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Comment by dpbriggs | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else here incredibly disappointed in the discourse around the lab-leak hypothesis?

I'm not even talking about the truth of it. Instead the way the discussion has occurred and changed over time. In the earliest days it seemed implausible but possible, to suddenly fringe and impossible, then recently to something that _could_ occur.

At some point there was this weird, almost intentional, conflation of the idea the virus could have escaped in some way related to the labs in Wuhan with some sort of nationalist, uneducated caricature blaming the Chinese.

Worse still is the weird apologia, or cope, around the topic in these threads. People recognize the political reality, and it's easy to get distracted in threads tossing links around. But we still see weird arguments like:

- Oh there _was_ nothing wrong with it, but /most/ people were using it to be xenophobic or racist (QED).

- There was never anything really against the idea, but instead new evidence came out!

- Some flunky 'Bayesian' argument clearly proving one way or the other.

There's probably merit to each point above, but is that really satisfactory in light of how discourse was shaped? It actually feel likes gas-lighting. I don't track every comment, every article, and every casual conversation I have. But it has changed, the media has softened, the hostile atmosphere of the last four years is dissipating.

Before anyone starts screaming for sources - this is just some free-form thoughts on the subject. I'm a regular Joe. My contribution to this topic is hoping someone more qualified is able to look deeply enough into it. I'm also terminally online, and have read several hundred comments every day over this pandemic, and observed general trends.

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You're not wrong. The quality of discourse is atrocious even by culture-war standards.

And I do think the culture war is basically to blame here. The lab leak proponents dialed up their rhetoric to 11, early on, without evidence. And the agenda (it can't be described as a "hidden" agenda) includes anti-China posturing as well as a strong undercurrent of undermining the credibility of science and scientists.

I empathize with people in the science community wanting to push back, but Daszak probably crossed ethical lines by covertly organizing the Lancet letter and by not declaring conflicts of interest (he's revised his CoI disclosures, which might be taken as an admission of getting them wrong earlier). It's also legitimate to question whether the science community is too trusting of Chinese scientists.

I do strongly support a real investigation, and am cautiously optimistic we can come to understand the origins. But the actual science story is pretty boring ("we still don't know") compared with all the intrigue. And public discussion is basically worthless, 99% of what's said is trivially derived from "where do you get your propaganda."

I don't have answers to any of this, but appreciate you bringing it up in this way.

> Koopmans says, adding that the preprint’s accusations could harm future collaborations on origin studies with Chinese researchers.

Does anyone thinks this is a wrong way to look at things? I haven’t read it, but if it’s just a hypothesis / fact finding document, there is no accusation.

Seems odd we have to tiptoe around this “or else” argument according to Koopmans.

When you have a former US president with a hold over an American politician party that has nearly 50% of the political power demanding more than $10 trillion in reparations, the discourse has moved away from "there is no accusation".

> a former US president with a hold over an American politician party that has nearly 50% of the political power demanding

The weight of that argument really went down (discredited it if you ask me) in light of the other accusations a former US president made before, during, and after his term. But he did highlight this effect really well:

> And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

> Does anyone thinks this is a wrong way to look at things? I haven’t read it, but if it’s just a hypothesis / fact finding document, there is no accusation.

Just because there's no intention of accusing China doesn't mean China wouldn't take it as an accusation.

Exactly!

since US knows China may take it as an accusation, it feels there is no way to avoid accusing China therefore does it anyway. There are tons of interesting theories and stories around the endless chain of suspicion. I'd say Trump administration did a great job at destroying all mutual trust between the two. Now both sides have to take the worst intention of the other side for granted.

The preprint leans pretty heavily in the "if it's not for science reasons it can't make sense at all" on the question of why data was removed, stating:

> However, the current study suggests that at least in one case, the trusting structures of science have been abused to obscure sequences relevant to the early spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan.

This is unambiguously an accusation that the Chinese authors acted nefariously.

