Hacker News Reader

Comment by learnstats2 | Hacker News Reader

> a) should have been likely

Given that coronavirus would not be observable until there is a cluster of symptomatic cases in a city (and a doctor with relevant experience who can observe multiple cases - here 李文亮), I find it highly unlikely that we could observe earlier cases, if they spread less rapidly or outside a city - or even within another city with less institutional knowledge.

> b) China would be highly incentivized to root out

Even if so, this doesn't form part of any prior. China being incentivized to act in that situation, doesn't affect how likely or unlikely that situation was.

View on HN

> China being incentivized to act in that situation, doesn't affect how likely or unlikely that situation was.

China being incentivized to find evidence supporting the CCP's desired image absolutely does affect how likely it would be for such evidence to surface if it exists.

We see virtually no such evidence; we can assume that's not because China's lack of trying to find it; which should adjust our prior against such evidence existing at all. Yes?

My belief is simply that there is no such evidence.

Reasonably convincing evidence, to me, would be:

- genetic precursor virus particles which have died and no longer exist - they are extinct, or,

- dated blood samples with immunological evidence of infection, sufficient that it isn’t just tampered/false positives. There’s no reason to expect this would have been collected.

i.e. if you haven’t collected it by 2019, there is never going to be any evidence.

This also answers your sibling commenter: it’s not in China’s interest to publicise any such search, when the odds of discovering anything (even if there were earlier infections) are vanishingly low.

After thinking about this statement a bit, I must also admit the possibility that it did not originate in a lab yet finding evidence that it did not is still very difficult. That said, I still think that CCP's default strategy to cover up everything and shroud the truth is now hurting it more than if they were just honest and straightforward about what really happened.

The point is that even if we didn't observe such cases originally, given the incentives now, I would have expected China to investigate and surface evidence of such cases, even if circumstantial. So your second point is not a real point: the incentives don't determine the likelihood of it occurring, but they do dictate the likelihood of an investigation to determine if it did occur.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com