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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#711

Post by tekknik »

sifar wrote: post #585
Animats wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US "intelligence community" is the CIA, NSA, etc.[1] Intelligence analysis is the business of trying to extract useful info from of noisy and deceptive data. Here's an introduction to the field.[2] See especially section 4. 4-11. Analyst have found the following rules helpful in dealing with deception: - Avoid over-reliance on a single source of information. - Seek and heed the opinions of those closest to the re…

>> This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools. Not just schools, this should be taught to everybody. One wonders how propaganda would react if this were to happen. Right now it is mostly non-physical information. But when you have a critical mass of people & environment which is not conducive to standard propaganda, perhaps it will resort to…

> Not just schools, this should be taught to everybody.

Doesn’t everybody, at least in the US, go to school. By law?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#712

Post by tekknik »

Natsu wrote: post #493
ornxka wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think they're saying that feeling the event instead of thinking about it is a problem. A lot of times the news is all on about something as an emergency that will do something terrible if you don't pay attention to it. There may be some seed of importance in there to lend it credibility, but a large portion of the time it's simple manipulation and I ignore it on principle for that reason. In other words, I usually…

This 1000 times. Any news org trying to invoke an emotional response should be treated as toxic. Get what important details you can from the article and move on. I don’t want AI to tell me what’s true, I want AI to remove the author’s bias.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#713

Post by cratermoon »

caddemon wrote: post #192
cratermoon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never will, because there is no such intelligence, it was reported as a statement from an unnamed intelligence official. It's garbage.

What incentive would the US government have to lie about this though? They were funding research at that lab, I don't understand why they would want people to think lab leak is correct all of a sudden - if that's what you're claiming?

Read the original report carefully. The wording is important, and as usual, it's not making any direct assertions. Someone says "we have intelligence suggesting.." or "there are reports from sources...". Both of those statements can be 100% true: someone does have a report that says such and such thing. But nowhere does anyone make hard claims about the veracity of those reports, or even the reliability of unnamed source.

It's a leak, purposely calculated to suggest something is true without every committing to making it verifiable.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#714

Post by crispyambulance »

tekknik wrote: post #710
crispyambulance wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source. Certainly such a tool might be useful to someone analyzing disinformation campaigns, but it only goes so far. If the intent with such plugins and other forms of human/AI moderation is merely identify the source of what looks like disinformation, you're going to disappointed to hear that those who are influenced…

> It's why meatheads on Fox News can blabber non-stop garbage and get the highest news media ratings in history. Interesting how you had to throw a right wing site in there with your underhanded attack. So you think the left is immune to this? Can you actually get through a CNN article without wanting to vomit? With that one statement you lost me entirely.

To be honest, I do feel that CNN and MSNBC have fallen off a cliff as far as quality is concerned in the last 10+ years. All cable news is pretty much a wasteland.

But there's a special place in hell reserved for Fox News.

As bad as CNN can get with its cloying reductive stories, they at least try. Fox News is end-to-end garbage. Sorry.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#715

Post by lawnchair_larry »

tootie wrote: post #670
spfzero wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has been strongly asserted by the scientific community that Covid-19 bears no hallmarks of an engineered virus. In fact, no one in this thread is even suggested it was engineered. That's the whole point of the article. The "accidental leak" theory is being conflated with "engineered weapon theory". The only options on the table are "animal -> human" or "animal -> lab -> human". Both are plausible and we have no co…

This is not exactly accurate. But it’s easier to get to the full story if people accept the lab leak of an unmodified virus as a possibility. However, the “assertions” are misleading and have been debunked. The virus does appear to be chimeric. There is a missing link in both hypotheses, but the lab leak hypotheses offers a few possible explanations. The zoonotic hypothesis still doesn’t have an explanation for that part.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#716

Post by fsckboy »

dang wrote: post #692
fsckboy wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Reasoned discussion has a fraught relationship with large groups. I'd be a bit careful about the word "allowed" because that posits an "allower" when much of the process you're describing is stochastic. I'm not trying to evade responsibility for the part that we play (at least I hope I'm not), but it's so much more complicated than just "allow v. unallow".

