I Asked Leading Covid Scientists, Off the Record, About the Lab Leak Theory | Hacker News Reader

I Asked Leading Covid Scientists, Off the Record, About the Lab Leak Theory

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All I can take away from this is that it really doesn't matter where it came from. The real problem is dealing with something like this was a failure on so many levels regardless of where it came from. The OP definitely finishes with the emotional desire to blame that still doesn't change the fact that the despair is not from where it came from but rather our global dealing with it.

Seems rather insane to me to "not care" about the origins if we all intend on preventing this in the future. Each origin hypothesis has vastly different implications - incredibly vast. I'm shocked that this article didn't discuss the Biosaftey Level of the WIV or the many, many, MANY, other lab leaks from labs with even stricter BSL.

The ever avuncular Jon Stuart said it well two years ago: https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?t=353

Let's say I'm from the government, and I'm here to help. What would you have me do about any of these vast implications?

You've asked a key question. Whether it came from the lab or a wet market, it is China's fuckup. We in other countries can at best punish them for that fuckup regardless of origin, but we have no control over their labs or their wet markets. That is China's problem to deal with.

As scientists, on the other hand, we like to understand things whether or not there is practical benefit.

Are we sure it was not actually done by some other country like USA for example?

Which government? Chinese? you already burned all the WIV records so all is good. US one - jail all the people in chain that led to financing GOF research in China.

If an adversarial government is conducting potentially dangerous research, would you not want to find a way to get your people in the room while they do it? And how would you convince them it was worth letting your people in to observe? There were Americans in the lab until funding for pandemic preparedness was pulled. The fact that we could have had eye witnesses accounts, but for a short sighted repealing of funding is inexcusable.

Imagine Civilization trade meme screen:

+ You receive intelligence on foe biolab.

- You kill 7 million people and cause global recession.

If it wouldn't matter, people wouldn't put this much effort in trying to suppress the discussion.

I lost the reference but I've read a virologist fearing that a lab leak would constitute a 'Chernobyl event for virology'.

Ask yourself - if you were the CN government, with all of the information you're withholding from scientists, researchers, NGOs, etc. If you truly believe it was a zoonotic origin wouldn't you do everything possible to exonerate yourself?

Again, if you were the CN government and it was a lab leak that got out of control, what would you do/say.

All I'm saying is - if they shared the basic data that international researchers and NGOs were asking for, we'd be MUCH closer to the truth...a rather inconvenient one for them.

> Ask yourself - if you were the CN government, with all of the information you're withholding from scientists, researchers, NGOs, etc. If you truly believe it was a zoonotic origin wouldn't you do everything possible to exonerate yourself?

That presumes that leaders in China know the origin.

Why would you presume that?

If it were a lab fuckup, people will be executed. In that case, you can be damn sure people are going to work VERY hard to bury this. Priority number one in that case would be to prevent anybody competent (especially from the West) from getting anywhere near things.

If it were zoontic, people still might be executed. Scapegoats are needed for Comrade Pooh. Personal survival probably depends upon keeping any such investigations ongoing and inconclusive.

There is NO situation where the truth helps the people involved on the ground in China. And it's not clear that truth helps anyone in the entire political chain in China.

Why don't defendants take the stand? Because even if they're not guilty of the crime they're accused of, they're usually guilty of something else. China's refusal to completely open the books is not strong evidence of lab origin.

If they made it in a lab, they would have samples of the intermediary steps. They could use one of those to infect a bat or pangolin and then claim to have proof of zoonotic origin. The “why wouldn’t you do everything possible to exonerate yourself” line of thinking is problematic

Could we please stop doing gain of function research in mammal/bird viruses anyway? That'd be great.

Or require much more stringent BSL with actual auditing

Which technology have we ever successfully stopped?

nuclear fission. note all the folks complaining on this site about how there ought to have been much more of it but muh regulations.

oh also decentralized file transfer.

The trick is you don't need to make it go away you just need to prevent wide-enough-use-to-cause-destabilization-of-the-thing-you-like.

