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Comment by miketery | Hacker News Reader

> I'm sure there will be some good games soon about how insane it is that there's anti-vaxxers, or election deniers.

I think using the word insane isn’t warranted. Check out Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Rightous Mind. There are good reasons to be skeptical, it’s also evolutionary necessary. The majority can be wrong.

To be specific it was misinformation to say it was a lab leak, now it’s generally accepted. As far as vaxx goes I took it, but the politics mixing with science has deteriorated a lot of trust. Also this is new technology, it’s not zero risk.

Election wise, we have examples in history to show it happens. Why not here? What about democrats pushing out Bernie? Again I agree mostly all good. But it’s not insane to think something is not kosher.

Rather it’s insane to be so certain of these things.

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> There are good reasons to be skeptical, it’s also evolutionary necessary. The majority can be wrong.

However most people that engage in this behavior do it for the reasons that have nothing to do with skepticism or critical thinking.

They do it for exactly opposite reason. People who are prone to it are generally less intelligent, less able to think critically, easier to mislead, they follow along easier, they more strongly bind with their in-group regardless of the crazy practices it performs.

This kind of behavior probably exists for evolutionary reasons, but it's not to help the species discover best truth.

It's more of a plan B for low fitness individuals, who are too flawed to compete with general population. They tend to look for or form smaller sub-populations of similarly flawed individuals in hopes that while in general population they are firmly below average desirability, in those smaller populations they might be above average and have a chance of passing their genes they wouldn't have otherwise.

I'm not exactly well-read on this, but /shouldn't/ there be some emergent structure that maintains a (perceived) low-fitness position? The actual fitness of a trait can only be seen in the long-term, and in the event the general population was long-term-incorrect in their evolution it is helpful to have a decent number of the alternative on hand.

This concept is known as ecological resilience.

What scotty79 is proposing is that we should be hyper efficient and hyper unsustainable like our economic system.

Do I really propose anything like that?

I was merely suggesting that behavior of people susceptible to conspiracy theories might be fully (or almost fully explained by selfish goals of their individual genes).

Isn't there no conclusive evidence for lab leak?

I'm not an anti-leaker, of course. I just believe it takes more than mere suspicion to buy into an idea. Otherwise you end up gobbling up whatever propaganda drifts near you, true or not.

There's circumstantial evidence.

1. The Wuhan lab was French built and supposed to jointly operated between France and China, but the French sounded the alarm about the terrible security practices of their Chinese counterparts.

2. Ecohealth, an organization with ties to the Wuhan lab, did a grant proposal to DARPA asking for money to do gain-of-function research on COVID. To be clear, gain of function research usually is something along the lines of: let's make this pathogen able to infect humans so we can study how it might infect humans if it ever evolved the ability to infect them.

3. It's dangerous research and should only be undertaken carefully, rather than in the haphazard way in which the French claimed the Chinese were engaging in research.

4. People close to the situation categorically denied that a lab leak was even possible, calling it a "conspiracy theory" although they knew that the lab had been doing similar research on similar diseases, and had declared an interest in doing so with COVID.

It's like if there was an organization that declared they wanted to make unicorns real, and they had made other fairy tale animals real in the past, and then unicorns appear in the wild in the same city where this organization is based, and they're like, "It is a conspiracy theory to think we had anything to do with this."

Let's also not forget that head of Ecohealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, published (or got published) a letter in the Lancet at the very beginning of this (~Jan-Feb 2020) essentially calling the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory.

Let's also not forget that it turns out the Ecohealth Alliance was essentially able to write the rules that were used to police their own research referenced above.

Also recall that recently a 19 nucleotide sequence (1 out of ~3 trillion liklihood of occurring naturally) out of SARS-COV-2 has been discovered as patented by Moderna back somewhere between 2013 to 2017.

> a 19 nucleotide sequence (1 out of ~3 trillion liklihood of occurring naturally)

Unless it's functional, which (1) changes the odds; and (2) is a prerequisite for patenting.

In case anyone else wants to read about that last comment, since it piqued my interest

https://api.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/mar/24/blog-posti...

I want to make sure that my comment was not misconstrued. I was not stating nor implying that Moderna created "Covid-19".

I just thought it was interesting to note the facts and statistics of the nucleotide sequence.

Also interesting to note that I just discovered that in the summer of last year, 2021, Mr. Daszak was recused from the Lancet's Covid commission. Hmmm.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210628023048/https://covid19co...

The problem is that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these sort of bio labs around the world.

So, I would agree that suspicion is warranted. Perhaps enough for an investigation. But, IMO, that's about it.

Unfortunately there cannot be an investigation. Too much time will pass before the Chinese let anyone investigate, if they ever do.

But there are many areas in life where you can't gather enough information to make a statistically perfect decision. That doesn't mean that we do nothing though.

I think my country should drastically reduce trade with China and tell them it's because they operate biolabs haphazardly and don't allow investigations into pandemic origins. I wish all countries would do this. Then the next pandemic might not happen, because nations would be afraid of the consequences.

>> The problem is that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these sort of bio labs around the world.

And they have leaked before. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/report-l...

