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But then I've heard assertions to the effect of a WIV research group performing sample collections at one of the caves in South East Asian countries where the c

by 4bpp 4y ago

But then I've heard assertions to the effect of a WIV research group performing sample collections at one of the caves in South East Asian countries where the closest wild relatives were found. (That they collected samples far afield is, as far as I know, uncontroversial; people are just arguing about whether they collected them at any of the specific closest-relative sites, which seems like a moot point if there is already more than one closest relative and so there could be more somewhere we didn't independently check) If anything, animal-human-animal-human transfer seems to serve to lessen the significance of the distance between the institute and the market and the samples from cages (since this makes a "researcher got infected in lab leak and then went to the market, infecting someone there, who passed it to the caged animals" sequence possible). Either way, I rarely see the same type of rigour or skepticism being applied to the natural-origin hypothesis (why is closest relatives being in a random cave in Laos a stronger argument against provenance through a far-away lab that does field work than against provenance through a wildlife market that is equally far away?), which is a hallmark of motivated reasoning. Motivation, here, is clearly plentiful, from researchers who could be personally scrutinised or have their scientific work encumbered by kneejerk procedural impositions to all the hundreds of millions of people for whom one or the other outcome would become a supreme cudgel to beat their outgroup with.

hotpotamus 4y ago
> I rarely see the same type of rigour or skepticism being applied to the natural-origin hypothesis Isn't the natural-origin the default assumption? There are no lab-leak theories for polio or smallpox as far as I know.
- 4bpp 4y ago
  Something that is overwhelmingly most likely in a general case may not be overwhelmingly most likely in a specific one given additional information. The vast majority of people do not die of violent causes, and yet we still have murder investigations. Relative probability is not preserved by conditioning: in an investigation seeking to establish if someone was murdered, the general prevalence also does not backpropagate to affect appropriate levels of skepticism towards concrete possible mechanism of death. For example, if you had a mysterious case of arsenic poisoning where you had trouble in explaining how arsenic wound up in the dead person's body except by teleportation, it would be unsound to argue that it wasn't murder because teleportation is not known to exist, but the theory that it teleported into the victim naturally should be above scrutiny since natural deaths are extremely common.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Yes, but if you had someone who died of an apparent heart attack, you could also spin all kinds of theories about how they were poisoned with an undetectable agent cooked up by a foreign intelligence agency.
    - 4bpp 4y ago
      Sure, but if that's the metaphor you want to invoke for this situation, you need to actually argue that the probabilities of the "lab leak" vs. "natural origin" scenarios are actually similar, _in this particular case_, to "undetectable agent" vs. "natural heart attack" - which brings us back to having to comb through the evidence on both sides. I think we are bound to walk in circles as long as we don't separate the proposition that it was in fact a lab leak from the proposition that further open-ended investigation is necessary; it is my impression that natural origin proponents mostly are strongly against both (whether they think the latter is too costly, or think it will be used to get the former accepted when it is actually false, or think the former should be treated as false even if it is true), but I really only want to push for the latter (it's not like I know anything about virus genetics myself anyway!).
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        This makes me wonder - is it possible to prove that it was not a lab leak?
        4bpp 4y ago
        I think something like a convincing natural pipeline (such as a close relative with last common ancestor predating known human infections) from a wild animal population that was shown to be traded at the wildlife market, or in contact with some population that was, would be pretty compelling. Barring that, systematic evidence against the circumstantial evidence for the lab leak would bring us closer to the general prior that infectious viruses arise in nature: show that the "furin cleavage site" or what that molecular construction which was found to resemble a gain-of-function grant proposal closely was called arose naturally in some other case, have another COVID-like virus emerge somewhere where the circumstances are not met but the purported circumstances of the natural origin story are (like Laos?), have hackers make a credible leak of all the internal data the WIV took offline in the wake of COVID and no data implicating them turn up, ...
masswerk 4y ago
Mind that RaTG13 isn't the closest known relative, BANAL-236 and BANAL-52 are much closer, and they are not known to have been present in China, nor is there evidence for these being studied at WIV. (Also mind that these are also just "cousins" and not directly related. We actually do not know of any direct lineage.) And where is any evidence (via social network analysis or whatever) to link the outbreak to any member of the WIV, be it socially or geographically? Or even a hint? All we have is evidence for the wet market as the center of origin of the outbreak and no link between this and the WIV, and no, these are not in the same vicinity, and (from genetic evidence) that the virus must have been around for some time. If we happen to ignore all the counter-evidence and insist on, "but it could have happened", without providing any evidence for this, I've a hard time finding a crucial difference between this argument and "Ancient Aliens". And, to return to the subject of the thread, it seems to be all about the thrills of the "game".
- 4bpp 4y ago
  What exactly do you mean by "ignoring the counter-evidence"? I don't think I am (if I did in the literal sense, I would be thinking that it was a lab leak with 100% certainty, not the 60% or so that I actually have!), and if anything, the actions of the US ruling class at the height of the COVID years were closer to something you could describe as that, as they were the ones who sought to banish discussion of the possibility of a lab leak from the public sphere and prevent further investigation after a small-scale one performed by people who were (in my eyes, quite convincingly) argued to have conflicts of interest. As I said, I'm by no means certain that COVID originates from a lab leak, and I would actually like to get greater certainty as to whether it did. COVID was very costly to society at large (and to me personally), so we should be willing to expend a lot of resources on minimising the likelihood of something like it happening again as well, which includes determining what the best way of spending resources is as well. If it was due to a lab leak, the optimal way of spending resources looks very different from if it was due to a natural animal-human transmission; among others we may want to significantly tighten safety protocols and enforcement in infectious disease research and review if it may be optimal to suspend certain classes of research entirely (i.e. pay in foregone discoveries). If it was animal-human transmission, we may instead be interested in limiting interactions between humans and wild animals, which also has a high (cultural, organisational, enforcement) cost. If you frame this to be about the "thrills of the game", what can't be framed as that?

