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Comment by hattmall | Hacker News Reader

You can judge. You can get all the evidence available to you and make an assessment. You can update that assessment as you gain more evidence, and you can share that with other people. No one has to defer to your authority if you don't make a good case. Stop waiting for "experts" to tell you how to use your judgement. Listening to supposed experts is why we have had such a prolonged battle with COVID with so much non-disease related societal harm.

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The problem with this argument is that in a complex field, a layperson does not have the baseline expertise needed to evaluate cases made by experts. Try reading a novel mathematical proof published in a journal paper and see if you can weigh the available evidence and make an assessment as to whether it's correct. The only reasonable way to do so as a layperson would be to acknowledge the fact that the proof was peer reviewed by experts, and so is likely correct, and assume that to be the case unless it is later disproven by experts. (A fact you'd also be unable to independently verify.)

In a field like mathematics it's obvious that we don't have the necessary tools to evaluate expert evidence, but the same is true in most complex fields, of which epidemiology is certainly one. The experts of course won't always be right, and their best guesses will evolve as more evidence is gathered, as they should. But asking people without specific domain knowledge, even intelligent generalists, to independently weight expert evidence without resorting to trust of experts is likely to result in less informed decision making, not more.

et Voila, Animal Farm.

We can't let the sheep make up their own minds, we have to make up their minds for them; for they are only sheep of course, and we are the pigs.

I mean, what would happen in one of those stupid sheep had a thought to themselves? They might think

    Hey isn't that a coronavirus reasearch lab right down the street? Maybe
    they know something about this new coronavirus?

I mean, if they starting thinking...we might have a real problem on our hands. Better lock it all down.

....

Human beings are built to defer to *legitamite* authority, its a principle of how we organize ourselves. Doesn't matter if its mathematics or goverment. But that legitamacy must be demonstrated. If a mathematician fails to answer basic mathematical questions, then his authority on the subject comes into question. When the authorities fail to answer basic questions (like where did this virus come from? Why aren't we investigating the wuhan lab? Why was Fauci funding it? Why was the man in charge of the WHO investigation the man who was in charge of funding it?), they are failing to demonstrate *legitamite* authority. In a functioning democracy, that failure would be met with replacement.

I should also point out than when I refer to experts, I'm talking about a consensus of the majority of experts. You can always find an expert to take any position on anything. But when most of the experts in a field agree, they're probably largely right.

My judgement such as it is, says we need a lot more time to be confident about the root cause and its premature to judge based solely on what is known at present from primary sources.

I also judge most people's opinions are being formed from at best secondary and probably tertiary sources.

I personally think your clarion call isn't helping.

The irony Herr is that its likely been so long that we won't find enough evidence to determine cause with high confidence.

The fact that a lab leak was even possible but it took over a year to get any researchers into the lab is a serious issue for data collection, not to mention the fact that the CCP got to pick those researchers and didn't share any lab records.

Its important that we learn from how this played out, but seems very unrealistic to think we could pinpoint the initial transmission event now.

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