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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of bad headline-writing on this subject today.

Here's the NYT's headline: Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says

And then the sub-head (or dek, if you want to sound like you're in the know): The conclusion, which was made with “low confidence,” came as America’s intelligence agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus.

So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cause,' and a confidence score: 'low'.

The NYT goes on to say:

Some officials briefed on the intelligence said that it was relatively weak and that the Energy Department’s conclusion was made with “low confidence,” suggesting its level of certainty was not high. While the department shared the information with other agencies, none of them changed their conclusions, officials said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/us/politics/china-lab-lea...

View on HN

The headline is absolutely, literally true. I also don't understand the nuance that anyone could miss here. The astounding thing is that the Energy Dept. can say that a lab leak is the most likely cause of the pandemic, and people jump out in front of them to say that what they somehow still mean is that a lab leak wasn't the cause of the pandemic.

They have "low confidence" that it was a lab leak (there might not even be a physical way to prove that conclusively), but they have higher confidence in that theory than in any other theory or possibly even than in all other theories combined. When evidence pointing to your previous belief being untrue makes you more confident in your previous belief, you're in When Prophecy Fails territory.

-----

edit:

Just wanted to add this wikipedia quote because it makes me sad...

  * 12:05 am. December 21. No visitor. Someone in the group notices that another clock in the room shows 11:55. The group agrees that it is not yet midnight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails#Sequence_o...

How can "low confidence" and "higher confidence than all other theories combined" jive? Does it require "all other theories" to not include "we don't have a clue" which is the most likely of all or am I missing something else?

Imagine if it's a curve like this:

- No idea for either solution and we'll never know - 70% chance

- Lab leak - 20% chance

- Occurred in nature - 10% chance

In that case, you could say that the most likely answer is "lab leak" if you must have an answer, but it's very "low confidence." I don't know what the actual odds are, it's just made up for demonstration.

Imagine you have a bunch of crappy and unrealistic theories about why something occured.

What those phrases mean is that the lab leak is simply the least crappy theory.

“We don’t know” is by definition not a theory though, it’s a lack of a theory.

"we don't have a clue" is not a theory about the origin. It's a theory about your knowledge of the origin. It's not in the pool of competing theories you're considering in this context.

True, in this case “nature” is basically the catch all “not lab” theory already including the probabilities the source is "not lab but we haven't named the source".

Check out the video I linked above about Survival Heuristics and Avoding Intelligence Traps.

Its fairly standard SOP. If you don't know what it means that video explains it fairly well.

Well say you have one theory you reckon has a 40% chance of being correct, one theory with a 5% chance, and one theory with a 55% chance. One theory is more likely than the rest put together, but is still almost as likely to be incorrect as not.

Plus "none of the above" is always an option. You could have 3 theories that all have very little supporting evidence - one of those theories could be the most likely of all the actual theories, but "none of the above" could be even more likely if the best theory is still weak.

It sounds like it's just semantics but there's a world of difference between saying a theory is very likely correct and saying that it's the most likely of competing theories.

A "sightly-less-shitty-than-other-theories" theory is still a shitty theory. Low-confidence means exactly what it sounds like.

then why even propose any theory ? why not let it remain a mystery.

> then why even propose any theory ? why not let it remain a mystery.

Reductio ad absurdum won't work here. There are ways to test a "low confidence" theory, and re-evaluate its confidence level. This is called science.

You aren't going to get any confirmation or material evidence until the chinese government allows it to happen, and with their initial reaction to the situation before the rest of the world kenw what was happening and their reaction to the WHO inquiries, odds are we'll never get anything aside from "low confidence".

Science isn't a magic wand, its a process, and honestly assuming we do get access an investigation like this most likely wouldn't even involve the scientific method at all. If science was enough to determine the origin given current available knowledge it probably would've been solved already.

You can’t call spoliation “low confidence.”

That's what China wants yes.

But while this helps the CCP party save face, it doesn't help to move on with the investigation. It's not even about the blame. We investigate air crashes in such detail so we can prevent them from happening again. Of course with an even bigger event like this we should do the same.

The pandemic has happened and no kind of blame or money can revert it. But we can try to learn everything about it that we can to stop the next one. I'm sure it was an accident but we need to know what happened.

For this reason I really think China should cooperate with the investigators.

Pilots are licensed and airframes are certified. Licenses can be revoked. Where are the personal civil and criminal penalties for the GoF staff?

You're missing the point. The main purpose of airplane crash investigations is to find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again in the future. This is done mostly without placing blame on anyone, precisely because that leads to finding a scapegoat instead of finding and fixing a problem.

Finding and fixing a problem is exactly what needs to happen here too.

On that basis does the actual cause even matter as opposed to mapping out likely vs unlikely caused?

I’m sure air crash investigations would resolve many safety issues completely unrelated to the actual cause of a crash.

let's remember that the US contributed the the funding of this research https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

Assigning blame is not so important here. Finding out what happened is so it can be prevented from happening again.

But the US could perhaps push for openness considering they contributed financially. Though I suspect they already have and failed.

People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with.

All of the theories had the properties of being convenient darlings of some pre-existing political faction.

The most responsible thing is to claim ignorance on the origin story unless you have genuine, credentialed, expertise and analytical training for it and even then, those people choose their audiences and presentation carefully because of the unintended consequences.

Those who refuse to fuel speculation on topics they are unqualified to comment on is by definition, absent and invisible.

It's also a distraction. The real problem is the chain of decisions and coordinating made by hundreds of groups around the planet between say November and April that catalyzed this from a problem to a global catastrophe. That's really the focus here because an H5N1 mutation is potentially around the corner and that could be much much worse.

It's dramatically affected egg supplies as you've probably seen at your local supermarket. A human uncontrolled outbreak would be a disaster. It's far more dangerous than covid.

For instance, that's today's date: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...

The first part (origin) has already happened, the second part about the management, that's the actual important stuff.

"People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with." You are right and thats the most fascinating / absurd part of this whole thing. Somehow wet market vs lab leak has political sides and people are emotionally invested in one over the other. Its crazy, lets just have the truth and move on, either way it came out of China and savaged the world. People don't want the lab leak theory to be true for the sole reason that Trump said it and they believe Trump is the devil. I am very much not a fan of Trump and saw his actions leading up to the election as a clear and present danger to our democracy but still have no emotional investment in one theory over another. I just want the truth. This is an example of how insane American politics have gotten over the last 8? years

Do you need the truth though? In some ways the mere question on the origin of the virus is a political one. No one in the public has ever cared to have definitive proof where any virus came from before. The ability to point to a specific time and place is probably outside of our ability. A lab had it on Nov 1st, 2021. A lab worker brought it home, is that 100% proof that was the first infection? Or did the lab get it from a place where it was already infecting people?

Finally, what do we do with the info? Is it just a, 'oh well, that's interesting'?

Moreover, disease stories has a very long history of being used to justify racism and genocide.

There's a specific American racist connection with blaming Chinese immigrants for disease that goes back to the era of the Chinese exclusion act of the 1880s. There were riots attacking chinatowns and doing ethnic cleansing with lynchings and mass destruction in Denver, Tacoma, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Eureka, Seattle and others throughout the 1880s.

Eugenicist texts of the early 1900s claimed Asians were disease carriers as well.

The general public's relationship with this stuff has only really been ugly and I can't stand here in 2023 pontificating absolute free speech and pretend like these types of narratives won't become tools of violence and racism in the hands of scammers and hatemongers.

So are you advocating for the government lying to the American people over where it came from because the truth might seem to be racist? Really? You would rather the government conceal information about a virus that killed millions of people because it might make some people upset with Asians? What else would you like the government to lie about? Murder rates? Crime Rates? The color of a man they are looking for accused of sexual assault?

Additionally it seems like you are advocating removing free speech? Friend you are sitting here actively campaigning for a 1984 style society. Not sure I have ever seen this one before; well done.

> So are you advocating for the government lying to the American people over where it came from because the truth might seem to be racist?

no.

> Really?

no.

> You would rather the government conceal information about a virus that killed millions of people because it might make some people upset with Asians?

no.

> Additionally it seems like you are advocating removing free speech?

no.

The personal responsibility for the liberty of speech includes reasonable consideration for the reaction of people. That's the whole point of Oliver Wendell Holmes "fire in a crowded theater" when he concretized the modern notion of free speech with Learned Hand.

Conduct has consequences

"The personal responsibility for the liberty of speech includes reasonable consideration for the reaction of people."

You said no to all my questions and then with your last paragraph again seemed to advocate for what I said.

Only if you ignore what "reasonable consideration for the reaction of people." means, which is exactly what you are doing. People like you are the most painful to converse with because you offer responses that are the considerate equivalent to "I know you are but what am I?".

Like, are you seriously going to pretend that you mean the same thing by the "reasonable consideration for the reaction of people" when that's exactly what you've been debating with dozens of people in this thread. Give me a break. It's bad faith, highschool kid that just read ayn rand style posting.

I know you are but what am I?

What a self-serving characterization... the issue wasn't that it was "racist" it's that people would have had excessively racialized and polarized reactions. Why are you being so purposefully obtuse about this? It's not a hard concept to grasp at all, but instead you pretend as if no one wanted to say it because the word was bad... no, they were avoiding the obvious reaction that would come from it.

It was excessive eisegesis. There may be a less scholarly word for it. Basically op presupposed a dynamic and then found his suppositions in my comment.

Considering possible eisegesis is one of the primary ways responsible experts with an audience police their speech.

It's probably impossible to both effectively communicate complex ideas and defend against all potential eisegesis. I wouldn't be surprised if enlightenment era philosophers talked about this. I'll readily admit their literature are beyond my patience so forgive me for my ignorance

I'm not being self serving, what could I possibly get out of this? I don't understand what the poster is saying or advocating for. I still don't apparently. It seems like both op and you are saying the truth is not important because it could lead to "excessively racialized and polarized reactions".

Which is exactly what I said op was saying in the first place and you and he reacted like I physically attacked you. From my perspective you are being needlessly obtuse not understanding what I am saying. The thought of not telling the truth and willingly advocate for the government to just ignore or not share the root cause of a pandemic that killed millions is anathema to me. I literally cannot wrap my head around it. How can you take the position that it's best not to know because some rogue elements could take it badly?

What you got out of it was an unfair characterization of something that only serves to advance your argument.

> It seems like both op and you are saying the truth is not important because it could lead to "excessively racialized and polarized reactions".

The truth... you act like there's a wholesale ban on truth. I think you are again mischaracterizing what is actually the media trying to not whip people up into a frenzy. People get whipped up into frenzies, you should probably check out some history. Maybe something on WWII. I'd recommend, Century of The Self, a great documentary that shows what kind of frenzies people get whipped up into when you have politicians using demagoguery to advance their agendas. You don't see how the entire past 3 years isn't completely different if every news paper is running with the headline "CHINESE VIRUS LEAK"? You are going to pretend, the same populace which was incapable of handling any actual discourse on the pandemic response, vaccination, etc, is going to just have a rational response? Regardless of where the virus came from, of which there is plenty literature available for the curious and literate, your perspective here seems childish at best.

>Which is exactly what I said op was saying in the first place and you and he reacted like I physically attacked you. From my perspective you are being needlessly obtuse not understanding what I am saying. The thought of not telling the truth and willingly advocate for the government to just ignore or not share the root cause of a pandemic that killed millions is anathema to me. I literally cannot wrap my head around it. How can you take the position that it's best not to know because some rogue elements could take it badly?

This is childishly naive. It's not rogue elements. The US president at the time was an actual demagogue.

It was legitimately a Chinese. Virus. Leak.

Your entire approach to this is arrogant. You have decided that based on your superiority and judgement that your mental inferiors are too simple to handle the truth and thus it should not be revealed. While I dislike him, Trump was a democratically elected president.

"your perspective here seems childish at best" This appears to be your approach to your fellow citizens, you are right and every one else is a child. You come off just as narcissist as Trump. Grow up friend, realize there is nothing special about you, you are just as intelligent and naive as your fellow man.

> You have decided that based on your superiority and judgement that your mental inferiors are too simple to handle the truth and thus it should not be revealed. While I dislike him, Trump was a democratically elected president.

I didn't make any decisions and you are incredibly foolish for even pretending that's the case. More of your false narrative creation that justifies your bullshit grievance-complex self-victimization. I don't edit any newspapers, I don't work in any government's health complex. I'm an IP attorney. Get a grip.

> This appears to be your approach to your fellow citizens, you are right and every one else is a child.

No, not sure why you are equivocating like that. As I pointed out, anyone who is interested is free to access all the literature on this. I did, you did.

>Grow up friend, realize there is nothing special about you, you are just as intelligent and naive as your fellow man.

Maybe read my post first and then get back to me.

lol, you seem angry and have devolved to personal attacks. I'll stop responding, don't want to upset you anymore. Sorry for hurting your feelings. Hope the rest of your day is better. Cheers.

You could just actually respond to what I said, instead of your made up version that has no resemblance to the words I wrote. That would definitely make me feel less annoyed about this conversation.

Or you could just ignore me. Allowing yourself to be emotionally compromised by an anonymous stranger on the internet is not a good thing. I'm not going to continue this discussion because I generally think it's a net negative for you. I wish you all the best.

It's actually totally normal to be annoyed by people who rudely put words in your mouth - you'd understand this if you ever had a normal social interaction. Couching this as you doing me some sort of favor, because I cannot navigate my own emotions, is just more of the same dishonesty from you. Rude and obnoxious.

You guys, as funny as this is to follow, pls take a break from the computer.

You too, take a break.

"you doing me some sort of favor"

You're welcome!

A response so misguided that it'd make me think you were illiterate if you weren't so obviously disingenuous

Of course I'm disingenuous. I can't figure out why you're still responding to me when I am being so obvious :)

I guess the foolish belief that you'd eventually develop some kind of self-respect

No, I don't think you can help yourself. You have to get the last word in and you have to ensure it's an insult. At this point you are emotionally compromised, you can't stop yourself. I'm sorry for breaking you.

Entirely a projection

"No, I don't think you can help yourself. You have to get the last word in and you have to ensure it's an insult. At this point you are emotionally compromised, you can't stop yourself"

I think I've proven my point. I'll call the game now. All the best:)

It really doesn't have to be nasty at all.

I don't need it, not much in life anyone really needs besides food, air and shelter. This applies to the majority of information on earth. Doesn't stop me wanting to learn about things. Not much I would do with it either, it would just let me know what happened and what caused my kids to spend a year plus in isolation. I'm just a single guy, consequences are a little above my paygrade. Do we need to cause of the Ohio train crash? 9/11?

I don't think it is just 'evil' China here. I think this is the US, China, and other world researchers who with NIMBY were doing research on coronaviruses and modifying them. Let's not use racism to mask the military-industrial-government complex as the true culprit. I do believe though that an accidental, not bioweapons release, of the virus occurred because people make mistakes. The coverup is why I think this needs to be vetted. It needs to be prevented, and not satisfy some stupid political ideologues. I commented elsewhere in this thread, but I lived in China over 7 years. I have been to Wuhan and the wet market there, and I have been disappointed at seeing tech sites in the US and China that don't live up to what people think when they hear a BSL-4 lab designation. Fauci and crew admit to doing experiments at the WIV, but argue the semantics "gain-of-function". The firin cleavage site on COVID-19 is very unique compared to other Corona viruses. It seems very plausible a lab leak spread to the wet market. We need to audit and call for more transparency so this never happens again, or it is minimized and can be attacked promptly and not when it's too late next time.

