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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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