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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#541

Post by rgoulter »

briefcomment wrote: post #337
pedalpete wrote: post #222

Am I the only one who feels like this is mostly a non-issue. I feel like the case of if this came from a lab for from a market is mostly taking a political side against China - if it came from a lab, or for China - if it was naturally developed. If it came from a Chinese lab as part of a conscious effort of weaponizing a virus, sure, that's important, but I don't think anyone is saying that. If it came from a lab acc…

I don't think it's the actual facts that are especially problematic, but the rabid antagonistic response to a theory.

Right. As the article argues, it doesn't seem like it would make any difference where the virus came from, which makes the reaction seem strange.

What surely deserves attention is how an idea like "could have come from a lab" is able to shift from 'mild' to 'fringe/controversial' to 'plausible/reasonable to discuss'.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#542

Post by rorykoehler »

pwillia7 wrote: post #217
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…

I agree but I think it has to do with credibility and authoritative sources that used to be credible within some reason no longer being so. I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months. I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to l…

It’s be fairly confused if a flat earther talked about GLOBAL warming.

On a serious note I’ve learned to not take anything as gospel. Facts aren’t binary, they sit on a spectrum and also in an ecosystem. Given the natural information compression that exists in thought and language it’s impossible to be too sure of anything. The one thing I’ve stopped however is being 100% sure of anything. Of course I will dismiss obvious BS from sociopaths but on the other end of the spectrum I also tread more lightly.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#543

Post by rayiner »

ornxka wrote: post #488
Animats wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Which is a big problem. Is it? What if the alternative is that people feel the wrong way about things?

If people agreed on what was the right and wrong way to interpret the world we wouldn't need democracy.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#544

Post by spfzero »

tootie wrote: post #497
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re incorrect on nearly all of this and haven’t “broken out” of the forced narrative. All I can suggest is you go back to the primary sources yourself. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take your preferred media outlet’s word for it. Dig it up and decide. The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we…

The lab leak theory is not Occam's razor. We've had many, many pandemics and epidemics and none have been associated with research labs. We've had SARS outbreaks in China that are not associated with a lab. There is also no proof beyond circumstance to associate it with the lab. And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pr…

Its only recently that research labs could engineer these viruses. Only recently have you been able to engineer mice with human ACE2 receptors, and breed viruses in them. History is not what you base your conclusions on in 2020’s biochemistry.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#545

Post by throwawaysea »

wpietri wrote: post #170
scottrogowski wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both. While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just…

Good thing they aren't monopolies, then. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit are are all very popular places for people to post their views. And that's not counting the myriad lesser places like the one we're using now. And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own. I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of…

Facebook has 3 billion users. Their efforts in censoring / shaping public opinion / propagandizing are broader and more influential than any government. I don’t want to argue about whose definition of monopoly should win. The fact remains that this is a problem and it needs to be addressed with regulation, just like we regulate power utilities. Social media is just utility communication like anything else we call “telecom”, except with massive barriers to competition due to network effects and no requirement for interoperability.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#546

Post by tripletao »

lamontcg wrote: post #495
tripletao wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an impossible coincidence, but what prior estimate of the probability that an arbitrary pandemic is lab-origin are you applying that to? Of the ~dozen pandemics in the last fifty years, one (the 1977 flu pandemic[1], which killed ~700k people) was probably lab-origin. A 1/12 prior plus a 1/10 coincidence in favor of lab origin is pretty close to even odds, so what evidence takes it back down? You can't just…

The 1977 flu pandemic was a known virus though which was released. It was highly plausible that the virus could have been in a lab. This virus is literally unlike any other known virus. The closest known virus to it is RaTG13 which is only 96% homologous and the 4% differences across all its basepairs is very high. We have a closer relationship to apes than SARS-CoV-2 does to RATG13. And we had SARS-1 in 2003 and H1N…

It seems like you have a lot more confidence than I do that we know everything the WIV was working on? I agree that SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to be derived (naturally, artificially, or otherwise) from any known virus, including RaTG13; but a distinctive characteristic of the WIV's research was their sampling of novel viruses from remote bat caves that no other humans routinely entered. That presents a pathway for emergence of novel, naturally-evolved pathogens beyond what normal agricultural etc. activity already risked, whether through a researcher infected in the field or through a literal lab accident back in Wuhan.

