Scientific opinion on how the SARS-CoV-2 virus got into human beings has not changed much over the past year. The greatest probability is that a human caught it from an animal; a long ways down in probability is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Nonexistent probability is that it is a biological weapon.
Most human diseases have come to us from animals. We know the origins of some of them. Studies of this kind take years and even decades. We have known about SARS-CoV-2 for a year and a half. Many similar viruses are known to exist in bats.
Those studies now can call on genome analysis. A number of virologists and epidemiologists make this their career. A professional who spends all their time on this has a wealth of knowledge that is never published – their last conversation with a colleague, the ways that ideas have gone wrong in the past, and much else that goes into their judgments. A professional in a given field also has a sense of how to evaluate new developments. Without this background, it’s easy to cherrypick data and publications, even without realizing it.
The popular writers who have been pushing the idea that the possibility of laboratory escape has been unthinkingly neglected have none of this background. They may not have thought about it for the last year, but that is not a significant consideration. Nor does their evaluation of the probabilities of various scenarios.
In particular, Nicholas Wade’s article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists should not be used as a reference. Wade demonstrated his ignorance of genetics in a book in which he argued that racial differences are genetic. Much of the argument on the transfer of SARS-CoV-2 depends on genetics. Likewise, Donald McNeil, Wade’s former colleague at the New York Times, supports Wade.
Much of the argument over laboratory escape is that Donald Trump and his people had this one thing right in the overwhelming cascade of racism and antiscience that they blasted out through 2020. But why? Whatever they said about laboratory escape was within a blame-China frame, free of evidence. In the same way, once Wade proved his inability to understand an essential part of the argument, I dismissed him.
There is so much being written on this subject now, that heuristics are necessary to weed out the garbage. That is one of them. Another that I use is seeing stuff that’s wrong in an article. I then discount the rest of the article.
A stopped clock is right twice a day. There are some things right in all of these. But when those things are combined in a faulty frame, they become meaningless or worse.
And so we come to what I think of as the bro culture pushing the “lab leak theory.” Words are important, and they know it. Scientists say “laboratory escape,” as I do here. The phrase “lab leak” is very, very recent. It’s an attractive alliteration, helps the phrase to stick in the mind. Where did they get that terminology?
The bros include Nate Silver, Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, David Leonhardt, and others. All well-off young white men with large media platforms. Most of them also felt that they were more qualified than the epidemiologists to decide when and whether masks and other non-pharmaceutical interventions are necessary. The media culture they are in favors being the first with the hottest, often contrarian take. They have been the primary promoters
There may be a story in how they became aware of this “great failure of the media” they now excoriate. Yesterday, Christopher Ford, Donald Trump’s Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation, published a striking open letter on both Medium and his own website. There is a lot to the letter; it seems primarily to be a response to criticisms of him in a Vanity Fair article that my heuristics told me to reject. Within the letter, however, is a documented story of how two of the minions Mike Pompeo inserted into Ford’s agency set about crafting a story of China’s developing SARS-CoV-2 as a biological weapon. As Ford tried to stop them, they burrowed in further, keeping their activities from him.
The simple question is where the bros got their tips and whether those tips are related to the disinformation campaign developed in Ford’s shop. Certainly the zone is being flooded with mis- and disinformation, as Steve Bannon recommended.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
Parfigliano
Assholes gonna be assholes.
Tom Levenson
Thank you for this, Cheryl.
I have an ancillary take to add, which I’ll try to get to later today (promises, promises). But for now, to me the key element in this post is your wildly under appreciated (by my media “fiends”) point about the significance of domain-specific knowledge. Sub-sub disciplines know things even closely allied ones do not.
When I and my colleagues teach student science journalists, we emphasize this. You need to get exegesis on a new development from someone who really understands what’s being said. You don’t get that by talking to, say, a synthetic biologist, about epidemiology. (And no, that example was not chosen at random, alas.)
Cheryl Rofer
@Tom Levenson: Thanks, Tom. As you know from our Twitter exchanges, we agree on this, with different emphases, so I’m looking forward to what you have to say.
