7 ms·

My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk r

My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.

SkyMarshal 6y ago
That's been my impression too fwiw. There's now a large segment of people who are primed to immediately accept the conspiracy theory over the Hanlon's Razor principle: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".
- TrispusAttucks 6y ago
  Sure. We could also invoke Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab. The problem is the media labeling common sense as conspiracy and conflating the two.
  - cameldrv 6y ago
    Exactly. If there were an Anthrax outbreak in Ft. Detrick, MD, everyone would be immediately assuming the lab was involved. Wuhan is the Ft. Detrick of Coronaviruses.
    - aww_dang 6y ago
      There were two incidents at that facility. The first led to a building being condemned. The second was a more nebulous investigation into the yet unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hatfill#Lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hatfill#Lawsuits
    - FabHK 6y ago
      I wrote this on 2020-01-24 (when that speculation was fairly new), and wonder why that sort of simple statistical argument has rarely been made explicit: It certainly is an interesting coincidence that the only lab in China that can deal with it happens to be in Wuhan. The question is, how big of a coincidence. If the disease hit a random person randomly uniformly anywhere in China, the probability that it would have happened in Wuhan is a bit less than 1% (as there are about 10+m people in Wuhan, and 1400+m people in China). If you think it might have struck randomly any city above a million people in China uniformly, it’s also roundabout 1% (as there are about 100 of those). So this is by no means proof that something fishy happened, but it is significant enough to warrant investigation. If you assume that this could only have happened in a city with, say, more than 5m people, Wuhan is one of about 15 to 20 of those (so we're just above the "usual" 5% significance threshold). Still, an independent investigation of that lab seems warranted. Of course it’s China, so unlikely to happen... (I must say that I think the comment has stood the test of time, so far.)
      - bingbong70 6y ago
        We are fitting information here...if a foreign actor were to drop covid-19 in a Chinese city, they would choose Wuhan for the same reasons you stated... China and many other countries in the global south have a long history of being the victim of US/Japan/UK germ warfare. Seems convenient/self-serving to ignore this multi-century trend.
        checker 6y ago
        If this was an attack it would be similar to being locked in a crowded elevator, getting into a fight with another passenger, and deciding to throw a hand grenade at your enemy instead of taking any other approach.
        bingbong70 6y ago
        Many countries have shown they are stupid/shortsighted enough to do this, history makes this very clear. Study the actions of SAIMR in Africa and their plot to drive Africans to extinction using the AIDS virus and fake vaccines, purely for the sake of controlling African resources...that was the UK/US/SA/etc... govts and IA at work...they even assassinated a UN secretary general in the process. I wish man/nation-states/intelligence-agencies were as wise as you assume but history says no.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - SkyMarshal 6y ago
    Yup, though to nitpick, Occam's Razor actually says that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely the correct one. Subtle but important difference. Otherwise, /agree, especially with the media being confused.
    - diydsp 6y ago
      Why do people rush to differentiate, e.g, the diffs bt correlation and causation, but never question Occam's razor (I'm officially leading the charge to cease its capitalization), which isn't science, isn't a law, but merely a design principle. It's been treated as an irrefutable endpoint at best and as a spell at worst. I find it a convenient false authority for lazy thinking. Consider a statement like: "an expressive programming language is necessary to manage a resource distribution system such as a food production, processing, and delivery system." One could quote Occam and say "nah let's hunt and gather," but how is that consistent with our values? Ergo, Occam's quote is a selectively applied false authority. We need to use our heads and put it to bed!
  - SyzygistSix 6y ago
    I invoked Occam's Razor when I wondered what was more likely: that it was spread via a wet market or escaped from a lab with biosecurity protocols staffed by professionals? Of course I still don't know and my ideas regarding the latter have changed because of this article but I'm now pretty sure that I don't have enough information to invoke Occam's Razor in any kind of insightful or effective way.
    - text70 6y ago
      When the virus broke out there was an early paper, later retracted, which tried to link the virus with engineered HIV carrier strains. Undoubtedly after looking at the sequences of that paper, there were some alignments, but how they were structured doesn't point to being engineered, but rather of co-infection, which did not match the conclusions of the paper. What they do actually indicate might even be more politically inflammatory. That the virus evolved out of a recombination event in an HIV infected person infected with a SARS-like virus, and repackaged as a new SARS-CoV-2 virus.
unishark 6y ago
Conspiracy theorists are always going to weave conspiracy theories, though. That doesn't absolve the media or the rest of us from being the adults in the room.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Absolve, no. Explain... maybe.
- p1necone 6y ago
  Yes but when when people consistently bring up the mostly unfalsifiable theory that is most associated with conspiracy theories it's basically impossible to separate the conspiracy theorists from everyone else, and sadly much more productive to just not engage.
  - Mat342 6y ago
