21 ms·

Longbets: A bioerror will lead to one million casualties by Dec 2020

137 points by emmelaich 6y ago

arcticbull 6y ago
Looks like we may have a surprise winner, though I doubt we'll know for sure, for a while. We've certainly cleared the 1M deaths marker. There is a decent chance that COVID was an accidental release from the Chinese research lab, just as SARS was released accidentally from a Chinese research lab in Beijing - on two separate occasions. These releases were confirmed by the PRC. [1] To be clear there's not specific evidence or an admission in the case of COVID, just saying there's clearly established, documented precedent. ("By ‘bioerror’, I mean something which has the same effect as a terror attack, but rises from inadvertance rather than evil intent." -- an accidental release would of course fit this bill). [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/
- dnautics 6y ago
  Can error mean to be policy error as well (versus technical containment error)?
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Sounds reasonable to me, I hadn’t considered it from that angle!
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    What is sufficient to judge a policy error? Would an ineffective but rationally justified policy count? Given limited information, there can be any number of reasonable paths to choose from. Should it only count as an "error" if it's incorrectness was (or should have been) recognized at the time?
  - imtringued 6y ago
    There is no global policy. Each local policy is only responsible for a fraction of the deaths. The originator of the virus can be a single person and thereby satisfy the criteria.
- officialjunk 6y ago
  let's be clear that this is not saying the initial SARS outbreak started from a lab breach.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  The SARS release was AFTER it'd spread worldwide and I'm guessing was from a lab studying the already spreading disease. I'm sure plenty of labs over the last 6 months have released COVID as well but it doesn't much matter since it's already widespread.
  - littlestymaar 6y ago
    Also, SARS was classified BSL3 to allow more labs to study it. The Wuhan lab is a BSL4-certified one, which have much lower leakage risk by design.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      I mean, none of them should leak. With that said, the Wuhan lab had both BSL-2 and BSL-3 units studying bat coronaviruses before the pandemic [1]. After the COVID pandemic hit the PRC mandated all COVID research be carried out in BSL-3+ conditions; the research they're doing at the moment on COVID happens to be done in their BSL-4 facility but only because of lack of sufficient resources in their BSL-3 facility; that's likely temporary [2]. I'm not sure why a secondary leak after a pandemic already began would be just fine though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology [2] https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q%26A.pdf https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...
      - littlestymaar 6y ago
        > With that said, the Wuhan lab had both BSL-2 and BSL-3 units studying bat coronaviruses before the pandemic [1]. That's interesting indeed. Thanks. > I mean, none of them should leak. In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. BSL-3 shouldn't leak, yet we don't put super scary viruses in there, because we know the probability it could happen isn't that low. > I'm not sure why a secondary leak after a pandemic already began would be just fine though. Fine isn't the word. It's still an industrial accident, but not necessarily a catastrophe. Do we even have an example of such leak that would have triggered an epidemic in the vicinity of the lab?
- wporr 6y ago
  Doesnt it say that it needs to surpass 1m deaths within a 6 month period? Covid didnt hit that mark until 10 months after it appeared in wuhan
- scottlamb 6y ago
  What makes you think we'll ever know?
  - gpm 6y ago
    It's impossible to prove the negative, and if it's the positive the people responsible both have all the evidence in their hands and plenty of reason to destroy it.
    - jkhdigital 6y ago
      Yes, if it happened then the hard forensic evidence is gone forever. The only remaining evidence would be witness testimony, and if anyone even remotely credible ever says a word they will be destroyed. So... yeah. The world will never get a solid answer on this one, sadly.
      - adventured 6y ago
        It has been more than a year since SARS-CoV-2 began spreading in China and the WHO is still too busy cowering to state that it originated in China. That's the first pitch of the first inning and they can't even do that. It's absolutely a safe bet the zero-credibility authorities will never provide an answer as to the origination of the virus. Their entire obvious goal is to never - not under any circumstances - blame China. They still dodge and evade that at all costs. They've collectively humiliated themselves and should be mocked frequently for it, for a long time. Every other sane person already knows where it came from: Wuhan, and likely inadvertantly escaped from their biolab after having been sampled from bats. It's the only credible, rational explanation given what is known (including about their sampling program and horrific lab security); every other explanation requires farcical, laughable stretches to go far out of the way to avoid blaming China (it was India; it was imported via frozen food; it was the US army; etc).
        arcticbull 6y ago
        The job of the WHO is not to hold member states accountable during a pandemic, it's to provide support, services and intergovernmental collaboration. To share learnings. To provide their expertise to those involved. It's to provide health care to the poor and to share understanding. They're not "cowering" to a country that provides them a teensy tiny fraction of their operation budget. Not to mention, they're not the "Health Police," they're doctors and epidemiologists. The WHO has a ton of credibility. They've only been mocked by people spreading misinformation guided by their personal political beliefs. They certainly aren't the ones humiliating themselves. If you want someone to hold China accountable for... honestly, there's no clear evidence the state of China did literally anything right now... take it up with the UN Security Council. You don't get mad at your doctor for the flu existing, and you don't get mad at the WHO for doing their jobs.
- staplung 6y ago
  There is essentially zero evidence that SARS-CoV2 was engineered in a lab. In any case, the evidence that it's natural born doesn't have to be believed by everyone, only by Rees and Pinker. Then again, 2020 still has 21 days left to fuck us one more time. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/05/scientists-exactly-zero-evidence-covid-19-came-lab https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/05/scientis... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/coronavirus-origins-misinformation-yan-report-fact-check-cvd/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/coronavir...
  - creato 6y ago
    Nothing in the parent post claims it was "engineered in a lab". Being accidentally released from a lab is not inconsistent with being "natural born". I think this is still highly unlikely, but it is annoying seeing people talking past each other on this point.