you think of the problem you are solving as "avoid flamewars including through automation to make the task easier on a no-profit forum"

I think there needs to be more room for "(perhaps heated) discussion of actual science in the face of an ongoing existential threat to vast swathes of western civilization and the third world"

I think there needs to be more room for discussion of a seemingly real, Orwellian-Huxleyan ideological takeover of important cultural institutions like wikipedia, the NY Times, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., a left wing doppelganger to the Red Scare of the 50's.

full disclosure: I'm a former leftie, I know the propaganda I used to spew in the name of the earnest conviction of what morally superior people we lefties were compared to those awful troglodytes, and I remember how easily the centrists would be convinced to go along by nice words. I mean, black lives DO matter, right? but BLM Inc(tm) is a Marxist led radical coalition that sees further violence as helping the cause by proving their case.

Cheers, I appreciate the work you do. :)

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#717

Post by briefcomment »

briefcomment wrote: post #328
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.…

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfqxCkJw0Rk

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#718

Post by sassy_quat »

Smoosh wrote: post #523
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I _almost_ am completely on your side in this discussion. The facts of the matter are as you describe. I disagree, however. Influence at the scale these companies have is its own power. There's a reason Zuckerberg is a fan of Caesar Augustus; with the proper and delicate application of influence in the right places, you can get whatever it is you want. The game they're playing is not direct application of political p…

Let me repeat myself from a post a fortnight ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27127269 I have remarked before that Zuckerberg wants to be the Murdoch of the 21st century. To wield his media influence as a "kingmaker" (mostly quietly and behind the scenes, but with those seeking to gain or hold power knowing they will need Facebook's co-operation). And ensuring as compensation an unchallenged position for Fac…

This seems to presume a greater degree of predictability and control over the masses than recent events suggest. Most of Facebook's activity comes from users amplifying news they have encountered elsewhere.

How would Facebook be unchallenged in a global world?

I would think his presidential ambitions would be be more obtainable than cyberpunk hegemon.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#719

Post by ryanwaggoner »

skinkestek wrote: post #704
dougmwne wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is to really address climate change all 8 billion of us are going to have to come together and make huge changes to our lives and each make personal sacrifices for the greater good. There will be new government mandates and it will affect how we live and work. There will be a huge social pressure to conform and a huge backlash. But we will have no choice because our environment will have changed to be mor…

Please take all that with a grain of salt everyone: comments like this is for me a good signal that this whole climate change thing is just a front for something else. Please note: I have no shares in fossil companies, I work for railway companies, I buy my stuff used and reuse and sort waste so much my wife gets crazy. So I'm almost there already but for other reasons: I belive in ecology. Not wasting wildlife areas…

https://www.ipcc.ch/

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#720

Post by MisterBastahrd »

Moodles wrote: post #696
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She did it at a time when there were zero incidents of COVID in the US and before the Republican party decided that to get ahead of the issue they'd create a racist flamewar instead of trying to handle the problem. Doing the opposite of what reality dictates was Trump's schtick, not Pelosi's.

Yeah, the other team "decided to create a racist flamewar". They met in a room, those angry old white men, and decided, together, that the best strategy is to create a racist flamewar. Someone suggested they should try to handle the problem, but everyone else disagreed. Someone else was like, fuck it, a racist flamewar is clearly the best strategy to get ahead, and his cisgendered straight colleagues all agreed that…

Show me on this doll where the reality hurt you.

When Trump and company knew the virus was going to be a threat, they allowed air travel to maintain at current levels to pack people into airports like sardines. Their response was NOT to be responsible but instead try to pretend that the problem did not exist and to scapegoat the Chinese by calling it "China Flu," "Kung Flu", and "Wuhan Virus."

And you are so INCREDIBLY triggered that you needed to bring "cisgendered straight colleagues" into the discussion when it wasn't even warranted.

How quaint.

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