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Alina Chan seems at least equally qualified and disagrees:

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1374108473571557377

Alina Chan, also not a virologist.

She's a geneticst or biochemist. She just uses some viruses in her research sometimes, like basically all biochemists.

Calling her qualified in virus biosafety is like saying someone with a PhD in Visual Arts is qualified as an expert in ballpoint pens because they've used them to draw. Sure they know some things about using ballpoint pens and which ones they prefer, but would you trust them to tell you how to design one from scratch? Or how to fix pens?

Not as much as some guy with a PhD in engineering and design at Mont Blanc, get what I'm saying?

I have also responded to her criticisms substance elsewhere, but she makes some big leaps in judgment that show she hasn't ever worked in a BSL4 lab before. Or studied the nitty gritty of virus genetics in nature before.

this pulling rank thing might work better on reddit, but if you want to make an argument you should give your audience the courtesy of actually making one

Hi I've actually made a dozen or so specific arguments across this post.

You can always respond to those if you want.

Sorry if I come off as condescending but when you have this argument several dozen or hundred times, it gets really really repetitive.

And it's difficult to avoid sounding like a dick. It's not my intent, I promise.

> I have also responded to her criticisms substance elsewhere,

Link?

Honestly, can't find it. It was in some random facebook group about this stuff, I joined a couple dozen as the pandemic went on, so hard to find which one and my activity log search isn't turning up anything.

Sorry. :(

I don't have the time or bandwidth to re-write it at the moment. But a lot of her arguments are similar to Dr. Degerin's and also Dr. Ebright over at Rutgers. They are a small minority, like the OP says.

I tend to rely on expert consensus when it makes mechanistic sense like this one does.

Nothing, no evidence we have, makes either possibility impossible. The lab leak just requires a lot more cloak and dagger and new assumptions. Occam's razer tells me to favor the hypothesis with the least new assumptions. Hence zoonotic release is more likely in my opinion. That's truly the crux of it, the rest of it is arguing over the number of angels on the head of a pin.

Coronavirus work at the WIV was treated as BSL2/3. Not BSL4. Very different biosecurity protocol in play.

That's fair if you don't want to engage because you feel you don't have time, but the spirit of the website is to have an open discussion. That means people will say wrong things. If you don't have time to engage with that....it's totally fine. But just saying I'm right and dropping a large read goes against the spirt of discussion. No one is forcing you to. If you wanted to just do a general response to everyone just make a comment on the main article with your link.

Good luck on your exam as well.

I am engaging, against my better judgement!

Referring to significant work already done is totally fair game. You can't ding him for "off site" links.

Thanks for posting this - really interesting and valuable in my view.

> The reason you will find extremely few people with actual credentials in the science we're discussing in these discussions is that working scientists don't have the time or will to get into these debates with people who wouldn't have the faintest idea how to actually conduct the research they're criticizing.

We have such a big problem with public perception of science. I think many people are willing to be educated, but internet forums tend to degenerate into arguments between people who think they know a lot more than they do (even in (especially?) places like HN).

Controversial idea: I think in the future we should pay researchers to spend x% of their time just interacting with people on internet forums answering questions and correcting misperceptions. The amount of disinformation out there is staggering.

Oh yeah I think that's a great idea. NSF has been toying with this kind of thing for a while, and they've put mandatory public-facing time in some of their grants. There just aren't all that many good venues for it. But I think the principle is fabulous, and we should fund more places for it to happen.

The National Science Policy Network has a good Q&A site where credentialed scientists answer public questions about their subject area. I forget the URL but a google search should turn it up in a few pages.

There's a similar one called the Science Creative Exchange where scientists sign up to talk to writers in hollywood and work through scripts and make the science in fiction more accurate wherever possible.

I love both of these and have spent lots of time on them in my (ever dwindling) free time. But I'm also the guy who's commenting on a HN post when I should be studying for the biggest exam in my career (USMLE Step 1), so I'm not the best example.

Your Phd is showing.

The problem with having expertise is the ability to see how wrong, not-even-wrong, or sideways everyone else sounds when chatting about the subject.

The problem with a phd is making sure everyone knows how little you think of them.

Firstly it is "Dunning-Kruger". Secondly you are engaging in an argument from "authority" without evidence which is often fallacious and always disingenuous.

I'm typing on a phone keyboard so forgive my typo.

And I linked to a literal mountain of evidence describing both my credentials on this topic and then an extremely detailed and heavily sourced set of arguments.

I'm not talking out of my ass, I'm sorry it sounds that way. After you have several hundred of these discussions and they keep popping up with zero new evidence, it tends to color your attitude.

Please accept my apologies

It’s a lost battle, I understand that your colleges just don’t want to even discuss. Thanks for all then info you posted

Pointing out spelling mistakes is a fallacy in the sense of attacking the person rather than the argument (as in, you know what they meant to say, but wanted to make them look silly), and they did post a literal megathread of evidence which (because it wasn't summarised for you) you decided to discount.

I am sure you are familiar with the concept involved with Dunning-Kruger, misspelling it when trying to make a point, makes said point somewhat hard to take seriously.

I have pursued most of what OP posted on reddit, I am not qualified to judge the finer points, but it doesn't mesh up with what I have seen presented by other independent expert sources or common sense. So I discounted it for that reason not the one you gave.

Here are a lot of other experts (and surveys of experts) who agree the lab leak is less likely: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...