6 ms·

A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?

by ufo 5y ago

ekianjo 5y ago
> A blog post full of wild speculation Asking valid questions, though. Is that better to bury one's head in the sand?
- ufo 5y ago
  This is the perenial problem with all these poorly sourced "just asking questions" posts, in any topic (from covid misinformation to holocaust denial). By the time someone who actually knows their shit has a time to issue a proper response, the original wild speculation has already spread like fire on social media and landed in front of a bunch of eyeballs. There are many things in the original article that raise red flags about how accurate it is (for example, barely even paying lip service to the non-lab-leak hypothesis, and using twitter as a primary source). Given that, I'm going to be less charitable about the questions it's asking.
MaxfordAndSons 5y ago
It also cites Science, The Taiwan Times, and Forbes (shrug). But more importantly, it's well reasoned. It's not "wild speculation". It's learned speculation based on history, opinions of experts, and independent sources, synthesized with deduction. I understand the reflex to push back on claims of conspiracy. I find the mainstream meme conspiracy theories (flat earth, 9/11 was an inside job, etc) to be somewhere between laughable and terrifying. But this is a unicorn among conspiracy theories: both the initial conditions are plausible (that this was an accident, of a kind that has happened before, not a nefarious pre-planned event with dubious benefit), and the conditions of the conspiracy are plausible (the set of people with positive knowledge of a given leak would be quite small, and their incentives to keep it secret would be strongly aligned).
- ufo 5y ago
  It links to a column on the Science website, and only to take a picture from it. The blog post doesn't discuss the scientific article that picture originally comes from or even he column that they link to. It uses the picture to say "omicron is weird" and jumps straight to speculation from twitter. As for the news article from the Taiwan Times, it has nothing to do with omicron which is the main topic at hand.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    If we don't know the answer, are all hypotheses "speculation" What is the differentiator?
    - ufo 5y ago
      It depends on what kind of media we're talking about. A scientific article about the origin of omicron would be expected to provide citations and evidence behind everything it says. It would also be expected to discuss all the leading theories, as well as what additional information we need to figure out which theory is the one most likely to be correct. A news article from a journalist might interview the experts to get their opinion and summarize the scientific consensus to the general public. Ideally it should also allow an interested reader to identify what scientific publications the news is talking about, should the reader desire to find more info. This blog post is none of that. It ignores the leading theories in order to paint a biased picture that only a lab leak is possible. Their main "evidence" is someone on twitter. A close read reveals innumerable holes and red flags. For example, it when it says that omicron couldn't have evolved in an immunocompromised patient because they "don't have the antibodies". They actually do, it's just that they don't have as many! The whole point of the immunocompromised patient theory is that a long infection with a weak immune response provides selective pressure for immune evasion, while giving enough time for mutations to develop. Things like this demonstrate that this author has little idea of what they're talking about. Someone else made a comparison to arguments from creationists, which I think is apt. They throw a bunch of things at the wall, hoping that something sticks. But they don't paint a coherent picture and if we look close it's a mess.
sliken 5y ago
Seems like a cheap shot to me. Does twitter as a communication medium somehow invalidate what was being said? One quoted thread was from "Tony VanDongen, an associate professor of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke" Seems like a reasonably valid opinion from someone with a clue. He's addressing specifically why Omicron is weird, and doesn't look like a normal evolution of COVID-19. Another is from "Scott Ferguson, a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and a postdoc at the Harvard Center for Systems Biology". 3rd and 4th are: "Phillip Buckhaults, Ph.D., is a molecular biologist and cancer geneticist at the University of South Carolina" and "Valentin Bruttel, who received his PhD in 2016 at the University of Würzburg (Germany) where he studied tumor immunology, autoimmune diseases, and development of biologicals" A key diagram used is a Phylogenetic Tree from Science. Looks like a collection of valuable scientific info, collected to support an opinion. Not saying it proves COVID came from a lab leak, but it's not just random speculation. Seems like a pretty valuable discussion to me. Wouldn't you want to know if a disease impacting billions of people looked inconsistent with a naturally evolved virus? The scientist involved mention possible other explanations, poor models, etc. But do seem to lean towards a likely explanation of artificially tweaks to get omicron.
- tatersolid 5y ago
  > Does twitter as a communication medium somehow invalidate what was being said? Pretty much. Serious people discussing serious things don’t use Twitter as their communication medium.
  - carlivar 5y ago
    What do they use?
    - rob_c 5y ago
      Serious people on serious topics, journals, peer reviewed publications, non anonymous blogs, large email threads... Almost anything other than a) social media and b) anonymous platforms
botev 5y ago
And if they are right though? Are you going to apologize for suppressing different theses? As far as I know, Science lives of These and Anti-These, right?
kelnos 5y ago
I dislike Twitter, but if the people posting there have legitimate credentials and expertise in the field, that credibility doesn't disappear just because they've chosen to talk about this on Twitter.