It'll be mildly interesting to see Blooms reaction to the stated reason they were removed "[because] the sequence information had been updated, was being submitted to another database, and [the owners] wanted the data removed from SRA to avoid version control issues". Though at a guess he'll just not comment, since waiting for a reply from the NIH about why the data was deleted wasn't important enough to delay spreading his preprint.

> Though at a guess he'll just not comment, since waiting for a reply from the NIH about why the data was deleted wasn't important enough

https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1407445641609957380?s=...

"Fortunately, Sequence Read Archive has rigorous data tracking enabling them to determine when data deleted & stated justification by authors. In fact, @NIHDirector @NCBI have already determined this & generously shared info w me, but will let them share more widely."

Interesting, in the discussion of the preprint he writes

> Minimally, it should be immediately possible for the NIH to determine the date and purported reason for deletion of the data set analyzed here

and then he goes on to say the thing about the trust of the NIH being abused.

The tweets and the preprint are from the same day, so it appears he indeed mostly just ignores the fact there is a know and plausible reason for the data being taken down.

I think “too trusting” is more like “too scared of committing career suicide.” Any reasoned discussion is drowned out by culture war BS, false dichotomy thinking, misrepresentation of statements to fit narratives, etc.

> The lab leak proponents dialed up their rhetoric to 11

No. The media reporting on those proponents' theories dialed it to 11 to get clickbait titles for their articles.

You're trying to frame this as a scientists vs the everyman debate, but there were plenty of scientists who were against gain of function research and warned that this exact scenario could happen.

Seems like scientists with the training an experience to know what they are talking about say SARS-Covid2 doesn't look like the result of gain of function research.

Got a link? I'm interested to see how its even possible to distinguish that.

I think one. I can't vouch for any of the detail. (Just like almost everyone else)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

"Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone"

When a scientist says 'irrefutably' that just means you should check their work even more carefully.

One of the authors of this paper is mentioned in the article, he's walked back his stance a bit.

> dialed up their rhetoric to 11

There appears to have been several years when the then-president of the US frequently made statements which were "dialled up to 11".

Much of the media covering this period dialled their coverage, responses and rebuttals up to 11.

Once that behaviour gets entrenched, doesn't it reach a point where it's almost impossible to have a normal exchange?

That seems kind of backwards and circular.

The lab leak people did have evidence: the fact that the virus emerged right next to a lab doing experiments on coronaviruses. The people claiming it couldn't have escaped from the lab were the ones without any evidence. Their claims were basically "it wasn't from the lab trust us we're scientists".

The "anti China posturing" you say existed could also be described in other ways but if someone believes China allowed a deadly virus to escape from a lab and then covered it up, it's hard for that position to not be anti China in some way.

As for "a strong undercurrent of undermining scientists", as you admit, it turned out later that they had been dishonest so the people trying to undermine them were in fact doing the right thing.

It feels like you're trying to retroactively justify a dismissal of these claims by arguing that because their conclusions didn't fit with your notion of what good people think you were right to dismiss it. But that's not how argumentation is meant to work.

> The lab leak people did have evidence: the fact that the virus emerged right next to a lab doing experiments on coronaviruses. The people claiming it couldn't have escaped from the lab were the ones without any evidence. Their claims were basically "it wasn't from the lab trust us we're scientists".

You are way way underselling it. There's a ton of stuff we knew a year ago that were called conspiracy theories until a month or so ago, until suddenly the media is pretending they're both credible and were only just discovered.

> 99% of what's said is trivially derived from "where do you get your propaganda."

haha this is true of most topics.

When the Great Fire of London started in 1666 [0], it lasted 5 days non-stop, and consumed virtually all of the central part of London (mostly poor parts but not only). It was a huge effort to send belongings and people out of the city, save whatever could be saved and demolish the rest, for fire breaks. Surprisingly, death toll seems to be small (only 6 recorded deaths, though possibly undercounted, as mostly "poor people"'s town was burned), but an estimated 88% of the inner city was burned.

