Odd timing to announce this, in the eve of the Chinese siding with the Russians.
Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#352There's a lot of bad headline-writing on this subject today. Here's the NYT's headline: Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says And then the sub-head (or dek, if you want to sound like you're in the know): The conclusion, which was made with “low confidence,” came as America’s intelligence agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus. So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cau…
Do we know why it is the Department of Energy that works on that? I would have expected a branch of government that's more related to health, granted, I know very little about US gvmt structure.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. In 2016 when people were like "hurr durr experts suck, they predicted Hillary would win and she lost", it was exasperating. If a model predicted an outcome with 60-70% certainty, and the less likely scenario happens, model wasn't necessarily bad. That'd be true even if it was a 90/10 split.
The model wasn't bad , just useless.
Highly disagree that it was "useless":
1. First, when many pundits were basically saying there was no chance that Trump would win, Silver was particularly highlighting not just that it was in the realm of possibility, but would not even be very surprising if Trump won (e.g. I think Nate does a good job with his "same probability of a team down by 3 points at the beginning of the 4th quarter coming back to win" to clarify to a lay person that this isn't unusual).
2. When making political predictions based on polling that turn out to be "wrong" (i.e. end up going the way of the < 50% option), it's helpful to think of why this might happen. In Trump's case, it was pretty obvious he was a very different type of politician than what came before, so it's worth thinking whether that difference might result in widespread error in some polls. Also, whenever a race is very close, it's obvious that any small movements one way or the other can affect the outcome. In 2016 Trump lost the popular vote by a substantial margin but won the electoral collage by a significant but not huge amount. In fact, the "all or nothing" way the US electoral college system works has the effect of amplifying smaller differences into larger vote outcomes.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
The counter to that is that the experts in coronaviruses knew they were the likely next epidemic and that they were doing their best to characterize the threat as best possible but unfortunately failed before the spillover came. The scientific community knew how close we came between SARS and MERS, a small mutation of either could’ve been much more virulent and pathogenic, so of course they were trying to research.
The question is not whether the research was worth it overall. They denied there was even a possibility that lab leak was the cause of the pandemic. I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that the research is and was worth it. But we need to have an accurate accounting of recent events. They tried to completely shut that down. Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.
> Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.
I still get the impression the 'selectively silence misinformation' crowd is still as emboldened as ever, even in the pursuit of science. Despite it repeatedly failing and backfiring.
COVID helped give Reddit-style control of discourse a glean of urgency/respectability and "it's okay because we had good-intentions" continues to be the go-to justification.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves. Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell them live to slaughter them at home to eat. Again, this…
No there isn't. More than 50K animals tested an no animal reservoir for C19. Are there really reddit-ors who still think C19 was natural when ALL of the current evidence including genetic markers points to lab leak? Yes, we can't say with absolute certainty, but the case for lab leak is MUCH stronger than for natural. Plus, why has China still not released the nature and details of the experiments that were conducted…
This is a dumb argument. Sick animals were probably culled immediately by the farms to avoid getting blamed.
As a 2-decade genetic engineer: there are no genetic "markers" pointing to a lab leak, there's really no sign of unnatural manipulation in the sequence.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1. They sequenced RaTG13 but that is too far away from SARS-CoV-2 with a thousand random mutations across its genome. And there's no evidence that they ever recovered culturable virus from RaTG13 or were able to culture it--there's a vast gap between sequencing a virus and culturing…
The obvious solution for this conundrum is that they did study it, but didn't publish it because the screw-up happened and all evidence was promptly destroyed. In a totalitarian state, the secrecy is the default mode. You can get exceptions and publish stuff, sure, but only once you asked and received permission. If you didn't - or in the period between you asking and permission being issued something happened - no e…
Perfect, then it's unfalsifiable.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1. They sequenced RaTG13 but that is too far away from SARS-CoV-2 with a thousand random mutations across its genome. And there's no evidence that they ever recovered culturable virus from RaTG13 or were able to culture it--there's a vast gap between sequencing a virus and culturing…
The obvious solution for this conundrum is that they did study it, but didn't publish it because the screw-up happened and all evidence was promptly destroyed. In a totalitarian state, the secrecy is the default mode. You can get exceptions and publish stuff, sure, but only once you asked and received permission. If you didn't - or in the period between you asking and permission being issued something happened - no e…
The effort required to culture virus like this is fairly large, and it requires them to keep it secret in 2019 before there was any need to keep it secret. Nobody talked about it to collaborators, no sequences were leaked out, etc.
They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a new iPhone, before they had any reason to.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? What's the thinking in that decision? This kind of post draws out the lowest quality comments and attracts accounts that comment only on this kind of post.
It seems like significant new information on a major ongoing topic. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Thank you for the clarification.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#359The fucking article says the DoE has low confidence in the report.
Look at the other intelligence community reports are rated as and what "low confidence" means in intelligence community assessments. The fact that the DOE is taking the time to revise their previous stance is a very big deal in our quest to understand the origins of the new coronavirus.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn’t the FBI also have a large biological analysis team? For bio terror ?
I think if anything COVID has shown us that biological warfare makes as much sense as nuclear: none. In our globally connected world it's mutually assured destruction, and that's without even the need for your enemy to maintain stockpiles of weapons. The virus will find itself within your own borders soon enough.
Only bad viruses. Good viruses will be genetically coded to only harm a particular subgroup.