    Wait people can't debunk dumdum conspiracy theories? sad
    - InitialLastName 6y ago
      There's an evolutionary theory of conspiracy theories (that I just made up) that they self-select for plausible unfalsifiability. If a theory has a weakness can be proven incorrect, people will eventually patch it with an ephemeral insinuation that "you know what happened here" and move on.
- twelve40 6y ago
  But some things make no sense at all. The most populated country on the planet - a vast, vast population across the area almost as big as the US - has been inexplicably reporting almost zero infections since like March 10, 2020 (way before any vaccines) while the rest of the world (except small and isolated regions), the richest and presumably the most advanced societies still can't get their shit together, are still FUDdding over the upcoming Nth wave and locking down again (see EU today). How???
abacadaba 6y ago
Or conflated with that by people using it as a straw man to debunk more likely scenarios, your pick.
- varjag 6y ago
  It happens in the comments here still, and not necessarily a malice. A kneejerk reaction to any claim amplified by the former administration, even if it's "the sky is blue". Same reason many otherwise sane folks mourned Soleimani.
  - epakai 6y ago
    Nobody was mourning Soleimani. This is a ridiculous straw man. Soleimani's assassination was problematic on a number of fronts, and people were right to criticize it.
    - varjag 6y ago
      Plenty were mourning Soleimani, and Twitter just couldn't shut up for a while about how the world is on the way to WW3 over this. It however turned out to be perhaps the most useful FP action of that administration.
Izkata 6y ago
What I saw was the opposite: proponents of "came from a lab" were generally clear about distinguishing whether they meant "escape" or "release", while anyone trying to discredit them were the ones conflating the two - by starting with the ambiguous phrase "came from a lab", ignoring the rest of the argument, and then debunking "created + deliberate release".
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Maybe people in general don't know about any "good" reasons to keep viruses in labs (eg research for new vaccines), and would reinterpret anything they heard as "intentionally released" or "bioweapon". So I wonder if, even if trying to be clear about any virus escape probably having been an accident, maybe somewhat many people still would have interpreted it differently (as if it was intentional), and that type of "news" gets more attention, spreads faster, right.
- anothernewdude 6y ago
  Some of the debunking relied on the analysis showing that it wasn't the result of Gain of Function research. Whereas an accident could certainly be a release of a natural sample they were originally working on.
  - ganafagol 6y ago
    The original article that our thread here is about cites a Wuhan researchers relief that the wild virus is not genetically close to anythibg they had in their lab. That's a complete contrast to what you are speculating.
Consultant32452 6y ago
My impression is that China and China influenced corporate press in the US conflated "lab escape" with "deliberate release" so as to be able to demonize anyone who was asking serious questions. This is a pretty standard propaganda move, pretend the accuser said something that is adjacent to the real accusation but also relatively absurd, then argue against that. Never address the serious accusation. Another example of this happening is the corporate press conflating "lab created" with "gene editing" instead of using the broader interpretation which would include things like "gain of function research" (much more likely). This allowed China and the WHO to explicitly claim they did not create the virus (by gene editing) while cautiously never really addressing whether it was created via gain of function research.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  What do you call a cabal of American newspapers, tech companies (policing social media), and politicians (attacking Trump/conservatives) simultaneously conflating the two theories (malicious artificial virus versus leak of natural virus), attacking anyone suggesting an accidental lab leak aggressively, and censoring discussion of the same? It isn’t just “China influenced corporate press”. It’s the entirety of the left and left-leaning institutions (news, tech) that voluntarily participated in this mass gaslighting. People often stir up fears of foreign influence but in the last few years it really has seemed like the biggest sources of inorganic influence and “propaganda” has been domestic.
  - musicale 6y ago
    > conflating the two theories (malicious artificial virus versus leak of natural virus) I have certainly been puzzled by this, for example in a Washington Post article. By conflating the two, lab escape became a "fringe conspiracy theory" rather than a hypothesis that should be investigated. It seemed like sloppy journalism at best.
    - Consultant32452 6y ago
      The people who work at these institutions were often educated in the best universities in the country. And yet they speak in lockstep fashion in this "sloppy" manner. I think you give them too much credit.
tasogare 6y ago
> My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on No, the conflating was done by the media and this is exactly how I know it’s actually the most probable theory. The same thing happened for other few big "accidents", where the media/government were prompt to demonize a particular option and push a less convincing one.
loudtieblahblah 6y ago
If there was a lab leak.. The resistance to independent investigation, the disappearing of doctors who reported on this early on and such makes them just as guilty as if it was done on purpose. At this juncture maliciousness or negligence is just splitting hairs. How they handled the negligence might as well have been malicious.
- cartoonfoxes 6y ago
  Indeed. The virus itself may not have been weaponized, but the aftermath most certainly was.