All the while this was happening, among the fire, the chaos of people fighting fire, people rushing away from the fire, or saving their belongings, there was a mob trying to lynch the presumed perpetrators. First it was the French and the Dutch immigrants, but throughout the saga, Poles, Jews, Catholics and other "aliens" were pursued. The presumed perpetrators changed without much rhyme or reason, merely according to whichever rumour was currently peaking, as the mob, and the fire, continued their steady march. All while the city was ablaze.

Interestingly enough, the cause of the fire is now known, and really should have been known at the time: it started from a small-ish fire at a bakery on Pudding Lane - a street that still exists, since central London was rebuilt on much the same street layout. It started small, but due to indecision wasn't tackled properly, grew a little, then grew a lot, then turned into an all-devouring beast that could not be stopped.

Some things don't really change.

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

Nice analogy, except for one essential part: French and Dutch immigrants did not have a history of blocking foreign investigations and covering up unwelcome information.

The Chinese have largely themselves to blame for the current suspicions against them. If they had been transparent from the start, the speculations would have been far fewer.

Well, the analogy might in fact be better than I thought: suspicion was initially cast at the Dutch and French since there were recent real wars with these countries (never mind “soft” combat like blocking investigations etc).

As an aside, I’m not taking a side in “blame” on China. I’m really only talking about the public opinion side of things. The cause of the fire was found through an investigation, and had nothing to do with the mob “crowdsourced” sleuthing. And the mob kept changing its mind as to who is to blame.

Sounds to me a lot like NYTimes saying one time “of course it’s not China you bigoted racist” to “ooh questions are being asked and it’s suspicious we don’t have answers” without any real change in available evidence.

Transparent by whose definition? Any investigation can be weaponised very easily. I remember seeing a tweet from one of the western scientists in China claiming the NYT misquoted them regarding the transparency & data they'd been shown.

Does that make sense in this situation?

Like the leading idea is that it occurred naturally, and there's heavy emphasis on it starting in that wet market. More than enough ammo already for the mob to hate on Chinese people, and sadly that's what happened and has been happening.

Suppressing inquiry into a possible source of the pandemic seems more like political shenanigans than some vague effort to save the population from harm.

Criticizing another country behavior is not xenophobia or racism. There is a totalitarian regime in China that controls the bahaviour of China.

Modern censorship has the protocol of calling names to ideas or opinions that they don't like, prior to "cancelling" them, like calling homophobic the people that disagree in their opinions about homosexuality with what mainstream media says the opinion should be.

The theory of lab escape was very obvious from the start for experts in the field. I talked with laboratories chiefs after the pandemic and every single of them told me it was the main hypothesis. But none of them went public about it at first because simply the West needed China in order to fight the pandemic.

The fact is that China did wrong here, but there is hypocrisy in the Western world. The West put taxes into CO2 so energy prices go through the roof but China does not pay taxes so it has a big competitive advantage over the West. The West buy products made in China because they are cheaper(because they don't have taxes on CO2 or pollution regulation[regulation exist but nobody complies with it in practice] or protection against verbatim copying products).

Lab research is controlled in the West with very stringent set of regulations, so the West subcontracts China research because it is way cheaper and the safety measures are a joke, not in my backyard.

The US financed (outsourced) the lab research done in Wuhan. Bill Gates and so many others did too. While the West is arguing about ethics, China is doing experiments with human embryos because in China there is no such a thing as ethics. So Western companies put money in Chinese laboratories to do what they are forbidden to do in their native countries.

Why blaming Wuhan lab leak is "nationalistic" or "caricature". China is a communistic country, it cannot care less about anything besides standard communistic agenda, gathering more power, winning more influence, spreading "revolution". Was crashing freedom in Hong Kong necessary? Is Urguys and Christians persecution needed? Did they care that their rocket debris might fall of the sky on some large India city and kill 5 million people? Do they care about factories that dump wastes directly to rivers and thanks to that they are cheap? And so on.