The longer I look at this, the more I become convinced that it’s a Bannonite tactic to flood the zone and tar science and scientists. Today Marco Rubio went after Anthony Fauci. And I wish the bros could get beyond their egos to see how they are being used.
Tom Levenson
@Cheryl Rofer: I think FL Democrats should be flooding the advertising zone now with a “what’s DeSantis hiding” campaign. Dragging Rubio into it.
Florida’s COVID record is mostly hidden, because, so my prior goes, it sucks. Rubio and De Santis face elections in which a full accounting of the COVID disaster would weigh against them. We need to hammer them now, early on (c.f. Obama v. Romney) to set the terms of the more public campaign to come
ETA: I think you’re spot on re Bannon and his tactical approach. This is maskirova aimed at the next elections, nothing more. Time to see what unpardoned criminal acts he’s committed.
Zelma
Thank you for this, Cheryl. I have diminishing hope for the future of truth or accuracy in a culture where the sensational prevails. This “controversy” is so clearly an effort to deflect attention from the failures of the Trump administration to deal with COVID.
Cameron
Once the idea of “alternative facts” entered our discourse, we were doomed……
VeniceRiley
True for Covid. True for Ebola. True for Saint Bernard. true for bengazi….. It’s a waste of a wish.
RepubAnon
This scenario plays off a few media axioms:
This is part of why lies run round the world and become perceived reality while truth is still hitting the “snooze” button…
Cervantes
You have to think that if it was a laboratory escape the Chinese are doing all they can to make sure it doesn’t happen again, so what this hypothesis really ought to do is make the U.S. take a good hard look at its own biosafety labs and make sure they are secure. Remember the anthrax mailings?
susanna
A very informative explanation, Cheryl, many thanks. I learned from this article. And so many want recognition, validation of their unproven ‘theories,’ or ego enhancement and influence in a way without thorough investigations or understanding of the problematic ‘facts,’ they choose to skirt around. Greed goes far beyond finances.
They’re the expendable foot soldiers, while the major planners and plotters like Bannon restring the puppets. “When will we ever learn!….”
No worries, we’ll continue keeping on until this political hell freezes over and sinks.
MattF
I think that when they started attacking Fauci, the jig was up. This is something a bunch of RW ratfuckers worked up over a pitcher of beer.
Spanky
@Cheryl Rofer:
You make it sound like they’re oblivious to it, and I suspect that for at least some of them, they’re not oblivious, but willing.
Roger Moore
@Cheryl Rofer:
My gut feeling is that they’re OK being used as long as it gets them clicks. It’s a fundamental problem with modern journalism, especially the personal branding school of people like Silver and Yglesias. When you’re directly profiting from the clicks, the temptation to go for the clickbait gets very difficult to resist.
JaySinWA
I see them as willing accomplices as well as useful idiots. They want to see a world remade in their own image. They assume they will be the in the masters club of their brave new world. “No one you see is smarter than me!”
ETA I seem to be late to this party.
Graham
One of the most frustrating things is talking to ‘these people’ about vaccines, COVID, or any number of stupid conspiracy theories…they use the Gish Gallop and you start to try to take their points one by one and realize the futility of the task. I am not an expert by any means, but I know the scientific method and can call out the glaring BS. Yes, they cherry-pick data and hide in the gaps of current knowledge and draw conclusions that the data does not support. It would be nice if the media would try to help the public understand stuff, but most of the so called arguments are so whack that they are not even wrong. How long, oh lord?
Soprano2
I’m not sure it was the first time, but I was listening live to the Diane Rehm show where this term was used for one of the earliest if not the first times by Scottie Neil Hughes, a Trump backer. Diane and the other guests, as well as I and a lot of other listeners, were shocked to the core by the use of this term. It was a precursor of things to come.
Cheryl Rofer
@Graham: This is exactly why I am avoiding the discussion of details and instead talking about more “meta” issues like where the information is coming from.
Here’s a great article for understanding the scientific issues.
Jamie
Yglesias is insufferable, pretty much a nonstop stream of tedious contrarian shit. No surprise to see him on this bandwagon.
BruceFromOhio
Interesting bro demographic, thank you for highlighting that.
Hence the ease with which a coordinated disinformation campaign finds it’s campaigners.