by 4bpp 4y ago

hotpotamus 4y ago

> I rarely see the same type of rigour or skepticism being applied to the natural-origin hypothesis Isn't the natural-origin the default assumption? There are no lab-leak theories for polio or smallpox as far as I know.

4bpp 4y ago
Something that is overwhelmingly most likely in a general case may not be overwhelmingly most likely in a specific one given additional information. The vast majority of people do not die of violent causes, and yet we still have murder investigations. Relative probability is not preserved by conditioning: in an investigation seeking to establish if someone was murdered, the general prevalence also does not backpropagate to affect appropriate levels of skepticism towards concrete possible mechanism of death. For example, if you had a mysterious case of arsenic poisoning where you had trouble in explaining how arsenic wound up in the dead person's body except by teleportation, it would be unsound to argue that it wasn't murder because teleportation is not known to exist, but the theory that it teleported into the victim naturally should be above scrutiny since natural deaths are extremely common.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Yes, but if you had someone who died of an apparent heart attack, you could also spin all kinds of theories about how they were poisoned with an undetectable agent cooked up by a foreign intelligence agency.
  - 4bpp 4y ago
    Sure, but if that's the metaphor you want to invoke for this situation, you need to actually argue that the probabilities of the "lab leak" vs. "natural origin" scenarios are actually similar, _in this particular case_, to "undetectable agent" vs. "natural heart attack" - which brings us back to having to comb through the evidence on both sides. I think we are bound to walk in circles as long as we don't separate the proposition that it was in fact a lab leak from the proposition that further open-ended investigation is necessary; it is my impression that natural origin proponents mostly are strongly against both (whether they think the latter is too costly, or think it will be used to get the former accepted when it is actually false, or think the former should be treated as false even if it is true), but I really only want to push for the latter (it's not like I know anything about virus genetics myself anyway!).
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      This makes me wonder - is it possible to prove that it was not a lab leak?
      - 4bpp 4y ago
        I think something like a convincing natural pipeline (such as a close relative with last common ancestor predating known human infections) from a wild animal population that was shown to be traded at the wildlife market, or in contact with some population that was, would be pretty compelling. Barring that, systematic evidence against the circumstantial evidence for the lab leak would bring us closer to the general prior that infectious viruses arise in nature: show that the "furin cleavage site" or what that molecular construction which was found to resemble a gain-of-function grant proposal closely was called arose naturally in some other case, have another COVID-like virus emerge somewhere where the circumstances are not met but the purported circumstances of the natural origin story are (like Laos?), have hackers make a credible leak of all the internal data the WIV took offline in the wake of COVID and no data implicating them turn up, ...

masswerk 4y ago

Mind that RaTG13 isn't the closest known relative, BANAL-236 and BANAL-52 are much closer, and they are not known to have been present in China, nor is there evidence for these being studied at WIV. (Also mind that these are also just "cousins" and not directly related. We actually do not know of any direct lineage.) And where is any evidence (via social network analysis or whatever) to link the outbreak to any member of the WIV, be it socially or geographically? Or even a hint? All we have is evidence for the wet market as the center of origin of the outbreak and no link between this and the WIV, and no, these are not in the same vicinity, and (from genetic evidence) that the virus must have been around for some time. If we happen to ignore all the counter-evidence and insist on, "but it could have happened", without providing any evidence for this, I've a hard time finding a crucial difference between this argument and "Ancient Aliens". And, to return to the subject of the thread, it seems to be all about the thrills of the "game".

4bpp 4y ago
What exactly do you mean by "ignoring the counter-evidence"? I don't think I am (if I did in the literal sense, I would be thinking that it was a lab leak with 100% certainty, not the 60% or so that I actually have!), and if anything, the actions of the US ruling class at the height of the COVID years were closer to something you could describe as that, as they were the ones who sought to banish discussion of the possibility of a lab leak from the public sphere and prevent further investigation after a small-scale one performed by people who were (in my eyes, quite convincingly) argued to have conflicts of interest. As I said, I'm by no means certain that COVID originates from a lab leak, and I would actually like to get greater certainty as to whether it did. COVID was very costly to society at large (and to me personally), so we should be willing to expend a lot of resources on minimising the likelihood of something like it happening again as well, which includes determining what the best way of spending resources is as well. If it was due to a lab leak, the optimal way of spending resources looks very different from if it was due to a natural animal-human transmission; among others we may want to significantly tighten safety protocols and enforcement in infectious disease research and review if it may be optimal to suspend certain classes of research entirely (i.e. pay in foregone discoveries). If it was animal-human transmission, we may instead be interested in limiting interactions between humans and wild animals, which also has a high (cultural, organisational, enforcement) cost. If you frame this to be about the "thrills of the game", what can't be framed as that?