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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#591

Post by dredmorbius »

jkhdigital wrote: post #344
dredmorbius wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were also a number of HN stories posted early in the pandemic concerning the lab-leak hypothesis. These paint a ... complicated ... picture of that theory and those who advocated for it. Few of the submissions had any significant discussion, I'm simply going off what was submitted to HN. Search, bound from 2020-1-1 to 2020-6-1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1593475200&dateRange=custom&... 26 March 2020: Exper…

> I'd argue that for the current outbreak the origin all but certainly does not matter in terms of steps taken to contain and end the outbreak It would have mattered a lot back in early 2020, when the (circumstantial) evidence for the lab leak theory was assembled. And I’m not sure what your point is—are you implying that the world is incapable of both handling the pandemic and investigating its origins simultaneousl…

How would ascertaining validity of the outbreak hypothesis if it could have been done at all changed or improved response to COVID-19?

What are the risks of a reasonable delay?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#592

Post by Moodles »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #492
Moodles wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what else was a bigger problem at the time? The coronavirus.

This might shock the shit out of you, but people are capable of addressing more than one issue in any given day.

No that does not shock me. But the point is that one strategy can be good for one goal but bad for another. Going around Chinatown and encouraging the populous to do the same "to combat racism" is obviously at odds with "be careful and social distance due to covid". Does that shock the shit out of you? I'll be honest as well, I think Pelosi's real motive there is to do the opposite of what Trump wants, rather than combat any racism, but that's just my personal opinion. Maybe she genuinely wanted to combat racism, I don't know, I'm not inside her head. But it's a terrible strategy to combat covid.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#593

Post by meowface »

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...

Of course this is undoubtedly true. However, deleting the information creates a Streisand effect and a much stronger belief perseverance and backfire effect compared to annotating the information with a counter-argument.

Between the three options of "delete", "annotate", and "leave untouched", I think the least-bad option is probably the middle one. It's not going to dissuade many people and will only reinforce beliefs for many, but there's not much else that can be done.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#594

Post by [deleted] »

seattle_spring wrote: post #329
swader999 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Recognized as a legitimate source of information" So default censor all non legitimate sources? Who gets to decide what is legitimate? I don't care for the comments on that site but many times they've had scoops and been proven correct after time has passed.

> So default censor all non legitimate sources No? Censor sources that have proven time and time again to provide verifiably false information. Zerohedge and Infowars specifically fit into that bucket and it's completely reasonable to shine a light on their lack of trustworthiness. A lot of folks are saying, "let the people decide what is false!" Well, here's the thing: People are really mind-numbingly stupid. Spend…

[deleted]

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#595

Post by lmm »

tshaddox wrote: post #477
SilverRed wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own. And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit. In the end, almost all communication online runs through a limited set of american megacorps who all act in the same ways, have the same rules and align to the same culture. It's no surprise China and Russia ban American sites because those sites control the debate and…

> 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…

Long enough that they don't co-ordinate, essentially, which would show in how they acted. When facebook, twitter and reddit all announce the same kind of moderation changes within a few months of each other, you can tell that they're a de-facto cartel, and the specifics of how that happens (such as whether they directly communicated with each other) are kind of irrelevant.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#596

Post by tux1968 »

the_optimist wrote: post #580
coffeefirst wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention many of the early proponents were notorious conspiracy theorists, racists, and nut jobs who spoke with absolute certainty, cited virtually no evidence and clearly had no idea what they were talking about. Could they, in their wild speculation, been right about a few things? Sure, that’s always possible, but they didn’t actually know that at the time. This isn’t a science or mainstream media problem; bo…

This is an interesting way to evaluate ideas. Where did you learn this technique?

It's very common and easy to learn these days. It's everywhere.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#597

Post by Moodles »

mcphage wrote: post #518
Moodles wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, incredible. He knows nothing about me except what I wrote above and he's convinced I'm from the "MAGA-verse".

> There are a number of other replies that come straight from MAGA-verse

Here's a tip: stop saying shit like "MAGA-verse" and try to talk to people, assuming they're good human beings with honest intentions.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#598

Post by lmm »

gowld wrote: post #422
monoideism wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more or less in agreement with you on all of those companies except Twitter. Twitter is a notable exception and absolutely does have a monopoly on the social media sector as a "public square" - one which features almost every major politician, journalist, analyst, and activist on the platform, including at times, the US President and many other heads of state. And because of the network effect, this monopoly is u…

The First Amendment has always applied to private property "town squares" that are open to public, originally this was decided in the case of indoor shopping malls.

I think/hope there would be raised eyebrows if government agencies set up shop in private malls. Malls have realistic alternatives. Twitter doesn't, even for some government services.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#599

Post by lmm »

pavlov wrote: post #462
R0b0t1 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wal…

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

A blog comment section usually presents itself as a curated space, and the flip side is that blog owners take some level of responsibility for the contents of their comments.

You can be a private club, or you can be a public space. But you can't be both. We make that kind of distinction in the real world too.

> 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”

Of course not, come off it, judges and juries are not actually complete idiots.

> 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.

Then ban those sites from the US, like India does. If you can't support US-style freedom of speech then you shouldn't get access to the US market.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#600

Post by svara »

cookiecaper wrote: post #365
svara wrote: post #209

This story is a real clusterfuck and really hammers home the point that humans are bad at dealing with probabilities and uncertainty. You mix some nationalism in and it becomes completely impossible to have a reasonable discussion. This article already starts with a false dichotomy: "I missed the furious initial skirmish in what’s become the Long Discourse Wars over the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from the Wu…

> No matter what anyone tells you, there is zero evidence that any part of the virus is engineered (and it isn't even entirely clear what such evidence would look like, in general!). I'm not a biologist so I don't really know what any of this means, but there seems to be debate around the presence of a "furin site" [0], which apparently could have emerged naturally, but also could have been artificially spliced in th…

Yeah, that's why I wrote "no matter what anyone tells you". I am a biologist, and I can say for sure that that's a complete red herring. Of course it could have been added in the lab, but that's literally true for any genetic sequence. It doesn't mean anything. The logic here is 1) new coronavirus is new 2) ??? 3) therefore, it's probably engineered.
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