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Comment by kipchak | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much everyone involved stands to lose from it proving to be true that a lab leak occurred. China looks bad, the CDC/US looks bad, researchers look bad, EcoHealth Alliance looks bad[1], the lancelet looks bad.[2] Heck even politifact and factcheck.org reported the idea as debunked for the first year or so, and Facebook for around the same time took down content with that angle.[3] It would also likely result in a backlash against interest in GOF research in general.

The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad, who will also unfortunately exaggerate their claims for greater effect.

[1]https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656

[2]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[3]https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-...

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I was with you up to here:

>The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad

I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened).

There's going to be quite a bit more externalizing risk while "privatizing" (even if it's nation states) gains in the future with bio-engineering, so these conversations should be had.

> I mean, collectively as humans we stand to benefit from knowing what happened so we can make more informed cost benefit decisions in the future about conducting risky research (if that's what happened).

You're not wrong, but I think what you're missing is that the risky research was funded (in part) by the us federal government, and no one voted for that in the first place. So even if we were all enlightened, what could we change? So many people still don't even know that there was a lab studying coronaviruses in wuhan.

You could highlight all the research being conducted in future so more stakeholders can weigh in on the risks. You can raise the requirements for conducting such research, or in extreme cases prevent it from being done. The assumption that “nothing can be done” has to be the worst approach, given the multitude of alternatives. Simply trying increases the odds that improvements are found.

People voted for it indirectly and if they knew that the virus originated because of that (I’m not saying it did, I have no idea) it would allow them to pressure politicians in insuring it never happens again.

They voted for it via representative democracy. If it comes out that there was a leak and politicians still want to fund this kind of thing, then they'll get less votes.

Nobody votes for most things in a representative democracy. I don't think you'd be surprised to know that bad press is effective at changing behavior.

The notable exception is Donald Trump, whose superpower is that shame causes him to double down. He's the kryptonite for a representative democracy. Just because of that, I'll never understand why people voted him in.

Transparency is the most important tool in becoming a better society.

I really don't think so. Knowing what actually happened makes no difference. What is important is knowing what problems exist and what can possibly happen as a consequence of them.

>"I really don't think so. Knowing what actually happened makes no difference. What is important is knowing what problems exist and what can possibly happen as a consequence of them."

Doing a root cause analysis is useful, because it provides you with information about certain modes of failure and their causes. Ignoring past failures, and using a 'tabula rasa' approach will deprive decision-makers of valuable information, and lead to repeating past errors.

That's such a diffuse benefit that you'd need to compare it to other things that benefit literally everyone alive - for example, the environment which sustains our existence - to determine how effective a motivator that is.

It's not looking great.

I definitely agree that there's good reason to know what actually happened, if for nothing else for the sake of long term trust in institutions. Instead of group, something more like organizations and institutions with the ability to investigate and hold people accountable would probably be more accurate.

I want to disagree with you and say it doesn’t matter, but you’re definitely right hiding bad situations is in the playbook of the authoritarian and should have no place in our society.

We have always been at war with Eurasia

*Eastasia.

I'm crushed that it is too late to ninja edit my comment

It matters in the same way that understanding why a plane crashed matters. If you can't figure out why a plane crashed then you can't improve flight safety much.

This is a helpful apolitical perspective. We need to improve social safety. But the pandemic is different in scope. It's not that the plane crashed. Rather, our technology "may have" allowed us to accidentally make a pandemic. It's as if no plane crash had ever occurred before, and now we made one happen. If we understand what really happened, we might see this event as bringing us into a new era in our evolution. The fact that we can imagine this to be the case even while firmly denying it to be what happened it's a firm sign that the times have changed.

I'm curious if you would expand on your last two sentences. They sound interesting but I don't quite grasp it.

That’s because it’s a mechanical device owned by a single large international company.

You can’t “engineer away” a virus.

The airplane analogy only makes sense of you say the result of investigation is to apply international sanctions against countries who continue to manufacture unsafe aircraft and fly them domestically…

…but, you have a) arguably no business telling them what to do in their own country and b) how are you even going to know, since those aircraft never visit your country?

Ie. yeah, great concept, but it’s so disparate from what we’re actually talking about it’s meaningless in this context.

It won’t fix things, or make things better knowing where it came from.

The only wins will be ideological.

>You can’t “engineer away” a virus.

If the virus is caused by risky research, you can stop doing risky research.

>arguably no business telling them what to do in their own country

Aren't there international standards for dealing with viruses? Also, some of the research in the Wuhan lab was funded by the US. So the US did have business telling them what to do in some cases regardless of international standards.

The genie is out of that bottle - the research has been done, and can be replicated by less honest actors. Under these circumstances, continuing this kind of research to understand how to combat viruses created by rouge actors might be the right thing to do.

By figuring out how it leaked, you can fix gaps in lab safety processes.

This is a spot on description. It's also the sad truth of why our institutions are decaying.

