Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out • Hacker News Board

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#591

Post by dang » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

natch wrote: post #406

jeduehr wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I'm not "coming to China's defense" here. I am no fan of the Chinese government I literally find them horrifically oppressive and a place I would /never/ want to live. I am no fan of China. I also anticipated this exact criticism and wrote a whole response to it. See here (#4): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRbACWf90iBC35xNOwlI5bWcUq0...

Yes green account, whatever you say.

You have repeatedly been an asshole in this thread. That's seriously not cool, regardless of how wrong other commenters are or you feel they are.

Attacking users for being new is particularly bad. Do we want HN to be a smug, insular community or welcoming to newcomers? Obviously the latter. Please don't poison it.

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

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#592

Post by eightysixfour » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

f6v wrote: post #520

eightysixfour wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like people are doing a poor job distinguishing between "engineered" and "leaked." There is, from my understanding, reasonable evidence to conclude the virus was not engineered from the perspective of "we took genes from one virus and moved them to this virus," but there's no evidence disproving the idea that it was the result of gain of function research. My personal feeling is that these statements are true:…

> but there's no evidence disproving... I don’t think that’s how legal system or science works(at least in statistics). We can assume that null hypothesis is that there was no leak/engineering of the virus, i.e. defendant isn’t guilty. Then it’s up to a prosecutor/someone with the evidence to reject that hypothesis. But you don’t start proving the alternative hypothesis when doing science, since it’s much more compli…

The circumstantial evidence exists though and I’m not making a claim to be a court of law, I’m claiming that these are how I view the probabilities, as a layman, and that anyone who doesn’t work on these things for a living that suggests they are more confident in one of these probabilities than another probably has some biases they need to check.

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#593

Post by tripletao » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

fighterpilot wrote: post #507

tripletao wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we disagree? There's plenty of reason to dislike the CCP, in relation to their handling of SARS-CoV-2 and otherwise. I just don't think SARS-CoV-2 originating in a WIV lab accident would add to that.

It would add to it, because it would significantly increase the number of lies they told the rest of the world, given that they've been maintaining that it isn't a lab leak.

Depending on the official, the CCP also seems to be maintaining that SARS-CoV-2 didn't originate naturally in China either, thus their (entirely unsupported) frozen food theory and push for sampling in other SE Asian countries. So I again see plenty of reason to dislike the CCP, but little specific to actual lab vs. non-lab origin.

I'm absolutely not saying the origin doesn't matter for anything--if 2.9M people died due to a particular class of research, then that absolutely should affect our judgment as to whether that research should be funded or permitted (though that cost/benefit tradeoff seems grossly unfavorable to me regardless). The link between that question and China's perceived culpability just seems bizarrely overstated to me, divorced from the reality that the USA was entirely supportive of that research pre-pandemic.

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#594

Post by natch » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

jeduehr wrote: post #438

natch wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They were built and designed by very reputable people in the virology community. Anyone under the thumb of communist party minders is by definition not in a position to freely act as a very reputable person. They may very well have a reputation, but they are not free to fulfill it well.

Then why has Shi Zhengli continued to support the zoonotic crossover theory as the most likely when the communist party no longer does? They left that behind a long time ago in favor of "The US did it."

Scientists in China play balancing acts all the time. They have to assess the risks and decide on a case by case basis what to say. I’m not inside her head but perhaps she also wants to try to maintain some scientific credibility for herself. It’s fine to wonder why, as you are, as long as you don’t assume that the question existing acts as a validation of your position.

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#595

Post by natch » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

jeduehr wrote: post #562

mushishi wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel their intention was to say that there is no known virus in nature that could be transformed to specifically SARS-CoV-2?

yeah, not in the time frame available or with the tools available. It would either have to be some hidden virus that they all lied about, or somehow an unknown contaminant in their samples that then also disappeared when they looked. All new assumptions that make this theory less likely.

Or, rather than starting with ANY virus as in your straw man, the lab started with a strain of the actual virus, from nature, and then leaked it with or without changes. Note the “or without” part. I don’t see how you rule this out.

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#596

Post by fighterpilot » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

tripletao wrote: post #593

fighterpilot wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would add to it, because it would significantly increase the number of lies they told the rest of the world, given that they've been maintaining that it isn't a lab leak.

Depending on the official, the CCP also seems to be maintaining that SARS-CoV-2 didn't originate naturally in China either, thus their (entirely unsupported) frozen food theory and push for sampling in other SE Asian countries. So I again see plenty of reason to dislike the CCP, but little specific to actual lab vs. non-lab origin. I'm absolutely not saying the origin doesn't matter for anything--if 2.9M people died…

Isn't that just one rogue official on Twitter? The mainstream CCP narrative is that it originated in a Wuhan market.

So a lab leak, if true, would indeed significantly increase the number of lies being told.

