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As someone who is out of the loop on this and only a basic understanding, it seems very peculiar that scientists were so quickly to just jump on the "it must be

As someone who is out of the loop on this and only a basic understanding, it seems very peculiar that scientists were so quickly to just jump on the "it must be bats and a wet market" thing so early on despite the Wuhan lab being right there. It's like when some out-of-control company creates a superfund site through gross negligence of industrial byproduct handling and then goes "idk cancer gonna cancer. you can't link that to us!".

emilgouliev 5y ago
“When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was alleged, with a little Soviet help, that the virus had been developed in an American lab. Between Washington’s inaction on the epidemic and its sordid past of shady experiments, proponents said the theory couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself. When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.” And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-hold-up-covid-china/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-... This literally happens every goddamn time. Natural explanation is simpler.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  You want to use a razor to shave a bear. Simplicity is not enough to favor a belief model. Machine Learning has shown us that large complex models can perform much better at providing the ground truths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor Razor's aren't scientifically rigorous theorems. Feel free to use them but don't argue by them in a public forum, it's disingenuous to truth.
  - morpheos137 5y ago
    Pretty good point. People resort to occams razor as if it is a fundamental constant of nature valid in all cases. Occams razor has heuristic value not probitive value.
- hamilyon2 5y ago
  It is not that lab leaks in general are unheard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
- jeegsy 5y ago
  > This literally happens every goddamn time. Natural explanation is simpler. NO it doesn't. Just because some theories LATER turned out to be wrong does not mean that we automatically dismissing this or that theory. It really doesn't matter if the "lab leak theory" is later on definitively discredited. To me thats not the point. The point is whether or not there was any justification for not only ignoring but actively removing it from discourse urgently as was done at a time when no one knew anything for certain.
  - whydoyoucare 5y ago
    Agreed - dismissing the lab-leak theory early on without conclusive evidence either way was certainly suspicious. Any scientist worth his/her salt shouldn't dismiss any theory outright without having hard data to back it up.
    - mbauman 5y ago
      There are two things going on here: - There's strong evidence that it's not bioengineered; scientists used very strong and convincing language here. - There was initially hope of finding the zoonotic reservoir; scientists used couched language here to subtly detangle a natural virus vs. a natural virus that had adapted to passage in cell culture in a lab, and had priors assuming a zoonotic source would be found. Guess which language journalists glommed onto.
      - shard972 5y ago
        your talking shit that this was just journos, this was scientists shutting down public debate and tech companies banning people for discussing it. Don't try and pretend like this is just another case of journos making shitty headlines because your fucking lying.
    - baja_blast 5y ago
      Virologists have a bias against the lab leak theory because if true it would threaten their careers. If it's natural on the other hand they get a boost in funding. It makes sense they are so against the idea, no one wants to be associated with/partially responsible for the death of 4 million + people worldwide, nor do they want to have their careers ruined.
- derbOac 5y ago
  So, in those cases I would say even though they are conspiratorial, I'd hope someone would be looking into those possibilities at least to some extent if they're even marginally possible. The nature of these things is when conspiracies are real, they're often made to look like something else, and to make people who see them look crazy. The other thing is that this case seems different? It's not some vague accusation based on some xenophobic idea of "The Other" or a geopolitical adversary, or a threatening location -- for instance, a US military rival, or a military base -- but rather a large lab specifically focused on experimental virology research. Even more specifically, it's a lab that has been involved in genetically manipulating closely related viruses to be more virulent. There's been suspicious coverup activity by multiple parties, which in itself is not evidence, but I think raises some "worthy of investigation" rationale, and also has been a serious ethical problem in itself regardless of the actual SARS-CoV-2 origin. I guess in short, yes, there's always conspiracy theories. But this time is different. I don't really see this situation as comparable to other situations, because the evidence justifying serious consideration is so specific. Personally, I think the train has left the station on ever figuring out what really was the source. This delay in itself seems suspicious to me but I don't know that I'll ever really feel confident about any particular explanation. As for "simpler", I think that depends on your subjective opinion. I personally think that the perspective that the "natural explanation" is simpler is naive, and underestimates human behavior, especially in our time. Take Ebola: is it really irrational for non-white, non-Euroamericans to be suspicious of health care workers given, for instance, what happened at Tuskegee and in the search for Osama Bin Laden? There's a reasonable argument that it is irrational, but also a reasonable argument it's not irrational. Turn it around. What's simpler?
