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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for bringing some perspective to the discussion, at the same time, I have no illusion that it is going to help to convince people that want to believe in the lab leak theory of anything else. Wanting to assign blame for all this is a very strong desire in many and the Chinese government through its acts and omissions has unfortunately made it a lot easier for people to continue to be deluded about this. Some of the arguments made are so incredibly weak that they shouldn't be made at all, and yet, they are supporting this whole house of cards of criminal intent gone wrong. It's a pretty sad statement as to the degree of understanding that people in general have about these matters, if they studied the subject (by reading textbooks, not watching youtube videos) we might be able to sidestep some of this.

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Thanks - I don't expect to change anyone's mind. I just don't want to give into the cynicism that evidential reasoning is pointless. I don't want to tell anyone what to think... but given that I have the professional background, I feel some moral duty to at least try to outline why most biologists assign low probability to a lab-leak.

I think one big missing element for the reasoning behind all this is that people seem to intuitively assign the wrong prior to the chances of a zoonotic event, they miss that fully 2/3rds or so of our pathogens are zoonotic in origin, and that's only the ones that we can trace back, the remainder is either an open question or settled to have originated in our species or passed on as part of our heritage prior to humanity budding off from our ancestors.

> Wanting to assign blame for all this is a very strong desire in many and the Chinese government through its acts and omissions has unfortunately made it a lot easier for people to continue to be deluded about this. Some of the arguments made are so incredibly weak that they shouldn't be made at all, and yet, they are supporting this whole house of cards of criminal intent gone wrong.

Nobody so far in the thread has said anything about "criminal intent". That's just you, interjecting your pre-existing biases into the discussion.

It's entirely possible that a laboratory was doing completely legal experiments with no malicious intent, and an accident happened. In fact, it's so possible, that reasonable people who understand the evidence have concluded that we're unlikely to ever know the truth.

That's where I sit on the matter.

> It's a pretty sad statement as to the degree of understanding that people in general have about these matters, if they studied the subject (by reading textbooks, not watching youtube videos) we might be able to sidestep some of this.

Maybe you should look at my profile.

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