4 ms·

I think there is a lot more controversy than you’re implying, even among serious scientists, but an HN comment thread is probably not the right place to litigat

I think there is a lot more controversy than you’re implying, even among serious scientists, but an HN comment thread is probably not the right place to litigate a complex issue that is also a partisan political football. I’ll leave it at this: I would encourage everyone to do their own research on this and try to look past the elephant in the room of the politics angle.

mikeyouse 4y ago
I've got a busy day so don't want to get into it again -- but I cannot express how incapable the average (even educated!) person is to "do their own research" on something as complex and nuanced as molecular engineering and the probabilities of covid genetic engineering. Even some expert 'pre-reviewers' that received the advance of the most recent bombshell paper that supposedly proved an unnatural virus with lab origin missed obvious tells that completely invalidated the authors' claims. E.g. this thread; https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1587090507288776704 https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/15870905072887767... If people do want to make up their own minds on this - I'd encourage you to track down people making falsifiable claims and then changing their priors based on the results of that research instead of people jumping from one conspiracy theory to the next to avoid changing their views. As one data point, several prominent "lab leakers" on Twitter are now insisting that prior strains are fake and were invented by virologists since those strains disprove recent papers instead of considering that maybe those recent papers were flawed. It's bizarre to watch. (One of the authors of the most recent 'bombshell' LL paper claiming that two related field-collected coronaviruses are fake / manipulated: https://twitter.com/VBruttel/status/1584920770605621248 https://twitter.com/VBruttel/status/1584920770605621248)
- benreesman 4y ago
  No layperson is qualified to understand any advanced technical field these days. Semiconductor fabrication is utterly out of reach for the typical voter, but they still have to form an opinion on the CHIPS act. Most of us aren’t lawyers, but still sometimes need to hire them. This is the dilemma inherent in not having a /u/PhdInEverything. But the answer isn’t “go away and let the grownups decide”, the answer is to try to learn what constitutes an expert, try to understand what degree of consensus does or does not exist amongst those experts, try to ferret out some obvious biases (e.g. red team / blue team idiocy) and be as informed as possible. The standard model of particle physics, or Wiles FLT proof, or 1000 other things are every bit as technical as anything in virology, but you’ll notice the mathematicians all agree: the layperson doesn’t have to look very hard to know what the takeaway is there. It’s medicine’s (including virology’s) job to get its shit together on the public’s behalf, not the other way around. This kind of condescension infuriates me, I’m working hard to be as polite as possible here.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    You can be as infuriated as you'd like, but I consider HN to be one of the more responsible and educated forums for casual discussion and the level of straight up conspiracy-driven misinformation on everything related to Covid is astonishing. From origins to vaccines to treatments (remember all of the threads extolling HCQ and IVM?), it's as sophisticated as you'd expect from people "doing their own research" in fields they don't understand and apparently aren't equipped to develop an understanding of. There's no political or financial implications to whether Wiles' proof of FLT is correct or not, and the proof can be checked with certainty by experts in the field -- so of course they can come to a consensus about something extraordinarily technical. Unfortunately with Covid, every question has turned into a political shibboleth so there will forever be FUD promoted by people who should know better. How is the average reader supposed to weigh the probabilities of some esoteric question like what the potential presence or absence of IIS restriction sites means when it's being promoted by people with advanced degrees as evidence of an artificial origin, even though it's nonsense? So I retreat to my earlier advice for those trying to form an opinion here -- look into the history of claims from the various scientists, and see whether evidence is guiding their claims or if their claims are guiding their evidence.
    - benreesman 4y ago
      Neither the GP nor myself said that SARS-COV-2 escaped from the Wuhan lab, let alone that it was the result of GoF research. I called it a theory, as in, neither conclusively proven nor conclusively disproven. It’s a theory about which there has been significant controversy. I didn’t even say there was significant evidence for it. Acknowledging the existence of a controversy is not the same thing as promoting a conspiracy theory, and as you yourself point out, basically everyone, from word-renowned virologists down to the man in the street, has skin in the game on this one. The world’s medical community had a COVID response that was a fucking disaster: inconsistent and constantly changing guidance, conflicts of interest, geopolitical 4th dimensional warfare, rushed and sloppy-looking vaccine approvals. It’s no wonder the public believes a bunch of crazy shit: the experts dropped the ball. Trying to blame that on the ignorance and gullibility of the layperson and flip the script like that set back the public’s willingness to take vaccines and listen to the authorities by 50-100 years. Don’t try to blame that on us plebs.