Documents show scientist calling lab leak likely after paper claiming opposite

> The newly exposed documents include full emails and pages of Slack chats that were cropped for the report, exposing the “Proximal Origin” authors’ real-time thinking. According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using “Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,” indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. Word, however, retains the original image when an image is cropped, as do many other apps. Microsoft’s documentation cautions that “Cropped parts of the picture are not removed from the file, and can potentially be seen by others,” going on to note: “If there is sensitive information in the area you’re cropping out make sure you delete the cropped areas.”

> When this Word document was converted to a PDF, the original, uncropped images were likewise carried over. The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth.

Disheartening but not unsurprising to see political concerns + firefighting trump the truth.

Threading the needle between naivety, skepticism and conspiracy thinking is tricky. There's a tradeoff between being lazy + letting existing patterns think for you, vs doing the hard work of questioning.

Someone like Scott from SSC lands in the hard-working but naive box for me. Typical reddit (and HN) posts are lazy and skeptical.

Some private positions that never supposed to become public, it's just the assumption that the general public needs to be carefully cradled like a child, to protect it from itself. The average person can not be trusted with such complicated and nuanced things, they start eating bleech if you aren't careful with how you talk to them.

That's what the people in charge think anyway. I think some of the "average person" will drink the metaphorical bleech anyway so you might as well tell it how it is, wouldn't really be an issue, in theory, in a functioning society that is.

On one side you have a detailed paper with evidence, assumptions, conclusions, etc laid out in detail and with precision that anyone with the requisite scientific skill can read and critique.

On the other side you have incomplete transcripts of private thoughts and words of an individual scientist, which might potentially disagree with the evidence laid out in the detailed paper.

I think it says a lot about someone whether they choose to put more weight in the former or the latter.

Science in itself can be a useful tool for gaining knowledge. All scientific knowledge builds on earlier knowledge. But when it is no longer possible to discern which knowledge was created for the honest pursuit of truth and conscience and which for pure power interests, the whole foundation collapses.

As long as the extent of this corruption is not known, one should treat every "scientific finding" with the greatest scepticism, because the findings are no longer trustworthy. Especially those that find wide and welcome dissemination in the media and politics.

This should be kept in mind under all circumstances if one wants to continue listening to the narratives about the "climate apocalypse" that are excellently placed in the media. For here, too, the exact same propaganda mechanisms are used: alleged consensus among all scientists and dissenting opinions are defamed as conspiracy theories and right-wing narratives. Anyone who thinks they will find honest discourse and argumentative competition here should have been taught better by now.

But I have already given up hope. Humanity will make the same mistake again and again.

It’s one of the truly irritating mass delusions of the era and of course it’s on here, tracked in through Glenn Greenwald’s private pigsty.