    - staplung 6y ago
      True, but for the purposes of the bet, you'd have to effectively _prove_ that it escaped from a lab, which seems virtually impossible. In any case, the linked articles talk about that possibility too. Then again one could make the argument that incompetence in the world's collective response to the pandemic is "bioerror" although again, the debate and terminology only really have to be resolved by the two bettors.
      - est31 6y ago
        There is a huge outdoors lab where we run a gigantic experiment "what happens when humans encroach on natural habitats of mammals on a never seen before scale and humans also are highly mobile, able to spread novel diseases across the globe before they even get discovered or their severity assessed?".
      - breck 6y ago
        > Then again one could make the argument that incompetence in the world's collective response to the pandemic is "bioerror Pinker specifically spells this out: "I assume a mere lack of preparedness doesn't count)" So I think it would have to be agreed with >50% likelihood that it was released by a Chinese lab or some similar error for Pinker to lose.
- bewaretheirs 6y ago
  I nominate CDC's bioerror: allowing a test reagent to become contaminated and then distributing that contaminated reagent as part of its first batch COVID-19 test kits[1]. My recollection is that this delayed widespread availability of COVID-19 testing in the US for something like a month during the crucial early stages of the pandemic; that may well cause a million excess casualties from the pandemic -- especially if you count economic casualties (lost jobs). The FDA's regulartory approach (being slow to license tests and quick to crack down on unauthorized testing) contributed to this bioerror. [1] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200623/early-cdc-covid-19-test-kits-likely-contaminated https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200623/early-cdc-covid-19-...
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Even if that were a satisfactory incident under the terms of the bet, there would not have been sufficient casualties due to that error alone.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      That's a good point. The arguments based around complacency can't count because each countries' response is different. There is no global preparation against the virus so all the additional deaths that can be attributed to local lockdowns not being sufficient cannot be attributed to a global cause. Each of them would be attributed to the individual countries' politicians. 10000 politicians each causing 100 deaths is not the same as an incompetent or malicious researcher leaking the virus on his own.
- vmception 6y ago
  hey there, there are cases from other areas of Hubei outside of Wuhan that predate the whole animal market / nearby research lab thing. so it nullifies or decreases that theory
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    It might, or it might not. Nobody's saying the WIV created this virus de novo, they studied it in the lab. That meant they of course found it out in the wild, and collected samples. There existing cases in the wild doesn't preclude the involvement of the WIV. Although, again, there's no evidence the WIV is involved.
powersnail 6y ago
Pinker gave many reasons, but mostly from high above, using general statistical patterns to make predictions on a very specific issue. Rees's argument was short. It was one plausible scenario. I often find the latter more compelling than the former.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Pinker’s use of statistics has been highly spurious, which is why he’s frequently drawn ire from N.N. Taleb and others: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
  - 1-more 6y ago
    I can only conclude from reading him that his job is to tell me that my eyes are playing tricks on me and everything is going well.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  I find both their arguments completely unpersuasive because neither provides an argument for or against the "bioerror" happening by this specific date? Why or why not by the end of 2020? Why not by the end of 2021 or 2025 or 2050? They're both mute on this point.
  - clankyclanker 6y ago
    Because then the likelihood of the event occurring increases so significantly that it becomes uninteresting to wager about.
  - runamok 6y ago
    That seems the whole premise of the site: "Long Bets". You can't just say "some day" as given a long enough time horizon many improbable things will occur.
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
aiscapehumanity 6y ago
2040 is a better bet and it shouldn't be low. Enough time to mature biotech for novel biologics outside of nature and the technological means(method + access) to pose risk. Ugh pinker is such a pseud in the ivory tower.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- aiscapehumanity 6y ago
  To would be downvoters, list contributions of pinker that's novel and long lasting? Until then I'll continue to view him as another overrated commercial intellectual.
spekcular 6y ago
If I'm reading correctly, the bet covered events in a period of 4 years. Given this, I think Pinker had the better side of the wager. Of course, with hindsight he was wrong, but with hindsight I'm a lottery winner. With any starting year between 2000 and 2016, Pinker would have won. I'd guess that's the case for the next decade, too.
- hervature 6y ago
  Where was the bioerror? Unless you believe COVID-19 came from a lab, then Pinker won.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    The bioerror was in letting it spread.
    - hervature 6y ago
      By that definition, Tuberculosis which kills 1.5 million every year. Doesn't quite satisfy the bet by itself but a few lopsided months could easily be 1 million in a 6 month period. Regardless, I don't think the lack of disease prevention was the intent of bioerror. The article says that bioerror is supposed to have the same outcomes as bioterror but I believe the implication is that it is also caused by a single human or organization.
    - grupthink 6y ago
      Rees's argument specifically mentions that it must be an error relating to biotechnology (possibly caused by "wierdos [sic] with the mindset of the people who now design computer viruses"). There is no proof that the coronavirus was created or unleashed intentionally or accidentally.
      - spekcular 6y ago
        I misread the terms of the bet. So Pinker won, even with hindsight!
gregwebs 6y ago
