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Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

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Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#401

Post by nomel »

jrockway wrote: post #395
nomel wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> purely out of retribution, which is ultimately pointless. If a mad scientist was making a better bomb design, and accidentally blew up a million people through negligence, would your perspective be different? What about a bridge that collapses and kills people? Engineers go to prison for that. There needs to be accountability for, demonstrably, one of the most dangerous acts that can be done. I would be perfectly o…

Blaming process failures on individuals rarely yields any results. Can you give me one example of a time it worked; where merely punishing an individual without making any process changes has prevented a class of accidents since that incident to now? My take is that any process relying on a single individual is ultimately a failure. All sorts of things happen to individuals, including losing the ability to fear the c…

I actually assume the policy is fine. Part of policy is, necessarily, enforcement. In any safety critical policy, there is someone that holds final accountability. That accountability is the pressure, the policy, that guarantees the policy is followed. This is why we have the enforcement of laws, and not just the laws themselves. Criminal negligence is a possibility, happens frequently, and is enforced often, around safety critical systems. If there’s no enforcement, then the policy is fiction.

I highly recommend you look into accountability, in safety critical systems. There are many many decades of policy/data that show accountability is a necessary component. Is what keeps them honest/careful.

(I’ll try to be back with references and a good example)

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#402

Post by hackerfromthefu »

ubertaco wrote: post #251
mejutoco wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "masks don't work unless you're a trained medical professional" Putting aside the phrasing, which I take to be something like "unless you follow procedures and have new masks often etc". In the beginning this was the narrative because there was a shortage of masks, or because of plain ignorance. Masks are not perfect, but they were effective, which is why they are still mandatory in some contexts. If one can ignore…

> In the beginning this was the narrative because there was a shortage of masks, or because of plain ignorance. Maybe I missed something, but I don't remember ever hearing "masks don't work unless you're a medical professional" (outside of later revisionist accounts by the right-wing "COVID isn't real and this is all a vast conspiracy" crowd); I mostly remember hearing "initial findings show that masks seem to be eff…

Yes, you missed a lot then.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#403

Post by hackerfromthefu »

kbelder wrote: post #390
lmm wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My friend, if you expect immediate inerrancy from everyone dealing with global-scale novel viruses The point is that if they are not certain then they should make it clear they are not certain . We were told very confidently that masks didn't work, that using them was nothing more than superstition. We are now told equally confidently that they do work. The establishment, taken as a whole, is extremely, dangerously…

I don't think they were confident, but they thought they needed to pretend to be confident. Consider it the side effect of presumably competent scientists spending too much time with politicians and PR departments. And that's why they ended up seeming like liars, and can't be trusted.

Well it's not just seeming - they actually were liars, about the degree of confidence. As you said, too much time with politicians and PR professional liars!

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#404

Post by ChrisLomont »

goblin89 wrote: post #359
ChrisLomont wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is still a misapplication. A perfect coin has a 50/50 chance for heads. That is a prior. Getting 10 heads in a row does not change that prior. Getting 1 billion heads in a row does not change that prior. Unlikely outcomes don't change the prior. The prior is the probability distribution of beliefs before evidence is taken into account.

I agree if we’re considering the prior probability of lab leak vs. spillover, where priors can be informed by e.g. laboratory biosecurity track record and such. However, what about the prior probability of a good-faith statement in presence of a strong conflict of interest? Having no ability to directly verify the truth, wouldn’t you require stronger evidence if you were to rely on that statement in your decision-mak…

>what about the prior probability of a good-faith statement in presence of a strong conflict of interest?

The definition of your prior would incorporate that.

>Having no ability to directly verify the truth, wouldn’t you require stronger evidence if you were to rely on that statement in your decision-making?

That is exactly the purpose of priors and Bayesian belief systems. If you could verify any truth, you'd not need a prior or Bayesian probability concepts for that.

In none of these cases do you change the prior after some evidence is obtained, You'd use the prior and Bayesian update to make a new belief, which is then the prior for making decisions as future evidence is obtained.

Retroactively changing the prior is demonstrably bad at reaching the proper conclusions over time. E.T. Jaynes "Probability Theory" [1] has detailed proofs of all of this, covered in the first few chapters.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/probability-theory/9CA0...

