Hacker News Reader

Comment by ttflee | Hacker News Reader

Putting the Bannon label aside, this paper seems to be well written and proofread. The claims fell into the range of educated guess and reasonable doubts.

EDIT:

You may like or dislike Bannon and/or Trump, but I judged this paper using my only knowledge in biochemistry/molecular cloning from when I was trained during undergraduate.

View on HN

I think knowing that this comes from people with a long and well established track record of intentional deception, propagating misinformation and exaggeration is useful background knowledge.

As for knowledge of biochemistry, there is no new research here. None. It's pasted together from other sources. For example the discussion of the proteins ZXC21 and ZC45 comes form this article [1], which also presents evidence that the virus can infect and therefore could have passed to humans from mammals other than bats. In other words it's closest viral relatives might be in a mammal species other than bats, so in focusing on bats for the virus's nearest relative we might be looking in the wrong place. That blows a hole in this paper's thesis that the virus not being almost identical to the bat viruses means it must be engineered, so of course it isn't mentioned in the article at all. Nice cherries they're picking!

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6135831/

In the words of Thomas Sowell, “virtually any belief, about almost anything, can be shown to be wrong if stated in a sufficiently simple-minded way.”

You’ve stated the paper’s thesis in a very simple-minded way, so your argument means little.

Yet somehow, it's a very close match (96%) for a bat coronavirus.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7

Magically, that virus was allegedly discovered in 2013, but despite their claim that it killed 3 out of 6 infected people, they somehow "forgot" to mention it to anyone anywhere or enter the genome into any public databases.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seven-year-covid-trail-re...

Even when you move away from politically-funded research, the story still stinks (well, CCP-sponsored research is still political).

These viruses circulate between mammal species. I said it's nearest relative might not be in bats, not that it has no relatives in bats.

> Putting the Bannon label aside,

No. The Bannon label is the problem here. White collar way to start dumpster fires.

This is malice. Knowingly and actively undermining public trust in the scientific method. Whatever works to make two stones fight.

You are committing the genetic fallacy[0] by stating your argument in this way. A paper like this should be judged on its merits, not its origin.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

Ideally, yes, but practically no. We are in the midst of a massive disinformation campaign aimed to undermine public trust in public institutions. It takes time to properly evaluate a paper in the manner you describe - and that's a key element of their game. Keep you distracted so they can control the narrative. No. We have to collectively decide to stop playing their game and shut it off at the source. Therefore our strategy must be to ignore papers from known bad actors.

That would be absolutely true for those with unlimited mental bandwidth and time, large nations' intelligence services for example.

If one wants my attention for something that looks like scientific writing, except for rare exceptions at my personal discretion, one will have to go through peer review - the main filter of the scientific method.

Otherwise, the bin.

What does your limited undergraduate knowledge have to do with anything? It's really just one step away from a high schooler citing their biology homework as a source of authority.

You also seem to think that proofreading a paper increases the chances that it's correct which (in my opinion) shreds your credibility.

To claim that an undergraduate degree is just one step away from highschool biology homework is disingenuous.

"Proofreading" a paper does, in some amount, increase the chances that it's correct. It's called peer review.

Proofreading a paper is absolutely not peer review, at least if we're using the commonly accepted meaning of the term 'peer review'.

Proof reading means reading the text and pointing out errors in wording, spelling and punctuation. Peer-reviewing would using the same fundamental data and redo the experiment/mathematics and hopefully come to the same conclusion as the original author.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com