The US frequently has it's own lab incidents including even with anthrax. China must be having lab incidents as well. There isn't a smoking gun to indicate either that this is a lab outbreak or natural. However, in the absence of evidence we need to ask ourselves which is more likely: 1) A disease traveled hundreds of miles to a large city without leaving a trace of evidence 2) A lab had yet another outbreak Almost all of the outbreak attention has been focused on the Wuhan lab that received international grants [1]. However, that lab is miles away from the initial outbreak and there's another lab that's a block away from the Wuhan seafood market that also does bat research (but not gain of function). This lab is also adjacent to the hospital that dealt with initial outbreak. This was pointed out by Chinese researchers in a preprint that was quickly taken down [2]. 1: https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741 https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan... 2: The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus 10.13140/RG.2.2.21799.29601 https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339070128_The_possible_origins_of_2019-nCoV_coronavirus https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...
- patmcc 6y ago
  >>>1) A disease traveled hundreds of miles to a large city without leaving a trace of evidence This doesn't strike me as intrinsically unlikely. Bats can apparently fly ~50 miles for food, a person on a bus can easily travel ~400 miles in a day, etc. I don't disagree with the premise that a lab outbreak is possible, but so is "guy got infected by bats or something, didn't realize, hopped on a bus to visit family/find work".
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    And that bus happened to be traveling to a city which hosts a top-tier biolab with the world's foremost experts on bat-borne coronaviruses. Not a smoking gun, of course, but anyways I think your logical fallacy here is the "reasonableness" heuristic, in which you base the likelihood of some incredibly unlikely event on whether you can "imagine" some scenario where it happened. The fact that you can come up with a story to explain... well, I don't even know exactly what you're explaining, because it's really just a fragment of a chain of causation which has been mostly left unsaid. But anyways, I'm willing to wager that you know very little about disease transmission patterns so your intuition here is worse than ignorance.
karmicthreat 6y ago
Better than average chance that The Thought Emporium [1] will be responsible for the first bioerror of this scale. 1: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV5vCi3jPJdURZwAOO_FNfQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV5vCi3jPJdURZwAOO_FNfQ
- jcims 6y ago
  He's one of those YouTube sleeper channels. On the surface a DIY/science tinkerer, then you pop on a livestream and he's hacking DNA on a website and creating mutant organisms.
- h_spacer 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoczYXJeMY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoczYXJeMY4 "I hope that this home brewed gene therapy doesn't kill me." are not words I expected to see in the first 30 seconds of a video.
ponker 6y ago
Why are these famous guys only betting $400?
- evan_ 6y ago
  Since you brought it up, for years isn’t all that “long”...
runako 6y ago
I generally think Pinker had the better argument, but oof this turned out to be highly country-specific: ---- >>> Multiply further by the chance that the Black Hat will defeat the White Hats, namely the world's medical and epidemiological networks, who would combat an outbreak with containment, vaccines, antibiotics, etc. The product is not 0, but I don't think it's high.
Reason077 6y ago
Well, there’s still 21 days to go.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  There's still time for Rudy Giuliani to ooze more black slime and fart in court again.
- vmception 6y ago
  did 1 million deaths occur within the 6 month time period? I think we already have a winner
jancsika 6y ago
If Reese doesn't get to collect $400 then this bet is an academic wankathon. Ignoring clear global threats, gutting the programs that exist to respond to those threats, and piping all comm through private algos that (inadvertently) degrade basic practices of self-preservation is functionally equivalent to whatever movie plot these two thought they were betting on coming true. Going forward-- dealing seriously with all three of these problems must decrease the risk of whatever movie plot these two thought they were betting on coming true.
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  Unless I misread, the bet has nothing to do with natural pandemics or how we prepare to respond to them.
  - voiper1 6y ago
    The bet _specifically_ excludes how we prepare: "I assume a mere lack of preparedness doesn't count"
- KMag 6y ago
  Reese's definition of bioerror appears to be confined to accidental leak of a lab/home lab grown pathogen. I remain unconvinced of the allegations that SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab. The first sentence of Reese's position is "Biotechnology is plainly advancing rapidly, and by 2020 there will be thousands-even millions-of people with the capability to cause a catastrophic biological disaster." He also specifically states that a bioerror "rises from inadvertance", a.k.a. negligence.
  - tristanj 6y ago
    Then what is your most likely explanation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2?
    - KMag 6y ago
      The most likely explanation is that one of the many widespread contacts between wild animals and humans in the area, likely at a wet market where wild animals were being sold as food, resulted in the virus jumping to humans. SARS-CoV2 makes a poor bioweapon. You'd want something with a higher fatality (or severe morbidity) rate, both for effectiveness and also to limit it's geographic impact to the target country. If it's not an engineered virus, the lab isn't a smoking gun. We have identified a very similar virus where bats are the reservoir species, and have identified a couple of very plausible routes by which it jumped to an intermediate wild animal that was transported to Wuhan for human consumption. If it's a wild virus, a lab escape seems less likely than the bushmeat hypothesis. Both HIV and genital herpes are believed to have jumped to humans due to humans/homonids eating bushmeat. It's known to be a very dangerous thing to do, and it's known to be somewhat widespread in Wuhan. Another possibility is that it is a virus engineered for research instead of direct use as a bioweapon, and it escaped. It's close enough to the wild bat virus that it's not obvious any engineering has been done. In any case, we have a very simple and likely explanation that matches the official story. It's comforting to believe we're in control and that simply being more stringent about lab safety will prevent this in the future. It's also politically convenient to blame foreigners (a favorite tactic of politicians everywhere for every occasion). Those two factors are why the lab escape rumours are so persistent. The truth is that (1) we keep having dangerous contact with wild animals and farm animals and we will not have control until we cut down on these practices and (2) U.S. officials are largely to blame for the sad state of things in the U.S. Yes, the Chinese authorities should have been more open from the beginning and botched the opportunity to snuff it out early, but there are plenty of countries doing much better than the U.S.
mountainboy 6y ago
If the analysis in Firstenberg's "The Invisible Rainbow" book is correct, then I would suggest that it has already happened and almost nobody is aware. And affecting more than just humans. Perhaps Rees should read the book if he wishes to make good on the bet.