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > I've got a busy day so don't want to get into it again -- but I cannot express how incapable the average (even educated!) person is to "do their own research" on something as complex and nuanced as molecular engineering and the probabilities of covid genetic engineering. I don't think you can claim to have consensus on this matter since Dr. Li-Meng Yan who worked at the lab and got the CCP scrub when she went public had been speaking out about this since 2020 after having been in hiding and then fleeing China for her claims. Moreover she detailed how people who worked at the lab in Wuhan have been in retrospect beholden to the CCP for not discussing the poor safety record of the lab. And your position about how it's not worthy of discussion makes it very clear you speak with a sense of bias because ultimately a conclusive epidemiological study will prove impossible since the floods in Wuhan in 2020 took place that coincided with the CCP's abject refusal to have outside investigators come in and search for the possible origin of the COVID, and even accused the US of creating the virus and spreading it--much how Russia has made to justify it's illegal invasion into Ukraine to de-nazify it and now de-satanize it after claims of US COVID biolabs in Ukraine. For what's it worth, I have a BSc in cellular and molecular biology, and I was also involved in the plight of the HK people since the Umbrella Revolution, and had people been actually abreast of that situation they would have known that something was going incredibly wrong by November 2019: the CCP/Lam regime forced the protests for the extradition bill (and possibly declare independence the way things were going since the Summer) in HK to be quelled altogether for a fear of contagion of what had been going around in order to prevent the calamity of the Avaian Bird flu that is still in recent memory for many in HK--which was much worse on the mainland than it was in HK because of the abysmal health and safety practices by the CCP. And had people paid attention, the CCP not only arrested many dissenters and created a massive diaspora in one of the most affluent and well educated countries in Asia that served as an economic hub to the West it got the NSL to pass during this time, it also continued to arrest and intimidate Hong Kong into abject repression all under the pretense of COVID. when they themselves, via the Lam regime, kept the borders open and allowed mainland Chinese to enter HK and their were plenty of recorded footage of them violating covid practices (quarantine) and actively going into public areas and act as vectors (coughing and spitting on elevators), going into restaurants despite quarantine practices etc... Lastly, Propublica released an investigative piece last month about the lab leak theory [0] under the auspicious of the US senate, which I'm not denying has glaring geo-political overtones; especially given the CCP's saber-rattling towards Taiwan and well documented tyrannical behaviour in Xinjiang and Hong Kong; the latter violated the Sino-British treaty and dismissed international Law which effectively mean it illegally annexed a territory imposed a repressive law (NSL) to suppress any dissent which was to operate autonomously until 2037--which can be seen as hostile as Russia violating both the Budapest Memorandum and the Minsk agreements when it invaded Ukraine in 2014 and illegally annexed and occupied Crimea/Lugansk/Donetsk and has led to full invasion and crimes against Humanity ever since with indiscriminate shelling on civilian areas under the aforementioned pretenses. I'll leave it here because quite honestly I can't fathom anyone to be so brazenly reductionist in their thinking and claim to have the 'upper hand' when their is clear violations all the way which implicate not just the CCP but the US (via NIH funding) as well for funding the GoF research in Wuhan [1] despite repeated safety record violations. And on a personal note: it's because the health sciences is filled with people like you that I had to turn to tech in the end. I was sent into such a forlorn depression after a short career in it when I found the Industry is was mainly filled with people who will cling on to any party-line in order to continue their work and research. In retrospect I wish I had chosen something else to give so much of my time, effort and passion had I known how quickly it becomes a way to legitimize the commonly held narratives of the State or a Corporation, and how quickly it willing compromise itself for such short-sighted goals in the process. 0: https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-or... 1: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...
idiotsecant 4y ago
I find pretty often when people resolve conversations like this by saying 'do your own research', particularly when the research to be done requires any homework at all, it is shorthand for 'find a loud voice saying things that are compatible with the worldview you've decided on already'.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  If "you do your own research" to confirm your own pre-existing ideas, then yes, you're going to get where you wanted to go. I read "do your own research" differently. I think it can go two different directions. In the positive direction, it can mean "Ignore all the loudmouths, all the liars, all the self-anointed experts. Even ignore me, the speaker. Find out who really knows what they're talking about, and listen to them." This assumes, though, that the listener can do that. Am I actually capable to discern truth from lies, or even real expertise from incompetence, in virology? Maybe, if I devote enough time to it. Do I have that kind of time for every topic on which someone tells me "do your own research"? Probably not. So what it really turns into is finding someone who at least sounds like they are doing their own research (and doing it well), and listening to them. More negatively, I suspect that "do your own research" at least sometimes is a veiled way of saying "If you really knew, then you would agree with me" in a much less in-your-face way than just saying it. The person saying this may have done their research as you say, finding a loud voice that said what they wanted to hear, and now be totally convinced that they are right, and that if you did your research, you would wind up agreeing with them.
justapassenger 4y ago
Most of controversy comes from scientists, often biologists and doctors, yeah. But not virologists. You know, people who actually know what they’re talking about. Biology is such an enormously wide and diverse field that opinions of someone who’s not a virologist is often as relevant as an opinion of the software engineer.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  It's like asking the DB admin about which machine learning framework to use for the new project, instead of your data scientist. Sure, the DB admin likely has an opinion, but it will almost never be as well formed an opinion as the one from your data scientist, even if their opinions are in agreement.

