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The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because

by sbagel 5y ago

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break. The oppression complex is really out of control, as if people were being visited by the secret police and forced to immediately cease all discussion about the lab leak theory. It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence. As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that. Really seems many want to feel like they've been oppressed and silenced when that couldn't be further from reality, reaching absurd levels of delusion here.

DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
> As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that. The thing is, no new info supporting the lab-leak theory has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been. All the evidence still points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology not having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, and all the new evidence is consistent with the default prior - that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals, just like every other novel virus in history.
- ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
  No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor. If you read the Nicholas Wade article, the PLOS blog, or even this article, you will know the evidence is not pointing in any one direction at the moment, but there is solid evidence of a cover-up and blame shifting by the Chinese government and the virology / national defense establishment.
  - DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    > No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor. This is an absurd equivalence. Viruses spill over from nature all the time. There are millions of people coming into contact every day with animal populations that harbor myriad SARS-related coronaviruses. Every known novel virus that has entered the human population has done so through spillover. This is the default hypothesis, which must be overwhelmingly favored at the outset of any discussion. Everything we know so far is perfectly consistent with this default assumption, and there is precisely zero evidence of a lab leak. > If you read the Nicholas Wade article I've read it, and it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about is getting so much circulation. > there is solid evidence of a cover-up There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak. Everything we know so far points to the lab not even having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic. It appears to be a completely novel virus, not closely related to anything else known before, which is precisely what you'd expect for a novel virus that spilled over from an unknown animal population. If there were a major outbreak of a virus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had (such as WIV-1), that would be a different matter, but there isn't.
    - ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
      > Viruses spill over from nature all the time. Right. And so too do viruses not uncommonly spill over from labs into the public. SARS1 escaped the lab four times. Pandemic flu is thought to have escaped once. > it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about In that case, a point by point rebuttal should be written by people who do know what they are writing about. The ad hominem isn't really persuasive. > There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak. I did not refer to a cover-up of a lab leak. I referred to a cover-up of something, which may be a lab leak. There is certainly no denying that there is a cover-up: 1. WIV removed their virus database from the web on Sept 19, 2019, and their staff/student bios from the web in late Jan 2020. 2. China has mandated that all papers concerning Covid-19 be approved by the government before publication since Feb 2020. 3. Access of investigators to the WIV has been blocked. Free staff interviews with foreign investogators have not been permitted. 4. Statements made by the Shi lab are mutually inconsistent in their details. 5. The US gain of function establishment has pre-emptively sought to associate any talk of lab leaks with social stigma and conspiracy theories. All these are detailed in the Vanity Fair article which started this comment chain. Thanks for revealing that you didn't read it.
justAnIdea 5y ago
Just by reading your post containing the "deaf democrat" trident of a) lying by omission, b) ad hominem attacks and c) argument from authority, you kinda discredit your entire point.
krona 5y ago
Oppression complex? How about orthodox privilege?
dalbasal 5y ago
Regardless of which hypothesis turns out to be true, there are fouls in either direction. Certainly overblown claims of both silencing and misinformation peddling. The "human story," conflicts of interests and such, gets most of the attention... unfortunately. Some of those interests were/are personal. The most onerous interests seem to be narrative. One narrative or the other suits a grander political narrative, for a variety of reasons. That kind of stuff sucks us in, unfortunately. There can be a fine line between skepticism and orthodoxy though. Skepticism defaults to ambiguity. I'm sure that ambiguity is the majority position, but "I don't know" isn't a position that gets much journalistic and political attention. Media, both new and traditional, gravitates towards hard positions... poop slinging and human conflict stories.
hubadu 5y ago