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#405

Post by nradov »

tinco wrote: post #335
sinecure wrote: post #274

I think covid's lasting impact will be one of vastly growing mistrust in the political and scientific organizations that society looks to for guidance. From the CDC's ever changing guidelines, the liability-free, fast tracked vaccine that doesn't actually mitigate transmission, the labeling of media pushed medical hypothesis as "science" and any debate as heresy, the effortless militarization of common citizens to so…

The liability-free fast tracked vaccine that doesn't actually mitigate transmission greatly restored my belief that we might survive the next large event. It was rolled out quickly, and it actually greatly reduced mortality. Reducing transmission would've been epic, but we can't win them all. The CDC's ever changing guidelines were good, but their not admitting that at some point the had been wrong or worse were flat…

Imposing mandatory curfews was never reasonable. That was never justified on an evidence-based medicine basis, and it violated the fundamental human right of free assembly. Those involved in policing such policies should be ashamed of themselves.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#406

Post by effingwewt »

pstuart wrote: post #377
stefanpie wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antihypoxiant by Andy Weir: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/antihypoxiant.html

My fave of his of all time is The Egg: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Just saw the Kurzgesagt video about this the other say and it was truly amazing!

For me it was up there with 'I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility'[1] by qntm.

I had meant to read up some more of Andy Weir but had spaced it.

Thanks for the links y'all!

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#407

Post by nradov »

slg wrote: post #383
logic_beats_pro wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, asking questions is now enough to get you labeled a conspiracy nut job. That toddler who continuously asks "why?" ten times in a row - conspiracy crank!!!

>That toddler who continuously asks "why?" ten times in a row - conspiracy crank!!! Well if the toddler is asking questions about the lab leak hypothesis... I explicitly said it is a generally acceptable approach that doesn't work on this specific topic because of the reasons listed.

Please give us a complete list of the topics about which we are no longer allowed to ask questions.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#408

Post by brippalcharrid »

jcims wrote: post #214
throwaway290 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the lab-leak hypothesis is comforting, because it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease We are well past the point where nature is our greatest enemy. A lab leak of such consequences has the attention of every hostile organization out there. Imagine the scale of hurt you could achieve, yourself remaining pretty much immune to detection and prosecution,…

Eh, a rogue planet could convert the earth into a small asteroid belt.

You'd need more than a few postgrads over the course of several weeks to synthesize a rogue planet, though.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#409

Post by programmarchy »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #355
programmarchy wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not a monolith > I highly doubt any of them Do you see the problem with your reasoning here? If you say scientists are not a monolith, then you don’t get to make sweeping generalizations about them.

> If you say scientists are not a monolith, then you don’t get to make sweeping generalizations about them. Sure you can. Humans are not a monolith but humans don't worship the Dark God-Eater Yglocth-Tyr. Both statements are accurate. Largely because he doesn't exist, in much the same way as there's no such thing as a macro level threat to scientists ability to ask for funding. It's not a real concept. If you feel co…

The discussion of how Big Science presents a macro level threat has been ongoing since at least WWII. It's no secret that the way things are funded have introduced bias or in some cases completely undermined the scientific method. There's the opportunity cost of Big Science displacing smaller, more independent researchers, the replication crisis, the publish or perish culture that has developed, etc. It's because of the concerns raised by the scientific community that the paltry checks and balances we do have even exist. So it's totally off base to write off this history of concern as non-existent, or pedantry.

It's also wrong to say a single dissenter can't bury a paper. It depends on the field, but in some fields there will only be one referee, and even when there are multiple referees, if the dissenter is a "leading authority" then they can absolutely bury the paper single-handedly.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#410

Post by xtracto »

honkdaddy wrote: post #376
ok_computer wrote: post #288

Hi, content aside, tweet chains posts are terrible to read on any device. And twitter bugs me to log in to track me through the browser. To all the people who think this is the best way to deliver information to their audience please stop. 1/1

What medium would you recommend Mr. Ebright use to deliver his message to his 50,000 followers, plus the other several hundred thousand who would have seen it given its popularity? He didn't write this for HN users to read, it's pretty unrealistic for us to expect people format their publishing to fit the preferences of nerdy HN readers.

A Substack/Medium/Wordpress-online-blog URL is less than 280 chars twitter limit.
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