4 ms·

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 ma

by 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, ...
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        I mean, I have no expertise in any of this, but I was under the impression that there was already evidence of a natural pipeline, though again I don't know the details, but it involved bats and/or pangolins. Also, given the name of the virus is sars-cov-2, I would think that a sars-cov-1 might already have happened and could perhaps qualify as another example of a similar virus with a natural origin. I have to say I'm pretty skeptical of the whole lab leak theory thing - and it's hard to pin down what a lab leak means - there seems to be a spectrum of theories that range from a virus sampled from natural origins that escaped a lab in Wuhan to a fully lab created artificial virus, and plenty of theories in between. But at the end of the day, it seems like most people just want it to be true for some reason; perhaps they want to blame China for the pandemic or they just want some explanation that's more satisfying than a random mutation of a virus at the wrong time and the wrong place brought the world to its knees and is still causing downstream affects throughout the global economy through to today and probably will for years to come.

by 4bpp 4y ago

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, ...
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I mean, I have no expertise in any of this, but I was under the impression that there was already evidence of a natural pipeline, though again I don't know the details, but it involved bats and/or pangolins. Also, given the name of the virus is sars-cov-2, I would think that a sars-cov-1 might already have happened and could perhaps qualify as another example of a similar virus with a natural origin. I have to say I'm pretty skeptical of the whole lab leak theory thing - and it's hard to pin down what a lab leak means - there seems to be a spectrum of theories that range from a virus sampled from natural origins that escaped a lab in Wuhan to a fully lab created artificial virus, and plenty of theories in between. But at the end of the day, it seems like most people just want it to be true for some reason; perhaps they want to blame China for the pandemic or they just want some explanation that's more satisfying than a random mutation of a virus at the wrong time and the wrong place brought the world to its knees and is still causing downstream affects throughout the global economy through to today and probably will for years to come.