4 ms·

This discussion instantly garned upvotes, not one substantial argument against the article, and was flagged off the front page. At least this person has a reas

This discussion instantly garned upvotes, not one substantial argument against the article, and was flagged off the front page. At least this person has a reasoning and stands behind it, that's heads and shoulders above the tactics of those who want to bury this.

PennRobotics 5y ago
This post had 40 points within 20 minutes, which is the reading time of the article at 200 WPM plus a minute or two for figures. How many of those upvotes were from people who didn't read or who skimmed the article?
- hermitdev 5y ago
  I read the article, then up voted. On refresh it was buried. I had to find it via my upvoted submissions. In my opinion, the immediate flagging is a symptom of the hostility of even discussing the origins, lab leak or not.
  - PennRobotics 5y ago
    I agree on the hostility, and I also hadn't flagged. I wanted to see how the post evolved as I read the article and looked into each linked source's motivations, so I made a note of the points (14 after 10 minutes) specifically because I felt there would be a lot of biased discussion. The instant popularity of the post could have three factors: multiple votes from one source, individuals already well-versed in disease propagation and clandestine government action who support more visibility in the post, and people who believe the post could have merit without actually putting a great deal of their own research into the sources. I'm in the fourth camp: agnostics. That's why I haven't contributed to the popularity of the post. However, two years of hearing about this disease does a lot to build resent for armchair epidemiologists.
    - BbzzbB 5y ago
      Here's a fourth factor: people upvoting before reading it (but possibly after skimming it or being aware of it's context) in order to keep it highly ranked (which is score + time sensitive) in order to trigger HN discussing the subject. I was in that camp before it got flagged.
  - daxuak 5y ago
    I read, had a bunch things to argue about, and came back to find it flagged. IMO it's a terrible blog post and I regret reading it. But man, the flagging was... fast.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  I read it, came back happy to upvote, and saw that it was flagged. And I wasn't surprised. That's a wild state of affairs. .. And it looks like I wasn't the only one.
- howaboutnope 5y ago
  I often upvote articles I find interesting enough I want to see a discussion of them on HN. To me it doesn't mean every word of an article is perfect and above criticism, it just means it's IMO interesting and of substance enough to warrant discussion. In this case I took my time fully reading it before posting it, but not being a biotech person I posted this here also because I was interested in criticism of flaws I would have no chance of not overlooking. But just flagging it isn't that. It doesn't tell me this article is bad, it tells me too many people aren't acting in good faith, so that raises the question why that is. Trying to turn it around on others by speculating on what they might have done (i.e. why they upvoted it, if they read it), doesn't change what was definitely done (i.e. flagging it without any substantial criticism).
  - Sevaris 5y ago
    Same here. I skimmed parts of the beginning, then upvoted because I found it interesting. I don't feel we should be squashing everything that might challenge our existing beliefs just because. Then HN would just be like every other awful social media site out there. If people have substantive problems with the article, they should articulate them as comments instead of blindly flagging something and hoping nobody ever has the opportunity to think about it.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    Agreed on this. I read the article before looking at comments (now 8-9 hours after it was posted), and thought "hmm, ok, I'm skeptical, but these seem to be pretty strong arguments". I was pleased to come here to the comments to find strong counter-arguments, many of which are things I wouldn't have considered due to lack of expertise here. So I'm glad it got enough votes and stuck around long enough for serious discussion. (For the record, I still do believe the various lab-leak theories have legs, and should be discussed and investigated, even if this particular article ends up being unconvincing.)
- kelnos 5y ago
  Given how quickly it was flagged, it feels like many/most of the flaggers didn't read it either, and just had a knee-jerk reaction to the headline.
daxuak 5y ago
Then let me offer two informal "substantial" arguments. It's too long to question every point. The author argued in section "weirdness 1" that the phylogentic tree implies the omicron strain is directly related to an ancestor genome from Spring 2020. I have the following concerns: the tree is based on https://nextstrain.org/ https://nextstrain.org/ , a database initially introduced in 2018 [1]. This is a great data source. However, for COVID, nextstrain naturally bias towards the more viable biosamples. In other words, COVID strains in wild animals such are going to be underrepresented, if represented at all. And if so, the large sequence divergence is surprising but not a direct indication of lab leak. The author can supply with a rough overview of sequencing sources of nextstrain to counter this. Or better, it would be good if the author can compare with, or cite existing literatures, phylogenetic trees of other epidemics and demonstrate that the sequence divergence is much larger than what we would expect from wild animal reservoir. "weirdness 2" has a stand, but it should be accompanied by silent/functional mutation ratios in other COVID strains since synonomous mutation could be not entirely silent if translation efficiency is affected (correct me if I'm wrong). Briefly on one other point, "weirdly it's exactly mice, not other animals": we use mice as lab animals for a reason. They are somewhat similar to human in terms of physiology. Therefore we can expect that they could be more prone to COVID infection, aren't we? editted to add one more sentence: from a peer review aspect, this blog is beyond terrible and I'd probably have 10 major conerns listed if it comes in as a PR. [1] https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/34/23/4121/5001388 https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/34/23/4121/5...
- howaboutnope 5y ago
  > correct me if I'm wrong I don't even remotely have the expertise for that, if applicable others would have to do that. But thanks a lot for elaborating!
  - daxuak 5y ago
    Oh I genuinely mean that and nothing else. I'm remotely familiar with the topic, but I do not work with protein translation and viruses at all. My question about this silent/functional ratio argument could be completely wrong or in the wrong direction. That original argument is interesting and is a surprising obervation to me, and I would love to read a well-written piece on that. Just keep in mind that "statistically unlikely" doesn't immediately mean "it's unlikely", you might have used the wrong presumption (in this case, silent mutation being not really silent).