Where’s your comment from two years ago belittling the wet market theory as shitty?

This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.

I saw a lot of folks saying that the theories all kinda stank at the time, and to wait and see. Interestingly, a lot of folks also kept quiet and didn't champion any theories. Maybe I can link you to a lack of comment two years ago to back up my bona fides?

Normally when you try to solve a serious problem in a small company you might want to know who caused the problem, but most of the times you just need to know it wasn't intentional and you focus on addressing the outcome and making sure it never happens again.

In big enterprises usually solving the problem is secondary to finding who the culprit is so that all future problems can be blamed on that department.

China and the US are both like big enterprises. None of them is actually focused on making sure all the problems that happened will not happen again. People are just focused on blaming their domestic shit on the other.

China releases a strategy paper on US hegemony, US brings the lab leak theory back into the spotlight. It doesn't really matter if there was valid research on that theory. The fact that the major newspapers come out with it 1 day after China releases their stuff, shows you it's political.

It may be right, it may be wrong, an unintended leak has always been a very likely on the list for me. It's not like lack of security in labs hasn't been an issue in the US, in China and in a bunch of labs in Europe for that matter. Probably other countries are way worse.

The point isn't whether it's right or wrong, the point is that the goal isn't to solve the problem, but exclusively to assert blame.

It seems that lo these many years later all the theories are still full of holes. Lab leak is plausible but there's no public evidence to back it. Somehow the DOE thinks they have something but we haven't seen it. Just based on history, zoonotic remains most likely but no host has been found.

There’s evidence that it’s more likely than various other theories, but there isn’t a smoking gun. That’s the kind of nuance that’s easy to ignore in favor of your preconceived notions because weak evidence is rarely worth changing your mind over.

At a practical level I don’t think there’s much difference between the lab link being a 7% chance vs a 70% chance. What’s more concerning is the potential of future leaks and what responses they might result in. The possibility that local officials get in CYA mode over a possible lab leak of a more dangerous virus is seriously concerning.

"There’s evidence that it’s more likely than various other theories,"

None that I've seen.

And the possibility of a future leak is probably unrelated to the possibility of this one having been a leak.

“None that I’ve seen.”

Which has little to do with the existence of said evidence. I’ve never seen direct evidence for the year Columbus sailed.

Anyway, many things that would make future leaks less likely also make past leaks less likely. The types of experiments being conducted and the types of labs those experiments are conducted in. Oversight, funding, and systems for reporting safety issues etc etc.

I'm responding to you saying there's evidence. To what were you referring?

The evidence used by the Energy Department in their assessment.

The DOE has not, to my knowledge, published their "low confidence" intelligence. Only their conclusion. Which still disagrees with every other agency. So it doesn't seem we actually have more evidence for lab leak.

> Which still disagrees with every other agency.

But that is a lie. From the article:

“The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory.”

Calling it a lie is a bit uncharitable. It’s gone from “disagrees with every other agency” to “disagrees with the majority of agencies.” I wouldn’t say that dramatically changes the point.

It's also weird to me that the Department of Energy (and not, say, the CDC/DHHS or USAMRIID or what have you) is advancing such hypotheses in the first place. What does the origin of SARS-CoV-2 have to do with American energy policy?

DOE supervises the national labs, which have 1) bio experience 2) high classification 3) supercomputers 4) lots more scientists than CIA or God help us FBI. DOE has organic science resources. The other agencies tend to rely on academic consultants, who are compromised because no one wants to bring virology labs under intense and blaming scrutiny.

That would also imply they were specifically looking at lab protocols to determine if there was a possibility of leak and perhaps not fully evaluating the likelihood of other origins which would be outside their expertise. The CDC/NIH/WHO operate loads more labs and also employ loads of epidemiologists.

As the Post article indicates, DOE has tens of thousands of scientists and has worked on NBC weapons for many decades.

Right, but that still doesn't answer why the DoE is supervising the national labs or otherwise has any significant degree of bio experience in the first place.

Read this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/27/...

There's a paywall.

Because "Department of Energy" is a friendly name for what should really be the Department of Nuclear Weapons, a subsidiary of the Defense Department.

DoE does a lot of civilian stuff now (electrical grid, cybersecurity, etc.) but it's kind of an add-on. The first couple of national labs - places like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge - are historically related to the nuke mission.

When it hit, I took the first Wuhan sequence and ran it through some Python and pulled out string repeats in nucleotides. I then searched for those repeated sequences in Google and found the NIH lab in Maryland was doing research on how to better infect mice or rats with a substitution technique for twiddling into a cell's ports. So, it's entirely plausible, but without proof it isn't scientific.

What was the origin of Bubonic Plague, of AIDS, of Polio? Do we know in sufficient detail? I remember many saying that the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 may never be known. Say it did escape from a Chinese lab - is that all you need to know? Or would you want to know how it came to be in the lab in the first place?

I remember articles and quotes firmly rejecting the lab leak hypothesis and darkly implying that those championing the theory had a hidden agenda.

The considerations were:

— there were random attacks on Asians

- public health officials and scientists were worried about an anti science backlash

- virologists were really worried about a backlash against virology

— relations with China had not yet deteriorated to their current levels and government leaders didn’t want to antagonize them

So there was a semi-coordinated effort by government officials and the scientific establishment to put the lab leak theory beyond the pale. The middlebrow media either wittingly or unwittingly went along for the ride. Their readership ate it up.

There were and are problematic elements of the lab leak people as well - I still see people (on this site) who claim that some or all aspects of the virus were synthetically created at the behest of Anthony Fauci. You may say I'm nutpicking, but I truly have a hard time determining what the lab leak theory is sometimes.

But my sense was that the agenda behind the lab leak family of theories was to lay blame at some human or humans for the events of the pandemic, which to me seems like a fairly futile endeavor. One of my questions for these people has always been this: say their darkest theories are correct; what am I supposed to do about that? It seems that the best course of action was to wear masks, socially isolate as much as possible, and get vaccinated and keep getting vaccinations as new strains appear.

It’s one thing for nutjobs to push a bad theory for some whacky reason and another thing entirely for establishment figures to shade the truth in order to push a (positive!) agenda. We have so many nutjobs, in part, because of generations of establishment figures being dishonest for the greater good.

Lab leak was always a better theory. There were what hundreds? thousands? of wet markets across China and two bsl-4 labs. Given that the virus arose in a city with a wet market and a bsl-4 lab, the prior should be that it had to do with the lab and not the wet market. That could be overcome with evidence, of course, but it is not some out there idea.

What are you supposed to do about it? Maybe nothing. But if you are an establishment figure, certainly don’t lie about it and further destroy our society’s trust in experts.

Do you think all these establishment figures all had perfect knowledge of the origin of this novel virus and all chose a coordinated lie, or does it seem possible that this was all the process (which I'll note is ongoing and may never be complete) of figuring it out, which is indeed messy and happens over time and in public?

I called it semi-coordinated and shading the truth above. I think they privately and in small groups decided to shade the truth or keep silent while their colleagues were doing so. All for “the greater good.”

Specifically, the talking point put out to the media that lab leak is highly unlikely is wrong and was unreasonable based on what they knew at the time.

I think that shading of the truth was arrogant and pernicious.

When did this talking point that the lab leak is highly unlikely go out to the media, and from whom?

Peter Daszak’s letter to the Lancet (prestigious British medical journal) on this matter is a very interesting rabbithole. Sadly it seems that most of the top of my search engine is filled with less substantial writing on this matter than I recall finding.

From the memory of this conspiracy-minded non-scientist:

- The signers declared no conflict of interest, but their lives would be made substantially more complicated and less lucrative by any increase in/scrutiny of biohazard control. One signer worked at or with the lab in question.

- The letter dismissed (VERY early and without any evidence to speak of) out of hand the possibility of a lab leak.

- The letter was picked up by the media and influenced public discussion and scientists’ opinions significantly.

According to the search I just did, Peter Daszak has recently been booted from investigations of this matter by the US government. He stands to gain and lose enormously depending on the future of virology research. This includes (iirc) the ‘ban’ on gain of function research, and the current loophole that taking an animal virus and changing it to be infectious to humans does not count as gain of function. There is much more to this story but that’s all I can remember with confidence.

Additionally, I would like to note that I’ve seen some solid-looking science tracing the outbreak to the wet market, but nobody seems to ever mention that lab workers have been (iirc) caught selling lab animals to wet markets in China in the past.

(Note again: I am not a scientist and I am conspiratorially-minded)

Great point - let's just get people rabid over what we don't know for sure, that doesn't likely have repercussions that are at least as negative at all.

There’s a short term benefit of not riling up people and a long term cost of destroying the public’s faith in institutions.

I don't really think it destroys the public's faith in institutions, I think the people that are deadset on attacking institutions are destroying the public's faith in institutions by making badfaith arguments such as what we are discussing here

Except for the little detail that this virus has been observed to make natural zoonotic jumps at least twice--and has infected other humans (probably *many* other humans) without appreciable onward transmission. It's an entirely reasonable thing for it to have happened once again. We simply don't need to involve the lab, so why blame it other than to bash China?

hotpotamus says >"You may say I'm nutpicking, but I truly have a hard time determining what the lab leak theory is sometimes. "<

Whose nuts are you picking? And, for God's sake, why?!

You know how you're driving and a person behind you gets in a turning lane but then continues to go straight anyway and then honks at YOU for getting in their way. And because you are the nice guy but knows they fucked up you don't raise a stink and honk back but you're still fucking mad as hell?

AIDS is caused by HIV, which is believed to have evolved from a virus infecting primates in Africa (probably more specific details than that exist, but I don't know them offhand).

Bubonic plague and polio both predate the existence of writing, and may well predate even agriculture.

HIV has at least one similarly plausible but unprovable origin story - concerning the unintended consequences of polio vaccination in the 1950s.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7935079/

This has been disproven pretty thoroughly IIRC

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_polio_vaccine_AIDS_hypo...

I know you're making a rhetorical point, but I found a thread I remembered from May 2020 where I both said that the wet market theory was shit[1] and that the Wuhan Institute of Virology/Wuhan CDC needed to be investigated without widespread censorship.[0] At the time, it was not exactly well-received. Someone accused me of throwing out so many lies that reasonable people couldn't even rebut it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23038503

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23041871

Hopefully that person is enjoying their 50 cents.

Were any of these "theories" (they're hypotheses, at best) ever mutually exclusive? It seems entirely possible - and maybe even probable - that SARS-CoV-2:

- Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent

- Was being studied in a lab and escaped

- Found its way into a wet market near said lab

They were not really mutually exclusive, but were often portrayed as such. The lab leak theory got confused with the intentionally fabricated theory, probably as a strawman argument to discredit the lab leak theory.

For what it's worth, your scenario seems to me the most probably by far. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, since China has done it's best to destroy all evidence (we should be careful not to take that fact as evidence for one theory or another though).

Your example chain of events would be called "lab leak".

But the lab is completely superfluous to the chain of events. It's jammed in the middle so we can still say "lab leak".

How so?

Suppose a lab worker went to a cave hundreds of miles away and collected a bunch of bats. Those bats were returned to the lab. At some point a different lab worker exposed himself to one of the bat carcasses and caught proto-Covid-19. Three days later he stopped at the wet market on the way home from work to pick up dinner and infected patients 1-5.

In what way is the lab in this scenario superfluous? If it had better and enforced protocols for handling potentially infected specimens there would have been no pandemic.

Because there's no reason it has to be a lab worker involved.

The ground zero wet market in Wuhan is several miles away from the virology lab, and across the river.

The simplest explanation is that one of the 11 million Wuhan residents who do not work at that particular lab brought it to the wet market. It was right before spring festival, lots of people traveling.

Inserting "possible" events that loop in the virology lab while all of the initial infections were nowhere close to it, with no evidence, is just trying to keep "lab leak" alive. Sure, it's possible! We could assume it was lab workers somewhere in the chain, or assume the CIA, we can assume whatever we want.

You’ve now pivoted from saying that the lab is irrelevant in the lab leak scenario to saying the lab leak scenario is unlikely. Those are two very different statements.

Why the need to throw everything against the wall to see what sticks?

I'm saying it's being shoehorned into the middle of a series of events, in a way that is both irrelevant and unlikely. And I'm positing that the shoehorning is because people are really attached to the idea of blaming a lab, given that said lab is not a necessary or likely component of the story.

I can't prove a negative, you believe what you want.

I lived in Macau for 6 years, and I went to Wuhan more than a few times. How is "several miles away from the virology lab, and across the river.", a virology lab that specifically studies coronaviruses, be so much more unlikely than a bunch of people traveling from places that don't have bat caves or other zootonic sources be more likely? Also, going to the wet market from work is very common for lunch and to pick up food on the way home. I have been to the wet market in Wuhan.

Second, COVID-19's furin cleavage site is unique from all other coronaviruses and that is what allows it to bind so well in humans. A new preprint (not full reviewed, Oct 2022) is interesting from a genomics perspective on this being a potential bioengineering marker[1].

I think just because Orange man called it out early on, it immediately became a non-starter for most people. A coronavirus lab just mere miles from a wet market where it supposedly bloomed, and contrary to finding other zootonic sources of other viruses relatively soon, none has been found at all in the past two-plus years. The wiping of databases by China; the involvement of US/Europpean/Russian agencies in the Wuhan lab; the whole NIH/Fauci mess with funded research there in gain of function or whatever you want to call it research, and it is unlikely?

Common sense has left the room during the political divisiveness these past years. I do believe over the years more evidence will come out proving a lab leak given the advances in genomics, intentionally slow drip feed of documents, and the sheer number of factors pointing towards this. I do believe it was an accident, and not a bioweapons thing, and originated from the Wuhan lab. Lab leaks are more common than people think, and having worked in China for over 7 years, I can imagine this was not your movie rendition of a BSL-4 lab, but one with a lot of warts. I say this about other countries too. I did some work for an aerospace robotics lab and I was dreaming of the BSL-4 suits and all, and what I found was a normal shop with out of tolerance machinery. This was in the U.S.

[1] https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/preprint-covid-19-shows-f...

I've also been to Wuhan and it's a big town with more than one place to buy food.

It's absolutely possible that the epicenter wet market was on a particular lab worker's way home and that's how the spread started. Also possible that someone who lived in the countryside, contracted it from an animal, and went to Wuhan to visit family for spring festival.

That biomarker stuff is interesting and I'll have to take the biologists' word for it. If it looks and quacks like a bio weapon, that is evidence. "Some people generally study viruses across town" is a lot weaker.. it's like automatically blaming Columbia University for an infection in Brooklyn because they have bio labs.

I believe it was an accidental leak of a modified coronavirus in order to study possible epidemiology even if from the lab, and not a bio weapon. Spring Festival? If it started in Oct-Dec 2019, it would be around Golden Week. Chinese Spring Festival 2020 was January 25.

Yes there are a lot of places to buy food, but wet markets are a special type of place to buy food. The wet market in question is right across the river from the WIV, which coincidentally(?) studies coronaviruses and was conducting studies prior to the outbreak.

From a 7 June 2021 paper [1]:

Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. We note that no pangolins (or bats) were traded, supporting reformed opinion that pangolins were not likely the spillover host at the source of the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

The other human coronaviruses came from bats mainly. The WIV had bats from a location known to have coronaviruses. Scientists now wear masks when bat hunting in caves, but before COVID-19 they typically did not (I'll dig up the reference later). No bats were sold at the Wuhan wet market. The US/NIH/Fauci and other world players have a stake in the WIV of some sort. They were doing research on coronaviruses, and they were manipulating the virus. Documents before 2019 asking for approval to conduct such research are in the public record.

