4 ms·
I'm not sure what you mean here? The presence of the world's biggest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in Wuhan doesn't decrease P(Wuhan|natural), but it does
by tripletao 2y ago
I'm not sure what you mean here? The presence of the world's biggest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in Wuhan doesn't decrease P(Wuhan|natural), but it does increase P(Wuhan|research-related). So it absolutely should change your estimate of P(research-related|Wuhan) in the obvious way, unless your prior for a research-related pandemic is zero. I don't see how that prior could be zero, since the 1977 flu pandemic already killed ~700k people and is uncontroversially accepted to be of research-related origin.
The arguments today are much more sophisticated, though. The debate that you linked relied heavily on Pekar's "The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2". It took those conclusions at face value, apparently since nobody on the other side had the mathematical skills to go deeper.
But not only is their fundamental approach questionable (why would you trust a model that complex with no opportunity to validate it?), but their implementation was filled with careless mistakes:
https://pubpeer.com/publications/3FB983CC74C0A93394568A373167CE#6 https://pubpeer.com/publications/3FB983CC74C0A93394568A37316...
https://gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/backstage-story-the-oct-2023-correction-to-pekar-et-al-e167080e957d https://gillesdemaneuf.medium.com/backstage-story-the-oct-20...
They partially addressed this in their erratum, but made minimal changes to the language of their conclusions despite the Bayes factors changing by factor of ~10.
- kelseyfrog 2y agoAssuming P(Wuhan|natural) and P(Wuhan|research-related) are mutually exclusive, exhaustive, and sum to unity then can you explain how one probability can increase without the other decreasing? If the presence of virology institutes lowers the probability of zoonotic spillover then a great defense against zoonotic spillover is simply building a bunch of virology institutes.
- tripletao 2y agoI think you may have your conditional probabilities backward? P(research-related|origin-place) and P(natural|origin-place) do sum to one, since those are mutually exclusive and exhaustive outcomes. P(origin-place|research-related) and P(origin-place|natural) don't, though. For example, if "origin-place" is "anywhere in the universe", then they're both exactly equal to one, so they sum to two. If it's "Mars", then they're both approximately zero. The virology institute (again, not just any virology institute; the single largest collection of novel related viruses in the world by far) doesn't decrease the probability of natural pandemics. It increases the probability of research-related pandemics, so natural becomes a smaller fraction of that larger total.