4 ms·
The tone of this content seemed a bit off to me. It converted a high degree of certainty, when the purpose was to decry that we are placing a high degree of cer
by darkerside 7y ago
The tone of this content seemed a bit off to me. It converted a high degree of certainty, when the purpose was to decry that we are placing a high degree of certainty on a fact that is unproven and likely unprovable, if not totally untrue. Seems ironic.
Anyway, this was the money line to me: "For an amino acid change such as D614S to be positively selected, as opposed to being maintained as a consequence of the founder effect, requires selective pressure. For such an already highly transmissible virus, the nature of such selection pressure is difficult to discern."
QED
- godelski 7y agoThis is backwards of what science does. Science doesn't really rule things in, rather it rules things out till there is nothing left. For example, take the discussion about D614S here. The original claim was that D614S makes the virus more transmittable, and the author claims this is wrong. Who has the burden of proof? It is the researchers that claimed D614S made Cov2 more transmissible. The author here points out that there is no selection pressure here and that there is a more reasonable solution to the results. Occam's razor is in play. So not all arguments need a burden of proof. It is the one that is making the claim that has the burden.
- alexandercrohde 7y agoRight, and this article is titled "There is one, and only one strain" which is an affirmative statement, and calls for a burden of proof. What this piece should be titled is "We don't have any evidence yet of multiple strains."
- darkerside 7y agoI'd even be happy with "We don't have any evidence yet of multiple strains, and we probably never will"
- godelski 7y agoExcept the claim was that there are more than one strain and the author is responding to that. The burden of proof lies in the one making the claim that there are multiple strains. The author has no burden of proof. This would be akin to one person making the claim: "Unicorns are not only real, but are causing a global pandemic" and then someone writing an article titled "Unicorns aren't real, STFU". The second title doesn't have the burden of proof and we wouldn't be having this conversation if these were the titles of the respective articles. Why is the unicorns title an accurate analogy? Because the science doesn't expect there to be multiple strains in the same way the science doesn't expect unicorns to exist. I'm using the same vernacular here that we use in science. I didn't say "unicorns don't exist" but "we don't expect unicorns to exist". This is how we say things.
- darkerside 7y agoThat's the thing. Science is a bit of a different language from English. And they get conflated all the time. The strain doesn't exist until it does, and then everybody gets mad and thinks the scientist was lying. It's speaking different languages that have a high overlap, but key words may have completely different meanings. And, when you're talking to a regular person, being able to speak English will help you convey your point.
- godelski 7y agoThis is exactly right. As I said in another post > Well we're chimps that can barely communicate with one another even when we speak the same language.
- darkerside 7y agoMy point is, this post was supposed to be written in English, but its headline only makes sense in science, and actually means something misleading in English
- alexandercrohde 7y ago>> Except the claim was that there are more than one strain and the author is responding to that. Doesn't matter, the author still made an unsubstantiated claim, and hence is unscientific. He should change the title.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- argwal 6y agoIt's D614G. However, due to what the post's author called the errors of RNA reproduction it became D614S in the second half of post.