You don't get to rewrite history after the facts and invent another smearing label to wave off the reality. Social medias implemented CCP-style censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year. Posts and comments were systematically deleted, users accounts were suspended. At some point you couldn't even share a link in a private message as it was blocked. You are the one reaching absurd levels of delusion here.
- sbagel 5y ago
  Citation needed. Please direct me to any user or accounts banned or suspended for discussing the lab leak theory. You're the one rewriting history here.
  - hubadu 5y ago
    Citation provided, and this is just a tiny fraction of the censorship that was unleashed on this topic: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-ban-on-posts-asserting-covid-19-was-man-made-11622094890 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-ban-on-posts-asse...
    - sbagel 5y ago
      Zero references of any users suspended or banned in your linked source. Posts were removed for 'Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made' which is very different from discussing the possibility and calling for further investigation. > Facebook in February began the ban on claims the virus was man-made or manufactured as part of a list of misleading health claims that aren’t allowed. During that period with the widespread dangerous misinformation spreading all over socials (questioning mask usage, recommending false treatments etc) it's easy to see how this was caught by that web. Still waiting for a citation of your claims of 'censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year.' or users being suspended for discussing it, not asserting it, which are very different.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
whiddershins 5y ago
The rational thing was to agree the lab leak was a perfectly decent theory from the beginning. Saying you have ‘no evidence’ of something is not a reason to discard a hypothesis. On the contrary, it is a reason to figure out how to get more data, a reason to figure out how to falsify the hypothesis. It’s a common logical fallacy to conflate absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
- sega_sai 5y ago
  When there is no evidence, the discussion is purely in the sphere of priors. And that doesn't make it very fruitful to discuss, as different people will likely have different priors. I think I agree that the likelihood of lab-leak was downweighted previously probably too strongly, but in the same time, I still don't see too much evidence in favor of it now.
  - whitepaint 5y ago
    What was the evidence of it occurring naturally in the seafood market?
    - SiempreViernes 5y ago
      Uh, nobody ever claimed that the seafood marked was some sort of natural reservoir. It was just the earliest suspected point of where the animal to human transmission happened, the reservoir was always presumed to be somewhere else.
      - whitepaint 5y ago
        The point I was trying to make is that the idea of it naturally occurring was mainstream. If you tried to guess it might have come from the lab, it'd be just dismissed completely. However, both of these claims had no evidence, so why was just one claim labeled as a conspiracy theory and dismissed entirely by the mainstream media? Do you disagree? Do you think it might have been political?
concordDance 5y ago
> There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break On hackernews the most you would get is downvotes. On Facebook or youtube? Things were deleted and banned.
calpaterson 5y ago
> There were tons of articles and threads on [the lab leak theory] everywhere including HN Until relatively recently lab leak discussion was censored from Twitter and Facebook. I didn't see much of it in the period Feb 2020 - May 2021. > On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture There was no brilliant evidence for any source of the coronavirus. Regardless of that, the idea of a lab leak was quickly ruled out and that was unjustified. I think the problem for the media was that a controversial American president publicly endorsed the lab leak theory, as it supported his broader agenda, and that made people in the media prefer to disbelieve it, even to wrongly suggest that it was not credible. In short: bias.
- frakkingcylons 5y ago
  I came across this article on Twitter about the lab leak hypothesis back in September 2020. The scientist in the article also was actively tweeting about the theory, she was definitely not being censored. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-broad-institute-coronavirus/ https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...
greenwich26 5y ago
Don't be absurd. Every single major social media platform banned even the most gentle suggestion that the lab was involved. And everyone who mentioned it was called "racist". Now that the scientific consensus is settling and lab leak does indeed seem to be true, they are all in major damage control. And you are trying to change the narrative by introducing some silly victim-blaming charade about "oppression complex", which is dubious and off topic. It will be less embarrassing for you if you get used to saying "I was wrong" instead of continuing your smug "b.b..but...ACTUALLY, oppression complexes! Therefore, my side is still right." Everyone can see straight through it. > It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence. Nonsense. It had an enormous amount of evidence. This paper was publicly available in March 2020: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1567134820300447 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15671...
- shlant 5y ago
