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Here's a rebuttal to this by one of the authors of the paper: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406148251754497 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmusse

Here's a rebuttal to this by one of the authors of the paper: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406148251754497 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/14994061482517544...

timr 5y ago
This is not a "rebuttal". This is terrible. Rasmussen asserts things she could not possibly know (e.g. the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter), and focuses on a corner of the article (a side debate about RaTG13 and the physical proximity of it to Wuhan), while completely brushing off the core argument of the piece: the authors of these papers have not demonstrated that the early infections at the market came from animals. That's the whole ballgame. Rasmussen spends a lot of words setting up and knocking down straw men, but there's nothing else here. To make it worse, she is rude, dismissive, profane and needlessly aggressive. As a former researcher, if a high-profile reporter published a piece questioning my research in a polite and civil manner, I'd like to think I'd be mature enough to engage with that person constructively in a public forum.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Not sure if you read it, but in the New York Magazine article by Nicholson Baker [0], that the rest of the press really hammered them for publishing, there is one bit that I still find really persistently interesting. He's talking about the lab's lead coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli: Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.” If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. It's reminiscent of the idea that the CIA were so jumpy about the JFK and RFK assassinations not because they know they did them, but that their fingers were in so many pies with so many undesirables that they didn't know they weren't involved. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, and I think it's a vanishingly unlikely idea that there was any malice. But an accidental escape? There are viruses named after accidental escapes. They happen. [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
  - timr 5y ago
    I find quotes like this uninteresting, because it's also exactly the sort of thing you would say if you were trying to cover up such a mistake. It carries no information. But on the flip side, the logic used by Baker is more than a little silly. I don't need Shi's quote to make me wonder if an outbreak of a mysterious viral pathogen might just be related to the viral pathogen research center down the street. I don't have a problem with the piece, but Baker was really reaching here. There's so much sloppy reasoning around all of this stuff, on both sides. It's exhausting to wade into it, but seeing Rasmussen behave the way she did on that twitter thread is just...unprofessional.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      > I find quotes like this uninteresting, because it's also exactly the sort of thing you would say if you were trying to cover up such a mistake. It carries no information. It carries a fair bit of information, when you consider that Shi is not really free to say what she wants. She has to say what they want her to say. That is a carefully crafted state-sponsored message, with all that entails. It's the Chinese state making a denial with the smallest surface area they can make, which is kind of unusual. But at any rate, Baker's point in context is not that Shi is engaging in a coverup. Nor is his point that until she said that nobody thought to look, or that it gives permission to do so. His point is not about Chinese science at all, so much as about Western science journalism. He's saying to other journalists, look, you can't just breezily let the world's science contributors dismiss this as fantasy along with the bioweapons nonsense, or let anyone shut it down as taboo. (When this article was written, this was dismissed by really most of the science-journalism complex as wild speculation.) He means, if Shi is saying that, it's a legitimate inquiry and it specifically invites that inquiry.
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- wh313 5y ago
  I can't tell if you simply skipped over words while reading her response or if you simply brought personal bias into your reading. First, you quote her as stating: "the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter." But her actual tweet notes "To have the virus originate at the lab under any circumstances, the lab has to have the fucking virus!" That seems to be a logical conclusion, which your framing dismisses. Rasmussen continues by stating "Not only did they not have intact, infectious, replication competent RaTG13–which, again, is not SARS-CoV-2–at WIV, there’s no evidence they had any ancestral proto-SC2 virus." The first point was explained by the tweets above that one, and the second point is clear. There is no evidence that they had the virus, so any argument that there was a lab leak requires them to have the virus in the first place, going back to her first axiom at the beginning of the tweet. But the bigger issue here seems to be one of framing. Yglesias frames the preprint in the context of the press response to it, and not so much the actual contents. The abstract clearly states: "Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic." Note the lack of any mention of a lab leak here, or anywhere else in the preprint. Rasmussen's rebuttal is done in the frame of the conclusions of her research, which Yglesias misinterprets as a paper trying to disprove the lab leak theory. Considering that he cites those figures as from the New York Times instead of from the appendix of the preprint, it seems pretty clear that Yglesias is responding to the New York Times article and probably didn't even read the actual preprint.