So specifically considering their group, the novelty of the pathogen doesn't seem to me like significant evidence against lab origin. The public focus on gain-of-function research actually seems excessive to me--while I do think it's possible that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 involves lab manipulation (e.g., genetic engineering or serial passage) of the virus, the WIV's library of novel natural viruses seems to me like at least as big a part of the danger. In any case, their database went offline on Sep 12 2019, around when that genetic clock suggests SARS-Cov-2 began spreading in humans:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_invest...

That timing could be coincidence, and their flimsy explanation for its continued unavailability ("hacking attempts") could just be the reflexive secrecy of an authoritarian regime. It's a second weird coincidence, though. The WIV has claimed to have published everything they have to GenBank; but Deigin et al. were able to assemble a novel Merbecovirus from contamination of agricultural datasets from a team that shared sequencing equipment with the WIV:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533

That Merbecovirus obviously has nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2; but if they had one unpublished virus, it seems reasonable to wonder if they have more.

If you're going to extend the field of zoonoses to include events that didn't become major pandemics, then it seems like you should extend the field of lab leaks too? But let's say negligible probability of lab origin is p 100 (which per above I don't see).

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#547

Post by spfzero »

XorNot wrote: post #370
wearywanderer wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. I disagree, the lab leak hypothesis is independent from the lab [inadvertently or deliberately] mutating the virus. The lab may have merely possessed the virus, having made only the mistake of transporting the virus from a re…

So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection. Biological materials are hard to grow and store. Very few people have ever been infected from handling corpses from much more pathogenic viruses (i.e. the black death was one of the only significant ones, and that's because it's a bacterium). A…

The whole purpose of the lab was to grow and study these viruses, and to promote their growth in order to study how they might grow. Hard to understand how they would not have had enough virus, as you say.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#548

Post by throwawaysea »

tshaddox wrote: post #479
monoideism wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really arguing from an antitrust perspective. My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly", I'll edit my post. But I'm sure you disagree with my thesis either way. That said, from an antitrust perspective, there are strong arguments against some social media companies, particularly Facebook. Furth…

> My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly" What's the concept then, other than that Twitter is doing things that you don't like? That's obviously not a sufficient argument, and if antitrust law isn't the reason for legal action to be taken against them, what's the reason? The only other legal course I…

A business doesn’t have to be a monopoly per the current legal definition for it to be subject to regulation. We can simply require social media companies to accept all customers. We can make political views a protected class that prevents denial of service at businesses in general. We can treat these tech companies as utilities because they operate the public town square. There are numerous routes for us to fix the current situation, where a small number of employees controlling these companies with billions of users, can become the sole arbiters of can communicate and what they can communicate. It just requires that we start talking about it, educate people about the problem, and build political will.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#549

Post by fsckboy »

dang wrote: post #150
byset wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN." And maybe is still getting suppressed? This post was #1 on HN one minute, and then, less than an hour later, it's down on page 3, ranked #88. Does the HN ranking algorithm really bury stuff that quickly?

It set off the flamewar detector as well as getting a lot of user flags. I've turned that off now. As for 'suppressed' please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27309238 .

> As for 'suppressed' please see...

thanks for the list. The suppression I'm talking about occurred before your earliest link, threads closed, cut off, etc. I remember because I learned about Yuri Deigin's research in April and no discussion of it was allowed on HN which should be a place for reasoned discussion

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#550

Post by rcpt »

XorNot wrote: post #499
Lazare wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safety incidents happen a lot . > By 1960, hundreds of American scientists and technicians had been hospitalized, victims of the diseases they were trying to weaponize. Charles Armstrong, of the National Institutes of Health, one of the consulting founders of the American germ-warfare program, investigated Q fever three times, and all three times, scientists and staffers got sick. In the anthrax pilot plant at Camp D…

Your first example there is literally an attempt to mass produce live virus for biological weapons, with human infectious viruses. As are most of your examples. This all changes if the literal goal of research is "mass produce liters of viable virus". But viral research in general doesn't do that, because it's a huge hazard, and unnecessary (and expensive, labor intensive etc.) What I am drawing contention on is what…

SARS 1, which is far less infectious, escaped from labs multiple times.
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