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The headline is absolutely, literally true. I also don't understand the nuance that anyone could miss here. The astounding thing is that the Energy Dept. can sa

The headline is absolutely, literally true. I also don't understand the nuance that anyone could miss here. The astounding thing is that the Energy Dept. can say that a lab leak is the most likely cause of the pandemic, and people jump out in front of them to say that what they somehow still mean is that a lab leak wasn't the cause of the pandemic. They have "low confidence" that it was a lab leak (there might not even be a physical way to prove that conclusively), but they have higher confidence in that theory than in any other theory or possibly even than in all other theories combined. When evidence pointing to your previous belief being untrue makes you more confident in your previous belief, you're in When Prophecy Fails territory. ----- edit: Just wanted to add this wikipedia quote because it makes me sad... * 12:05 am. December 21. No visitor. Someone in the group notices that another clock in the room shows 11:55. The group agrees that it is not yet midnight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails#Sequence_of_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails#Sequence_o...

axxto 4y ago
A "sightly-less-shitty-than-other-theories" theory is still a shitty theory. Low-confidence means exactly what it sounds like.
- dangwhy 4y ago
  then why even propose any theory ? why not let it remain a mystery.
  - selcuka 4y ago
    > then why even propose any theory ? why not let it remain a mystery. Reductio ad absurdum won't work here. There are ways to test a "low confidence" theory, and re-evaluate its confidence level. This is called science.
    - philippejara 4y ago
      You aren't going to get any confirmation or material evidence until the chinese government allows it to happen, and with their initial reaction to the situation before the rest of the world kenw what was happening and their reaction to the WHO inquiries, odds are we'll never get anything aside from "low confidence". Science isn't a magic wand, its a process, and honestly assuming we do get access an investigation like this most likely wouldn't even involve the scientific method at all. If science was enough to determine the origin given current available knowledge it probably would've been solved already.
      - junofan 4y ago
        You can’t call spoliation “low confidence.”
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    That's what China wants yes. But while this helps the CCP party save face, it doesn't help to move on with the investigation. It's not even about the blame. We investigate air crashes in such detail so we can prevent them from happening again. Of course with an even bigger event like this we should do the same. The pandemic has happened and no kind of blame or money can revert it. But we can try to learn everything about it that we can to stop the next one. I'm sure it was an accident but we need to know what happened. For this reason I really think China should cooperate with the investigators.
    - landemva 4y ago
      Pilots are licensed and airframes are certified. Licenses can be revoked. Where are the personal civil and criminal penalties for the GoF staff?
      - roelschroeven 4y ago
        You're missing the point. The main purpose of airplane crash investigations is to find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again in the future. This is done mostly without placing blame on anyone, precisely because that leads to finding a scapegoat instead of finding and fixing a problem. Finding and fixing a problem is exactly what needs to happen here too.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
      On that basis does the actual cause even matter as opposed to mapping out likely vs unlikely caused? I’m sure air crash investigations would resolve many safety issues completely unrelated to the actual cause of a crash.
    - officialjunk 4y ago
      let's remember that the US contributed the the funding of this research https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with. All of the theories had the properties of being convenient darlings of some pre-existing political faction. The most responsible thing is to claim ignorance on the origin story unless you have genuine, credentialed, expertise and analytical training for it and even then, those people choose their audiences and presentation carefully because of the unintended consequences. Those who refuse to fuel speculation on topics they are unqualified to comment on is by definition, absent and invisible. It's also a distraction. The real problem is the chain of decisions and coordinating made by hundreds of groups around the planet between say November and April that catalyzed this from a problem to a global catastrophe. That's really the focus here because an H5N1 mutation is potentially around the corner and that could be much much worse. It's dramatically affected egg supplies as you've probably seen at your local supermarket. A human uncontrolled outbreak would be a disaster. It's far more dangerous than covid. For instance, that's today's date: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2023-DON445 https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2... The first part (origin) has already happened, the second part about the management, that's the actual important stuff.
    - wonderwonder 4y ago
      "People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with." You are right and thats the most fascinating / absurd part of this whole thing. Somehow wet market vs lab leak has political sides and people are emotionally invested in one over the other. Its crazy, lets just have the truth and move on, either way it came out of China and savaged the world. People don't want the lab leak theory to be true for the sole reason that Trump said it and they believe Trump is the devil. I am very much not a fan of Trump and saw his actions leading up to the election as a clear and present danger to our democracy but still have no emotional investment in one theory over another. I just want the truth. This is an example of how insane American politics have gotten over the last 8? years
      - jboy55 4y ago
        Do you need the truth though? In some ways the mere question on the origin of the virus is a political one. No one in the public has ever cared to have definitive proof where any virus came from before. The ability to point to a specific time and place is probably outside of our ability. A lab had it on Nov 1st, 2021. A lab worker brought it home, is that 100% proof that was the first infection? Or did the lab get it from a place where it was already infecting people? Finally, what do we do with the info? Is it just a, 'oh well, that's interesting'?
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  Where’s your comment from two years ago belittling the wet market theory as shitty? This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.
  - WaxProlix 4y ago
    I saw a lot of folks saying that the theories all kinda stank at the time, and to wait and see. Interestingly, a lot of folks also kept quiet and didn't champion any theories. Maybe I can link you to a lack of comment two years ago to back up my bona fides?