There is a great book by Kissinger about China that explains a way of thinking Chinese rulers have. That was stroked me most was a chapter about early conflict between US and China (in Mao times). US were trying to frighten Chinese rulers with nuclear weapon, but Chinese answer was that even if US strike them that way and kill 300 million people, there is still 700 millions alive.

If you look on Covid from that perspective, the mess in some lab in Wuhan sounds very plausible. For Europe/US it is a big problem, for China it is a big opportunity.

In Europe/US there is a lot of regulation concerning research (ethical, security) that just don't exist in China. We don't know what they do in terms of genetic modifications, cloning, bacteriology, etc. The fun fact is that western companies are eagerly investing in such research in China as they are cheaper and they don't need to care about boring stuff like ethics.

We should be scared.

Something to reflect on : should we be scared of the people who didn't care about 300m deaths, or the people who threatened to kill 300m people?

BTW. I don't believe that story - Kissinger was a lot of things but he and Nixon were not in the 50 Hitlers league.

> Something to reflect on : should we be scared of the people who didn't care about 300m deaths, or the people who threatened to kill 300m people?

Something else: should we be more scared of countries with a confirmed history of genocide and using weapons of mass destruction against cities, or China.

> Something else: should we be more scared of countries with a confirmed history of genocide and using weapons of mass destruction against cities, or China

To be fair, China is also doing their own genocide against the Uyghurs.

China has a confirmed history of genocide and a confirmed history of mass violence against its own citizens.

Do I have to pick just one?!

patriots pick the right one.

Good ol' Bush-era rhetoric

Ah yes, the Harry Potter-esque spell to conjure jingoism: "Withhus Orragenstus!"

>Chinese answer was that even if US strike them that way and kill 300 million people, there is still 700 millions alive.

That is just how it is done in that corner of the world. Fight for your Motherland until the last man standing, and individual lives have no value. USSR lost 30M in WWII so that remaining 170M saw the Victory Day. Stalingrad was basically a meat grinder.

The USSR was fighting for its existence in a war of extermination. Sacrificing lives was not really a choice but rather one of the rare advantages they could press.

Smaller Eastern European countries had even more appalling losses, not because of their disregard for human life, but because of their enemies' appetite for murder.

Stalingrad was a worthwhile strategic objective, if I'm not mistaken. Keeping the Wehrmacht engaged also gave the Soviets an opportunity to stage the massive pincer that broke the Wehrmacht's back and damn near knocked its allies out of the war

Dictators tend to be a lot more willing to sacrifice masses of their people to preserve their rule than the subjects are to take that particular path, even if surrendering to the Nazis did sometimes lead to an equally-bad outcome as fighting. But Stalin had just recently purged all potential rivals and opposition so there was no one to stop him internally.

Supposedly during the second world war prior to America's entry into the war, there was a joke about china's approach:

An American is on a steamship with a Chinese steward. The news reports the Japanese had lost 25 soldiers that day and the Chinese 250. The next day it's worse, the Japanese lost 35 men and the Chinese 500. On the third day, the numbers are 50 Japanese and 2000 Chinese troops. All the while, the Chinese steward simply smiles. Finally, the American asks him how he can be so happy, given the news. The Chinese gentleman simply says "Pretty soon, no more Japanese".

It's social media. These days we aren't allowed to discuss anything philosophical or scientific, without having it called a "dogwhistle for <something_bad>", and then a few thousand people pile on you, and someone posts a death threat because you're some type of racist or bigot. And some of these people work for organisations that are supposed to promote scientific enquiry, skepticism and rational thought.

I think we should start adopting the term 'tinnitus' when people argue with 'dogwhistle'. Just because a person calling X a dogwhistle of Y doesn't make it so.

Remember: If you think you are hearing a dogwhistle, perhaps you are the dog.

> It actually feel likes gas-lighting.

There is a really interesting dynamic in political debate. I'm going to pick on Ivermectin as a COVID treatment, for example. There is official guidance on Ivermectin [0] that says "So, currently there is no clear information that confirms whether ivermectin works as a COVID-19 treatment."