mikeyouse 4y ago

I've got a busy day so don't want to get into it again -- but I cannot express how incapable the average (even educated!) person is to "do their own research" on something as complex and nuanced as molecular engineering and the probabilities of covid genetic engineering. Even some expert 'pre-reviewers' that received the advance of the most recent bombshell paper that supposedly proved an unnatural virus with lab origin missed obvious tells that completely invalidated the authors' claims. E.g. this thread; https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1587090507288776704 https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/15870905072887767... If people do want to make up their own minds on this - I'd encourage you to track down people making falsifiable claims and then changing their priors based on the results of that research instead of people jumping from one conspiracy theory to the next to avoid changing their views. As one data point, several prominent "lab leakers" on Twitter are now insisting that prior strains are fake and were invented by virologists since those strains disprove recent papers instead of considering that maybe those recent papers were flawed. It's bizarre to watch. (One of the authors of the most recent 'bombshell' LL paper claiming that two related field-collected coronaviruses are fake / manipulated: https://twitter.com/VBruttel/status/1584920770605621248 https://twitter.com/VBruttel/status/1584920770605621248)

benreesman 4y ago
No layperson is qualified to understand any advanced technical field these days. Semiconductor fabrication is utterly out of reach for the typical voter, but they still have to form an opinion on the CHIPS act. Most of us aren’t lawyers, but still sometimes need to hire them. This is the dilemma inherent in not having a /u/PhdInEverything. But the answer isn’t “go away and let the grownups decide”, the answer is to try to learn what constitutes an expert, try to understand what degree of consensus does or does not exist amongst those experts, try to ferret out some obvious biases (e.g. red team / blue team idiocy) and be as informed as possible. The standard model of particle physics, or Wiles FLT proof, or 1000 other things are every bit as technical as anything in virology, but you’ll notice the mathematicians all agree: the layperson doesn’t have to look very hard to know what the takeaway is there. It’s medicine’s (including virology’s) job to get its shit together on the public’s behalf, not the other way around. This kind of condescension infuriates me, I’m working hard to be as polite as possible here.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  You can be as infuriated as you'd like, but I consider HN to be one of the more responsible and educated forums for casual discussion and the level of straight up conspiracy-driven misinformation on everything related to Covid is astonishing. From origins to vaccines to treatments (remember all of the threads extolling HCQ and IVM?), it's as sophisticated as you'd expect from people "doing their own research" in fields they don't understand and apparently aren't equipped to develop an understanding of. There's no political or financial implications to whether Wiles' proof of FLT is correct or not, and the proof can be checked with certainty by experts in the field -- so of course they can come to a consensus about something extraordinarily technical. Unfortunately with Covid, every question has turned into a political shibboleth so there will forever be FUD promoted by people who should know better. How is the average reader supposed to weigh the probabilities of some esoteric question like what the potential presence or absence of IIS restriction sites means when it's being promoted by people with advanced degrees as evidence of an artificial origin, even though it's nonsense? So I retreat to my earlier advice for those trying to form an opinion here -- look into the history of claims from the various scientists, and see whether evidence is guiding their claims or if their claims are guiding their evidence.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    Neither the GP nor myself said that SARS-COV-2 escaped from the Wuhan lab, let alone that it was the result of GoF research. I called it a theory, as in, neither conclusively proven nor conclusively disproven. It’s a theory about which there has been significant controversy. I didn’t even say there was significant evidence for it. Acknowledging the existence of a controversy is not the same thing as promoting a conspiracy theory, and as you yourself point out, basically everyone, from word-renowned virologists down to the man in the street, has skin in the game on this one. The world’s medical community had a COVID response that was a fucking disaster: inconsistent and constantly changing guidance, conflicts of interest, geopolitical 4th dimensional warfare, rushed and sloppy-looking vaccine approvals. It’s no wonder the public believes a bunch of crazy shit: the experts dropped the ball. Trying to blame that on the ignorance and gullibility of the layperson and flip the script like that set back the public’s willingness to take vaccines and listen to the authorities by 50-100 years. Don’t try to blame that on us plebs.