ameliaquining 6y ago
It seems almost as though Pinker was confused about what he was betting on. Most of his arguments are against deliberate bioterror attacks, not accidents.
abeppu 6y ago
I think it's generally not worth paying attention to renowned experts opining about stuff outside their field. If an epidemiologist and a biochemist had different views on this question, and posted their reasoning, that would be interesting. What does Jennifer Doudna think of the probability of catastrophic bioerror? (I hope that's in an interview somewhere.) Or perhaps there's a retired national security expert who could weigh in on which groups are most likely to attempt that sort of bioterrorism. But these two are only in a position to make uninteresting and unconvincing arguments on behalf of their respective positions.
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  Pinker is a jackass and a jerk. Why anyone listens to him is beyond me. Just another New York Times know-nothing shouting psudo-liberal.
  - ggm 6y ago
    Are you in his field?
    - DubiousPusher 6y ago
      Pinker hasn't really had a field for some time now. IMO, this poster is basically correct though the mode of exposition is not very HN approved.
      - ggm 6y ago
        I think he's a bit of a prick too.. but seriously, this isn't how HN works. If you're not a linguist or in stats then the critique is at best third hand, and basically common knowledge sour grapes. (All of the ego scientist stuff makes me mad, but I try to keep away from that)
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      You don't need to be in his field to notice he is an associate of Jeffrey Epstein.
mchusma 6y ago
Well. The FDA and similar agencies banned many vaccines that were very likely to work, leading to over 1M dead. Seems like a "bio error" to me.
- hef19898 6y ago
  To me it seems more like we developed, and approved, more vaccines in a shorter time period than ever before. So your argument would be much stronger if you provided sources and more details on which vaccines have been blocked by the FDA.
gojomo 6y ago
If COVID turns out to be an accidental lab release of a virus that went through gain-of-function experiments, Rees wins. Otherwise, Pinker wins. However, a consensus on the true origin of COVID may not be reached for years (or decades).
- monoideism 6y ago
  What if Covid was just released through bat research? Given the proximity of two bat research facilities to Wuhan, accidental release of a wild virus into human population seems much more likely than a gain of function scenario.
  - gojomo 6y ago
    That'd also count as a 'bioerror'. But, what makes you think those Wuhan labs weren't doing gain-of-function research? Or even: inadvertent gain-of-function selection, via other research methods? See the proud tweet about testing ">50 novel" "bat SARS-related CoVs" against "human cells", and using "recombinant viruses/humanized mice to see SARS-like signs, and showing some don’t respond to MAbs, vaccines" that's linked in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25370869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25370869 )
- ivalm 6y ago
  There is no evidence it is from lab, while it likely originated from bats, pangolins have very similar virus extant in the wild. The burden of proof is heavily on showing that it was released from the lab, Pinker wins by default.
  - betwixthewires 6y ago
    The US state department has said that they have intelligence that tells them that it originated in a lab, but do not believe the release was deliberate. Now, I take that with a grain of salt, state agencies are known to sometimes say what they need to to further their agenda. But it is worth noting. I've seen a few interviews and articles by evolutionary microbiologists who have examined some of the genetic and behavioral traits and found several that indicate that it evolved under selective pressures of being in a controlled environment like a lab. I don't have links to them, but I'm sure they can be found with an internet search, once you wade through the mountains of bullshit that you're sure to pull up when you do. Two behavioral traits I noted were the significantly lower number of cases that are thought to have been spread outdoors and the propensity of the virus to move across different tissues, a trait that is deliberately selected for in lab testing of viruses because it enables ease of testing in different scenarios. So there is evidence is came from a lab, but so far no proof that the public is privy too.
ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago
Our DEATH NOTE(s) is the SCIENCE... :D
swang 6y ago
when was this bet made?
karlerss 6y ago
Maybe the quick and wide rollout of the covid vaccine is the bioerror - say the mrna translation products causing some kind of amyloid-buildup. One year after vaccination people will be showing signs of dementia. Since the elderly get vaccinated first, it isn't noticed that fast. For precedent of "new drugs have tragic effects you only notice in a ~year" see thalidomide.
cantrevealname 6y ago
> Duration 4 years (02017-02020) ... a single event within a six month period starting no later than Dec 31 02020 Am I the only one who finds the terms above terribly ill-defined? Let's suppose an event happens on Dec 31 2020, and a million casualties accumulate over the first few months of 2021. Does that count? It counts because it's within a six month period starting Dec 31 2020. It doesn't count because the duration of the bet was 2017 to 2020, and therefore wouldn't include 2021. Wouldn't have been less confusing to state the terms as "within a six month period ending no later than Dec 31 02020" (if that's what was intended)? What if the event happened on Jan 15 2021 followed by a million casualties. Does that count? Jan 15 2021 is within "a six month period starting no later than Dec 31 02020". If that's the case, the duration of the bet is 2017 to Jun 30 2021.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Am I the only one who finds the terms above terribly ill-defined? Yes.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
kk_cz 6y ago
I try to understand "intellectual curiosity" here but I just find it very off-putting to bet on whether millions will die, no matter how sound the arguments of both sides might be.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  The winner of the bet does not profit personally, so it's not really a bet. They use the term "bet" because it's easy for people to understand. And it makes it more interesting than alternatives like "prediction & rebuttal". Long Bets and the Long Now Foundation try to get people thinking about the future so we can make it better.
  - kk_cz 6y ago
    Even if it is just used as a figure of speech: "I bet that millions will die in next 4 years" crosses the line for me. But I guess it's just me.
DoctorOetker 6y ago
please don't create viruses to win a $400 dollar bet...
jp0d 6y ago
What if Martin Rees is the "inventor" of the Corona virus?
mikewarot 6y ago
The prediction was made in 2002, the bet was only accepted in 2016. Martin Rees was dead on right. https://web.archive.org/web/20060210071214/https://longbets.org/9/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060210071214/https://longbets....

