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Okay, let me know when you wanna talk about it like adults! I'll be around when you do. Until then, I'm not really interested in being ad hominem attacked and

Okay, let me know when you wanna talk about it like adults! I'll be around when you do. Until then, I'm not really interested in being ad hominem attacked and so I'm gonna step back and study for my med school exams instead. It's important to have conversational ground rules and one of those for me is decency and no ad hominems. As a last thought: You seem to kind of disregard the consensus that exists among virologists (even as pointed out in the very article we're discussing under, the OP). All those statements I made are consistent with the consensus. And on a small scale, I had that post reviewed by 8ish working PhD virologists before I posted it as part of the editorial process. I say 8ish because some of them have PhDs in non-virology stuff but now work exclusively on virology. It's not a true peer review since I know them and it wasn't blinded. But I want to be clear it's not like I just wrote it out of nowhere. Many of those same virologists helped me field comments on the original post! It was a great time we all got together on zoom to do it. Anyway, let me know when you wanna discuss the science and not ad hominems. Thanks

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
COGlory 6y ago
>And on a small scale, I had that post reviewed by 8-10 working PhD virologists before I posted it as part of the editorial process. Not a true peer review since I know them and it wasn't blinded. But I want to be clear it's not like I just wrote it out of nowhere. Again with the appeal to authority. Argue the merits of the argument. Not who is making it (which is almost all you've done). Except in this case, the merits of the argument were pretty weak and superficial, and only applied to people who weren't expert enough to realize that no one is suggesting CRISPR-Cas9 was used to make 1200 edits to a virus lmao. There's no talking your way out of that one. Anyone who knows anything about molecular biology or virology knows clearly that that was a total strawman rebuttal. I won't suggest motive, just that it was not ever a good faith argument. >Okay, let me know when you wanna talk about it like adults! If you point out where I'm not in that reply, I'll happily edit it to be less offensive. *Still waiting for you to refute my hypothesis with an actual argument, by the way.*
- jeduehr 6y ago
  I asked if you wanted to talk explicitly about the science, you said no. Until you agree to that, I'm good. Thanks for the interesting thoughts, but I think for my own mental health, I'm good.
  - COGlory 6y ago
    Drop the gatekeeping and appeals to authority and we have an agreement?
    - jeduehr 6y ago
      as long as we're discussing the molecular science, I won't have to bring any credentials up. But you just /had/ to get those two little accusations in there, didn't you?
      - COGlory 6y ago
        OK so if you go back to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26757986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26757986 You don't have any molecular biology refutation that I can find.
        jeduehr 6y ago
        Hi that's truly quite rude. I link to several, I have a zillion in my post. Are you arguing in good faith?
        COGlory 6y ago
        Not sure what you're referencing as rude. Let me go back to my original hypothesis, and then try to restate your arguments, and you can tell me where I'm restating them incorrectly. My original hypothesis: 1) Major point of differentiation for this virus is that compared to it's closest known relatives, it has acquired a furin site (eukaryotic protein cleavage site) that enhances its virulence. You said: >And in there, I describe exactly how wrong your point 1 is. I honestly can't find anything that refutes what I said. Please, just paste the line that points out how this is, to quote you, wrong. As in, disproves that compared to its closest known relatives (RATG-13) it has acquired a furin site, which increases its virulence" I can find absolutely nothing* in either your Reddit posts, or your posts here on HN, that refute this. I can find plenty of things explaining how natural evolution could cause it, but nothing saying that it hasn't acquired a furin site that enhances its virulence that its closest known relative doesn't have. 2) That furin site RNA contains a non-canonical amino acid codon To be fair, you didn't dispute this. 3) That non-canonical codon contains a restriction site that could easily be used to track, whether, say, your added furin site is surviving multiple cell passages, by performing a restriction digest and running the fragments on a cell. You said: >how misguided your point 3 is. OK, let's examine my point #3. It is non-canonical, as in only 5% of the arginines in SARS-CoV 2 contain it. I guess we can get into what exactly non-canonical means, and you do make some points there, but at the end of the day, 5% is 5%, and 5%*5% is 0.25%, so it seems to me that the usage of the term "non-canonical" to describe a site that has a 0.25% chance of occurring is fitting. OK, so let's talk about the restriction site. You don't dispute the presence of it anywhere, at least not that I can find. Please, if you have something to dispute the presence of it, just paste it in reply to this because I legitimately can't find it. You also don't dispute the usefulness of using a restriction site to track genetic engineering, presumably because it's done all the time. So with all this in mind, it seems to me like your disagreement with me is not with any of the 3 major points I made, or even the two of those three points you called out in your initial reply. So I'm thoroughly confused by what you're trying to debate. Are you debating the interpretation of those facts? Because that interpretation appears to be almost entirely of your own imagination. Nowhere did I offer (at least not that I can see) an interpretation of those facts beyond speculating that they are a possibility. In fact, my entire first post was just to reframe the argument as I understood it, and comment that it's very difficult to rule out because of the nature of the evidence. For the record, I find the likelihood that it was a lab leak extremely slim, but I'm not going to discount it, especially not concretely. On the other hand, the post you linked to was very much dancing around any of the concrete arguments about the topic, making absurd insinuations like that people are claiming the 1200 mutations came from engineered Cas9 usage, which I've personally never seen claimed (by the way I'm still waiting for you to address this). All while ignoring crucial facts like that the furin site was an insertion, not a polymorphism. I'm thoroughly confused by whatever point you're trying to make here. To me, it seems like you've been arguing against words you imagined me saying.

