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China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

theguardian.com

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Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#261

Post by meowface »

rumanator wrote: post #250
meowface wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is. Any argument akin to "I don't need to provide evidence of anything I accuse you of because you lie about things" is complete and utter bullshit. You would basically be just as bad and intellectually dishonest as the CIA, in that case. You always need evidence, regardless of the nature of the accused person or entity. You could be accusing Stalin himself; you still need evidence

> Yes, it is. Any argument akin to "I don't need to provide evidence of anything I accuse you of because you lie about things" Either you didn't understood the point or you don't want to address it. The point is that if China's regime tries to portray the fact that they operate a coronsvirus military research lab a few meters from the outbreak's alledged epicenter as nonsense while at the same time they try to pin th…

I understand the point. I still maintain any totalitarian communist regime is going to spread absurd propaganda in such a situation pretty much no matter what.

The lab escape theory is certainly completely plausible. But it becomes no more or less plausible just because there's "US military conspiracy" propaganda spread by the government.

They easily could've done that to counter all of the accusations hurled at them by US citizens that it's an intentional bioweapon, or due to Trump calling it "the Chinese virus" and constantly trying to associate it with them, or to pull attention away from themselves due to the outbreak starting there and just generally to reduce embarrassment and spread confusion that they hope will improve their reputation, or even specifically because of posts like yours.

If you assume for the sake of argument that the lab hypothetically isn't responsible, but lots of people think it is, this would be one way to provide such a distraction. It would as well if the lab were in fact responsible, but that definitely doesn't mean that's proof the lab is responsible. They have a ton of possible reasons for why they would want to spread this propaganda.

The hypothesis that "they're more likely to spread propaganda about the US military causing it if their lab caused it" carries a ton of implicit assumptions which may or may not be true. It's reasonable to speculate about and discuss, but it alone is evidence of nothing. If there were some leaked document saying something like "hey, since our lab fucked up let's distract people by accusing the US", then it'd be a different story.

Of course, China's government promoting and spreading absurd conspiracy theories needs to be condemned no matter what, but an analysis of the true root cause of the outbreak needs to be totally impartial and objective.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#262

Post by surge »

Medicalidiot wrote: post #258
surge wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is saying its a bioweapon, merely shoddy containment in a facility that did viral research, the research could have been entirely altruistic, its still their fault for letting it out of the lab and then hiding the fact, arresting doctors and journalists and letting it spread. When they could have been letting other countries take precautions to prepare for it and shut down travel out of the country sooner inst…

>Even if this isn't a bio-weapon, it actually would be pretty effective as one assuming you already had the vaccine, which no one does. Not even close, not even a little close. With proper containment COVID-19 is easily contained. This isn't that great, especially when you look at countries who are handling this well: Taiwan. Bioweapons are notorious for being quick and lethal. As per the CDC on bioterrorism: >When t…

It's easily contained by shutting down the economy and social distancing...

You didn't read a thing I said did you? You're calling whats happening now, easy? Did you even read what happened to the naval ship that got infected?

This has had pretty disastrous effects for the economy of the entire world, there are food riots overseas right now, the unemployment rate is skyrocketing. The social disorder alone, cops are arresting doctors providing supplies to the homeless, yelling at women not wearing a mask while walking their dog, arresting people playing in a park near no one else, by world leaders being put in the ICU. Get your head out of the sand.

None of this is easily contained. Ebola is easily contained, this you don't even know you're sick when you're walking around spreading it for days.

>If you give me a normal amount of resources and competent public health professionals COVID-19 does not scare me.

