A follow-up on our analysis of the anomalous restriction map of SARS-CoV-2

The dramatic claims of the paper are not supported by experiments present. They highlight a real pattern, but that is far from proving SC2 being of synthetic origin. A better approach would have been waiting for peer review, probably getting dinged on speculative conclusions, softening the language and then publishing in a peer reviewed journal

Instead they juked the review and posted on a pre-print with speculative language intact. There is no time pressure, they could have waited a few months to have outside eyes on it. I think they knew their conclusion was a reach and wanted to get it out there anyway for the twitter clout.

Having contrarians in science is helpful because they will always tilt at windmills, and sometimes succeed, but usually not. But that's why review is so important. It should have been reviewed by three experts before publishing. Instead they chose to have peer-review be public, by thousands of people, many of whom are not experts. They made their bed.

This truly sad and bias inducing for academia.

   Personally, I think the dichotomy between hypothesis-testing and likelihood-quantification is a false one. The “P=0.05” cutoff we use to “reject” a hypothesis is an arbitrary one. When I read papers, I never “accept” or “reject” hypotheses but rather consider likelihood quantification as a measure of the weight of evidence or a distance of the data from some null hypothesis, as measured by some statistic. I encourage everyone else to consider this probabilistic worldview when viewing our paper: we aimed to quantify probabilities of this system occurring in nature, and P-values were convenient and commonly understood ways of communicating quantiles.

> We chose our statistic based on principles. Since all fragments sum to the length of the genome, if the longest fragment is equal to the inverse of the number of fragments, it implies the sites are perfectly evenly spaced. Conversely, if the longest fragment is nearly the entire length of the genome, it implies the restriction sites are concentrated in a tiny region of the genome.

The attacks upon the preprint are the product of an epistemically polluted trust network. In this case, the network (I believe) is aligned with the political Left. If the author were being attacked for asserting that Covid vaccines are generally safe and effective, one would assume the compromised trust network was aligned with the right. We as a society need to come up with a way to both foster freedom of speech and disseminate among the general populace the skills needed to vet competing accounts of scientific phenomena. And we all need to be willing to say, when appropriate, "There is not yet enough evidence to arrive at a firm conviction -- we will have to wait and see."