121–130 of 494 posts
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It is reasonable & responsible to downplay theories that get constructed in absence of sufficient and meaningfully qualified evidence.
Such as the theory, presented often without evidence, that Sars-Cov-2 came from an imaginary population of bats in Wuhan?
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if we figure out, what then? Are they to blame for all the death?
well how about establishing safety procedures, research guidelines and international regulation body governing dangerous GoF research so that such outbreak doesn't happen again.
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Prescient how? This article is about a rejected proposal. Not only did the research not happen, we have no reason to believe this type of research caused the pandemic.
There's more evidence for this type or research happening where the pandemic arose than there is for natural origin.
Check out this prescient article from 2017, when the ban was lifted: Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic... Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist who directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health, called review panels “a small step forward.” Recent disease-enhancing experiments, he said, “have given us some m…
Prescient how? This article is about a rejected proposal. Not only did the research not happen, we have no reason to believe this type of research caused the pandemic.
And yes we do have reason to believe this type of research caused the pandemic.
I could be missing something but this isn't exactly the smoking gun the title makes it seem. I'm sure there are proposals, plans and applications for all types of things. What I'm waiting for, perhaps naively, is strong evidence, revelated an independent investigation, that there was some foul business going on here. Until I see that, I'm more inclined to rely on the word of experts who have no connection to any of t…
The submitted title ("New Leaked Documents Point to Engineered Lab Origin for SARS‑CoV‑2") broke the site guidelines badly by editorializing. Submitters: please don't do that—it will eventually cause you to lose submission privileges on HN. Instead, follow the site guidelines, which include: " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsgu…
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Fetching them in a way that information (like titles) can be meaningfully extracted from is a lot harder than it sounds - we've worked on it in the past and got bogged down in lots of details and corner cases etc. An easier way might be to rely on one of the archiving services, e.g. archive.org. If a snapshot could be taken at submission time than it would be there to refer to later. On the other hand, titles changin…
> information (like titles) can be meaningfully extracted From a technical perspective it's probably simpler to just grep the page for the user-submitted title.
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Prescient how? This article is about a rejected proposal. Not only did the research not happen, we have no reason to believe this type of research caused the pandemic.
A rejected proposal does not mean research does not happen. It means they were unable to get funding from DARPA. It does not necessarily mean they were unable to get funding from "somebody". And yes we do have reason to believe this type of research caused the pandemic.
Oh, that’s right, they didn’t. You can tell that by looking at what they did work on next. Did you look?
Like it says in the article.
if you called someone crazy at some point for suggesting this as a possibility, it is time to pause and reflect
I've asked people to explain to me why I should care one way or another, beyond curiosity, and no one has been able to answer yet. That is to say, is there an actual person who is perfectly fine with all the terrible things the CCP plainly does, but finding out that they've been incompetently handling research will suddenly make them change their views?
The basis for GoF research (at least, the publicly-espoused thesis, bioweapons research being a likely secondary interest) is that such research can help us stop or reduce the impact of a pandemic. If the natural origin theory turns out to be the truth, then this adds lots of weight to the idea that we SHOULD be aggressively pursuing GoF research in order to fix the next naturally-occuring viral pandemic. However, if sars-cov-2 actually came from a lab leak, then we have evidence that such research is both far more risky than we thought and as well that natural pandemics are less likely than we think, so we should probably not do it at all.
1. There is no viral backbone anyone knows of which would have been used in this research 2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research 3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses 4. There are now many known related sarbecoviruses which have been found with furin cleavage sites 5. Furi…
The proposal that this article is about weakens your argument significantly. They were going to experiment with multiple backbones, experimenting with multiple variations of spikes, looking specifically to try novel types of furin cleavage sites. There was no public reporting of what happened with this research. We don't know what they have because WIV database was taken offline. They claimed to have searched it, but…
It is research that "sounds like" what happened with the SARS-CoV-2 zoonotic spillover, but that isn't a strange coincidence. They were researching the thing they were worried about happening, and then it happened. Their research proposals naturally rhyme with what actually occurred because they had studied and understood the problem enough to guess more or less accurately what the process would be. There are still massive gaps in between this proposal and SARS-CoV-2 that you could fly a plane through.
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There's more evidence for this type or research happening where the pandemic arose than there is for natural origin.
There's some evidence this kind of research happens. There's not really evidence it was happening in Wuhan nor evidence that the virus we have is the result of experimentation. Historically lab leaks are vanishingly rare and acquisition from animals is extremely common. For lab leak to be even a plausible story the evidence would have to be very strong and it is nowhere near convincing right now.