As far as I know, "wet market" just means a place you can buy live food. It's the default rather than the exception outside of tier 1 cities for most of the third world, live animals are self-preserving and don't require refrigeration. You can walk past several "wet markets" on a single block.

I meant they were special compared to Western market models, but there are usually large, famous ones in any Chinese city compared to any small, limited 'wet market'. In Macau it was Hung Kai Sie (Red Market), which takes up an entire block or more.

Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent

Almost everyone thinks this is true. Even the most fringy people don’t seem to be claiming that a virus was synthesized from scratch.

Found its way into a wet market near said lab

Ditto for this one. It’s pretty clear that there was a cluster of people early on that were infected in or near the market.

—-

The distinction between the lab leak and non-lab leak theory is whether the lab had anything at all to do with the chain of transmission.

If patient zero caught the virus in the lab or from a vector that was once in the lab, that’s lab leak. It’s apologists for the lab that want to conflate lab leak and bioweapon in order to dismiss the former as a nutty conspiracy theory.

> … want to conflate lab leak…

And if a lab worker had become infected while field sampling captive farmed "wild" animals for the lab and brought the infection to Wuhan?

And if a lab worker had become infected while buying captive farmed "wild" animals for the lab and brought the infection to Wuhan?

And if a lab worker had become infected while buying captive farmed "wild" animals for dinner and brought the infection to Wuhan?

>>> This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences

Aint this the dang truth.

How big the sway ones political affiliation is drove all of that

It's but just one example of the firehose of garbage aimed at us every waking moment.

> Where’s your comment from two years ago belittling the wet market theory as shitty?

Ah, the ol' litigating my personal grievances with society at large, with a particular individual that has nothing to do with it at all...

Yes it's a completely ridiculous theory that the biolab that works on bat borne coronaviruses might have had something to do with the bad borne coronavirus that sprang up a mile away.

It's just a theory. Totally crackpot.

I mean come on they totally found the animal that came from to support the zoonotic origin theory.

Oh wait, they have yet to identify a spillover animal.

Anyone with common sense notice the lab leak is the most likely scenario here. But sure go ahead and continue to defend the honor of the CCP, an organization that is shortly going to be sending lethal weaponry including suicide drones to Vladimir Putin so he can murder Ukrainian civilians with impunity.

> a spillover animal

"Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on mink farms between humans and mink and back to humans"

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5901

Not what you meant?

How long did it take to definitively identify a natural reservoir for the 2002 SARS outbreak?

"Bats as Animal Reservoirs for the SARS Coronavirus: Hypothesis Proved After 10 Years of Virus Hunting"

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258204548_Bats_as_a...

The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market, in less than a year. The animal reservoir that infected the civets were the horseshoe bats, and yes, that took a few years to confirm.

No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan. The article you posted regarding minks has absolutely nothing to do with an original source of spillover. It's simply documenting the common pandemic phenomenon of humans infecting mammals with covid, and, wow, the minks infecting humans with the same virus that is already evolved to infect human ACE2 receptors.

You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis. The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away, despite:

Location is 1000km away from the known horseshoe bat populations in Yunnan that are SARS reservoirs. Emergence was during late autumn/early winter when local bats are already hibernating. Emergence was in the middle of a cosmopolitan metropolis where the locals don't eat bats. Chinese Communist Party immediately blocked any investigations and never even pretended to want to restore records that were deleted, despite the prospect of being vindicated by a zoonotic origin being found. CCP currently, rather than attempt to continue to claim a non-existent zoonotic origin, has now claimed a US-based lab leak is at fault. Multiple NIH grants specifically mention humanized mouse models with human ACE2 receptors lining air passages, and conducting serial passage of wild-type bat-borne SARS in research being conducted by grant recipient in Wuhan lab. (There was an intermediate host, it was a genetically modified mouse model, and long since disposed of.)

Humanized mouse models can be purchased from any reputable bio supplier: https://www.criver.com/products-services/research-models-ser...

> You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis. The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away…

Where did I say that?

> The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market…

I'll take your word for it. (A long "few years" — "The virus originally came from horseshoe bats, though that wasn’t conclusively determined until 2017".)

"No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan" likely because —

"Unlike with SARS, however, there were no opportunities to sample the markets to look for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2. Chinese authorities closed and cleared out the markets soon after the epidemic started, citing public-health concerns, and banned all wildlife trade on 26 January 2020. Eating and trading wild animals were permanently banned in February 2020. Samples at the market to test for SARS-CoV-2 were not taken until months later. The virus was found in the drains of the market, but there were no live animals to test."

"The tick study that documented the sale of illegal animals in the Huanan market observed, however, that the sellers were not too concerned about law enforcement, and that plainly illegal animals were openly sold. It is unclear whether any of the animal traders engaged in illegal wildlife commerce have been since found, fined or punished. The swift clear-out of the market may have been intended to protect them as well as the law-enforcement officers and local politicians who had looked the other way."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...

Commonplace criminality or sinister super secret science scandal?

How many people in this world just put their blinders on and distort new information to fit their preconceptions and biases? What do you think "low confidence" means in the context of an intelligence report? I tried finding out myself, and I mostly just found people like yourself pretending it means whatever they want it to.

I was surprised to find, at CNN, of all places, something that actually sounds credible: "https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan..."

"A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion."

That's a far cry from "shitty theory".

Yikes, what's your definition for "shitty theory" then? Something that's "not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion" sounds pretty shitty to me. Literal shit lets you draw more conclusions about the defecator than that!

What do you think a theory is? A theory is by definition unproven. With enough evidence, it becomes proven and therefore no longer a theory. Then there's the grey area in between, where a theory seems plausible but there's not enough evidence to be conclusive about it.

A "shitty" theory is one which completely lacks evidence supporting it and/or has far more evidence that contradicts it. The covid lab leak theory is not "shitty" by either metric.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theory

No. Low confidence means they have a bunch of crap theories. The lab leak theory is simply the least crappy theory.

That's the nuance.

It is an interesting admission though, because by definition that means that the "evolved in nature and came from wet markets" view is also a crappy theory.

What it means is that we lack the ability to prove either of those theories, not necessarily that either theory is bad.

This entirely depends on the total amount of theories. It also assumes the known theories cover all possible origins.

Saying COVID evolved from nature is sort of a catch all. It's like saying all possible theories in aggregate except for the lab leak theory.

For example: What are the chances of anyone but you winning the lottery? Quite high.

So when they say low confidence of the lab leak theory it most likely means it's a crap theory.

Our ability to prove a theory or not is entirely dependent on our ability to gather evidence for or against. How many other theories can be thought of is totally irrelevant.

Low confidence means inability to prove or disprove. That is it.

Edit: extrapolating further about this is just a Rorschach test.

This is just vocabulary. If you can't find evidence to support a theory confidently... I call it a crap theory.

Would you prefer to communicate without using words? I'm confused.

The argument is descending into one about the definition of "crap theory."

I have a low bar for crap theory. As long as it doesn't have evidence that confidently supports it, it's crap.

The other guy has a high bar for crap theory. A theory without any evidence, to him, is not crap.

It's like arguing over what temperature is hot and what temperature is cold. Pointless. An Eskimo has a different definition of cold and hot then say some guy who lives in a desert. Put them in the same place and let them debate about whether the current temp is hot or cold... That argument ends up being an argument about vocabulary. What is the definition of hot or cold?

Who fucking cares? That is my point.

They're not even crappy theories, they just don't have enough evidence to improve confidence or be solved. A crappy theory would be that an alien dropped it as part of an attack on Earth.

> The headline is absolutely, literally true

It absolutely, literally isn't.

The headline says the lab leak is the most likely origin. The lab theory being the least shitty theory absolutely doesn't make it a likely origin: it is purely a statement about the information we have (rather lack thereof) on origins, not on the likelihood of any of those. Likelihood of origin doesn't even come into it given the current state of theories.

Yes, a thing can be most likely, and not likely.

It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins.

> It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins.

That's how you read it. GP is reading "most likely" as statement of absolute likelihood, making it false here, because the most likely thing is "any of the possibilities not under consideration", which takes most of the probability mass.

IMO, GP's interpretation is the one that most people take for "most likely" statements, which in our opinion makes this headline a blatant lie.

If you told most people you had 10 rolls of a dice to land a 6 and then suggested the most likely number of rolls you'll get it on is 1 I wonder whether they'd believe you...

I think most people would have the same reaction as me, that is "er, I'm having trouble parsing this, could you rephrase?".

Anyway, a different way of putting my point is: "most likely" modifies meaning of the thing it attaches to. "Lab leak [is the] most likely origin of" strongly suggests the absolute take. Relative take would be phrased "Lab leak [is the] most likely of hypotheses proposed for the origin of", or something to that effect - that is, attaching "most likely" to the body of proposed explanations (which, by definition, excludes "anything else not on this list" as an option), not to the origin itself.

A yet different way: NYT is doing the equivalent of me putting some object under a color detector, and announcing "Blue most likely color of Object", without mentioning that my color detector consists of separate R, G, and B color sensors, and that I'm just reporting which sensor gave the highest reading. Most people would read my announcement as "Object is some shade of blue, unless their machine is broken or something", whereas the object itself could be purple, or white, or yellow, or near-black, or any other color that just has "B" component stronger than "G" and "R".

> least shitty theory

I read about CIA false flags in Cuba. Nordstream didn't blow itself up because the pipe was angry it allowed .de and .ru to engage in commerce.

I guess a rogue western intelligence group bribed or compelled a Chinese lab worker to sabotage something.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rfk-ope...

"The CIA had been plotting to assassinate Castro since the summer of 1960, even before John Kennedy was elected. A congressional investigation of the CIA later uncovered eight separate plots of varying ridiculousness between 1960 and 1965."

I really doubt this. The pandemic was bad for the whole world, not just China. I'm sure it was an accident.

I agree with this statement, COVID is very likely to be an accident, unless it was created by a mad scientist or aliens, I can't think of any reason to artificially create COVID to harm the interests of China or other countries other than China.

They were making deadly viruses in a lab. It’s like handing out loaded shotguns to school children then claiming anything that happens is an accident.

Bad for whom? Some billionaires reportedly believe in the discredited Malthusian population problem.

I believe in it - not that population itself is a problem but that we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet

I don't think it would have been unreasonable for a nation-state to imagine, pre-pandemic, that China would be better equipped to handle such a thing with their lack of individual rights and that it might provide a competitive advantage.

The headline is absolutely, literally true.

The story is that the DOE determined a lab leak is the most likely origin. And that’s exactly what the headline says.

Did they decide it’s only marginally more likely than other theories? Perhaps, but the headline remains true.

This is not complicated.

it is if you have a narrative to sell.

It seems like you are misunderstanding the nuance of what they are saying.

Its best understood after watching and grokking this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc

Putting what is being said in the correct context, outlined in that video, which is how government typically operates.

Its pretty clear what they mean to any educated rational reader what was meant. The characterization you made is poor and doesn't aptly apply.

The point is that the headline is clickbait. As you have said, you have to read the article to determine the radically different meaning of the headline. That's how clickbait works.

How is it clickbait? A US intelligence agency did say that the lab leak theory was more likely than the wet market one, even if their confidence is low to moderate.

And 4 other US intelligence agencies still say the wet market is more likely.

The title doesn't contradict that.

Got a source?

That's a very circular argument and definition.

By that definition, any headline of any article will be clickbait to someone just by them saying so regardless of any truth in the matter. People lie every day.

If you are looking at 'reading' articles, its kind of expected that you will read them if you choose to do so. Complaining about it doesn't change any meaningful thing.

I really don't understand the point you were trying to communicate.

Is it that you want someone to just tell you everything to believe, without needing to critically think at all?

People lie, so it sounds like you want something that will never come to pass, and trying to make it come to pass would only create a negative outcome for you, those close to you, and anyone else that happened to be within your sphere of influence, at least given a sufficient amount of time.

For the past couple thousand years of history exploitation has been the norm in various forms.

Did I completely misread what you meant (but didn't say?). Could you clarify?

Yes, but the point is the headline is clickbaity, and for the uninformed masses, it sounds like it's highly likely it's from the lab, when that judgment was made with "low confidence"

That you think it's a coincidence that a novel coronavirus pops up in the only place in china working on coronaviruses blows my mind. Any sane, rational human thought it likely a lab leak from the moment this thing started.

Or the scientists sensibly chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found, to make studying them easier?

You'd probably, for example, find that charities studying/helping poverty are often found near where lots of poor people live - yet you wouldn't blame charities for creating poverty.

> chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found

Then they should have built the lab 800 KM south west in Yunnan. The lab is there for the same reason we have labs in NYC major regional hub with many universities, the lab has been there since the 1950s. Researchers had to travel to places like Yunnan and Laos to collect samples.

Isn’t that lab in Wuhan because it’s a region with a lot of endemic coronaviruses?

It's a large region. Also the virus didn't come from anywhere near there. Also, the bats they supposedly came from weren't sold at the wet market. Start with the suspicion and work your way through the facts from there.

A distinction without a difference.

I've said it was a lab leak from about month two of the pandemic.

Any sane person hearing me say this should assume I have low confidence as the sort of evidence necessary to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt is information a random hn commentor could not possibly have.

Unfortunately, even expressing that you thought it likely it was a lab leak was enough to get my accounts banned on several social media.

If I ask you what time it is and you're not really sure, do you say "It's 1:04:35.023"?

So if you 'said it was a lab leak', but expected people to know you really mean "based on the extremely limited information I have on the situation, it don't feel the possibly of it being a lab leak can not be entirely discounted", then you've communicated poorly.

You've said in this comment that "you thought it likely it was a lab leak". Again, that's not the words of someone with low confidence in their theory.

Then we have to come to your motives in espousing such a theory. What was your point in saying that then and now? Is it that you think the world in general should work towards better lab practices? If so why not say that instead. Why do you want people to know you think it was from a particular lab?

Just saying what you're saying sounds a lot like an anti-China dog-whistle, especially in the environment in which you're saying it.

What is your motivation in making this post other than to protect the Chinese communist party from any and all criticism? Since we're questioning motivations and all. Exactly what do we get by leaving the origins of COVID a mystery, and uninvestigated. Why do you think it's not important to know exactly the source of the virus.

Yes, if the virus were engineered or even just leaked from a wild source kept in the lab, we deserve to know, for a multitude of reasons.

>What is your motivation in making this post other than to protect the Chinese communist party from any and all criticism?

Sorry, but if this is your best effort at explaining that post, then there is something deeply wrong with you.

It's not a meaningful distinction because of what you said years ago? Am I even reading this post right? It's so absurd.

The headline is literally true in a certain, non-colloquial usage of the term "most likely". It's is also true to claim that Covid-19 was more likely not because of a lab leak. That's what "low confidence" means. If you could bet at even odds that it was a lab leak, and the bet could be settled by some omniscient force, you'd be a fool to take the bet.

The fact the chances of it being a lab leak are so high does mean something, and I'd like to see those odds be lower for any future scenario, but to think that implies we can say with confidence "that's what happened" is, as was clearly stated, wrong.

I'm not entirely clear on why the Energy Department would even be investigating this let alone issuing a controversial finding with low confidence at all. They mention specific intelligence that flipped their conclusion but didn't even characterize what the nature of that intelligence is.

