Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

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The biggest error a considered, good-faith journalist typically makes is "Presenting both sides" without comment when one of them is an established consensus with abundant supporting evidence. If you go looking for a fringe outside perspective on an issue, or the motivated reasoning of somebody who stands to gain by a bit of sophistry, you will probably eventually be able to find one presented by a PhD. That is not how research is supposed to work.

The biggest error made in the COVID origin story has been the hilarious ineptitude and imprecision of the actual hypothesis being forwarded, something that appears even in this article's metacommentary on the matter - all the various sorts of "lab leaks" that might have occurred are conflated, as if they were one idea that might be true or false.

As long as we are conflating all lab leaks, when I say an undetected contagion that happened to be on a bat they captured might have accidentally walked out of the lab in somebody's nasal cavity, you are free to hear that China bioengineered a weapon and unleashed it on its own people in the interest of striking out at 'Murica, demanding immediate geopolitical reprisals & a violent purge of the Chinese-American population (something a significant fraction of the country was very receptive towards).

"Lab Leak: True or false?" Both the same idea because we haven't bothered to specify. When a far-right politician does this it's clearly to sell the population a villain and sell themselves as somebody who will take revenge, and then be able to motte and bailey themselves back to the other position when the center-right gets uncomfortable with the level of racism. When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-count.

Certainly you are correct that there are several different "lab" theory versions, and they vary by orders of magnitude in how plausible they are. However:

"I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario."

This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration.

Which is important, not least because "our propensity to pay China to do our research at the lowest cost has resulted in a virus leaking out of the lab" is very different in its implications than "China was researching bioweapons and released one". How is an ordinary person supposed to know which of those theories are remotely plausible, and which implausible?

If only there were a profession, between scientists and the general public, whose job was to help the latter understand the work of the former...

> This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration.

You have to acknowledge this is incredibly weak logic. “A thing is possible, therefore it happened.” Is this molecular evidence the Furin Cleavage Site? Cause that was peddled basically as a lie - they occur in nature just fine, it’s also used in research.

I’m unaware of any compelling evidence for the lab leak theory, but I will acknowledge it’s basically impossible to disprove. We don’t know where most diseases arose (or where they came from) - it’s just we mostly don’t care, unlike with COVID.

You are blatantly missing the point.

The point: Scientist says in private "A thing is possible" but in public "A thing is not all possible!"

Not the point: "A thing is possible, therefore it happened"

Yes, this is absolutely the point.

Note that all of this is deeply problematic, EVEN IF the truth is that the virus was a normally evolved bat coronavirus that got to Wuhan through some method that did not involve a lab in any way. The dichotomy between what they were saying in public, and what they were saying to each other in private, severely undercuts the idea that they are who the public should be trusting for advice on this topic.

I don't know that I've ever heard such a violent "woosh" as the goalposts were moved. Going from "obviously happened, consistent with evidence" to "the problem is the way it was discussed in private" is just... wow.

I wonder how this would play out if we transposed it to any other field. If I was interviewed and asked if So-And-So had proved P=NP, I'd just say "almost certainly not" knowing that any other response would require an amount of nuance that wasn't going to be conveyed - despite having plenty of private conversations that "yeah, P=NP is total possible and it'd be interesting because...". And that's a pretty theoretical problem with immediate real world impact, and relatively little new being discovered day-to-day.

I'd be shocked if there was any non-trivial topic discussed in any field where the internal debate _isn't_ broader and more nuanced in private than what is conveyed in public interviews. That's a natural consequence of communicating to a population with less expertise than the speaker, IMO.

> but in public "A thing is not all possible!"

...and the media picking it up, shouting that thing did absolutely not happen, could never have happened, the debate is over, the science is settled, and anyone who breathes a word in opposition is stupid, dumb, smells bad, and votes for Trump.

Exactly, and the same script is being played all over again with a different tune.

You forgot to mention the lefts position. They usually used the lab-leak theory to ridicule, mock and even have careers ended for those who dared to propose it as plausible.

As so many of our media outlets lean to the left, the mocking and ridiculing was clearly ubiquitous.

And when it started to look like lab leak theory had some merit, media just went silent on the matter. SO I disagree hard with that it's a right or far right tool to sell hero worship.

Journalism has turned to absolute shit and anything that comes from the perceived "other" side must be instantly mocked without any investigation or partisan integrity. And should the "other" side show merit there will either be silence or continued mockery along the lines of "even a broken clock is right twice a day" . Left and right equally guilty.

Journalism is a joke. Maybe it always was and it's just these past 3 years that made so many of us realise exactly what a sh**show it actually is.

Several polls have shown that trust in news media is at a historical low https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-med...

and even expert opinion https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/02/15/americans-tru... has lost all merit as it is just, for the lack of a better word, raped to haul in clicks.

This is especially true for the medical scientists who could not get their shit together during the crisis and seemed to have a pissingcompetition of who could recommend the most intrusive, obnoxious guideline that conflicted the most with what any other "expert" scientist recommended.

Masking toddlers, banning sitting on public park benches, banning children from playgrounds. Banning walking outdoors in company. Masking while standing up in a restaurant to take it off while sitting down. Banning sports, isolating the elderly to the point of driving them to insanity and severe cognitive decline. DENYING AEROSOL SPREAD. That one is my personal pet peeve with the scientific community. The embarrassing list is endless.

My own trust in medical expertise, that is, the one I see in the news. Is at an all time low. I ofc listen to my personal MD. But if she'd proclaim something in the media I'd probably never listen to her again and switch doctors.

That Jon Stewart take on it is pretty funny https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?t=211, the Hershey factory, gets me pretty good.

An incredibly dumb take by someone who has no idea what he's talking about.

The Hershey factory in question is the Huanan market - you know, the place where they were selling wild animals, where the initial cases were heavily clustered around. It's not the research institute on the other side of the city that never even had a closely related virus in the first place.

Yah Stephen hit him on that point, he counters with Austin Texas and the nightly bat flocking behavior which is true. There’s all kinds of bats in Houston Texas too.

The media was not silent as it became more plausible it was prominent. Seems like you have have a somewhat myopic consumption pattern.

>myopic consumption pattern

Declassified report[0] shows that CIA is still 50/50 on lab vs natural origin.

[0]: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-...

> When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-count.

I haven't seen any non-affiliated journalists doing this. I've seen right-wing journalists doing it, fitting whatever they can find into their ten times stepped-on John Birch worldview. What I've seem far more of is administration-connected journalists characterizing whatever position that they support censorship of in its most extremist, unhinged, obviously factually-incorrect form. Radical right-wingers insist that they're the only option other than current Democratic party orthodoxy, and Democrats agree with them 100%.

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