  - timr 5y ago
    > But her actual tweet notes "To have the virus originate at the lab under any circumstances, the lab has to have the fucking virus!" That seems to be a logical conclusion, which your framing dismisses. No, it doesn't. The point I was making is that she can't know what she's claiming to know (and also that she was being incredibly rude). > Rasmussen continues by stating "Not only did they not have intact, infectious, replication competent RaTG13–which, again, is not SARS-CoV-2–at WIV, there’s no evidence they had any ancestral proto-SC2 virus." The first point was explained by the tweets above that one The tweets prior to this one in no way support that assertion. In those tweets, she makes a hand-wavy claim that RaTG "is not ancestral" to SARS-CoV2 (this is Not Even Wrong -- it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of phylogeny), and further, that it could not become SARS-CoV2 "even through engineering", which is a truly bizarre, bold claim. Then she advances that the Laos viruses are somehow better in this respect, even though they are also separated from SARS-CoV2 by many mutations, and have the same basic problems. What Rasmussen is doing here is trying to assert that because "there's no evidence that they had RaTG13", it means that they didn't have it, and Yglesias must be wrong. But that's the whole question. It's a truism. Did they have it? We don't know. The Chinese aren't saying, and as far as I know, Angie Rasmussen didn't work at the Wuhan lab, so she can't pretend to know either. > The abstract clearly states: "Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic." Yeah, abstracts say lots of things that are unsupported by the data below them. They don't prove those claims, and the use of the words "dispositive evidence" is the sort of phrasing that should make any scientist skeptical, unless said evidence involves a warm body and a smoking gun.
mellosouls 5y ago
Somewhat undermined by restricting to an approved list (only those she follows in addition to Yglesias) who can reply to the rebuttal.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Nope, I can see why she did that. First off, this topic attracts the Wrong People as well. By the Wrong People I mean terrifying crazy people who will never leave you alone, not merely people with wrong opinions. Second: she's a woman in science on Twitter. The appalling sexist hate she will absolutely trigger by simply speaking up warrants at least throwing the switch so it can't be seen. This is why so many women writing for newspapers now ask for the comments to be switched off on their articles, too. Because it is endless and soul-damaging.
  - deadbeeves 5y ago
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      > but I can't help but feel if you can't deal with the attention appearing/posting things publicly gets you Deal with it by not being female, maybe? I mean, I think your idea makes sense in principle. But the nature of the attention is not irrelevant: there is good data that shows that women encounter both the lion's share of online abuse, and also much worse abuse on every level than men, even on non-gender-related topics. The raw truth of the world is that women in any sphere of influence but perhaps particularly in science and politics get so much more abuse of so much more vile a nature, that we should probably be forgiving of their wish to ultimately just be able to speak without having it shoved in their faces.
      - deadbeeves 5y ago
        >Deal with it by not being female, maybe? That would imply that women are inherently more socially inept than men. >there is good data that shows that women encounter both the lion's share of online abuse, and also much worse abuse on every level than men, even on non-gender-related topics. Is there? Such as? I'm not being glib, I'm honestly asking. I doubt it, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. >perhaps particularly in science and politics get so much more abuse of so much more vile a nature I think you're exaggerating and losing perspective of just how terrible the world is. >we should probably be forgiving of their wish to ultimately just be able to speak without having it shoved in their faces. If you want to, feel free. When someone shuts off others' ability to respond, what it says to me is either that they're not confident enough in their words to defend them (so why did they bother?), or that I should listen to them, but they are important enough not to have to reciprocate that courtesy. Why should I listen in either case?

