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Comment by maest | Hacker News Reader

This is a really big claim, so some background checking:

The paper was published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics[0] (this accepted version is materially different from the original link posted here).

Only thing I could find about Birger Sorensen's was his Linkedin page [1a] and the Immunor page where he's listed as the Chairman [1b].

Angus Dagleish looks legit, although it's notable that he did stand for Parliament in 2016 as a UKIP candidate, according to Wikipedia[2].

Can't find any primary sources for Andreas Susrud.

[0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

[1a]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/birger-sorensen-174a20b/?origina... btw, if this is considered doxxing, let me know and I can remove the link.

[1b]: https://immunor.com/about-immunor/board-of-directors/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Dalgleish

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Might find more if you search for Birger Sørensen. He is kind of legit from previous work however he is viewed as a fringe character in Norway with this, and "no-one" supports this.

>“The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.”

I think they are just two different papers. The linked paper has the following quote:

>We have just (2nd June 2020) published Biovacc-19 in QRB-Discovery: a candidate vaccine for this daunting task (Sørensen et al., 2020).

Why do the background checking? Why not just consider the arguments on their merits alone? That's what science is.

Can't speak for the OP, but for myself: I am not qualified to evaluate the evidence in this case; I just don't have the biology background. But sometimes when you get some out-there questionable sounding stuff research, and you spend a minute googling, you quickly find out that the journal the thing is published in is chaired by the author and itself has no credibility, the author is selling some form of snake oil directly supported by the dubious claims, and similar. Sure technically their argument ought to stand on it's own anyway, but there are so many quacks out there and so little time. It's a useful optimization.

> I am not qualified to evaluate the evidence in this case; I just don't have the biology background.

A "background check" does not change this fact, nor does your point actually negate the comment you are responding too. No one here is arguing that you must listen and believe everything that someone has written in a paper, but things must be proven and disproven.

"Background checking" in any form is not science. It might help you make a decision. But that does not make the decision a scientific one even if you consider it "an informed" decision.

To be completely honest, it has become silly that things like this need to be said and reirerated so often on HN.

Most things that climate change deniers post are factually accurate. If you would target the basis of their claim with the data they provide, you will always lose. Being a climate change denier when you only have access to facts that don't support climate change is only logical.

To disprove them requires you to have even greater subject matter knowledge than they do, which is unfeasible for most normal people. Even at a top university you would need several years to become a subject matter expert. Clearly not a feasible strategy for every commenter on HN.

So what can we do? Most "Climate Skeptics Science", while not being factually disproven, can lose a great amount of credibility by background checking things like authors, what scientific conferences or journal a paper has been submitted to, if it is peer reviewed, etc. In fact, with enough loss of credibility it becomes the burden of the author to prove that they/their paper is credible (see what I did there?).

If there was a clear bias in the authors' background, this would call into question the credibility of the paper. Humans are well-equipped to understand bias without a university degree, less so with bioengineering.

To summarize: HN commenters are generally ill-equipped to prove/disprove arguments in a scientific paper. Like in most sciences this isn't always necessary since you can put the credibility of the authors up for test. If they fail that test, they must prove their credibility before their scientific argument carries any weight. Most HN-commenters are adept at judging other peoples biases.

The problem is that this... methodology... works for both true & false claims. Pure credentialism held up Lysenkoism, among other things, for quite some time, after all. I mean, I read this:0

> If there was a clear bias in the authors' background, this would call into question the credibility of the paper.

And I can't help thinking how there would always be a "clear bias" of people who weren't strongly in support of the Party against Lysenkoism, so it just puts people into a stronger bubble, it doesn't defend any truth.

I think that those not capable of defending a position scientifically shouldn't attempt to do so and should leave it to those who can. I think this because I see these failed attempts as a way of weakening the point they're attempting to support.

> To summarize: HN commenters are generally ill-equipped to prove/disprove arguments in a scientific paper.

