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Except it was never misinformation. It's always been not only plausible, but the null hypothesis given the location of the lab, the nature of research there, an

by caeril 5y ago

Except it was never misinformation. It's always been not only plausible, but the null hypothesis given the location of the lab, the nature of research there, and the early cases along the train line. When Jack banned zerohedge for their article, there were other reasons than "misinformation". Only he and his masters know those reasons.

jkhdigital 5y ago
Exactly, the misinformation argument is a red herring. The evidence for the lab leak theory was assembled and publicly available by February of last year. It has not changed in the intervening 15 months. The only explanation I can come up with is TDS—otherwise intelligent people (including some of my close friends) who simply could not consider an idea supported by Trump to be credible. Didn’t matter how clear and convincing the evidence was, they just assumed that it must be faulty and untrustworthy.
corndoge 5y ago
> Except it was never misinformation This sort of illustrates the problem here. It was plausible to you but what you think doesn't matter if the powers that be decide it's misinformation. You can't just come by after the fact and say "it was always obviously not misinformation" to dismiss the fact that anti-misinformation controls failed here, in a way that ultimately suppressed reasonable speech. My opinion: in the grand scheme of things this comes down to just letting people express things online, even if they are outlandish or ridiculous or whatever. Letting people speak their mind without being censored even when I don't agree with them ensures that I get to speak my mind without getting censored when I'm in the minority, which is a right I value.
antonvs 5y ago
That's not what "null hypothesis" means. The null hypothesis in this case is certainly animal origin. The idea of a null hypothesis is to identify what the data would look like if they are purely due to chance, if there's no intervening effect to be discovered. In fact this is part of what makes the lab leak hypothesis weak: it'll be difficult to rule out the null hypothesis without fairly direct evidence of a lab leak, and the lab leak has low probability for many reasons, not least of which is that it's a low probability occurrence in general. The whole idea is just an excuse for people to larp as CIA analysts.

by caeril 5y ago

jkhdigital 5y ago

Exactly, the misinformation argument is a red herring. The evidence for the lab leak theory was assembled and publicly available by February of last year. It has not changed in the intervening 15 months. The only explanation I can come up with is TDS—otherwise intelligent people (including some of my close friends) who simply could not consider an idea supported by Trump to be credible. Didn’t matter how clear and convincing the evidence was, they just assumed that it must be faulty and untrustworthy.

corndoge 5y ago

> Except it was never misinformation This sort of illustrates the problem here. It was plausible to you but what you think doesn't matter if the powers that be decide it's misinformation. You can't just come by after the fact and say "it was always obviously not misinformation" to dismiss the fact that anti-misinformation controls failed here, in a way that ultimately suppressed reasonable speech. My opinion: in the grand scheme of things this comes down to just letting people express things online, even if they are outlandish or ridiculous or whatever. Letting people speak their mind without being censored even when I don't agree with them ensures that I get to speak my mind without getting censored when I'm in the minority, which is a right I value.

antonvs 5y ago

That's not what "null hypothesis" means. The null hypothesis in this case is certainly animal origin. The idea of a null hypothesis is to identify what the data would look like if they are purely due to chance, if there's no intervening effect to be discovered. In fact this is part of what makes the lab leak hypothesis weak: it'll be difficult to rule out the null hypothesis without fairly direct evidence of a lab leak, and the lab leak has low probability for many reasons, not least of which is that it's a low probability occurrence in general. The whole idea is just an excuse for people to larp as CIA analysts.