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#597

Post by tripletao » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #521

tripletao wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deigin has said explicitly elsewhere that if SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab accident, he believes it arose from manipulation of a novel, unpublished virus collected by the WIV from nature. This makes any arguments based on distance from existing, published viruses irrelevant. RaTG13 was such a virus (collected 2013, published post-pandemic), but it's very unlikely to be the ancestor for the reasons that you note. No one…

The RdRp of RaTG13 was published years before the pandemic. The full genome wasn't published, but enough of it was published to identify the virus. SARS-CoV-2, by contrast, is not among any of the sequences published by the WIV over the years.

That's correct. The RdRp was published as RaBtCoV/4991 in 2016, and that's how the link to the Mojiang mine became known. The first publication on SARS-CoV-2 didn't mention that, instead referring to the virus by its new name RaTG13, but others made the connection:

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202005.0322/v2

Of course that's not evidence of anything malicious; the renaming and failure to reference might have just been inadvertent. But it's still a bit weird, and it unquestionably shows at least a 2.5 year delay between sampling and publishing even a fragment of the genome.

That delay isn't evidence of anything malicious either. Research takes time, and any group in any discipline has a backlog of unpublished work. The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection.

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#598

Post by dang » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #237

dang wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment was rightly flagged because you broke the site guidelines and took the thread a big step further into flamewar hell. Please don't do that. Please do review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN.

pg knows as well as anyone else that if someone makes an attempt to paint you into alignment with a right-wing conspiracy theory, they're probably doing it with ill intent, especially if you made no such claim. If you want the HN guidelines to be consistent, they shouldn't demand people presume good faith when the tactics of cancel culture are wielded in threads to try to tag people with the label they are promoting…

The guidelines are consistent. You should have replied to the argument instead of attacking the other comment. If you had simply posted your sentence "The claim is not that [etc.]" and omitted all the name-calling, your comment would not have been flagged and it would have been more persuasive too. By packing it with insults, you discredit your own point. By the way, that's one of several less-obvious reasons for presuming good faith even when you don't feel like it.

I agree with you that the GP swerved into a strawman at the end and shouldn't have. Indeed they broke the site guidelines there ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.") But piling on with grossly worse violations is exactly the wrong thing to do in such a case. If you have a better point, you should serve it properly by keeping your cool. Assuming you're in the right, doing otherwise just discredits the truth, and that actually causes harm.

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

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#599

Post by tripletao » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

fighterpilot wrote: post #596

tripletao wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the official, the CCP also seems to be maintaining that SARS-CoV-2 didn't originate naturally in China either, thus their (entirely unsupported) frozen food theory and push for sampling in other SE Asian countries. So I again see plenty of reason to dislike the CCP, but little specific to actual lab vs. non-lab origin. I'm absolutely not saying the origin doesn't matter for anything--if 2.9M people died…

Isn't that just one rogue official on Twitter? The mainstream CCP narrative is that it originated in a Wuhan market. So a lab leak, if true, would indeed significantly increase the number of lies being told.

As far as I can tell, the mainstream CCP narrative is basically everywhere except China:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1181292.shtml (USA, misidentified as vape lung)

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1183658.shtml (something with Fort Detrick)

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1214376.shtml (not the Huanan market, maybe imported seafood)

I guess you could try counting up and comparing the total lies implied by each origin, but the volume is so high that seems pointless to me. Their strategy seems more like a general fog of confusion to me than a particular story intended to be believed.

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#600

Post by dang » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

ricksunny wrote: post #350

jeduehr wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I actually wrote a direct response to this idea in my original post. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRbACWf90iBC35xNOwlI5bWcUq0... (Footnote 1) Also, you can literally look around on this exact post and find people who believe that this virus was cooked up in a lab. There were also a lot of people on my original post who believed that. As is often the case: never underestimate the intellectual overconfidence of…

By the way, welcome to HN commments, as I note your account is five hours old. And here is fresh evidence that labs in Wuhan have worked on unpublished coronaviruses: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533 The above findings are replicable by any bioinformatician operating on published sources. This preprint was reviewed by one of the authors of the Human Genome Project’s landmark 2001 paper having served as an HGP sequenc…

> By the way, welcome to HN commments, as I note your account is five hours old.

In this context, that does not read like a genuine welcome but rather as a sinister insinuation. That is seriously against the site guidelines. Please read and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We want HN to be a place that's open to newcomers, not a smug and insular backwater. Internet users (including HN users, unfortunately) are vastly too likely to assume sinister manipulation and bad faith in others.

By leading with a swipe like that, you not only break the site guidelines, you discredit the rest of your own comment. That's a pity. Please stick to substantive points in the future, and follow the rule of assuming good faith even when you feel like the other person isn't necessarily in good faith. The primary reason for the rule is that you (i.e. all of us) owe it to the community, not just to the other person per se.