I disagree strongly with this, we have a lot of good scientists here who are better equipped than the vast majority of sites. Maybe not everything can be written into a single post, sure, but most of the people here have blogs or what have you and it's not uncommon to see someone post a rebuttal on their blog and for that to make the front page of HN.

I think I understand your argument, but I think you misunderstood me. I agree that just looking at credentials isn't the way to go. It does create these echo chambers where only those wearing "my colors" can be correct (when perhaps people need to see and hear those without "their colors"). But my argument was never to resort to pure credentialism. Looking at someones background is an important tool in our toolbox for finding the truth. My argument wasn't that a background check should replace scientific debate.

> I think that those not capable of defending a position scientifically shouldn't attempt to do so and should leave it to those who can.

Exactly! And to the 95+% of people who commented or clicked the opening link who do not have a background in bioengineering, how could they take a critical and informed stance to what the paper claims? The claim of the pandemic being man-made affects them, wheter they can fully understand the scientific discussion or not! I never meant to say that there is no-one on HN that cannot have the scientific discussion. I meant to say that most people simply have other skills than bioengineering in their toolbox, but they do have the ability to judge someones character if they find background information about them.

Maybe I should have put more emphasis on "generally" when I wrote it, but I hope I have clarified my point here and that you see it is very much in line with your thinking.

That's better, I just find that when things get political, it's best to focus on facts. People can have completely opposite views about a particular party's credentials. Here, for example, someone might reject authors that are Chinese because "of course" they'd defend the CCP vs. other people who think just the opposite.

I feel that pure facts helps take away the "heat" of an argument. Things that shouldn't be even remotely political--like wearing masks--have turned into political footballs and adding more "heat" to the issue only hardens people to bad positions that hurt everyone.

As a non-expert, if someone says something unusual that would require expertise in the field to say with credibility, I have every right to verify their expertise. Or to at least verify whether or not they have a history of things like “being convicted of fraud” or “being barred from practicing medicine due to publishing fraudulent papers in the Lancet”.

The reliability of those who write papers is fairly important. How do I know that data hasn’t been falsified? How do I know what is correct?

There are reasons why some publications are treated more seriously than others. Reputation is very helpful for the layman. The very fact that most scientists have said they feel it was a natural outbreak speaks volumes to me. This paper is just a vast chain of speculation, and I think it needs to be treated with a great deal of caution.

Do you think pagerank works?

Do you think it's unscientific?

Should we look at websites in random order after a search?

Don't confuse the fact h-index has significant issues with the idea it is useless.

A background check does help though. If a paper written by or on an anti-vaxx site for example, I have some idea what I’m dealing with right away. It makes me less likely to be charitable on any questionable claims.

Also, swamping people with already settled arguments that they have to continue to prove or disprove is a disinformation tactic. A background check helps avoid giving those situations any air.

How do you make sure this doesn't lull you into a false sense of trust?

Here's a discussion about a paper by respected scientists working in a respected organisation. The paper is probably bad science. https://twitter.com/DiseaseEcology/status/128386841036377702...

I said it makes me less likely to be charitable. I try and read every paper with a skeptical mind.

I disagree. Or rather, I don't think this is about doing science.

In many aspects of our lives we rely on the advice of experts. Personally, as I am not a trained biologist, I am unable to reliably decide if the arguments here are right or wrong. I also believe the vast majoriy of people are in a similar position.

As a result, the only options are to look at:

1. The scientific consensus.

2. The legitimacy of the people making the claims.

It's too early for 1, so 2 is what remains.

In many aspects we rely on multiple and competing opinions from various experts. It's not unheard of to go see half a dozen or more experts for treatment recommendations from various experts on a disease. Covid is a novel virus, so nobody has any more than 6 months or so of experience with this particular virus. So first of all, the rush to consensus is a mistake for a novel virus. Secondly, ascertaining the origin of a virus is not something that you garner from consensus. It takes serious investigative work that may take years.

So, again, consensus is just a way to cast complex, nuanced topics as flat, solved for things. That's not the case in most scientific subjects.

#2 is not what remains. You can engage with the arguments and the logic. Even as a layperson.

Who says an expert is an expert?

