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Anyone else here incredibly disappointed in the discourse around the lab-leak hypothesis? I'm not even talking about the truth of it. Instead the way the discu

• cyanydeez 5y ago
  welcome to the backlash to the backlash to conspiracy theory culture. its not a wonder why we cant have rational discussion when theres a constant reverberating noise of irrational conspiracy theories. anyone who really considers the global propaganda should understand by now thst this is intentionsl. degrade scientific rationality, democracy and good governance by pumping FUD into any critical corner.
  • macawfish 5y ago
    Absolutely! 5g is another area where this is happening. If you read literal industry whitepapers and peer reviewed articles about mm wave antenna arrays, the biometric sensing applications and corresponding privacy concerns are quite literally spelled out. There are entire industries being built around these applications and hosts of highly qualified researchers openly collaborating with corporations. Meanwhile these towers, which are effectively biometric radars, are going into cities across the country with zero informed public conversation.
    • legulere 5y ago
      Do you have some good articles that give an overview over this?
      • macawfish 5y ago
        There are some links in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444
    • mdp2020 5y ago
      Could you kindly share a few links that you deem most informative and reliable? Thank you
      • macawfish 5y ago
        Sure! Some links here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444
    • helloworld11 5y ago
      I'm genuinely curious. Could you provide at least a couple links to said papers?
      • macawfish 5y ago
        Yes, here is a comment with some links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444
• DevKoala 5y ago
  People will never accept that they followed the word of “experts” as if it was religion, and lacked rational thinking and original critical analysis. It’s 2021, we have the Internet and yet the masses were still as easily manipulated as the people in the 60’s who only had the TV and newspapers.
  • aulin 5y ago
    You really notice this if you're outside mainstream social networks. People at some point start to have infinite discussions IRL about some new uninteresting topic you never heard about like it was the most important thing in the world. You listen them argue with polarized and surprisingly well defined opinions, like they're reciting some script they're supposed to follow to defend their faction of choice. You change social circle, like go from friends to family, to find the very same discussions with the same factions and the same detailed, almost scripted arguments. Meanwhile you keep wondering why they even care, and why they're so passionate about it, it's like they're under some kind of spell which for some reason didn't work on you.
    • peytn 5y ago
      Can confirm; have been living under a rock, and it’s bizarre. Doubly so if the topic is something with which you have real-world experience. It’s so clear people are living in a weird propaganda world.
    • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      I have a large Indian family. Nobody is writing newspaper articles about it. The same thing happens with family gossip. You’re describing basic human social dynamics.
  • aww_dang 5y ago
    The illusion of openness can be more convincing in the case of the Internet. It isn't just a talking head telling you what to think on TV, it is a collection of curated and censored opinions from a simulated peer group.
• raphlinus 5y ago
  You're not wrong. The quality of discourse is atrocious even by culture-war standards. And I do think the culture war is basically to blame here. The lab leak proponents dialed up their rhetoric to 11, early on, without evidence. And the agenda (it can't be described as a "hidden" agenda) includes anti-China posturing as well as a strong undercurrent of undermining the credibility of science and scientists. I empathize with people in the science community wanting to push back, but Daszak probably crossed ethical lines by covertly organizing the Lancet letter and by not declaring conflicts of interest (he's revised his CoI disclosures, which might be taken as an admission of getting them wrong earlier). It's also legitimate to question whether the science community is too trusting of Chinese scientists. I do strongly support a real investigation, and am cautiously optimistic we can come to understand the origins. But the actual science story is pretty boring ("we still don't know") compared with all the intrigue. And public discussion is basically worthless, 99% of what's said is trivially derived from "where do you get your propaganda." I don't have answers to any of this, but appreciate you bringing it up in this way.
  • taneq 5y ago
    I think “too trusting” is more like “too scared of committing career suicide.” Any reasoned discussion is drowned out by culture war BS, false dichotomy thinking, misrepresentation of statements to fit narratives, etc.
  • arkh 5y ago
    > The lab leak proponents dialed up their rhetoric to 11 No. The media reporting on those proponents' theories dialed it to 11 to get clickbait titles for their articles.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • prox 5y ago
    > Koopmans says, adding that the preprint’s accusations could harm future collaborations on origin studies with Chinese researchers. Does anyone thinks this is a wrong way to look at things? I haven’t read it, but if it’s just a hypothesis / fact finding document, there is no accusation. Seems odd we have to tiptoe around this “or else” argument according to Koopmans.