Or, what @Parfigliano said.
Roger Moore
@Graham:
One of the key problems with today’s news media is that it continues to give attention to people who have blatantly and repeatedly lied to it. Once you know you can’t trust a word out of someone’s mouth, you need to stop listening to them. If they’re so important you can’t ignore them, at least don’t repeat what they say verbatim. When you catch them lying, the story is that they were lying about X, not the details of their lies.
MattF
@Jamie: Yes, Yglesias is insufferable and generally just wrong. Assumes his readers are lazy. And Silver has been chasing clicks for a long time.
Major Major Major Major
There’s obviously a huge amount of useful idiocy going on, but I do think it’s being used by many to completely dismiss the possibility of a laboratory escape, even though any virologist worth their salt will tell you there’s not enough evidence to make a conclusion at this point (though the current evidence, plus priors, leans heavily to zoonosis).
Graham
@Cheryl Rofer: It makes it difficult when they are not interested in evidence. Tell them to take a question and try to disprove their answer instead of trying to confirm their bias and they look at you like a two headed baby….
Starfish
@Spanky: How can I too make the big bucks on substack if I don’t tell wealthy racists what they want to hear?
Anoniminous
“My ignorance trumps your expert knowledge” is so American it might as well be written into the Constitution.
BruceFromOhio
@Cheryl Rofer:
Which is itself curious – to what end is this tarring? There’s a distinction between lizard-brain conning for clicks and donations from rubes, and targeting a specific community for take-down. The former is easy to understand, the latter massively underestimates the capacity for science (and scientists) to defend itself (and themselves). Or are the fascists just mad at Fauci because he survived the change in the executive, so he’s today’s flavor?
steve g
Many of the reporters quite literally do not know what they are talking about. Donald McNeil is impatient for the SARS-CoV-2 animal reservoir to be found – it’s been a whole year already! He has no idea how long it actually takes. I see stories of how a lab escape might have occurred, which often are not even self consistent. Inconvenient facts are worked around with on the spot ad libs and no concern for the fact that they do not form a coherent account. The actual genetics involved are elaborate and convoluted and give me a headache when I try to make sense of it all. The idea that the origin question can be adequately addressed in a news blurb is just ridiculous.
Gozer
@Cheryl Rofer: “Always wrong, never in doubt.”
Cheryl Rofer
@BruceFromOhio: Scientists are the quintessential fact-based community and thus the ultimate enemies of the Bannon-Trump approach. And Fauci had the temerity to disagree with the Great Orange God.
Starfish
@BruceFromOhio: This distracts from the fact that Biden has had a pretty good COVID response by making it look like he wants to hide this one true thing. It also amplifies the Sinophobia where people’s Chinese grandmas are getting punched do the powerful people heightening racism.
Is the answer to this question going to make much of a difference in how we behave? No. Is creating concern about this question going to heighten racism and create doubts about Biden hiding something and put us on more precarious footing with China? Possibly.
Graham
@Roger Moore: When, shortly after the election, the media started immediately cutting away from TFG when he started lying, and calling out the lies…I was flabbergasted. First time in my life that I remember the media refusing to broadcast lies. Of course that did not last long….
RepubAnon
I think it’s due to the media’s Contrarian Syndrome:
* Contrarian views always get attention, and show an “open mind.”
* If the Contrarian is proven correct, they get lots of praise – if they’re wrong, their take is flushed down the memory hole.
Example: Remember all the hype about hydroxychloroquine from various contrarians promising “one weird trick” to cure Covid? Remember any of them being criticized later for their baseless assertions?
joey5slice
@Cheryl Rofer:
You’ve finally gotten me to comment after lurking for about a decade. I owe you a debt of gratitude!
I am an avid reader of all of the “useful idiots” you describe, and I’m just not seeing the views you’ve ascribed to them in their long-form written pieces on the topic.
I avoid Twitter at all costs, but I know you and they are all active on that platform. Is this piece (and your others on this topic) a reaction to what you’ve seen on Twitter?
