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Comment by tick_tock_tick | Hacker News Reader

As it takes longer and longer to find any evidence in nature a lab leaking is becoming the most likely source.

Hasn’t the exact same amount of time elapsed without finding any evidence of a lab leak?

Nature leaves a trail, so if you don’t find a trail then it becomes increasingly implausible that COVID resulted from a natural process. There are currently several intermediate steps that have not been uncovered anywhere, and which would have to have happened in order for this to be a natural process.

This just sounds like the “lack of evidence is evidence of a conspiracy” epistemology so often resorted to by conspiracy theorists. The problem with the epistemology is that it applies equally well to all conceivable conspiracies.

This may be true in general, but in this case we're trying to figure out if something is man-made or occurred naturally. No one is saying it couldn't have happened naturally, but natural evolution happens differently (and more slowly and messily) than human creation. In prior cases (SARS and MERS), plenty of evidence of natural evolution was found very quickly. Here it has been conspicuously absent. What conclusion would you draw from that?

> but in this case we're trying to figure out if something is man-made or occurred naturally.

False dichotomy. The main lab-leak theory is that a natural virus being studied escaped from a lab, not a man-made one.

You only need a handful of people working on this to have knowledge of it. The PRC is really good at locking up people to keep them quiet.

I'm not sure I follow the logic. If China is so good at keeping people quiet, how do you know? Sounds to me that for us to know they have to be less than good at it?

I'm sorry but I really cannot see how everyone knowing (since we on HN knows it must be widespread) is China being good at keeping people quiet. Instead of downvoting how about explaining the logic?

Nope - no investigation for _that_ theory allowed by Beijing.

That may be but we have hardly started looking yet. We haven't even found a source of SARS from 2002 yet..

>"... no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching..."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11...

Edit: Added source.

Wrong. A likely Sars1 origin was found within months. For Sars2 Chinese researches sampled 40000 animals (according to WHO report) and found nothing.

Sars1: Prof. Zheng-Li Shi from Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Shu-Yi Zhang from the Institute of Zoology, and some researchers from Australia also tracked the source of SARS virus to bats, and their findings were published in Science in September 2005

Finding a virus in an animal isn't that same as finding the source. A source has not been found. Only later and intermediate hosts (as in 2005):

>"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat caves"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11...

>"No direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations, but WIV16 was found in a cave in Yunnan province, China between 2013 and 2016, and has a 96% genetically similar virus strain."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

That is an argument from ignorance logical fallacy. The inability to find something has no bearing on whether it exists or not and thus has no bearing on the probability of an inverted outcome.

Dark matter/energy also frequently fall into this sort of argument. There is no evidence that they do exist, which does not suggest the absence of their existence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

Not sure what your point is. The source for SARS and MERS were found within months. We're over a year into this with no clue. Based on the current circumstances' inconsistencies with historical circumstances, this appears to be something different.

His point still stands. Lack of evidence for one thing shouldn't be confused as evidence for something else. A man is home alone during a murder, and there is no evidence for this, did he commit the murder?

How do you know he was home?

No, but when the second hypothesis is the one that CCP has banned any investigation and news of, is not cooperating on the investigation and when there had been claims about the WIV safety and the WIV has openly stated that they were researching bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses, then the lack of evidence for any other cause makes this one seem all the more likely. That's a lot of coincidences.

If CCP are covering it up, then of course there will be a lack of direct evidence. The above doesn't prove it conclusively, but it does make it rather suspicious. Why would CCP be hampering the investigations if they have nothing to hide? It was over a year before they let the WHO have a look. Plenty of time to get rid of any actual evidence.

Using a conspiracy theory to qualify a clear example of a logical fallacy is pretty weak.

Are you saying that the CCP did, in fact, let people talk about it? That they didn't cover it up for months before admitting that there was a pandemic, after it had already spread around the world? That they did, in fact, let the WHO investigate last year rather than a year later? That the WIV didn't research bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses?

There's also the reports about the leaked state department cables from 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep... But I couldn't actually figure out where to find them, so you can discount that one as "not enough evidence to verify".

