The odds of creating a super-virus researching Delta with this method are far, far lower than the odds of Delta continuing to stack up a body-count if we can't understand it better.
The odds of COVID19 escaping a BSL4 facility were also pretty low but here we are.
Only a small fraction of scientists actually believe the lab leak hypothesis, so it's a bit ridiculous to speak as if it's an established fact.
Got a source for that?
And, let's not forget that wholly insubstantial Daszak / Lancet piece, used to justify massive censorship of the lab leak theory. Millions of posts discussing the lab leak hypothesis were scrubbed from FB and Twitter - even posts by legit scientists with highly valid and relevant points and questions.
Believe me or no, that's what I remember in good faith. And I think it's supported by the fact that extremely few people with the relevant domain knowledge are coming public with a strong opinion either way.
And don't believe stuff just because FB and Twitter censored it. They're not trying to hide the Truth, they just hate anti-establishment opinions regardless of whether those opinions are true. And things are not true just because they're anti-establishment. That's just the opposite end of conformity.
https://thepostmillennial.com/dr-daszak-bullied-fellow-scien...
If you're keeping up with the news, do you just read partisan polemics or do you actually keep up with the scientific developments? Here is an article on an exceptionally close bat coronavirus relative to the COVID coronavirus, which can bind to ACE2. The lab leak peanut gallery said such a thing didn't exist anywhere. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2
Who among the proponents of the lab leak theory claim that the virus doesn't occur in nature? Nobody I am aware of. Perhaps the kooks who claim covid was completely manmade as a bioweapon or something.
There is no transparency on this issue with China. There's a reason why there is a dearth of evidence- it's all been suppressed or destroyed.
Except the first reference, which is the entire point of the article: French scientists found bat coronaviruses very similar to SARS-CoV-2 in Laos.
No more partisan posturing please. You are straining to defend preconceived notions by ignoring new information, rather than paying curious attention to the world around you. Turn politics brain off, turn science brain on.
What are you trying to do here? If you're not trying to learn, are you trying to play political debate and beat me? There's no audience to impress. You either learn something from our conversation or you don't. That's all that can come of this.
There are two reasons people censor things.
One is that they're authoritarians who don't want something true to be disseminated. In these cases the thing being censored is true.
The other is that they're authoritarians too incompetent to convincingly demonstrate that something they believe to be false actually is false using evidence or reasoning, since otherwise they could do that in place of censorship. This level of incompetence is correlated with being factually incorrect, so the thing being censored in these cases is also true more often than not.
That isn't to say that 100% of things being censored are true, or even 99%, because that would be too easy. But it's not a bad heuristic to expect that it's decently in excess of 50%.
Neither party to the dynamic knows or cares if the bullshit is actually true or if there are compelling arguments either way. That would be too much work.
Some day FB is going to censor some urban legend about zombies because it motivated some kid to kill another kid. Will you believe in zombies then?
Suppose the incompetent authorities aren't worse than random. They're just censoring whatever ambiguous things they don't like independent of their veracity. Then the expected chance that it's true is 50%. Coin flip. You add to that any amount of things censored intentionally because they know for sure that they're true and you're above 50%.
Wait.
Suppose nobody knows, so the probability is ~50%.
Now suppose there is any non-zero percent chance that they did know and the reason it was censored is that they didn't want to inculpate themselves. Then knowing that it was censored puts the percentage above 50%, right? It's a sliver of evidence in favor of the possibility that it could have been censored to hide the truth, in which case there was a truth to hide.
Then censorship occurs. This is new information. Evidence.
If the censorship occurred because they don't like the speculation but they don't know any better than you, this doesn't affect the probability, because it's not dependent on whether the idea is true.
If the censorship occurred because it was true and they wanted to suppress it, it was true. If there is any non-zero probability that this is what happened, the censorship is some evidence that it did, so the existence of the censorship increases the probability that it was true from 50% to some higher amount.
If censorship only happened for the second reason then the calculation would be easy. If censorship happened, the probability that it was true would be 100%. It can happen for both reasons, so depending on how likely each reason is, the probability given censorship increases proportional to how likely that was to be the cause of the censorship. But unless the probability of the second alternative is zero, it increases by some.