  > Now that the scientific consensus is settling and lab leak does indeed seem to be true That is absolutely not the scientific consensus > It had an enormous amount of evidence I've been following this since the beginning. No it didn't > This paper was publicly available in March 2020 did you read the paper? it does not conclude what you insinuate it does.
  - greenwich26 5y ago
    I realize this is difficult and embarrassing for you, but you cannot remain in denial much longer. And your feeble attempt to be cavalier and aloof by omitting punctuation fools no one. It just makes you look like a haughty fool. The paper may "conclude" nothing but it provides strong evidence for the lab leak theory, if you understand it. As did many other things back then, some of which are alluded in the OP article. Indeed, the pure prior probability, based simply on the emergence of a novel coronavirus in the one city with the biggest coronavirus research center, is significant enough to make the hypothesis very credible.
- op00to 5y ago
  > Every single major social media platform banned even the most gentle suggestion that the lab was involved Citation requested. I remember seeing a LOT of insane bullshit on Twitter which was never removed. get out of here with that drivel.
whitepaint 5y ago
What was the evidence that it occurred naturally?
stevenhuang 5y ago
You must not have been paying attention. Here's one case of someone stating the true goals of those who promote the lab leak hypothesis is to promote anti Asian sentiments... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547263 It's hard to believe how one can reach such a daft conclusion. There are many others.
- flavius29663 5y ago
  > anti Asian sentiments I think an unintentional lab leak is going to create less issues for Asians than the other theory of "dirty" Asians eating bats, don't you think?
- shkkmo 5y ago
  That is not what that comment is saying. It discusses effects, it does not ascribe motivation.
christophilus 5y ago
It’s not surprising. The lab leak hypothesis was one of several obvious and logical hypotheses, but it’s the only one that we were consistently told was Dangerous and Disallowed Thought. Even if it turns out to be a false hypothesis, it’s outrageous that it was treated the way it was for so long, with such vitriol, and with such unanimity before any real investigation had been done. I’ve got no dog in this fight, but the way this hypothesis was treated gets my libertarian hackles up.
op00to 5y ago
You can’t rail against the government due to your own oppression if you’re making $350k+options without some serious mental gymnastics.
istjohn 5y ago
The media also insisted masks were useless for the general public. The media demonstrated a real inability to critically evaluate the statements authority figures feed to them over the past year.
- flavius29663 5y ago
  You can attribute that to being unprofessional. Which is not great, but not terrible. What is absolutely terrible is for the media and big tech to ACT like they are the absolute authority in any field they have interest in. We're heading towards "ministry of truth" levels of censorship.
bart_spoon 5y ago
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. Virtually none of the evidence being discussed here, aside from 3 workers at the lab getting sick in November, is new. Its all the same info that has been available for well over a year. And much of it not coming from "misinfo merchants". > Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. This cuts both ways. There have been many who haven't been saying that the lab-leak is definitively the source of the virus, but simply saying that its a credible possibility with at least as much evidence as any other theory, and should therefore be investigated. Throughout the last year, it was pretty consistently called a conspiracy theory or "debunked", when clearly it was neither. Declaring something to be misinformation when it is not, isn't any more skeptical that declaring something to be the truth with no evidence. You can try and poo-poo all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the mainstream narrative, both on social media and in the mainstream media, has been wildly off about this for over a year, and virtually nothing has changed from an evidence perspective to warrant their about face. The general narrative was simply wrong, due to a combination of hubris, partisanship, and lack of skepticism.
bena 5y ago
Not to mention, the "origin of COVID" fails my test of relevance. If it came from a lab, does anything change? No, not really. It's still a virus that we need to protect against. The only thing that would change any sort of response is if COVID was deliberately released. And that doesn't even change the medical side of the response, just the political side. > HN has really gone downhill. Yes, it has, but mentioning the reason for that will bring the brigade of the very same element that has made it go downhill.
qez 5y ago
I was a bit shocked by this sentence > On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. As far as I can tell, it makes two logical errors, 1) that absence of evidence is reason to not take an idea seriously, in a space of known unknowns, & 2) that a possibility can be discredited because dishonest people are pushing it. On the former point: "evidence = likely" does not necessarily imply "no evidence = unlikely" as you seem to believe (if by evidence you mean like courtroom evidence; we use probabilistic reasoning in the absence of such "evidence" for any one explanation.) we have gathered 0 evidence for many (probably most) true things. Finally, there's a lack of understanding of how power works in the US. If you could get censored for saying something that the US government knew for months, then yes, you were being silenced, the absence of literal NKVD notwithstanding.

