Comment by raphlinus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raphlinus | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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

haha this is true of most topics.

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