7 ms·

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

by axxto 4y ago

dangwhy 4y ago
then why even propose any theory ? why not let it remain a mystery.
- selcuka 4y ago
  > 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.
  - philippejara 4y ago
    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.
    - junofan 4y ago
      You can’t call spoliation “low confidence.”
- wkat4242 4y ago
  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.
  - landemva 4y ago
    Pilots are licensed and airframes are certified. Licenses can be revoked. Where are the personal civil and criminal penalties for the GoF staff?
    - roelschroeven 4y ago
      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.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    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.
  - officialjunk 4y ago
    let's remember that the US contributed the the funding of this research https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      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.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  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/2023-DON445 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.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    "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
    - jboy55 4y ago
      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'?
bradleyjg 4y ago
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.
- WaxProlix 4y ago
  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?
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    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.
  - tootie 4y ago
    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.
JPKab 4y ago
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.
- Mizoguchi 4y ago
  [flagged]
- igouy 4y ago
  > 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 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_animal_reservoirs_for_the_SARS_coronavirus_Hypothesis_proved_after_10_years_of_virus_hunting https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258204548_Bats_as_a...
  - JPKab 4y ago
    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-services/animal-models/mice/humanized-mice/pbmc-humanized-mouse-model?gclid=CjwKCAiAjPyfBhBMEiwAB2CCIiQgcJAb3Ax-Ntc8LqzOyofl2nXKe8bu7kPoV-PpWqOiwUDSTvwHQhoCtY8QAvD_BwE&region=3616 https://www.criver.com/products-services/research-models-ser...
PathOfEclipse 4y ago
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-china-intelligence/index.html 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".
- zamnos 4y ago
  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!
  - PathOfEclipse 4y ago
    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.
    - igouy 4y ago
      https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theory https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theory

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

by axxto 4y ago

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

dangwhy 4y ago

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

selcuka 4y ago
> 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.
- philippejara 4y ago
  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.
  - junofan 4y ago
    You can’t call spoliation “low confidence.”
wkat4242 4y ago
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.
- landemva 4y ago
  Pilots are licensed and airframes are certified. Licenses can be revoked. Where are the personal civil and criminal penalties for the GoF staff?
  - roelschroeven 4y ago
    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.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  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.
- officialjunk 4y ago
  let's remember that the US contributed the the funding of this research https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    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.
kristopolous 4y ago
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/2023-DON445 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.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  "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
  - jboy55 4y ago
    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'?

bradleyjg 4y ago

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.

WaxProlix 4y ago
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?
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  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.
- tootie 4y ago
  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.

JPKab 4y ago

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.

Mizoguchi 4y ago
[flagged]
igouy 4y ago
> 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 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_animal_reservoirs_for_the_SARS_coronavirus_Hypothesis_proved_after_10_years_of_virus_hunting https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258204548_Bats_as_a...
- JPKab 4y ago
  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-services/animal-models/mice/humanized-mice/pbmc-humanized-mouse-model?gclid=CjwKCAiAjPyfBhBMEiwAB2CCIiQgcJAb3Ax-Ntc8LqzOyofl2nXKe8bu7kPoV-PpWqOiwUDSTvwHQhoCtY8QAvD_BwE&region=3616 https://www.criver.com/products-services/research-models-ser...

PathOfEclipse 4y ago

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-china-intelligence/index.html 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".

zamnos 4y ago
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!
- PathOfEclipse 4y ago
  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.
  - igouy 4y ago
    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theory https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theory