Here's a rebuttal to this by one of the authors of the paper: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406148251754497 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/14994061482517544...

timr 5y ago

This is not a "rebuttal". This is terrible. Rasmussen asserts things she could not possibly know (e.g. the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter), and focuses on a corner of the article (a side debate about RaTG13 and the physical proximity of it to Wuhan), while completely brushing off the core argument of the piece: the authors of these papers have not demonstrated that the early infections at the market came from animals. That's the whole ballgame. Rasmussen spends a lot of words setting up and knocking down straw men, but there's nothing else here. To make it worse, she is rude, dismissive, profane and needlessly aggressive. As a former researcher, if a high-profile reporter published a piece questioning my research in a polite and civil manner, I'd like to think I'd be mature enough to engage with that person constructively in a public forum.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Not sure if you read it, but in the New York Magazine article by Nicholson Baker [0], that the rest of the press really hammered them for publishing, there is one bit that I still find really persistently interesting. He's talking about the lab's lead coronavirus researcher, Shi Zhengli: Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.” If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. It's reminiscent of the idea that the CIA were so jumpy about the JFK and RFK assassinations not because they know they did them, but that their fingers were in so many pies with so many undesirables that they didn't know they weren't involved. I don't think we'll ever know for sure, and I think it's a vanishingly unlikely idea that there was any malice. But an accidental escape? There are viruses named after accidental escapes. They happen. [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...
- timr 5y ago
  I find quotes like this uninteresting, because it's also exactly the sort of thing you would say if you were trying to cover up such a mistake. It carries no information. But on the flip side, the logic used by Baker is more than a little silly. I don't need Shi's quote to make me wonder if an outbreak of a mysterious viral pathogen might just be related to the viral pathogen research center down the street. I don't have a problem with the piece, but Baker was really reaching here. There's so much sloppy reasoning around all of this stuff, on both sides. It's exhausting to wade into it, but seeing Rasmussen behave the way she did on that twitter thread is just...unprofessional.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    > I find quotes like this uninteresting, because it's also exactly the sort of thing you would say if you were trying to cover up such a mistake. It carries no information. It carries a fair bit of information, when you consider that Shi is not really free to say what she wants. She has to say what they want her to say. That is a carefully crafted state-sponsored message, with all that entails. It's the Chinese state making a denial with the smallest surface area they can make, which is kind of unusual. But at any rate, Baker's point in context is not that Shi is engaging in a coverup. Nor is his point that until she said that nobody thought to look, or that it gives permission to do so. His point is not about Chinese science at all, so much as about Western science journalism. He's saying to other journalists, look, you can't just breezily let the world's science contributors dismiss this as fantasy along with the bioweapons nonsense, or let anyone shut it down as taboo. (When this article was written, this was dismissed by really most of the science-journalism complex as wild speculation.) He means, if Shi is saying that, it's a legitimate inquiry and it specifically invites that inquiry.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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wh313 5y ago
I can't tell if you simply skipped over words while reading her response or if you simply brought personal bias into your reading. First, you quote her as stating: "the Wuhan lab did not have "the fucking virus" -- we don't know what they had or did not have, because the Chinese government is not exactly being forthright on the matter." But her actual tweet notes "To have the virus originate at the lab under any circumstances, the lab has to have the fucking virus!" That seems to be a logical conclusion, which your framing dismisses. Rasmussen continues by stating "Not only did they not have intact, infectious, replication competent RaTG13–which, again, is not SARS-CoV-2–at WIV, there’s no evidence they had any ancestral proto-SC2 virus." The first point was explained by the tweets above that one, and the second point is clear. There is no evidence that they had the virus, so any argument that there was a lab leak requires them to have the virus in the first place, going back to her first axiom at the beginning of the tweet. But the bigger issue here seems to be one of framing. Yglesias frames the preprint in the context of the press response to it, and not so much the actual contents. The abstract clearly states: "Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic." Note the lack of any mention of a lab leak here, or anywhere else in the preprint. Rasmussen's rebuttal is done in the frame of the conclusions of her research, which Yglesias misinterprets as a paper trying to disprove the lab leak theory. Considering that he cites those figures as from the New York Times instead of from the appendix of the preprint, it seems pretty clear that Yglesias is responding to the New York Times article and probably didn't even read the actual preprint.
- timr 5y ago
  > But her actual tweet notes "To have the virus originate at the lab under any circumstances, the lab has to have the fucking virus!" That seems to be a logical conclusion, which your framing dismisses. No, it doesn't. The point I was making is that she can't know what she's claiming to know (and also that she was being incredibly rude). > Rasmussen continues by stating "Not only did they not have intact, infectious, replication competent RaTG13–which, again, is not SARS-CoV-2–at WIV, there’s no evidence they had any ancestral proto-SC2 virus." The first point was explained by the tweets above that one The tweets prior to this one in no way support that assertion. In those tweets, she makes a hand-wavy claim that RaTG "is not ancestral" to SARS-CoV2 (this is Not Even Wrong -- it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of phylogeny), and further, that it could not become SARS-CoV2 "even through engineering", which is a truly bizarre, bold claim. Then she advances that the Laos viruses are somehow better in this respect, even though they are also separated from SARS-CoV2 by many mutations, and have the same basic problems. What Rasmussen is doing here is trying to assert that because "there's no evidence that they had RaTG13", it means that they didn't have it, and Yglesias must be wrong. But that's the whole question. It's a truism. Did they have it? We don't know. The Chinese aren't saying, and as far as I know, Angie Rasmussen didn't work at the Wuhan lab, so she can't pretend to know either. > The abstract clearly states: "Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic." Yeah, abstracts say lots of things that are unsupported by the data below them. They don't prove those claims, and the use of the words "dispositive evidence" is the sort of phrasing that should make any scientist skeptical, unless said evidence involves a warm body and a smoking gun.

mellosouls 5y ago

Somewhat undermined by restricting to an approved list (only those she follows in addition to Yglesias) who can reply to the rebuttal.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Nope, I can see why she did that. First off, this topic attracts the Wrong People as well. By the Wrong People I mean terrifying crazy people who will never leave you alone, not merely people with wrong opinions. Second: she's a woman in science on Twitter. The appalling sexist hate she will absolutely trigger by simply speaking up warrants at least throwing the switch so it can't be seen. This is why so many women writing for newspapers now ask for the comments to be switched off on their articles, too. Because it is endless and soul-damaging.
- deadbeeves 5y ago
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    > but I can't help but feel if you can't deal with the attention appearing/posting things publicly gets you Deal with it by not being female, maybe? I mean, I think your idea makes sense in principle. But the nature of the attention is not irrelevant: there is good data that shows that women encounter both the lion's share of online abuse, and also much worse abuse on every level than men, even on non-gender-related topics. The raw truth of the world is that women in any sphere of influence but perhaps particularly in science and politics get so much more abuse of so much more vile a nature, that we should probably be forgiving of their wish to ultimately just be able to speak without having it shoved in their faces.
    - deadbeeves 5y ago
      >Deal with it by not being female, maybe? That would imply that women are inherently more socially inept than men. >there is good data that shows that women encounter both the lion's share of online abuse, and also much worse abuse on every level than men, even on non-gender-related topics. Is there? Such as? I'm not being glib, I'm honestly asking. I doubt it, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. >perhaps particularly in science and politics get so much more abuse of so much more vile a nature I think you're exaggerating and losing perspective of just how terrible the world is. >we should probably be forgiving of their wish to ultimately just be able to speak without having it shoved in their faces. If you want to, feel free. When someone shuts off others' ability to respond, what it says to me is either that they're not confident enough in their words to defend them (so why did they bother?), or that I should listen to them, but they are important enough not to have to reciprocate that courtesy. Why should I listen in either case?