The media's lab leak fiasco • Hacker News Board

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#551

Post by rcpt » Fri, May 28, 2021, 5:41 AM UTC

throwawayboise wrote: post #461

bialpio wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It'd be pretty stupid for them to deliberately release it right next to the lab.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#552

Post by Lazare » Fri, May 28, 2021, 5:41 AM UTC

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…

Those are good questions, but I think the link I provided gives some decent potential answers.

I don't know, and I'm not asserting, that any of this is true. But given what is known about the types of research being done, this doesn't seem like something we can rule out either.

For one example, the article quotes Shi Zhengli, a lab director at the Wuhan Virology Institute, who had been doing research on RaTG13, and who upon realising COVID-19 was related to RaTG13 was immediately was concerned it had leaked from her lab. According to the article, she lost sleep over this, and was enormously relieved when she could prove that the outbreak in Wuhan was not any strain that the lab had a record of storing.

I find it surprising that you are so much more convinced than a lab director of the lab in question that no such leak was possible. To be sure, perhaps she was suffering from an excess of caution...but if she found the thought plausible enough that she lost sleep over it, perhaps we, vastly further away and with much less information, should not rule the risk out entirely?

In any case, if you feel comfortable, based on your knowledge, concluding that you can rule out the lab leak hypothesis, that's great, but it does seem to put you at odds with basically every expert I've seen quoted so far.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#553

Post by 0xy » Fri, May 28, 2021, 5:47 AM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #394

tacitusarc wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also pinned the first result for any query about the WIV to an article claiming that there was no way whatsoever the virus came from there.

That’s awful, I hope they are thoroughly embarrassed.

Google have been manipulating search results for years, putting their fingers on the scale both in terms of censorship and boosting of results.

When you control weights behind search results and news articles, you quite literally control the flow of information.

Google is an actively malicious company, and this was not done with good intentions. Anti-science rhetoric by Dr Fauci, the WHO and the mainstream media establishment was never based on any evidence other than politicized opinion.

Dr Fauci was vehemently against closing the border with China in January 2020. He was vehemently against masks. He was vehemently against lab leak theory (calling it "impossible"). He falsely claimed the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not doing gain-of-function research.

These are malicious acts which have a real cost. The cost is human life. How many additional people died on the back of his anti-mask rhetoric in March?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#554

Post by pessimizer » Fri, May 28, 2021, 5:49 AM UTC

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.”

> claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”

The "fake news" part is always disputable on a case by case basis, but the "elite" part is indisputable. A very small number of very wealthy people get to decide the range of opinions that are acceptable, and the deviations that get administrative comments. The mods aren't the auteurs - mods that correct incorrectly will be fired. Close calls rattle up the chain of command until they hit the CEO/Founder, who is often a billionaire, always very wealthy, always of a particular demographic.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#555

Post by wslack » Fri, May 28, 2021, 5:50 AM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #366

throw0101a wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

IMO I think it's useful to avoid getting moderates and people who don't know better caught up in the mess. For people who are already convinced, they're already convinced. Banning the content entirely also doesn't help. People are very good at spreading information, even if you manage to ban all conspiracies from the internet, you have TV, the newspaper, private networks, and just word-of-mouth. Another good tool wou…

However, in past decades, those other networks didn't cause the same level of propagation of misinformation.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#556

Post by pessimizer » Fri, May 28, 2021, 5:55 AM UTC

stevenicr wrote: post #529

tshaddox wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit. I suppose the question is how long that list of websites really is, and how long it needs to be before people stop calling all those websites "monopolies." Obviously it would be fairly absurd to say "no one will read your website unless you can post links on site 1, site 2, site 3, ... site 3,109,550, and therefore those 3.1 million…

I believe there are a LOT of people in the world that would think if your site does not come up in gooogle than it doesn't exist. I remember reading that there are huge populations in which 'the internet' is facebook - so if fbk censors you - you do not exist.

Also, your site will not come up in google.

Google is just another social network that people are gaming (with the lazy consent of the people who run it.) Even if you make it, you can be wiped off google as easily as off twitter, no matter what your traffic.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#557

Post by doggodaddo78 » Fri, May 28, 2021, 5:56 AM UTC

So I can wave the red, white, and blue all day with my TXSSAR membership, 2 flag triangles, and good life.. but still there are deeper, fundamental, metastasized cancerous problems with the shining city on the hill that have tarnished it.

