Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jaepa | Hacker News Reader

We know it wasn't lab made. We've know this since March.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-scientists-think-of...

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Now, realistically, it probably was not made in a lab. But it is not true that we know that.

There's plenty of evidence it is not lab made.

There's some evidence that is suggestive, but far from what anyone knowledgeable would consider proof.

> but far from what anyone knowledgeable would consider proof.

Which is why the comment said "evidence" and not "proof".

Read the Nature paper.

If you are going to be pedantic, there is no such thing as 'proof' at all. You can only ever demonstrate that you are 9X% likely to be correct.

Maybe the murder caught on camera is a lost identical twin, or victim of a very elaborate frame-up. The standard for conviction is beyong reasonable doubt. What is reasonable?

Maybe we have laws of physics wrong, and next tuesday sun will rise in the west, and Jesus rises from the dead. Again.

Do yoy trust governments and scientists? They used to claik smoking is a great way to get your essential vitamins.

Do you trust your own mind, because research has shown people can be manipulated into remembering things that never happened.

Ib radical doubt, the only thing you can proove is 'I think, therefore I am".

So then just give voice to unsubstantiated rumors that contraindicate what we see in the genetic marker?

Also I'd like to contest that the nature study is "suggestive" that its not man made. Finding Elvis dead in Vegas is not "suggestive" that Elvis is dead.

If you are asking me to proof a negative, that's virtually impossible.

That's a kind of dangerous line of thinking.

It's impossible to prove that it was not grown in a lab, which is why the burden is to show that it _was_ grown in a lab. Until we have that, we shouldn't be sharing stories about how it _might_ have been grown in a lab.

I don't think it's "dangerous" to acknowledge that it is possible the Coronavirus was grown in a lab.

It is extremely unlikely that the virus was grown in a lab, because it's unlikely anyone has the technology to create a virus quite like this one.

The last decade has given us some pretty good illustrations of how it can be dangerous to give credence to baseless conspiracy theories.

Logically and epistemically sound thinking is what the world needs more of, not less.

I presume you're not a big fan of conspiracy theories - well, a big part of where they come from is the media doing something similar to what you're complaining about, stating what might be true, as unequivocally true. It would also be interesting to know how much of the polarization in society can be attributed to the fantasy world the media projects into people's minds using these techniques.

I’ll share whatever stories I please.

The probabilistic model of knowledge as just a collection of hypotheses that have failed to have been falsified over sufficient testing is the dominant epistemological view today in empirical sciences. Knowing = Probably Is. It's just a matter of degree, so making the statement "it is not true that we know that, but it probably is the case" is ill-formed in the absence of consistent belief thresholds.

Normally I wouldn't say anything, but you did pull a "well, actually" there, so out-pedantifying seems warranted if only for the humour of the situation.

The downvotes on this are interesting - this is not a settled matter?

I think there is a very big misunderstanding with this. Now, I'm not an expert, like most people commenting on this, but this is my understanding from listening to other experts.

Scientists pretty much agree that this virus was not created in a lab. Howver, that doesn't mean the virus could not have been taken into a lab from the wild and allowed to reproduce under controlled conditions and basically speeding up the evolutionary process to make it more virulent in order to make it easier to study in lab conditions.

This is common practice in lab study and is not possible to tell definitively that it has been done. Because it doesn't involve genetic manipulation per se. It is simply an artificially manipulated environment for the virus to grow in "naturally".

It has been suggested that the propensity of the virus to spread well indoors rather than outside may be due to the fact that it spent time indoors in a lab selecting for that before it escaped back into the wild.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com