6 ms·

I think this view is overly negative. First of all, consider the timing of this all; this was super early days. People, including many experts, had much less

by emn13 5y ago

I think this view is overly negative. First of all, consider the timing of this all; this was super early days. People, including many experts, had much less facts then, and the topic was sensitive. I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary that ill-founded but hard-to-disprove theories such as the lab leak theory at the time are examined critically, but to do so requires a healthy debate - in particular, a debate in which people constructively interpret what other's say, and don't take it out of context. The back and forth helps focus attention on all the various factors and indirect or partially trusted evidence. But that means people must be able to propose ill-founded hypotheses. They'll be proposing tons of them as they try to separate fact from fiction! In an idealized world you might do this in the open. Unfortunately, media outlets and social media including hacker news will take things out of context, as both the telegraph and this very discussion is doing right now. That's simply not a valid interpretation of the participants opinions and their confidence in them. Selectively quoting "experts" while they're still forming their interpretation of the data is misleading, because it removed the whole point of expertise; the reason you trust such expert opinion is because it is informed, and the social contract here is that experts should refrain from misusing their authority when they're not sure of their conclusions. And most generally do that to maintain their reputation. So what to make of this? I think this could simply be part of a normal healthy debate; one that never saw the light of day simply because (a) evidence was lacking, and alternative explanations (e.g. of that furin cleavage site) emerged, and (b) given the lack of evidence and the unfortunate impossibility to express a nuanced opinion and have it be interpreted by the public correctly due to the charged atmosphere at the time, many chose simply not to speak. That's not to say there aren't a few people that probably acted in bad faith, but the vast majority looks perfectly reasonable to me. And if we want to avoid this in the future, we need to have an atmosphere where nuance is expressible; otherwise you simply can't expect people to open up about potentially explosive hypotheses that they themselves don't even really support but cannot rule out; the damage to their reputation and to society would be too large.

raxxorrax 5y ago
We had people banned from the discussion for suggesting ideas that run counter the official story. This isn't reasonable anymore, this is a propaganda instrument and not something that was nuanced at all. The mistakes that were made need correction. Don't advertise diversity, live up to it.
- marvin 5y ago
  I was banned from the biggest national (Norway) Facebook discussion group on the pandemic for posting a comment reasoning about mask usage and whether the official guidelines might be factually incorrect. That's far into propaganda and censorship territory.
  - emn13 5y ago
    That's not fair. But excesses like that are related to the same underlying problem, which is lack of nuance, trust, and honesty in public debate. Additionally, I think you should consider the fact that facebook simply is not a great venue for discussing such things. They cannot tell fraud from fact, don't have a process for doing so, and instead have social dynamics that encourage irrational conspiracies. What exactly should have been done? I get that they certainly ban the wrong things at time, but the real problem here is the platform, which kind of makes it inevitable that either that happens, or that misinformation spreads like wildfire. But really: the moment to allow a public discussion like that to come to it's own (unguided) conclusions is not in the initial chaos of uncertainty. The consequences of uninformed, unmoderated speculation running wild are still visible everywhere. On the one hand, mostly everybody accepts that healthy debate is a useful social tool, but on the other hand the current zeitgeist is one in which we've not socially learned to distinguish between the right to shout whatever we feel is truthy from the wisdom of relying on that to form public opinion. Clearly, mistakes were made - but we need to consider the alternative to partially incorrect guidance by experts, which is sometimes extremely dangerous widely and deeply held beliefs formed by social media echo chambers. Hopefully future generations will have better habits when it comes to dealing with this kind of information overload, and a greater ability to put one's own suspicions in perspective relative to experts, but that's clearly not an easy task. We don't know who to trust, why to trust them; we do our own research, but poorly and with terribly limited resources; we trust others that appear to be like us without having a way to really judge how great their interpretations are nor to recognize which are flawed, and all this is spiced up by the fact that some of these beliefs about facts blur into deeply held moral axioms - which we as a society don't universally share, leading to easily exploitable deep divisions. ...so, while it's deeply unfortunate that your potentially valid observations were silenced, I'm not sure I really believe the alternative would have been better, on facebook.
prox 5y ago
I am sorry but the buck stops when instead of letting science, data and on-going process be determined by what politicians might say. Yeah it’s tough, but the only right thing to do and what everyone deserves. The cards need to be on the table at some point and publicly scrutinizable.
snthd 5y ago
>I think this view is overly negative. First of all, consider the timing of this all; this was super early days. People, including many experts, had much less facts then, and the topic was sensitive. I think you're missing that the lack of access to facts was a willful manipulation of the geography the "debate" took place on, which shows just what an effective strategy it was.
himinlomax 5y ago
> I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary that ill-founded but hard-to-disprove theories such as the lab leak theory at the time are examined critically, There's nothing ill-founded, it was then and is now the most reasonable and plausible explanation for the outbreak. You can do the same back of the envelope calculation today that I did 2 years ago, and nothing has made it less valid: 1. There's 100 cities in PRC with >1 million inhabitants. 2. There's one (1) lab in PRC doing work on bat viruses. The probability that the outbreak happened in the same city as the one with the lab by pure coincidnce is therefore about 1%. That's not a proof, that's not a definite argument, that's just evaluating how plausible the hypothesis is. You can tweak the values to be more charitable if you want, say note that Wuhan is a large city and we shouldn't count smaller ones, or point out that there might be a few mor labs doing the same kind of work but with less prominence. That merely lowers the lab leak's plausibility to 50%. I.e very plausible.
- NLips 5y ago
  To get the 1% figure you have to include an unstated assumption, which is that a novel virus is just as likely to emerge from this lab as from all top 100 cities put together. If we try to make a rough calculation from an unknowledgeable starting position, it might be more reasonable to say "just as likely to come from each 1M+ city as to come from each lab [of which there is one]". Then, if we didn't know the geographic origin, the lab probability is ~1% ( = 1/(100 cities + 1 lab)), but knowing the geographic start point you'd get 50% P(this lab given Wuhan) = P(Wuhan given this lab) * P(lab) / P(Wuhan) P(this lab given Wuhan) = 1 [this lab is in Wuhan!] * (1/101) / (2/101)
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    Fact is, there's nothing that points to Wuhan as being a more likely source of viruses in the first place. It's not a tropical rainforest area, for instance. And indeed, the closest wild relatives we know of have been found much farther south.
    - NLips 5y ago