They have become heavily biased towards self-preservation over function.

The real question is why self-preservation cannot best be obtained through functioning.

because organizations are made up of people and people are imperfect. Eventually someone is bound to screw up large enough to put an organization's survival at risk. And the natural response by other members to try and suppress knowledge to ensure survival. That of course just makes things worse.

Isn't that because there is insufficient jeopardy for covering up a mistake?

Good leaders are merciful to sins confessed and decisive towards sins discovered.

People don’t like to change and a lot of the time for institutions to continue existing they need a radical shift in their approach or outlook.

What looks bad is having millions of people die and not learning how to prevent it in future. This should be a blameless post-mortem. Shit went wrong, this is how we fix it. Truth and reconciliation, not hide-behind-feels. The people who want to apportion blame grow stronger from all this cat and mouse.

Governments likely have it in form of top-secret intelligence reports for top decision makers.

Not easy to achieve though.

If one or more parties are "responsible" then public sentiment (amplified by social media) will bring the pitchforks.

That translates to political support and basically guarantees the election or increased support for certain types of politicians and response, which in turn will impact diplomacy.

It would take some supreme social engineering to get society at large to accept the idea of a blameless post mortem. It's really not part of the broader cultural lexicon. Even companies struggle and they are much smaller and simpler systems.

Responsibility and liability are intrinsically linked in the public mind.

and why shouldn't the responsible be liable?

Reparations are OK for some things, but not for causing worldwide pandemics?

..the point of the grandparent post is that if we emphasise _liability_, it's less likely we'll get any information.

This is a common understanding in industries dealing with safety. If you want to _punish_, focus on blame. If you want to focus on _helping ensure the problem doesn't happen again_, remove the threat of blame.

Also, mentioning reparations brings up ideas of ...current US political discussion... and is likely to polarise this discussion. Please try and keep this productive.

We are WAAAAY past the industry problem. It's not a faulty Boeing or improperly constructed nuclear plant.

This a problem of global proportions. We've had protracted wars over much smaller things in the past.

>It would also likely result in a backlash against interest in GOF research in general.

If general GOF research caused this pandemic, then maybe there should be a backlash against it. Lot's of science doesn't happen because it's too dangerous to human lives, even if the theoretical benefits outweigh the costs.

The other problem is the damage they have done to the institutions and the publics trust. Even if it's a natural event they all have to go. Who can trust them to tell the truth the next time. They have burned those bridges.

> The only group that stands to benefit are those who benefit by making those groups look bad, who will also unfortunately exaggerate their claims for greater effect.

Does this also hold for Root Cause Analysis?

Assuming there was a lab leak, the root cause to me would seem to be organizations overestimating the benefit from GOF research compared to the risks. Why that happened is a bit harder to answer. A couple potential explanations are a leak was actually a one in a million chance (this seems unlikely given past issues)[1], there is some extreme benefit we just haven't seen yet (also seems somewhat unlikely) or organizations are likely to accept risks if it means everyone gets to keep their jobs and grants keep coming in.

How to fix that problem is difficult, as gain of function research is complicated and obscure enough to be off the radar of most people until something goes wrong, so questioning scientific orthodoxy is somewhat impossible for the average person. I'm not sure what can be done about it, other than those with respectable credentials advocating for transparency and and regular people maintaining a healthy sense of curiosity.

[1]https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=837679

If nobody can benefit from truth being public - there is no truth.

The only group that benefits are those who want to know the truth, and that is dangerous cause the truth will make the liars look bad? I mean, no offense but that sounds like something a sociopath would say.

I wouldn't say the truth itself is dangerous, but it is dangerous to the organizations involved. Those who benefit from the truth such as you or I do not have the ability to uncover it, and the institutions that could have the ability to do so don't benefit from doing so. There's no impartial oversight group outside of regular citizens, who unfortunately lack the ability to hold their institutions to account for a variety of reasons. The (potential) truth is dangerous to the parties involved, so they have an incentive not to investigate or ignore the possibility. They might even give some not completely self serving explanations/rationalizations if asked, such as keeping the peace or not causing a panic.

If for example there was a leak, and it was purely the fault of one country, I would imagine there would be vigorous finger pointing.

> If for example there was a leak, and it was purely the fault of one country, I would imagine there would be vigorous finger pointing.

I imagine by the same account, if a person is murdered, it was purely the fault of one murderer, that there would be vigorous finger pointing.

However, if they don't come forward and citizens, media, and prosecutors have to determine who killed someone; not only should they be required to pay significantly more if they have assets, but the punishment should be harsher because they deliberately withheld the truth causing their victims families more suffering.

Politifact and factcheck get plenty of things wrong so I wouldn't say "heck even" to that. These websites are a joke.

I agree they leave a lot to be desired, but they're both at least perceived as somewhat reliable and trustworthy - factcheck is used by Facebook for example. I'm sure lots of people have pointed to those sites as proof, unfortunately.

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