137 points by emmelaich 6y ago

Looks like we may have a surprise winner, though I doubt we'll know for sure, for a while. We've certainly cleared the 1M deaths marker. There is a decent chance that COVID was an accidental release from the Chinese research lab, just as SARS was released accidentally from a Chinese research lab in Beijing - on two separate occasions. These releases were confirmed by the PRC. [1] To be clear there's not specific evidence or an admission in the case of COVID, just saying there's clearly established, documented precedent. ("By ‘bioerror’, I mean something which has the same effect as a terror attack, but rises from inadvertance rather than evil intent." -- an accidental release would of course fit this bill). [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7096887/

dnautics 6y ago
Can error mean to be policy error as well (versus technical containment error)?
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Sounds reasonable to me, I hadn’t considered it from that angle!
- ineedasername 6y ago
  What is sufficient to judge a policy error? Would an ineffective but rationally justified policy count? Given limited information, there can be any number of reasonable paths to choose from. Should it only count as an "error" if it's incorrectness was (or should have been) recognized at the time?
- imtringued 6y ago
  There is no global policy. Each local policy is only responsible for a fraction of the deaths. The originator of the virus can be a single person and thereby satisfy the criteria.
officialjunk 6y ago
let's be clear that this is not saying the initial SARS outbreak started from a lab breach.
marcinzm 6y ago
The SARS release was AFTER it'd spread worldwide and I'm guessing was from a lab studying the already spreading disease. I'm sure plenty of labs over the last 6 months have released COVID as well but it doesn't much matter since it's already widespread.
- littlestymaar 6y ago
  Also, SARS was classified BSL3 to allow more labs to study it. The Wuhan lab is a BSL4-certified one, which have much lower leakage risk by design.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    I mean, none of them should leak. With that said, the Wuhan lab had both BSL-2 and BSL-3 units studying bat coronaviruses before the pandemic [1]. After the COVID pandemic hit the PRC mandated all COVID research be carried out in BSL-3+ conditions; the research they're doing at the moment on COVID happens to be done in their BSL-4 facility but only because of lack of sufficient resources in their BSL-3 facility; that's likely temporary [2]. I'm not sure why a secondary leak after a pandemic already began would be just fine though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology [2] https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli%20Q%26A.pdf https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...
    - littlestymaar 6y ago
      > With that said, the Wuhan lab had both BSL-2 and BSL-3 units studying bat coronaviruses before the pandemic [1]. That's interesting indeed. Thanks. > I mean, none of them should leak. In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. BSL-3 shouldn't leak, yet we don't put super scary viruses in there, because we know the probability it could happen isn't that low. > I'm not sure why a secondary leak after a pandemic already began would be just fine though. Fine isn't the word. It's still an industrial accident, but not necessarily a catastrophe. Do we even have an example of such leak that would have triggered an epidemic in the vicinity of the lab?
wporr 6y ago
Doesnt it say that it needs to surpass 1m deaths within a 6 month period? Covid didnt hit that mark until 10 months after it appeared in wuhan
scottlamb 6y ago
What makes you think we'll ever know?
- gpm 6y ago
  It's impossible to prove the negative, and if it's the positive the people responsible both have all the evidence in their hands and plenty of reason to destroy it.
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    Yes, if it happened then the hard forensic evidence is gone forever. The only remaining evidence would be witness testimony, and if anyone even remotely credible ever says a word they will be destroyed. So... yeah. The world will never get a solid answer on this one, sadly.
    - adventured 6y ago
      It has been more than a year since SARS-CoV-2 began spreading in China and the WHO is still too busy cowering to state that it originated in China. That's the first pitch of the first inning and they can't even do that. It's absolutely a safe bet the zero-credibility authorities will never provide an answer as to the origination of the virus. Their entire obvious goal is to never - not under any circumstances - blame China. They still dodge and evade that at all costs. They've collectively humiliated themselves and should be mocked frequently for it, for a long time. Every other sane person already knows where it came from: Wuhan, and likely inadvertantly escaped from their biolab after having been sampled from bats. It's the only credible, rational explanation given what is known (including about their sampling program and horrific lab security); every other explanation requires farcical, laughable stretches to go far out of the way to avoid blaming China (it was India; it was imported via frozen food; it was the US army; etc).
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        The job of the WHO is not to hold member states accountable during a pandemic, it's to provide support, services and intergovernmental collaboration. To share learnings. To provide their expertise to those involved. It's to provide health care to the poor and to share understanding. They're not "cowering" to a country that provides them a teensy tiny fraction of their operation budget. Not to mention, they're not the "Health Police," they're doctors and epidemiologists. The WHO has a ton of credibility. They've only been mocked by people spreading misinformation guided by their personal political beliefs. They certainly aren't the ones humiliating themselves. If you want someone to hold China accountable for... honestly, there's no clear evidence the state of China did literally anything right now... take it up with the UN Security Council. You don't get mad at your doctor for the flu existing, and you don't get mad at the WHO for doing their jobs.
staplung 6y ago
There is essentially zero evidence that SARS-CoV2 was engineered in a lab. In any case, the evidence that it's natural born doesn't have to be believed by everyone, only by Rees and Pinker. Then again, 2020 still has 21 days left to fuck us one more time. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/05/scientists-exactly-zero-evidence-covid-19-came-lab https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/05/scientis... https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/coronavirus-origins-misinformation-yan-report-fact-check-cvd/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/coronavir...
- creato 6y ago
  Nothing in the parent post claims it was "engineered in a lab". Being accidentally released from a lab is not inconsistent with being "natural born". I think this is still highly unlikely, but it is annoying seeing people talking past each other on this point.
  - staplung 6y ago
    True, but for the purposes of the bet, you'd have to effectively _prove_ that it escaped from a lab, which seems virtually impossible. In any case, the linked articles talk about that possibility too. Then again one could make the argument that incompetence in the world's collective response to the pandemic is "bioerror" although again, the debate and terminology only really have to be resolved by the two bettors.
    - est31 6y ago
      There is a huge outdoors lab where we run a gigantic experiment "what happens when humans encroach on natural habitats of mammals on a never seen before scale and humans also are highly mobile, able to spread novel diseases across the globe before they even get discovered or their severity assessed?".
    - breck 6y ago
      > Then again one could make the argument that incompetence in the world's collective response to the pandemic is "bioerror Pinker specifically spells this out: "I assume a mere lack of preparedness doesn't count)" So I think it would have to be agreed with >50% likelihood that it was released by a Chinese lab or some similar error for Pinker to lose.
bewaretheirs 6y ago
I nominate CDC's bioerror: allowing a test reagent to become contaminated and then distributing that contaminated reagent as part of its first batch COVID-19 test kits[1]. My recollection is that this delayed widespread availability of COVID-19 testing in the US for something like a month during the crucial early stages of the pandemic; that may well cause a million excess casualties from the pandemic -- especially if you count economic casualties (lost jobs). The FDA's regulartory approach (being slow to license tests and quick to crack down on unauthorized testing) contributed to this bioerror. [1] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200623/early-cdc-covid-19-test-kits-likely-contaminated https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200623/early-cdc-covid-19-...
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Even if that were a satisfactory incident under the terms of the bet, there would not have been sufficient casualties due to that error alone.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    That's a good point. The arguments based around complacency can't count because each countries' response is different. There is no global preparation against the virus so all the additional deaths that can be attributed to local lockdowns not being sufficient cannot be attributed to a global cause. Each of them would be attributed to the individual countries' politicians. 10000 politicians each causing 100 deaths is not the same as an incompetent or malicious researcher leaking the virus on his own.
vmception 6y ago
hey there, there are cases from other areas of Hubei outside of Wuhan that predate the whole animal market / nearby research lab thing. so it nullifies or decreases that theory
- arcticbull 6y ago
  It might, or it might not. Nobody's saying the WIV created this virus de novo, they studied it in the lab. That meant they of course found it out in the wild, and collected samples. There existing cases in the wild doesn't preclude the involvement of the WIV. Although, again, there's no evidence the WIV is involved.