So what is interesting is that there are then a large number of largely faceless/anonymous opinions that Ivermectin is obviously totally proven/totally disproven as a COVID treatment. Anyone discussing the evidence either way runs the risk of being censored.

But when the official position is taken, all the faceless opinions on the wrong side will vanish. If something like Ivermectin proved to be workable then anyone advocating for it will find this weird situation where they were right but no-one official ever argued with them and it is sorta mysterious where the pushback came from.

Ditto the reverse, where if it is disproven as a treatment then there will be a weird situation where it was only ever a tiny fringe of people who cared. This effect is very frustrating in political debates, but does in a sense incentivise people to be clear in their positions. Debating anonymous opinions doesn't actually help and is a trap a lot of people fall in to.

[0] https://www.nps.org.au/ivermectin-and-covid-19

If only the debate around vaccines worked like that.

People will never accept that they followed the word of “experts” as if it was religion, and lacked rational thinking and original critical analysis.

It’s 2021, we have the Internet and yet the masses were still as easily manipulated as the people in the 60’s who only had the TV and newspapers.

You really notice this if you're outside mainstream social networks. People at some point start to have infinite discussions IRL about some new uninteresting topic you never heard about like it was the most important thing in the world.

You listen them argue with polarized and surprisingly well defined opinions, like they're reciting some script they're supposed to follow to defend their faction of choice. You change social circle, like go from friends to family, to find the very same discussions with the same factions and the same detailed, almost scripted arguments.

Meanwhile you keep wondering why they even care, and why they're so passionate about it, it's like they're under some kind of spell which for some reason didn't work on you.

Can confirm; have been living under a rock, and it’s bizarre. Doubly so if the topic is something with which you have real-world experience. It’s so clear people are living in a weird propaganda world.

I have a large Indian family. Nobody is writing newspaper articles about it. The same thing happens with family gossip. You’re describing basic human social dynamics.

The illusion of openness can be more convincing in the case of the Internet. It isn't just a talking head telling you what to think on TV, it is a collection of curated and censored opinions from a simulated peer group.

Yes I agree. As someone who works with programmatic advertising technologies, I struggle to convince friends that 80% of what they see in a screen has been decided by a third party and it is not them “looking for it”.

> People will never accept that they followed the word of “experts” as if it was religion, and lacked rational thinking and original critical analysis.

> It’s 2021, we have the Internet and yet the masses were still as easily manipulated as the people in the 60’s who only had the TV and newspapers

I really don't know why you're assuming that the average person is capable of doing sufficiently qualitative research with Google to be better than a epidemiologist at fighting a pandemic.

On the contrary, the internet makes it so that anyone can say anything they want. YouTube video saying the lizard people gave the virus? A epidemiologist-union.org website or a Facebook post claiming the same? How can you expect people without good web skill, without prior knowledge, without academic rigor to be able to filter out what is real and what is not?

The best advice is listen to the fucking experts, locally and globally, think about it, compare with reputable online sources. If in doubt, doubt, discuss, search more information. But don't go against official public health guidance unless there are many officially qualified experts confirming your doubts. And even that kind of rough advice is too hard to follow for a person barely capable of Office and Facebook.

> The best advice is listen to the fucking experts, locally and globally, think about it, compare with reputable online sources.

The “experts” have been exposed lying, and carrying out their own political agendas many times throughout this pandemic. The appeal to authority is a logical fallacy in the first place, and “expert” credibility is (rightly) at an all time low. It’s now almost entirely evaluated politically, rather than on any criteria of trustworthiness.

I would suggest the best advice is to treat everything you hear/read with a healthy dose of skepticism, especially in regards to people who rely heavily on their credentials to deflect criticism.

> The “experts” have been exposed lying

This is the biggest problem that social media has brought us. Everyone is under scrutiny, afraid of the mob, afraid of losing their job. Too many experts go along with the dogma-de-jour. And then, like we're all idiots or something, they just "flip" and say the opposite, thinking we won't notice, because scrolling back 3 months on Twitter is hard.