PennRobotics 5y ago

This post had 40 points within 20 minutes, which is the reading time of the article at 200 WPM plus a minute or two for figures. How many of those upvotes were from people who didn't read or who skimmed the article?

hermitdev 5y ago
I read the article, then up voted. On refresh it was buried. I had to find it via my upvoted submissions. In my opinion, the immediate flagging is a symptom of the hostility of even discussing the origins, lab leak or not.
- PennRobotics 5y ago
  I agree on the hostility, and I also hadn't flagged. I wanted to see how the post evolved as I read the article and looked into each linked source's motivations, so I made a note of the points (14 after 10 minutes) specifically because I felt there would be a lot of biased discussion. The instant popularity of the post could have three factors: multiple votes from one source, individuals already well-versed in disease propagation and clandestine government action who support more visibility in the post, and people who believe the post could have merit without actually putting a great deal of their own research into the sources. I'm in the fourth camp: agnostics. That's why I haven't contributed to the popularity of the post. However, two years of hearing about this disease does a lot to build resent for armchair epidemiologists.
  - BbzzbB 5y ago
    Here's a fourth factor: people upvoting before reading it (but possibly after skimming it or being aware of it's context) in order to keep it highly ranked (which is score + time sensitive) in order to trigger HN discussing the subject. I was in that camp before it got flagged.
- daxuak 5y ago
  I read, had a bunch things to argue about, and came back to find it flagged. IMO it's a terrible blog post and I regret reading it. But man, the flagging was... fast.
mandmandam 5y ago
I read it, came back happy to upvote, and saw that it was flagged. And I wasn't surprised. That's a wild state of affairs. .. And it looks like I wasn't the only one.
howaboutnope 5y ago
I often upvote articles I find interesting enough I want to see a discussion of them on HN. To me it doesn't mean every word of an article is perfect and above criticism, it just means it's IMO interesting and of substance enough to warrant discussion. In this case I took my time fully reading it before posting it, but not being a biotech person I posted this here also because I was interested in criticism of flaws I would have no chance of not overlooking. But just flagging it isn't that. It doesn't tell me this article is bad, it tells me too many people aren't acting in good faith, so that raises the question why that is. Trying to turn it around on others by speculating on what they might have done (i.e. why they upvoted it, if they read it), doesn't change what was definitely done (i.e. flagging it without any substantial criticism).
- Sevaris 5y ago
  Same here. I skimmed parts of the beginning, then upvoted because I found it interesting. I don't feel we should be squashing everything that might challenge our existing beliefs just because. Then HN would just be like every other awful social media site out there. If people have substantive problems with the article, they should articulate them as comments instead of blindly flagging something and hoping nobody ever has the opportunity to think about it.
- kelnos 5y ago
  Agreed on this. I read the article before looking at comments (now 8-9 hours after it was posted), and thought "hmm, ok, I'm skeptical, but these seem to be pretty strong arguments". I was pleased to come here to the comments to find strong counter-arguments, many of which are things I wouldn't have considered due to lack of expertise here. So I'm glad it got enough votes and stuck around long enough for serious discussion. (For the record, I still do believe the various lab-leak theories have legs, and should be discussed and investigated, even if this particular article ends up being unconvincing.)
kelnos 5y ago
Given how quickly it was flagged, it feels like many/most of the flaggers didn't read it either, and just had a knee-jerk reaction to the headline.

daxuak 5y ago

Then let me offer two informal "substantial" arguments. It's too long to question every point. The author argued in section "weirdness 1" that the phylogentic tree implies the omicron strain is directly related to an ancestor genome from Spring 2020. I have the following concerns: the tree is based on https://nextstrain.org/ https://nextstrain.org/ , a database initially introduced in 2018 [1]. This is a great data source. However, for COVID, nextstrain naturally bias towards the more viable biosamples. In other words, COVID strains in wild animals such are going to be underrepresented, if represented at all. And if so, the large sequence divergence is surprising but not a direct indication of lab leak. The author can supply with a rough overview of sequencing sources of nextstrain to counter this. Or better, it would be good if the author can compare with, or cite existing literatures, phylogenetic trees of other epidemics and demonstrate that the sequence divergence is much larger than what we would expect from wild animal reservoir. "weirdness 2" has a stand, but it should be accompanied by silent/functional mutation ratios in other COVID strains since synonomous mutation could be not entirely silent if translation efficiency is affected (correct me if I'm wrong). Briefly on one other point, "weirdly it's exactly mice, not other animals": we use mice as lab animals for a reason. They are somewhat similar to human in terms of physiology. Therefore we can expect that they could be more prone to COVID infection, aren't we? editted to add one more sentence: from a peer review aspect, this blog is beyond terrible and I'd probably have 10 major conerns listed if it comes in as a PR. [1] https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/34/23/4121/5001388 https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/34/23/4121/5...

howaboutnope 5y ago
> correct me if I'm wrong I don't even remotely have the expertise for that, if applicable others would have to do that. But thanks a lot for elaborating!
- daxuak 5y ago
  Oh I genuinely mean that and nothing else. I'm remotely familiar with the topic, but I do not work with protein translation and viruses at all. My question about this silent/functional ratio argument could be completely wrong or in the wrong direction. That original argument is interesting and is a surprising obervation to me, and I would love to read a well-written piece on that. Just keep in mind that "statistically unlikely" doesn't immediately mean "it's unlikely", you might have used the wrong presumption (in this case, silent mutation being not really silent).