Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

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No. I'm seriously posting a paper by the director of the University College of London Genetics Institute.

The same twitter thread (again, same person: director of UCL UGI) shows a Lancet article placing the first documented hospitalization on December 1, and a different source documenting a case in China in mid-November:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...

So yes, there are multiple lines of evidence. This isn't even remotely controversial. You're arguing that the sky is red, and your only counter-argument to the evidence otherwise is incredulity.

> are there any actual sequenced, dated samples from Italy in December? That's the standard of evidence here, not some crappy antigen test or unsequenced amplification hit.

I mean, you're inventing "standards of evidence" here, but as long as you're asking: yes. Dated, PCR-confirmed wastewater samples in Italy were purified by gel electrophoresis and sequenced.

https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/13280584020529684...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.25.20140061v...

No one is arguing that the earliest known case on Dec 11 is when sars-cov-2 "began". We know it must be older than that. More recent reviews of chinese epidemiology don't mention the hubei patient, the Dec 11 case seems to be consensus earliest verified case.

And yes, for a data point of this importance a random environmental sewage PCR handled over half a year later is of dubious provenance. If you've never done a ton of environmental PCR work you'd be amazed how easy it is to contaminate everything, but whatever. Given how contagious sars-cov-2 is, if it really were present in Italy in early December... we'd probably have more definitive proof of it's presence much earlier than Jan 31.

Ok, fine. We're agreed then: the virus was obviously circulating widely by December, which means in all likelihood, it could have been found in pubic places in Wuhan China. Like, say...a public market.

I'm not saying it had to happen that way, just that finding shreds of viral RNA in a market, in December, in Wuhan, is in no way dispositive evidence of the market being the origin of the virus -- any more than finding flu virus in the ball pit at a McDonalds means that the flu came from Ronald McDonald.

> And yes, for a data point of this importance a random environmental sewage PCR handled over half a year later is of dubious provenance. If you've never done a ton of environmental PCR work you'd be amazed how easy it is to contaminate everything, but whatever.

"They could have made a mistake, so I'm going to ignore all evidence which disagrees with my prior beliefs."

Millions of old people in dense cities turn out to be a fantastically sensitive instrument for detecting the presence of sars-cov-2 in a population. You’d have to explain nearly two months of cryptic transmission that left no hospital reports or verifiable samples…

You do realize these papers pointing to an international nov-dec timeline only -weaken- any link to WIV at all, and have in fact been heavily leaned upon by Chinese conspiracy theorists as evidence this disease has -western- origins?

> You do realize these papers pointing to an international nov-dec timeline only -weaken- any link to WIV at all, and have in fact been heavily leaned upon by Chinese conspiracy theorists as evidence this disease has -western- origins?

Chairman Pooh? Is that you?

The CCP can fuck right off with this idiocy. Seriously. Nobody with half a brain is falling for it.

You don't get to suppress information and/or not look for it in the first place, then claim that the lack of information is indicative of something.

I'm not a huge fan of "appeal to authority", but I'm curious what your credentials and experience in this area are?

The person you are arguing with claims to have direct experience working with viruses in a lab setting.

Is this another of HN's all too frequent, "computer science major arguing with expert in field completely unrelated to computer science"?

Reasoning doesn't require credentials, please let's keep it that way.

One of the parties did an appeal to authority as a way to _prove_ they entered _relevant_ evidence.

This is obviously entirely misguided, and if you start making such basic logical mistakes it is expedient to inquire about the posters background to know if they've reached the limit to their ability to create reasoned arguments.

There are nuances, but at it's core either it was valid for them to make that appeal and it is valid for us to request their credentials (which is essentially an appeal to authority--"who has the better credentials?"), or it was not valid for them to make that appeal and it is not valid for us to request their credentials. I lean towards the latter view.

Logical mistakes don't weaken a person's entire argument (we don't want to just see who's "winning"), or even weaken the line of reasoning they were invoked to support -- they just fail to provide evidence.

One of the parties called into question the validity of a paper the other party posted, and the other party rebutted by implying that as the director of an established institution, the paper's author has something to lose. I find that argument weak, but the initial questioning of validity also provided no evidence or made any strong arguments as to why the paper was not valid.

Appeals to authority are useful not as logical arguments but as a way to avoid wasting time on drivel, and I don't believe that to be the case here.

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