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The burden of proof is on the one making the claim and the more extraordinary the claim the more extraordinary the evidence needs to be in my opinion.
by exegete 5y ago
The burden of proof is on the one making the claim and the more extraordinary the claim the more extraordinary the evidence needs to be in my opinion.
- throwaway4good 5y agoExactly. There is an investegative group from the WHO interviewing the Wuhan lab people and looking at various form of documentation. The lab leak proponents claim that they are all lying and all the documents are fraudulent. The lab leak proponents have the burden of proof and IMHO kinda should shut up until they can carry that burden.
- neonological 5y agoDid you read the article. The investigative group is compromised. The doctors who were part of the group have strong connections and even experiments running in the same lab.
- throwaway4good 5y agoOh - I forgot - the investigation is comprimised ... Insanity!
- guesst 5y agoI agree that compromised isn't a smart word to use about this, but even if you think all these questions have been settled, I'm surprised you don't agree that it is bad optics to have the investigator to be the funder of the research being investigated, and even worse when he says things like: well, we asked them and they said no, so that's that. The conflict of interest couldn't be more obvious. It's the media's job to investigate conflicts of interest, so the fact that they didn't looked into that, and that they took Daszak's original so-called debunking at face value, is bad optics on another level. It has left a credibility vacuum, so it's unsurprising that articles like the current one are coming in from the margins.
- tomjen3 5y agoWhat is least likely? A group of scientists in a quasy communist country do a shit job of safety and end up endangering the worlds population or that a virus that coexists with Bats, somehow and for no (direct) evolutionary benefit, becomes able to infect humans?
- jounker 5y agoBased on what we know about the history and ecology of pathogens, the latter is far more likely. I say this as someone with training in the biological sciences.
- SiempreViernes 5y agoUh, infecting a new type of organism is a pretty big evolutionary benefit though? Saying there is no benefit is like saying there is no benefit for people people who switch jobs just so they get paid more.
- tomjen3 5y agoIt is, on the whole, but not immediately. It is kinda like the idea that while having eyes is a huge evolutionary benefit, having just part of the eye confers none. Or like guessing a password by random chance. If you get some immediate feedback by being partially right then it is pretty easy, but if you only know if the password is right or wrong, then the odds of guessing the password rounds to zero.