It's more accurate to say it's accepted as a possibility. Back in 2020 it was commonly dismissed as pure conspiracy theory and just not even considered as an option.

Afaik, we are currently back to "probably not lab leak, that is improbably". Unless you live in specific bubble that needs it to be lab leak for political reasons.

It isn't insane that some people won't take the vaccine.

It isn't insane that some people are against vaccine mandates.

It is insane that some people believe what they do about the vaccine: That it's a ploy to decimate the population, that it contains baby parts and poison, or microchips, that it is a test run for the mark of the beast.

That is absolutely batshit insane.

I 100% agree. The issue at hand is that those insane people are a small fringe, there are many people who hold slight skepticism, and they are quickly labelled insane and grouped with the fringe. That's not a good thing for a healthy society.

One of the key features of the mark of the beast is the inability to buy or sell goods without taking it. By way of vaccine passports, that already happened, so yeah that fear does have a foundation.

The 'mark of the beast' is, if I'm not incorrect, a fictional idea that is (perhaps intentionally) incredibly easy to generalize with. Identification with fictional texts is best left to High School English class instead of the real-world decision making process.

People sometimes use weird domain specific languages, the principle of charity goes a long way in being able to understand peoples' concerns despite the weird way they communicate them. I hate how easily we dismiss people with nonstandard language usage. Grow up.

I agree with what he's probably attempting to say -- widespread requirement of vaccine passports is absurd, and functionally locks people out of society. Regardless, his comment didn't just use it as an example. Without further interpretation, the entire body of his point was that what is happening now is similar to a fictional thing that happened in a fictional story. Whether or not you agree with the point, it's so absurdly general that it has about the same meaning as, say, comparing Biden to Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

There is difference between religion and pop culture. One person's fiction is another people's truth. This isn't reddit.

I live my life by the way of Master Splinter, as we all should. Every day I hone my Ninjitsu so that whenever evil approaches, whether it be in the form of Shredder or Krang or an argumentative poster on Hacker News, I will be prepared.

The only difference is the level at which people attempt to integrate the philosophy into their life -- I'm sure there is someone out there who has been impacted more by Terry Pratchett novels than the religion they were brought up as, and using either of those in the way the instigating poster did would be silly.

> that already happened

If you have evidence of people being unable to buy or sell goods without a vaccine passport, please share.

Oh, and do recall that the context from Revelation is that a person was completely excluded from the economy, not that they lost some privileges, so please don't waste time with false equivalences.

Although, honestly, it's probably a waste of time anyway: I just don't live in the same fantasy dimension as these people and their arguments hold no water to me.

I don't disagree with your general view, but all aspects of human biology have a certain level of uncertainty associated with them. Nobody expects guarantees with medications, surgical procedures, treatments for illnesses etc. Being skeptical is valuable against dogmatism, but we're not asserting things with absolute certainty here. We do have to recognize the difference and respect the outcome of the scientific process - which is what produced these vaccines. If you say the majority of scientists can be wrong, you have to be more specific. Do you mean colloquially wrong as in making an error in day to day work, or do you mean being collectively wrong about immunology since 1798 and we should reject things that we built on those discoveries?

If there is any risk here, I'd say the risk here is our own inability in not being able to describe human biology in detail. The vague statement "the human body can heal itself" sounds warm and fuzzy, and most people agree with it, but when transformed into "injecting these set of molecules into your blood will trigger complex interactions with independent internal biological processes and cause the body to produce clones of proteins with increasing avidity towards the original molecules which also trigger further complex biological processes [...]" - can get you into trouble sometimes if you treat it as absolute truth.

nonsense, it's not now 'generally accepted' that it was a lab leak. It's possible. We don't know.

However, and this is critical, it was absolutely 100% misinformation when first claimed. Trump was desperate to deflect blame and not let COVID derail his reelection chances, so he immediately blamed China, well before we had any actual information, analysis, or intelligence to suggest that. Talk about your 'politics mixing with science' deteriorating trust.

> To be specific it was misinformation to say it was a lab leak, now it’s generally accepted.

Which is a case of some people happening to guess, one time, that an ultimately highly unlikely thing (based on available information) happened.

To peddle such an unlikely, unconfirmed claim as fact before there's actual evidence still isn't/wasn't reasonable. They didn't know it was a lab leak. They wildly guessed. Yet they never treated it as speculation, they prematurely treated it as fact.

Current evidence likewise strongly supports the idea that the 2020 election is legitimate.

You think the lab leak is the least likely theory of COVID origin?

> What about democrats pushing out Bernie?

I'm not sure what you mean, but Bernie didn't win the primary. That decides the horse that the DNC backs (except in incumbent years).

> To be specific it was misinformation to say it was a lab leak, now it’s generally accepted.

It's not generally accepted except in counter-culture circles. There isn't any more evidence for a lab leak hypothesis today than there was two years ago. The actual cause is not known, so claiming a specific theory with certainty would indeed be misinformation.

Battling strawmen is a circuitous exercise.

Skepticism is not insanity. Questioning vaccine safety is not insanity.

Many of the anti vax claims were utter insanity (microchips in the injection)

As were the election claims

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