    - rjzzleep 4y ago
      Normally when you try to solve a serious problem in a small company you might want to know who caused the problem, but most of the times you just need to know it wasn't intentional and you focus on addressing the outcome and making sure it never happens again. In big enterprises usually solving the problem is secondary to finding who the culprit is so that all future problems can be blamed on that department. China and the US are both like big enterprises. None of them is actually focused on making sure all the problems that happened will not happen again. People are just focused on blaming their domestic shit on the other. China releases a strategy paper on US hegemony, US brings the lab leak theory back into the spotlight. It doesn't really matter if there was valid research on that theory. The fact that the major newspapers come out with it 1 day after China releases their stuff, shows you it's political. It may be right, it may be wrong, an unintended leak has always been a very likely on the list for me. It's not like lack of security in labs hasn't been an issue in the US, in China and in a bunch of labs in Europe for that matter. Probably other countries are way worse. The point isn't whether it's right or wrong, the point is that the goal isn't to solve the problem, but exclusively to assert blame.
    - tootie 4y ago
      It seems that lo these many years later all the theories are still full of holes. Lab leak is plausible but there's no public evidence to back it. Somehow the DOE thinks they have something but we haven't seen it. Just based on history, zoonotic remains most likely but no host has been found.
- JPKab 4y ago
  Yes it's a completely ridiculous theory that the biolab that works on bat borne coronaviruses might have had something to do with the bad borne coronavirus that sprang up a mile away. It's just a theory. Totally crackpot. I mean come on they totally found the animal that came from to support the zoonotic origin theory. Oh wait, they have yet to identify a spillover animal. Anyone with common sense notice the lab leak is the most likely scenario here. But sure go ahead and continue to defend the honor of the CCP, an organization that is shortly going to be sending lethal weaponry including suicide drones to Vladimir Putin so he can murder Ukrainian civilians with impunity.
  - Mizoguchi 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - igouy 4y ago
    > a spillover animal "Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on mink farms between humans and mink and back to humans" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5901 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5901 Not what you meant? How long did it take to definitively identify a natural reservoir for the 2002 SARS outbreak? "Bats as Animal Reservoirs for the SARS Coronavirus: Hypothesis Proved After 10 Years of Virus Hunting" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258204548_Bats_as_animal_reservoirs_for_the_SARS_coronavirus_Hypothesis_proved_after_10_years_of_virus_hunting https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258204548_Bats_as_a...
    - JPKab 4y ago
      The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market, in less than a year. The animal reservoir that infected the civets were the horseshoe bats, and yes, that took a few years to confirm. No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan. The article you posted regarding minks has absolutely nothing to do with an original source of spillover. It's simply documenting the common pandemic phenomenon of humans infecting mammals with covid, and, wow, the minks infecting humans with the same virus that is already evolved to infect human ACE2 receptors. You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis. The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away, despite: Location is 1000km away from the known horseshoe bat populations in Yunnan that are SARS reservoirs. Emergence was during late autumn/early winter when local bats are already hibernating. Emergence was in the middle of a cosmopolitan metropolis where the locals don't eat bats. Chinese Communist Party immediately blocked any investigations and never even pretended to want to restore records that were deleted, despite the prospect of being vindicated by a zoonotic origin being found. CCP currently, rather than attempt to continue to claim a non-existent zoonotic origin, has now claimed a US-based lab leak is at fault. Multiple NIH grants specifically mention humanized mouse models with human ACE2 receptors lining air passages, and conducting serial passage of wild-type bat-borne SARS in research being conducted by grant recipient in Wuhan lab. (There was an intermediate host, it was a genetically modified mouse model, and long since disposed of.) Humanized mouse models can be purchased from any reputable bio supplier: https://www.criver.com/products-services/research-models-services/animal-models/mice/humanized-mice/pbmc-humanized-mouse-model?gclid=CjwKCAiAjPyfBhBMEiwAB2CCIiQgcJAb3Ax-Ntc8LqzOyofl2nXKe8bu7kPoV-PpWqOiwUDSTvwHQhoCtY8QAvD_BwE&region=3616 https://www.criver.com/products-services/research-models-ser...
- PathOfEclipse 4y ago
  How many people in this world just put their blinders on and distort new information to fit their preconceptions and biases? What do you think "low confidence" means in the context of an intelligence report? I tried finding out myself, and I mostly just found people like yourself pretending it means whatever they want it to. I was surprised to find, at CNN, of all places, something that actually sounds credible: "https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan-china-intelligence/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan..." "A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion." That's a far cry from "shitty theory".
  - zamnos 4y ago
    Yikes, what's your definition for "shitty theory" then? Something that's "not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion" sounds pretty shitty to me. Literal shit lets you draw more conclusions about the defecator than that!
    - PathOfEclipse 4y ago
      What do you think a theory is? A theory is by definition unproven. With enough evidence, it becomes proven and therefore no longer a theory. Then there's the grey area in between, where a theory seems plausible but there's not enough evidence to be conclusive about it. A "shitty" theory is one which completely lacks evidence supporting it and/or has far more evidence that contradicts it. The covid lab leak theory is not "shitty" by either metric.
      - igouy 4y ago
        https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theory https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theory
zamadatix 4y ago
How can "low confidence" and "higher confidence than all other theories combined" jive? Does it require "all other theories" to not include "we don't have a clue" which is the most likely of all or am I missing something else?
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Imagine if it's a curve like this: - No idea for either solution and we'll never know - 70% chance - Lab leak - 20% chance - Occurred in nature - 10% chance In that case, you could say that the most likely answer is "lab leak" if you must have an answer, but it's very "low confidence." I don't know what the actual odds are, it's just made up for demonstration.
