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Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

wsj.com

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Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#561

Post by Godel_unicode »

zamadatix wrote: post #527
pessimizer wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline is absolutely, literally true. I also don't understand the nuance that anyone could miss here. The astounding thing is that the Energy Dept. can say that a lab leak is the most likely cause of the pandemic, and people jump out in front of them to say that what they somehow still mean is that a lab leak wasn't the cause of the pandemic. They have "low confidence" that it was a lab leak ( there might not e…

How can "low confidence" and "higher confidence than all other theories combined" jive? Does it require "all other theories" to not include "we don't have a clue" which is the most likely of all or am I missing something else?

“We don’t know” is by definition not a theory though, it’s a lack of a theory.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#562

Post by somewhereoutth »

t-3 wrote: post #510
somewhereoutth wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens. Much easier to believe the 'baddies' have been found and 'brought to justice' than having to face up to the world we live in and our effect on it.

What? Why would anyone be punished for an unintentional lab leak? Scientists are also humans that can make mistakes.

Its not about punishment, its about the 'just world' fallacy where bad things happen because of 'bad' people (whether through malice or incompetence). It allows us to hide from uncomfortable truths - in this case that pathogen spillovers are inevitable, and that our response has been typically woeful.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#563

Post by Godel_unicode »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #551
kilgnad wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Low confidence means they have a bunch of crap theories. The lab leak theory is simply the least crappy theory. That's the nuance.

It is an interesting admission though, because by definition that means that the "evolved in nature and came from wet markets" view is also a crappy theory.

What it means is that we lack the ability to prove either of those theories, not necessarily that either theory is bad.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#564

Post by somewhereoutth »

dqpb wrote: post #514
somewhereoutth wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was situated in a region known for coronaviruses

Why was it so stigmatized before and now it's the preferred hypothesis for FBI and DOE?

Good question! Perhaps 'Deep Trump'? Certainly even the 3 letter agencies are not immune to what at best we might call the reactionary right, at worst proto-fascism.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#565

Post by xyzzy123 »

lamontcg wrote: post #450
xyzzy123 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument "they would have used a published backbone and reverse genetics system" is wishful thinking. You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 "Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China" MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of engineering, and guess what the system is unpublishe…

HKU4 contamination in agricultural samples in the Country that HKU4 was discovered in does not pose a particularly controversial question as to how it got there. While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is…

Did you notice the bit where it's a cDNA clone of an RNA virus and do you understand the implications of that?

This is an engineering product.

As for politics, sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#566

Post by selcuka »

dangwhy wrote: post #544
axxto wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "sightly-less-shitty-than-other-theories" theory is still a shitty theory. Low-confidence means exactly what it sounds like.

then why even propose any theory ? why not let it remain a mystery.

> then why even propose any theory ? why not let it remain a mystery.

Reductio ad absurdum won't work here. There are ways to test a "low confidence" theory, and re-evaluate its confidence level. This is called science.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#567

Post by chasd00 »

t-3 wrote: post #510
somewhereoutth wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens. Much easier to believe the 'baddies' have been found and 'brought to justice' than having to face up to the world we live in and our effect on it.

What? Why would anyone be punished for an unintentional lab leak? Scientists are also humans that can make mistakes.

You can unintentionally harm someone and still be liable for that harm.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#568

Post by Izkata »

tzs wrote: post #311
khazhoux wrote: post #234

Time once again to post Jon Stewart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8 I still don't understand how in 2020 people were branded as racist sinophobes for saying that the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, probably originated from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan . I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been the leading theory to be disproved. Instead, IIRC Twitter and FB were flaggi…

> I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been the leading theory to be disproved The leading theory should be the thing that has never happened before (lab leak causes epidemic or pandemic) instead of the thing that has happened dozens of times before (animal virus jumps to humans and causes epidemic or pandemic)?

> The leading theory should be the thing that has never happened before (lab leak causes epidemic or pandemic)

It happens pretty often, we just don't hear about most of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#569

Post by autoexec »

dangwhy wrote: post #555
autoexec wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time trump and his people were first pushing lab leak/bio-weapon conspiracies it was without evidence (and Occam's Razor isn't evidence), and worse the actual evidence we did have at the time suggested it wasn't leaked from a lab. That didn't stop the "crazies" from insisting it was true though. Anyone can have their own theory of things, but what separates Trump and the "crazies" from the rest of us (includin…

how were the people pushing wet market theory not "crazies" also then.

> how were the people pushing wet market theory not "crazies" also then.

Because they had evidence that made the wet market theory the one most likely to be true, and a lack of stronger evidence for the lab leak theory. Investigating and supporting the theory that is best supported by the evidence you have isn't crazy, it's science.

When you look at all the facts you have, and then ignore that because it doesn't support what you want to be true, and then you act on what you wish was true instead, that's crazy. That's exactly what Trump and many of his supporters were doing.

We have new evidence now that suggests the lab leak theory is more likely than the wet market one, so once it is released non-crazy people will support the lab leak theory when they could not (and should not) have before.

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