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I understand how intense the magnetic pull can be, but this is off topic in this thread. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27190749 .
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How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
131–140 of 255 posts
Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. If it was indeed gain of function research in China that caused covid we should immediately stop doing that sort of research and ban it. There’s a reason it’s been controversial and many virologists have jobs on the line when it comes to its origins
It was banned in the USA around 2013, then Fauci and Straszak shifted funding to continue it in Wuhan to get around the USA bans. Virologists signed on to the article promoted by Straszak claiming the wet market fantasy as Fauci and Straszak control much of the funding in virology.
> then Fauci and Straszak shifted funding to continue it in Wuhan
A nested conspiracy theory is just what we need for some more political polarization in the USA. Score!
Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
#133There's basically no evidence either way, although the outbreak being in a city with a class 4 bio lab actively studying sars viruses does on the surface seem to make the lab leak more probable. Bit of a coincidence. What really makes me think though is the way China is being uncooperative. You'd think if they were innocent they wouldn't need to limit access to data and prevent investigation of the Wuhan lab. Maybe t…
Another way to get at a similar disconcerting place:
Where is the animal population that harbored the virus?
Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately that outcome is happening already, from just the hearsay
Well the heresay comes from people like Donald Trump and the longer the Democrats ignore the theory the more credibility they lose and give to him, even if the way he said it was inflammatory. Seems like it would be far less destructive to bring it out into the open now than to just let people think that someone calling it the Kung Flu was more transparent than the political party that pretended like the lab leak is…
The Democrats (and the many “gullible” reporters like the one that wrote the referenced link) are simply waiting this out in hopes the average reader forgets that Trump and others including a few brave scientists pointed towards the obvious possibility of a lab leak early in the pandemic.
Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
#135So if the lab leak theory turns out to be true, how will people deal with the fact that they've been vehemently disregarding it as a "Q-anon conspiracy theory"? And would it be worth questioning if any other recent topics labeled as "conspiracy theories" may in fact also be true?
> So if the lab leak theory turns out to be true, how will people deal with the fact that they've been vehemently disregarding it as a "Q-anon conspiracy theory"?
If the lab leak theory turns out to be true, I'll admit I was wrong about my intuition. It's not impossible, but it's extremely unlikely. We've had literally thousands of new virus strains evolve in the past century of viral research and like three known "lab leaks". As has been repeated ad nausum, there is absolutely nothing surprising about SARS-CoV-2's structure or relatives or evolution and no reason to doubt that like every other pandemic this is a naturally evolved pathogen.
Now tell me why people keep INSISTING that this must be true absent evidence[1], and explain what you'll do when (as with basically every conspiracy theory) it turns out that there never really was any real evidence.
[1] Or don't. We all know why. The lab leak theory casts a convenient boogieman in the part of the villain, and distracts from fingerpointing aimed at parties closer to home who could have reacted well to the pandemic but chose not to. It "makes it all someone else's fault", so there's no surprise why it's so popular.
Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's nothing conspiratorial about it. Any politically sensitive organization will inherently do whatever it can do avoid blame. This implies multiple high ranking officials and organizations conspired to hide information and cover up evidence. We have a word for this: conspiracy theory. Americans tend to equate the word "conspiracy theory" with being crazy or ridiculous, but that is not always the case. Many con…
I think of it more like the Illuminati myself. Normal bureaucratic blame shifting hardly merits the term.
There's a lot of interesting conspiracy theories about why that is the case. Most people point to one of the Warren Commission documents obtained via FOIA about how the CIA must discredit people who doubt the official JFK assassination narrative and have them associated with communists.
Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
#137There's basically no evidence either way, although the outbreak being in a city with a class 4 bio lab actively studying sars viruses does on the surface seem to make the lab leak more probable. Bit of a coincidence. What really makes me think though is the way China is being uncooperative. You'd think if they were innocent they wouldn't need to limit access to data and prevent investigation of the Wuhan lab. Maybe t…
Has anyone analyzed this with a Bayesian statistical approach? Considering that a zoonotic transfer could happen in a very large number of places on earth, I would imagine that the odds of an outbreak in any particular city would be quite small? With that in mind, how many virology labs are there doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses? How many have had safety issues in the past? How many times have pathoge…
This is my thought. I think it is hard to do a Bayesian analysis here and come up with priors everyone can agree on but it always seemed to me it would be like if a new Mad Cow disease started near Cambridge, Mass. If a new cow disease arose naturally it would probably be in a cattle farm with tons of animals being slaughtered - not next to a lab that studies prions.
Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
#138edit Changed "character" to "structure" because my intent is being misunderstood. This is ultimately about human psychology (as in homo sapiens), not particular nations or peoples. Each of us could very well have but for chance been placed in any of these boats, and our behavior would change to match because we're not morally special. There are a number of things at play here that stoke up distrust, mainly due to Chi…
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. If you reach " they have a legacy to uphold as the Kingdom of Heaven. Their mission under Xi is a moral one to once again become the shining beacon of civilization, the center of the Earth ", you long ago left the topic of this thread. Actually as soon as you went to "Chinese national character" you already did that. For god's sake please let's avoid $anyone's…
It wasn't my intention to turn this into a nationalistic thread. I was just trying to explain that we're not going to get anywhere with an investigation because there are a lot of political, historical, and aspirational issues at play here rather than actual malfeasance. I'm not trying to discuss about who is "right" or who is "wrong" because we'll be at it all day and the thread will turn to garbage.
At the core this isn't really about this or that nation anyway; it's about human nature and how we respond to pressure based on our power. This is how humans will behave in a contentious political world, and why the distrust is and will continue to run high for years or even decades as the new political world order sorts itself out. One might even say "interesting times". Nationalist countries will always be oversensitive, up-and-comers will try out their new strength, and egocentric leaders will steer their countries in twisted directions based on idealized past glories and fables. Thus my final paragraph in the parent.
The "legacy to uphold as the Kingdom of Heaven" is China's past glory being used by its egocentric leader, similar to Trump's MAGA, or Bolsonero or Erdoğan or Putin or Duda or any of the egocentric leaders who've gained power due to fear and uncertainty in today's turbulent world.
Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
#139So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories. That being said, I don't believe anyone can reasonably claim with any degree certainty that Covid was a lab-leak BUT the WHO investigation simply hasn't done their due diligence to a sufficient degree to eliminate this theory. Unfortunately the WHO's credibility is trained here. In the early days of the pandemic the WHO bent over backwards not to upset Chin…
> So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat. And it was once considered blasphemy to say putting leeches on your body didn't help an illness. There's a reason why the term "conspiracy theory" is thrown around by the media so much...it's because they know a certain subset of people have been socially conditioned to bypass critical…
I think people usually give zero weight to conspiracy theories not because they're never true but because it's much likelier that the experts know better than you do.
Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
#140So if the lab leak theory turns out to be true, how will people deal with the fact that they've been vehemently disregarding it as a "Q-anon conspiracy theory"? And would it be worth questioning if any other recent topics labeled as "conspiracy theories" may in fact also be true?
> So if the lab leak theory turns out to be true, how will people deal with the fact that they've been vehemently disregarding it as a "Q-anon conspiracy theory"? If the lab leak theory turns out to be true, I'll admit I was wrong about my intuition. It's not impossible, but it's extremely unlikely. We've had literally thousands of new virus strains evolve in the past century of viral research and like three known "l…
I would believe that Covid started elsewhere in China before believing in started in a wet market in Wuhan. It is extremely unlikely to start there given that isn't where the bats in China are or where new corona viruses are.
In fact, if you read any research that had been published by the WIV on coronoaviruses pre-2020 they all start by talking about expeditions to collect bat droppings 1500 miles away.