“The DOE oversees several U.S. national labs, some of which conduct advanced biological research”

and funds a good deal of biological research in academia

Yeah, this is how the fake news can lie with facts.

"Most likely" might be technically true - in the sense that there might be a 2% chance it was that, but there's a hundred other possibilities each with lesser probability, so that one is on top. But it's not really likely at all. So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that, which nobody will.

(don't focus on the actual number, that's just for illustration.)

Where did you get 2% from? I tried searching for what "low confidence" means when given by an intelligence agency, and in the process I'm finding a lot of people like yourself that apparently like to pretend it means whatever they want it to.

> But it's not really likely at all.

Is that what low confidence means in this context? After digging, I finally found a news site that said something that sounds credible: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan...

"Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion."

That's a far cry from your made-up definition, which is, to be honest, likely motivated by your own partisan biases.

> So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that

This news story was broken by the NYT, probably the most leftwing major print media company in the world. I'm pretty sure they have nothing to gain by misleading people into thinking the lab leak theory is more likely to be true than not, especially given their previous stances: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-.... On the contrary, they risk offending their payer base by reporting the truth in this instance.

Let's face it. Your partisan side lost this one. They worked hard to suppress and censor anyone who dared claim the lab leak theory was plausible. They were wrong. And they were evil to do the censoring in the first place. Take your loss and move on.

I said don't focus on the number, I was simply using 2% as an illustration for how such a headline can be constructed to be misleading. Since you didn't read my post I won't read the rest of yours.

You say "don't focus on the number", and then say in the same sentence "it's for illustration." Well, if you pick a terrible number, don't you think that affects the quality of your illustration? See, your illustration was as bad as the number you pulled out of a hat to construct it, but if you refuse to learn from criticism when presented to you, then I'm certainly not going to waste any more time on you either.

To recap, you assumed "low confidence" means "highly unlikely", which is false. The 2% number you chose, is, let's say, very illustrative of your mistaken assumption.

Im in China myself and I dont mind if it's a lab leak, better than saying we re degenerate Pangolin eaters :D

However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US, I want to believe them but they just shot 3 balloons in hysterical panic that were just their own weather balloons just because we sent 1... so sometimes they seem to be wrong and we should keep an open mind.

The best would be that a bat shat on a pangolin a lab worker ate before going to work, he sneezed around and contaminated all his colleagues who spread it around and poom: wild bat + pangolin traffic + lab leak all together lol Now that we can all agree, what has changed ?

Surely we re not agreeing that China was making weapons or leaked voluntarily, so beyond us being weasels unable to accept we screwed up, not sure why we drag on: we ll never say we screwed up, the US will never entirely accept we didnt screw up, what then?

> However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US

The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted more than the autocratic Chinese communist party that is accountable to absolutely no one.

> The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted

No. Where were checks and balances when a coup attempt happened? Or before that, when a sitting US president committed multiple crimes, including influence peddling, and got away with it? Or when Guantanamo was established and random people were kidnapped and tortured because of their name or watch? Or when the US president decided to murder a US citizen without due process? Or when it was decided to implement dragnet surveillance of the whole Internet? Or when it was decided to spy on allies? Just because we later learned about some of those transgressions doesn't in any way make the US government and it's various entities trustworthy. Yes, it's better than the authoritarian regime in China, sure, but that doesn't equal actual trust.

The communist party is as accountable as the CIA. It works the same way, handwave a little national security here, assassimate a little critic there. The CIA is not Chinese.

But, Im not saying the department of energy is the CIA, Im saying it s made of the same american citizens who can fear us sometimes to the point of sending million-dollar missiles towards canadian weather balloons, see ? It's a matter of belief for me: are they objective and we screwed up, or are they hysterical and we dont know really? A democracy can absolutely elect lunatics if the population is afraid, as well.

Im certainly not saying the communist party is better, so not sure why you brought it up. Maybe part of the general hysteria, you think criticizing the US is a sort of patriotic duty for me or something, and Im like a red communist spouting Mao like a demented on the streets... but we can be anti communist in China and not impressed at all by the US general performance.

they shot the balloons as theater to show they are tough on balloons after the political opposition started hassling them about the balloon, I wouldnt call it a panic

> (there might not even be a physical way to prove that conclusively)

There is a way, or there would be a way had this not been in an autocratic country. A developed and free nation would have formed an independent enquiry and be given access to the lab, its staff and documents. That would have had a high likelihood to either find the cause there or rule it out with some certainty.

But this is China, and for some reason some people don't want to admit that it's a repressive dictatorship with no regard for human life, justice and transparency.

Low Confidence in intelligence assessments has a particular meaning, which is worth considering in this context:

> Low confidence generally means questionable or implausible information was used, the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or significant concerns or problems with sources existed [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence

Good luck getting 95% of the American populace to understand any of that nuance.

After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but they willfully don't want to.

Yeah. In 2016 when people were like "hurr durr experts suck, they predicted Hillary would win and she lost", it was exasperating. If a model predicted an outcome with 60-70% certainty, and the less likely scenario happens, model wasn't necessarily bad. That'd be true even if it was a 90/10 split.

The model wasn't bad, just useless.

Why useless? People have to attempt to predict the outcomes of elections, and have to do their best.

I would guess that the vast majority of the population do not take meaningful actions based on election prediction (other than "I might [not] need to actually vote").

There are good reasons to have polls and predictions but they are far from necessary.

People who work for political campaigns need to know, businesses and investors might like to plan, etc.

Yes, but it is not "needed" in the current form. It is needed the same way you need to predict how global trends will be in 6 months: very important for a lot of people, but not an actionable information for most.

Just because something isn't useful to everyone, doesn't mean it isn't useful to someone.

The original claim was that election prediction is useless -- are you willing to concede that election prediction isn't useless?

I made no such claim. I merely stated that this particular election prediction was useless.

Worse than useless. It likely impacts election outcomes.

Highly disagree that it was "useless":

1. First, when many pundits were basically saying there was no chance that Trump would win, Silver was particularly highlighting not just that it was in the realm of possibility, but would not even be very surprising if Trump won (e.g. I think Nate does a good job with his "same probability of a team down by 3 points at the beginning of the 4th quarter coming back to win" to clarify to a lay person that this isn't unusual).

2. When making political predictions based on polling that turn out to be "wrong" (i.e. end up going the way of the < 50% option), it's helpful to think of why this might happen. In Trump's case, it was pretty obvious he was a very different type of politician than what came before, so it's worth thinking whether that difference might result in widespread error in some polls. Also, whenever a race is very close, it's obvious that any small movements one way or the other can affect the outcome. In 2016 Trump lost the popular vote by a substantial margin but won the electoral collage by a significant but not huge amount. In fact, the "all or nothing" way the US electoral college system works has the effect of amplifying smaller differences into larger vote outcomes.

Trump winning can happen in a model that gives him a 30% chance and a model that gives him a 5% chance. What was odd was seeing fans of Nate Silver point out the former, but then trying to say that his model was better because it gave Trump a higher probability of winning (or even saying Sam Wang's model was terrible for having Clinton's chance in the high 90's). That could be the case, but it's not necessarily the case, for the exact reasons they just stated.

It isn’t always a lack of will. Sometimes it is lacking a worldview that continually perceives through the lenses of statistical probabilities because most of the time, heuristics are Good Enough. Constantly evaluating upon an ever-shifting, -updating net of probabilities is relatively more cognitively demanding.

Those who do reflexively apply probability assessments however, would do well to also perceive when to accept heuristic Good Enough solutions.

Doesn't matter if they understand the nuance. The lab leak theory takes a back seat for the following reason:

Lets say it is found out with definite proof that it was a lab leak. Then what? Grandma's dead, china killed her and there is nothing you can do. We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it.

Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.

The first stage of grief is denial.

A lot of people seem to think the lab leak premise is the same as the "engineered biological weapon" premise so if that become popular it'll probably only drive a perception of "weak government that betrays the citizens" even more than we've already got...

Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance. They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus while doing something they should never have been doing: gain-of-function research. We need to stop that research, and we can't let them defend it with any nonsense excuses.

Lab leak involves bio-engineering because it involves gain of function research. Bio-engineering can be used in a testing setting but it could also be used to make a weapon. I highly doubt China was stupid enough to make a bioweapon and not immunize its citizens first.

The significance of getting people to investigate, and if all things are true, confirm lab leak is that it puts an impetus on the importance of controls and second is a corrective measure for all the people who colluded to suppress lab leak being discussed. I am very interested in seeing those people held accountable in very direct ways, even if they were under false impressions at the time. That starts with all the names on that infamous open letter.

A lab leak doesn’t mean gain of function, bio-engineered virus, or other engineering. It just means that the virus was spread via a lab leak.

> The October 2021 report said that there was a consensus that Covid-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program. But it didn’t settle the debate over whether it resulted from a lab leak or came from an animal, saying that more information was needed from the Chinese authorities.

In what way is gain of function not bio-engineering? You're modifying a virus and subjecting it to human-like tissue to observe the results. Lab leak and gain of function are inexplicably tied.

I don't know what point the quote is getting to. I already said it wasn't a bioweapon.

You could bio-engineer a virus without gain of function, I presume. My point was that a lab leak does not also mean bio-engineering.

