5 ms·

As it takes longer and longer to find any evidence in nature a lab leaking is becoming the most likely source.

austincheney 5y ago
That is an argument from ignorance logical fallacy. The inability to find something has no bearing on whether it exists or not and thus has no bearing on the probability of an inverted outcome. Dark matter/energy also frequently fall into this sort of argument. There is no evidence that they do exist, which does not suggest the absence of their existence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
- whatthesmack 5y ago
  Not sure what your point is. The source for SARS and MERS were found within months. We're over a year into this with no clue. Based on the current circumstances' inconsistencies with historical circumstances, this appears to be something different.
  - actusual 5y ago
    His point still stands. Lack of evidence for one thing shouldn't be confused as evidence for something else. A man is home alone during a murder, and there is no evidence for this, did he commit the murder?
    - dgfitz 5y ago
      How do you know he was home?
    - dkersten 5y ago
      No, but when the second hypothesis is the one that CCP has banned any investigation and news of, is not cooperating on the investigation and when there had been claims about the WIV safety and the WIV has openly stated that they were researching bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses, then the lack of evidence for any other cause makes this one seem all the more likely. That's a lot of coincidences. If CCP are covering it up, then of course there will be a lack of direct evidence. The above doesn't prove it conclusively, but it does make it rather suspicious. Why would CCP be hampering the investigations if they have nothing to hide? It was over a year before they let the WHO have a look. Plenty of time to get rid of any actual evidence.
      - austincheney 5y ago
        Using a conspiracy theory to qualify a clear example of a logical fallacy is pretty weak.
        dkersten 5y ago
        Are you saying that the CCP did, in fact, let people talk about it? That they didn't cover it up for months before admitting that there was a pandemic, after it had already spread around the world? That they did, in fact, let the WHO investigate last year rather than a year later? That the WIV didn't research bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses? There's also the reports about the leaked state department cables from 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep... But I couldn't actually figure out where to find them, so you can discount that one as "not enough evidence to verify". Those things aren't conspiracy theories. Yes, its not enough evidence to prove it either, but damn does it make them look shady.
        austincheney 5y ago
        I am not providing any opinion as to the origins of the virus. You seem to believe otherwise due to poor objectivity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
        dkersten 5y ago
        No, I'm saying that CCP's behaviour is suspect and the fact that WIV did, in fact, openly research the exact type of virus that caused the outbreak and that the first reports were from Wuhan is a pretty crazy coincidence. Couple those two things together and occam's razor would suggest this needs more attention.
    - unishark 5y ago
      Suppose DNA was left at the scene and strong circumstantial evidence points to the man as the culprit, yet he refuses to let them compare his DNA to exonerate himself.
  - checker 5y ago
    Source for finding SARS source within months? This is contrary but I'm open to debate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747529/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747529/
    - adrianb 5y ago
      Wikipedia [1] seems to include sources: > In late May 2003, studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets (Paguma sp.), even if the animals did not show clinical signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from Asian palm civets to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was also later found in raccoon dogs (Nyctereuteus sp.), ferret badgers (Melogale spp.), and domestic cats. In 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like coronaviruses in Chinese bats.[60][61] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Origin_and_animal_vectors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
      - bigpumpkin 5y ago
        In 2003, it was hypothesized that civets were the source. However, this was not conclusively proved until 2017.
        adrianb 5y ago
        Infected animals were found in the market where the outbreak began 4 months after it started. We have nothing comparable a year and a half after COVID.
      - checker 5y ago
        Thanks. Pretty legit sources from 2005.
- btilly 5y ago
  It stops being a fallacy and starts to become a valid consideration when the search for the thing not found has been thorough enough that it would have been very likely to be found if it had been there. Suppose that I remember leaving $5000 in plain sight on a table. My initial priors are a 90% chance that it is there, a 9% chance that I put it somewhere else by accident, and a 1% that my friend Bob took it. I conduct a search that would have found it with 100% odds if it was on the table, 95% odds if I had put it somewhere else by accident, and a 0% chance if Bob took it. Add in the evidence of the search and all of a sudden the new odds are 0% chance that it is where I thought it was, about a 31% chance that I put it somewhere else, and a 69% chance that Bob took it. This is the first major disease to jump to humans in the last 20 years that we haven't quickly tracked down the path to us. We're good at it. The fact that we didn't succeed this time when more effort was put into the search is something that should give us pause.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    Logic does not cease to be fallacious merely because somebody works hard and becomes frustrated.
