproven. If it was deliberate, then why?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#462

Post by pavlov »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #223
pavlov wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument seems to assume that Internet hosting is like air — a natural resource which by default is available for everyone to use, but social media companies restrict unfairly. As everyone here should know, it’s not like that: hosting can be awfully expensive, especially for media content. Social media companies receive money from advertisers, and use that money to host content from users and partners that hopef…

Real estate is expensive too, but there are "town square" doctrines in some states where presenting yourself as a public space means you must not discriminate on usage. This goes further -- in some states where such doctrine does not exist it was kind of synthesized because some electoral districts have, say, 80% of the electorate in an apartment building which a judge ruled must be accessible to candidates who run.

A comment section on a blog presents itself as a public space. Does this mean nobody can moderate comments anymore?

Or if the rule only applies to political expression, can spammers just adopt the formula: “I love candidate $X because he buys viagra at http:yyy”

Or, if the rule is that big enough sites suddenly become “town squares”, that seems like a major disincentive to American companies to grow. Others would walk in without these limitations, like Chinese already did with TikTok.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#463

Post by llsf »

No sure why it is a big deal? Some people (like Cotton) said that the virus escaped a Chinese lab, but had not hard proofs. Lots of scientists said there are no hard proofs. Then we moved on... until we get more proofs.

Anybody can claim anything including truth, but until it is proven to be true, it would be discredited. In this case, finding the truth with hard proofs is not trivial.

If we find out tomorrow that it was indeed a virus escaped from a Chinese lab, then so be it. I expect from media to find the truth among the sea of noise and misinformation. Sometimes it takes time.

Even if the US gov knew about the source of the virus, back in Feb. 2020, I can understand that they decided to sit on it. Fighting the pandemic was the priority, before pointing fingers.

It would be interesting to see, if the virus was indeed escaped from a Chinese lab, what would be the consequences ? Will all countries would come to some kind of agreement to stop playing with bioweapons ? Or they would double down on bioweapons (e.g. with a vaccine before being released) ? Or do like before, and hoping for the best ?... we gonna wipe us out of this planet !

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#464

Post by fartcannon »

Animats wrote: post #417
neither_color wrote: post #34

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disag…

Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.

I think this is a good place for authorship attribution AI's. A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source.

Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum?

Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#465

Post by lawnchair_larry »

CiceroCiceronis wrote: post #436
shaicoleman wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also systematic censorship and disinformation against prophylaxis and early treatment information, which could prevent millions of hospitalisations and deaths. [1] e.g. YouTube recently censored the Ivermectin Global Summit, in which doctors and scientists showed the overwhelming scientific evidence for Ivermectin from around the world. [2] 1. https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea... 2.…

A recently released meta—analysis from the British Medical Journal suggests that the evidence base for ivermectin’s efficacy in treating COVID-19 is low. https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...

This is kind of doing the same thing that the “fact checkers” are doing. There is indeed a lack of proper studies to validate it. That’s the problem. There are mountains of evidence that show it as very promising and worthy of a proper study. That’s what people are asking for. The FDA keeps saying not to use it, because we don’t know for certain that it works, because we haven’t had any rigorous RCTs to validate it, even though it appears by all accounts to be an extremely valuable tool. They don’t claim that it doesn’t work. They don’t claim that it’s harmful (we know it’s not, it’s been broadly deployed for like 30 years and is known to be far safer than the vaccines, which are already quite safe, at least in the short to medium term). Also, this article is misinformed on the dosage requirement, which has been raised and addressed - looks like sibling comment called this out as well. See, it’s clear who actually follows the science, and who disregards the science but brow beats others with phrases like “follow the science.” Other things known to people following the science? Schools are safe to open and masks don’t do shit outdoors because the probability of infection is To not drop everything and study this aggressively is criminally negligent imo. I believe I read that we have finally decided to fund looking into validating what appears to be strong evidence. But it’s 30 years old, dirt cheap, and not patented. And all of this only came to light well after we sunk billions into vaccines. So, there is not exactly a profit motive or a strong appetite to potentially upend all of that. But if people unwilling to be vaccinated are willing to take that instead, it might be the only hope for herd immunity. Because there is no way we will get there by vaccines alone. Too much of the population are refusing the vaccines.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#466

Post by BurningFrog »

edgyquant wrote: post #301
BurningFrog wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I would do, if elected Emperor over this, is to add warnings or links to debunkings of fringe theories, but never delete them. The power to silence will always be abused.

Facebook already does this and people just claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”

Of course some people will disagree.

I don't see that as a problem.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#467

Post by tootie »

neither_color wrote: post #34

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disag…

As far as I can tell this is a false premise. The scientific consensus on zoonotic origin was never really considered conclusive by anyone and was never really sold as being conclusive. There was a very strong backlash against the ridiculous theories spread by people like Tom Cotton that virus was engineered that absolutely soured the debate. And people like Trump and his sycophants who didn't just suggest lab leak but declared it as being overwhelmingly likely. That made honest debate extremely difficult. And even know the hand-wringing of "oh now they were right all along" is even worse. There was not then nor is there now sufficient evidence to declare this a settled debate. Trump is and was wrong. And Cotton shot himself the foot by ruining his credibility before trying to reset his opinion. In reality, we don't know. Zoonotic remains most likely. More investigation is warranted but is unlikely to turn up a smoking gun.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#468

Post by ratsmack »

caddemon wrote: post #401
briefcomment wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insane How can you be so gung-ho with relatively new vaccines, but bury relatively benign and longer standing interventions?

I mean if a benign intervention doesn't actually work and it causes people to avoid a real intervention that is problematic. There's definitely plenty of alternative medicine misinformation out there that makes similar arguments about safety and history. That said, it is wrong for YouTube to be removing these videos IMO. First of all, who at YouTube reviewed the material? Do they actually have the expertise necessary…

>why is YouTube so fixated on removing COVID-related videos?

Could it be to protect their advertising revenue interests from the huge Pharmaceutical Industry?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#469

Post by bballer »

seattle_spring wrote: post #202
narrator wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zerohedge getting banned from Twitter for publishing an expose of the Wuhan Lab which is pretty close to what is acknowledged as a probable story these days is the most high profile example. https://www.zdnet.com/article/zerohedge-banned-from-twitter-...

Is the majority of HN really fighting for Zerohedge to be recognized as a legitimate source of information?

Nice strawman.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#470

Post by BurningFrog »

throw0101a wrote: post #253
BurningFrog wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I would do, if elected Emperor over this, is to add warnings or links to debunkings of fringe theories, but never delete them. The power to silence will always be abused.

> or links to debunkings of fringe theories Sadly won't be helpful, and may actually make things worse: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backfire_effect * https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...

You clearly have a strong belief that it won't be helpful, so I won't try to argue with you.
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