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Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

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Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#871

Post by tripletao »

jounker wrote: post #819
jkhdigital wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lab wasn’t just studying coronaviruses. The director had intimate knowledge of gain-of-function techniques, with publications and grant proposals to document this. Some of the research was published during her tenure at the lab, so it can be assumed that the research was performed there.

From what I know you’re mischaracterizing the research. To the extent that they were looking at gain of function, they were also looking at loss of function. My understanding is that the research was looking at how random point mutation affect infectivity, both positively and negatively. They were using also using virus evolutionary pretty distant from covid 19. There are corona viruses present in species in the wet…

The WIV had the largest program in the world to sample novel sarbecoviruses from nature. At the beginning of the pandemic, the published virus closest to SARS-CoV-2 (RaTG13) was from the WIV. Closer viruses (BANAL) have since been published, by a different group but from areas where the WIV was also recently sampling.

There's no serious question that the WIV has unpublished viruses--even with no attempt at secrecy, every active research group has unpublished work. Researchers found an unpublished merbecovirus in contamination from shared equipment. This isn't related to SARS-CoV-2, but shows the claim that the WIV had zero unpublished viruses to be specifically false. Public access to the WIV's database of viral genomes was removed early in the pandemic, and never restored.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2

Pangolins were initially proposed as the proximal host, but that's been abandoned for years. After a long delay, the paper in Nature was extensively corrected, following Alina Chan's discovery that the alleged multiple samples were all from a single batch of smuggled pangolins. These were probably infected during trafficking, in the same way that housecats are sometimes infected by SARS-CoV-2 but aren't the source.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2

The goal of research like DEFUSE was gain of function, a deadlier or faster-spreading virus. That goal wasn't always successfully achieved, but that's true for all goals. The point is that skilled researchers specifically trying to achieve a goal (like by directed evolution during serial passage, or by genetic engineering) are much more likely to do so than would random point mutations alone.

None of this means it's certain that SARS-CoV-2 arose from an accident at the WIV. The picture that you've received isn't accurate, though.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#872

Post by tripletao »

jounker wrote: post #817
AcerbicZero wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the very least it was such an obvious connection that ruling it out should have been an early step; when the PRC clammed up, and stopped letting any data out that should have been seen as the attempt at a cover-up that it likely was. Maybe it didn't come from the lab. Maybe it didn't come from China at all. But maybe we should have checked that? Maybe we should know if some senior coronavirus researchers at that l…

The initial cases of covid 19 cluster around the wet market. The lab is in another part of the city. If it were a lab leak then we’d expect the initial cases to cluster around the lab, and to show up in those who had contact with lab workers. Nobody considered the lab as a source because the basic epidemiological evidence doesn’t support it.

By that argument, we'd expect the first major clusters outside Asia to appear at airports or seaports, since the virus couldn't have been introduced anywhere else. They didn't, instead appearing in nursing homes, choir practices, and other locations where it spread particularly fast to patients who were particularly likely to seek medical attention.

There is no reason to believe it's possible to determine the point of introduction with such granularity from initial epidemiological data. The form of modeling behind these geographic claims shows no history of correct predictions, making them essentially unfalsifiable.

The misleading claims that you're repeating here are exactly those promoted by the scientific press, including both the highest-impact peer-reviewed journals and popular outlets like Scientific American. If you are willing to entertain the possibility that they'd misinform you and seek sources outside that bubble, then I believe you'll see that yourself.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#873

Post by tripletao »

drewrv wrote: post #692
tokinonagare wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There is a virus lab in Wuhan because a lot of coronaviruses originate in that region. Its existence/location is not evidence of a lab leak. If anything, the lab leak “theory” has received too much media attention when the primary evidence (location of a lab) is easily explained by other factors. Imagine a virus was spread from penguins to humans. It would not be surprising if research on the virus were conducted in…

Do you know where you got this idea? It's completely wrong and incredibly prevalent; so I'm wondering if particular sources are misleading people, or if it just "feels right" and people come to it independently unprompted.

Beyond the general background already linked, Dr. Shi specifically did not expect that natural spillover of SARS-CoV-2 occurred near Wuhan:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...

She could be wrong, but the idea that she chose her work location based on the natural abundance of sarbecoviruses is unequivocally false.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#874

Post by llm_trw »

thrance wrote: post #854
llm_trw wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an odd study to support the idea of white sumrpemacy when 2/3rds of the population sampled isn't Western or white according to white supremacists.

White supremacy and other kinds of racisms. Non-whites can be racist too, you know? I feel like I'm wasting my time. What do you want to convince me of? That disbelief in evolution is not correlated to white supremacy? What a weird hill to die on. Minds infected with weird ideas tend to believe in multiple ones at the same time, it's not hard to accept.

>Minds infected with weird ideas tend to believe in multiple ones at the same time, it's not hard to accept.

Irony thy name is thrance.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#875

Post by unethical_ban »

Xcelerate wrote: post #808
unethical_ban wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your sentence has grammatical issues. I assume you're implying that people who advocate for cultural support of science are hyper liberal and would be hostile to any science conducted by a hyper conservative. I reject this assertion. "Trust the science" means that peer reviewed science and scientific consensus should carry weight, and too many people are anti-intellectual.

> I assume you're implying that people who [...] Nope.

Scientists aren't people!

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#877

Post by ristos »

Crayfish3348 wrote: post #523

A book came out in August 2024 called "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola," by Susan Greenhalgh. She's a professor (emeritus) at Harvard. The book is a history. It shows how the Coca-Cola Company turned to "science" when the company was beset by the obesity crisis of the 1990s and health advocates were calling for, among other things, soda taxes. Coca-Cola "mobilized allies in academia to create a soda…

Intentionally leaving out important or key information is still lying and deception, and is harmful, and can be really harmful if it's a big thing, even in cases when it's done with good intentions.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#878

Post by cryptonector »

mrguyorama wrote: post #520
cryptonector wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific method has no authorities, but science does.

It literally doesn't. Even Nobel Prize winners do not get a free pass to make baseless claims. There's an entire realm of people who did great science, won a Nobel prize, and then went on to make absurd unfounded claims about shit they do not know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Why do you suppose he said that? Do you really think it's different now? It's not.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#879

Post by 23B1 »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #869
23B1 wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not thinking deeply enough about the problem, which is annoying because I'm addressing the main thrust of the original article. Staff/editors/leadership cannot be trusted to label correctly if they are serving their own agendas. This is a real problem when we're looking to science to guide sociopolitical decision making, e.g. during a pandemic, or in childcare, or with the environment.

> Staff/editors/leadership cannot be trusted to label correctly if they are serving their own agendas This can be boiled down to "nobody can be trusted to do anything", which is technically true. The question is, is there evidence of motives leading to actual misbehavior? Having a nonzero motive to misbehave isn't the same as that.

It can be boiled down to incentive alignment - though a lot of people (falsely) believe that incentives can (or should) be tuned for social good.

> is there evidence of motives leading to actual misbehavior?

Yes. Having a 'very strong opinion' is a strong indicator that a publication concerned with science has gone off the rails.

Re: Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

#880

Post by GoblinSlayer »

suzzer99 wrote: post #670
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? AFAIK singularity is a dense object of zero size.

Infinitely dense, which is a math term for "some other realm of existence that makes no sense in our physical world".

It may not have all properties you want, but it can have properties appropriate to its state, makes perfect sense to me, why not. Also it's not infinite density, it's zero size, infinities don't exist. Mass is a property of inertial motion, singularity doesn't have inertial motion, thus no mass.
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