- kilgnad 4y ago
  Imagine you have a bunch of crappy and unrealistic theories about why something occured. What those phrases mean is that the lab leak is simply the least crappy theory.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  “We don’t know” is by definition not a theory though, it’s a lack of a theory.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- yakubin 4y ago
  "we don't have a clue" is not a theory about the origin. It's a theory about your knowledge of the origin. It's not in the pool of competing theories you're considering in this context.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    True, in this case “nature” is basically the catch all “not lab” theory already including the probabilities the source is "not lab but we haven't named the source".
kilgnad 4y ago
No. Low confidence means they have a bunch of crap theories. The lab leak theory is simply the least crappy theory. That's the nuance.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  It is an interesting admission though, because by definition that means that the "evolved in nature and came from wet markets" view is also a crappy theory.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    What it means is that we lack the ability to prove either of those theories, not necessarily that either theory is bad.
    - kilgnad 4y ago
      This entirely depends on the total amount of theories. It also assumes the known theories cover all possible origins. Saying COVID evolved from nature is sort of a catch all. It's like saying all possible theories in aggregate except for the lab leak theory. For example: What are the chances of anyone but you winning the lottery? Quite high. So when they say low confidence of the lab leak theory it most likely means it's a crap theory.
      - Godel_unicode 4y ago
        Our ability to prove a theory or not is entirely dependent on our ability to gather evidence for or against. How many other theories can be thought of is totally irrelevant. Low confidence means inability to prove or disprove. That is it. Edit: extrapolating further about this is just a Rorschach test.
        kilgnad 4y ago
        This is just vocabulary. If you can't find evidence to support a theory confidently... I call it a crap theory.
lucideer 4y ago
> The headline is absolutely, literally true It absolutely, literally isn't. The headline says the lab leak is the most likely origin. The lab theory being the least shitty theory absolutely doesn't make it a likely origin: it is purely a statement about the information we have (rather lack thereof) on origins, not on the likelihood of any of those. Likelihood of origin doesn't even come into it given the current state of theories.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  Yes, a thing can be most likely, and not likely. It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins. That's how you read it. GP is reading "most likely" as statement of absolute likelihood, making it false here, because the most likely thing is "any of the possibilities not under consideration", which takes most of the probability mass. IMO, GP's interpretation is the one that most people take for "most likely" statements, which in our opinion makes this headline a blatant lie.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      If you told most people you had 10 rolls of a dice to land a 6 and then suggested the most likely number of rolls you'll get it on is 1 I wonder whether they'd believe you...
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        I think most people would have the same reaction as me, that is "er, I'm having trouble parsing this, could you rephrase?". Anyway, a different way of putting my point is: "most likely" modifies meaning of the thing it attaches to. "Lab leak [is the] most likely origin of" strongly suggests the absolute take. Relative take would be phrased "Lab leak [is the] most likely of hypotheses proposed for the origin of", or something to that effect - that is, attaching "most likely" to the body of proposed explanations (which, by definition, excludes "anything else not on this list" as an option), not to the origin itself. A yet different way: NYT is doing the equivalent of me putting some object under a color detector, and announcing "Blue most likely color of Object", without mentioning that my color detector consists of separate R, G, and B color sensors, and that I'm just reporting which sensor gave the highest reading. Most people would read my announcement as "Object is some shade of blue, unless their machine is broken or something", whereas the object itself could be purple, or white, or yellow, or near-black, or any other color that just has "B" component stronger than "G" and "R".
than3 4y ago
It seems like you are misunderstanding the nuance of what they are saying. Its best understood after watching and grokking this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc Putting what is being said in the correct context, outlined in that video, which is how government typically operates. Its pretty clear what they mean to any educated rational reader what was meant. The characterization you made is poor and doesn't aptly apply.
- notfed 4y ago
  The point is that the headline is clickbait. As you have said, you have to read the article to determine the radically different meaning of the headline. That's how clickbait works.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    How is it clickbait? A US intelligence agency did say that the lab leak theory was more likely than the wet market one, even if their confidence is low to moderate.
    - jboy55 4y ago
      And 4 other US intelligence agencies still say the wet market is more likely.
      - himinlomax 4y ago
        The title doesn't contradict that.
      - tekknik 4y ago
        Got a source?
  - than3 4y ago
    That's a very circular argument and definition. By that definition, any headline of any article will be clickbait to someone just by them saying so regardless of any truth in the matter. People lie every day. If you are looking at 'reading' articles, its kind of expected that you will read them if you choose to do so. Complaining about it doesn't change any meaningful thing. I really don't understand the point you were trying to communicate. Is it that you want someone to just tell you everything to believe, without needing to critically think at all? People lie, so it sounds like you want something that will never come to pass, and trying to make it come to pass would only create a negative outcome for you, those close to you, and anyone else that happened to be within your sphere of influence, at least given a sufficient amount of time. For the past couple thousand years of history exploitation has been the norm in various forms. Did I completely misread what you meant (but didn't say?). Could you clarify?
mliker 4y ago
Yes, but the point is the headline is clickbaity, and for the uninformed masses, it sounds like it's highly likely it's from the lab, when that judgment was made with "low confidence"
- plutonorm 4y ago
  That you think it's a coincidence that a novel coronavirus pops up in the only place in china working on coronaviruses blows my mind. Any sane, rational human thought it likely a lab leak from the moment this thing started.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - swores 4y ago