Greed. Corruption. Apathy. Ignorance. Narcissistic self-absorption (hyperindividualism). Unfocused leadership.

Under such conditions of weak debate ethics and sensible balance, democracy gives oxygen to the crazies and drives policy and attention to satisfy the conspiracy theorists who demand a particular investigational outcome. It's not that free speech needs to go away, but that the leadership shouldn't kowtow to idiocy or even consider what's popular if it's existentially-vital. This can only be accomplished with ethical leadership, which I don't see happening anytime soon since celebrity straw puppets are typically installed to continue serving the interests of the 1%.

If it were possible, leadership means putting on the Big Boy™ pants and not bending and shifting focus on the whims of idiots. There are no political figures anywhere that I've seen who aren't duplicitous, have a backbone, and are empathetic and sane individuals.

Perhaps political parties and elections should be disbanded and revert to "jury duty" public administration for a fixed term (1 year) from a pool of random, qualified, competent professionals.

Remember what a democratic idiocracy did to Socrates. "Democracy" is another word for "mob rule." Combine mob rule with vulture capitalism selling off public infrastructure to corporations and corruption, then you have basically the recipe for a third-world country fighting over the last scraps of what was once a nearly shiny city on a hill (minus the genocides, training of death squads, banana wars, and Monroe doctrine).

The only way for the human species to survive is to crawl-out from under greed, dogma, conflict, laziness, material comfort, and ignorance and do many thing to defeat the threats to our very survival.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#558

Post by andromeduck » Fri, May 28, 2021, 5:58 AM UTC

generalizations wrote: post #148

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're in favor of taking action against misinformation, then you should be willing to accept this situation as an acceptable failure. We can believe taking action against misinformation is a generally good principle while still believing that both our definition of "misinformation" and the kinds of actions we take may need to be improved.

You still have to be willing to accept that whatever actions you take against misinformation will occasionally be taken against things that are actually true. That also means that over time, the credibility of the entities that flag 'misinformation' will inevitably erode: as more people are exposed to things they know, perhaps first-hand, are true, but are flagged as 'misinformation'.

Yeah this is how I came to be more skeptical of MSM and Gov't authorities. I think by the time one hits ~30-40 most people have probably been through enough news cycles and been the subject of or close enough to some newsworthy event to have an inside look of the accuracy/fairness of the process and it's probably why older people tend to be more conservative cynical.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#559

Post by throwawaysea » Fri, May 28, 2021, 5:58 AM UTC

neuronexmachina wrote: post #180

speeder wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Infamous case was Twitter baning Zerohedge because of it. And all that Zerohedge did was point out a lot of public documents, nothing private, and no bioweapon theory. (Twitter claimed Zerohedge had doxxed the scientist, but Zerohedge only had shown the official lab website and documents from it). https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...

I think it's pretty obvious why they were banned: > The article, posted under the pseudonym "Tyler Durden" (the fictional character played by Brad Pitt in the movie "Fight Club"), was titled "Is This Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?" It included a photograph of a scientist at Wuhan's Institute of Virology and suggested that anyone curious about the epidemic might want to pay him "a visit."

That quote of paying “a visit” makes the Zero Hedge article sound more sinister than it actually is. The full sentence from Zero Hedge’s article is: “Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.”

I don’t see anything wrong with that statement. Peng was the publicly listed face of this research lab at WIV, and his name, photo, and contact info were openly displayed on the website as public facing content.

Zero Hedge was banned because the possibility of a lab leak was politicized by those on the left, including tech companies who operate social media platforms, and they unfairly censored and banned this content because they were biased against Trump/Republicans to a point where legitimate speculation was disallowed.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#560

Post by nraynaud » Fri, May 28, 2021, 6:04 AM UTC

Drunk_Engineer wrote: post #505

nraynaud wrote: post #500

What all those Wuhan lab story miss is a good explanation as to why the oldest cases are outside Wuhan.

Thank you. Had to scroll to the next page to find this comment. The lab leak theory never made any sense, because it does not fit the timeline of the viral spread. Nor does it explain why some countries already had T-cell immunity to the virus.

well, it could make sense, but it's not the simplest scenario because the first cases were outside. It would be more reasonable if the earliest cases were actually close to it. And as far as I know there is no suspicion that it comes from another lab.