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I'm trying to be a good bayesian reasoner here but the particulars of this specific case are all so tangled and piecemeal. The conspiracy theorists among us are

I'm trying to be a good bayesian reasoner here but the particulars of this specific case are all so tangled and piecemeal. The conspiracy theorists among us are having an absolute field day with the current events and it's easy to see why. According to my bayesian analysis, I believe that the most likely cause of this virus is a wet-market infection, followed by a slip-up at a lab, with—by high margin, in very very last place at, say, 1% probability, that this was concocted by a nefarious player (the CCP being a favorite candidate). The conspiracy theorists (my Facebook friends especially) seem to rank the likelihood of this list in reverse (i.e. clearly this was concocted by the chinese government). With how secretive and disingenuous the CCP is even on a good day, it's easy to see why their argument has a few credence points (like any good conspiracy). But I can't reconcile that there's not much for the CCP to gain on the world stage by releasing this thing. The US was already so politically tumultuous, and the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign was so much more effective at breaking our democracy apart, with the added benefit of not sending our economy into a global recession as a byproduct. What has the CCP gained here? Xi's power as a leader has only weakened, and their position as the world's factory is now only slipping faster. So this is kind of like 9/11 to me. The people who would be the most likely to profiteer off a tragedy like this would have not in any capacity been able to pull it off, and the ones who are powerful or otherwise sophisticated enough to pull it off don't have much incentive to anyways. So that's why bayesian reasoning leads me to believe that yes, we know these viruses jump from animals to humans from time to time, and this seems to likely be one of those instances. What am I missing?

banads 7y ago
>I can't reconcile that there's not much for the CCP to gain on the world stage by releasing this thing. Is causing the social, political, and economic collapse of an arch rival nation state not the natural perogative of empire scale nations?
- shadowprofile77 7y ago
  Not when whatever is happening also causes the political, social and economic collapse of your own nation state. There are simpler ways to compete with a rival superpower, ways much less prone to exploding in any perpetrator's face. One of them is simply, well, doing nothing but outpacing them economically through more or less usual means. Not too hard to consider for a productive country with 5 times the population of its main rival.
  - banads 7y ago
    You're assuming that political elites all care more about the general population (which as you've noted, there is a large, expendable surplus of) than consolidating and increasing their own power. To clarify, I don't think COVID19 was a Chinese conspiracy, just making note of historically self evident incentive structures that others seem naively oblivious to.
irishcoffee 7y ago
The only reason I can possibly fathom as to why it would be nefarious would be trade. And that’s a stretch.
- nikkwong 7y ago
  I'm totally willing to entertain that argument, but their exports have suffered tremendously and any forecasters could have predicted that a global slowdown would hurt such an interconnected country like China the most. So I am just unable to connect the dots here as to what the conspiracy theorists think the motive is. Conspiracy theories that end up actually being true generally have one thing in common: they have wide consensus as to what the actual facts of the case really are. You could sort of make this argument for the conspiracy that Jeffrey Epstein's death was not a suicide but rather a cover up. In that theory, most theorists posit that high powered individuals whom Epstein had dirt on arranged to have him killed before he could get to trial and expose them. That's actually not a completely crazy theory, in the realm of how crazy some conspiracies really get. Whereas, the 9/11 truthers cannot internally reconcile why the US government may have flown our own planes into the trade towers. No good singular theory emerges probably because not one exists. And of the theories that are floated, they all end up being conflicting and self-cancelling. I think time will prove that the same is true for COVID19.
  - irishcoffee 7y ago
    I agree with you, just pointing out the only thing I could come up with. Great comment.

banads 7y ago

>I can't reconcile that there's not much for the CCP to gain on the world stage by releasing this thing. Is causing the social, political, and economic collapse of an arch rival nation state not the natural perogative of empire scale nations?

shadowprofile77 7y ago
Not when whatever is happening also causes the political, social and economic collapse of your own nation state. There are simpler ways to compete with a rival superpower, ways much less prone to exploding in any perpetrator's face. One of them is simply, well, doing nothing but outpacing them economically through more or less usual means. Not too hard to consider for a productive country with 5 times the population of its main rival.
- banads 7y ago
  You're assuming that political elites all care more about the general population (which as you've noted, there is a large, expendable surplus of) than consolidating and increasing their own power. To clarify, I don't think COVID19 was a Chinese conspiracy, just making note of historically self evident incentive structures that others seem naively oblivious to.

irishcoffee 7y ago

The only reason I can possibly fathom as to why it would be nefarious would be trade. And that’s a stretch.

nikkwong 7y ago
I'm totally willing to entertain that argument, but their exports have suffered tremendously and any forecasters could have predicted that a global slowdown would hurt such an interconnected country like China the most. So I am just unable to connect the dots here as to what the conspiracy theorists think the motive is. Conspiracy theories that end up actually being true generally have one thing in common: they have wide consensus as to what the actual facts of the case really are. You could sort of make this argument for the conspiracy that Jeffrey Epstein's death was not a suicide but rather a cover up. In that theory, most theorists posit that high powered individuals whom Epstein had dirt on arranged to have him killed before he could get to trial and expose them. That's actually not a completely crazy theory, in the realm of how crazy some conspiracies really get. Whereas, the 9/11 truthers cannot internally reconcile why the US government may have flown our own planes into the trade towers. No good singular theory emerges probably because not one exists. And of the theories that are floated, they all end up being conflicting and self-cancelling. I think time will prove that the same is true for COVID19.
- irishcoffee 7y ago
  I agree with you, just pointing out the only thing I could come up with. Great comment.