Weirdly, no countries seem to have this, since they're all getting ravaged, at least those with high population density. The only country's with high population density not getting ravaged is Taiwan, which has an extreme mistrust of the CCP, and speak/read Chinese so had intelligence from the Chinese Internet on what was really going on far before most country's public did. They reacted sooner by shutting down travel, and sounded the alarm bells, but the WHO didn't listen to them, because they were too busy pretending they weren't a country.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#263

Post by dirtyid »

rumanator wrote: post #250
meowface wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is. Any argument akin to "I don't need to provide evidence of anything I accuse you of because you lie about things" is complete and utter bullshit. You would basically be just as bad and intellectually dishonest as the CIA, in that case. You always need evidence, regardless of the nature of the accused person or entity. You could be accusing Stalin himself; you still need evidence

> Yes, it is. Any argument akin to "I don't need to provide evidence of anything I accuse you of because you lie about things" Either you didn't understood the point or you don't want to address it. The point is that if China's regime tries to portray the fact that they operate a coronsvirus military research lab a few meters from the outbreak's alledged epicenter as nonsense while at the same time they try to pin th…

>I mean, if a work accident committed by China's military is ruled out as outlandish then why are they pushing conspiracy theories akin to area52 aliens as reasonable and plausible?

Because the incident isn't about deflection to US.

It was retaliating and warning US against pushing Wuhan conspiracy theory (Tom Cotton) and calling covid19 Wuhan virus (Pompeo) after WHO re-designation. Both these events proceeded the Chinese tweets.

Current US administration has consistently been the instigator of bellicose diplomacy. But people conveniently forget when it comes to China who has been remarkably patient compared to other countries, including US allies.

US is pushing crazy propaganda to deflect blame from their inadequate response. In return, China unleashed one of their mid tier diplomats to troll crazy US rhetoric coming from a Senator and Secretary of State to demonstrate that China is willing to escalate to dirty propaganda games. Hence why it had to be de-escalated by Chinese ambassador to US, a diplomat 2 levels higher than the original foreign ministry spokes person. It also plays well to Chinese domestic audience.

If China wanted to deflect blame, there would be much more plausible ways. The fact that China chose to confront US conspiracy with Chinese conspiracy should be interpreted as signalling to not go full retard. The message and messenger was calibrated for this affect. And what do you know the US backed off on this avenue of attack and has shifted to boosting Taiwan. Also concurrent to the conspiracy tit-for-tat was banning each others journalists. These events have to be evaluated in proper context and timelines.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#264

Post by meowface »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #238
meowface wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just pointing out that Wuhan was studying viruses exactly like the one tearing through the world right now, lol. Yes, and this is important, but this is also already publicly known. It's not providing any new or interesting information. There're still a lot of other variables and factors to take into account here. Statistics aren't so simple. For example, Wuhan is a huge city, larger than NYC, and an important econo…

I see you making a lot of comments in this thread and I think you make some good points. I’m curious, could you think of an example of “strong evidence” that would support the theory that it was accidentally released from a lab?

It's very hard to prove or disprove, and probably even harder with a totalitarian regime, so it's likely just going to be conspiracy theory fodder for years or decades. You might need a whistleblower, leaked/stolen/hacked documents, or a surreptitiously recorded conversation.

Another commenter mentioned a third party inspecting the lab, though if the lab really were the source I think they'd probably be able to fully cover that up before any inspection took place.

I mean, even if they didn't cover it up but are responsible, an inspection may still find no evidence of it (samples or animals containing a 100% or near-100% match of the virus could add some additional evidence, but also isn't proof by itself).

Hell, maybe their leaders don't even know if their lab was responsible or not. If it did happen, maybe it was a fuckup they were totally unaware of and still have no way of tracing retroactively. In such a scenario, maybe an employee made a mistake, got infected, but became a permanently asymptomatic carrier. Then they could've spread it to someone while out on a walk, or in some other way that would be really hard to reliably go back and track.

I will say, from everything I've seen, Chinese citizens are generally also quite concerned and angry about this whole situation. They've actually forced the government to apologize and backtrack on things quite a bit. If there's a highly convincing and credible leak that the virus escaped from the lab mistakenly, and they knew about it and covered it up, I think there would be outrage and possibly massive protests. Yes, I really think they'd be so outraged that huge numbers of them may do this even with an authoritarian regime that's infamous for killing protestors en masse.