• ffggvv 5y ago
  my hunch is the ccp is powerful at manipulation and convinced the left that lab leak theory is “racist” but somehow saying they eat bats isn’t. (likely to cover up for the fact it was lab leak) and the establishment is very easy to manipulate with the R word
• nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  Truth is there was never a problem with the lab escape idea. Problem was that it was first brought to main stream by Alt-Right / MAGA crowd and sadly in the current (or at least in that time's) political climate if we disagree with even one thing everything you say has to be treated as information hazard of the most toxic nature. Left is not alone in this, it goes both ways. No matter how good points the other side is making since we disagree on which old guy should sit in the White house we have to disagree on everything else as well.
• piokoch 5y ago
  Why blaming Wuhan lab leak is "nationalistic" or "caricature". China is a communistic country, it cannot care less about anything besides standard communistic agenda, gathering more power, winning more influence, spreading "revolution". Was crashing freedom in Hong Kong necessary? Is Urguys and Christians persecution needed? Did they care that their rocket debris might fall of the sky on some large India city and kill 5 million people? Do they care about factories that dump wastes directly to rivers and thanks to that they are cheap? And so on. There is a great book by Kissinger about China that explains a way of thinking Chinese rulers have. That was stroked me most was a chapter about early conflict between US and China (in Mao times). US were trying to frighten Chinese rulers with nuclear weapon, but Chinese answer was that even if US strike them that way and kill 300 million people, there is still 700 millions alive. If you look on Covid from that perspective, the mess in some lab in Wuhan sounds very plausible. For Europe/US it is a big problem, for China it is a big opportunity. In Europe/US there is a lot of regulation concerning research (ethical, security) that just don't exist in China. We don't know what they do in terms of genetic modifications, cloning, bacteriology, etc. The fun fact is that western companies are eagerly investing in such research in China as they are cheaper and they don't need to care about boring stuff like ethics. We should be scared.
  • sgt101 5y ago
    Something to reflect on : should we be scared of the people who didn't care about 300m deaths, or the people who threatened to kill 300m people? BTW. I don't believe that story - Kissinger was a lot of things but he and Nixon were not in the 50 Hitlers league.
    • taneq 5y ago
      Do I have to pick just one?!
      • wangii 5y ago
        patriots pick the right one.
• rich_sasha 5y ago
  When the Great Fire of London started in 1666 [0], it lasted 5 days non-stop, and consumed virtually all of the central part of London (mostly poor parts but not only). It was a huge effort to send belongings and people out of the city, save whatever could be saved and demolish the rest, for fire breaks. Surprisingly, death toll seems to be small (only 6 recorded deaths, though possibly undercounted, as mostly "poor people"'s town was burned), but an estimated 88% of the inner city was burned. All the while this was happening, among the fire, the chaos of people fighting fire, people rushing away from the fire, or saving their belongings, there was a mob trying to lynch the presumed perpetrators. First it was the French and the Dutch immigrants, but throughout the saga, Poles, Jews, Catholics and other "aliens" were pursued. The presumed perpetrators changed without much rhyme or reason, merely according to whichever rumour was currently peaking, as the mob, and the fire, continued their steady march. All while the city was ablaze. Interestingly enough, the cause of the fire is now known, and really should have been known at the time: it started from a small-ish fire at a bakery on Pudding Lane - a street that still exists, since central London was rebuilt on much the same street layout. It started small, but due to indecision wasn't tackled properly, grew a little, then grew a lot, then turned into an all-devouring beast that could not be stopped. Some things don't really change. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London
  • misja111 5y ago
    Nice analogy, except for one essential part: French and Dutch immigrants did not have a history of blocking foreign investigations and covering up unwelcome information. The Chinese have largely themselves to blame for the current suspicions against them. If they had been transparent from the start, the speculations would have been far fewer.
    • rich_sasha 5y ago
      Well, the analogy might in fact be better than I thought: suspicion was initially cast at the Dutch and French since there were recent real wars with these countries (never mind “soft” combat like blocking investigations etc). As an aside, I’m not taking a side in “blame” on China. I’m really only talking about the public opinion side of things. The cause of the fire was found through an investigation, and had nothing to do with the mob “crowdsourced” sleuthing. And the mob kept changing its mind as to who is to blame. Sounds to me a lot like NYTimes saying one time “of course it’s not China you bigoted racist” to “ooh questions are being asked and it’s suspicious we don’t have answers” without any real change in available evidence.