by sbagel 5y ago

DiogenesKynikos 5y ago

> As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that. The thing is, no new info supporting the lab-leak theory has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been. All the evidence still points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology not having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, and all the new evidence is consistent with the default prior - that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals, just like every other novel virus in history.

ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor. If you read the Nicholas Wade article, the PLOS blog, or even this article, you will know the evidence is not pointing in any one direction at the moment, but there is solid evidence of a cover-up and blame shifting by the Chinese government and the virology / national defense establishment.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  > No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor. This is an absurd equivalence. Viruses spill over from nature all the time. There are millions of people coming into contact every day with animal populations that harbor myriad SARS-related coronaviruses. Every known novel virus that has entered the human population has done so through spillover. This is the default hypothesis, which must be overwhelmingly favored at the outset of any discussion. Everything we know so far is perfectly consistent with this default assumption, and there is precisely zero evidence of a lab leak. > If you read the Nicholas Wade article I've read it, and it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about is getting so much circulation. > there is solid evidence of a cover-up There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak. Everything we know so far points to the lab not even having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic. It appears to be a completely novel virus, not closely related to anything else known before, which is precisely what you'd expect for a novel virus that spilled over from an unknown animal population. If there were a major outbreak of a virus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had (such as WIV-1), that would be a different matter, but there isn't.
  - ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
    > Viruses spill over from nature all the time. Right. And so too do viruses not uncommonly spill over from labs into the public. SARS1 escaped the lab four times. Pandemic flu is thought to have escaped once. > it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about In that case, a point by point rebuttal should be written by people who do know what they are writing about. The ad hominem isn't really persuasive. > There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak. I did not refer to a cover-up of a lab leak. I referred to a cover-up of something, which may be a lab leak. There is certainly no denying that there is a cover-up: 1. WIV removed their virus database from the web on Sept 19, 2019, and their staff/student bios from the web in late Jan 2020. 2. China has mandated that all papers concerning Covid-19 be approved by the government before publication since Feb 2020. 3. Access of investigators to the WIV has been blocked. Free staff interviews with foreign investogators have not been permitted. 4. Statements made by the Shi lab are mutually inconsistent in their details. 5. The US gain of function establishment has pre-emptively sought to associate any talk of lab leaks with social stigma and conspiracy theories. All these are detailed in the Vanity Fair article which started this comment chain. Thanks for revealing that you didn't read it.

justAnIdea 5y ago

Just by reading your post containing the "deaf democrat" trident of a) lying by omission, b) ad hominem attacks and c) argument from authority, you kinda discredit your entire point.

krona 5y ago

Oppression complex? How about orthodox privilege?

dalbasal 5y ago

Regardless of which hypothesis turns out to be true, there are fouls in either direction. Certainly overblown claims of both silencing and misinformation peddling. The "human story," conflicts of interests and such, gets most of the attention... unfortunately. Some of those interests were/are personal. The most onerous interests seem to be narrative. One narrative or the other suits a grander political narrative, for a variety of reasons. That kind of stuff sucks us in, unfortunately. There can be a fine line between skepticism and orthodoxy though. Skepticism defaults to ambiguity. I'm sure that ambiguity is the majority position, but "I don't know" isn't a position that gets much journalistic and political attention. Media, both new and traditional, gravitates towards hard positions... poop slinging and human conflict stories.

hubadu 5y ago

You don't get to rewrite history after the facts and invent another smearing label to wave off the reality. Social medias implemented CCP-style censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year. Posts and comments were systematically deleted, users accounts were suspended. At some point you couldn't even share a link in a private message as it was blocked. You are the one reaching absurd levels of delusion here.

