Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

The truly irritating thing is that even that wouldn't necessarily be enough, because so many sites actually do live A/B/C/[n] title tests simultaneously to randomized sets of users then choose whichever one gets the most clicks or whatever metric first. Even without any manual shenanigans. So there's a window where merely refreshing or browsing from a different IP will yield a different title. Sometimes evidence is left in the URL or interactions with older systems on the a site but that's all baroque. So so so many edge cases in grabbing titles.

Probably not worth the effort on HN to try to automate vs just treating it case by case. It doesn't usually seem to be a problem. "Pre-optimization is the root of all evil" and all that.

Edit: or archive.org as dang says, but I don't know if even they see all versions of a page if there is a simultest situation. Regrettably seems pretty SOP on even reputable places.

Ok, but to play in this space for a second: toward the beginning of the pandemic when these theories were flying left and right, where exactly was the "sufficient and meaningfully qualified evidence" to assert that it had natural origins?

Is the default to simply assert that, because it is biological, it naturally evolved? In the modern era we're in, I'm not convinced that is a sensible default.

The most sensible default is to say we don't know, and all reasonable possibilities are being explored. That is not the same as saying that its reasonable and responsible to downplay a completely reasonable theory; for all that's holy, the virus was first discovered in the same city as China's only L4 biohazard lab studying human pathogens, literally that evidence alone is enough to say the lab-leak theory is "reasonable". Not a smoking gun! But REASONABLE and not worthy of downplay.

"And then what's more, they sat on the fact that they had requested funding for this research for the last 18 months, when the world has been desperately trying to find any relevant information on the virus' origins. The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect."

They didn't just "sit on it". EcoHealth and Peter Daszak deliberately and aggressively attacked anyone who pointed to lab-leak origins as conspiracy theorists and bigots. They did so in an article in The Lancet journal where they also stated they had no conflicts of interest.

Reading this statement, knowing what you know now, and it becomes very clear how sinister and calculated the misdirection was:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

And look at the end of the letter, at the sentence: "We declare no competing interests." That's a blatant lie, as we now know.

Those of us who have been seeing this for a long time were attacked, bullied, and tarred as bigots because of these irresponsible scientists desperately trying to cling to their grant funding. My comment history on HN has numerous comments, from months and months ago, where I was attacked, downvoted, and called an anti-Asian bigot for saying what is now obvious. Talking about this before the 2020 election resulted in immediate accusations of being a Trump sycophant/white nationalist, along with banning and deletions from social media. As a lifelong heterodox thinker, I always sort of shrugged my shoulders at being surrounded by people who predominantly just go with the herd on things. But this entire situation has now made me actively despise the "herd". After being a lifelong liberal Democrat who got demonized, bullied, and yes, beaten up for opposing the Iraq war in the conservative area I grew up in, I was shocked to realize that the other side isn't any different. Just a little more sophisticated. They don't physically assault you, but they'll try to get you fired, and equate you with a Nazi in a heartbeat.

As a result of this pandemic, my mother-in-law and aunt are dead, a friend took his own life when his charter fishing business went under, and my wife's mental health has been crushed. I myself was infected a month before I was eligible for the vaccine. Luckily it was a mild case, but I still don't have my sense of smell. Billions around the world had it worse than me, and it is unforgivable that the media, big tech, and the scientific community have colluded to obfuscate the true origins of this manmade disaster. The Soviets would have dreamed of having this kind of cover as Chernobyl spewed radiation into the atmosphere.

1. We can do two things at a time. Investigation of origins does not block anyone from making and following policies to stop the spread.

2. I don't know about you but I have lost more than 1.5 years of my life to this. World around me has changed fundamentally in many ways. Just for closures sake I would like to know why this happened to me.

you mean figuring out what caused a global pandemic, deaths of millions of people and trillions dollars of economic damage is of no consequence?