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Comment by rflrob | Hacker News Reader

> I find the degree to which the Chinese government has stomped all over foreign-led investigations into the origin of SARS-Cov-2 to be highly, highly suspicious.

I don't find it suspicious at all, precisely because I don't trust the Chinese government. In my estimation of the CPC, the following probabilities are all roughly equal (and close to 1):

* P(suppress investigation | natural origin)

* P(suppress investigation | lab leak of benign research)

* P(suppress investigation | lab leak of gain of function)

From a Bayesian point of view, then, P(lab leak | suppress investigation) is going to be almost equal to P(lab leak).

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This is exactly what's so frustrating about the media treating the gain-of-function research they were doing as the "smoking gun" is so disingenuous. We were doing all of the same types of research, even cooperating with their government on some of it in our own labs IN CHINA, and then all of a sudden we turn around and blame them? Come on, people, you're playing right into what the propaganda says happened. They're not doing anything the U.S. government wouldn't do if the likely point of origin had been somewhere in Atlanta.

Right, but the purpose of the narrative is not to compare whether we are doing the same thing. It is to blame China for the pandemic. TBH, if we did the same thing, I expect the rest of the world would blame us.

That said, it seems pretty unproductive at this point to blame anyone, but it does seem productive to avoid it happening again.

Do we need to actually blame them, as such? Or is it more important to memorialize the mistake so we can learn from our history?

That's exactly my point. It doesn't help anyone to blame anyone else, and the fact that Americans are so fast to blame China is very telling.

Years of propaganda has worked its magic in far more sinister ways than any of us want to admit, especially to ourselves.

> the fact that Americans are so fast to blame China is very telling

* P(agressivley blame china | american lab leak of gain of function)

Not a 0 on that one.

Not sure that makes sense given your presumed knowledge of the Chinese government's reaction to SARS?

Or are you in bad faith giving dubious priors?

"This lack of openness caused delays in efforts to control the epidemic, resulting in criticism of the People's Republic of China from the international community. China officially apologized for early slowness in dealing with the SARS epidemic."

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

I think we agree? The Chinese government wasn't open about SARS, and despite their apology in 2003 (by which point SARS was on the path to containment), I don't have reason to believe they've become more open about such things in the last couple decades. I am by no means a China expert, so you may disagree with my priors about their behavior.

My experience in biology labs (though not virology labs) suggests that a leak of benign research is plausible, and that if it did happen odds are good that there wouldn't be a ton of documentation to suppress. Mistakes happen all the time, and if researchers filled out a report every time a tube was dropped or some PPE was ignored in a "pretty safe" scenario, there'd be almost no time for research.

I still think the total number of human-animal contacts outside the lab are at least an order of magnitude greater than inside of it, so I would rank the probabilities as (natural > benign research leak >> gain of function leak).

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