I think the fundamental issue is that the most important factor in succeeding as a politician (and I mean that in the broader sense of anybody who takes on political accountability), is the art of avoiding accountability entirely. The truth often stand directly in the way of that objective, so this idea of the scientific politician is already starting off as a bit of an oxymoron.

Another problem is that politicians are just fundamentally bad at risk management. I’m sure we’ve all worked with those types of politicians at least once. They never want to try anything, because the risk it will fail is unacceptable, and the most important part of solving any problem is finding somebody else to blame. Politicians in public office are the worst at this. I used to live in a place where road deaths where a big cause for public concern, and I watched somebody get elected to office on the platform of reducing road deaths to 0. Now, anybody with any experience in risk management would know that attempting to reduce the likelihood of any risk to 0 is not only a bad idea, but is just simply impossible. The goal of risk management is to reduce the likelihood and impact of risks to an acceptable level, but a politician can’t stand in front of a news camera and say “an acceptable number of people died on our roads this year”.

I think even if you left the risk assessment portion of pandemic management entirely to the “experts”, it’s this deeply flawed style of politically managing these risks that has been biggest source of controversy. To start making risk management decisions on behalf of other people, it is necessary to curtail their liberty, and regardless of how medically unqualified the general population is, they can plainly see that a lot of the policy decisions around the pandemic have been very politically influenced.

> The “experts” have been exposed lying, and carrying out their own political agendas many times throughout this pandemic

That will depend on a per country basis. In the ones i followed there were no lies, only revisions in guidance based on better knowledge of the situation.

> The appeal to authority is a logical fallacy in the first place, and “expert” credibility is (rightly) at an all time low.

Yes, and that's how we got shit like Trump and Brexit, because people are "sick of experts" and decide to yolo it for the guy screaming the loudest. Guess what, that doesn't work, and you're much better off listening to experts, and evaluating what they're saying, rather than ignoring them and going with the village idiot. Experts can lie, be frauds, have conflicts of interest, etc. but their reputation and credibility are paramount. Which politicians or talk show hosts, because that's apparently who people take their pandemic guidance on, are credible?

> I would suggest the best advice is to treat everything you hear/read with a healthy dose of skepticism, especially in regards to people who rely heavily on their credentials to deflect criticism

And by having everyone doubt everything, you end up with people believing in Q shit in Germany. Skepticism is critical, but too much of it just creates chaos.

Personally, I’d generally consider blaming outcomes that you don’t like on people exercising their freedom to think for themselves too liberally to be a particularly low-effort criticism. You should always be skeptical of everything, you should be especially skeptical of people who claim their credentials place them above scrutiny. This is the very basis of critical thought, you can never have enough of it, and people being free to think for themselves is the most fundamental form of liberty.

Seems to me like experts are just following the herd advocating the things most politically palpable. For example, the public likes travel restrictions, and (a sizeable subset of them) become viciously outraged over herd immunity, so whatever scientifically-based policies countries had previously are dropped under the guise of supposedly learning more. Yeah they learned better how to keep their jobs.

Turns out the "fucking" experts were mostly afraid that their careers and "gain of function"-research could loose their grants and connections.

Money and PR have eroded away the societal trust into science. Tobacco is harmless. Sugar is healthy. Social science topped it off, when it declared that he who yells loudest, is always the one owning the truth, which is relative and just a display of power.

Little, big lies, that now have eaten their way into the core of the whole institution, from the point of view of the common men. No solutions for the big problems (energy/environment protection), but lots of small problems, while flooding the world with un-replicatable drivel. And getting demeaning and insulting does not repair the damage.

One problem is I need to be an expert to decipher what the experts are saying (and who is an expert, and which experts to listen to).

So instead I rely on various secondary and tertiary sources to help me make sense of the world, which opens up the possibility that my sources are wrong or even manipulative. But how would I ever know? I'm not an expert.

> One problem is I need to be an expert to decipher what the experts are saying (and who is an expert, and which experts to listen to).