    - jerf 5y ago
      Many of the logical fallacies are logical fallacies from an Aristotelian perspective of statements that are either True or False, and nothing in between. "True" is a high bar. Many of them dissolve when treated correctly with something like a Bayesian analysis. [1] This is one of them. Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence, contrary to the frequent assertions otherwise. It just isn't proof. The strength of the evidence is proportional to the amount of the possibility space searched and the quality of that search. It is not fallacious to observe that our normally-successful efforts to find a natural cause failing raises the probabilities of the remaining explanations, and that of those possibilities, "lab origin" has a lot of the remaining probability. It doesn't mean that natural origin is disproved, nor did it mean any of the other possibilities are certain, but it is valid to adjust ones probability estimates. (I've also learned from experience a lot of people will read this as being critical of the Aristotelian perspective or something. I am not. It is a valid logic. There are other valid logics. Many of them are more practically useful than rigid True and False, but Aristotelian logic, like Newtonian physics, is still a very important one to understand as it serves as an important limiting case for many other more complicated logics.) [1]: This is not a position statement on Bayesian vs. frequentist.
- titzer 5y ago
  > The inability to find something has no bearing on whether it exists or not Bigfoot has entered the chat. > Dark matter/energy...There is no evidence that they do exist, Except there is plenty of evidence for dark matter. It's stuff that has observable mass and is found in countless galaxy rotation curve studies, gravitational lensing, etc.
  - austincheney 5y ago
    Dark matter has never been observed or detected.
tshaddox 5y ago
Hasn’t the exact same amount of time elapsed without finding any evidence of a lab leak?
- gnicholas 5y ago
  Nature leaves a trail, so if you don’t find a trail then it becomes increasingly implausible that COVID resulted from a natural process. There are currently several intermediate steps that have not been uncovered anywhere, and which would have to have happened in order for this to be a natural process.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    This just sounds like the “lack of evidence is evidence of a conspiracy” epistemology so often resorted to by conspiracy theorists. The problem with the epistemology is that it applies equally well to all conceivable conspiracies.
    - gnicholas 5y ago
      This may be true in general, but in this case we're trying to figure out if something is man-made or occurred naturally. No one is saying it couldn't have happened naturally, but natural evolution happens differently (and more slowly and messily) than human creation. In prior cases (SARS and MERS), plenty of evidence of natural evolution was found very quickly. Here it has been conspicuously absent. What conclusion would you draw from that?
      - Izkata 5y ago
        > but in this case we're trying to figure out if something is man-made or occurred naturally. False dichotomy. The main lab-leak theory is that a natural virus being studied escaped from a lab, not a man-made one.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  You only need a handful of people working on this to have knowledge of it. The PRC is really good at locking up people to keep them quiet.
Dah00n 5y ago
That may be but we have hardly started looking yet. We haven't even found a source of SARS from 2002 yet.. >"... no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching..." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11.1842 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11... Edit: Added source.
- ChemSpider 5y ago
  Wrong. A likely Sars1 origin was found within months. For Sars2 Chinese researches sampled 40000 animals (according to WHO report) and found nothing. Sars1: Prof. Zheng-Li Shi from Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Shu-Yi Zhang from the Institute of Zoology, and some researchers from Australia also tracked the source of SARS virus to bats, and their findings were published in Science in September 2005
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    Finding a virus in an animal isn't that same as finding the source. A source has not been found. Only later and intermediate hosts (as in 2005): >"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat caves" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11.1842 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11... >"No direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations, but WIV16 was found in a cave in Yunnan province, China between 2013 and 2016, and has a 96% genetically similar virus strain." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

