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CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

nytimes.com

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Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#811

Post by camgunz »

idlewords wrote: post #800
camgunz wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but I think we're all subject to the temptation to make bad arguments to get one over on people we disagree with. I can respect some things about someone and not respect other things. I guess this comes from being low-key terrified I've been as bamboozled as conservatives have, and I hope if I started parroting various propaganda someone here would have respect enough to tell me respectfully. But, also I get t…

Baldly accusing someone of bad faith is serious business, and I believe against the rules of this forum. It is way worse than calling out what you believe are bad arguments, as it's a slur against someone's integrity and character. Rayiner doesn't deserve that.

I might be misusing bad faith, but honestly I don't think so. I felt like trying to equate the Hunter Biden Laptop letter with the Iraq War was way too polemic to be good faith, designed solely for gotcha purposes rather than to continue or deepen a discussion. I think a good faith discussion would have had some standard by which they were categorizing Hunter Biden laptop letter signatories and wouldn't have equated the letter with all the intelligence fraud behind the Iraq War. I think it's not unreasonable to expect someone with Rayiner's platform on this site (and intelligence) to know that stuff. Maybe (probably?) you clearly take good/bad faith more seriously than I do; I think it's really easy to prioritize winning the argument or mindshare vs. participating in a discussion that benefits us all, and I think that comment had all the hallmarks of it. I don't think Rayiner's a bad person, just that he--like all of us--sometimes could do better (I'm also guilty of this, probably even recently who knows). I'm fine not agreeing on this, but I try pretty hard to criticize behavior and not people, and I think I've held to that standard here.

EDIT: I reread and I definitely gave the impression that Rayiner posts in bad faith a lot. I don't think that, and I apologize.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#812

Post by strangecasts »

labster wrote: post #745
strangecasts wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior probability estimates are not part of science?

Prior probability estimates of p = 0.083 are not extraordinary. As the sibling says one out of twelve past pandemics was a known lab leak.

Okay, but your objection was requiring more evidence for the less likely assertion constituted an "arbitrary bar", you cannot argue that and quote _an arbitrary estimate by another commenter_

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#813

Post by strangecasts »

tripletao wrote: post #715
strangecasts wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Depending how we count, there have been a dozen or so pandemics comparably novel or deadly to the 1977 flu in the last fifty years. Of those, at least one was research-origin. So are you really saying p ~ 1/12 is an "extraordinary claim"? Yes, I think it is extraordinary to extrapolate one event in 1977 to a "once every fifty years" rate

Can you quantify what you believe is a correct prior then, and explain how you got that number? I hope you're not going to count every natural spillover since prehistory in the denominator. The technology to culture and freeze an influenza virus didn't exist before ~1930, and the technology to genetically enhance a sarbecovirus didn't exist before ~2010. The absence of pandemics with such origin before that means not…

Apply the same reasoning with the start cutoff at 2010 then

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#814

Post by ocschwar »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #770
ocschwar wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A narcissist like Trump doesn't have better information than I do. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

“I have better information than the president of the United States… HE is a narcissist” Yep. Just checking to make sure I’m following along correctly.

The president has access to information that I do not. It's wasted on him. You know this as well as I.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#815

Post by greasegum »

miguelazo wrote: post #476
drewbug01 wrote: post #17

> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete. I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain. --- One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as…

What’s most disturbing and highly irresponsible about comments like that and all of the reporting on this development is that there’s almost zero acknowledgement that the lab in question was being funded by the US government and much of the Gain of Function research was being directed by a US nonprofit with ties to the US government.

I think people are missing one very sympathizable effect of this joint research, that it prevents either country from gaining an offensive edge from dual-use research that could be used for bio-weapons. You could argue that this has the benefit of preventing a bio-weapons arms race.

Vertiginous to think about the layers of unknowns.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#816

Post by tripletao »

Fomite wrote: post #779
maeil wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take. This frankly makes me distrust you; in 2020-2022 this was absolutely a risky position to take for most public figures, let alone those on academia, let alone those connected to epidemiology. This remains the only time and topic I've seen blanket banned from discussing across all major US so…

I got death threats for suggesting that mandatory vaccination for school kids wasn't well justified not from the people who wanted vaccination, but from the people who decided I wasn't sufficiently opposed to it.

That's obviously bad. Vaccination and COVID origins are different topics, though.

Opinions do correlate in the general public, and I guess that's why you've made that link. I don't think that trend holds among scientists, though--Deigin, Chan, Ebright, Bloom, etc. all have quite ordinary views on vaccine risk and efficacy.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#817

Post by VMG »

disambiguation wrote: post #810
VMG wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Why" because of all the latent anger and frustration from the mass death and pain of the pandemic. Its naive to underestimate it. How it unfolds, think WWI reparations from Germany. Why is a lab outbreak worse than a wet market outbreak?

The same reason arson is worse than a wild fire.

Arson implies intent, leak does not

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#818

Post by tripletao »

strangecasts wrote: post #813
tripletao wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you quantify what you believe is a correct prior then, and explain how you got that number? I hope you're not going to count every natural spillover since prehistory in the denominator. The technology to culture and freeze an influenza virus didn't exist before ~1930, and the technology to genetically enhance a sarbecovirus didn't exist before ~2010. The absence of pandemics with such origin before that means not…

Apply the same reasoning with the start cutoff at 2010 then

I said fifty years because that roughly covers the period during which an accident similar to the 1977 flu was possible. Perhaps I should have said longer, since influenza was first cultured in 1931; but we also need some time in the freezer for the circulating virus to diverge. I don't think much changes if we say a hundred years instead.

Can you explain why 2010 would be a reasonable start cutoff? That doesn't make any sense to me, since it excludes most of the time that a research-origin flu pandemic was possible. We obviously haven't had a research-origin novel sarbecovirus pandemic before maybe SARS-CoV-2; but when new technological developments occur, the most similar old technologies are our best model. Nobody had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but anyone familiar with unpowered gliders could predict the risk.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#819

Post by cudgy »

Fomite wrote: post #775
cudgy wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“as an infectious disease epidemiologist” Yet you propose no thoughts of your own. You only base it on your belief in people around you and your disbelief of people you assume are political. This sounds not scientific at all. Are you really an epidemiologist? I was honestly hoping for more given that you’re supposedly an epidemiologist.

I base it on my evaluation of the arguments of those people as an epidemiologist. And their expertise - as I've said, my expertise focuses on a different aspect of outbreaks, with its own theories and methods, and I know enough to recognize that addressing this requires a good deal of specialized knowledge.

Well, that sounds more reasonable, but the prior comment seems to be relying mostly on reputation and political viewpoints rather than the arguments themselves.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#820

Post by disambiguation »

VMG wrote: post #817
disambiguation wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason arson is worse than a wild fire.

Arson implies intent, leak does not

Intent is a good word, and the right question. What's the intent of a bio security lab? What's the intent of gain of function research?

Some say the intent of a firearm is self defense, as the intent of a nuclear bomb is a deterrent.

Finally, what role does intent play in the poker world championship?

And for record of the court, arson by negligence is a criminal offense.

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