SkyMarshal 6y ago

That's been my impression too fwiw. There's now a large segment of people who are primed to immediately accept the conspiracy theory over the Hanlon's Razor principle: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".

TrispusAttucks 6y ago
Sure. We could also invoke Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab. The problem is the media labeling common sense as conspiracy and conflating the two.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  Exactly. If there were an Anthrax outbreak in Ft. Detrick, MD, everyone would be immediately assuming the lab was involved. Wuhan is the Ft. Detrick of Coronaviruses.
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    There were two incidents at that facility. The first led to a building being condemned. The second was a more nebulous investigation into the yet unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hatfill#Lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hatfill#Lawsuits
  - FabHK 6y ago
    I wrote this on 2020-01-24 (when that speculation was fairly new), and wonder why that sort of simple statistical argument has rarely been made explicit: It certainly is an interesting coincidence that the only lab in China that can deal with it happens to be in Wuhan. The question is, how big of a coincidence. If the disease hit a random person randomly uniformly anywhere in China, the probability that it would have happened in Wuhan is a bit less than 1% (as there are about 10+m people in Wuhan, and 1400+m people in China). If you think it might have struck randomly any city above a million people in China uniformly, it’s also roundabout 1% (as there are about 100 of those). So this is by no means proof that something fishy happened, but it is significant enough to warrant investigation. If you assume that this could only have happened in a city with, say, more than 5m people, Wuhan is one of about 15 to 20 of those (so we're just above the "usual" 5% significance threshold). Still, an independent investigation of that lab seems warranted. Of course it’s China, so unlikely to happen... (I must say that I think the comment has stood the test of time, so far.)
    - bingbong70 6y ago
      We are fitting information here...if a foreign actor were to drop covid-19 in a Chinese city, they would choose Wuhan for the same reasons you stated... China and many other countries in the global south have a long history of being the victim of US/Japan/UK germ warfare. Seems convenient/self-serving to ignore this multi-century trend.
      - checker 6y ago
        If this was an attack it would be similar to being locked in a crowded elevator, getting into a fight with another passenger, and deciding to throw a hand grenade at your enemy instead of taking any other approach.
        bingbong70 6y ago
        Many countries have shown they are stupid/shortsighted enough to do this, history makes this very clear. Study the actions of SAIMR in Africa and their plot to drive Africans to extinction using the AIDS virus and fake vaccines, purely for the sake of controlling African resources...that was the UK/US/SA/etc... govts and IA at work...they even assassinated a UN secretary general in the process. I wish man/nation-states/intelligence-agencies were as wise as you assume but history says no.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- SkyMarshal 6y ago
  Yup, though to nitpick, Occam's Razor actually says that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely the correct one. Subtle but important difference. Otherwise, /agree, especially with the media being confused.
  - diydsp 6y ago
    Why do people rush to differentiate, e.g, the diffs bt correlation and causation, but never question Occam's razor (I'm officially leading the charge to cease its capitalization), which isn't science, isn't a law, but merely a design principle. It's been treated as an irrefutable endpoint at best and as a spell at worst. I find it a convenient false authority for lazy thinking. Consider a statement like: "an expressive programming language is necessary to manage a resource distribution system such as a food production, processing, and delivery system." One could quote Occam and say "nah let's hunt and gather," but how is that consistent with our values? Ergo, Occam's quote is a selectively applied false authority. We need to use our heads and put it to bed!
- SyzygistSix 6y ago
  I invoked Occam's Razor when I wondered what was more likely: that it was spread via a wet market or escaped from a lab with biosecurity protocols staffed by professionals? Of course I still don't know and my ideas regarding the latter have changed because of this article but I'm now pretty sure that I don't have enough information to invoke Occam's Razor in any kind of insightful or effective way.
  - text70 6y ago
    When the virus broke out there was an early paper, later retracted, which tried to link the virus with engineered HIV carrier strains. Undoubtedly after looking at the sequences of that paper, there were some alignments, but how they were structured doesn't point to being engineered, but rather of co-infection, which did not match the conclusions of the paper. What they do actually indicate might even be more politically inflammatory. That the virus evolved out of a recombination event in an HIV infected person infected with a SARS-like virus, and repackaged as a new SARS-CoV-2 virus.

unishark 6y ago

Conspiracy theorists are always going to weave conspiracy theories, though. That doesn't absolve the media or the rest of us from being the adults in the room.