That is an argument from ignorance logical fallacy. The inability to find something has no bearing on whether it exists or not and thus has no bearing on the probability of an inverted outcome. Dark matter/energy also frequently fall into this sort of argument. There is no evidence that they do exist, which does not suggest the absence of their existence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

whatthesmack 5y ago
Not sure what your point is. The source for SARS and MERS were found within months. We're over a year into this with no clue. Based on the current circumstances' inconsistencies with historical circumstances, this appears to be something different.
- actusual 5y ago
  His point still stands. Lack of evidence for one thing shouldn't be confused as evidence for something else. A man is home alone during a murder, and there is no evidence for this, did he commit the murder?
  - dgfitz 5y ago
    How do you know he was home?
  - dkersten 5y ago
    No, but when the second hypothesis is the one that CCP has banned any investigation and news of, is not cooperating on the investigation and when there had been claims about the WIV safety and the WIV has openly stated that they were researching bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses, then the lack of evidence for any other cause makes this one seem all the more likely. That's a lot of coincidences. If CCP are covering it up, then of course there will be a lack of direct evidence. The above doesn't prove it conclusively, but it does make it rather suspicious. Why would CCP be hampering the investigations if they have nothing to hide? It was over a year before they let the WHO have a look. Plenty of time to get rid of any actual evidence.
    - austincheney 5y ago
      Using a conspiracy theory to qualify a clear example of a logical fallacy is pretty weak.
      - dkersten 5y ago
        Are you saying that the CCP did, in fact, let people talk about it? That they didn't cover it up for months before admitting that there was a pandemic, after it had already spread around the world? That they did, in fact, let the WHO investigate last year rather than a year later? That the WIV didn't research bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses? There's also the reports about the leaked state department cables from 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep... But I couldn't actually figure out where to find them, so you can discount that one as "not enough evidence to verify". Those things aren't conspiracy theories. Yes, its not enough evidence to prove it either, but damn does it make them look shady.
        austincheney 5y ago
        I am not providing any opinion as to the origins of the virus. You seem to believe otherwise due to poor objectivity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory
        dkersten 5y ago
        No, I'm saying that CCP's behaviour is suspect and the fact that WIV did, in fact, openly research the exact type of virus that caused the outbreak and that the first reports were from Wuhan is a pretty crazy coincidence. Couple those two things together and occam's razor would suggest this needs more attention.
  - unishark 5y ago
    Suppose DNA was left at the scene and strong circumstantial evidence points to the man as the culprit, yet he refuses to let them compare his DNA to exonerate himself.
- checker 5y ago
  Source for finding SARS source within months? This is contrary but I'm open to debate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747529/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747529/
  - adrianb 5y ago
    Wikipedia [1] seems to include sources: > In late May 2003, studies were conducted using samples of wild animals sold as food in the local market in Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets (Paguma sp.), even if the animals did not show clinical signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from Asian palm civets to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was also later found in raccoon dogs (Nyctereuteus sp.), ferret badgers (Melogale spp.), and domestic cats. In 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like coronaviruses in Chinese bats.[60][61] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Origin_and_animal_vectors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
    - bigpumpkin 5y ago
      In 2003, it was hypothesized that civets were the source. However, this was not conclusively proved until 2017.
      - adrianb 5y ago
        Infected animals were found in the market where the outbreak began 4 months after it started. We have nothing comparable a year and a half after COVID.
    - checker 5y ago
      Thanks. Pretty legit sources from 2005.
btilly 5y ago
It stops being a fallacy and starts to become a valid consideration when the search for the thing not found has been thorough enough that it would have been very likely to be found if it had been there. Suppose that I remember leaving $5000 in plain sight on a table. My initial priors are a 90% chance that it is there, a 9% chance that I put it somewhere else by accident, and a 1% that my friend Bob took it. I conduct a search that would have found it with 100% odds if it was on the table, 95% odds if I had put it somewhere else by accident, and a 0% chance if Bob took it. Add in the evidence of the search and all of a sudden the new odds are 0% chance that it is where I thought it was, about a 31% chance that I put it somewhere else, and a 69% chance that Bob took it. This is the first major disease to jump to humans in the last 20 years that we haven't quickly tracked down the path to us. We're good at it. The fact that we didn't succeed this time when more effort was put into the search is something that should give us pause.
- austincheney 5y ago
  Logic does not cease to be fallacious merely because somebody works hard and becomes frustrated.
  - jerf 5y ago
    Many of the logical fallacies are logical fallacies from an Aristotelian perspective of statements that are either True or False, and nothing in between. "True" is a high bar. Many of them dissolve when treated correctly with something like a Bayesian analysis. [1] This is one of them. Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence, contrary to the frequent assertions otherwise. It just isn't proof. The strength of the evidence is proportional to the amount of the possibility space searched and the quality of that search. It is not fallacious to observe that our normally-successful efforts to find a natural cause failing raises the probabilities of the remaining explanations, and that of those possibilities, "lab origin" has a lot of the remaining probability. It doesn't mean that natural origin is disproved, nor did it mean any of the other possibilities are certain, but it is valid to adjust ones probability estimates. (I've also learned from experience a lot of people will read this as being critical of the Aristotelian perspective or something. I am not. It is a valid logic. There are other valid logics. Many of them are more practically useful than rigid True and False, but Aristotelian logic, like Newtonian physics, is still a very important one to understand as it serves as an important limiting case for many other more complicated logics.) [1]: This is not a position statement on Bayesian vs. frequentist.
titzer 5y ago
> The inability to find something has no bearing on whether it exists or not Bigfoot has entered the chat. > Dark matter/energy...There is no evidence that they do exist, Except there is plenty of evidence for dark matter. It's stuff that has observable mass and is found in countless galaxy rotation curve studies, gravitational lensing, etc.
- austincheney 5y ago
  Dark matter has never been observed or detected.