I heard that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had inserted furin cleavage sites into random types of viruses in the past and that SARS-CoV-2 is unique among coronaviruses for having a furin cleavage site, but this[0] says otherwise:

``` Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2. ```

0: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340798/

If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future. Failure to do so will result in more issues down the line. It's basic engineering.

If this kind of research is so important then maybe the nations of the world should buy a cruise ship and implement extreme isolation protocols between interactions, if that's the only way to safely perform that kind of research. Just as an example.

The US isn't capable of preventing its own citizens from acquiring weapons and performing terrorist attacks with them. The idea that we'll be able to enforce controls on labs in foreign countries seems pretty far fetched given that. And as the tech advances, I suspect it will democratize like any other technology so that a lone enthusiast can design their own viruses in a home lab. I'm not particularly an optimist about what it portends.

But it is in the best interest of all countries. Unlike nuclear weapons where the damage can be isolated to one area, highly contagious weapons are impossible to control and will end up hurting themselves as well.

I suspect the world would be better off if all knowledge of nuclear weapons were eradicated. I doubt on a few levels that the damage can really be isolated given proliferation. Baby Boomers were found to have significantly elevated levels of strontium-90 in their baby teeth attributed just to atmospheric testing. That did result in a treaty to ban the practice, but nuclear weapon research continued and continues today. I doubt any country will willingly stop viral research; especially because there are legitimate medical reasons for such research, though I suspect weapon applications are inextricably intertwined as well.

And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens. Much easier to believe the 'baddies' have been found and 'brought to justice' than having to face up to the world we live in and our effect on it.

I agree but also disagree. There are too many conflicting interests and I don't think you will ever get a straight answer. People also can't look at the lab leak with a critical eye because they think it makes them look like trump lovers. I standby my original assertion that a country in grief will collectively go through the stages of grief of which denial is the first. Similar to 9/11 when we convinced ourselves that our foreign policy had nothing to do with terrorist attacks and 2008 when we convinced ourselves bailing out failing industries was a good idea. 20 and 10 years later and we changed our tunes on those things. In 2033 we will finally accept that a lab-leak was most likely but only after the other 6 stages...

In 2008 we had to bail out the banks, otherwise everything would have gone under. Indeed, I believe that a defining moment of the GW Bush presidency was when he told the head of the Federal Reserve (I think?) to do whatever was necessary, with GWB providing political cover, and thus 'saved the world'. Where we screwed up was in not bringing to account (i.e. prison) many of the people responsible for letting things get as far as they did. We also used monetary policy too much when fiscal policy (i.e. bailing out Main Street) would have been better.

My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably.

> My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably.

The proximal host is the animal that transmitted the virus to humans. That host was identified for SARS-1 (civet cats) and MERS (camels) within about a year. For example, here's an article from 2003:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1140695/

The reservoir host is the animal in which most of the virus's genome evolved. That host (bats for both) took much longer to identify, through Dr. Shi's work at the WIV.

Since SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to SARS-1, we knew its reservoir host (bats) as soon as it was sequenced. We still don't know its proximal host. The proximal host is the critical question in establishing natural zoonotic origin--no one disputes that SARS-CoV-2 evolved mostly in bats, just whether its path into humans involved a research accident.

What? Why would anyone be punished for an unintentional lab leak? Scientists are also humans that can make mistakes.

But was it negligence? This is the difference between "a mistake" and "manslaughter".

Without knowing, and a proper investigation, we can't decide. If it was negligence, punishment is used for a variety of reasons. Often, it is the only way to get people to push back against employers.

And fines, are often the only way to get companies to care.

Its not about punishment, its about the 'just world' fallacy where bad things happen because of 'bad' people (whether through malice or incompetence). It allows us to hide from uncomfortable truths - in this case that pathogen spillovers are inevitable, and that our response has been typically woeful.

You can unintentionally harm someone and still be liable for that harm.

If a practicing engineer is ultimatrly responsible for a catastrophic outcome of a design they signed off on, I can see a case for shoddy virologists with bad lab practices being held ultimately responsible for what they ultimately leak.

When what you make has the potential to impact billions; no offense, but I expect you to be a bit more hardcore about your adherence to safe practices of your trade.

If this means the only people who end up becoming virologists and doing work that conceivably leads to the creation of pandemic pathogens are the most hardcore mf'ers with a boner for safety, perfectionism , and preserving their own skin; ...I'm actually okay with that.

I'll even sweeten the pot. Lets extend that to Software Engineers and get a PE program for that sorted.

Consistency after all.

Long story short: "Oopsie" as an excuse stops applying when your body count becomes non-zero.

> practicing engineer

That sounds like a call for professional licensure and personal financial penalties for failures. Ensuring financial ruin for GoF cowgirls and cowboys and their families would be a good start.

Scientists can definitely make mistakes. What circles around lab leak that's most interesting was the rampant indictments that discussing it made you a conspiracy theorist, which prevented it being discussed or investigated for over a year after the pandemic started. Around that time, the only thing that was acceptable to discuss was zoonotic origins.

The original Lancet article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

The retraction: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens.

In my experience it's rather that "lab leak" means "bad foreigners we're already hating did this to everyone, why won't we nuke them already or something", when the alternative would be to actually think about failing healthcare, vulnerable supply chains, lack of trust in institutions, etc.

"Lab leak" is a cop-out. It should lead to improving procedures in biolabs, but people there are already doing it anyway, because they're smart enough to think about possibilities ("oh, even if it was a wet market issue this time, the next one might be someone here fucking up; let's review the procedures to make that less likely to happen"). For general population, the media and political sphere, it's just a permission to dismiss and ignore any potential fixes ("You say spending more on X would reduce the spread of the virus? It's not like the last one was because of problem with X - it came from a foreign lab, nothing X can do about it!").

"Encroachment on the natural world" is mostly orthogonal to that. We are going to keep encroaching on it anyway, and the way to do it safely is to do those fixes that "lab leak" gives an excuse for not doing.

>> We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it.

> If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future

I'm not sure why people choose to assume their simple solutions are somehow insightful. You aren't going to be able to reach into most countries to intervene in any other way than simple sanctions at best. The protocol of "asking country X please knock it off" is not productive, as it's not going to result in any specific change, it hurts trade, and every country is doing it to some degree despite previous agreements on the world stage (basic Game Theory).

This is what the GP described, yet someone still thinks that nobody involved, understands "basic engineering". Very smart people do this kind of work with money and lives at stake. Let's give a little rope to people with big responsibilities, to try to understand the motivations rather than assume they are ignorant.

If, hypothetically, it did leak from a lab, there are two important things that should happen:

1- China has suffered more than enough to revaluate protocols around virus handling. The pandemic has done more to undermine confidence in their government than anything else in decades. They've got plenty of reason to be invested in change if change is warranted

2- The US government could put stronger regulations in place around funding companies that turn around and fund foreign labs (such as ecohealth) unless those projects can demonstrate compliance with new, safer protocols. What you call simple sanctions, I call the power of the purse.

All of this happens only if we determine whether the existing protocols, or lax enforcement of them, gave rise to the spread of the virus.

Just shrugging it off and saying "meh, it's hard so why bother" is a recipe for future man-made disasters.

I know, basic engineering, so simple and straightforward right? And when a country says "no", I assume we issue a series of stronger and stronger worded warning letters to them right?

The issue involves misplaced incentives. Scientists have an incentive to apply for certain grants, and the National Science Foundation and NIH have an incentive to spend their federal funding. Scientists are thus incentivized to draw attention to "black swan" events and ask for funding to prevent these events. And they are incentivized to conduct riskier and riskier research until, let's say, a "human error event" occurs, and here we are.*

*Assuming the lab leak was accidental, rather than intentional

> Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.

only Americans were touched by covid I guess...

> The first stage of grief is denial.

At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes.

Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900

The first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China.

no one is going to care if the deaths were "intentional" or negligent.

not Americans.

They always need someone to blame.

Remember when they went to war with Iraq on fabricated evidence?

Remember when they wen to war with Afghanistan after 9/11, but Afghanistan had no responsibility whatsoever (again!) and 10 years later they handed the country back to Talibans?

Can we consider 9/11 an accident?

Would it be the same to you?

You know when really nobody talks about it?

When it's the US killing people out of negligence and incompetence and sheer arrogance.

Are you aware of this?

Do they talk about it in USA?

They never apologized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

***

can we also talk about this?

I'm quite sure how these poor people died makes a lot of difference for the families of the victims.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes...

***

It's not China fault if during covid in USA Trump was President and people really believed that covid wasn't real and a lot of Americans died with a rate double than my Country which was already hit very hard BTW.

China handled it much better anyway.

It's talked about in many circles in the United States, mind. Not one year has gone by without a rant in my sphere about stupid boutique or ulteriorally motived wars, and a pining for the day the U.S. focuses more on solving domestic problems than foreign.

It just happens that for some stupid reason, neither the Republican or Democratic parties have a great track record of producing candidates that can manage to walk the line of foreign policy that minimally entangles us with very poorly advised foreign intervention.

Which is made all the more difficult when allies don't do their utmost in terms of defense spending. The U.S. doesn't need to always be the first bunch of people everyone looks to when some autocratic idiot starts rattling the saber again. This may even be made easier if we don't export advanced manufacturing business to places that value human life and time at approximately zero because it makes the quarterly reports look better.

After all, it's way harder to be an autocrat when no one will do enough business with you to keep the military sufficiently in your pocket. Or teach you how to make the machines that make arms or advanced weaponry. Or sell you said arms.

This is probably the most egregious example of "whataboutism" I've seen on HN.

I think you're missing the point.

To me the post was answering to someone claiming that

- Americans suffered the consequences of COVID because of China, which is arguably not true, they have handled the pandemic badly because of their own faults, incompetence and hubris (and a President in denial).

- The Americans are at the first stage of grieving over this, because they are obviously victims, while truth is they are often perpetrators that just don't care of the consequences of what they do, because if some non American dies, it's probably because they deserve it. During COVID they proved that they also don't care very much if someone of their own dies, because FREE MARKET OH YEAH! FLY EAGLE OF FREEDOM! Which has honestly been embarrassing, watching from outside.

If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling.

> If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling.

I'm not American, nor do I live in America.

And while I have some sympathy for pointing out "the world is not the US", the majority of the comment was bald whataboutism:

> "At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes. Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900. he first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China."

What about "People in the USA are grieving because of China virus created to kill us, but we won't do anything against China because the first step of grief is denial"?

How does this sound?

It's completely normal to me to answer: well my friend, first of all a leak is a mistake, it's not intentional since, you know, the first who paid where the Chinese themselves, it would be pretty stupid to do it intentionally. But if you really think things go that way because people do not understand who's their enemy (the Chinese who want to kill you by engineering a virus), what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?

Should they cut the links too?

What about what the USA and UK did to Chinese people?

There's a reason why they made a cultural revolution and chose communism, and no, being a "democracy" doesn't make your country automatically better.

Spoiler alert: American people have lost many relatives because of their government.

So maybe it's toward them that they should be angry and ask for a change.

Even if it was a lab leak, the right solution would be cooperation, so that it doesn't happen again (because next time could happen to the US...)

> what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?

As I said: literally whataboutism. And that is just a distraction tactic used to deflect attention from the issue at hand.

In some limited circumstances it may be a legitimate tactic, for example, when it is relevant to highlight that the person making the accusation has a bias. For the most part, however, even if the person making the accusation is a hypocrite or has double standards, this does not mean that their accusation is false.

https://theconversation.com/whataboutism-what-it-is-and-why-...

It's completely legitimate to have a discussion about US imperialism. But not to try to deflect a discussion about Chinese recalcitrance by deflecting it like this.

let's remember that the US helped fund this research too https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

And if it comes to light that it was not a natural disaster- that this funding contributed to it- then we should cut off said funding until better protocols, enforcement and accountability are in place

If it turned out to be not a lab leak, fine, carry on. If it was a lab leak, why on earth should I be complacent about my tax dollars contributing to the next one?

Are you suggesting that a more correct course of action would be some kind of punitive retribution so those of us who survived suffer in the hopes that those most responsible suffer a little more than we do?

The idea that we would hurt our own economic future out of grief/vengeance is bizarre. So yes, everyone does know what you suggest, and we’re all OK with it.

It's pretty sickening that a coronavirus lab in China that the US was completely involved with both financially and through scientific cooperation can be reframed as more nationalistic anti-China bullshit. The US isn't keeping things peaceful with China for the sake of trade relations, it's actually threatening China constantly. The US is keeping quiet about the lab leak theory because it was just as responsible for that lab as China was, and it wants to distract from that fact.

It's not like any other options have high confidence. All theories are low confidence right now because there is no conclusive proof for either. But if you support some, you are the defender of science, and if you support another, you are a filthy conspirologist and get banned from social media. Try explaining that to 95% of the American populace.

I think it has more to do with the fact that one opinion is supported by more conspiracy nuts. Doesn’t mean it isn’t the right answer, but having lots of crazies insisting it is the only possible answer makes more grounded people less credible in the eyes of others.

Are the pejoratives really necessary? From the beginning the "lab leak" theory satisfied Occam's Razor more than the convoluted "wet market" theory or the "pangolin" theory. Meanwhile, a lot of departments at a lot of universities got a lot of funding to pursue their pet theories.

At the time trump and his people were first pushing lab leak/bio-weapon conspiracies it was without evidence (and Occam's Razor isn't evidence), and worse the actual evidence we did have at the time suggested it wasn't leaked from a lab. That didn't stop the "crazies" from insisting it was true though.

Anyone can have their own theory of things, but what separates Trump and the "crazies" from the rest of us (including many of those who suspected the lab leak theory was true) is that one group accepted the possibility and investigated that, while the others were running around calling for "china to pay" and beating up random Asian people in the streets at a time when the evidence we had for the the lab leak theory was weaker than the evidence we had for other theories.

Even today, while the evidence is inconclusive, what changed was that we have additional evidence that has raised the level of credibility of the lab leak theory.

"Crazies" went all in regardless of evidence or reason, and for that the pejorative is well earned.

how were the people pushing wet market theory not "crazies" also then.

> how were the people pushing wet market theory not "crazies" also then.

Because they had evidence that made the wet market theory the one most likely to be true, and a lack of stronger evidence for the lab leak theory. Investigating and supporting the theory that is best supported by the evidence you have isn't crazy, it's science.

When you look at all the facts you have, and then ignore that because it doesn't support what you want to be true, and then you act on what you wish was true instead, that's crazy. That's exactly what Trump and many of his supporters were doing.

We have new evidence now that suggests the lab leak theory is more likely than the wet market one, so once it is released non-crazy people will support the lab leak theory when they could not (and should not) have before.

> Because they had evidence that made the wet market theory the one most likely to be true

sorry but what was evidence supporting wet market theory when this article was published

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/health/coronavirus-animal...

> The new virus seems to have leapt from wildlife to humans in a seafood and meat market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were slaughtered and sold as food.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/science/pangolin-coronavi...

None of these qualify as evidence that you say the claim was based on.

Your own links contain the evidence you're looking for. Your pangolin link mentions one paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.939207v1....

There was a lot of evidence supporting the wet market theory at the time and supporting that it wasn't made in a lab (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) including exposure to the market by early patients (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) and the fact that wet markets have been guilty of spreading similar diseases in the past (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14738798/)

> There was a lot of evidence supporting the wet market theory at the time and supporting that it wasn't made in a lab

You do realise that when people say it was a lab leak, they don't necessarily mean it was made in a lab. They are merely saying that the origin of the pandemic was a virus escaping the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology via one of the workers/researchers there.

You’re over-generalizing on “people”. The majority, or at least loudest, of the lab leak proponents also say it was a Chinese-designed bioweapon intentionally released in China to attack the US. They have been moving goalposts, but your more reasonable take is not at all universal.

Except neither bats nor pangolins were sold at the market. That probably should have been one of the first things to check before spending, undoubtedly, millions of dollars.

The idea that someone in the lab down the street was accidentally infected with something from the lab and then went to lunch is far more plausible than creatures from thousands of miles away introduced a disease down the street street from a lab working on viruses that are known to be almost identical to the one of interest.

There’s no issue with pursuing all leads, but obviously some are much more plausible than others.

> Except neither bats nor pangolins were sold at the market.

We know that because…?

"Raccoon dogs, marmots, civets, mink, Siberian badgers and many other furry mammals that could have served as intermediate hosts for the SARS-CoV-2 virus were openly, illegally and profitably sold in the market. The wild and farmed animals were documented to be in poor health, and crowded together in their cages."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2021.2...

"Live animals that are susceptible to COVID-19 were in the market in December 2019"