detaro 5y ago
Shouldn't the next step not be "I wonder what the scientists consider that my basic understanding doesn't cover", not "scientists are lying"?
- ChemSpider 5y ago
  Being a scientist myself, I did that. But it could simply not understand how - in early 2020! - "the scientist" could be so sure and demonized the lab leak theory so fervently. And now in mid-2021, one of the few things that we know for sure is that some of the key scientists in the "It must be natural" camp have ties with the WIV and thus a strong conflict of interest that they did not disclose. And then of course, there is the fact that China is blocking all research. Is that only China being China?
  - aliasEli 5y ago
    What do you mean "did not disclose", most scientists that had connections with WIV were pretty open about it.
    - haihaibye 5y ago
      Author of the Lancet paper did not disclose ties to WIV https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/under-fire-lancet-admits-conflict-interest-lab-leak-letter https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/under-fire-lancet-...
    - ChemSpider 5y ago
      Unfortunately not. And Lancet and Nature admit it now. Here is the Lancet update from 2021: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01377-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... More info on the same topic: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
- paulddraper 5y ago
  Not when scientists were constantly saying "there's so much we don't know" and citing a possible 3% mortality rate.
busymom0 5y ago
Because the scientists were too busy playing politics. > "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins." https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory-science-scientists-rcna1191 https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory... It never occurred to these people that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats there is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling. The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on?
- forcry 5y ago
  >The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" Originally, trust in scientists was not required. Because anyone could have repeated the experiment and should see results consistent with what the scientists were saying. This is where the credibility of science come from and it made people's trust in science grow to a kind of blind faith. But then some point, experiments became too large to be attempted by anyone. This along with entities like "consensus" and "reputation", that can reject any conflicting results, enabled entities that control all of these to have a veto power on scientific truth. This is our current situation. And I am not sure people recognise the true danger of this situation. This is the kind of power that in holy men held in ancient times, where you could make people to do mass murders and other atrocities in the name of god. So I think it is very dangerous. It might not be that bad as of now, but we are in that path. One solution to this problem is to recognise and reduce the trust in "science" that is a result such collaboration. May be we can do it by using a measure of how easily verifiable a result is. For example, if something is verifiable by anyone in this planet, it should have a measure of 1. And if it is only verifiable by a single entity, then it should have a measure of zero. If it is verifiable by a few entities, then it should be somewhere between.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    That's a nice idea but there are a lot of problems with it. 1. Being able to replicate a study is necessary but not sufficient for the conclusions to be correct. Scientists pump out a lot of studies that are just doing stats on public data sets. These should be easily replicable, but the conclusions may still be nonsensical if the analysis isn't done right (and a lot aren't done right), or if the scientific work itself contains fraud or logic errors (and a lot do). 2. There are no incentives for scientists to make their work replicable. Their salary does not depend on it. Their salary isn't going to depend on it, because the scientific institutions are all basically dependent on funding by governments or rich benefactors who aren't paying attention - funding "science" is not a means to an end but the end in and of itself for these groups, and thus they aren't particularly motivated to double check the quality of what gets released. Consider the above problem: scientists were deceiving people because they thought helping Trump is the same thing as helping "racists". Scott Alexander did a very thorough analysis of this where he pointed out that Trump is not, in fact, racist and a lot of the claims that his followers are don't make any sense [1]. If self-proclaimed scientists can't do even basic sanity checks on their own beliefs like that, you can imagine how much they struggle with more complicated claims. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...
willis936 5y ago
Watch Contagion (2011). COVID-19 has been predicted for nearly 20 years, including the origin story. When the most likely explanation was predicted based on understanding, why should the politically charged finger pointers be given credence? An investigation should happen, but the lab-leak proponents appear to have ulterior motives rather than to innocently seek the truth.
myfavoritedog 5y ago
It’s much worse than you even hint at. The WIV lab - the one place that might have vindicated the innocence of the lab and perhaps the natural origins of the virus - was shut down and wiped clean while every measure was put in place to stop any semblance of transparency. Chinese scientists who tried to talk about it were disappeared. An international team was assembled to wage a propaganda effort in order to keep the WIV leak theory from ever becoming viable.