What I have seen Yglesias and Chait write in their long-form platforms is that the non-crazy media largely dismissed the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan lab as a kooky conspiracy theory (this aligns with what I recall from last summer), when in fact most experts would not have gone so far. Instead, the consensus I have seen both then and now is that the stronger likelihood is animal-to-human transmission, but that we don’t know how it happened yet and shouldn’t rule out the possibility of a lab accident.
Acknowledging what we don’t know is an underappreciated skill, and one that most scientists I’ve interacted with take seriously.
Now, it is true that people who were screaming “LAB LEAK!!1!!1” were mostly doing so in bad faith and with nefarious motivations. But the fact that bad people were taking one extreme position doesn’t mean that good people should take the other extreme position, even if that other extreme is much more likely. If we don’t know, we should say we don’t know! We can say “we don’t know, but those bad people are probably wrong, and even if they end up being right this time it is still the case that they are bad people who are advocating for bad things” – but that’s not the same as saying “Those bad people definitely wrong about this.”
That’s the argument I’ve seen your “useful idiots” make. It is one I agree with. I’m curious as to whether you are reacting to something different.
Roger Moore
@Jamie:
The problem with both Yglesias and Silver is that they’ve both built up narrow areas of expertise where they genuinely know their stuff. If Yglesias limited himself to talking about housing and mass transit, and Silver restricted himself to talking about statistical analysis of polls and sports, they’d both be really valuable resources. But instead they wind up trying to play general-purpose pundit and saying a bunch of total BS.
MattF
Good OT news. The Oregon State rep who literally opened the door of the State Capitol to RW thugs has been expelled from the legislative body by a vote of 59-1.
Alison Rose
@Roger Moore: Indeed. The problem with a lot of men (particularly but not only white men) who are smart in one or more specific areas is that they think they are equally smart in every area. They never seem to second-guess themselves or to even think second-guessing themselves is a thing that would ever need doing, because they are Smart™ and can never possibly be Unsmart™ about anything.
Anoniminous
The lab leak BS has as much supporting evidence as the “theory” Lizard People from Gryzzyx injected it into our bio-sphere.
Starfish
@joey5slice: That take is not as rational as you make it out to be. The story has been the same for a whole year. The story was not generally dismissed. It was generally considered. Then, nothing changed.
After a year of nothing changing, these voices decided that it was the most important story ever to denounce people who may have made the story that existed a year ago seem less important than it was without considering any of the consequences of their actions. Will this make our relationship with China worse? Will this get more grandmas beat up in San Francisco?
The story is not that important. It does not need an immediate answer. In time, there will be an answer.
Why are these folks bringing a sudden urgency to it? Why is it so important to yell at people for stories that they did a year ago right now?
Alison Rose
@MattF: LOLOLOL the dude himself was the only No vote. Oh that’s good for a chuckle.
topclimber
@Spanky: If people at least have good will in thought and deed, I might invest in an intervention on their behalf.
Given scarce resources and the righteous anger many a jackal feels when wondering why they didn’t get the cushy opinion jobs so many in the Village have snagged–I will pass for now.
patroclus
Jonathan Chait is 49 – I’m not sure if that’s considered all that young.
I’m also not sure how this really matters politically. It’s an interesting scientific question, to be sure, but to matter politically, one would have to go down Bannon’s rabbit hole about how the CCP is malevolent and a threat to the world and how they would deliberately inflict a killer virus on the whole world and blah, blah blah… But I’ve actually lived in China for awhile and since 1978, the CCP isn’t exactly what it was during the Cultural Revolution and most of them are arch unrepentant money-grubbing capitalist-roaders that you could find anywhere and aren’t exactly looking to overcome running dog imperialistic colonialism anymore rather than making lots of money.
So if the “bros” are Bannon’s useful idiots or not really doesn’t seem all that important because the whole premise seems ludicrous. But feel free to call them out on it anyway!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Problem in finding a clear answer to this question is Dude Bro culture is rigged for this kind of group think. The dude bros failed to control the disease so they a looking to scapegoat someone, anyone, for their failure.
Jake Gibson
If it is a bioweapon, it is not that good.
Disruptive, but with too low a fatality rate to soften a country enough for easy conquest.
dmsilev
@Alison Rose: Nate Silver has deliberately built his personal brand around “generalist is better than specialist” (his whole “fox vs. hedgehog” thing). To be honest, it reduces the amount of trust I have in his actual specialist expertise.