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162...

> Your own links contain the evidence you're looking for. Your pangolin link mentions one paper

pangolin werent sold at wet markets though ?

The lab leak theory folks had plenty of evidence. The evidence the dept of energy cities is identical to what the supposed conspiracy theorist have said for months / years.

Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories, and conflating them means you don't actually bother to learn the argument of the opposing side(s), before dismissing them as "crazies". I think if you attempt to have serious discussion the minimum you should do is to learn what the disagreement is about. If you don't bother to do even that, then what's the point in it? Just booing the outgroup one more time?

> is that one group accepted the possibility and investigated that

I'm not sure what group you mean here, but that was certainly not mainstream media, "The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment. Those spent 100% of the effort on suppressing any possibility of the lab leak theory being seriously considered and investigated and declaring anybody who disagreed "crazies", and 0% of the effort investigating anything. To the honor of the actual scientific community, they managed to fight back and re-legitimize the leak theory, but it took significant time and effort, and significant struggle. And the PR damage (and career damage, etc.) to the people who dared to dissent was already done.

> and beating up random Asian people in the streets

I think mentioning people who considered lab leak theory a viable possibility together with people who beat up Asian people on the street, or even suggesting that there's a connection between the two, they have a common cause, and the former bear any responsibility on the latter - is an extremely dishonest move and you should apologize for making such connection.

> "Crazies" went all in regardless of evidence or reason, and for that the pejorative is well earned.

The "bat soup" propagandists went all in much further than the "crazies" - while the crazies only talked about the possibility of the lab leak (or bioweapon lab, ok) - the non-crazies banned, fired, ruined careers, declared opponents racist, and all that with even less evidence - at least for the lab leak theory there's a lab to leak from. By the time the "bat soup" theory was declared the only truth possible there was nothing to support it evidentially, let alone on the level of the only viable possibility. So "the crazies" earned their name, then "bat soup" propagandists must be named "super crazies on crazy juice while taking crazy pills and bathing in the crazy ocean". Or we can go back to actually discussing the evidence, if anybody is interested in that, of course.

> Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories, and conflating them means you don't actually bother to learn the argument of the opposing side(s), before dismissing them as "crazies".

I never said they were the same thing. They are different, but they were both BS conspiracy theories because they were pushed without sufficient evidence to support them and while ignoring stronger evidence for other theories.

> I'm not sure what group you mean here, but that was certainly not mainstream media,

the mainstream media acknowledged that the science was still primarily, and that there were a lot of questions, but they mostly reported on our best understanding of the facts that we have and not on conspiracy theories that ignored our best understanding of the facts that we had.

> "The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment. Those spent 100% of the effort on suppressing any possibility of the lab leak theory being seriously considered and investigated and declaring anybody who disagreed "crazies", and 0% of the effort investigating anything.

Who exactly is the ""The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment"? As you yourself acknowledge scientists and governments continued to investigate the origins of the virus including the possibility of a lab leak to find evidence.

> I think mentioning people who considered lab leak theory a viable possibility together with people who beat up Asian people on the street, or even suggesting that there's a connection between the two, they have a common cause, and the former bear any responsibility on the latter - is an extremely dishonest move and you should apologize for making such connection.

I clearly made a distinction between the people who believed a BS conspiracy theory and acted on it (in some cases by beating asian people) and those who accepted it was possible, and investigated that, but followed the available evidence and supported the theory that best fit the facts that we had.

> By the time the "bat soup" theory was declared the only truth possible

Declared by who? When? There was constant questioning of the origin and acknowledgement that there were multiple conflicting theories in mainstream media. I don't know where you were getting your information from, but it sounds like you weren't paying much attention to what mainstream media was actually saying.

The bat origin also had no evidence given that the bats that naturally carry this kind of corona virus are not endemic to Wuhan and are not regularly consumed.

Yet many people insisted that this was the origin.

> The bat origin also had no evidence

Of course it had evidence (see https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-origin-bats.html and https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55998157) but there were always questions (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/who-report-says-covid-orig...)

Congratulations, you have just discovered why almost every claim "there's no evidence about X" is false. Almost every conspiracy theory - and surely almost every side of a scientific debate - has some evidence behind it. Maybe inconclusive evidence, maybe bad evidence, maybe very weak evidence, maybe even evidence later proven to be false or fake - but there's almost always at least something. The reason is simple - the number of possible theories is infinite, but people's attention is finite. So even the dumbest, most gullible person would select the theories to believe in somehow - and those that have zero evidence to lean on would rarely make the cut, because there's just too many of them, so the probability of any of them to land any significant number of supporters is practically zero. Thus, the theories you've heard about likely to have at least some evidence - but there are questions, as you correctly noted. For bad theories, there would be very small and bad evidence and very large and hairy questions. It's not a 100% rule - hence I say "almost" - but it is very often the case.

For more exploration of the "no evidence" question, I suggest you read https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

> but they mostly reported on our best understanding of the facts that we have and not on conspiracy theories that ignored our best understanding of the facts that we had.

Except those weren't conspiracy theories but alternative explanations of the known facts supported by at least as much evidence (not much, not conclusive, but neither had the alternative) as their explanation. Which the press tried to de-emphasize in every way possible, and paint it as if there's absolutely no possible legitimacy behind the alternatives. After 3 years of screaming abuse and calling people "conspiracy theorists" we finally arrived at the point where we find their assertions of there being an only valid explanation are not true.

I have no problem with people believing for a while in a theory that later proven to be false or unsupported. I did it myself - believed in experiments and conclusions that failed to reproduce or have been disproven. It happens to much better people than me. I do have a problem with the same people making claims that people who believed in alternative explanations are crazy, racists, idiots, extremists, terrorists, etc. - and not even apologizing afterwards, just saying "well, we believed in the best theory NYT/WaPo described to us, what do you want?" I think they earned at least some epistemic humility.

> Who exactly is the ""The Experts (TM)" and the medical-political establishment"?

Pretty much everybody you regularly seen on TV and in the newspapers discussing those things and making decisions on those things.

> Declared by who? When?

By the media, the politicians and, for a period, by publications such as Lancet. And in much further degree, by the "I fucking love science" crowd which took delight in mobbing the dissenters and calling them all kinds of names. And continues to do so on other questions, btw.

> There was constant questioning of the origin and acknowledgement that there were multiple conflicting theories in mainstream media.

Nope, there wasn't for a long while, until scientists prominent enough that there was no way to silence them started to raise objections. The most prominent event was probably in September 2021, when Lancet published a rebuttal to their February 2020 article flatly declaring any non-nautural-origin theories to be "conspiracy theories". That's when the idea started to regain legitimacy. Until then, it was The Science (TM) that only natural origin is scientific and all the rest is crazy. And if you don't believe me (which you are right to do, I'm just some jerk on the internet), think about it - why would a team of 16 health experts write an article to Lancet demanding "objective, open, and transparent scientific debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2" and arguing that scientists "need to evaluate all hypotheses on a rational basis, and to weigh their likelihood based on facts and evidence, devoid of speculation concerning possible political impacts" - if by then such debate was already happening for all this while and the political impacts did not influence it at all? Were they just bored and were Lancet editors dumb for publishing a letter calling for something that is already being done and stating the obvious? Or maybe it wasn't obvious by then and it wasn't done - and this is what not me, a random internet jerk, but experts serious enough to be taken seriously by the Lancet, were worried about enough to write a collective letter?

> I don't know where you were getting your information from, but it sounds like you weren't paying much attention to what mainstream media was actually saying.

Can you show me an article in NYT or WaPo in the period between February 2020 and September 2021 that describes natural origin and lab leak theories as equal possibilities, each of them could yet be proven true and each of them being legitimate alternatives and areas of scientific enquiry? I admit I do not read every article in these publications (mainly because I consider them mostly be utter garbage and in cases where they raise above that level I usually get a referral from one of the places I trust more) but I am willing to accept evidence if presented to me.

> those weren't conspiracy theories but alternative explanations of the known facts supported by at least as much evidence (not much, not conclusive, but neither had the alternative) as their explanation.

This just isn't true. There wasn't anywhere near as much evidence for the lab leak theory as their was for a natural origin which is why the lab leak theory was determined to be unlikely compared to other theories. Even the people who were pushing the conspiracy theory admitted to the lack of evidence.

Tom Cotton, one of the first in politics to push the theory, said himself: "Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says" (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/coronavirus-cotton-f...)

For example there is an early article from a 'low credibility' right biased news website (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-mail/) The Daily Mail, and even they had a microbiologist explain: "at this point there's no reason to harbour suspicions' that the facility had anything to do with the outbreak, besides being responsible for the crucial genome sequencing that lets doctors diagnose it" (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...)

Same story with this article which was pushing the bio-weapon theory. (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus...). It also stated that evidence was incredibly weak without dismissing it entirely: "In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident."

Meanwhile, other theories being talked about at the time were supported by actual science such as genome analysis (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) and note that here too they weren't totally dismissing any other theories either, only presenting the best evidence we had saying:

"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here...More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."

> The most prominent event was probably in September 2021, when Lancet published a rebuttal to their February 2020 article flatly declaring any non-nautural-origin theories to be "conspiracy theories".

The opinion piece February did not flatly declare every non-natural origin theory to be a conspiracy. What it said was "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." which is very different from saying that all theories of a non-natural origin are by definition conspiracy theories. Those same authors made that explicit in a followup article (July 21) saying: "Careful and transparent collection of scientific information is essential to understand how the virus has spread and to develop strategies to mitigate the ongoing impact of COVID-19, whether it occurred wholly within nature or might somehow have reached the community via an alternative route, and prevent future pandemics." They did not dismiss that other options were possible. They were just saying "We want evidence, not conjecture"

> Can you show me an article in NYT or WaPo in the period between February 2020 and September 2021 that describes natural origin and lab leak theories as equal possibilities, each of them could yet be proven true and each of them being legitimate alternatives and areas of scientific enquiry?

They weren't equally supported by the evidence, but there are certainly cases where articles on those (left-biased) sites made it clear that a lab leak was possible and that the origin of the virus was not certain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/covid-lab-leak-fa...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/27/medias-de...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/30/scientist...

> What it said was "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin." which is very different from saying that all theories of a non-natural origin are by definition conspiracy theories

I feel a lot of mental gymnastics here. "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" does exactly this - declares that non-natural-origin theories are conspiracy theories. And it has been widely seen and used as such.

Out of your links: 1. only reports some scientists call for investigating the possibility of lab leak theory, hurrying to emphasize it's "unlikely" and there's no "new evidence". But at least the possibility of research is discussed - so maybe September 2021 is not the turning point, but May 14, 2021 letter to Science was? I think that would be more correct timeframe. 2. talks about "engineering" hypothesis proponent (and his rejection of it ) and is pretty dismissive of lab leak theory, though admits the possibility (month after May 2021) 3. opinion piece which pretty much confirms what I said about "the media has scorned the idea of an accidental lab release as a far-flung conspiracy theory, declaring it “debunked,” “dangerous” or “doubtful.”" and argues for lab leak hypothesis - also 27 May 2021 (weird coincidence, not sure what to think about it, especially given it's 1 day after Biden's order to research the origins of covid) and 4. is basically reporting lab leak theory is now legit, but also says it only happened "in recent weeks" (on May 30, that'd be about two weeks since May 14). I wonder what changed in those "recent weeks" - it doesn't mention any new evidence - so either it still has absolutely no evidence as before, but somehow now it's important to research if though it hasn't been for more than a year - or there's still some evidence which existed all that time but wasn't explored? Also, if that all only happened in "recent weeks" - what happened in many weeks before? You claim both theories were duly and equally investigated - then what exactly happened in "recent weeks" and what all these scientists are calling for if it has been already happening for a year anyway? Why the "leading scientist" needs to "call" for investigating the lab leak theory, if, as you claim, it already was being properly investigated?

> I feel a lot of mental gymnastics here. "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" does exactly this - declares that non-natural-origin theories are conspiracy theories. And it has been widely seen and used as such.

I can see how you'd read it that way, but remember that at that time, there were several conspiracy theories going around. Some were saying it came from the lab, some said it was designed in America, or that it was a bio-weapon and and released intentionally etc. "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" is not the same as "strongly condemn every theory suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" - and again, the same authors did clarify that in the follow up.

It might help if you build a time line of events.

conspiracy theories were going around pretty much immediately, but I mostly saw them spreading in January and and February of 2020. At the time, there wasn't any evidence for it besides "A lab exists" and "We don't like China", while evidence that it jumped to humans from animals was growing.

By March 2020 however it was discovered that China had hidden the first cases of the virus, meaning the outbreak had started ~20 days before they reported it to the WHO and they'd been pressuring doctors to stay quiet. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-wu...) Still, this was not evidence of a lab leak, but it sure caused people to lose trust in China and fueled the theory.

A year later, the lab leak theory was starting to be taken much more seriously because there had been new evidence (although mainly circumstantial). March was when a lot of it happened:

- A new report that some scientists at the Wuhan lab had gotten sick, but China said they tested negative for the virus. (https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/who-team-scientis...).

- The WHO released their report (https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-...) but people were already skeptical (https://www.state.gov/joint-statement-on-the-who-convened-co...) and the world was yelling at china for being secretive (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/who-wuhan-tedros-lab/20...)

Then in May 2021 it was discovered that three researchers from the lab had been sick and sent to hospital before the virus was reported to the WHO (https://nypost.com/2021/05/23/three-wuhan-lab-workers-were-h...). It looked pretty suspicious, but we still couldn't say that they had covid and naturally China said it was all lies (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1224284.shtml) but they'd basically lost all credibility by then. There was also this article (https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...) which got walked back a bit later (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-06-08/nobel-laur...)

The lab leak theory started out as nothing but a wild conspiracy theory without evidence, some of it was very clearly fueled by anti-Chinese sentiment and some of it was straight up crazy talk (like it being a US manufactured bio-weapon) and all of that never really let up. It fueled attacks on innocent Asian Americans and tainted the theory from the start. It made sense for most of the research to follow the evidence that we had, and for people to be wary about the wild and harmful claims people had been making.

I wasn't the idea of a lab leak that bothered people (outside of china anyway), it was how aggressively the theory was pushed without evidence, and all while ignoring what our best evidence suggested that concerned people. We can see that's true because once evidence (even weak evidence) started to emerge suggesting a lab leak more and more people started to ask for further investigation and this time with good cause!

Gradually over the years, the official story (stories really) coming out of china fell apart and new evidence (although not hard evidence) started to come forward. Again, nothing solid, but China wasn't exactly being helpful.

Research continued as best as it could though with reporters and scientists looking wherever the evidence took them and both the trump and biden administrations investigating to the best of their ability.

Natural-origin theories came and went, with varying degrees of confidence, but we never got a conclusive answer on the natural-origin side of things either. It did not appear to be engineered or lab-grown as some people had claimed, that was investigated, but there was never really a smoking gun.

Now, the government says we have new intelligence that is still not conclusive but makes the possibility of a lab leak the more likely scenario. I haven't seen that evidence, but I'm inclined to believe it until I see otherwise. I hope whatever new data we have gets out so that it can be researched. In any case, people who was spouting off lab leak theories, even the more sensible theories, in the early months of the pandemic shouldn't feel vindicated. Their suspicions were not based on evidence or reached through investigation of the facts. I don't think it hurt the investigation too much though, since the information we need is in China's hands, but it did hurt a lot of people.

The rightmost political commentators in the US almost universally entertained the lab leak theory in the same breath as the bioweapon idea. The implicit or explicit accusation was that there was no other reason to be working with viruses. People love a good mad-scientist story and those without an understanding of public health research, or a xenophobic disbelief that science is even conducted in China, ate it right up.

> Lab leak and bio weapon are two completely different theories

No, they're not. The people who pushed the lab leak hoax originally (and as evidenced by several redcap troll accounts in this thread) all believed that covid-19 was engineered in a lab and released by the chinese government to harm them personally.

Even if it ends up being a case where a natural virus was studied in a lab and accidentally released, it does not validate their views.

"Even if it's proved we are wrong, we were right because bad people partially agreed with our opponents". Makes sense.

What pejoratives? There are literally conspiracy nuts out there who strongly support the lab leak theory, mostly because China was the enemy du jour before drag queens. There is a lot of absolutely batshit stuff out there, including Trump himself accusing China of intentionally launching covid as a “bioweapon”.

As I said, that environment makes it hard to separate the legit, well-informed, grounded people who also advance real evidence of a lab leak.