I get what you're saying with this analysis, I just don't think it's relevant in this case. The inconsistent and weak suppression by random social media websites isn't what you'd expect if some actually powerful authorities with an actual interest in concealing the lab leak truth were involved in suppressing it.
Your analysis applies best to Peter Daszak, who may have insider info about what WIV was doing and who has clearly been trying to cover his ass from the beginning. But his behavior is equally consistent with a generalized anxiety about what may be uncovered if there is an investigation, because he knows (like we all do) that lab leaks have a long history.
China's behavior is also consistent with generalized anxiety without regard for truth. China zealously suppresses uncontrolled information spread out of fear of what might become widely believed, but they are not at all precise or rational about it. For example, they footgunned themselves by suppressing a doctor's report that SARS had resurfaced in Wuhan. As it turned out, this was false, but it was not far off from the truth. It was not in their interest to suppress this information -- they should have reacted with aggressive investigation and containment measures, as they did several weeks later. But their instinct to censor uncontrolled information of any kind, without regard to truth, is too powerful and too reflexive.
The fact that China suppressed an incorrect but informative report should give you an idea of the weakness of the connection between suppression and truth. They would have also suppressed the report if it had been both untrue and completely uninformative.
Um, millions of posts on Facebook and Twitter were removed. Not very inconsistent, weak, or random - and certainly not warranted by scientific evidence or Daszak's analysis.
As for China's behaviour, it has been very consistent about keeping independent investigations well the fuck away from Wuhan; and I don't really give a shit what their reason for that is.
I am against censorship of FB and Twitter, but realistically, FB and Twitter posts have essentially no informational value so it doesn't really matter if they were suppressed.
> As for China's behaviour, it has been very consistent about keeping independent investigations well the fuck away from Wuhan; and I don't really give a shit what their reason for that is.
If you don't care what their reason is, then you're not in a position to make a rational argument about what it says about the lab leak hypothesis.
No it is not. Randomly generated ideas are much less likely than 50% to be true.
For example, I could make two claims: COVID was a leaked research project, and COVID is a leaked research bioweapon. These claims cannot both be 50% probable, because the second claim is more specific version of the first and therefore must be less likely.
For an idea to spread, it has to at least sound plausibly true. For it to spread to a large number of people in a forum open to public debate, it has to survive all of their attempts to convincingly refute it.
The ideas that remain in contention are the ones that can neither be proved to be highly likely nor highly unlikely. In other words, the ones whose average probability is a coin flip.
> These claims cannot both be 50% probable, because the second claim is more specific version of the first and therefore must be less likely.
We're talking about average probabilities, not individual probabilities. Suppose the probability based on available information is 75% for the first and 25% for the second. Then the average is still 50%. When you put them in a box with a thousand other ideas with probabilities centered around 50% and pull one out at random, you're still at 50%.
The things that didn't have a probability around 50%, i.e. the things that can be proved highly likely or highly unlikely, weren't in contention.
Given that just this week, QAnon believers showed up in Dealy plaza apparently expecting John F. Kennedy Jr would appear and re-appoint Donald Trump president, I think that assertion might call for a big [citation needed] sign hung from it.
It also requires public debate. This is why segregating people with stupid ideas from people who could correct them is a bad idea.
Have we been refraining from that? They got mass banned from the biggest social media platforms and dumped into Gab and such like.
> What sort of reasoned debate should we expect to have with people who think a man who died 22 years ago in a plane crash isn't dead?
Encourage them to go to the place where he's alleged to show up. Have them commit in advance to admitting that if he doesn't, they were wrong. Then he won't, because he died 22 years ago in a plane crash.
You'll have convinced some of them. Now recruit those to help you convince the others. They'll be more believable because of the shared experience and because they understand the language of that subculture.
The whole thing has the hallmarks of a scam. If somebody is making money off of this somehow, figure out who it is. Expose them.
Figure out what else they believe. Identify the things that can be falsified. Falsify them.
"You're wrong, you're banned" doesn't do any of that, and then the only place they're accepted with their broken ideas is in a place full of other people who believe the same things and reinforce their nonsense.
There aren't enough hours in the day to waste answering every single instance of bullshit posted to the internet with a thoroughly researched, evidence-based point for point rebuttal that would only be buried under another layer of bullshit.
This is the internet. It's full of pedants who do it all day long and then do it again tomorrow. It's the method by which we determine whether the thing is actually bullshit.