Melting_Harps 4y ago
> I've got a busy day so don't want to get into it again -- but I cannot express how incapable the average (even educated!) person is to "do their own research" on something as complex and nuanced as molecular engineering and the probabilities of covid genetic engineering. I don't think you can claim to have consensus on this matter since Dr. Li-Meng Yan who worked at the lab and got the CCP scrub when she went public had been speaking out about this since 2020 after having been in hiding and then fleeing China for her claims. Moreover she detailed how people who worked at the lab in Wuhan have been in retrospect beholden to the CCP for not discussing the poor safety record of the lab. And your position about how it's not worthy of discussion makes it very clear you speak with a sense of bias because ultimately a conclusive epidemiological study will prove impossible since the floods in Wuhan in 2020 took place that coincided with the CCP's abject refusal to have outside investigators come in and search for the possible origin of the COVID, and even accused the US of creating the virus and spreading it--much how Russia has made to justify it's illegal invasion into Ukraine to de-nazify it and now de-satanize it after claims of US COVID biolabs in Ukraine. For what's it worth, I have a BSc in cellular and molecular biology, and I was also involved in the plight of the HK people since the Umbrella Revolution, and had people been actually abreast of that situation they would have known that something was going incredibly wrong by November 2019: the CCP/Lam regime forced the protests for the extradition bill (and possibly declare independence the way things were going since the Summer) in HK to be quelled altogether for a fear of contagion of what had been going around in order to prevent the calamity of the Avaian Bird flu that is still in recent memory for many in HK--which was much worse on the mainland than it was in HK because of the abysmal health and safety practices by the CCP. And had people paid attention, the CCP not only arrested many dissenters and created a massive diaspora in one of the most affluent and well educated countries in Asia that served as an economic hub to the West it got the NSL to pass during this time, it also continued to arrest and intimidate Hong Kong into abject repression all under the pretense of COVID. when they themselves, via the Lam regime, kept the borders open and allowed mainland Chinese to enter HK and their were plenty of recorded footage of them violating covid practices (quarantine) and actively going into public areas and act as vectors (coughing and spitting on elevators), going into restaurants despite quarantine practices etc... Lastly, Propublica released an investigative piece last month about the lab leak theory [0] under the auspicious of the US senate, which I'm not denying has glaring geo-political overtones; especially given the CCP's saber-rattling towards Taiwan and well documented tyrannical behaviour in Xinjiang and Hong Kong; the latter violated the Sino-British treaty and dismissed international Law which effectively mean it illegally annexed a territory imposed a repressive law (NSL) to suppress any dissent which was to operate autonomously until 2037--which can be seen as hostile as Russia violating both the Budapest Memorandum and the Minsk agreements when it invaded Ukraine in 2014 and illegally annexed and occupied Crimea/Lugansk/Donetsk and has led to full invasion and crimes against Humanity ever since with indiscriminate shelling on civilian areas under the aforementioned pretenses. I'll leave it here because quite honestly I can't fathom anyone to be so brazenly reductionist in their thinking and claim to have the 'upper hand' when their is clear violations all the way which implicate not just the CCP but the US (via NIH funding) as well for funding the GoF research in Wuhan [1] despite repeated safety record violations. And on a personal note: it's because the health sciences is filled with people like you that I had to turn to tech in the end. I was sent into such a forlorn depression after a short career in it when I found the Industry is was mainly filled with people who will cling on to any party-line in order to continue their work and research. In retrospect I wish I had chosen something else to give so much of my time, effort and passion had I known how quickly it becomes a way to legitimize the commonly held narratives of the State or a Corporation, and how quickly it willing compromise itself for such short-sighted goals in the process. 0: https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-or... 1: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...