emilgouliev 5y ago

“When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was alleged, with a little Soviet help, that the virus had been developed in an American lab. Between Washington’s inaction on the epidemic and its sordid past of shady experiments, proponents said the theory couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself. When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.” And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-hold-up-covid-china/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-... This literally happens every goddamn time. Natural explanation is simpler.

goldenkey 5y ago
You want to use a razor to shave a bear. Simplicity is not enough to favor a belief model. Machine Learning has shown us that large complex models can perform much better at providing the ground truths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor Razor's aren't scientifically rigorous theorems. Feel free to use them but don't argue by them in a public forum, it's disingenuous to truth.
- morpheos137 5y ago
  Pretty good point. People resort to occams razor as if it is a fundamental constant of nature valid in all cases. Occams razor has heuristic value not probitive value.
hamilyon2 5y ago
It is not that lab leaks in general are unheard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
jeegsy 5y ago
> This literally happens every goddamn time. Natural explanation is simpler. NO it doesn't. Just because some theories LATER turned out to be wrong does not mean that we automatically dismissing this or that theory. It really doesn't matter if the "lab leak theory" is later on definitively discredited. To me thats not the point. The point is whether or not there was any justification for not only ignoring but actively removing it from discourse urgently as was done at a time when no one knew anything for certain.
- whydoyoucare 5y ago
  Agreed - dismissing the lab-leak theory early on without conclusive evidence either way was certainly suspicious. Any scientist worth his/her salt shouldn't dismiss any theory outright without having hard data to back it up.
  - mbauman 5y ago
    There are two things going on here: - There's strong evidence that it's not bioengineered; scientists used very strong and convincing language here. - There was initially hope of finding the zoonotic reservoir; scientists used couched language here to subtly detangle a natural virus vs. a natural virus that had adapted to passage in cell culture in a lab, and had priors assuming a zoonotic source would be found. Guess which language journalists glommed onto.
    - shard972 5y ago
      your talking shit that this was just journos, this was scientists shutting down public debate and tech companies banning people for discussing it. Don't try and pretend like this is just another case of journos making shitty headlines because your fucking lying.
  - baja_blast 5y ago
    Virologists have a bias against the lab leak theory because if true it would threaten their careers. If it's natural on the other hand they get a boost in funding. It makes sense they are so against the idea, no one wants to be associated with/partially responsible for the death of 4 million + people worldwide, nor do they want to have their careers ruined.
derbOac 5y ago
So, in those cases I would say even though they are conspiratorial, I'd hope someone would be looking into those possibilities at least to some extent if they're even marginally possible. The nature of these things is when conspiracies are real, they're often made to look like something else, and to make people who see them look crazy. The other thing is that this case seems different? It's not some vague accusation based on some xenophobic idea of "The Other" or a geopolitical adversary, or a threatening location -- for instance, a US military rival, or a military base -- but rather a large lab specifically focused on experimental virology research. Even more specifically, it's a lab that has been involved in genetically manipulating closely related viruses to be more virulent. There's been suspicious coverup activity by multiple parties, which in itself is not evidence, but I think raises some "worthy of investigation" rationale, and also has been a serious ethical problem in itself regardless of the actual SARS-CoV-2 origin. I guess in short, yes, there's always conspiracy theories. But this time is different. I don't really see this situation as comparable to other situations, because the evidence justifying serious consideration is so specific. Personally, I think the train has left the station on ever figuring out what really was the source. This delay in itself seems suspicious to me but I don't know that I'll ever really feel confident about any particular explanation. As for "simpler", I think that depends on your subjective opinion. I personally think that the perspective that the "natural explanation" is simpler is naive, and underestimates human behavior, especially in our time. Take Ebola: is it really irrational for non-white, non-Euroamericans to be suspicious of health care workers given, for instance, what happened at Tuskegee and in the search for Osama Bin Laden? There's a reasonable argument that it is irrational, but also a reasonable argument it's not irrational. Turn it around. What's simpler?

detaro 5y ago

Shouldn't the next step not be "I wonder what the scientists consider that my basic understanding doesn't cover", not "scientists are lying"?

