Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The media's lab leak fiasco

slowboring.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 736 posts

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#581

Post by hermitdev »

vosper wrote: post #368
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…

> No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article) https://taibb…

This was an interesting read, but I think there's something missed with fact-checkers. They seem to be caught in a strict binary of true and false when there's often a third possibility: we do not have the necessary information to either prove or disprove a claim/statement.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#582

Post by asdff »

mapme wrote: post #511
asdff wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People stopped reading the source material, and started just parroting the talking points. It's even gotten to the point where people are even convinced the talking points are the source material.

Genuine question: were people ever reading the source material? Seems like a dubious claim that folks of yesteryear read deeply into original sources. Most people read headlines and attention grabbing quotes and this was just as true 100 years ago. I recently read about the Russian revolution and it was similar to today.

100 years ago an appreciable portion of people were reading from the western canon during their free time. Today, it's joe rogan. Just compare the first televised presidential debate versus the most recent one, and see just how far the bar has fallen in terms of the substance of public discourse from not even 100 years ago to today.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#583

Post by the_optimist »

websites420 wrote: post #413

This is a the consequence of having an administration that transparently lied at every turn. Even if they were right, no one would believe them.

Your statement follows a pattern of, ‘the person was doing X therefore the unjustifiable response was justified.’ This fails the commonly adopted Rawlsian theory of justice (Veil of Ignorance), and it is known as victim blaming.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#585

Post by sifar »

Animats wrote: post #540
moralestapia wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the intelligence community What do you mean by this? And I'm not being snarky, really.

The US "intelligence community" is the CIA, NSA, etc.[1] Intelligence analysis is the business of trying to extract useful info from of noisy and deceptive data. Here's an introduction to the field.[2] See especially section 4. 4-11. Analyst have found the following rules helpful in dealing with deception: - Avoid over-reliance on a single source of information. - Seek and heed the opinions of those closest to the re…

>> This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools.

Not just schools, this should be taught to everybody.

One wonders how propaganda would react if this were to happen. Right now it is mostly non-physical information.

But when you have a critical mass of people & environment which is not conducive to standard propaganda, perhaps it will resort to creating a physical reality as a base to anchor upon. Not that this hasn't happened earlier, but it will become pervasive.

Would we be able to believe what we see then ?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#586

Post by katbyte »

noofen wrote: post #400
briefcomment wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've had COVID, and this is why I will not get vaccinated, despite CDC recommendations. It's very creepy how they've buried treatments and promoted experimental vaccines.

Why won’t you get a vaccine?

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#587

Post by trhway »

It isn't media fiasco. Media is a business, and they have been selling what has been selling well - i.e. people were buying it very well.

It is fiasco of people believing media without applying basic reality check. In this particular case, the people would easily believe in the coincidence of a very low probability that a virus would jump to humans at the same time and right near, yet without any connection to, the lab where the virus was being bred to do exactly that (the "gain of function research") while dismissing outright the much more probable no-coincidence version of events. Pointing that more than a year ago cost me some karma, and will probably cost me today too :)

After such profound failure of the basic thinking, the people instead of recognizing the failure on their part are still and again blaming media. And the next time the media comes with a well selling, yet failing basic logic/probability/reality/etc check, story the people would again believe in it whole heartedly. Ad infinitum...

Btw, how is that for conspiracy theory - associating the lab leak idea with conspiracy theorism, right wing nut-jobbery and racism was just a successful "damage control" PR operation by China government (and probably by some actors in US as US was partially funding that research in the Wuhan labs after closing such research in US because of the dangers of that research).

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#588

Post by dredmorbius »

dang wrote: post #371
dredmorbius wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were also a number of HN stories posted early in the pandemic concerning the lab-leak hypothesis. These paint a ... complicated ... picture of that theory and those who advocated for it. Few of the submissions had any significant discussion, I'm simply going off what was submitted to HN. Search, bound from 2020-1-1 to 2020-6-1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1593475200&dateRange=custom&... 26 March 2020: Exper…

Thanks! I've added these two to the above list: Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070031 - May 2020 (76 comments) Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 - March 2020 (6 comments) The others seem to either have no comments or in one case (the Montagnier…

I know your focus is generally pointing to prior discussion. Just to be clear, I'm looking at the evolution of the story itself, at least as reflected through HN submissions (survival bias noted).

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#589

Post by pjc50 »

Animats wrote: post #417
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…

Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.

If we're going to talk about the intelligence community, then the same criticism that gets used against the media needs to be brought up: the Iraq WMD.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#590

Post by throwaway210222 »

Animats wrote: post #417
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…

Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.

> In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources

Where on earth do you get this from?

In additional to the yellow cake fiasco, remember the pressure US and British intelligence came under find kompromat on UN security council members to bully them into voting for the Iraq invasion.

Complete and utter lap dogs.

Post reply on HN