    Or the scientists sensibly chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found, to make studying them easier? You'd probably, for example, find that charities studying/helping poverty are often found near where lots of poor people live - yet you wouldn't blame charities for creating poverty.
    - baja_blast 4y ago
      > chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found Then they should have built the lab 800 KM south west in Yunnan. The lab is there for the same reason we have labs in NYC major regional hub with many universities, the lab has been there since the 1950s. Researchers had to travel to places like Yunnan and Laos to collect samples.
  - mullingitover 4y ago
    Isn’t that lab in Wuhan because it’s a region with a lot of endemic coronaviruses?
    - plutonorm 4y ago
tga_d 4y ago
The headline is literally true in a certain, non-colloquial usage of the term "most likely". It's is also true to claim that Covid-19 was more likely not because of a lab leak. That's what "low confidence" means. If you could bet at even odds that it was a lab leak, and the bet could be settled by some omniscient force, you'd be a fool to take the bet. The fact the chances of it being a lab leak are so high does mean something, and I'd like to see those odds be lower for any future scenario, but to think that implies we can say with confidence "that's what happened" is, as was clearly stated, wrong.
tootie 4y ago
I'm not entirely clear on why the Energy Department would even be investigating this let alone issuing a controversial finding with low confidence at all. They mention specific intelligence that flipped their conclusion but didn't even characterize what the nature of that intelligence is.
- iaseiadit 4y ago
  “The DOE oversees several U.S. national labs, some of which conduct advanced biological research”
  - walleeee 4y ago
    and funds a good deal of biological research in academia
uonpopular_th 4y ago
[flagged]
- microtherion 4y ago
  The origin and the remedy are entirely uncorrelated (If anything, one would think that a manufactured origin of the virus would make "natural immunity" a LESS likely viable remedy).
  - uonpopular_th 4y ago
    This strawman is getting tiresome. You're equating the virus escaping from a lab with the virus being engineered with the virus being a bio-weapon with the release being intentional.
vikingerik 4y ago
Yeah, this is how the fake news can lie with facts. "Most likely" might be technically true - in the sense that there might be a 2% chance it was that, but there's a hundred other possibilities each with lesser probability, so that one is on top. But it's not really likely at all. So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that, which nobody will. (don't focus on the actual number, that's just for illustration.)
- PathOfEclipse 4y ago
  Where did you get 2% from? I tried searching for what "low confidence" means when given by an intelligence agency, and in the process I'm finding a lot of people like yourself that apparently like to pretend it means whatever they want it to. > But it's not really likely at all. Is that what low confidence means in this context? After digging, I finally found a news site that said something that sounds credible: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan-china-intelligence/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan... "Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion." That's a far cry from your made-up definition, which is, to be honest, likely motivated by your own partisan biases. > So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that This news story was broken by the NYT, probably the most leftwing major print media company in the world. I'm pretty sure they have nothing to gain by misleading people into thinking the lab leak theory is more likely to be true than not, especially given their previous stances: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-lab-leak.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-.... On the contrary, they risk offending their payer base by reporting the truth in this instance. Let's face it. Your partisan side lost this one. They worked hard to suppress and censor anyone who dared claim the lab leak theory was plausible. They were wrong. And they were evil to do the censoring in the first place. Take your loss and move on.
  - 4y ago
xwolfi 4y ago
Im in China myself and I dont mind if it's a lab leak, better than saying we re degenerate Pangolin eaters :D However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US, I want to believe them but they just shot 3 balloons in hysterical panic that were just their own weather balloons just because we sent 1... so sometimes they seem to be wrong and we should keep an open mind. The best would be that a bat shat on a pangolin a lab worker ate before going to work, he sneezed around and contaminated all his colleagues who spread it around and poom: wild bat + pangolin traffic + lab leak all together lol Now that we can all agree, what has changed ? Surely we re not agreeing that China was making weapons or leaked voluntarily, so beyond us being weasels unable to accept we screwed up, not sure why we drag on: we ll never say we screwed up, the US will never entirely accept we didnt screw up, what then?
- himinlomax 4y ago
  > However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted more than the autocratic Chinese communist party that is accountable to absolutely no one.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted No. Where were checks and balances when a coup attempt happened? Or before that, when a sitting US president committed multiple crimes, including influence peddling, and got away with it? Or when Guantanamo was established and random people were kidnapped and tortured because of their name or watch? Or when the US president decided to murder a US citizen without due process? Or when it was decided to implement dragnet surveillance of the whole Internet? Or when it was decided to spy on allies? Just because we later learned about some of those transgressions doesn't in any way make the US government and it's various entities trustworthy. Yes, it's better than the authoritarian regime in China, sure, but that doesn't equal actual trust.
himinlomax 4y ago
> (there might not even be a physical way to prove that conclusively) There is a way, or there would be a way had this not been in an autocratic country. A developed and free nation would have formed an independent enquiry and be given access to the lab, its staff and documents. That would have had a high likelihood to either find the cause there or rule it out with some certainty. But this is China, and for some reason some people don't want to admit that it's a repressive dictatorship with no regard for human life, justice and transparency.
object-a 4y ago
Low Confidence in intelligence assessments has a particular meaning, which is worth considering in this context: > Low confidence generally means questionable or implausible information was used, the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or significant concerns or problems with sources existed [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence

axxto 4y ago

A "sightly-less-shitty-than-other-theories" theory is still a shitty theory. Low-confidence means exactly what it sounds like.

dangwhy 4y ago
then why even propose any theory ? why not let it remain a mystery.
- selcuka 4y ago
  > then why even propose any theory ? why not let it remain a mystery. Reductio ad absurdum won't work here. There are ways to test a "low confidence" theory, and re-evaluate its confidence level. This is called science.
  - philippejara 4y ago
    You aren't going to get any confirmation or material evidence until the chinese government allows it to happen, and with their initial reaction to the situation before the rest of the world kenw what was happening and their reaction to the WHO inquiries, odds are we'll never get anything aside from "low confidence". Science isn't a magic wand, its a process, and honestly assuming we do get access an investigation like this most likely wouldn't even involve the scientific method at all. If science was enough to determine the origin given current available knowledge it probably would've been solved already.
    - junofan 4y ago
      You can’t call spoliation “low confidence.”
- wkat4242 4y ago
  That's what China wants yes. But while this helps the CCP party save face, it doesn't help to move on with the investigation. It's not even about the blame. We investigate air crashes in such detail so we can prevent them from happening again. Of course with an even bigger event like this we should do the same. The pandemic has happened and no kind of blame or money can revert it. But we can try to learn everything about it that we can to stop the next one. I'm sure it was an accident but we need to know what happened. For this reason I really think China should cooperate with the investigators.
  - landemva 4y ago
    Pilots are licensed and airframes are certified. Licenses can be revoked. Where are the personal civil and criminal penalties for the GoF staff?
    - roelschroeven 4y ago
      You're missing the point. The main purpose of airplane crash investigations is to find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again in the future. This is done mostly without placing blame on anyone, precisely because that leads to finding a scapegoat instead of finding and fixing a problem. Finding and fixing a problem is exactly what needs to happen here too.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    On that basis does the actual cause even matter as opposed to mapping out likely vs unlikely caused? I’m sure air crash investigations would resolve many safety issues completely unrelated to the actual cause of a crash.
  - officialjunk 4y ago
    let's remember that the US contributed the the funding of this research https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-function-risky-bat-virus-engineering-links-america-to-wuhan/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
- kristopolous 4y ago
  People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with. All of the theories had the properties of being convenient darlings of some pre-existing political faction. The most responsible thing is to claim ignorance on the origin story unless you have genuine, credentialed, expertise and analytical training for it and even then, those people choose their audiences and presentation carefully because of the unintended consequences. Those who refuse to fuel speculation on topics they are unqualified to comment on is by definition, absent and invisible. It's also a distraction. The real problem is the chain of decisions and coordinating made by hundreds of groups around the planet between say November and April that catalyzed this from a problem to a global catastrophe. That's really the focus here because an H5N1 mutation is potentially around the corner and that could be much much worse. It's dramatically affected egg supplies as you've probably seen at your local supermarket. A human uncontrolled outbreak would be a disaster. It's far more dangerous than covid. For instance, that's today's date: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2023-DON445 https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2... The first part (origin) has already happened, the second part about the management, that's the actual important stuff.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    "People want a blunt weapon to promote their politics with." You are right and thats the most fascinating / absurd part of this whole thing. Somehow wet market vs lab leak has political sides and people are emotionally invested in one over the other. Its crazy, lets just have the truth and move on, either way it came out of China and savaged the world. People don't want the lab leak theory to be true for the sole reason that Trump said it and they believe Trump is the devil. I am very much not a fan of Trump and saw his actions leading up to the election as a clear and present danger to our democracy but still have no emotional investment in one theory over another. I just want the truth. This is an example of how insane American politics have gotten over the last 8? years
    - jboy55 4y ago
      Do you need the truth though? In some ways the mere question on the origin of the virus is a political one. No one in the public has ever cared to have definitive proof where any virus came from before. The ability to point to a specific time and place is probably outside of our ability. A lab had it on Nov 1st, 2021. A lab worker brought it home, is that 100% proof that was the first infection? Or did the lab get it from a place where it was already infecting people? Finally, what do we do with the info? Is it just a, 'oh well, that's interesting'?
bradleyjg 4y ago
Where’s your comment from two years ago belittling the wet market theory as shitty? This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.
- WaxProlix 4y ago
  I saw a lot of folks saying that the theories all kinda stank at the time, and to wait and see. Interestingly, a lot of folks also kept quiet and didn't champion any theories. Maybe I can link you to a lack of comment two years ago to back up my bona fides?