No you don't? Probably most countries have health ministries which lead the fight against the pandemic, usually via some proxy ( like head epidemiologist, or a person appointed specifically for that task). The guidance they and the WHO gave is the expert guidance, and at least the latter was given in a very digestible format for the general public.

WHO and CDC guidance were murky early on (made even less clear by people actively trying to confuse people). Consider the confusion about whether asymptomatic spread is possible (WHO not effectively communicating the difference between "truly asymptomatic " and presymptomatic), or confusion over whether to use masks (getting translated into "masks don't work" by the game-of-telephone that is social media).

Or consider the controversies over drugs used to fight COVID-19. People advocating their use were physicians -- that makes them experts relative to me. Then other physicians said no, they don't work and are dangerous. They are also experts. Who am I to believe?

This problem goes beyond the pandemic. Doctors of medicine use jargon derived from Greek and Latin both for historic reasons and with the purpose of creating an air of authority. But when someone comes along and usurps that language, it sounds to an uneducated ear like the real thing. That's how we end up with people drinking special water to alter blood pH to prevent cancer. Absurd? Maybe. But if you have letters after your name and I don't, how can I know?

welcome to the backlash to the backlash to conspiracy theory culture.

its not a wonder why we cant have rational discussion when theres a constant reverberating noise of irrational conspiracy theories.

anyone who really considers the global propaganda should understand by now thst this is intentionsl. degrade scientific rationality, democracy and good governance by pumping FUD into any critical corner.

Absolutely! 5g is another area where this is happening. If you read literal industry whitepapers and peer reviewed articles about mm wave antenna arrays, the biometric sensing applications and corresponding privacy concerns are quite literally spelled out. There are entire industries being built around these applications and hosts of highly qualified researchers openly collaborating with corporations. Meanwhile these towers, which are effectively biometric radars, are going into cities across the country with zero informed public conversation.

Do you have some good articles that give an overview over this?

There are some links in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444

Could you kindly share a few links that you deem most informative and reliable? Thank you

Sure! Some links here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444

I'm genuinely curious. Could you provide at least a couple links to said papers?

Yes, here is a comment with some links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444

Truth is there was never a problem with the lab escape idea. Problem was that it was first brought to main stream by Alt-Right / MAGA crowd and sadly in the current (or at least in that time's) political climate if we disagree with even one thing everything you say has to be treated as information hazard of the most toxic nature. Left is not alone in this, it goes both ways. No matter how good points the other side is making since we disagree on which old guy should sit in the White house we have to disagree on everything else as well.

It was half to make Trump look like a racist / idiot, half to protect China from sanctions.

I guess it was a risky move, hoping that evidence wouldn't popup (or come out late enough to make sanctions worth (b|tr)illions improbable).

Yet, the most significative thing about this story is that a move was made.

Probably the biggest case of foreign propaganda we've seen until now.

I call it the "Orwellian flip", when the sentiment on an opinion goes from "you must not express this opinion, on pain of being politically incorrect" to "oh no, that was true all along, and we always said so".

> At some point there was this weird, almost intentional, conflation of the idea the virus could have escaped in some way related to the labs in Wuhan with some sort of nationalist, uneducated caricature blaming the Chinese.

I doubt anyone has argued that the CCP deliberately spread COVID19 to the world because it is Chinese. Taiwan and Hong Kong are also Chinese, and would be primary targets of such an attack. Who dislikes the Taiwanese?

The presumptive reason for an aggressive "unprovoked" WMD use would be because China is a Communist dictatorship. Those have an aggressive track record, to put it mildly.

I say "unprovoked" in quotes because CCP media will gladly list many provocations, and aren't they the ones whose opinion counts when inquiring as to motive?

If there's something Chinese about this, it might be the unconventional warfare aspect, from the culture that gave us Sun Tzu.

Maybe the real racists are those who assume that Chinese Communists would not attack a stronger opponent in an indirect and clandestine manner. Isn't that projecting one's value system onto another?