Catholic priests are all experts in catholicism. They write papers about Catholicism, all peer reviewed by other experts in catholicism.

Most agree the Pope is infallible.

Groupthink is still Groupthink and belief is still belief. Hence why we have debacles like the lipid hypothesis.

It is very easy to find out whether someone is an expert, as long as you really want to and don't just fool around. For example, an expert on viral diseases will have a long track record of publications in highly acclaimed journals for the past 30 years or longer.

For the purpose of validation or expert testimony, there is no need to consider everyone who has a PhD and got tenure an expert. It is reasonable to set the bar very high.

The expert on catholicism example is a needless distraction. Of course, there are such experts on catholicism, and they can tell you best what catholic doctrine says. Their opinions about virology are obviously irrelevant, though.

It's not easy at all.

By your measure, Professor Ferguson at ICL is an expert in predicting diseases. He's got a big team and has been doing it for more than 20 years. Many published papers. Invited repeatedly to advise world government's due to his expert status. Widely asserted to be the best in his field.

Guess what - it appears every prediction he ever made was wildly wrong. His predictions for COVID were also wildly wrong. His code was released and it was full of severe bugs. He told the world millions would die of COVID and then when they didn't, claimed his expert recommendations had saved them, all in a fraudulent paper that assumed as a prior that the virus in Sweden mysteriously behaved totally differently to everywhere else and that only lockdowns can possibly affect the course of an epidemic (despite knowing that it isn't true).

This guy has been a failure and fraud his entire life. So has his entire field. It's not just him. All the expert epidemiologists produced models that failed to track reality in any way at all.

Yet, he's an expert by any proxy metric you care to pick. His colleagues rally around, his university protects him, Nature magazine published apologetics for him. He's an expert, unless you pick the only test that matters - are his papers correct?

I know it's scary. But decades, perhaps centuries of near sheep-like behaviour towards science and academics has led to their institutions being saturated with incompetence and fraud. They have no working institutional mechanisms to detect or clear it out. That's why so many fields have "skeptic" movements that "deny" the science. Usually they aren't actually science-deniers as painted, they're people who expected the so-called science to actually care about the scientific method and do their sums right. When they discover that it isn't happening they blog about the errors they found, and the next thing they know, they're being demonised by the press and the very self-same scientists they're criticising. Not because they are wrong, but because they are dangerously right.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Doubly so when there is motivated reasoning behind the argument.

If a pharma company came out with a paper saying “we’re almost done developing a cure for cancer!”, people would be rightly skeptical. Lethal manmade viruses are less ridiculous than that, but I’d still classify them as very surprising. Motivated reasoning for those with political ends should be unsurprising when it comes to discussing whether covid is manmade.

Checking background/credentials is due diligence to ensure you aren’t being duped. I wish the world exclusive operated on good faith argumentation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

I think it's valid in a politically charged scenario such as this one to take into account the motivation behind the research as well as the research itself. At least in a forum like this one, as opposed to similar research papers. And I think the GP did it in an even handed way.

In science (as in politics) it is important to understand the reputations of the people who have produced research. Andrew Wakefield being a terrific example.

It's also important to point out that this is pretty much an opinion piece.

Actually it makes sense to background check from an ethical point of view. There's a reason you are supposed to disclose your affiliation, source of funding, conflict of interest, human subject consent statements etc when publishing any bio paper.

So what if Angus stood for UKIP? He's entitled to his views. How is that relevant to virus research or his scientific credentials?!

It's not of course, it's chaff from the sort of leftists who don't believe anyone who believes in local government should be allowed to have any influence.

I don't appreciate the snide remark.

This is a politically charged topic so any strong political affilications are notable. I would've also mentioned it if he had run for lib-dems or green or any other party.

The idea this is relevant to the argument relies on a hugely convoluted and entirely unarticulated conspiracy theory of the form ... "the paper is a clever obfuscation that's not really about the stated topic but rather designed to push the political goals of ukip" but there's no plausible way that's true. It's about as relevant as saying the guy is a dog owner.

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