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[deleted]

COGlory 6y ago

>And on a small scale, I had that post reviewed by 8-10 working PhD virologists before I posted it as part of the editorial process. Not a true peer review since I know them and it wasn't blinded. But I want to be clear it's not like I just wrote it out of nowhere. Again with the appeal to authority. Argue the merits of the argument. Not who is making it (which is almost all you've done). Except in this case, the merits of the argument were pretty weak and superficial, and only applied to people who weren't expert enough to realize that no one is suggesting CRISPR-Cas9 was used to make 1200 edits to a virus lmao. There's no talking your way out of that one. Anyone who knows anything about molecular biology or virology knows clearly that that was a total strawman rebuttal. I won't suggest motive, just that it was not ever a good faith argument. >Okay, let me know when you wanna talk about it like adults! If you point out where I'm not in that reply, I'll happily edit it to be less offensive. *Still waiting for you to refute my hypothesis with an actual argument, by the way.*

jeduehr 6y ago
I asked if you wanted to talk explicitly about the science, you said no. Until you agree to that, I'm good. Thanks for the interesting thoughts, but I think for my own mental health, I'm good.
- COGlory 6y ago
  Drop the gatekeeping and appeals to authority and we have an agreement?
  - jeduehr 6y ago
    as long as we're discussing the molecular science, I won't have to bring any credentials up. But you just /had/ to get those two little accusations in there, didn't you?
    - COGlory 6y ago
      OK so if you go back to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26757986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26757986 You don't have any molecular biology refutation that I can find.
      - jeduehr 6y ago
        Hi that's truly quite rude. I link to several, I have a zillion in my post. Are you arguing in good faith?
        COGlory 6y ago
        Not sure what you're referencing as rude. Let me go back to my original hypothesis, and then try to restate your arguments, and you can tell me where I'm restating them incorrectly. My original hypothesis: 1) Major point of differentiation for this virus is that compared to it's closest known relatives, it has acquired a furin site (eukaryotic protein cleavage site) that enhances its virulence. You said: >And in there, I describe exactly how wrong your point 1 is. I honestly can't find anything that refutes what I said. Please, just paste the line that points out how this is, to quote you, wrong. As in, disproves that compared to its closest known relatives (RATG-13) it has acquired a furin site, which increases its virulence" I can find absolutely nothing* in either your Reddit posts, or your posts here on HN, that refute this. I can find plenty of things explaining how natural evolution could cause it, but nothing saying that it hasn't acquired a furin site that enhances its virulence that its closest known relative doesn't have. 2) That furin site RNA contains a non-canonical amino acid codon To be fair, you didn't dispute this. 3) That non-canonical codon contains a restriction site that could easily be used to track, whether, say, your added furin site is surviving multiple cell passages, by performing a restriction digest and running the fragments on a cell. You said: >how misguided your point 3 is. OK, let's examine my point #3. It is non-canonical, as in only 5% of the arginines in SARS-CoV 2 contain it. I guess we can get into what exactly non-canonical means, and you do make some points there, but at the end of the day, 5% is 5%, and 5%*5% is 0.25%, so it seems to me that the usage of the term "non-canonical" to describe a site that has a 0.25% chance of occurring is fitting. OK, so let's talk about the restriction site. You don't dispute the presence of it anywhere, at least not that I can find. Please, if you have something to dispute the presence of it, just paste it in reply to this because I legitimately can't find it. You also don't dispute the usefulness of using a restriction site to track genetic engineering, presumably because it's done all the time. So with all this in mind, it seems to me like your disagreement with me is not with any of the 3 major points I made, or even the two of those three points you called out in your initial reply. So I'm thoroughly confused by what you're trying to debate. Are you debating the interpretation of those facts? Because that interpretation appears to be almost entirely of your own imagination. Nowhere did I offer (at least not that I can see) an interpretation of those facts beyond speculating that they are a possibility. In fact, my entire first post was just to reframe the argument as I understood it, and comment that it's very difficult to rule out because of the nature of the evidence. For the record, I find the likelihood that it was a lab leak extremely slim, but I'm not going to discount it, especially not concretely. On the other hand, the post you linked to was very much dancing around any of the concrete arguments about the topic, making absurd insinuations like that people are claiming the 1200 mutations came from engineered Cas9 usage, which I've personally never seen claimed (by the way I'm still waiting for you to address this). All while ignoring crucial facts like that the furin site was an insertion, not a polymorphism. I'm thoroughly confused by whatever point you're trying to make here. To me, it seems like you've been arguing against words you imagined me saying.