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    Normally when you try to solve a serious problem in a small company you might want to know who caused the problem, but most of the times you just need to know it wasn't intentional and you focus on addressing the outcome and making sure it never happens again. In big enterprises usually solving the problem is secondary to finding who the culprit is so that all future problems can be blamed on that department. China and the US are both like big enterprises. None of them is actually focused on making sure all the problems that happened will not happen again. People are just focused on blaming their domestic shit on the other. China releases a strategy paper on US hegemony, US brings the lab leak theory back into the spotlight. It doesn't really matter if there was valid research on that theory. The fact that the major newspapers come out with it 1 day after China releases their stuff, shows you it's political. It may be right, it may be wrong, an unintended leak has always been a very likely on the list for me. It's not like lack of security in labs hasn't been an issue in the US, in China and in a bunch of labs in Europe for that matter. Probably other countries are way worse. The point isn't whether it's right or wrong, the point is that the goal isn't to solve the problem, but exclusively to assert blame.
  - tootie 4y ago
    It seems that lo these many years later all the theories are still full of holes. Lab leak is plausible but there's no public evidence to back it. Somehow the DOE thinks they have something but we haven't seen it. Just based on history, zoonotic remains most likely but no host has been found.
JPKab 4y ago
Yes it's a completely ridiculous theory that the biolab that works on bat borne coronaviruses might have had something to do with the bad borne coronavirus that sprang up a mile away. It's just a theory. Totally crackpot. I mean come on they totally found the animal that came from to support the zoonotic origin theory. Oh wait, they have yet to identify a spillover animal. Anyone with common sense notice the lab leak is the most likely scenario here. But sure go ahead and continue to defend the honor of the CCP, an organization that is shortly going to be sending lethal weaponry including suicide drones to Vladimir Putin so he can murder Ukrainian civilians with impunity.
- Mizoguchi 4y ago
  [flagged]
- igouy 4y ago
  > a spillover animal "Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on mink farms between humans and mink and back to humans" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5901 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe5901 Not what you meant? How long did it take to definitively identify a natural reservoir for the 2002 SARS outbreak? "Bats as Animal Reservoirs for the SARS Coronavirus: Hypothesis Proved After 10 Years of Virus Hunting" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258204548_Bats_as_animal_reservoirs_for_the_SARS_coronavirus_Hypothesis_proved_after_10_years_of_virus_hunting https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258204548_Bats_as_a...
  - JPKab 4y ago
    The spillover animals (aka intermediate hosts) for SARS-1 were rapidly identified as civets in a wet market, in less than a year. The animal reservoir that infected the civets were the horseshoe bats, and yes, that took a few years to confirm. No intermediate host was ever identified as the source of infection in Wuhan. The article you posted regarding minks has absolutely nothing to do with an original source of spillover. It's simply documenting the common pandemic phenomenon of humans infecting mammals with covid, and, wow, the minks infecting humans with the same virus that is already evolved to infect human ACE2 receptors. You started with an absurd, inverse hypothesis. The lab that studies bat-borne coronaviruses had absolutely nothing to do with the bat-borne coronavirus that broke out a kilometer away, despite: Location is 1000km away from the known horseshoe bat populations in Yunnan that are SARS reservoirs. Emergence was during late autumn/early winter when local bats are already hibernating. Emergence was in the middle of a cosmopolitan metropolis where the locals don't eat bats. Chinese Communist Party immediately blocked any investigations and never even pretended to want to restore records that were deleted, despite the prospect of being vindicated by a zoonotic origin being found. CCP currently, rather than attempt to continue to claim a non-existent zoonotic origin, has now claimed a US-based lab leak is at fault. Multiple NIH grants specifically mention humanized mouse models with human ACE2 receptors lining air passages, and conducting serial passage of wild-type bat-borne SARS in research being conducted by grant recipient in Wuhan lab. (There was an intermediate host, it was a genetically modified mouse model, and long since disposed of.) Humanized mouse models can be purchased from any reputable bio supplier: https://www.criver.com/products-services/research-models-services/animal-models/mice/humanized-mice/pbmc-humanized-mouse-model?gclid=CjwKCAiAjPyfBhBMEiwAB2CCIiQgcJAb3Ax-Ntc8LqzOyofl2nXKe8bu7kPoV-PpWqOiwUDSTvwHQhoCtY8QAvD_BwE&region=3616 https://www.criver.com/products-services/research-models-ser...
PathOfEclipse 4y ago
How many people in this world just put their blinders on and distort new information to fit their preconceptions and biases? What do you think "low confidence" means in the context of an intelligence report? I tried finding out myself, and I mostly just found people like yourself pretending it means whatever they want it to. I was surprised to find, at CNN, of all places, something that actually sounds credible: "https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan-china-intelligence/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan..." "A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion." That's a far cry from "shitty theory".
- zamnos 4y ago
  Yikes, what's your definition for "shitty theory" then? Something that's "not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion" sounds pretty shitty to me. Literal shit lets you draw more conclusions about the defecator than that!
  - PathOfEclipse 4y ago
    What do you think a theory is? A theory is by definition unproven. With enough evidence, it becomes proven and therefore no longer a theory. Then there's the grey area in between, where a theory seems plausible but there's not enough evidence to be conclusive about it. A "shitty" theory is one which completely lacks evidence supporting it and/or has far more evidence that contradicts it. The covid lab leak theory is not "shitty" by either metric.
    - igouy 4y ago
      https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theory https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theory

