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Comment by asojfdowgh | Hacker News Reader

Coincidences arn't evidence though, Coincidences don't need to be debunked

Enough coincidences absolutely do need to be debunked. I'm not sure that's the case here, but talking in the abstract - if you start to see tens or hundreds of well documented coincidences, there comes a point at which you can no longer reasonably dismiss them.

Of the 9 us intel agencies asked:

- 4 refused to say what they believed likely, because they couldn’t decide between a lab leak and natural origins;

- 4 weakly assessed a natural origin, but didn’t rule out a lab leak;

- 1 moderately assessed a lab leak, but didn’t rule out natural origin.

This report was before a number of studies that led to more support for the lab leak — eg, the patented gene being the only genetic difference between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13.

You don’t have to believe it, but surely you can’t say that there’s zero evidence supporting a lab leak.

The US military was in Wuhan for the military games right at the beginning of the outbreak and they were some of the first to get sick. They also flew through Seattle to get there, which was the site of the first outbreak in the US. Combine that with the history of leaks from Ft. Detrick. I haven't seen any of this be debunked. Why won't they allow inspectors into Ft. Detrick?

The lab leak theory originated in China in January 2020. It wasn’t until much later that China started pushing propaganda about Ft. Detrick to distract everyone. It serves no purpose than to get everyone to stop talking about the origin being china and instead shift the blame to everyone else.

If China is so positive that they are not the origin they would have opened up for an investigation in 2020. But it’s 2022 and it hasn’t happened and it’s too late.

They've allowed inspectors from the WHO to investigate twice: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.france24.com/en/asia-pacifi...

I remember reading loads about this at the time. Didn't they severely restrict their movement and ability to investigate?

Yes and the people who investigated and the WHO complained. So basically 2 worthless investigations.

How many inspectors have been allowed into Ft. Detrick?

The only people beating the drum on Ft. Detrick is china. The country that created the conspiracy theory. It's nothing more than misdirection.

> If China is so positive that they are not the origin they would have opened up for an investigation in 2020.

I doubt it. I think it's just a standard Chinese reaction to refuse international oversight and they would do this regardless of the truth. So there's not much of a conclusion to be taken from this.

If you want to dismiss the connection between pieces of evidence, you need an argument. Not just calling them a coincidence and dismissing the connection out of hand.

This is something I'm trying to sort out. Is there a qualitative difference between a coincidence and evidence?

Ex: Supposing they recover the old database from the WIV and they found the SARS-CoV-2 sequence in there, and notes that described it as the result of an ongoing project. It's still possible that the exact same sequence occurred naturally and leaked to humans that way. It could be a coincidence that the sequence is exactly the same.

It seems that the difference between this and the other coincidences is merely a question of orders of magnitude of likelihood. Otherwise it's the same sort of thing. Therefore, the coincidences so far stated are tantamount to weak evidence.

Yes? No?

No, not really. There's evidence of lots of events that are extremely unlikely to occur by chance, and it gets labelled as a "coincidence" by people who don't like where it points and are trying to stop people drawing obvious conclusions. The term "coincidence" only really makes sense when the probability of accidental coexistence is very high but that's not the case here.

Do you live in the US? This would be part of circumstantial evidence in conjunction with a response of why the statement was removed.

by itself there is nothing to debunk, it is a fact, the statement existed before, now it is down. That clearly warrants an explanation.

i feel like the word coincidence is abused like the way the word conspiracy is abused, to shut down the conversation. The circumstances of these two events together absolutely are relevant to any lab leak investigation.

On the contrary, put enough coincidences together and you have what is called evidence. They're not proof, but you certainly need to address them if you want to be taken seriously.

"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."

https://xkcd.com/552/

How many places have virology labs in China doing this kind of research? Now many places have wet markets?

Now calculate the probability that a virus would happen to naturally mutate in a wet market next to a virology research facility.

A lab leak has the highest probability of being true. It takes a mountain of evidence to overcome that very simple probability calculation.

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