• fallingknife 5y ago
  Part of the driving philosophy of much of the left these days is collective (and hereditary) responsibility by race. So it's easy to see how, by projection, they would think that Trump saying it came out of the Chinese lab and calling it the "China virus" is blaming Chinese people as a whole.
• aww_dang 5y ago
  When has censorship been anything but a tool of authoritarians?
• roenxi 5y ago
  > It actually feel likes gas-lighting. There is a really interesting dynamic in political debate. I'm going to pick on Ivermectin as a COVID treatment, for example. There is official guidance on Ivermectin [0] that says "So, currently there is no clear information that confirms whether ivermectin works as a COVID-19 treatment." So what is interesting is that there are then a large number of largely faceless/anonymous opinions that Ivermectin is obviously totally proven/totally disproven as a COVID treatment. Anyone discussing the evidence either way runs the risk of being censored. But when the official position is taken, all the faceless opinions on the wrong side will vanish. If something like Ivermectin proved to be workable then anyone advocating for it will find this weird situation where they were right but no-one official ever argued with them and it is sorta mysterious where the pushback came from. Ditto the reverse, where if it is disproven as a treatment then there will be a weird situation where it was only ever a tiny fringe of people who cared. This effect is very frustrating in political debates, but does in a sense incentivise people to be clear in their positions. Debating anonymous opinions doesn't actually help and is a trap a lot of people fall in to. [0] https://www.nps.org.au/ivermectin-and-covid-19 https://www.nps.org.au/ivermectin-and-covid-19
  • taneq 5y ago
    If only the debate around vaccines worked like that.
• bumbada 5y ago
  Criticizing another country behavior is not xenophobia or racism. There is a totalitarian regime in China that controls the bahaviour of China. Modern censorship has the protocol of calling names to ideas or opinions that they don't like, prior to "cancelling" them, like calling homophobic the people that disagree in their opinions about homosexuality with what mainstream media says the opinion should be. The theory of lab escape was very obvious from the start for experts in the field. I talked with laboratories chiefs after the pandemic and every single of them told me it was the main hypothesis. But none of them went public about it at first because simply the West needed China in order to fight the pandemic. The fact is that China did wrong here, but there is hypocrisy in the Western world. The West put taxes into CO2 so energy prices go through the roof but China does not pay taxes so it has a big competitive advantage over the West. The West buy products made in China because they are cheaper(because they don't have taxes on CO2 or pollution regulation[regulation exist but nobody complies with it in practice] or protection against verbatim copying products). Lab research is controlled in the West with very stringent set of regulations, so the West subcontracts China research because it is way cheaper and the safety measures are a joke, not in my backyard. The US financed (outsourced) the lab research done in Wuhan. Bill Gates and so many others did too. While the West is arguing about ethics, China is doing experiments with human embryos because in China there is no such a thing as ethics. So Western companies put money in Chinese laboratories to do what they are forbidden to do in their native countries.
• raffraffraff 5y ago
  It's social media. These days we aren't allowed to discuss anything philosophical or scientific, without having it called a "dogwhistle for <something_bad>", and then a few thousand people pile on you, and someone posts a death threat because you're some type of racist or bigot. And some of these people work for organisations that are supposed to promote scientific enquiry, skepticism and rational thought.
  • y2kenny 5y ago
    I think we should start adopting the term 'tinnitus' when people argue with 'dogwhistle'. Just because a person calling X a dogwhistle of Y doesn't make it so.
    • jdougan 5y ago
      Remember: If you think you are hearing a dogwhistle, perhaps you are the dog.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• loicd 5y ago
  I think this is a problem with modal logic. There are important nuances between what is true, what is likely and what is possible. In my experience, people are not good at perceiving those nuances and personal bias often erases them. It can go in one of two ways: (1) It is possible and I like the idea so it is true; (2) It is possible but I do not like the idea so it is false. Now what happens when lots of people indulge in (1) for a particular topic (here the lab leak hypothesis) ? Then you will have lots of "serious" people forcefully pointing out correctly that there is no evidence that this is true, since it is merely a possibility. But since people do not perceive the nuance, they will interpret that as meaning that the "serious" people believe it to be false. When the group indulging in (1) stops monopolizing the conversation, the nuance reemerges and it appears like it becomes a possibility again.