powersnail 6y ago

Pinker gave many reasons, but mostly from high above, using general statistical patterns to make predictions on a very specific issue. Rees's argument was short. It was one plausible scenario. I often find the latter more compelling than the former.

claudeganon 6y ago
Pinker’s use of statistics has been highly spurious, which is why he’s frequently drawn ire from N.N. Taleb and others: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
- 1-more 6y ago
  I can only conclude from reading him that his job is to tell me that my eyes are playing tricks on me and everything is going well.
pmoriarty 6y ago
I find both their arguments completely unpersuasive because neither provides an argument for or against the "bioerror" happening by this specific date? Why or why not by the end of 2020? Why not by the end of 2021 or 2025 or 2050? They're both mute on this point.
- clankyclanker 6y ago
  Because then the likelihood of the event occurring increases so significantly that it becomes uninteresting to wager about.
- runamok 6y ago
  That seems the whole premise of the site: "Long Bets". You can't just say "some day" as given a long enough time horizon many improbable things will occur.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago

aiscapehumanity 6y ago

2040 is a better bet and it shouldn't be low. Enough time to mature biotech for novel biologics outside of nature and the technological means(method + access) to pose risk. Ugh pinker is such a pseud in the ivory tower.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
aiscapehumanity 6y ago
To would be downvoters, list contributions of pinker that's novel and long lasting? Until then I'll continue to view him as another overrated commercial intellectual.

spekcular 6y ago

If I'm reading correctly, the bet covered events in a period of 4 years. Given this, I think Pinker had the better side of the wager. Of course, with hindsight he was wrong, but with hindsight I'm a lottery winner. With any starting year between 2000 and 2016, Pinker would have won. I'd guess that's the case for the next decade, too.

hervature 6y ago
Where was the bioerror? Unless you believe COVID-19 came from a lab, then Pinker won.
- garmaine 6y ago
  The bioerror was in letting it spread.
  - hervature 6y ago
    By that definition, Tuberculosis which kills 1.5 million every year. Doesn't quite satisfy the bet by itself but a few lopsided months could easily be 1 million in a 6 month period. Regardless, I don't think the lack of disease prevention was the intent of bioerror. The article says that bioerror is supposed to have the same outcomes as bioterror but I believe the implication is that it is also caused by a single human or organization.
  - grupthink 6y ago
    Rees's argument specifically mentions that it must be an error relating to biotechnology (possibly caused by "wierdos [sic] with the mindset of the people who now design computer viruses"). There is no proof that the coronavirus was created or unleashed intentionally or accidentally.
    - spekcular 6y ago
      I misread the terms of the bet. So Pinker won, even with hindsight!

gregwebs 6y ago

The US frequently has it's own lab incidents including even with anthrax. China must be having lab incidents as well. There isn't a smoking gun to indicate either that this is a lab outbreak or natural. However, in the absence of evidence we need to ask ourselves which is more likely: 1) A disease traveled hundreds of miles to a large city without leaving a trace of evidence 2) A lab had yet another outbreak Almost all of the outbreak attention has been focused on the Wuhan lab that received international grants [1]. However, that lab is miles away from the initial outbreak and there's another lab that's a block away from the Wuhan seafood market that also does bat research (but not gain of function). This lab is also adjacent to the hospital that dealt with initial outbreak. This was pointed out by Chinese researchers in a preprint that was quickly taken down [2]. 1: https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741 https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan... 2: The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus 10.13140/RG.2.2.21799.29601 https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339070128_The_possible_origins_of_2019-nCoV_coronavirus https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...

