Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#411

Post by rualca » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

madamelic wrote: post #381

sgt101 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would have had to be very quick though. Submission was end of march 2018, there would have been a review process and I think it's unrealistic to put that at under six weeks. So that takes us to mid may 2018. Then they would have to have got some money and ask someone else - again that's going to take three months or so unless they had the money in their account. Then the project would have to be stood up - lab s…

> also the genetic engineering was slated to happen in North Carolina... This is honestly the most damning part of evidence. China has shown over and over their current strategy is to snap up resources, countries and partnerships that the West, and specifically the United States, refuse or ignore. China would have strong motivation to have SARS related research considering SARS originates in their country. So we have…

> This is honestly the most damning part of evidence.

What evidence? There was a grant proposal, and the proposal was rejected. Why do you feel that the fact that the rejected proposal referred to North Carolina is supposed to be "damning" at all, or even remotely relevant?

> China would have strong motivation to have SARS related research considering SARS originates in their country.

It has. They fund their own lab at Wuhan. Why is this damning in light of a failed grant proposal that never went off the ground?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#412

Post by SilasX » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

rualca wrote: post #408

SilasX wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cut off the critical part of the parent's comment: "(or well, with such a low chance it may as well be)". If you're objecting to the idea that well-accepted scientific theories can't put a "very low probability" on certain things being observed ... what? That's exactly what a scientific theory -- or indeed, any well-posed belief -- should do!

> You cut off the critical part of the parent's comment: "(or well, with such a low chance it may as well be)". No, I left out the weasel words from the original claim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word Either GP's claim is factual and indeed he is aware of proof of impossibility, or he is not and he's just knowingly spreading disinformation. > If you're objecting to the idea that well-accepted scientific the…

>No, I left out the weasel words from the original claim.

It's not a "weasel word", "Scientific theories placing a low enough probability to match lay usage of 'impossible', and clarifying that you mean as much" isn't a weasel word; it's being precise, and scientific theories do classify things that way.

>Either GP's claim is factual and indeed he is aware of proof of impossibility, or he is not and he's just knowingly spreading disinformation.

There's a third possibility: OP is aware that some scientists think the mainstream scientific theory places a low probability on the claim in question, but does not rise to the level of an impossibility theorem.

>I object to the idea of random people on the internet knowingly spreading disinformation with baseless claims that fly on the face of critical thinking, and then resorting to vague appeals to authority, inversions of the burden of truth, and outright bullying to force-fed their disinformation.

I don't see how the parent did any of that, just how another commenter is overreacting to ideas they don't like.

Are you seriously telling me that if I look through your posting history, I won't find a single case of you suggesting something without posting links to rigorous proof?

If you're going to scream bloody murder at the idea that any unsupported idea would ever be uttered here, you could maybe glance at the sibling comments in the thread, like mine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28653730

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#413

Post by AlotOfReading » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 3:51 PM UTC

nekt wrote: post #388

tikiman163 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid wasn't a brand new disease. They had most of the research necessary to create a vaccine completed two years before the outbreak. We would likely have had the Johnson and Johnson vaccine by July of 2020 if Trump hadn't shut down the pandemic response team purely because it was created by Obama. They were the ones already preparing the ground work necessary for a vaccine to existing SARS Corona virus diseases tha…

If that is the case why did Peter himself say a covid vaccine was impossible at the Nipah conference in 2019?

The 2019 nipah conference was December 09-10. The first COVID patients with symptoms had only entered the hospital the previous day and the epidemic was still unrecognized. Why was anyone talking about a vaccine for a disease no one knew existed at an unrelated virus conference? Can you source anything to that effect?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#414

Post by dang » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

xqcgrek2 wrote: post #395

dang wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you with high confidence—since I'm the person making these calls—that this has nothing to do with how we moderate HN. I mean, it's possible that you know more about my unconscious than I do - but I think the odds are low. I'm pretty sure we're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck and don't give a shit about the "globalist game". Re "I don't doubt that there are bots or Chinese national…

Interesting. You don't actually refute any of his arguments.

What arguments? I didn't see any. But perhaps the following will help:

> HN (Y Combinator) has an incentive to curb posts that could potentially make China angry.

We have no such incentive and people post such things all the time (if by China you mean the Chinese government).

> Being a forefront Silicon Valley investment company, they have to play the globalist game.

Short answer: no we don't. Longer answer: whatever "globalist game" means, I've never encountered the slightest reference to this kind of thing in the years I've worked for YC.

> Therefore, I suspect there may be policies in place, whether spoken or unspoken to suppress these types of posts.

There are no such policies, as anyone can easily see for themselves by looking through what actually gets posted here:

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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

> I don't doubt that there are bots or Chinese nationals that also downvote/flag these posts as well.