Since WWII, the USA has strong-armed the world into accepting the USD as reserve currency, permitting the US oligarchy to "tax" them by creating new USD ex nihilo via financial wizardry. Armed robbery, even when state-sponsored, often inspires armed resistance. Don't go crying, "He hit me for no reason!" when you're holding his lunch money.

Apparently you can't say this, since I always get downvoted when I do. I have yet to hear an answer.

> Oh there _was_ nothing wrong with it, but /most/ people were using it to be xenophobic or racist (QED).

Wait but less flippantly phrased this was exactly the problem earlier on.

People who wanted to absolve our own abject failure to prepare or deal with the virus started acting like the lab leak theory was a proven fact and thus since it was all chinas fault we could stop quarantining and if only we frothed with nationalistic sanctimony our lives would return to normal.

The problem was three fold. 1) the leak was an especially unproven theory back then with very little evidence either way, i.e just pure speculation. 2) the way it was used to absolve ourselves of being ill prepared, even if it wasn’t speculation there is no excuse for our preparedness 3) it was used for racist propaganda and we don’t need to sound like America is moving to Japanese internment camps 2.0, China edition. It’s not helpful and just gives the CCP propaganda fodder that harms our actual efforts resolving our justified grievances against the Chinese government.

I think this is a problem with modal logic. There are important nuances between what is true, what is likely and what is possible. In my experience, people are not good at perceiving those nuances and personal bias often erases them. It can go in one of two ways: (1) It is possible and I like the idea so it is true; (2) It is possible but I do not like the idea so it is false. Now what happens when lots of people indulge in (1) for a particular topic (here the lab leak hypothesis) ? Then you will have lots of "serious" people forcefully pointing out correctly that there is no evidence that this is true, since it is merely a possibility. But since people do not perceive the nuance, they will interpret that as meaning that the "serious" people believe it to be false. When the group indulging in (1) stops monopolizing the conversation, the nuance reemerges and it appears like it becomes a possibility again.

I think you need to realize couple of issues:

- While the disease was spreading it probably made more sense to focus on dealing with the disease. Focusing on blame would probably take away from the efforts and clear message needed to combat the actual problem. As an example, see how any information about people hurt by the vaccine actually caused more problems. There is probably orders of magnitude more people dead or going to die because of reluctance to take the vaccine that would ever be hurt by the vaccine itself.

- There is probably intentional and unintentional misinformation war happening in social media that for me or you is difficult to quantize or understand effect of. I find it likely there are state actors trying to influence public opinion on various matters or at least make various points moot. Add to this misinformation from various (I will call them amateur) groups that spread it based on rumor or feelings or pure conjecture without any facts to back it up. Then there are people who are responding to this misinformation, without having any facts themselves.

All of this is going to make it difficult to understand where these shifts come from but not difficult to understand why they are happening.

Early on, I found myself thinking that the idea that it came out of a wet market and couldn't possibly have come from a lab, to have its own wierdly racist overtones. I think someone recently tweeted as such too, and I felt "slightly less crazy".

The thing I find amusing/terrifying is that people are now claiming the moral high ground over how it was handled originally (context be damned), while still using it as a political stick to beat people with - one key point here is the distinction between political and partisan disputes.

if you re-examine some famous virus history books like The Coming Plaque from the 1990s you realize that the escape form labs theory is not new but recycled propaganda. It happen with Ebola and several others and it was on both sides of the cold war with the CIA and KGB pursuing distributing those theories.

We have to find some way to subtract the political infighting from the public health motive to find the origins of this virus outbreak.

When has censorship been anything but a tool of authoritarians?

my hunch is the ccp is powerful at manipulation and convinced the left that lab leak theory is “racist” but somehow saying they eat bats isn’t. (likely to cover up for the fact it was lab leak)

and the establishment is very easy to manipulate with the R word

Part of the driving philosophy of much of the left these days is collective (and hereditary) responsibility by race. So it's easy to see how, by projection, they would think that Trump saying it came out of the Chinese lab and calling it the "China virus" is blaming Chinese people as a whole.

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