Those things aren't conspiracy theories. Yes, its not enough evidence to prove it either, but damn does it make them look shady.

I am not providing any opinion as to the origins of the virus. You seem to believe otherwise due to poor objectivity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory

No, I'm saying that CCP's behaviour is suspect and the fact that WIV did, in fact, openly research the exact type of virus that caused the outbreak and that the first reports were from Wuhan is a pretty crazy coincidence. Couple those two things together and occam's razor would suggest this needs more attention.

Suppose DNA was left at the scene and strong circumstantial evidence points to the man as the culprit, yet he refuses to let them compare his DNA to exonerate himself.

Source for finding SARS source within months?

This is contrary but I'm open to debate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747529/

Wikipedia [1] seems to include sources:

> In late May 2003, studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets (Paguma sp.), even if the animals did not show clinical signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from Asian palm civets to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was also later found in raccoon dogs (Nyctereuteus sp.), ferret badgers (Melogale spp.), and domestic cats. In 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like coronaviruses in Chinese bats.[60][61]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

In 2003, it was hypothesized that civets were the source. However, this was not conclusively proved until 2017.

Infected animals were found in the market where the outbreak began 4 months after it started. We have nothing comparable a year and a half after COVID.

Thanks. Pretty legit sources from 2005.

It stops being a fallacy and starts to become a valid consideration when the search for the thing not found has been thorough enough that it would have been very likely to be found if it had been there.

Suppose that I remember leaving $5000 in plain sight on a table. My initial priors are a 90% chance that it is there, a 9% chance that I put it somewhere else by accident, and a 1% that my friend Bob took it. I conduct a search that would have found it with 100% odds if it was on the table, 95% odds if I had put it somewhere else by accident, and a 0% chance if Bob took it. Add in the evidence of the search and all of a sudden the new odds are 0% chance that it is where I thought it was, about a 31% chance that I put it somewhere else, and a 69% chance that Bob took it.

This is the first major disease to jump to humans in the last 20 years that we haven't quickly tracked down the path to us. We're good at it. The fact that we didn't succeed this time when more effort was put into the search is something that should give us pause.

Logic does not cease to be fallacious merely because somebody works hard and becomes frustrated.

Many of the logical fallacies are logical fallacies from an Aristotelian perspective of statements that are either True or False, and nothing in between. "True" is a high bar.

Many of them dissolve when treated correctly with something like a Bayesian analysis. [1] This is one of them. Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence, contrary to the frequent assertions otherwise. It just isn't proof. The strength of the evidence is proportional to the amount of the possibility space searched and the quality of that search.

It is not fallacious to observe that our normally-successful efforts to find a natural cause failing raises the probabilities of the remaining explanations, and that of those possibilities, "lab origin" has a lot of the remaining probability. It doesn't mean that natural origin is disproved, nor did it mean any of the other possibilities are certain, but it is valid to adjust ones probability estimates.

(I've also learned from experience a lot of people will read this as being critical of the Aristotelian perspective or something. I am not. It is a valid logic. There are other valid logics. Many of them are more practically useful than rigid True and False, but Aristotelian logic, like Newtonian physics, is still a very important one to understand as it serves as an important limiting case for many other more complicated logics.)

[1]: This is not a position statement on Bayesian vs. frequentist.

The problem with your reasoning is that you are falsely equating absence of evidence into a qualifier for an opinion or conclusion, which it isn't. The absence of evidence only means that such evidence is missing and is in no way suggestive of anything else. All conclusions drawn from an absence of evidence are otherwise unqualified assumptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_assumption

This was the exact reasoning people bet the farm on the housing market prior to late 2008. There was no evidence the housing market ever depreciated, so with that absence of evidence the housing market must therefore not ever depreciate. Contrary to that reasoning the housing market crashed and I got my house as a foreclosure at a heavily depreciated value.

> The inability to find something has no bearing on whether it exists or not

Bigfoot has entered the chat.

> Dark matter/energy...There is no evidence that they do exist,

Except there is plenty of evidence for dark matter. It's stuff that has observable mass and is found in countless galaxy rotation curve studies, gravitational lensing, etc.

Dark matter has never been observed or detected.

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