by emn13 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago

We had people banned from the discussion for suggesting ideas that run counter the official story. This isn't reasonable anymore, this is a propaganda instrument and not something that was nuanced at all. The mistakes that were made need correction. Don't advertise diversity, live up to it.

marvin 5y ago
I was banned from the biggest national (Norway) Facebook discussion group on the pandemic for posting a comment reasoning about mask usage and whether the official guidelines might be factually incorrect. That's far into propaganda and censorship territory.
- emn13 5y ago
  That's not fair. But excesses like that are related to the same underlying problem, which is lack of nuance, trust, and honesty in public debate. Additionally, I think you should consider the fact that facebook simply is not a great venue for discussing such things. They cannot tell fraud from fact, don't have a process for doing so, and instead have social dynamics that encourage irrational conspiracies. What exactly should have been done? I get that they certainly ban the wrong things at time, but the real problem here is the platform, which kind of makes it inevitable that either that happens, or that misinformation spreads like wildfire. But really: the moment to allow a public discussion like that to come to it's own (unguided) conclusions is not in the initial chaos of uncertainty. The consequences of uninformed, unmoderated speculation running wild are still visible everywhere. On the one hand, mostly everybody accepts that healthy debate is a useful social tool, but on the other hand the current zeitgeist is one in which we've not socially learned to distinguish between the right to shout whatever we feel is truthy from the wisdom of relying on that to form public opinion. Clearly, mistakes were made - but we need to consider the alternative to partially incorrect guidance by experts, which is sometimes extremely dangerous widely and deeply held beliefs formed by social media echo chambers. Hopefully future generations will have better habits when it comes to dealing with this kind of information overload, and a greater ability to put one's own suspicions in perspective relative to experts, but that's clearly not an easy task. We don't know who to trust, why to trust them; we do our own research, but poorly and with terribly limited resources; we trust others that appear to be like us without having a way to really judge how great their interpretations are nor to recognize which are flawed, and all this is spiced up by the fact that some of these beliefs about facts blur into deeply held moral axioms - which we as a society don't universally share, leading to easily exploitable deep divisions. ...so, while it's deeply unfortunate that your potentially valid observations were silenced, I'm not sure I really believe the alternative would have been better, on facebook.

prox 5y ago

I am sorry but the buck stops when instead of letting science, data and on-going process be determined by what politicians might say. Yeah it’s tough, but the only right thing to do and what everyone deserves. The cards need to be on the table at some point and publicly scrutinizable.

snthd 5y ago

>I think this view is overly negative. First of all, consider the timing of this all; this was super early days. People, including many experts, had much less facts then, and the topic was sensitive. I think you're missing that the lack of access to facts was a willful manipulation of the geography the "debate" took place on, which shows just what an effective strategy it was.

himinlomax 5y ago

> I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary that ill-founded but hard-to-disprove theories such as the lab leak theory at the time are examined critically, There's nothing ill-founded, it was then and is now the most reasonable and plausible explanation for the outbreak. You can do the same back of the envelope calculation today that I did 2 years ago, and nothing has made it less valid: 1. There's 100 cities in PRC with >1 million inhabitants. 2. There's one (1) lab in PRC doing work on bat viruses. The probability that the outbreak happened in the same city as the one with the lab by pure coincidnce is therefore about 1%. That's not a proof, that's not a definite argument, that's just evaluating how plausible the hypothesis is. You can tweak the values to be more charitable if you want, say note that Wuhan is a large city and we shouldn't count smaller ones, or point out that there might be a few mor labs doing the same kind of work but with less prominence. That merely lowers the lab leak's plausibility to 50%. I.e very plausible.

NLips 5y ago
To get the 1% figure you have to include an unstated assumption, which is that a novel virus is just as likely to emerge from this lab as from all top 100 cities put together. If we try to make a rough calculation from an unknowledgeable starting position, it might be more reasonable to say "just as likely to come from each 1M+ city as to come from each lab [of which there is one]". Then, if we didn't know the geographic origin, the lab probability is ~1% ( = 1/(100 cities + 1 lab)), but knowing the geographic start point you'd get 50% P(this lab given Wuhan) = P(Wuhan given this lab) * P(lab) / P(Wuhan) P(this lab given Wuhan) = 1 [this lab is in Wuhan!] * (1/101) / (2/101)
- himinlomax 5y ago
  Fact is, there's nothing that points to Wuhan as being a more likely source of viruses in the first place. It's not a tropical rainforest area, for instance. And indeed, the closest wild relatives we know of have been found much farther south.
  - NLips 5y ago