zamadatix 4y ago

How can "low confidence" and "higher confidence than all other theories combined" jive? Does it require "all other theories" to not include "we don't have a clue" which is the most likely of all or am I missing something else?

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Imagine if it's a curve like this: - No idea for either solution and we'll never know - 70% chance - Lab leak - 20% chance - Occurred in nature - 10% chance In that case, you could say that the most likely answer is "lab leak" if you must have an answer, but it's very "low confidence." I don't know what the actual odds are, it's just made up for demonstration.
kilgnad 4y ago
Imagine you have a bunch of crappy and unrealistic theories about why something occured. What those phrases mean is that the lab leak is simply the least crappy theory.
Godel_unicode 4y ago
“We don’t know” is by definition not a theory though, it’s a lack of a theory.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
yakubin 4y ago
"we don't have a clue" is not a theory about the origin. It's a theory about your knowledge of the origin. It's not in the pool of competing theories you're considering in this context.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  True, in this case “nature” is basically the catch all “not lab” theory already including the probabilities the source is "not lab but we haven't named the source".

kilgnad 4y ago

No. Low confidence means they have a bunch of crap theories. The lab leak theory is simply the least crappy theory. That's the nuance.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
It is an interesting admission though, because by definition that means that the "evolved in nature and came from wet markets" view is also a crappy theory.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  What it means is that we lack the ability to prove either of those theories, not necessarily that either theory is bad.
  - kilgnad 4y ago
    This entirely depends on the total amount of theories. It also assumes the known theories cover all possible origins. Saying COVID evolved from nature is sort of a catch all. It's like saying all possible theories in aggregate except for the lab leak theory. For example: What are the chances of anyone but you winning the lottery? Quite high. So when they say low confidence of the lab leak theory it most likely means it's a crap theory.
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      Our ability to prove a theory or not is entirely dependent on our ability to gather evidence for or against. How many other theories can be thought of is totally irrelevant. Low confidence means inability to prove or disprove. That is it. Edit: extrapolating further about this is just a Rorschach test.
      - kilgnad 4y ago
        This is just vocabulary. If you can't find evidence to support a theory confidently... I call it a crap theory.

lucideer 4y ago

> The headline is absolutely, literally true It absolutely, literally isn't. The headline says the lab leak is the most likely origin. The lab theory being the least shitty theory absolutely doesn't make it a likely origin: it is purely a statement about the information we have (rather lack thereof) on origins, not on the likelihood of any of those. Likelihood of origin doesn't even come into it given the current state of theories.

anothernewdude 4y ago
Yes, a thing can be most likely, and not likely. It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins. That's how you read it. GP is reading "most likely" as statement of absolute likelihood, making it false here, because the most likely thing is "any of the possibilities not under consideration", which takes most of the probability mass. IMO, GP's interpretation is the one that most people take for "most likely" statements, which in our opinion makes this headline a blatant lie.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    If you told most people you had 10 rolls of a dice to land a 6 and then suggested the most likely number of rolls you'll get it on is 1 I wonder whether they'd believe you...
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      I think most people would have the same reaction as me, that is "er, I'm having trouble parsing this, could you rephrase?". Anyway, a different way of putting my point is: "most likely" modifies meaning of the thing it attaches to. "Lab leak [is the] most likely origin of" strongly suggests the absolute take. Relative take would be phrased "Lab leak [is the] most likely of hypotheses proposed for the origin of", or something to that effect - that is, attaching "most likely" to the body of proposed explanations (which, by definition, excludes "anything else not on this list" as an option), not to the origin itself. A yet different way: NYT is doing the equivalent of me putting some object under a color detector, and announcing "Blue most likely color of Object", without mentioning that my color detector consists of separate R, G, and B color sensors, and that I'm just reporting which sensor gave the highest reading. Most people would read my announcement as "Object is some shade of blue, unless their machine is broken or something", whereas the object itself could be purple, or white, or yellow, or near-black, or any other color that just has "B" component stronger than "G" and "R".

than3 4y ago

It seems like you are misunderstanding the nuance of what they are saying. Its best understood after watching and grokking this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNv2PlqmsAc Putting what is being said in the correct context, outlined in that video, which is how government typically operates. Its pretty clear what they mean to any educated rational reader what was meant. The characterization you made is poor and doesn't aptly apply.

notfed 4y ago
The point is that the headline is clickbait. As you have said, you have to read the article to determine the radically different meaning of the headline. That's how clickbait works.
- goatlover 4y ago
  How is it clickbait? A US intelligence agency did say that the lab leak theory was more likely than the wet market one, even if their confidence is low to moderate.
  - jboy55 4y ago
    And 4 other US intelligence agencies still say the wet market is more likely.
    - himinlomax 4y ago
      The title doesn't contradict that.
    - tekknik 4y ago
      Got a source?
- than3 4y ago
  That's a very circular argument and definition. By that definition, any headline of any article will be clickbait to someone just by them saying so regardless of any truth in the matter. People lie every day. If you are looking at 'reading' articles, its kind of expected that you will read them if you choose to do so. Complaining about it doesn't change any meaningful thing. I really don't understand the point you were trying to communicate. Is it that you want someone to just tell you everything to believe, without needing to critically think at all? People lie, so it sounds like you want something that will never come to pass, and trying to make it come to pass would only create a negative outcome for you, those close to you, and anyone else that happened to be within your sphere of influence, at least given a sufficient amount of time. For the past couple thousand years of history exploitation has been the norm in various forms. Did I completely misread what you meant (but didn't say?). Could you clarify?