Chinese citizens are pretty much no different from anyone else. They would absolutely want to know if their government is covering up that one of their labs accidentally unleashed the pandemic of the century. They're not necessarily going to buy all the propaganda about it if there's serious, clear evidence that this happened. But as it is now, there's no evidence, so they, and us, have no reason to be outraged about this particular accusation. It's something that should be investigated, but even if "unfounded accusations like these are dangerous" sounds like the words of a worried Chinese government censor, it's also true in this case.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#265

Post by dTal »

abc-xyz wrote: post #252
dependenttypes wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see anything in that image.

I don’t know about you but I find it very concerning that mods of major subreddits like r/worldnews and r/coronavirus are censoring comments like: > “Yeah but you can’t trust any of those numbers coming out of China. It’s gotta be way worse than they’re letting on”

Pretty sure what they mean is the image is illegibly blurry. It is for me, at any rate.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#266

Post by irishcoffee »

JackFr wrote: post #169
markdown wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you think your opinion on this should be regarded as equal to that of a study published in Nature?

You miss the point entirely. Nothing in the Nature piece is in conflict with the theory that it accidentally escaped a lab were Coronaviruses are studied. Not that it was a weapon. Not that it was man made. Simply someone working at a research lab, screwed up and released a dangerous virus.

Occam’s razor, it seems to fit

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#267

Post by Klinky »

papermachete wrote: post #83
meowface wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? That's not how evidence works. The onus is on the person making the claim to provide positive evidence. Not actively insisting they have to prove a negative.

That's just appeal to perfection, proving a secret military base got away with corona would make you more effective than CIA and MI-6 combined. However, China has hundreds of documents of this base and backgrounds on all scientists, which it can release to no detriment at all, supposing the lab had nothing to do with corona.

You're using a "Nothing to hide" argument to counter this supposed "appeal to perfection". Lack of evidence is not evidence.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#268

Post by irishcoffee »

nikkwong wrote: post #235

I'm trying to be a good bayesian reasoner here but the particulars of this specific case are all so tangled and piecemeal. The conspiracy theorists among us are having an absolute field day with the current events and it's easy to see why. According to my bayesian analysis, I believe that the most likely cause of this virus is a wet-market infection, followed by a slip-up at a lab, with—by high margin, in very very l…

The only reason I can possibly fathom as to why it would be nefarious would be trade. And that’s a stretch.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#269

Post by root_axis »

jotakami wrote: post #172
PeCaN wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "coronavirus escapes from a lab, in the exact area where the outbreak started, that was studying coronaviruses" is exactly an 'extraordinary claim'. If anything it's the elephant in the room. Are we just supposed to casually ignore that or what…. I think the problem is that when people think of "lab" they think of some sort of devious genetic engineering bioweapons program, and not something considerabl…

Yeah that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to all my reasonable friends who think that the moment I say “it came from a lab” that means this is a bioweapon that was intentionally released. No, actually, there is a chain of evidence that makes an accidental lab leak more plausible than the theory that the virus jumped straight from an animal in a wet market hundreds of miles away from its normal habitat that just ha…

How does an "accidental lab leak" happen without a bunch of people at the lab getting infected? Seems like we'd have some evidence if it was an accidental leak.

Re: China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

#270

Post by dang »

hoot wrote: post #212
nikofeyn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, indeed. however, you'll note by the downvotes no one here wants to be reasonable. it's a trend i've noticed on hacker news. this site claims a lot to be unbiased and evidence based, but i have noticed when it comes to china, all reason floats out the window. it's a dangerous effect because there are actual problems that are exacerbated and confused by propaganda and unfounded claims from the other side, which al…

I've noticed this as well. Does China have any stake in HN that would allow them to sway discussions?

No, and what you're all observing is the most routine of all phenomena on an internet forum when the topic is divisive. People make diametrically opposite interpretations of the exact same threads based on their pre-existing positions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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