sbagel 5y ago
Citation needed. Please direct me to any user or accounts banned or suspended for discussing the lab leak theory. You're the one rewriting history here.
- hubadu 5y ago
  Citation provided, and this is just a tiny fraction of the censorship that was unleashed on this topic: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-ban-on-posts-asserting-covid-19-was-man-made-11622094890 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-ban-on-posts-asse...
  - sbagel 5y ago
    Zero references of any users suspended or banned in your linked source. Posts were removed for 'Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made' which is very different from discussing the possibility and calling for further investigation. > Facebook in February began the ban on claims the virus was man-made or manufactured as part of a list of misleading health claims that aren’t allowed. During that period with the widespread dangerous misinformation spreading all over socials (questioning mask usage, recommending false treatments etc) it's easy to see how this was caught by that web. Still waiting for a citation of your claims of 'censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year.' or users being suspended for discussing it, not asserting it, which are very different.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

whiddershins 5y ago

The rational thing was to agree the lab leak was a perfectly decent theory from the beginning. Saying you have ‘no evidence’ of something is not a reason to discard a hypothesis. On the contrary, it is a reason to figure out how to get more data, a reason to figure out how to falsify the hypothesis. It’s a common logical fallacy to conflate absence of evidence with evidence of absence.

sega_sai 5y ago
When there is no evidence, the discussion is purely in the sphere of priors. And that doesn't make it very fruitful to discuss, as different people will likely have different priors. I think I agree that the likelihood of lab-leak was downweighted previously probably too strongly, but in the same time, I still don't see too much evidence in favor of it now.
- whitepaint 5y ago
  What was the evidence of it occurring naturally in the seafood market?
  - SiempreViernes 5y ago
    Uh, nobody ever claimed that the seafood marked was some sort of natural reservoir. It was just the earliest suspected point of where the animal to human transmission happened, the reservoir was always presumed to be somewhere else.
    - whitepaint 5y ago
      The point I was trying to make is that the idea of it naturally occurring was mainstream. If you tried to guess it might have come from the lab, it'd be just dismissed completely. However, both of these claims had no evidence, so why was just one claim labeled as a conspiracy theory and dismissed entirely by the mainstream media? Do you disagree? Do you think it might have been political?

concordDance 5y ago

> There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break On hackernews the most you would get is downvotes. On Facebook or youtube? Things were deleted and banned.

calpaterson 5y ago

> There were tons of articles and threads on [the lab leak theory] everywhere including HN Until relatively recently lab leak discussion was censored from Twitter and Facebook. I didn't see much of it in the period Feb 2020 - May 2021. > On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture There was no brilliant evidence for any source of the coronavirus. Regardless of that, the idea of a lab leak was quickly ruled out and that was unjustified. I think the problem for the media was that a controversial American president publicly endorsed the lab leak theory, as it supported his broader agenda, and that made people in the media prefer to disbelieve it, even to wrongly suggest that it was not credible. In short: bias.

frakkingcylons 5y ago
I came across this article on Twitter about the lab leak hypothesis back in September 2020. The scientist in the article also was actively tweeting about the theory, she was definitely not being censored. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-broad-institute-coronavirus/ https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...

greenwich26 5y ago

Don't be absurd. Every single major social media platform banned even the most gentle suggestion that the lab was involved. And everyone who mentioned it was called "racist". Now that the scientific consensus is settling and lab leak does indeed seem to be true, they are all in major damage control. And you are trying to change the narrative by introducing some silly victim-blaming charade about "oppression complex", which is dubious and off topic. It will be less embarrassing for you if you get used to saying "I was wrong" instead of continuing your smug "b.b..but...ACTUALLY, oppression complexes! Therefore, my side is still right." Everyone can see straight through it. > It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence. Nonsense. It had an enormous amount of evidence. This paper was publicly available in March 2020: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1567134820300447 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15671...