patmcc 6y ago
>>>1) A disease traveled hundreds of miles to a large city without leaving a trace of evidence This doesn't strike me as intrinsically unlikely. Bats can apparently fly ~50 miles for food, a person on a bus can easily travel ~400 miles in a day, etc. I don't disagree with the premise that a lab outbreak is possible, but so is "guy got infected by bats or something, didn't realize, hopped on a bus to visit family/find work".
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  And that bus happened to be traveling to a city which hosts a top-tier biolab with the world's foremost experts on bat-borne coronaviruses. Not a smoking gun, of course, but anyways I think your logical fallacy here is the "reasonableness" heuristic, in which you base the likelihood of some incredibly unlikely event on whether you can "imagine" some scenario where it happened. The fact that you can come up with a story to explain... well, I don't even know exactly what you're explaining, because it's really just a fragment of a chain of causation which has been mostly left unsaid. But anyways, I'm willing to wager that you know very little about disease transmission patterns so your intuition here is worse than ignorance.

karmicthreat 6y ago

Better than average chance that The Thought Emporium [1] will be responsible for the first bioerror of this scale. 1: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV5vCi3jPJdURZwAOO_FNfQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV5vCi3jPJdURZwAOO_FNfQ

jcims 6y ago
He's one of those YouTube sleeper channels. On the surface a DIY/science tinkerer, then you pop on a livestream and he's hacking DNA on a website and creating mutant organisms.
h_spacer 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoczYXJeMY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoczYXJeMY4 "I hope that this home brewed gene therapy doesn't kill me." are not words I expected to see in the first 30 seconds of a video.

ponker 6y ago

Why are these famous guys only betting $400?

evan_ 6y ago
Since you brought it up, for years isn’t all that “long”...

runako 6y ago

I generally think Pinker had the better argument, but oof this turned out to be highly country-specific: ---- >>> Multiply further by the chance that the Black Hat will defeat the White Hats, namely the world's medical and epidemiological networks, who would combat an outbreak with containment, vaccines, antibiotics, etc. The product is not 0, but I don't think it's high.

Reason077 6y ago

Well, there’s still 21 days to go.

DonHopkins 6y ago
There's still time for Rudy Giuliani to ooze more black slime and fart in court again.
vmception 6y ago
did 1 million deaths occur within the 6 month time period? I think we already have a winner

jancsika 6y ago

If Reese doesn't get to collect $400 then this bet is an academic wankathon. Ignoring clear global threats, gutting the programs that exist to respond to those threats, and piping all comm through private algos that (inadvertently) degrade basic practices of self-preservation is functionally equivalent to whatever movie plot these two thought they were betting on coming true. Going forward-- dealing seriously with all three of these problems must decrease the risk of whatever movie plot these two thought they were betting on coming true.

dwaltrip 6y ago
Unless I misread, the bet has nothing to do with natural pandemics or how we prepare to respond to them.
- voiper1 6y ago
  The bet _specifically_ excludes how we prepare: "I assume a mere lack of preparedness doesn't count"
KMag 6y ago
Reese's definition of bioerror appears to be confined to accidental leak of a lab/home lab grown pathogen. I remain unconvinced of the allegations that SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab. The first sentence of Reese's position is "Biotechnology is plainly advancing rapidly, and by 2020 there will be thousands-even millions-of people with the capability to cause a catastrophic biological disaster." He also specifically states that a bioerror "rises from inadvertance", a.k.a. negligence.
- tristanj 6y ago
  Then what is your most likely explanation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2?
  - KMag 6y ago
    The most likely explanation is that one of the many widespread contacts between wild animals and humans in the area, likely at a wet market where wild animals were being sold as food, resulted in the virus jumping to humans. SARS-CoV2 makes a poor bioweapon. You'd want something with a higher fatality (or severe morbidity) rate, both for effectiveness and also to limit it's geographic impact to the target country. If it's not an engineered virus, the lab isn't a smoking gun. We have identified a very similar virus where bats are the reservoir species, and have identified a couple of very plausible routes by which it jumped to an intermediate wild animal that was transported to Wuhan for human consumption. If it's a wild virus, a lab escape seems less likely than the bushmeat hypothesis. Both HIV and genital herpes are believed to have jumped to humans due to humans/homonids eating bushmeat. It's known to be a very dangerous thing to do, and it's known to be somewhat widespread in Wuhan. Another possibility is that it is a virus engineered for research instead of direct use as a bioweapon, and it escaped. It's close enough to the wild bat virus that it's not obvious any engineering has been done. In any case, we have a very simple and likely explanation that matches the official story. It's comforting to believe we're in control and that simply being more stringent about lab safety will prevent this in the future. It's also politically convenient to blame foreigners (a favorite tactic of politicians everywhere for every occasion). Those two factors are why the lab escape rumours are so persistent. The truth is that (1) we keep having dangerous contact with wild animals and farm animals and we will not have control until we cut down on these practices and (2) U.S. officials are largely to blame for the sad state of things in the U.S. Yes, the Chinese authorities should have been more open from the beginning and botched the opportunity to snuff it out early, but there are plenty of countries doing much better than the U.S.

mountainboy 6y ago

If the analysis in Firstenberg's "The Invisible Rainbow" book is correct, then I would suggest that it has already happened and almost nobody is aware. And affecting more than just humans. Perhaps Rees should read the book if he wishes to make good on the bet.

ameliaquining 6y ago

It seems almost as though Pinker was confused about what he was betting on. Most of his arguments are against deliberate bioterror attacks, not accidents.

abeppu 6y ago

I think it's generally not worth paying attention to renowned experts opining about stuff outside their field. If an epidemiologist and a biochemist had different views on this question, and posted their reasoning, that would be interesting. What does Jennifer Doudna think of the probability of catastrophic bioerror? (I hope that's in an interview somewhere.) Or perhaps there's a retired national security expert who could weigh in on which groups are most likely to attempt that sort of bioterrorism. But these two are only in a position to make uninteresting and unconvincing arguments on behalf of their respective positions.