andrewflnr 6y ago
Absolve, no. Explain... maybe.
p1necone 6y ago
Yes but when when people consistently bring up the mostly unfalsifiable theory that is most associated with conspiracy theories it's basically impossible to separate the conspiracy theorists from everyone else, and sadly much more productive to just not engage.
- Mat342 6y ago
  Wait people can't debunk dumdum conspiracy theories? sad
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    There's an evolutionary theory of conspiracy theories (that I just made up) that they self-select for plausible unfalsifiability. If a theory has a weakness can be proven incorrect, people will eventually patch it with an ephemeral insinuation that "you know what happened here" and move on.
twelve40 6y ago
But some things make no sense at all. The most populated country on the planet - a vast, vast population across the area almost as big as the US - has been inexplicably reporting almost zero infections since like March 10, 2020 (way before any vaccines) while the rest of the world (except small and isolated regions), the richest and presumably the most advanced societies still can't get their shit together, are still FUDdding over the upcoming Nth wave and locking down again (see EU today). How???

abacadaba 6y ago

Or conflated with that by people using it as a straw man to debunk more likely scenarios, your pick.

varjag 6y ago
It happens in the comments here still, and not necessarily a malice. A kneejerk reaction to any claim amplified by the former administration, even if it's "the sky is blue". Same reason many otherwise sane folks mourned Soleimani.
- epakai 6y ago
  Nobody was mourning Soleimani. This is a ridiculous straw man. Soleimani's assassination was problematic on a number of fronts, and people were right to criticize it.
  - varjag 6y ago
    Plenty were mourning Soleimani, and Twitter just couldn't shut up for a while about how the world is on the way to WW3 over this. It however turned out to be perhaps the most useful FP action of that administration.

Izkata 6y ago

What I saw was the opposite: proponents of "came from a lab" were generally clear about distinguishing whether they meant "escape" or "release", while anyone trying to discredit them were the ones conflating the two - by starting with the ambiguous phrase "came from a lab", ignoring the rest of the argument, and then debunking "created + deliberate release".

cutemonster 6y ago
Maybe people in general don't know about any "good" reasons to keep viruses in labs (eg research for new vaccines), and would reinterpret anything they heard as "intentionally released" or "bioweapon". So I wonder if, even if trying to be clear about any virus escape probably having been an accident, maybe somewhat many people still would have interpreted it differently (as if it was intentional), and that type of "news" gets more attention, spreads faster, right.
anothernewdude 6y ago
Some of the debunking relied on the analysis showing that it wasn't the result of Gain of Function research. Whereas an accident could certainly be a release of a natural sample they were originally working on.
- ganafagol 6y ago
  The original article that our thread here is about cites a Wuhan researchers relief that the wild virus is not genetically close to anythibg they had in their lab. That's a complete contrast to what you are speculating.

Consultant32452 6y ago

My impression is that China and China influenced corporate press in the US conflated "lab escape" with "deliberate release" so as to be able to demonize anyone who was asking serious questions. This is a pretty standard propaganda move, pretend the accuser said something that is adjacent to the real accusation but also relatively absurd, then argue against that. Never address the serious accusation. Another example of this happening is the corporate press conflating "lab created" with "gene editing" instead of using the broader interpretation which would include things like "gain of function research" (much more likely). This allowed China and the WHO to explicitly claim they did not create the virus (by gene editing) while cautiously never really addressing whether it was created via gain of function research.

throwawaysea 6y ago
What do you call a cabal of American newspapers, tech companies (policing social media), and politicians (attacking Trump/conservatives) simultaneously conflating the two theories (malicious artificial virus versus leak of natural virus), attacking anyone suggesting an accidental lab leak aggressively, and censoring discussion of the same? It isn’t just “China influenced corporate press”. It’s the entirety of the left and left-leaning institutions (news, tech) that voluntarily participated in this mass gaslighting. People often stir up fears of foreign influence but in the last few years it really has seemed like the biggest sources of inorganic influence and “propaganda” has been domestic.
- musicale 6y ago
  > conflating the two theories (malicious artificial virus versus leak of natural virus) I have certainly been puzzled by this, for example in a Washington Post article. By conflating the two, lab escape became a "fringe conspiracy theory" rather than a hypothesis that should be investigated. It seemed like sloppy journalism at best.
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    The people who work at these institutions were often educated in the best universities in the country. And yet they speak in lockstep fashion in this "sloppy" manner. I think you give them too much credit.

tasogare 6y ago

> My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on No, the conflating was done by the media and this is exactly how I know it’s actually the most probable theory. The same thing happened for other few big "accidents", where the media/government were prompt to demonize a particular option and push a less convincing one.

loudtieblahblah 6y ago

If there was a lab leak.. The resistance to independent investigation, the disappearing of doctors who reported on this early on and such makes them just as guilty as if it was done on purpose. At this juncture maliciousness or negligence is just splitting hairs. How they handled the negligence might as well have been malicious.

cartoonfoxes 6y ago
Indeed. The virus itself may not have been weaponized, but the aftermath most certainly was.