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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#401

Post by caddemon »

briefcomment wrote: post #328
shaicoleman wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also systematic censorship and disinformation against prophylaxis and early treatment information, which could prevent millions of hospitalisations and deaths. [1] e.g. YouTube recently censored the Ivermectin Global Summit, in which doctors and scientists showed the overwhelming scientific evidence for Ivermectin from around the world. [2] 1. https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea... 2.…

Insane How can you be so gung-ho with relatively new vaccines, but bury relatively benign and longer standing interventions?

I mean if a benign intervention doesn't actually work and it causes people to avoid a real intervention that is problematic. There's definitely plenty of alternative medicine misinformation out there that makes similar arguments about safety and history.

That said, it is wrong for YouTube to be removing these videos IMO. First of all, who at YouTube reviewed the material? Do they actually have the expertise necessary to filter out fake claims? There are plenty of natural treatments out there that actually can be helpful, and I doubt YouTube hired a doctor familiar with the relevant literature for its fact checking operation.

Second of all, why is YouTube so fixated on removing COVID-related videos? Is this sort of content about possible preventative measures really more harmful than countless videos that exist on YouTube about natural "cures" for cancer?

And really these are just implementation concerns, there's also potentially more fundamental problems with silencing information like this. I haven't read enough on what the OP posted to comment on how real it may be, but even supposing it were false information, deleting the videos entirely may not be a net positive.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#403

Post by dqpb »

neither_color wrote: post #34

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disag…

Is HN any better? I got censored and ridiculously rate limited today for trying to post a similar article.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#404

Post by mistermann »

aasasd wrote: post #327
arduinomancer wrote: post #137

I hate how it feels like there's such a "collective narrative" for everything now days with the internet. Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Its like we've been absorbed into the internet consciousness and talking to a person is like talking to "the internet brain".

Perhaps because the proper honest statement that vast majority of people can make is ‘I have no clue about any of this’.

To honestly make that statement, it would first require conscious awareness of it. I believe that this is the root problem: people, even smart people, are literally unable to realize that they do not know under certain conditions. On certain topics (fight or flight mode?), it's like the mind stops supporting trinary logic and downgrades to binary only.

Consider this: how frequently do you find the logical styles so common in this thread in threads where the topic is technology or things of that sort?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#405

Post by caddemon »

cratermoon wrote: post #382
caddemon wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they were, NIH grants went to WIV. Here is a government science website saying as much: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/9563/ It went through a non-profit, but trust me there is careful accounting of where money goes with NIH grants, there is no way the government was not aware that some of it's money was funding research at WIV. Especially because they suspended the funding once COVID blew up,…

Note that the NIH funding was cancelled under the Trump administration. That administration also attacked its own public health officials, denied the science, catastrophically failed in its response, and was generally incompetent. There's no reason to believe the cancellation was anything other than posturing for political reasons, coming from an Oval Office that never stopped referring to COVID-19 as the "Chinese Vi…

I never made a comment one way or the other about whether the cancellation was logical, I was just responding to the claim that there was no funding to begin with.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#406

Post by munk-a »

SilverRed wrote: post #293
wpietri wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing they aren't monopolies, then. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit are are all very popular places for people to post their views. And that's not counting the myriad lesser places like the one we're using now. And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own. I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of…

>And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own. And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit. In the end, almost all communication online runs through a limited set of american megacorps who all act in the same ways, have the same rules and align to the same culture. It's no surprise China and Russia ban American sites because those sites control the debate and…

I do think there is a problem with how tightly some big corporations have locked down social media - but the 1st amendment (and equivalent laws elsewhere) don't cover the requirement that anyone actually listen to your speech.

I think if we see social media as being a necessary modern medium for speech then we're going to need to get a government sponsored something in the mix - whether that is a common required protocol for messaging or a full blown nationalized social network is an open debate we can have. The main issue is that as long as we're blindly trusting the market to fix itself - it has decided the fix is that monopolies are great when nobody is breaking up big tech companies.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#408

Post by slg »

caddemon wrote: post #391
slg wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you feel if we swapped out "social media sites" and "algorithmic" for "newspapers" and "editorial" in that first paragraph? There are a limited number of slots in the newspaper. Should the government step in a guarantee that the New York Times needs to publish any crackpot theory I come up with?

NYT can also be held liable for things like slander though, right? If social media sites try to claim they are not responsible for any content posted, that does feel a bit like trying to have their cake and eat it too.

I'm not sure the goal here. Do you want increased or decreased moderation? Repealing 230 and making social media companies liable will lead to more moderation and bans not less.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#409

Post by Lazare »

wearywanderer wrote: post #350
Lazare wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would help explain how the virus got from the mine to Wuhan; it does not help explain how the virus mutated from a bat virus unable to infect humans to a virus that was extremely good at infecting humans with, so far, no intermediate stages identified. Much of the problem with the zoonotic explanation is that no evidence of the process has been found. Was a third virus involved? We haven't identified it. Was a t…

I generally agree with you, my guess is the virus was messed with and accidentally got out. However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios, such as: 1) The sample the lab received was from the 'third host' and not from a bat; e.g. a field researcher mailed the lab a slice of pangolin. 2) A guano miner or lab researcher received a massive viral dose and inadvertently became a one-man walking "GoF la…

> However I don't feel comfortable ruling out alternative scenarios

I haven't suggested we should, not do I think that would be wise. We're in the uncomfortable position of having effectively no evidence in favour of any theory of COVID-19s origin, so we're reduced to trying to imagine which bits of missing evidence are the least likely to have been missed.

It seems true that Wuhan is outside the flight range of the horseshoe bats living in the mine, and that a sample of RaTG13 was brought from the mine to the lab in Wuhan. If RaTG13 was a direct predecessor of COVID-19 (likely), and if the lab in Wuhan was the direct source of the initial infections in Wuhan (hard to estimate), then I think Occam's Razor suggests we have a good enough explanation for how RaTG13 got to Wuhan. It would be a remarkable coincidence if a sample of RaTG13 was in Wuhan to be studied, then RaTG13 independently mutated into an unknown COVID-19 precursor outside of Wuhan, then the precursor was separately brought to Wuhan to be studied, then the precursor leaked and became COVID-19!

...but as ever with this mess, I don't know of a reason we could rule it out. At most we can try and estimate the odds of the lab having a closer precursor than RaTG13 but not realising or, if they realised it, not admitting it, but I'm not sure how to even start evaluating that scenario, so...

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#410

Post by ineedasername »

I think there's a difference between making an extreme claim in the early days of this thing without giving evidence to back it up, compared to now where there's been a year's worth of putting the pieces together. And even now we don't know-- it's just better informed speculation (although the intelligence community may have more to go on that we don't know about.)

The media isn't great about reporting science, but I don't fault them for being critical of an unsupported claim made at a time when it was in the political interests of a person's party to cast blame in China's direction.

Calling that a fiasco is itself ignoring the contexts involved as reporting changed. Making an unsupported accusation that turns out to be correct doesn't mean it was right to make the accusation at that time.

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