The thing with viruses is that usually they are helpful inasmuch as they prevent clones with correlated weaknesses from taking over the biosphere (that's why they exist imo), but since the clones is US now, viruses is bad, and advancing their evolution on purpose is like simulating a world where our population is x times larger in order to get what a little more information about how viruses is bad for us?

idk seems like simple stuff.. govt should not be paying money for things that are bad for humans. voters are all humans after all.

That's why any hint of scientists suppressing or discounting evidence for a covid lab leak is absolutely devastating for science in the long wrong btw.. imagine the worst case scenario: scientists scrambling to hide the fact that they accidentally leaked a horrible virus into the world; hiding it so that they can continue creating pandemic-worthy viruses for a few paltry research dollars. essentially putting a 2nd mortgage on the house to buy baseball cards and then losing all the paperwork till the bank shows up.

and it's exactly as embarrassingly immature as the above, because the question we really need to focus on is: can a lab leak of a GoF virus happen, what will the consequences be if it does, and should we be paying money to support that risk/reward profile?

kinda like AI; when we're doing the P(x)*v calculation, all we need to know is that v is negative big and that the number of plays is large; at some point P(x) stops mattering.

I can't find it but I remember a midwit meme circulating with the lab leak theory on the tails when people were shouting down the idea and thought that that iteration of the midwit meme would never be topped.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit

Edit: ahh here it is

https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/the-midwit-meme-and-the-ri...

The people who make these memes are right in the center of the bell curve.

Which means in all likelyhood, they are probably right. If it weren't the case, the idea would be so far fetched it'd never spread well or catch on. That it catches on is evidence of it's staying power.

If you've ever really been innovative, you'll know 90% of the time, your work is looked at with derision/horror in the early stages. You're only vindicated when with time, your thing becomes foundational to the new normal.

That's the thing. It drives every innovator nuts because normal people miss all the "nuance and sexy" of your vision, and tend to only adopt whats left after putting it through the ball mill of life; which, in point of fact, tends to only leave behind the core of the state of affairs after grinding off the extraneous, idiosyncratic bullshit your vision picks up along the way to realization as a result of having been first realized by your own crazy ass.

It's the Artist's/Craftsman's/Quality Assurance guy's curse. You might be the first, but by the time there are many like it, it tends to have lost all semblance to that which so captivated you those many moons ago.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm in the throes of a bout of perspective, and feel the need to go curl into a ball and cry for a bit. Ciao.

Humans really have a tough time dealing with nuance it seems. We’ll never really know for sure but yeah maybe it did come from the lab, maybe from somewhere else.

That's like saying: "We'll never know if humans evolved or if god created them or if they came from somewhere else". You make a hypothesis, you investigate, you gather data, you validate. Just because the CN gov isn't cooperating doesn't mean we have to pretend this is an epistemological blackhole.

What sticks out to me is our collective inability to interpret answers from scientists. “There isn’t evidence that masks will prevent infection” and what is heard is masks don’t work, but what was said was they don’t know yet. “The lab leak claims are wholly unsubstantiated” and we hear that they think it’s bs, but what they’re saying is there isn’t any real evidence, but we should investigate further.

Stop carrying water for these people. They didn't say "we don't know", they said clearly that masks won't do anything and even advanced explanations for why that was e.g. people touching their face. This meme that scientists are never wrong or deceptive and it's all just the listeners fault needs to die. They lied, they lied a lot and the first step is to acknowledge that.

Name and shame.

Fauci: “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

WHO: "wearing a mask can provide a false sense of security, say experts, leading some to become less vigilant in more important hygiene measures, such as hand washing. Additionally, removing a mask so it no longer covers your nose, or touching the outside of the mask can make it less effective."

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/who-should-wear-a-fac...

And they were right! Masks didn't work, it can be clearly seen in graphs of case numbers. But they later reversed that position. To say now that it was all misinterpretation of the never-wrong scientists is revisionist history. Their words were plain and we have the receipts.

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