UShouldBWorking 6y ago
Pinker is a jackass and a jerk. Why anyone listens to him is beyond me. Just another New York Times know-nothing shouting psudo-liberal.
- ggm 6y ago
  Are you in his field?
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    Pinker hasn't really had a field for some time now. IMO, this poster is basically correct though the mode of exposition is not very HN approved.
    - ggm 6y ago
      I think he's a bit of a prick too.. but seriously, this isn't how HN works. If you're not a linguist or in stats then the critique is at best third hand, and basically common knowledge sour grapes. (All of the ego scientist stuff makes me mad, but I try to keep away from that)
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    You don't need to be in his field to notice he is an associate of Jeffrey Epstein.

mchusma 6y ago

Well. The FDA and similar agencies banned many vaccines that were very likely to work, leading to over 1M dead. Seems like a "bio error" to me.

hef19898 6y ago
To me it seems more like we developed, and approved, more vaccines in a shorter time period than ever before. So your argument would be much stronger if you provided sources and more details on which vaccines have been blocked by the FDA.

gojomo 6y ago

If COVID turns out to be an accidental lab release of a virus that went through gain-of-function experiments, Rees wins. Otherwise, Pinker wins. However, a consensus on the true origin of COVID may not be reached for years (or decades).

monoideism 6y ago
What if Covid was just released through bat research? Given the proximity of two bat research facilities to Wuhan, accidental release of a wild virus into human population seems much more likely than a gain of function scenario.
- gojomo 6y ago
  That'd also count as a 'bioerror'. But, what makes you think those Wuhan labs weren't doing gain-of-function research? Or even: inadvertent gain-of-function selection, via other research methods? See the proud tweet about testing ">50 novel" "bat SARS-related CoVs" against "human cells", and using "recombinant viruses/humanized mice to see SARS-like signs, and showing some don’t respond to MAbs, vaccines" that's linked in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25370869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25370869 )
ivalm 6y ago
There is no evidence it is from lab, while it likely originated from bats, pangolins have very similar virus extant in the wild. The burden of proof is heavily on showing that it was released from the lab, Pinker wins by default.
- betwixthewires 6y ago
  The US state department has said that they have intelligence that tells them that it originated in a lab, but do not believe the release was deliberate. Now, I take that with a grain of salt, state agencies are known to sometimes say what they need to to further their agenda. But it is worth noting. I've seen a few interviews and articles by evolutionary microbiologists who have examined some of the genetic and behavioral traits and found several that indicate that it evolved under selective pressures of being in a controlled environment like a lab. I don't have links to them, but I'm sure they can be found with an internet search, once you wade through the mountains of bullshit that you're sure to pull up when you do. Two behavioral traits I noted were the significantly lower number of cases that are thought to have been spread outdoors and the propensity of the virus to move across different tissues, a trait that is deliberately selected for in lab testing of viruses because it enables ease of testing in different scenarios. So there is evidence is came from a lab, but so far no proof that the public is privy too.

ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago

Our DEATH NOTE(s) is the SCIENCE... :D

swang 6y ago

when was this bet made?

karlerss 6y ago

Maybe the quick and wide rollout of the covid vaccine is the bioerror - say the mrna translation products causing some kind of amyloid-buildup. One year after vaccination people will be showing signs of dementia. Since the elderly get vaccinated first, it isn't noticed that fast. For precedent of "new drugs have tragic effects you only notice in a ~year" see thalidomide.

cantrevealname 6y ago

> Duration 4 years (02017-02020) ... a single event within a six month period starting no later than Dec 31 02020 Am I the only one who finds the terms above terribly ill-defined? Let's suppose an event happens on Dec 31 2020, and a million casualties accumulate over the first few months of 2021. Does that count? It counts because it's within a six month period starting Dec 31 2020. It doesn't count because the duration of the bet was 2017 to 2020, and therefore wouldn't include 2021. Wouldn't have been less confusing to state the terms as "within a six month period ending no later than Dec 31 02020" (if that's what was intended)? What if the event happened on Jan 15 2021 followed by a million casualties. Does that count? Jan 15 2021 is within "a six month period starting no later than Dec 31 02020". If that's the case, the duration of the bet is 2017 to Jun 30 2021.

coldtea 6y ago
>Am I the only one who finds the terms above terribly ill-defined? Yes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

kk_cz 6y ago

I try to understand "intellectual curiosity" here but I just find it very off-putting to bet on whether millions will die, no matter how sound the arguments of both sides might be.

mleonhard 6y ago
The winner of the bet does not profit personally, so it's not really a bet. They use the term "bet" because it's easy for people to understand. And it makes it more interesting than alternatives like "prediction & rebuttal". Long Bets and the Long Now Foundation try to get people thinking about the future so we can make it better.
- kk_cz 6y ago
  Even if it is just used as a figure of speech: "I bet that millions will die in next 4 years" crosses the line for me. But I guess it's just me.

DoctorOetker 6y ago

please don't create viruses to win a $400 dollar bet...

jp0d 6y ago

What if Martin Rees is the "inventor" of the Corona virus?

mikewarot 6y ago

The prediction was made in 2002, the bet was only accepted in 2016. Martin Rees was dead on right. https://web.archive.org/web/20060210071214/https://longbets.org/9/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060210071214/https://longbets....