tshaddox 5y ago

Hasn’t the exact same amount of time elapsed without finding any evidence of a lab leak?

gnicholas 5y ago
Nature leaves a trail, so if you don’t find a trail then it becomes increasingly implausible that COVID resulted from a natural process. There are currently several intermediate steps that have not been uncovered anywhere, and which would have to have happened in order for this to be a natural process.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  This just sounds like the “lack of evidence is evidence of a conspiracy” epistemology so often resorted to by conspiracy theorists. The problem with the epistemology is that it applies equally well to all conceivable conspiracies.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    This may be true in general, but in this case we're trying to figure out if something is man-made or occurred naturally. No one is saying it couldn't have happened naturally, but natural evolution happens differently (and more slowly and messily) than human creation. In prior cases (SARS and MERS), plenty of evidence of natural evolution was found very quickly. Here it has been conspicuously absent. What conclusion would you draw from that?
    - Izkata 5y ago
      > but in this case we're trying to figure out if something is man-made or occurred naturally. False dichotomy. The main lab-leak theory is that a natural virus being studied escaped from a lab, not a man-made one.
tomjen3 5y ago
You only need a handful of people working on this to have knowledge of it. The PRC is really good at locking up people to keep them quiet.

Dah00n 5y ago

That may be but we have hardly started looking yet. We haven't even found a source of SARS from 2002 yet.. >"... no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching..." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11.1842 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11... Edit: Added source.

ChemSpider 5y ago
Wrong. A likely Sars1 origin was found within months. For Sars2 Chinese researches sampled 40000 animals (according to WHO report) and found nothing. Sars1: Prof. Zheng-Li Shi from Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Shu-Yi Zhang from the Institute of Zoology, and some researchers from Australia also tracked the source of SARS virus to bats, and their findings were published in Science in September 2005
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Dah00n 5y ago
  Finding a virus in an animal isn't that same as finding the source. A source has not been found. Only later and intermediate hosts (as in 2005): >"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat caves" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11.1842 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11... >"No direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations, but WIV16 was found in a cave in Yunnan province, China between 2013 and 2016, and has a 96% genetically similar virus strain." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome_coronavirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...