91–100 of 631 posts
What is the motivation behind research that makes viruses more suitable for humans anyway? I assume it's not strictly a military project, since there was international cooperation between countries that aren't allies. What is it we're tying to achieve?
It appears reasonable to assign COVID lab leak hypothesis a higher prior, in Bayesian terms, just based on the many institutions/individuals whose image/status would it directly or indirectly damage if found true (NIH, DARPA, the US, WIV, CCP), and which therefore would be compelled to paint it as unlikely.
The problem with this is it is full of utterly debunked nonsense that Ebright knows full well has been addressed. It's Brandolini's law [0] in action, and no matter how many times virologists rebut these positions the same old tripe gets wheeled out again, and again, and again. If you ignore rebuttals and just repeat yourself + get 20k likes on twitter how many people are going to see a rebuttal like the excellent on…
Till those questions have been answered I remain skeptical about the origin.
If you click on the link in the thread, there's an editor's note clarifying that this paper is being used to prop up dodgy claims, for which there's no evidence. The main issue I have with the 'lab leak' theory is that I haven't seen much evidence one way or another. Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence. I personally don't see any issue with the idea…
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...
If you click on the link in the thread, there's an editor's note clarifying that this paper is being used to prop up dodgy claims, for which there's no evidence. The main issue I have with the 'lab leak' theory is that I haven't seen much evidence one way or another. Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence. I personally don't see any issue with the idea…
>Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence Say mr X was seen at the crime scene at 10 am, he also knew the victim and lots of people have seen them fight a week ago, the victim had just came out of the bank with 20k$ in cash in a bag, mr X who's broke have been seen driving a car a month after the crime worth 18k$. There is no evidence mr X killed the vic…
Conspiracy theorists will always say they have enough evidence for their theory, of course.
If you click on the link in the thread, there's an editor's note clarifying that this paper is being used to prop up dodgy claims, for which there's no evidence. The main issue I have with the 'lab leak' theory is that I haven't seen much evidence one way or another. Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence. I personally don't see any issue with the idea…
>Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence Say mr X was seen at the crime scene at 10 am, he also knew the victim and lots of people have seen them fight a week ago, the victim had just came out of the bank with 20k$ in cash in a bag, mr X who's broke have been seen driving a car a month after the crime worth 18k$. There is no evidence mr X killed the vic…
The problem is that none of the circumstantial evidence for a lab leak is remotely as convincing as your hypothetical.
And most of it tends to be spun. Read the linked thread and note how many times the author throws out terms like "much more likely to be lab-generated" without evidence. We don't know any of that. We have very limited understanding of wild pathogen evolution in general. Likewise the "1000 miles from bat viruses" thing is spun. We don't know that either! We just know what we measured, not what we didn't.
And you can spin it the other way, anyway: we know that the presumptive covid ancestor was at least as close as 1000 miles, on the same continent and within easy travel distance of a migratory flying species. It's true, that if the closest relative was in Argentina, that getting it to Wuhan would require a lot of weird argument. But from Yunnan? Seems not unreasonable.
People continue to bang this hypothesis, and... it's not a bad hypothesis really. But the reason consensus among experts is behind natural evolution is that natural evolution remains a clearly better hypothesis. I know that's upsetting to people who want to believe the lab theory for whatever reason, but it is and remains the truth. Until someone finds better evidence, the lab leak is going to remain a popular conspiracy theory only.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually many people would like it to be false for personal profit or just human mentality. It's another ballpark of seriousness if that wasn't brought up by mother nature. What kind of evidence do you need? This paper is full of evidence that if you combine the probability of each event happening, the probability that it was accidental is really small. So the burden of probability should be to prove that it wasn't l…
At what probability does the burden of proof shift?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
SARS itself leaked from the lab 4 times, once from a BSL-4 lab.
It appears reasonable to assign COVID lab leak hypothesis a higher prior, in Bayesian terms, just based on the many institutions/individuals whose image/status would it directly or indirectly damage if found true (NIH, DARPA, the US, WIV, CCP), and which therefore would be compelled to paint it as unlikely.
That is not a valid reason for a higher Bayesian prior of the lab leak hypothesis. A prior is that, a prior: the fact that many institutions would see their reputation damaged in the event of a known lab leak has no effect on making a lab leak event more likely to happen a priori . In fact, it would make much more sense to argue the opposite (not that I would necessarily agree with this reasoning either). The fact th…
Wouldn’t weighing evidence play a key role in assessing relative likelihoods of two possible causes of an event that had already occurred?
Especially since any remaining evidence is not conclusive. (As it happens, there appears to be evidence of some of the parties involved acting in ways that prevent further evidence gathering, too.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hope this gets more upvotes. Kind of dismaying the number of people relying on tweets with no source(s). Haven't we learned enough over these years of misinformation and "fake news"? TLDR the tweet string from the actual Dr of Virology: evidence so far points to natural but more info is needed
Ah I expected to get downvoted into oblivion, I know it's a cliche to say it but HN isn't what it once was. A key point to take away is that the fact there are 2 lineages means that lab leak is super unlikely. It would require somebody from the lab to come to the same relatively small market to give lineage A, then somebody else who got infected through a totally different evolutionary route at the lab to happen to c…
I think the downvotes are because of this type of statement, which suggests that people who have read the papers, and thought about the conflicting evidence, and finally come to a conclusion that differs from your viewpoint, dislike the implication that they are simply nutty conspiracy-theorists tirelessly and obsessively working to undermine rational science.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence Say mr X was seen at the crime scene at 10 am, he also knew the victim and lots of people have seen them fight a week ago, the victim had just came out of the bank with 20k$ in cash in a bag, mr X who's broke have been seen driving a car a month after the crime worth 18k$. There is no evidence mr X killed the vic…
I think you are using a definition of evidence normally associated with criminal trials here, and not scientific evidence.