Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 1001 posts

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#491

Post by seizethecheese »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #170
ttul wrote: post #11

The This Week In Virology podcast has been talking about the lab leak concept since the early days of the pandemic, with various experts opining on the likelihood. In [1], the expert discusses how the virus itself does not seem engineered; it’s most likely a naturally created virus. However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately - and they produce good science…

> However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately Bat coronavirus work including chimera creation was done at WIV at BSL-2, not BSL-4.

This is the real scandal.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#492

Post by BeFlatXIII »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #269
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #151

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.

…and their votes count equally to yours. Isn't democracy grand?

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#493

Post by CyanBird »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #269
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #151

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.

Correct, that's why the title is written in such a way, to ensure that they don't understand it

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#494

Post by nl »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #151

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…

See "Words of estimative probability" related to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_of_estimative_probabilit...

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#495

Post by anigbrowl »

extheat wrote: post #336
anigbrowl wrote: post #237

It's a little perplexing to me that we're getting evaluations from spy agencies and the Department of Energy. I know the latter specializes in nuclear energy in particular, and this has experience with proliferation and adversarial information-gathering. They also supervise biological weapons laboratories (presumably for the same reason), but what they're being asked to do here is to validate a premise (natural or en…

The DOE (as a research agency) does a lot of biological and genomic research and is well qualified to do this kind of research, as other comments here have pointed out. It's not uncommon for researchers in different agencies to collaborate with each other, all labs have different areas of expertise and it would be naive to say any one from one agency is more "qualified" than another. The moniker at the top is not so…

The "low confidence" has a particular meaning in the world intelligence

Indeed, which is why I think it should be given more weight in the article. The actual terminology is easy to understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#496

Post by tripletao »

lamontcg wrote: post #458
tripletao wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It…

Explain the coincidence of why it happened to be in a wet market and not a restaurant or other gathering where people congregate. Just happened to be the one place to make it look exactly like zoonosis and extraordinarily similar to SARS-1.

If you think SARS-CoV-2 arose naturally in the same city as the world's biggest laboratory collection of sarbecoviruses (which I do agree is possible), then you must agree that weird coincidences do happen sometimes? A wet market is crowded and poorly-ventilated, so it's a great place for a respiratory virus to spread, regardless of how it got introduced.

There's also the question of ascertainment bias, whether cases were found in the wet market simply because that's where the authorities looked. I assume you've seen those endless debates, which seem basically unresolvable to me given the limited information available.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#497

Post by bee_rider »

belorn wrote: post #292
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #151

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…

If all the other origin theories has "very low" as confidence score, then a lab leak is still the most likely origin with a "low" confidence score. It would be nice to see the confidence score as a numerical number in order to understand how much lead this theory has to the second most likely origin theory.

Do we need to make a decision on this matter at the moment? If the choices are between low certainly and very low, I’d say we just don’t have enough information to say anything interesting.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#498

Post by jonhohle »

brookst wrote: post #445
smsm42 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like any other options have high confidence. All theories are low confidence right now because there is no conclusive proof for either. But if you support some, you are the defender of science, and if you support another, you are a filthy conspirologist and get banned from social media. Try explaining that to 95% of the American populace.

I think it has more to do with the fact that one opinion is supported by more conspiracy nuts. Doesn’t mean it isn’t the right answer, but having lots of crazies insisting it is the only possible answer makes more grounded people less credible in the eyes of others.

Are the pejoratives really necessary? From the beginning the "lab leak" theory satisfied Occam's Razor more than the convoluted "wet market" theory or the "pangolin" theory. Meanwhile, a lot of departments at a lot of universities got a lot of funding to pursue their pet theories.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#499

Post by nl »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #424
mwbajor wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter if they understand the nuance. The lab leak theory takes a back seat for the following reason: 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…

> Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head. only Americans were touched by covid I guess... > The first stage of grief is denial. At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes. Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wa…

This is probably the most egregious example of "whataboutism" I've seen on HN.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#500

Post by frank_nitti »

boopmaster wrote: post #338
belorn wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all the other origin theories has "very low" as confidence score, then a lab leak is still the most likely origin with a "low" confidence score. It would be nice to see the confidence score as a numerical number in order to understand how much lead this theory has to the second most likely origin theory.

This. Low confidence still significant in that it could have been “low confidence transmission from wet market game”, but that’s not the direction this landed on. It’s likely a lab leak, says the report, but there’s too many gaps to support higher certainty.

Exactly - and how many were mocked, ridiculed, cancelled for even floating the idea of the lab leak; it was labeled as a BS conspiracy theory.

Many, even some in this thread, are eager to minimize this story if they participated in ridiculing the fringe voices who kept questioning the official narrative. Better to have this quickly fade into oblivion lest they be outed as having placed their blind faith in false prophets. But Pepperidge farm remembers

Post reply on HN