My point was that they very loud, very nutty lab leak enthusiasts discredit legit discussion of the real possibility. I think you may have illustrated my point.

Well, if you ban and ostracize people for supporting some idea, then a lot of supporters for this idea would be people who are not afraid of being banned and ostracized - and this category of people has a lot of conspiracy nuts, because they have nothing to lose anyway. You can not use the consequence of the suppression policy as a justification of the same suppression policy.

>I think it has more to do with the fact that one opinion is supported by more conspiracy nuts.

Evaluating an empirical claim based on the aggregate character of those who are supporting it rather than actual steelmanned arguments is poor epistemic hygiene. It's a commonly-used justification for tribal epistemic closure - "the red tribe has lower IQ than average, therefore they are wrong in every disagreement with the blue tribe."

There's an equally-negative opposite of a "conspiracy nut" here - something like "sheeple".

I agree. And yet that is human nature and I hope it is not surprising and inexplicable.

You have been taught to associate the lab leak theory with low status conspiracy theorists. Your emotional mind has then sought to achieve higher status by siding with the non crazy people. As someone that is not easily swayed it is absolutely stunning to see how social dynamics sway people's opinions. As a younger person I just did understand how the opinions of the people I interacted with were driven by pure emotion, as this is something I fought with before I reached adolescence. I assumed everyone else had. Even those who claim to be 'scientific' are not in pursuit of truth, but social status. This whole thread is just one giant cope by the people who have sided with authority in search of status. They see that the gain in status they achieved through their allegiance being threatened and attack the facts by obfuscating them. DOE thinks it's the most likely scenario, they're not confident, but it's the best they can come up with. The FBI has done the same. That means intelligent rational people in receipt of all the facts have come to a conclusion you cast out and ridiculed in your dopaminergic dash for upvotes. Be better.

Part of the problem might be that commentators are going to want to willfully conflate intelligence "confidence" with a more pseudo science-y sounding "confidence score" that sounds like a bastard hybrid of research critique and statistics.

One wouldn't predict that to be the case with all of the scientists here. But given that it is, perhaps we can't fault the American people if they don't understand the nuance.

The truth is that "low confidence" is only meaningful in the context of COVID's origin if it is possible that a conclusion can be made with "high confidence". That doesn't seem to be possible.

Certainly not in the other direction if some agencies are concluding at this stage, even with "low confidence", that COVID was lab leaked. Further, certainly "low confidence" doesn't imply that the inverse conclusion is likely true.

The NYT's choice to over-emphasize the relatively meaningless "confidence score" is understandable given its prior investment in other views.

Rigid historical narratives have been built on less than low confidence intelligence conclusions. A conclusion is the conclusion when one has to be made regardless.

In the case of COVID, a conclusion as to its origin has to be made and yet the scientific evidence isn't likely to get better for either possibility. Short of confessions.

> Further, certainly "low confidence" doesn't imply that the inverse conclusion is likely true.

Not by the strictest definition of "likely", no, but it certainly does imply there's a high enough likelihood of spreading from the wild that a lab leak isn't conclusive. It's not meaningless nor even "relatively meaningless": it's just very difficult to tell where a given virus came from unless there's a smoking gun, and any conclusion in any direction is going to be shaky.

> After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but they willfully don't want to.

As someone who does understand statistics, it's made me dislike Nate Silver even more than if I didn't. It's been sad to watch his metamorphoses over the years from an interesting numbers guy with nuanced discussions on polling and models, to becoming the exact kind of pundit and talking head he used to make fun of. There's still a little bit of statistics on his site, but the overwhelming majority of content is the same trite punditry you'll find on pretty much any political blog.

I still respect his models, but I think the rest is the kind of stuff you’re expected to do as part of a media organization.

> I still respect his models, but I think the rest is the kind of stuff you’re expected to do as part of a media organization.

Exactly. His models are still outstanding. Ironically, I think the signal from his models gets lost in all the noise around the filler content on his site.

I enjoyed "The Signal and the Noise" I think its focus on the problems of fitting models to noise is something that should be more widely understood and he did that really quite well. It's a while ago but I think it was the massive failures of earthquake predictions was how he did it and it was convincing and readable.

I've never read his blog and care stuff all about his political polling predictions.

"The Signal and the Noise" is a great book and it definitely impacted some of the most important choices I made around my career. I think that's part of the reason I'm so annoyed that Nate Silver has gone so far down the punditry rabbit hole.

> Good luck getting 95% of the American populace to understand any of that nuance.

And that's why media use these headlines (dark patterns?) and politicians keep making fake promises and get reelected.

#SAD

…and their votes count equally to yours. Isn't democracy grand?

Correct, that's why the title is written in such a way, to ensure that they don't understand it

Good luck? The whole point of that headline is to get the American populace to completely miss all the nuance and hate china more then they already do.

Then when they are taken to court for outright bullshitting, that's when they point out the "nuance."

Hold on. I'm not saying the lab leak theory is completely left field. But definitely the intent of this announcement is more of a deliberate political attack then it is a declaration of actual scientific findings. The "least crappy theory" is essentially not news at all. A more accurate title is "inconclusive." But that sort of title doesn't get people all riled up against china.

My teenager brings up the A&W 1/3lb burger failure when I rant how people are choosing “math ignorance.” Kid’s point being that “fast food lovers[] would never let math intentionally get between them and greater amounts of fast food by choice, and that people simply that dumb.” I’ve dubbed it Hanlon’s Burger.

[] rephrased as their wording was a bit unfair to those that consume large amounts of fast food.

What most people really struggle with is uncertainty, and they lack the conceptual framework (distributions) and working understanding of how those distributions behave under various scenarios.

One of the better data scientists I've worked with explained to me that his entire job was 'quantifying uncertainty', and after working in the field I definitely believe it. You could play around with RStan for the weekend and gain an intuition for how evidence changes hypothesis and how a hypothesis could be the "most likely" but still "unlikely" in an absolute sense, all with tremendous uncertainty in your prediction.

Still, when you try to communicate the results of a model, uncertainty is simply hard to communicate when people are interest in using your analysis for a snap decision, and the uncomfortable truth is "we can't tell you" is a fine modeling result.

Its really not that hard, I don't see how you can have such a negative attitude.

I linked a video above that explains it very simply.

There isn't much nuance to it at all.

If all the other origin theories has "very low" as confidence score, then a lab leak is still the most likely origin with a "low" confidence score.

It would be nice to see the confidence score as a numerical number in order to understand how much lead this theory has to the second most likely origin theory.

There is way to actually quantify such estimates. Any numbers would just be made up. A qualitative confidence rating like "low" really is the best way to convey intelligence information to policy makers.

Four U.S. agencies say "market origins" - as does the U.S. National Intelligence Council. Two more agencies -- including the CIA -- are undecided. And then there's the "low confidence" Energy Department opinion, and one from the FBI.

So it ultimately depends on how you weight the 75% of groups that don't think there's evidence that it leaked from a lab.

This. Low confidence still significant in that it could have been “low confidence transmission from wet market game”, but that’s not the direction this landed on. It’s likely a lab leak, says the report, but there’s too many gaps to support higher certainty.

Exactly - and how many were mocked, ridiculed, cancelled for even floating the idea of the lab leak; it was labeled as a BS conspiracy theory.

Many, even some in this thread, are eager to minimize this story if they participated in ridiculing the fringe voices who kept questioning the official narrative. Better to have this quickly fade into oblivion lest they be outed as having placed their blind faith in false prophets. But Pepperidge farm remembers

> it was labeled as a BS conspiracy theory.

At the time it was a BS conspiracy theory. There was some evidence for it, and some evidence against it and it happened that the evidence we had at the time was stronger for the non-lab leak theories.

That's what changed right now. We have new evidence that puts the lab leak theory above the others. Back when Trump was demanding that "China pay" and people were beating up random Asians who were just walking down the street, that wasn't true. Just because we today have the evidence to support the lab leak theory, that doesn't justify Trump's claims or the "blind faith" of his followers who rejected the available evidence to support what they wanted to be true.

> Trump was demanding that "China pay" and people were beating up random Asians who were just walking down the street

Unfortunately, random Asian people getting brutalized when they're going about their daily business has been a long-standing problem in a number of cities. Is there any evidence to suggest that the people perpetrating these crimes were even aware of Trump's words, let alone motivated by them, rather than this just fitting the usual pattern of criminality combined with a generalized ethnic resentment?

> Unfortunately, random Asian people getting brutalized when they're going about their daily business has been a long-standing problem in a number of cities.

It increased after the pandemic (https://abcnews.go.com/US/hate-crimes-asians-rose-76-2020-am... and https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-hate-crimes-against-c...). It's hard to get data on people's motivations for crimes, but we can very clearly see drastic shifts in trends and this was trending higher than the baseline "generalized ethnic resentment" you'd expect to see normally.

https://www.justice.gov/crs/highlights/2020-hate-crimes-stat...

increases

anti black - 50%

anti white - 30%

anti asian - 75%

Problem was you weren't even allowed to speculate about this and consider that the possibility warranted more investigation without being written off as a "Trumper."

I've seen huge family fights over this very issue and not one person involved was a Trump supporter or a conspiracy theorist but then the names get thrown around because somebody didn't toe somebody else's ideological line.

How on earth did you manage to bridge the gap from 'there was some evidence for it' to 'BS conspiracy theory'. If it has some evidence for it, it is not, by definition a BS conspiracy theory. You allowed others to do your thinking for you. You allowed your emotions to cloud your judgement, all while under the banner of the holy rationalists. Own it and do better next time. The media is used to manipulate opinion especially in times of national crisis, dont fall for it.

Because initially the "some evidence" amounted to little more than "A lab exists" and "leaks are a thing that has happened". Meanwhile the other theories were being supported by science like genome analysis. As time and investigations went on, more evidence came up, but when it started being spread around the evidence being presented was absolutely so weak that as a theory it was essentially speculation.

You are reading you info second hand. If you had gone to the evidence yourself you would not be saying what you are now saying. Read the academic papers, look up the facts from sources as close to the truth as you can. You can't trust people to give you information untainted by their pov. It was obvious to me at the time just by doing a modicum of research.

It's not just me saying there was no evidence. It's the people and articles that were spreading the conspiracy theory.

"Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says" - Tom Cotton

"at this point there's no reason to harbour suspicions' that the facility had anything to do with the outbreak, besides being responsible for the crucial genome sequencing that lets doctors diagnose it" (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...)

"In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident." (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus...)

I hope this goes to show how dangerous social media censorship is. Social media has completely ruined all their credit as arbiters of truth. I never trusted the group think in the first place and feel fortunate they all so completely and quickly fell on their face. I pray no one trusts their judgment ever again.

Do we need to make a decision on this matter at the moment? If the choices are between low certainly and very low, I’d say we just don’t have enough information to say anything interesting.

Also article mentions FBI has “moderate” confidence it was lab leak. I find that very interesting given it wouldn’t be so much based on scientific analysis but some intelligence collection the FBI has.

Doesn’t the FBI also have a large biological analysis team? For bio terror ?

I think if anything COVID has shown us that biological warfare makes as much sense as nuclear: none. In our globally connected world it's mutually assured destruction, and that's without even the need for your enemy to maintain stockpiles of weapons. The virus will find itself within your own borders soon enough.

It still makes sense for things like anthrax that aren't easily communicable. Or botulinum toxin.

Fair enough, I meant viral biowarfare.

I should point out that some viruses are not easily transmissible either.

Terrorists motivated by religion or ideology sometimes use tactics and weapons that make no sense to rational people. The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological weapons.

> The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological weapons.

Sarin would be classed as chemical, not biological.

It's also worth illustrating that their primary terrorist act killed 15 people, after releasing sarin on 5 different trains during Tokyo's busy rush hour. You would have been more effective just lobbing a single grenade.

The cult used a chemical weapon. They were also developing biological weapons based on botulism and anthrax at the same time but fortunately didn't get a chance to use those.

The same thing they just said about sarin vs. a grenade, you can say about anthrax vs. a grenade.

Only bad viruses. Good viruses will be genetically coded to only harm a particular subgroup.

I was thinking that actually gives the United States a distinct advantage in such (hypothetical) biological warfare, it has the most diverse gene pool on the planet.

That seems unlikely, I would expect most African countries to beat the US easily.

Until they mutate.

It is beneficial to the survival of a virus to infect the largest group that it can. A virus targeted to a small group of people has a large "survival benefit" the moment it can mutate to infect everybody.

In addition, it's really hard to target a biological entity at a specific subgroup of humans. From a biological standpoint, all humans are damn near identical.

You share 50% of your DNA with a banana.

> The virus will find itself within your own borders soon enough.

Depends on the virus - something with the long incubating periods and frequent lack of symptoms like Covid yes, but something much more quick and deadly (say, Ebola, even though 2-21 days is still potentially slow) could result in quick mass deaths without the opportunity to spread it around.

And the WSJ piece says the CIA is undecided! I wonder what explains the different assessments.

Probably they still aren’t sharing all the information they have with each other. I had thought that was supposed to be much improved post 9-11.

Or there aren't objective standards for what "low, medium, and high confidence" actually mean, thereby allowing one agency to look at the evidence and say it's of low confidence and another to look at the same data and say it's moderate confidence.

Interestingly, the CIA has published a paper on exactly this subject:

Words of Estimative Probability (PDF) https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/ar...

Moderate and Low are Words of Analytic Confidence [1]. This has more to do with the quality of the sourcing than a numeric probability number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence

Or they are coming to different conclusions given the same ambiguous/incomplete information. It could simply be disagreement, or just lack of a standard metric here to compare notes easily.

It probably just means the correct aggregate conclusion is “we don’t know, go ask China”.

I read that they did massively increase sharing after 9/11, but there was a reassessment after the Manning leaks. Manning had access to way more information than someone at their level needed for their job, and they concluded this came about from going a bit too far on the post 9/11 sharing and so they dialed it back a bit.

They improved the ability to share info (fusion centers and whatnot), but the desire to do so remains under the auspices of humans.

I'm sure that the undecidedness is not about the origin but about the geopolitical impact such an official statement would have.

I have not been inside the CIA, but that could just mean they haven't done any research on that or that their research is ongoing.

An institution will not have assessments on everything at any point in time. Two different institutions might have didferent assessments for a billion reasons, e.g. they could have done the research at different points in time, the underlying evisence could differ, the interviewed experts could have said different things and so on.

Two different instutions reaching different conclusions is not as surprising as it seems.

What the CIA says publicly and what is happening internally are often very different things. The FBI has less of a global political agenda.

Organizations like the CIA don't make factual statements, they make strategic statements. Any connection with reality is purely coincidental.

If the CIA came out tomorrow and said they were 100% confident it was a lab leak from China we would have no way of knowing if that's based on facts or political propaganda.

Maybe, in 40-50 years we'll get an answer. Until then, it's too politically and strategically useful to keep it up in the air. At least one goal is for people to be arguing about it.

Well, when all 17 intelligence agencies agree on something, you know they must be right then.

I don’t know… I think when they all agree it’s also likely that they are wrong. (It indicates some possibility of motivated reasoning.)

> Well, when all 17 intelligence agencies agree on something, you know they must be right then.

Then you know they are lying.

This is exactly why I can't give this article, or any of those multiple intelligence agency assessments any real credence. I don't have access to any of the data that went into those assessments. What I do have access to doesn't point very strongly at a lab leak origin, despite its plausibility.

It's perfectly reasonable for the government to support one theory based on non-conclusive evidence that they have and reasonable for the public to support another based on the non-conclusive evidence available to them.

It makes it a lot more likely that public support for the non-lab leak theories will change once we get the chance to see the government's new evidence though.

And for the record, the National Intelligence Council and four other unidentified agencies say with "low confidence" that the virus came about through natural transmission.

If you repeat a lie often enough, even the at first reluctant will start to believe it. That's how the propaganda machine typically works.

The more these claims based on minimal new evidence are repeated, the more it seems the virus may have potentially been released by nefarious actors as an attack on the population.

It's not implausable for an entity with knowledge and access to a virus being studied, to release a copy of it in the environment surrounding the lab while maintaining a high degree of deniability.

If it is so, then the question that remains is, much like in the case of Nordstream, which nation state has the most incentive to carry it out?

While I won't discount the possibility that the outbreak could be a nefarious plot to plant a virus.I feel the US's response to the pandemic and the massive mistakes made make it less likely. The most likely would be just an accident where a researcher unknowingly got infected while conducting research in a BSL2 lab where they were testing wild SARS like viruses and inserting FCS to gauge the viruses potential threat level

>I feel the US's response to the pandemic and the massive mistakes make it less likely.

It may be unlikely but there have been many instances where the US population becomes a victim of its own government's covert actions. The quality of response doesn't neccessarily prove anything.

I'm wary of engaging, but this just makes no sense to me. Perhaps you can explain and actually make explicit some of the implied connections.

Previously the 'big lie' was that it was not from a lab. Now that it's assessed to be likely from a lab the new lie is the contention that it was done deliberately? Whose propaganda machine is at work here anyway? The Chinese govt or the US one? Or are they in cahoots now?

>Previously the 'big lie' was that it was not from a lab.

Wasn't the previous news claim specifically that somebody in Wuhan ate a bat or pangolin? Until it was made public that the US was involved in funding the research.

Science is the collecting and processing of empirical data using peer reviewed methods to reach a conclusion. Which part do you think the FBI is not doing which separates their process from science?

“The FBI employs a cadre of microbiologists, immunologists and other scientists and is supported by the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, which was established at Fort Detrick, Md., in 2004 to analyze anthrax and other possible biological threats.” -the article