As explained above, it's against the site guidelines to post like this when you have zero evidence. This is an important rule, for reasons I've explained many times over many years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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

---

I believe that covers everything. Better?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#415

Post by CyanBird » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

uap wrote: post #336

googlemaps wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a nearly identical RBD in the wild. But... without the furin cleavage site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649716 And you know what, northern Laos where the RBD was found, and south Yunnan, where the well documented sars outbreak happened (which presumably led to the discovery of ratg13), share a border with each other

What if EcoHealth (originally Wildlife Preservation Trust International) was infiltrated by eco-terrorists who did the reasearch anyway then released a depopulation virus to punish humans and 'restore balance' to the ecosystem, in a sicko 'Army of the 12 Monkeys'-style act of terrorism? But either they weren't that successful ( only 5 million deaths is not depopulation) or their goal was lockdowns and reduced air tra…

Please don't pollute HN with mindless, needless speculation

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#416

Post by passivate » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

lovemenot wrote: post #318

passivate wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistical models work great for well defined problem spaces like the probability of rolling a die in a particular way. You can reason in your own mind the probability of aliens or extinction events or lab leaks or anything really, but it doesn't get you very far (IMO) in proving anything. To paraphrase Wernher von Braun - "Hard data is worth a thousand expert opinions." :)

You seem to be conflating subjective and opinion on the one hand with statistical on the other. Actually, Bayes statistics works great in poorly defined problem spaces where we can update our priors as new information becomes available. Just like in the issue under discussion. Your example of rolling dice is Frequentist, not Bayesian. We wouldn't use Frequentist stats in this domain, for the reasons you mention.

>Actually, Bayes statistics works great in poorly defined problem spaces where we can update our priors as new information becomes available. Just like in the issue under discussion.

Can you give me a few comparable scenarios where it worked great?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#417

Post by bawolff » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

flavius29663 wrote: post #313

bawolff wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames. The stuff you cite is circumstantial at best. Yes, given the seriousness of covid i would like someone to investigate it, but i would hardly call it billowing smoke. > Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything. Is tha…

Occam's razor works against your argument...given everything we know so far, the simplest explanation is that a chinese lab leaked a virus and it's covering it. There is no jump in logic needed. It's actually easier to explain why the virus was so close to the Wuhan lab.

Occams razor states "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"

It doesn't seem neccesary for a chinese lab to be involved, and the only evidence so far (afaik) is that it exists and was studying something similar. Meanwhile there exists (albeit definitely not ironclad) evidence that china wasn't involved.

If there is no evidence beyond circumstantial evidence that china had a lab near by, and there is a pretty much equally reasonable explanation that the event happened by chance, than i think occam's razor favours the one with less entities involved.

I'm not saying that china isn't involved. I'm saying that we basically have no idea and the argument that china did it is no more strong than the alternative. On the balance i find the natural explanation more compelling, but ultimately we have no idea. I also think there may be some cognitive biases going on - covid 19 has hurt, and we want scapegoat to blame. If it was natural, than we have only ourselves to blame for being underprepared. If china did it, we convinently have someone to hate.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#418

Post by BeFlatXIII » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

reilly3000 wrote: post #224

If you are an expert in virology I’d love to know the answer to this question: If given the right resources, would it be feasible to synthesize a pandemic-inducing virus in a lab setting? If so, a general question: why haven’t the villains of the world done so already?

To answer your final question:

That’s more of a doomsday terrorist fantasy than viable bio weapons research.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#419

Post by BeFlatXIII » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #195

somewhereoutth wrote: post #150

Fairytales about lab leaks won't absolve us of our abject failure to deal with this novel pathogen, nor will they help us prepare for the next.

Refusal to investigate whether this is the biggest disaster in scientific history is odd. If dangerous research killed 15 million people we need to know.

Even if it did and we do know, do you honestly think it would stop rather than be moved to secret bio weapons research facilities?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#420

Post by dang » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

mandmandam wrote: post #359

dang wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for sinister explanations—your comment broke the site guidelines egregiously, so users flagged it, entirely appropriately. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

... Egregiously? Really? Shit, what would a _mildly bad_ comment look like? It's also weird that you'd take issue with my comment and not the one I'm replying to. Did you read it? It's got literally 7 kinds of deliberately crafted misinformation.

Your comment consisted of nothing other than calling someone full of shit. (Doing it euphemistically doesn't change this.) That's obviously against the site guidelines and correctly flagged. Then you made sinister insinuations as if the flags weren't an obvious consequence of what you'd posted.

Please read the site guidelines and don't post anything like that to HN again - you actually already did it again downthread ("Smell the air: smells like smoke - and something else"). Flouting the rules like that, after we specifically asked you to stop, will get you banned here.

Pointing the finger at someone else isn't a very tasteful way to respond about your own behavior, but as it happens, I don't see how the other comment broke the guidelines. The commenter may be 100% wrong, but there's no rule against being wrong on HN. If someone else is wrong and you know the truth, the thing to do is patiently and respectfully provide correct information and better arguments. Name-calling is definitely not ok, and please stop posting in the flamewar style. It's the opposite of what we want here.

What we want is described well in this sentence pg wrote years ago: Comments should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.