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Comment by rozab | Hacker News Reader

Evidence? The hypothesis of the article is that certain scientists did believe a lab leak was likely, but hid their views. The article provides ample evidence for this.

If you also want it to conclusively prove the lab leak hypothesis in the same breath then I'd say your expectations are too high. Better publications have tackled the subject anyway: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...

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I too would like to see some evidence for the hypothesis that hn is "the smartest forum on the web".

Between public “popular” forums, it very well might be. What alternatives are there? I don’t know any big subreddit that has as smart people. Lesswrong has more intelligent people (probably), but it’s a much narrower, more technical forum.

Then the title of the article is highly misleading. Using "Scientists" instead of "Some scientists" implies that the great majority of the scientists believed in this hypothesis, and there is no evidence for that.

And you would make the same criticism against articles that denied it could have had a lab origin? At some point people don't believe you anymore.

I don't have a strong opinion about what happened, it may or may not be a lab leak. It's still ongoing and I feel it will be a very long and sterile debate with few scientific facts to prove anything.

Granted, if the title of the article was "Scientists believed that Covid had natural origins...", this article wouldn't attract my attention as much, because I already believe that to be the popular opinion. But if, in this hypothetical title, "Scientists" only represented a minority of scientists, it would still be a very misleading title.

Did you notice though that the lab leak in mainstream media was stated as being conclusively not a lab leak - not even potentially? That's what I saw, only relatively recently did the tune change.

Oddly enough the mainstream media I saw stated that it was conclusively a lab leak, orchestrated by the democrats, in conjunction with soros, gates, leftists, globalist and the CCP. There was zero potential that it could be anything else at all, or that even one of the supposed conspiring parties was not involved.

The point is that scientists felt compelled to hide their views for one hypothesis.

Yes, some scientists did and they didn't want speculation and suppressed the fact with political means. There were other scientists that did entertain the thought publicly and they were branded as being anti-science. Just for entertaining the thought, not for saying the had any conclusive evidence.

If an article is headlined "Firefighters rescue cat from tree"

Is your assumption that all firefighters were involved in the rescue?

It’s not reasonable to assume all firefighters were involved in a cat rescue.

But if one says “Firefighters think cats are cute”, it certainly appears that it implies most firefighters share this opinion.

I do agree with you we should require specificity as a pillar to integrity but it seems like a long way to there.

Also, the scientists with the most power were the ones doing the misleading. For whatever reason, the power structure has been such that the scientists willing to mislead are elevated to positions where they are given the opportunity to mislead the most people, and not challenged by other scientists^1 like you would expect in a community dependent on debate to find the truth.

And it's not as if this is leading to a substantial change in the community. If we're being honest, scientists with positions of power are just as likely to mislead us in the future when they believe the truth might be harmful to their funding.

1 in a substantial way

That's one of the tough parts about headline interpretations because you're right. I think editors use it as a sort of con knowing it can leave them with a way out. Here's an NPR headline using the same term that could be seen as just as misleading:

"Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence" April 22, 2020 4:08 PM ET https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/841925672/scientists-debunk-l...

Agreed - both should say "Some scientists".

I think if you qualify every bit of a statement, it comes off as verbose, which mollifies the impact. If you have half a brain, you should know that it means "some scientists" not "all scientists". I suppose it's normal to read absolutes into things you know nothing about or are unwilling to invest thought into. Then the ambiguity leads to lots of pointless quibbles.

Just like when CNN, WaPo, etc post “The GOP…” or “Republicans…”

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