Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

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> I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain.

There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were funding banned research on coronaviruses in a lab a few feet away from the origin of the outbreak unlikely. They also find tales of non-lab origin both speculative and vague, while stories of lab origin are only speculative.

It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin. The obvious reasons for that demand are that millions died, and that everybody involved with that lab can easily be named. Also weird that this observation is covid-skeptic coded, when in reality the worse you think covid is, the greater the crime that a lab leak entails.

I assumed it was a non-lab origin at first because that's how all previous pandemics have started as far as I am aware. A lab origin (and what precisely that means has never been particularly clear to me), but I have to say that I'd say your last observation cuts both ways - if one thinks this is such a great crime, then perhaps one would have encouraged masking, shutdowns/distancing, and vaccines, but those seem anti-correlated. Perhaps we'll do better next time around?

> Perhaps we'll do better next time around?

We won’t, because the judgment of many of our cognitive elites has been impaired.

This is a bit of a digression, but I’m reading a tweet thread by a $2,300/hour attorney who is an MSNBC contributor that is making just basic logical errors in discussing the birthright citizenship EO. Not even on the merits, literally in just summarizing the implications of the argument being made on a page of a filing he screenshotted in his tweet. I’m persuaded that if you had these folks take the LSAT with questions that had a political coding, they’d score a 160.

We need to get back to prioritizing the institutional and values of the different professions above all else. The public should view our scientific and professional organizations as neutral actors staffed by people who put the institutions above their personal beliefs. They shouldn’t be wondering whether medical organizations would be saying the same things about the “Lab Leak” theory if it had involved Russia instead of China.

> a tweet thread by […] an MSNBC contributor that is making just basic logical errors in discussing the birthright citizenship EO

No surprise there. Some people are not, contrary to your apparent assumption, actually trying to analyze something logically and arrive at some form of truth. I very much doubt that this has anything at all to do with COVID.

Not that it was the start of a pandemic, but the original SARS leaked from labs in China twice.[1]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/

As an example of a lab escape of a novel virus (fortunately not leading to a pandemic) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Marburg_virus_disease_out...

African green monkeys later found to be carrying the virus were shipped to several labs in Germany and Yugoslavia; the virus hopped from the monkeys to lab workers and then from the lab workers to a small number of others.

If we are looking what we could do better next time, then we should look to the studies that showed what worked and what was most effective. The most effective initial method against the virus was neither masking, shutdowns/distancing (vaccines are not applicable since they didn't exist initially). It was to close down mass transportation. Shared recycled air is a highly suitable transportation mechanism for this kind of virus, with airplanes, trains and busses being mobile centers for outbreaks. We should try to look towards this kind of research next time something like this hit and be more focused on what actually work, rather than what either the governing party or opposing party want to promote. Airborne diseases travel by air and if you want to prevent that you need to make sure that people who are non-infected do not share the same air as people who are. If that is impossible, shutdowns/distancing helps to reduce the risks until a vaccine is developed.

> It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin.

It's not, zoonotic transmission has happened many times, lab leak is the extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence

And there's been mutations in the virus since the initial exposure. How could that happen? How can a virus change its genetic code without a lab to do it?!?!!/s

Regardless of the source, it was dangerous but could have been better mitigated if it was taken seriously as a threat (not just a "common cold").

You just set an arbitrary bar that that is higher for the lab leak based on an “everybody knows” argument. That’s not science, it’s faith.

Prior probability estimates are not part of science?

Prior probability estimates of p = 0.083 are not extraordinary. As the sibling says one out of twelve past pandemics was a known lab leak.

Okay, but your objection was requiring more evidence for the less likely assertion constituted an "arbitrary bar", you cannot argue that and quote _an arbitrary estimate by another commenter_

The 1977 flu is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a research accident, probably either an inadequately attenuated vaccine or a challenge trial in human subjects. The death toll is typically reported as 700,000, though I don't think that's a very good number and I can't find the methodology. Many fewer people died in the 1977-78 season; but the virus has continued to spread, so the cumulative toll is much higher (and continues to increase).

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/936217

So how many people have to die before this is no longer an extraordinary claim? Bhopal managed to change chemical manufacturing standards with "only" thousands or tens of thousands of deaths; but the 1977 flu is somehow completely forgotten.

Perhaps the death toll is so high that people simply can't believe it? YouTube's fact-checkers recently removed an unambiguously factual description of the 1977 pandemic, ignoring appeals well-referenced into the peer-reviewed literature with no stated justification.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-i-fell-foul-of-youtu...

The argument is not "research accidents categorically do not happen" it was "are they the more common event and therefore the more probable explanation, absent anything else"

Depending how we count, there have been a dozen or so pandemics comparably novel or deadly to the 1977 flu in the last fifty years. Of those, at least one was research-origin.

So are you really saying p ~ 1/12 is an "extraordinary claim"? Is a 6'1" American man "extraordinarily tall"? There's unfortunately no standard map between English phrases and numerical probabilities, but I think most people would understand a much lower probability. If you really want to define it that way, then "extraordinary evidence" is likewise diluted to the point that the circumstantial case (emergence in Wuhan, DEFUSE) brings research origin easily into contention.

> Depending how we count, there have been a dozen or so pandemics comparably novel or deadly to the 1977 flu in the last fifty years. Of those, at least one was research-origin. So are you really saying p ~ 1/12 is an "extraordinary claim"?

Yes, I think it is extraordinary to extrapolate one event in 1977 to a "once every fifty years" rate

Can you quantify what you believe is a correct prior then, and explain how you got that number?

I hope you're not going to count every natural spillover since prehistory in the denominator. The technology to culture and freeze an influenza virus didn't exist before ~1930, and the technology to genetically enhance a sarbecovirus didn't exist before ~2010. The absence of pandemics with such origin before that means nothing. No one had ever suffered a cancer induced by an X-ray tube before 1904; but that doesn't mean the risk wasn't there, and Edison's assistant still died horribly.

Apply the same reasoning with the start cutoff at 2010 then

I said fifty years because that roughly covers the period during which an accident similar to the 1977 flu was possible. Perhaps I should have said longer, since influenza was first cultured in 1931; but we also need some time in the freezer for the circulating virus to diverge. I don't think much changes if we say a hundred years instead.

Can you explain why 2010 would be a reasonable start cutoff? That doesn't make any sense to me, since it excludes most of the time that a research-origin flu pandemic was possible. We obviously haven't had a research-origin novel sarbecovirus pandemic before maybe SARS-CoV-2; but when new technological developments occur, the most similar old technologies are our best model. Nobody had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but anyone familiar with unpowered gliders could predict the risk.

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