Nobody is requiring you to read or participate in the arguments. If you only want to know the end result, get off Twitter and find someone you trust to summarize them and read their summary. But that's no reason to shut down the debate.
Maybe for some, but most of us have actual lives to live.
>It's the method by which we determine whether the thing is actually bullshit.
No it isn't. Science and critical thinking is the way we determine whether a thing is bullshit. Pedants on the internet are its second biggest source of entropy after Bitcoin, but at least Bitcoin eventually finds a consensus.
>But that's no reason to shut down the debate.
Once it's clear the other side has no interest in debate, only in aggressively spreading misinformation, shutting down the discourse is the only reasonable course of action.
You're here, aren't you?
But also, it doesn't have to be everyone in order to work.
> No it isn't. Science and critical thinking is the way we determine whether a thing is bullshit.
I tried doing all forms of science in the entire world personally but it turns out I didn't have time, so some of it had to be handed off to quite a large number of other people and now we have to have a debate and evaluate each others hypotheses.
> Pedants on the internet are its second biggest source of entropy after Bitcoin, but at least Bitcoin eventually finds a consensus.
Science is a process, not a result.
> Once it's clear the other side has no interest in debate, only in aggressively spreading misinformation, shutting down the discourse is the only reasonable course of action.
Who decides this? What happens when they get it wrong?
As are you, and you've got way more more failure points than I do. And neither of us is accomplishing a thing here.
The same exact arguments have been had here before, the same exact arguments will be had again tomorrow.
>But also, it doesn't have to be everyone in order to work.
Great. You go right ahead, then, let us know how you do.
>I tried doing all forms of science in the entire world personally but it turns out I didn't have time, so some of it had to be handed off to quite a large number of other people and now we have to have a debate and evaluate each others hypotheses.
But you just said you believed censored information is more likely true than not, simply by virtue of being censored. What's the point in referring to science if you're not going to trust it as authoritative? On what basis are you evaluating hypotheses? Moh's scale of edginess?
>Science is a process, not a result.
Arguing on the internet is not science, at best it's politics. The scientists are already doing the science. The internet has rejected the science and is drinking horse piss and bleach instead because a Facebook meme told them to.
And science does reach results. Relativity is a result. The earth being more round than flat is a result. Germ theory winning out over miasma theory is a result. Science as a process moves in a direction that validates some claims and invalidates others. It doesn't move in an endless circle.
>Who decides this? What happens when they get it wrong?
This is one of the most insufferable thought terminating cliches I've ever seen on this site. It gets applied to everything but it doesn't mean anything. Must there always be a singular, authoritative and objective source of truth for anything to be decidable? The universe is fundamentally uncertain.
I decide. You decide. The owner of the venue decides. Society decides. The law decides. Whomever wants to decide decides because opinions are like assholes, everybody has one, and most are full of shit. And what if they get it wrong? What if they do? People get things wrong all the time, but eventually the truth will out, we move on.
For example, I'm familiar with a site called Hacker News that will castigate, constrain, and in some cases out and out ban users for political flame war. They don't do this because they're trying to hide a truth... They do this because it's not what that website is for. The site owners and operators seek a particular signal on the site, and political flame war just fuzzes up the signal to noise ratio from their point of view.
Is it authoritarian? Indubitably. But simply because some things are off topic.
Meanwhile you still have the non-zero (even if small) probability that they could censor something they want to suppress because they know it's true.
This is a strong assertion you keep making that doesn't hold water. The flat earth hypothesis, for example, doesn't become true simply because someone has banned discussion of it.
Your assertion, unless I'm misunderstanding it, implies that any topic dang steps in to say "please stop posting about this" is true. And since he steps in to stop people discussing both sides of flamewar topics, your assertion implies that the positions held by both sides must be true, even when they are factually opposed, which is obviously impossible.
There's definitely a flaw in your reasoning, sorry. :(
Sometimes, fiction is just fiction.
A virus without any genetic code contents isn't going to "find a way" to reproduce.
I don't think the latter has happened. If I really stretch, maybe something could trigger a reactivation of a virus that's burned into your DNA? But that can't give you a new virus, and such a reactivation could happen on its own without help.
Or if you were implying something about the origin of viruses, I disagree and don't think the mechanism we're talking about was part of that story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...