mliker 4y ago

Yes, but the point is the headline is clickbaity, and for the uninformed masses, it sounds like it's highly likely it's from the lab, when that judgment was made with "low confidence"

plutonorm 4y ago
That you think it's a coincidence that a novel coronavirus pops up in the only place in china working on coronaviruses blows my mind. Any sane, rational human thought it likely a lab leak from the moment this thing started.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- swores 4y ago
  Or the scientists sensibly chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found, to make studying them easier? You'd probably, for example, find that charities studying/helping poverty are often found near where lots of poor people live - yet you wouldn't blame charities for creating poverty.
  - baja_blast 4y ago
    > chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found Then they should have built the lab 800 KM south west in Yunnan. The lab is there for the same reason we have labs in NYC major regional hub with many universities, the lab has been there since the 1950s. Researchers had to travel to places like Yunnan and Laos to collect samples.
- mullingitover 4y ago
  Isn’t that lab in Wuhan because it’s a region with a lot of endemic coronaviruses?
  - plutonorm 4y ago

tga_d 4y ago

The headline is literally true in a certain, non-colloquial usage of the term "most likely". It's is also true to claim that Covid-19 was more likely not because of a lab leak. That's what "low confidence" means. If you could bet at even odds that it was a lab leak, and the bet could be settled by some omniscient force, you'd be a fool to take the bet. The fact the chances of it being a lab leak are so high does mean something, and I'd like to see those odds be lower for any future scenario, but to think that implies we can say with confidence "that's what happened" is, as was clearly stated, wrong.

tootie 4y ago

I'm not entirely clear on why the Energy Department would even be investigating this let alone issuing a controversial finding with low confidence at all. They mention specific intelligence that flipped their conclusion but didn't even characterize what the nature of that intelligence is.

iaseiadit 4y ago
“The DOE oversees several U.S. national labs, some of which conduct advanced biological research”
- walleeee 4y ago
  and funds a good deal of biological research in academia

uonpopular_th 4y ago

[flagged]

microtherion 4y ago
The origin and the remedy are entirely uncorrelated (If anything, one would think that a manufactured origin of the virus would make "natural immunity" a LESS likely viable remedy).
- uonpopular_th 4y ago
  This strawman is getting tiresome. You're equating the virus escaping from a lab with the virus being engineered with the virus being a bio-weapon with the release being intentional.

vikingerik 4y ago

Yeah, this is how the fake news can lie with facts. "Most likely" might be technically true - in the sense that there might be a 2% chance it was that, but there's a hundred other possibilities each with lesser probability, so that one is on top. But it's not really likely at all. So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that, which nobody will. (don't focus on the actual number, that's just for illustration.)

PathOfEclipse 4y ago
Where did you get 2% from? I tried searching for what "low confidence" means when given by an intelligence agency, and in the process I'm finding a lot of people like yourself that apparently like to pretend it means whatever they want it to. > But it's not really likely at all. Is that what low confidence means in this context? After digging, I finally found a news site that said something that sounds credible: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan-china-intelligence/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/26/politics/covid-lab-leak-wuhan... "Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion." That's a far cry from your made-up definition, which is, to be honest, likely motivated by your own partisan biases. > So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that This news story was broken by the NYT, probably the most leftwing major print media company in the world. I'm pretty sure they have nothing to gain by misleading people into thinking the lab leak theory is more likely to be true than not, especially given their previous stances: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-lab-leak.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/health/wuhan-coronavirus-.... On the contrary, they risk offending their payer base by reporting the truth in this instance. Let's face it. Your partisan side lost this one. They worked hard to suppress and censor anyone who dared claim the lab leak theory was plausible. They were wrong. And they were evil to do the censoring in the first place. Take your loss and move on.
- 4y ago

xwolfi 4y ago

Im in China myself and I dont mind if it's a lab leak, better than saying we re degenerate Pangolin eaters :D However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US, I want to believe them but they just shot 3 balloons in hysterical panic that were just their own weather balloons just because we sent 1... so sometimes they seem to be wrong and we should keep an open mind. The best would be that a bat shat on a pangolin a lab worker ate before going to work, he sneezed around and contaminated all his colleagues who spread it around and poom: wild bat + pangolin traffic + lab leak all together lol Now that we can all agree, what has changed ? Surely we re not agreeing that China was making weapons or leaked voluntarily, so beyond us being weasels unable to accept we screwed up, not sure why we drag on: we ll never say we screwed up, the US will never entirely accept we didnt screw up, what then?

himinlomax 4y ago
> However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted more than the autocratic Chinese communist party that is accountable to absolutely no one.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted No. Where were checks and balances when a coup attempt happened? Or before that, when a sitting US president committed multiple crimes, including influence peddling, and got away with it? Or when Guantanamo was established and random people were kidnapped and tortured because of their name or watch? Or when the US president decided to murder a US citizen without due process? Or when it was decided to implement dragnet surveillance of the whole Internet? Or when it was decided to spy on allies? Just because we later learned about some of those transgressions doesn't in any way make the US government and it's various entities trustworthy. Yes, it's better than the authoritarian regime in China, sure, but that doesn't equal actual trust.

himinlomax 4y ago

> (there might not even be a physical way to prove that conclusively) There is a way, or there would be a way had this not been in an autocratic country. A developed and free nation would have formed an independent enquiry and be given access to the lab, its staff and documents. That would have had a high likelihood to either find the cause there or rule it out with some certainty. But this is China, and for some reason some people don't want to admit that it's a repressive dictatorship with no regard for human life, justice and transparency.

object-a 4y ago

Low Confidence in intelligence assessments has a particular meaning, which is worth considering in this context: > Low confidence generally means questionable or implausible information was used, the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or significant concerns or problems with sources existed [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence