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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 o

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.

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.