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I have to say, this reliance on the government telling the populace the truth if it has it just doesn’t ring true to me. In recent memory, I’ll point to going

I have to say, this reliance on the government telling the populace the truth if it has it just doesn’t ring true to me. In recent memory, I’ll point to going to war with Afghanistan, telling the Taliban to pack sand when they offered up Bin Laden, while ignoring Saudi Arabia. Going to war with Iraq over “wmds” and lying to the world about it. Would the govt tell us that China, a country that owns most of our debt, and is probably the most important trade environment, started this thing and covered it up? They might not. I understand your instinct to push back against blowhards that confidently proclaim some bullshit, which they only do when it’s expedient and helpful to them. I’m just saying that instinct that I also had might not be good. To discount a whole tree of idea ideas because some jackass is shaking it, maybe just ignore the jackass and still evaluate the ideas.

mindslight 3y ago
I'm not arguing that "government" will tell population the truth. Rather that if a President is making an extraordinary claim that is actually based on some concrete details in a classified briefing, then we would expect that President to reference those details - especially a President who readily publicized classified information. That he did not points to the claim as being from the same vein of political misinformation as non-existent "wmds". > To discount a whole tree of idea ideas because some jackass is shaking it, maybe just ignore the jackass and still evaluate the ideas. Sure, this is valid if one is taking the time to sit down and examine the topic themselves from first principles and thoroughly verified facts. But, at least to me, the aspect of where Covid came from didn't deserve that effort of investigation, especially compared to analyzing things like how to protect myself. Without analyzing everything from scratch, one is left to examine other people's arguments. And the problem created by someone in a strong leadership position spewing bullshit is that it creates a strong attractor for many other people to choose the same conclusion, and then work backwards fleshing out the details to support it. So it's not that the whole tree of ideas should be ruled out, but rather that legitimate arguments supporting that tree of ideas become practically indistinguishable from bad faith ones. This isn't a desirable state of affairs, but rather the pragmatic reaction to strong distortion of the information landscape - especially when the distortion is pushing towards a destructive course of action.
- MarkMarine 3y ago
  I understand your reasoning here, I agree without spending an inordinate amount of time doing first person research on every topic we all basically have to fall back to listening to other people's reasoning on a subject and then decide, but I'm curious, has discussing this and reading the article (and probably some of the other information around) caused you to rethink COVID origin possibilities or at least do some more reading about it?
  - mindslight 3y ago
    You're asking in the context of me personally, rather than in the context of the topic. That answer is "no". The importance I give to a topic is mostly based on what is actionable, which for this topic would seem to be limited to posting my resulting opinion on social media. Just like I never bought into the "China virus" narrative, I also never bought into the "no, it's definitely not from a lab" narrative. I am comfortable with leaving a topic undecided in my mind. Contrast with say masking, where I looked at the details and decided to start wearing a P100 respirator in public in February. That was something I could do, where the downside was really small (oh weird looks in a store, boo hoo), and the possible upside was much larger. In the context of the topic, I didn't find my skim of this article particularly compelling. No smoking guns stuck out at me, and it would seem that other ways of the main claim happening aren't as uncorrelated as one would think at first brush (eg virus circulating publicly in Wuhan, these researchers get it, which is then noticed and recorded because they care about such things for lab workers). But in line with what I said above, that isn't a rejection of the article and "no that definitely didn't happen!", rather it just didn't move my needle much, and I am comfortable with it remaining ambiguously unknown.
    - MarkMarine 3y ago
      The main claim of the article is the bat coronavirus researchers at WIV were hospitalized with Covid symptoms in November. The wet market outbreak was in December into January.

mindslight 3y ago

I'm not arguing that "government" will tell population the truth. Rather that if a President is making an extraordinary claim that is actually based on some concrete details in a classified briefing, then we would expect that President to reference those details - especially a President who readily publicized classified information. That he did not points to the claim as being from the same vein of political misinformation as non-existent "wmds". > To discount a whole tree of idea ideas because some jackass is shaking it, maybe just ignore the jackass and still evaluate the ideas. Sure, this is valid if one is taking the time to sit down and examine the topic themselves from first principles and thoroughly verified facts. But, at least to me, the aspect of where Covid came from didn't deserve that effort of investigation, especially compared to analyzing things like how to protect myself. Without analyzing everything from scratch, one is left to examine other people's arguments. And the problem created by someone in a strong leadership position spewing bullshit is that it creates a strong attractor for many other people to choose the same conclusion, and then work backwards fleshing out the details to support it. So it's not that the whole tree of ideas should be ruled out, but rather that legitimate arguments supporting that tree of ideas become practically indistinguishable from bad faith ones. This isn't a desirable state of affairs, but rather the pragmatic reaction to strong distortion of the information landscape - especially when the distortion is pushing towards a destructive course of action.

MarkMarine 3y ago
I understand your reasoning here, I agree without spending an inordinate amount of time doing first person research on every topic we all basically have to fall back to listening to other people's reasoning on a subject and then decide, but I'm curious, has discussing this and reading the article (and probably some of the other information around) caused you to rethink COVID origin possibilities or at least do some more reading about it?
- mindslight 3y ago
  You're asking in the context of me personally, rather than in the context of the topic. That answer is "no". The importance I give to a topic is mostly based on what is actionable, which for this topic would seem to be limited to posting my resulting opinion on social media. Just like I never bought into the "China virus" narrative, I also never bought into the "no, it's definitely not from a lab" narrative. I am comfortable with leaving a topic undecided in my mind. Contrast with say masking, where I looked at the details and decided to start wearing a P100 respirator in public in February. That was something I could do, where the downside was really small (oh weird looks in a store, boo hoo), and the possible upside was much larger. In the context of the topic, I didn't find my skim of this article particularly compelling. No smoking guns stuck out at me, and it would seem that other ways of the main claim happening aren't as uncorrelated as one would think at first brush (eg virus circulating publicly in Wuhan, these researchers get it, which is then noticed and recorded because they care about such things for lab workers). But in line with what I said above, that isn't a rejection of the article and "no that definitely didn't happen!", rather it just didn't move my needle much, and I am comfortable with it remaining ambiguously unknown.
  - MarkMarine 3y ago
    The main claim of the article is the bat coronavirus researchers at WIV were hospitalized with Covid symptoms in November. The wet market outbreak was in December into January.