7 ms·

I'm genuinely curious what happened, with some positive prior probability on all hypothesis, and I'm sad that in all likelihood I will never find out.

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
If you're going to take into account prior probability you should consider the fact that every single pandemic and disease that has ever infected humans did not leak from a lab and instead evolved in nature, usually in animals. In other words: Prior probability of zoonotic provenance: 100% Prior probability of lab leak: 0%
- tripletao 2y ago
  The 1977 flu killed about 700k people, and is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a failed vaccine trial. I've seen legalistic attempts to define that as something other than a lab accident, but there's no question that the virus spent 1957 to 1976 in a lab freezer. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/936217 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/936217 No prior pandemic is known to have arisen from a genetically engineered virus, but the technology for that has only recently come to exist. No one had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but the risk was obviously still there.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    The 1977 virus was already circulating in the population, hence why it ended up as a vaccine. Therefore, it was not a lab leak (or any human-driven mechanism; nobody's certain) that first caused humans to be infected with the virus but good, old fashioned, zoonotic transmission. >> No prior pandemic is known to have arisen from a genetically engineered virus, but the technology for that has only recently come to exist. No one had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but the risk was obviously still there. Unlike plane accidents, diseases and pandemics happened way before labs that could leak them. We're talking about prior probabilities here, yes? "How often has something happened in the past". Whether the probability of lab leaks increases now that there's a possibility of a lab leak is a conditional probability: "given that a lab leak is now possible, what is its probability?". And btw that will remain very low because of the infinitesimally low prior probability of a lab leak.
    - tripletao 2y ago
      > The 1977 virus was already circulating in the population, hence why it ended up as a vaccine. The 1957 flu evolved naturally, but it went extinct in the wild. By 1976, it wasn't known to be circulating anywhere. It then reappeared in 1977 with an almost identical genome, without the mutations it should have picked up in 20 years of cryptic spread. This is consistent with storage in a laboratory freezer, and very little else. The exact site of reintroduction isn't known, but it's generally believed to be a vaccine challenge trial in China: > Although there is no hard evidence available, the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus is now thought to be the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus (C.M. Chu, personal communication). https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1141 https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1141 So the scientists who undertook that trial (or whatever the activity was) caused that pandemic. If not for their actions, those 700k people wouldn't have died. Of course a different flu virus would have circulated, but 700k was much worse than an average season. Does that not concern you? The reckless trial caused those influenza deaths, just as surely as the leak at Bhopal caused those poisoning deaths. The long chain of transmission between the site of reintroduction and the site of the deaths doesn't change the causality--if those researchers hadn't reintroduced the virus, then those patients wouldn't have died. > Unlike plane accidents, diseases and pandemics happened way before labs that could leak them. That's not a meaningful statement. Cancer happened way before radiological accidents that could induce them, and most cancer is natural; but Edison's X-ray tube nonetheless killed his assistant. When a new technology creates a new way to die, a period will exist in which it hasn't killed anyone yet; but someone can still be first. The correct guide is therefore the most similar pre-existing technologies, which in this case have already killed 700k people. It's possible that by failing to take any lesson from that, researchers at the WIV have now killed an additional 7M. If that's the case, then I hate to think what comes next.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
        Where did the 700k number come from? This was a discussion about "prior probability", according to the terminology that you introduced. I pointed out that if you really want to use "prior probability" then you have to take into account the, well, prior. probability. Of the two events you're considering. Even if you insisted on the 1977 virus being an instance of a lab escape causing a pandemic, the prior probability of that kind of event would stay zero, maybe with a desultory and lonely 1 after three or four decimal zeroes. So, zero. Are you using "prior probability" in a figurative sense? Are you saying that we should set our priors according to personal preference rather than observed frequency of real-world events? If so, well I guess you're a true Bayesian then and I salute you, but please make that clear. >> That's not a meaningful statement. Yeah, thanks a lot for the respectful debate there. You should read again the bit where I point out the difference between prior and conditional probabilities and if you really want to use the terminology "prior probability" make yourself more familiar with it.
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  Very good discussion in a sibling comment. From my side, surely the lab leak prior probability is not 0. It is possible so must have a positive probability. Not is it, a priori, a crackpot theory. The crackpot bit is when people are totally convinced of it with no or shaky evidence.
tim333 2y ago
Maybe not for certain but the probabilities for various scenarios go up and down. I used to feel like that but now feel the odds are about 99% it was a Wuhan lab doing research similar to that proposed by Ralph Baric which is close enough to certain to me. Although more detail would be interesting.

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago

If you're going to take into account prior probability you should consider the fact that every single pandemic and disease that has ever infected humans did not leak from a lab and instead evolved in nature, usually in animals. In other words: Prior probability of zoonotic provenance: 100% Prior probability of lab leak: 0%

tripletao 2y ago
The 1977 flu killed about 700k people, and is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a failed vaccine trial. I've seen legalistic attempts to define that as something other than a lab accident, but there's no question that the virus spent 1957 to 1976 in a lab freezer. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/936217 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/936217 No prior pandemic is known to have arisen from a genetically engineered virus, but the technology for that has only recently come to exist. No one had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but the risk was obviously still there.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  The 1977 virus was already circulating in the population, hence why it ended up as a vaccine. Therefore, it was not a lab leak (or any human-driven mechanism; nobody's certain) that first caused humans to be infected with the virus but good, old fashioned, zoonotic transmission. >> No prior pandemic is known to have arisen from a genetically engineered virus, but the technology for that has only recently come to exist. No one had ever died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but the risk was obviously still there. Unlike plane accidents, diseases and pandemics happened way before labs that could leak them. We're talking about prior probabilities here, yes? "How often has something happened in the past". Whether the probability of lab leaks increases now that there's a possibility of a lab leak is a conditional probability: "given that a lab leak is now possible, what is its probability?". And btw that will remain very low because of the infinitesimally low prior probability of a lab leak.
  - tripletao 2y ago
    > The 1977 virus was already circulating in the population, hence why it ended up as a vaccine. The 1957 flu evolved naturally, but it went extinct in the wild. By 1976, it wasn't known to be circulating anywhere. It then reappeared in 1977 with an almost identical genome, without the mutations it should have picked up in 20 years of cryptic spread. This is consistent with storage in a laboratory freezer, and very little else. The exact site of reintroduction isn't known, but it's generally believed to be a vaccine challenge trial in China: > Although there is no hard evidence available, the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus is now thought to be the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus (C.M. Chu, personal communication). https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1141 https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1141 So the scientists who undertook that trial (or whatever the activity was) caused that pandemic. If not for their actions, those 700k people wouldn't have died. Of course a different flu virus would have circulated, but 700k was much worse than an average season. Does that not concern you? The reckless trial caused those influenza deaths, just as surely as the leak at Bhopal caused those poisoning deaths. The long chain of transmission between the site of reintroduction and the site of the deaths doesn't change the causality--if those researchers hadn't reintroduced the virus, then those patients wouldn't have died. > Unlike plane accidents, diseases and pandemics happened way before labs that could leak them. That's not a meaningful statement. Cancer happened way before radiological accidents that could induce them, and most cancer is natural; but Edison's X-ray tube nonetheless killed his assistant. When a new technology creates a new way to die, a period will exist in which it hasn't killed anyone yet; but someone can still be first. The correct guide is therefore the most similar pre-existing technologies, which in this case have already killed 700k people. It's possible that by failing to take any lesson from that, researchers at the WIV have now killed an additional 7M. If that's the case, then I hate to think what comes next.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
      Where did the 700k number come from? This was a discussion about "prior probability", according to the terminology that you introduced. I pointed out that if you really want to use "prior probability" then you have to take into account the, well, prior. probability. Of the two events you're considering. Even if you insisted on the 1977 virus being an instance of a lab escape causing a pandemic, the prior probability of that kind of event would stay zero, maybe with a desultory and lonely 1 after three or four decimal zeroes. So, zero. Are you using "prior probability" in a figurative sense? Are you saying that we should set our priors according to personal preference rather than observed frequency of real-world events? If so, well I guess you're a true Bayesian then and I salute you, but please make that clear. >> That's not a meaningful statement. Yeah, thanks a lot for the respectful debate there. You should read again the bit where I point out the difference between prior and conditional probabilities and if you really want to use the terminology "prior probability" make yourself more familiar with it.
rich_sasha 2y ago
Very good discussion in a sibling comment. From my side, surely the lab leak prior probability is not 0. It is possible so must have a positive probability. Not is it, a priori, a crackpot theory. The crackpot bit is when people are totally convinced of it with no or shaky evidence.

tim333 2y ago

Maybe not for certain but the probabilities for various scenarios go up and down. I used to feel like that but now feel the odds are about 99% it was a Wuhan lab doing research similar to that proposed by Ralph Baric which is close enough to certain to me. Although more detail would be interesting.