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Comment by ffssffss | Hacker News Reader

And the WSJ piece says the CIA is undecided! I wonder what explains the different assessments.

Probably they still aren’t sharing all the information they have with each other. I had thought that was supposed to be much improved post 9-11.

Or there aren't objective standards for what "low, medium, and high confidence" actually mean, thereby allowing one agency to look at the evidence and say it's of low confidence and another to look at the same data and say it's moderate confidence.

Interestingly, the CIA has published a paper on exactly this subject:

Words of Estimative Probability (PDF) https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/ar...

Moderate and Low are Words of Analytic Confidence [1]. This has more to do with the quality of the sourcing than a numeric probability number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence

Or they are coming to different conclusions given the same ambiguous/incomplete information. It could simply be disagreement, or just lack of a standard metric here to compare notes easily.

It probably just means the correct aggregate conclusion is “we don’t know, go ask China”.

I read that they did massively increase sharing after 9/11, but there was a reassessment after the Manning leaks. Manning had access to way more information than someone at their level needed for their job, and they concluded this came about from going a bit too far on the post 9/11 sharing and so they dialed it back a bit.

They improved the ability to share info (fusion centers and whatnot), but the desire to do so remains under the auspices of humans.

What the CIA says publicly and what is happening internally are often very different things. The FBI has less of a global political agenda.

Organizations like the CIA don't make factual statements, they make strategic statements. Any connection with reality is purely coincidental.

If the CIA came out tomorrow and said they were 100% confident it was a lab leak from China we would have no way of knowing if that's based on facts or political propaganda.

Maybe, in 40-50 years we'll get an answer. Until then, it's too politically and strategically useful to keep it up in the air. At least one goal is for people to be arguing about it.

I'm sure that the undecidedness is not about the origin but about the geopolitical impact such an official statement would have.

I have not been inside the CIA, but that could just mean they haven't done any research on that or that their research is ongoing.

An institution will not have assessments on everything at any point in time. Two different institutions might have didferent assessments for a billion reasons, e.g. they could have done the research at different points in time, the underlying evisence could differ, the interviewed experts could have said different things and so on.

Two different instutions reaching different conclusions is not as surprising as it seems.

And for the record, the National Intelligence Council and four other unidentified agencies say with "low confidence" that the virus came about through natural transmission.

Well, when all 17 intelligence agencies agree on something, you know they must be right then.

I don’t know… I think when they all agree it’s also likely that they are wrong. (It indicates some possibility of motivated reasoning.)

> Well, when all 17 intelligence agencies agree on something, you know they must be right then.

Then you know they are lying.

This is exactly why I can't give this article, or any of those multiple intelligence agency assessments any real credence. I don't have access to any of the data that went into those assessments. What I do have access to doesn't point very strongly at a lab leak origin, despite its plausibility.

It's perfectly reasonable for the government to support one theory based on non-conclusive evidence that they have and reasonable for the public to support another based on the non-conclusive evidence available to them.

It makes it a lot more likely that public support for the non-lab leak theories will change once we get the chance to see the government's new evidence though.

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