3 ms·

I agree with your description of what these correspondents consensus seemed to be at the time of writing. I don't see how this is at all consistent with that t

I agree with your description of what these correspondents consensus seemed to be at the time of writing. I don't see how this is at all consistent with that the paper claimed - "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible", nor how it was portrayed by the media - "COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin".

jonnycomputer 3y ago
The phrase "is not likely" imo should have been substituted for "is not plausible", though I am not sure everyone else interprets the phrase "not plausible" as meaning something like "almost certainly not true"; they could have meant it as, something like, "the least likely of all the possibilities, by a fair margin." Sure, I'd have preferred if they had been explicit, by giving their estimate of the probability of each possibility explicitly.
- gptbore 3y ago
  "the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario" As an understatement, I don't think the authors accurately conveyed what their priors on the origin really were, nor what data they encountered to so dramatically shift these priors.
  - jonnycomputer 3y ago
    My only response would be (1) to point to the date of when he said that compared to the date of the final manuscript, and the all the conversations that occurred n between. I think that was from sometime in January. (2) we shouldn't read over-much into an off-the-cuff slack message, ostensibly shared with a small number of individuals, with his impressions and thoughts at the time. The purpose of those discussions is to bang ideas off the wall. In any case, I don't expect good scientists to rigidly hang on to an idea. I expect good scientists to evolve their thinking as they learn. But you may be right that the published paper did not speak to what their particular priors were when they started out. I'm not certain that we should expect it to either. A lot of times you start off with ill-formed half-ideas, and while they may be where you started off from, the utility of sharing that starting point might cause more confusion--or even spread more misinformation--that do good.

jonnycomputer 3y ago

The phrase "is not likely" imo should have been substituted for "is not plausible", though I am not sure everyone else interprets the phrase "not plausible" as meaning something like "almost certainly not true"; they could have meant it as, something like, "the least likely of all the possibilities, by a fair margin." Sure, I'd have preferred if they had been explicit, by giving their estimate of the probability of each possibility explicitly.

gptbore 3y ago
"the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario" As an understatement, I don't think the authors accurately conveyed what their priors on the origin really were, nor what data they encountered to so dramatically shift these priors.
- jonnycomputer 3y ago
  My only response would be (1) to point to the date of when he said that compared to the date of the final manuscript, and the all the conversations that occurred n between. I think that was from sometime in January. (2) we shouldn't read over-much into an off-the-cuff slack message, ostensibly shared with a small number of individuals, with his impressions and thoughts at the time. The purpose of those discussions is to bang ideas off the wall. In any case, I don't expect good scientists to rigidly hang on to an idea. I expect good scientists to evolve their thinking as they learn. But you may be right that the published paper did not speak to what their particular priors were when they started out. I'm not certain that we should expect it to either. A lot of times you start off with ill-formed half-ideas, and while they may be where you started off from, the utility of sharing that starting point might cause more confusion--or even spread more misinformation--that do good.