idiotsecant 4y ago

I find pretty often when people resolve conversations like this by saying 'do your own research', particularly when the research to be done requires any homework at all, it is shorthand for 'find a loud voice saying things that are compatible with the worldview you've decided on already'.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
If "you do your own research" to confirm your own pre-existing ideas, then yes, you're going to get where you wanted to go. I read "do your own research" differently. I think it can go two different directions. In the positive direction, it can mean "Ignore all the loudmouths, all the liars, all the self-anointed experts. Even ignore me, the speaker. Find out who really knows what they're talking about, and listen to them." This assumes, though, that the listener can do that. Am I actually capable to discern truth from lies, or even real expertise from incompetence, in virology? Maybe, if I devote enough time to it. Do I have that kind of time for every topic on which someone tells me "do your own research"? Probably not. So what it really turns into is finding someone who at least sounds like they are doing their own research (and doing it well), and listening to them. More negatively, I suspect that "do your own research" at least sometimes is a veiled way of saying "If you really knew, then you would agree with me" in a much less in-your-face way than just saying it. The person saying this may have done their research as you say, finding a loud voice that said what they wanted to hear, and now be totally convinced that they are right, and that if you did your research, you would wind up agreeing with them.

justapassenger 4y ago

Most of controversy comes from scientists, often biologists and doctors, yeah. But not virologists. You know, people who actually know what they’re talking about. Biology is such an enormously wide and diverse field that opinions of someone who’s not a virologist is often as relevant as an opinion of the software engineer.

mrguyorama 4y ago
It's like asking the DB admin about which machine learning framework to use for the new project, instead of your data scientist. Sure, the DB admin likely has an opinion, but it will almost never be as well formed an opinion as the one from your data scientist, even if their opinions are in agreement.