A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?

by ufo 5y ago

A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?

ekianjo 5y ago

> A blog post full of wild speculation Asking valid questions, though. Is that better to bury one's head in the sand?

ufo 5y ago
This is the perenial problem with all these poorly sourced "just asking questions" posts, in any topic (from covid misinformation to holocaust denial). By the time someone who actually knows their shit has a time to issue a proper response, the original wild speculation has already spread like fire on social media and landed in front of a bunch of eyeballs. There are many things in the original article that raise red flags about how accurate it is (for example, barely even paying lip service to the non-lab-leak hypothesis, and using twitter as a primary source). Given that, I'm going to be less charitable about the questions it's asking.

MaxfordAndSons 5y ago

It also cites Science, The Taiwan Times, and Forbes (shrug). But more importantly, it's well reasoned. It's not "wild speculation". It's learned speculation based on history, opinions of experts, and independent sources, synthesized with deduction. I understand the reflex to push back on claims of conspiracy. I find the mainstream meme conspiracy theories (flat earth, 9/11 was an inside job, etc) to be somewhere between laughable and terrifying. But this is a unicorn among conspiracy theories: both the initial conditions are plausible (that this was an accident, of a kind that has happened before, not a nefarious pre-planned event with dubious benefit), and the conditions of the conspiracy are plausible (the set of people with positive knowledge of a given leak would be quite small, and their incentives to keep it secret would be strongly aligned).

ufo 5y ago
It links to a column on the Science website, and only to take a picture from it. The blog post doesn't discuss the scientific article that picture originally comes from or even he column that they link to. It uses the picture to say "omicron is weird" and jumps straight to speculation from twitter. As for the news article from the Taiwan Times, it has nothing to do with omicron which is the main topic at hand.
- verdverm 5y ago
  If we don't know the answer, are all hypotheses "speculation" What is the differentiator?
  - ufo 5y ago
    It depends on what kind of media we're talking about. A scientific article about the origin of omicron would be expected to provide citations and evidence behind everything it says. It would also be expected to discuss all the leading theories, as well as what additional information we need to figure out which theory is the one most likely to be correct. A news article from a journalist might interview the experts to get their opinion and summarize the scientific consensus to the general public. Ideally it should also allow an interested reader to identify what scientific publications the news is talking about, should the reader desire to find more info. This blog post is none of that. It ignores the leading theories in order to paint a biased picture that only a lab leak is possible. Their main "evidence" is someone on twitter. A close read reveals innumerable holes and red flags. For example, it when it says that omicron couldn't have evolved in an immunocompromised patient because they "don't have the antibodies". They actually do, it's just that they don't have as many! The whole point of the immunocompromised patient theory is that a long infection with a weak immune response provides selective pressure for immune evasion, while giving enough time for mutations to develop. Things like this demonstrate that this author has little idea of what they're talking about. Someone else made a comparison to arguments from creationists, which I think is apt. They throw a bunch of things at the wall, hoping that something sticks. But they don't paint a coherent picture and if we look close it's a mess.

sliken 5y ago

Seems like a cheap shot to me. Does twitter as a communication medium somehow invalidate what was being said? One quoted thread was from "Tony VanDongen, an associate professor of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke" Seems like a reasonably valid opinion from someone with a clue. He's addressing specifically why Omicron is weird, and doesn't look like a normal evolution of COVID-19. Another is from "Scott Ferguson, a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and a postdoc at the Harvard Center for Systems Biology". 3rd and 4th are: "Phillip Buckhaults, Ph.D., is a molecular biologist and cancer geneticist at the University of South Carolina" and "Valentin Bruttel, who received his PhD in 2016 at the University of Würzburg (Germany) where he studied tumor immunology, autoimmune diseases, and development of biologicals" A key diagram used is a Phylogenetic Tree from Science. Looks like a collection of valuable scientific info, collected to support an opinion. Not saying it proves COVID came from a lab leak, but it's not just random speculation. Seems like a pretty valuable discussion to me. Wouldn't you want to know if a disease impacting billions of people looked inconsistent with a naturally evolved virus? The scientist involved mention possible other explanations, poor models, etc. But do seem to lean towards a likely explanation of artificially tweaks to get omicron.

tatersolid 5y ago
> Does twitter as a communication medium somehow invalidate what was being said? Pretty much. Serious people discussing serious things don’t use Twitter as their communication medium.
- carlivar 5y ago
  What do they use?
  - rob_c 5y ago
    Serious people on serious topics, journals, peer reviewed publications, non anonymous blogs, large email threads... Almost anything other than a) social media and b) anonymous platforms

botev 5y ago

And if they are right though? Are you going to apologize for suppressing different theses? As far as I know, Science lives of These and Anti-These, right?

kelnos 5y ago

I dislike Twitter, but if the people posting there have legitimate credentials and expertise in the field, that credibility doesn't disappear just because they've chosen to talk about this on Twitter.