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

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

#631

Post by tenpies »

mwbajor wrote: post #282
ThePhantom wrote: post #205

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…

I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. The fact that the lab and epicenter of the virus are in the same geographic area make it the likely scenario and warrants the most investigation. The efforts to look past this seem artificial.

A big problem was that Trump was into this theory early on: the Chinese virus, from Wuhan. Let's time travel back to May of 2020 for example: "Trump claims to have evidence coronavirus started in Chinese lab but offers no details" [1].

According to the Swamp, Trump cannot be right about anything ever, therefore the virus' origin is unknown and don't call it the Chinese flu because that's racist - even if the early Chinese accounts of the disease literally called it the "Wuhan pneumonia". This became Woke dogma the minute Trump said the opposite.

This whole thing has been disgusting and if we were a serious society thousands in leadership positions would have been fired or resigned in disgrace. Instead, Hollywood made fan films about people who quite easily fit the definition of having committed crimes against humanity, Tedros still has a job, and the WHO won't see any reform - it will see a major expansion of its power. I fear for the next pandemic, because if it's anything deadlier than COVID it might legitimately end civilization given the amount of incompetence we've now entrenched into our civilizational safeguards.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/donald-trump...

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

#632

Post by logicchains »

seydor wrote: post #456
kklisura wrote: post #90

Nothing will breed more conspiracy theorists than the way how the scientific community dealt with Covid-19 pandemic.

They did act like a global cabal in a bubble and told people of power what they wanted to be told

That's inevitable when most science is funded by people in power; you don't get funded if you're the kind of person who tells people in power what they don't want to hear.

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

#633

Post by fasteddie31003 »

fwungy wrote: post #539

On the upside, we advanced mRNA vaccine technology faster than it ever could have been done under the normal overly cautious test protocols. This technology is going to save countless lives and healtcare dollars in the future, so it was for the best, even if it was an accident.

Wow we are really never going to learn anything from the pandemic. Listen to yourself, "done under the normal overly cautious test protocols". The lesson we need to learn from the pandemic origin is that we need to be "more" cautious with bleeding edge medical research. The cost/benefit is not there for a lot of research if there is a tiny chance a mistake can kill millions people unintentionally.

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

#634

Post by chitowneats »

B8MGHCBekDuRi wrote: post #503
chitowneats wrote: post #377

[flagged]

what should your ideal candidate think after reading these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_genocide

Thankfully I exist in 2023. I would not have, and will never, support apartheid or genocide of Black Americans. China is perpetrating this as we speak.

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

#635

Post by than3 »

pessimizer wrote: post #511
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…

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…

It seems like you are misunderstanding the nuance of what they are saying.

Its best understood after watching and grokking this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc

Putting what is being said in the correct context, outlined in that video, which is how government typically operates.

Its pretty clear what they mean to any educated rational reader what was meant. The characterization you made is poor and doesn't aptly apply.

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

#636

Post by JoBrad »

craigc wrote: post #622
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…

[deleted]

“Low confidence” does not equate to “overwhelming evidence”.

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

#637

Post by TeMPOraL »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #423
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future. Failure to do so will result in more issues down the line. It's basic engineering. If this kind of research is so important then maybe the nations of the world should buy a cruise ship and implement extreme isolation protocols between interactions, if that's the only…

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.

> 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.

In my experience it's rather that "lab leak" means "bad foreigners we're already hating did this to everyone, why won't we nuke them already or something", when the alternative would be to actually think about failing healthcare, vulnerable supply chains, lack of trust in institutions, etc.

"Lab leak" is a cop-out. It should lead to improving procedures in biolabs, but people there are already doing it anyway, because they're smart enough to think about possibilities ("oh, even if it was a wet market issue this time, the next one might be someone here fucking up; let's review the procedures to make that less likely to happen"). For general population, the media and political sphere, it's just a permission to dismiss and ignore any potential fixes ("You say spending more on X would reduce the spread of the virus? It's not like the last one was because of problem with X - it came from a foreign lab, nothing X can do about it!").

"Encroachment on the natural world" is mostly orthogonal to that. We are going to keep encroaching on it anyway, and the way to do it safely is to do those fixes that "lab leak" gives an excuse for not doing.

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

#638

Post by autoexec »

brippalcharrid wrote: post #584
autoexec wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was labeled as a BS conspiracy theory. At the time it was a BS conspiracy theory. There was some evidence for it, and some evidence against it and it happened that the evidence we had at the time was stronger for the non-lab leak theories. That's what changed right now. We have new evidence that puts the lab leak theory above the others. Back when Trump was demanding that "China pay" and people were beating up r…

> Trump was demanding that "China pay" and people were beating up random Asians who were just walking down the street Unfortunately, random Asian people getting brutalized when they're going about their daily business has been a long-standing problem in a number of cities. Is there any evidence to suggest that the people perpetrating these crimes were even aware of Trump's words, let alone motivated by them, rather t…

> Unfortunately, random Asian people getting brutalized when they're going about their daily business has been a long-standing problem in a number of cities.

It increased after the pandemic (https://abcnews.go.com/US/hate-crimes-asians-rose-76-2020-am... and https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-hate-crimes-against-c...). It's hard to get data on people's motivations for crimes, but we can very clearly see drastic shifts in trends and this was trending higher than the baseline "generalized ethnic resentment" you'd expect to see normally.

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

#639

Post by mliker »

pessimizer wrote: post #511
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…

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…

Yes, but the point is the headline is clickbaity, and for the uninformed masses, it sounds like it's highly likely it's from the lab, when that judgment was made with "low confidence"

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

#640

Post by wespiser_2018 »

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.

What most people really struggle with is uncertainty, and they lack the conceptual framework (distributions) and working understanding of how those distributions behave under various scenarios.

One of the better data scientists I've worked with explained to me that his entire job was 'quantifying uncertainty', and after working in the field I definitely believe it. You could play around with RStan for the weekend and gain an intuition for how evidence changes hypothesis and how a hypothesis could be the "most likely" but still "unlikely" in an absolute sense, all with tremendous uncertainty in your prediction.

Still, when you try to communicate the results of a model, uncertainty is simply hard to communicate when people are interest in using your analysis for a snap decision, and the uncomfortable truth is "we can't tell you" is a fine modeling result.

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