shlant 5y ago
> Now that the scientific consensus is settling and lab leak does indeed seem to be true That is absolutely not the scientific consensus > It had an enormous amount of evidence I've been following this since the beginning. No it didn't > This paper was publicly available in March 2020 did you read the paper? it does not conclude what you insinuate it does.
- greenwich26 5y ago
  I realize this is difficult and embarrassing for you, but you cannot remain in denial much longer. And your feeble attempt to be cavalier and aloof by omitting punctuation fools no one. It just makes you look like a haughty fool. The paper may "conclude" nothing but it provides strong evidence for the lab leak theory, if you understand it. As did many other things back then, some of which are alluded in the OP article. Indeed, the pure prior probability, based simply on the emergence of a novel coronavirus in the one city with the biggest coronavirus research center, is significant enough to make the hypothesis very credible.
op00to 5y ago
> Every single major social media platform banned even the most gentle suggestion that the lab was involved Citation requested. I remember seeing a LOT of insane bullshit on Twitter which was never removed. get out of here with that drivel.

whitepaint 5y ago

What was the evidence that it occurred naturally?

stevenhuang 5y ago

You must not have been paying attention. Here's one case of someone stating the true goals of those who promote the lab leak hypothesis is to promote anti Asian sentiments... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547263 It's hard to believe how one can reach such a daft conclusion. There are many others.

flavius29663 5y ago
> anti Asian sentiments I think an unintentional lab leak is going to create less issues for Asians than the other theory of "dirty" Asians eating bats, don't you think?
shkkmo 5y ago
That is not what that comment is saying. It discusses effects, it does not ascribe motivation.

christophilus 5y ago

It’s not surprising. The lab leak hypothesis was one of several obvious and logical hypotheses, but it’s the only one that we were consistently told was Dangerous and Disallowed Thought. Even if it turns out to be a false hypothesis, it’s outrageous that it was treated the way it was for so long, with such vitriol, and with such unanimity before any real investigation had been done. I’ve got no dog in this fight, but the way this hypothesis was treated gets my libertarian hackles up.

op00to 5y ago

You can’t rail against the government due to your own oppression if you’re making $350k+options without some serious mental gymnastics.

istjohn 5y ago

The media also insisted masks were useless for the general public. The media demonstrated a real inability to critically evaluate the statements authority figures feed to them over the past year.

flavius29663 5y ago
You can attribute that to being unprofessional. Which is not great, but not terrible. What is absolutely terrible is for the media and big tech to ACT like they are the absolute authority in any field they have interest in. We're heading towards "ministry of truth" levels of censorship.

bart_spoon 5y ago

> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. Virtually none of the evidence being discussed here, aside from 3 workers at the lab getting sick in November, is new. Its all the same info that has been available for well over a year. And much of it not coming from "misinfo merchants". > Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. This cuts both ways. There have been many who haven't been saying that the lab-leak is definitively the source of the virus, but simply saying that its a credible possibility with at least as much evidence as any other theory, and should therefore be investigated. Throughout the last year, it was pretty consistently called a conspiracy theory or "debunked", when clearly it was neither. Declaring something to be misinformation when it is not, isn't any more skeptical that declaring something to be the truth with no evidence. You can try and poo-poo all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the mainstream narrative, both on social media and in the mainstream media, has been wildly off about this for over a year, and virtually nothing has changed from an evidence perspective to warrant their about face. The general narrative was simply wrong, due to a combination of hubris, partisanship, and lack of skepticism.

bena 5y ago

Not to mention, the "origin of COVID" fails my test of relevance. If it came from a lab, does anything change? No, not really. It's still a virus that we need to protect against. The only thing that would change any sort of response is if COVID was deliberately released. And that doesn't even change the medical side of the response, just the political side. > HN has really gone downhill. Yes, it has, but mentioning the reason for that will bring the brigade of the very same element that has made it go downhill.

qez 5y ago

I was a bit shocked by this sentence > On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. As far as I can tell, it makes two logical errors, 1) that absence of evidence is reason to not take an idea seriously, in a space of known unknowns, & 2) that a possibility can be discredited because dishonest people are pushing it. On the former point: "evidence = likely" does not necessarily imply "no evidence = unlikely" as you seem to believe (if by evidence you mean like courtroom evidence; we use probabilistic reasoning in the absence of such "evidence" for any one explanation.) we have gathered 0 evidence for many (probably most) true things. Finally, there's a lack of understanding of how power works in the US. If you could get censored for saying something that the US government knew for months, then yes, you were being silenced, the absence of literal NKVD notwithstanding.