611–620 of 1001 posts
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How can "low confidence" and "higher confidence than all other theories combined" jive? Does it require "all other theories" to not include "we don't have a clue" which is the most likely of all or am I missing something else?
“We don’t know” is by definition not a theory though, it’s a lack of a theory.
No idea if it's possible to still find the source, but the doctor of patient zero also got infected (and died/"disappeared" afterwards like her boss at the wuhan hospital). Patient zero was a virologist that seems to have been censored off the Chinese internet afterwards, and I can't find the links anymore :-/ In the beginning of sars-cov-2 breakout there was an article shared on wechat that later got censored in var…
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/51845/is-huang-...
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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.
Passage through humanized mice wouldn't leave signs of unnatural manipulation. It's still pretty suspicious that COVID was so transmissible between people from the outset, and no evidence of it circulating in local populations was found.
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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.
Regardless of what actually happened in this case (FWIW I still believe a natural origin was most likely), the Chinese authorities covered up everything to do with the lab and destroyed potential evidence before a proper investigation could take place. In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.
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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.
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.
There are two theories: - the covid19 was created naturally and just happen to happen near the only place on Earth (or one out of two or three places?) that study covid19-style viruses; - the covid19 was created in the lab and leaked outside because of negligence and/ or sloppy procedures. Your choice which theory you believe. But a lot of powers in this world have vested interests to make you believe in “nothing to…
correlation != causation
No idea if it's possible to still find the source, but the doctor of patient zero also got infected (and died/"disappeared" afterwards like her boss at the wuhan hospital). Patient zero was a virologist that seems to have been censored off the Chinese internet afterwards, and I can't find the links anymore :-/ In the beginning of sars-cov-2 breakout there was an article shared on wechat that later got censored in var…
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And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens. Much easier to believe the 'baddies' have been found and 'brought to justice' than having to face up to the world we live in and our effect on it.
What? Why would anyone be punished for an unintentional lab leak? Scientists are also humans that can make mistakes.
The original Lancet article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The retraction: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
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The headline is absolutely, literally true. I also don't understand the nuance that anyone could miss here. The astounding thing is that the Energy Dept. can say that a lab leak is the most likely cause of the pandemic, and people jump out in front of them to say that what they somehow still mean is that a lab leak wasn't the cause of the pandemic. They have "low confidence" that it was a lab leak ( there might not e…
> The headline is absolutely, literally true It absolutely, literally isn't. The headline says the lab leak is the most likely origin. The lab theory being the least shitty theory absolutely doesn't make it a likely origin: it is purely a statement about the information we have (rather lack thereof) on origins, not on the likelihood of any of those. Likelihood of origin doesn't even come into it given the current sta…
I read about CIA false flags in Cuba. Nordstream didn't blow itself up because the pipe was angry it allowed .de and .ru to engage in commerce.
I guess a rogue western intelligence group bribed or compelled a Chinese lab worker to sabotage something.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rfk-ope...
"The CIA had been plotting to assassinate Castro since the summer of 1960, even before John Kennedy was elected. A congressional investigation of the CIA later uncovered eight separate plots of varying ridiculousness between 1960 and 1965."
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> The headline is absolutely, literally true It absolutely, literally isn't. The headline says the lab leak is the most likely origin. The lab theory being the least shitty theory absolutely doesn't make it a likely origin: it is purely a statement about the information we have (rather lack thereof) on origins, not on the likelihood of any of those. Likelihood of origin doesn't even come into it given the current sta…
Yes, a thing can be most likely, and not likely. It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins.
That's how you read it. GP is reading "most likely" as statement of absolute likelihood, making it false here, because the most likely thing is "any of the possibilities not under consideration", which takes most of the probability mass.
IMO, GP's interpretation is the one that most people take for "most likely" statements, which in our opinion makes this headline a blatant lie.