Ironic, since the anthrax from the "anthrax attacks" in 2001 were traced to Fort Detrick.

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...

Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic?

I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands.

(And while we're on the subject, did anything come of the thing about Pfizer engineering the virus, ostensibly for vaccine research purposes?)

Yes we have the sequences and no they’re nothing like SarsCov2

True. And yet, it shows that there is a large scientific community & apparatus willing to experiment with this.

Circumstantial evidence is not proof of wrongdoing, but it is reason to ask more questions. Why were those questions censored? Why were they ruled unacceptable "misinformation"? It seems to me that we were asleep at the switch.

The counter to that is that the experts in coronaviruses knew they were the likely next epidemic and that they were doing their best to characterize the threat as best possible but unfortunately failed before the spillover came. The scientific community knew how close we came between SARS and MERS, a small mutation of either could’ve been much more virulent and pathogenic, so of course they were trying to research.

The question is not whether the research was worth it overall. They denied there was even a possibility that lab leak was the cause of the pandemic.

I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that the research is and was worth it. But we need to have an accurate accounting of recent events. They tried to completely shut that down. Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.

There’s an immense benefit to being specific with both what you mean by lab leak (natural virus leaked or modified one did) and by “they” when you’re talking about coverups because it gets weirdly racist and conspiratorial in a hurry otherwise.

Unfortunately, you seem fundamentally confused about the position of people who are skeptical of zoonotic origin.

Please explain to me how position A) is more racist than position B)

A) Scientists all over the world, including Chinese, Americans, and others, made a fundamental misjudgement about the safety of the Wuhan virology lab, or perhaps viral experimentation generally, and the result was a global pandemic

Versus

B) Chinese people eating & trading wild and exotic meat unintentionally caused a global pandemic due to their consumption

Of course, neither theory is racist. That's a word that used to mean something (and I wish it still did!), but is mostly used today to shut down debate in Western countries.

I’d rather just leave you to your false dichotomy. Thanks though.

It is scary to think that educational systems in democracy around the world produce comments like that. The commenter made a good point and your response is simply that you're going to stick with your prior beliefs because what? Part of good rhetoric is entertaining opposing ideas.

Refusing to engage with false dichotomies doesn't mean I'm stubbornly sticking with my priors.. if this is your first dip in the "lab leak" vs "zoonotic origin" pool, welcome, because otherwise you'd know how quickly it turns to shit when people pretend like only two scenarios exist. Don't fret, democracy will survive even I don't choose to engage with this particular round of bad faith argument!

There's no dichotomy here. The OC is merely pointing out that one theory (wet market) was widely accepted despite its obvious racism, while another (lab leak) was dismissed as racist despite being less racist than the wet market one. I believe this is a worthy point of discussion.

I mean... for several years, the notion that Chinese people are unsanitary was conisdered not racist, while the notion that extremely smart Chinese bioscientists may have covered up a lab accident was considered Asian hating. That sort of double think is worthy of questioning and criticism.

> Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.

I still get the impression the 'selectively silence misinformation' crowd is still as emboldened as ever, even in the pursuit of science. Despite it repeatedly failing and backfiring.

COVID helped give Reddit-style control of discourse a glean of urgency/respectability and "it's okay because we had good-intentions" continues to be the go-to justification.

No we do not have the sequences, the lab has so far refused to share the sequences in their public database taken down down September of 2019. Plus recently people have discovered through BLAST searches an unreported Chimera virus that got accidentally got sequenced via contaminated agricultural rice sequencing dataset. Which means they had viruses that have not been previously reported. And this makes sense researchers do not publish viruses until they themselves can publish them in a journal. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2....

It was available well into 2020 if you read past the shitty early headlines.

I guess you're referring here to Flo Débarre's misleading tweet, which you linked to four months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247997

As I noted in my reply at that time, everyone has always agreed that the overall server remained intermittently accessible until Feb 2020. The particular database "was not accessed from outside of the WIV after 12 September 2019", though.

Right, a database put online in June 2019 - widely claimed to be “suspiciously removed” in Sept 2019, actually wasn’t. It was available into 2020 at which point after a bunch of hacking attempts, they took it down. And certainly “everyone hasn’t agreed” because in every thread about the topic people imply like this 6 Month old database is a smoking gun when it’s self evidently not.

I don't think the server is conclusive evidence of anything, but your representation seems misleading to me. The date when the information became publicly unavailable seems like the relevant one to me, even if the server remained connected to the Internet for a few months afterward.

And you seriously believe their claim that it was taken down due to "hacking attempts"? Given the international importance of the subject, is there really no one anywhere in China who can keep a simple database-backed website running? Or could they not share the information in a form that obviously presents no information security risk, like a dump on a flash drive?

Even if we had them and they were found to be different, that doesn't exclude the possibility that they repeated the same experiment with different source material.

The evidence there is not that that particular group created covid, but that there is a clear history of engineering viruses in exactly the way a lab leak scenario would play out.

> Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic?

I don't know about those specifically, but one of the earliest genetic matches we had is a natural virus called RaTG13 and was studied in the Wuhan lab. I think a closer match has since been found though.

> I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands.

Yes, indirectly through EcoHealth Alliance, hence the "without its own knowledge" part.

The BANAL viruses collected in Laos are closer than RaTG13. No published virus is close enough that SARS-CoV-2 could readily be derived from it in the lab, though some people have speculated about pathways via accelerated evolution during serial passaging.

I believe the most likely research-related origin involves an unpublished virus. I don't think that's implausible; the WIV was also sampling in Laos, and no research group in the world has published literally everything they're currently working on. Even with no attempt at secrecy, it takes time to write stuff up. It's also possible that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus collected and leaked by the WIV before they were able to sequence it.

As to the grandparent's final question, I'm not aware of any serious claim that Pfizer had anything to do with this. There was a claim that Moderna was somehow involved, based on a genetic sequence that appears both in SARS-CoV-2 and in a pre-pandemic Moderna patent; but that sequence appears in other previously-known organisms too.

Thanks. To clarify my question, the part about Pfizer seems to be that they were engineering virus variants after the pandemic started, and doing so intentionally in a laboratory, not (merely) as a byproduct of overly-specific vaccines exerting evolutionary pressure.

What I heard about that was based on supposed leaked information (Project Veritas). Such information going public would obviously be very bad PR, so it would make sense for it to be secret, if it's real. But also, anyone can record a fake interview (and nowadays, somewhat convincingly replace the faces and voices too), so...

Ah, the video with Jordon Trishton Walker--so not the virus origins, but alleged gain of function work after emergence. I understand that the video is real, and he really is (or was) a "Director of Research and Development" at Pfizer. Most of what he said was scientifically incoherent, though. I'd guess that he got the job for internal political reasons, and that he has almost zero influence on or even understanding of whatever Pfizer is actually doing. I don't love fact check sites in general, but this one has some quotes from researchers that are consistent with my judgment of his expertise:

https://www.factcheck.org/2023/02/scicheck-no-evidence-pfize...

I'm not aware of anyone developing vaccines targeting laboratory-enhanced viruses. GoF proponents sometimes cite earlier vaccine development as a possible benefit, but even they don't actually fund such work--the mutations that occur in the lab aren't predictive enough of the mutations that will occur in real human spread to justify the speculative investment. The research of concern is pretty much all in academia, basic research with more nebulous intended benefit.

Do we know why it is the Department of Energy that works on that? I would have expected a branch of government that's more related to health, granted, I know very little about US gvmt structure.

I don't know the answer to your question, but the DoE does a lot more than just energy. In addition to overseeing energy policy, they oversee the R&D of nuclear weapons and the nuclear weapons program, they oversee the National Laboratories which does a lot of research and development in the areas of technology, health, physics, climate/environment and energy, they started the Human Genome Project, etc.

Here's their overview of some of the stuff their National Laboratories have done: https://www.energy.gov/articles/75-breakthroughs-americas-na...

It sounds like they need to rename themselves. Perhaps "Department of Science"?

There's a reason why DoE's used as the "villain" agency in Stranger Things, enough so that DoE commented[1] on it.

1: https://www.energy.gov/articles/what-stranger-things-didnt-g...

For what it’s worth - FBI arrived at the same conclusion in 2021 with “moderate confidence.”

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807...

Well you didn’t just out and expect the US gov officials to say “lol yeah it was us, we were messing around with stuff we shouldn’t have been and is actively outlawed in US territories”, did you?

The connections to eco health alliance were all laid out a long time ago

Perhaps. But you buried the lede.

It wasn't that long ago that just asking the question - or questioning the then narrative - was positioned as a threat to the democracy, racist (i.e., anti China), conspiracy theory, etc.

Low confidence based on available data is 100x better than high confidence based on nothing but some backroom creative thinking, and a mindless media entourage willing to parrot anything tossed in front of them.

It felt like 1984 then; this only magnifies that. And yet, still not an ounce of accountability. That's the lede.

I got banned from a major Coronavirus subreddit for saying in 2021 "we don't know yet how many boosters will be needed or on what schedule". This was seen as a claim that the vaccines don't work, which was patently false (at the time).

Questioning whether the virus emerged organically or came from a lab leak? That was equivalent to claiming the government is run by lizard people and the earth is flat. That's a public shaming and banning with prejudice.

What concerns me is now that the facts are dripping out, the tools (i.e., public shaming) that enabled a false narrative and marginalized traditional common (i.e., asking painfully obvious questions) are still normalized.

We can't just flip a button and undo the "programming" and glorification of group think. The step in the wrong direction can't be reversed.

Feels like we should assume it's a lab leak and push for caution anyways. If it wasn't a lab leak then all we've done is help better prevent that from happening in the future.

It’s hard enough to get a good objective analysis done without saying it should be bent to political considerations.

Sadly, the objective here isn’t to prevent this from happening in the future.

> So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cause,' and a confidence score: 'low'.

These qualifications seem to me to be in conflict. If there's low confidence about the most likely cause, then does that imply that there's low confidence about every possible cause? Could there be high confidence in the least likely cause? That, too, seems contradictory to me.

There are only two theories being seriously considered: lab leak, wet market. Therefore I think it is reasonable to expect a probability of at least 90% that it is one of these two theories and not a third theory that no one is discussing. So if we have over 90% confidence that _either_ "lab leak" or "wet market", and we believe that "lab leak" is the _most_ the likely cause, then it follows that we must estimate the lab leak theory to be true with at least 45% probability. Maybe you could say "low confidence" if you're 45-80% sure, and "high confidence" if you're more certain than that.

>"low confidence,” suggesting its level of certainty was not high

you're analyzing this like it's the press sensationalizing. This is an establishment walking back what they've said in the past, and allowing a pov that this same press and govt literally censored. We shouldn't expect they're going to scream "we were completely wrong because we were biased".

They're now admitting that there is no evidence at all for the hypothesis they've been treating as gospel, and admitting the evidence better fits lab leak (a view we know from Fauci's emails was floated early on and suppressed). That's saying a lot.

We'll still have to wait for "not natural in origin", but that's coming too.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but have the people here on HN who are poo-pooing this also taken stands in the past that allowing this would be a climbdown from? Because I remember when it wasn't allowed to discuss lableak here on HN either.

Yes, let me quote Zola, "J'accuse!"

FWIW the Japanese translation of the title is

新型コロナの起源、研究所から流出の可能性高い＝米エネルギー省

To retranslate back to English as a relatively direct translation

The cause of COVID, there is a high possibility it spread from a lab.

Notably missing are something like 一番, to mean most. This title is in absolute terms. The reason I found this in the first place was because a Japanese colleague was surprised that it did come from a lab! after an initial moment of doubt before accepting it because WSJ is reputable.

I sent the news deck an email pointing it out but do expect it's intentional. Reading as absolute rather than relative is likely "correct" and a great example of misinformation from the WSJ. Presumably reputable news sources just don't exist anymore, or perhaps they never did :(

See "Words of estimative probability" related to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_of_estimative_probabilit...

More context on the Energy Department labs:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/27/...

I wonder if the timing of these "bad headlines" is connected to this

https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-top-diplomat-expects-ne...

Of course it is. It makes me sincerely hope J. Posadas was right.

They went from "undecided" to "Low Confidence". That is a shift in a particular direction.

I would go on to talk about how the US invaded countries with zero confidence but...

What is the substantive difference between "Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says" and "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says"? The only difference I see is that one notes the pandemic ("Covid-19") while the other notes the agency ("Energy Dept.").

Or is your comment more broadly that both headlines are bad? If so, then I'd disagree. Both headlines give the most important part of the story: a US agency currently believes that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak.

I'm not sure what the better headline would be. "Lab leak possible origin?" Well, yes, in that they haven't ruled it out. But that's not really the same thing as saying that something is "most likely" even if, as the subhead notes, they wouldn't bet the farm on it.

> Both headlines give the most important part of the story: a US agency currently believes that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak.

seems to me you're still leaving out a very important part of the news, which is that the confidence level is "low".

so right now the US government has multiple theories, none of which it is confident. it's just that of the reports that is not confident in, it might be the least not confident in the lab leak idea.

but the WSJ has decided to throw integrity aside and ignore that part in their headline.

The confidence level for the Covid-19 vaccine being sterilizing was low, but we still ran headlines saying as much. The confidence level for cloth masks being effective was low, but we still ran headlines saying as much. The confidence level for everything when it comes to Covid-19 is low.

The media gave up on integrity a long time ago, especially with respect to the pandemic. You're just noticing it now?

You know you're right. Remember when Saddam closed his labs to us? The ones that never had WMDs? What was the "confidence" threshold for invading iraq? I also bet its the same exact people now telling us about more "confidence" levels.

Confidence, high, low, whatever, it means nothing. No one trusts the govt. or media anymore and no one should.

As long as this logic also applied to the “confidence” in the original official narrative that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory. In the LA area, many in the science/tech communities were on board with the official story and joined in the fun - laughing at the “morons” still considering the possibility of the lab leak.

I suspect many of those are the same ones who are eager to sweep it under the rug, or now turn to conspiracy theory that THIS story is part of a psyop but not the original response from the science/health authorities.

I think the criticism is that saying something is ‘most likely’ implies a sense of it being pretty likely. When the reality is that they are very uncertain.

Both headlines are clickbait compared to the content of the article.

Sure, but the real news is it used to be taboo to say this - Sinophobic even. A lot of people are owed a serious apology.

Context, as always, is key: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1027236499/anti-asian-hate-cr...

Are these people who are owed a serious apology the ones who actually attacked Asian-Americans? Or simply the ones who stoked racial animus prompting others to attack them?

The people who are owed an apology are the people who did nothing more than to believe that the wuhan coronavirus outbreak originated from the wuhan coronavirus research lab.

That was situated in a region known for coronaviruses

Why was it so stigmatized before and now it's the preferred hypothesis for FBI and DOE?

Good question! Perhaps 'Deep Trump'? Certainly even the 3 letter agencies are not immune to what at best we might call the reactionary right, at worst proto-fascism.

Is that even true? Because I recall the opposite.

in which an evidence for zootipic origin couldn't be found.

If you had actually read the article that you are supposed to be commenting on,you would realize that this statement of the title is done in "low confidence"

No one is gonna apologize to you if you are unable to parse information

I can parse fine, can you?

From the article:

> The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak

People used to be called racist for saying this!

I think it's different in that I think when the lab leak strategy was first introduced, it was introduced in an explicitly political manner, i.e. by a politician vs an (arguably) apolitical institution. There wasn't evidence presented to support this theory beyond the political pundits footballing the theory around, who were most certainly not medical research experts about this. At least this is how I saw it as a layperson who didn't do any serious research myself, so it all seemed like a load of political bs trying to score points instead of a seeking of actual truth.

So at first it did look like just plain ol' xenophobic politics to me. Only one party, the party that politically campaigned on xenophobia, was the one spreading the theory widely on their mainstream media.

I'm more than happy to accept lab leak theories from actual researchers who understand how to analyze outbreaks and not politicians trying to score points with voters. It just wasn't that at the beginning, probably because the researchers had to take the time to come to their conclusions.

Regular people here without a known political affiliation were ridiculed relentlessly for even mentioning the lableak hypothesis. Same goes for merely questioning lockdowns. I hope many of you are doing some serious reflection.

IDK what you mean by "here". I wasn't ridiculing anyone relentlessly and I didn't see relentless ridicule, mostly because dang generally bans people for bad faith/hostility/etc. So idk what you mean by "many of you", since you're clearly not talking to me.

I mean many people here on this forum during the worst of the pandemic. No, they weren’t modded or banned that I could tell.

It was not introduced with any political intent. It was introduced by people noticing that, wait a minute, that wet market you say the virus came from is right next to a huge virus lab, and you expect me to believe that it's a coincidence? The idea that this was a political statement is itself a piece of political propaganda.

[deleted]

Lol

“Low confidence” does not equate to “overwhelming evidence”.

This is a prelude to war with China. We want people to hate them now that geopolitics are pitting us against them. Oh shit, we are heading to war.

They always softball these bombshells like this so any confidence in official terms is something that pretty much solidifies this as the source of the virus for me.

I’m trying to think of anyone involved had a conscience if they would be tallying themselves to be one of the most prolific murderers in history but then that likely wouldn’t happen since first unofficial hazing ritual you do when entering academia is to develop an air of “that’s not me” attitude about things like this.

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