• lmilcin 5y ago
  I think you need to realize couple of issues: - While the disease was spreading it probably made more sense to focus on dealing with the disease. Focusing on blame would probably take away from the efforts and clear message needed to combat the actual problem. As an example, see how any information about people hurt by the vaccine actually caused more problems. There is probably orders of magnitude more people dead or going to die because of reluctance to take the vaccine that would ever be hurt by the vaccine itself. - There is probably intentional and unintentional misinformation war happening in social media that for me or you is difficult to quantize or understand effect of. I find it likely there are state actors trying to influence public opinion on various matters or at least make various points moot. Add to this misinformation from various (I will call them amateur) groups that spread it based on rumor or feelings or pure conjecture without any facts to back it up. Then there are people who are responding to this misinformation, without having any facts themselves. All of this is going to make it difficult to understand where these shifts come from but not difficult to understand why they are happening.
• fredgrott 5y ago
  if you re-examine some famous virus history books like The Coming Plaque from the 1990s you realize that the escape form labs theory is not new but recycled propaganda. It happen with Ebola and several others and it was on both sides of the cold war with the CIA and KGB pursuing distributing those theories. We have to find some way to subtract the political infighting from the public health motive to find the origins of this virus outbreak.
• mhh__ 5y ago
  The thing I find amusing/terrifying is that people are now claiming the moral high ground over how it was handled originally (context be damned), while still using it as a political stick to beat people with - one key point here is the distinction between political and partisan disputes.
• ppf 5y ago
  I call it the "Orwellian flip", when the sentiment on an opinion goes from "you must not express this opinion, on pain of being politically incorrect" to "oh no, that was true all along, and we always said so".
• jokethrowaway 5y ago
  It was half to make Trump look like a racist / idiot, half to protect China from sanctions. I guess it was a risky move, hoping that evidence wouldn't popup (or come out late enough to make sanctions worth (b|tr)illions improbable). Yet, the most significative thing about this story is that a move was made. Probably the biggest case of foreign propaganda we've seen until now.
• dnautics 5y ago
  Early on, I found myself thinking that the idea that it came out of a wet market and couldn't possibly have come from a lab, to have its own wierdly racist overtones. I think someone recently tweeted as such too, and I felt "slightly less crazy".
• mint2 5y ago
  > Oh there _was_ nothing wrong with it, but /most/ people were using it to be xenophobic or racist (QED). Wait but less flippantly phrased this was exactly the problem earlier on. People who wanted to absolve our own abject failure to prepare or deal with the virus started acting like the lab leak theory was a proven fact and thus since it was all chinas fault we could stop quarantining and if only we frothed with nationalistic sanctimony our lives would return to normal. The problem was three fold. 1) the leak was an especially unproven theory back then with very little evidence either way, i.e just pure speculation. 2) the way it was used to absolve ourselves of being ill prepared, even if it wasn’t speculation there is no excuse for our preparedness 3) it was used for racist propaganda and we don’t need to sound like America is moving to Japanese internment camps 2.0, China edition. It’s not helpful and just gives the CCP propaganda fodder that harms our actual efforts resolving our justified grievances against the Chinese government.
• Cyberthal 5y ago
  > At some point there was this weird, almost intentional, conflation of the idea the virus could have escaped in some way related to the labs in Wuhan with some sort of nationalist, uneducated caricature blaming the Chinese. I doubt anyone has argued that the CCP deliberately spread COVID19 to the world because it is Chinese. Taiwan and Hong Kong are also Chinese, and would be primary targets of such an attack. Who dislikes the Taiwanese? The presumptive reason for an aggressive "unprovoked" WMD use would be because China is a Communist dictatorship. Those have an aggressive track record, to put it mildly. I say "unprovoked" in quotes because CCP media will gladly list many provocations, and aren't they the ones whose opinion counts when inquiring as to motive? If there's something Chinese about this, it might be the unconventional warfare aspect, from the culture that gave us Sun Tzu. Maybe the real racists are those who assume that Chinese Communists would not attack a stronger opponent in an indirect and clandestine manner. Isn't that projecting one's value system onto another? Since WWII, the USA has strong-armed the world into accepting the USD as reserve currency, permitting the US oligarchy to "tax" them by creating new USD ex nihilo via financial wizardry. Armed robbery, even when state-sponsored, often inspires armed resistance. Don't go crying, "He hit me for no reason!" when you're holding his lunch money. Apparently you can't say this, since I always get downvoted when I do. I have yet to hear an answer.