ChemSpider 5y ago
Being a scientist myself, I did that. But it could simply not understand how - in early 2020! - "the scientist" could be so sure and demonized the lab leak theory so fervently. And now in mid-2021, one of the few things that we know for sure is that some of the key scientists in the "It must be natural" camp have ties with the WIV and thus a strong conflict of interest that they did not disclose. And then of course, there is the fact that China is blocking all research. Is that only China being China?
- aliasEli 5y ago
  What do you mean "did not disclose", most scientists that had connections with WIV were pretty open about it.
  - haihaibye 5y ago
    Author of the Lancet paper did not disclose ties to WIV https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/under-fire-lancet-admits-conflict-interest-lab-leak-letter https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/under-fire-lancet-...
  - ChemSpider 5y ago
    Unfortunately not. And Lancet and Nature admit it now. Here is the Lancet update from 2021: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01377-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... More info on the same topic: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...
paulddraper 5y ago
Not when scientists were constantly saying "there's so much we don't know" and citing a possible 3% mortality rate.

busymom0 5y ago

Because the scientists were too busy playing politics. > "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins." https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory-science-scientists-rcna1191 https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory... It never occurred to these people that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats there is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling. The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on?

forcry 5y ago
>The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" Originally, trust in scientists was not required. Because anyone could have repeated the experiment and should see results consistent with what the scientists were saying. This is where the credibility of science come from and it made people's trust in science grow to a kind of blind faith. But then some point, experiments became too large to be attempted by anyone. This along with entities like "consensus" and "reputation", that can reject any conflicting results, enabled entities that control all of these to have a veto power on scientific truth. This is our current situation. And I am not sure people recognise the true danger of this situation. This is the kind of power that in holy men held in ancient times, where you could make people to do mass murders and other atrocities in the name of god. So I think it is very dangerous. It might not be that bad as of now, but we are in that path. One solution to this problem is to recognise and reduce the trust in "science" that is a result such collaboration. May be we can do it by using a measure of how easily verifiable a result is. For example, if something is verifiable by anyone in this planet, it should have a measure of 1. And if it is only verifiable by a single entity, then it should have a measure of zero. If it is verifiable by a few entities, then it should be somewhere between.
- native_samples 5y ago
  That's a nice idea but there are a lot of problems with it. 1. Being able to replicate a study is necessary but not sufficient for the conclusions to be correct. Scientists pump out a lot of studies that are just doing stats on public data sets. These should be easily replicable, but the conclusions may still be nonsensical if the analysis isn't done right (and a lot aren't done right), or if the scientific work itself contains fraud or logic errors (and a lot do). 2. There are no incentives for scientists to make their work replicable. Their salary does not depend on it. Their salary isn't going to depend on it, because the scientific institutions are all basically dependent on funding by governments or rich benefactors who aren't paying attention - funding "science" is not a means to an end but the end in and of itself for these groups, and thus they aren't particularly motivated to double check the quality of what gets released. Consider the above problem: scientists were deceiving people because they thought helping Trump is the same thing as helping "racists". Scott Alexander did a very thorough analysis of this where he pointed out that Trump is not, in fact, racist and a lot of the claims that his followers are don't make any sense [1]. If self-proclaimed scientists can't do even basic sanity checks on their own beliefs like that, you can imagine how much they struggle with more complicated claims. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...

willis936 5y ago

Watch Contagion (2011). COVID-19 has been predicted for nearly 20 years, including the origin story. When the most likely explanation was predicted based on understanding, why should the politically charged finger pointers be given credence? An investigation should happen, but the lab-leak proponents appear to have ulterior motives rather than to innocently seek the truth.

myfavoritedog 5y ago

It’s much worse than you even hint at. The WIV lab - the one place that might have vindicated the innocence of the lab and perhaps the natural origins of the virus - was shut down and wiped clean while every measure was put in place to stop any semblance of transparency. Chinese scientists who tried to talk about it were disappeared. An international team was assembled to wage a propaganda effort in order to keep the WIV leak theory from ever becoming viable.