361–370 of 1001 posts
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Why useless? People have to attempt to predict the outcomes of elections, and have to do their best.
I would guess that the vast majority of the population do not take meaningful actions based on election prediction (other than "I might [not] need to actually vote"). There are good reasons to have polls and predictions but they are far from necessary.
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Why useless? People have to attempt to predict the outcomes of elections, and have to do their best.
I would guess that the vast majority of the population do not take meaningful actions based on election prediction (other than "I might [not] need to actually vote"). There are good reasons to have polls and predictions but they are far from necessary.
The original claim was that election prediction is useless -- are you willing to concede that election prediction isn't useless?
The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals, including bats. Like other labs, there are dedicated personnel for hydrating and feeding the experimental animals. Notably, there are "wet markets" in Wuhan where live animals are sold, including bats, which harbor coronaviruses. Someone who is working in the facility in charge of maintenance…
Did I just read this correctly? “janitor steals a highly modified and virulent bat and sells it for $10 in a wet market” Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.
It’s an interesting question though. Working off of a lab leak theory, how did the first known cases all come from the wet market?
Is it just coincidence that an infected scientist traveled to the outdoor market and infected others?
With human to human transmission, you’d think it would have spread more rapidly among a scientist’s friends & family in an indoor setting.
When the US was doing contact tracing early on, I think the number of outdoor transmissions was extremely low.
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The only reason to not say it was a lab leak is to avoid embarrassing those responsible, China first and America second. But little by little people will start accepting that. What should the consequences be? At the very least a tightening of the controls around labs doing bio research. Of course, this amounts to nothing if someone is allowed to outsource research to labs in countries that don't follow the stringent…
> What should the consequences be? The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulatin…
This kind of sloppy hyperbole is tremendously damaging, feeding the false narrative that we must choose between the benefits of modern virology--smallpox wasn't eradicated until 1977!--and the catastrophic risks of experiments on novel potential pandemic pathogens.
Almost all modern virological research involves either existing pathogens already present in humans, or novel pathogens in systems incapable of replicating in humans. The WIV's research was a narrow exception, and one that was controversial long before this pandemic. For example, here's David Relman asking Ralph Baric a question about those risks, back in 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s
That narrow area carries almost all the risk of a catastrophic research accident, and has yet to deliver any significant benefit. It could be banned with minimal impact on almost all modern virological research. That narrow regulation is what we need, and there are people (like the new NGO Protect Our Future) working to draft and enact it. Your conflation between modern virology in aggregate and that narrow area doesn't help them, and I hope you will stop.
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1) That’s a big assumption you’re making, even if it was a lab leak (which is itself a big leap from what’s known today) 2) It also wouldn’t be “weird” at all. That’s like saying you find it weird that a firefighter got burned or a nuclear safety researcher caused a nuclear safety incident.
No it's not. Not at all. Everything risk is increasing exponentially. BSL-4 labs are expanding 1 per year, or around 2% extra risk. CRISPr and CRISPr cas9 are only 10 and 20 years old. How much added risk is that per year? 10,000%? Then to send money to actively seek out bat viruses in the place thought to harbor the worse or most diverse viruses? And to do all that in partnership with a hostile enemy who most certai…
And no, it's nowhere near acceptable to just assume that every new virus is a lab leak. Especially when the subtext of this line of inquiry is usually that we're going to "hold 'them' accountable" somehow. Combine those two thoughts and you get something like, "anywhere that a novel virus appears in suddenly gets smacked by the international community," and I'm not sure you could create a stronger disincentive to early pathogen detection and alerting if you tried.
P.S. There's almost certainly not anywhere close to "tens of thousands" of BSL-3 labs. Probably in the few hundreds to maybe thousand or two, but that'd be a stretch, and "tens of thousands" is not supported by any data I can find: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-le...
The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals, including bats. Like other labs, there are dedicated personnel for hydrating and feeding the experimental animals. Notably, there are "wet markets" in Wuhan where live animals are sold, including bats, which harbor coronaviruses. Someone who is working in the facility in charge of maintenance…
Did I just read this correctly? “janitor steals a highly modified and virulent bat and sells it for $10 in a wet market” Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.
It's a 45min drive between the Hunan market WIV building:
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/30%C2%B022%E2%80%B235%E2%80%...
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I doubt it. It was almost immediately clear that the world’s reliance on China for some things was a problem. I think this was a pretty clear outcome, because before COVID there were people already harping on that single point of failure. This is going to hurt China’s long term influence. Countries are diversifying their strategic supply chains, on shoring capacity for thinks like chip fabs. This weakens China’s geop…
(I do not believe in the intentional malicious leak theory, to be clear)
There'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…
Good luck getting 95% of the American populace to understand any of that nuance. After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but they willfully don't want to.
Lets say it is found out with definite proof that it was a lab leak. Then what? Grandma's dead, china killed her and there is nothing you can do. We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it.
Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.
The first stage of grief is denial.
Politics?
https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/16299562794466918...
https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15519378265808240...
I mean, if you have a toothache, you probably do see a dentist, not your butcher right?
If we take a plane, we won't choose one of us to fly it, right?