Quicksand
@patroclus:
YES HE IS. For, uh, reasons.
Starfish
@Quicksand: A lot of the bros come across as younger than they are because their ideas require you to credulously believe that they fell off the turnip truck yesterday. #ConorFriedersdorfIsOlderThanIThoughHeWasByALot
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Jake Gibson: I thought bio weapons were mostly revenge weapons. My country gets nuked we seed your country with antrax kind of thing.
Major Major Major Major
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: the “COVID as a bioweapon” take is so obviously insane that we should probably ignore the people who say anything vaguely positive about it for the rest of their lives.
Cameron
@Starfish: And I think that’s where the counterpunch has to be: “No matter where the coronavirus came from, Donald Trump’s response was a disaster that needlessly cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. More than incompetence, ignorance and stupidity – willful, evil dishonesty.”
joey5slice
@Starfish: I haven’t taken the time to do a serious review of all media coverage of the story from a year ago, but I can tell you that, if you had asked me three months ago “Could the virus have leaked from that lab in Wuhan” I would have said “No, that’s a kooky conspiracy theory that has been debunked.” So I do think that there were some media stories that pushed this line.
When Yglesias and Chait got on the beat, I realized that I was wrong and that the experts were less certain about the origins of the virus than I thought. Good, I learned something. Or rather, unlearned something that wasn’t necessarily true.
Now, is this the most important thing in the world? Hardly! In fact, I’ll quote Chait on the importance of finding out for sure whether the virus came from a lab:
But generally, I prefer to be better-informed than worse-informed, and it turns out that I was poorly-informed on this issue. I am glad that I am now better-informed.
Chait’s pieces on this topic have mostly been about group-think and the danger of allowing our (correct!) desire to call out evil warmongering liars get in the way of telling the truth. I think he has a point. I think calling him and Yglesias, Silver, and Leonhardt useful idiots demonstrates that he has a point.
But again, I suspect that Cheryl is reacting to arguments they have made that I haven’t seen.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
I’m so sick of this shit. In 100 years, Sean Hannity’s cryogenically preserved head is still going to be telling anybody who’s willing to listen that it was a Chinese weapon.
Baud
@MattF:
Bipartisanship!
quakerinabasement
@BruceFromOhio: …and plain common sense from people like Cheryl is only seen by we jackals.
Cameron
@Cameron: I forgot “laziness.”
Matt McIrvin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: You generally want a biological weapon to be very lethal, to incapacitate or kill rapidly, and to not be super-contagious so that it kills the people you want it to kill. Anthrax fits the bill in all those ways.
That’s why the stories of HIV being a bioweapon were ridiculous–it ticked two of those boxes, but it had a years-long latency period (which helped it spread, because the person would be infectious during most of that time). Who would want a weapon that kills people three years later?
With COVID-19, it’s so contagious that it easily gets out of control, but it takes several days to even affect a person and it’s not all that lethal. In every way, not what you want in a biological weapon.
Cheryl Rofer
@joey5slice: You are leaving out the part where Matt Yglesias stripped out all the anti-China propaganda from Tom Cotton quotes so that he could make Cotton’s argument that it might have been a lab escape look reasonable.
And so on. In fact, your last paragraph quotes a bad-faith argument that the bros are making. NOBODY that I have seen has argued that the Trumpies are bad people and therefore the opposite of what they say is true. If you read the OP, you will see that I make quite a different argument, about the worthlessness of stopped clocks.
Silver has argued quite explicitly on Twitter that the experts are wrong – again and again and again.
Baud
@joey5slice:
I’m not following this origins investigation because it’s not that important. But if Silver and Chait are constantly flogging this issue, which it sounds like, then it almost doesn’t matter that the content of what they are saying is measured. The unwarranted constant repetition of a subject that one knows is used by bad faith actors for propaganda is problematic in itself.
Major Major Major Major
@joey5slice: This story has taken a sort of predictable trajectory IMO:
Cheryl has been pushing against the last two bullet points for a while now, and justifiably so. But again I do think this whole hullabaloo (ETA: which does not include ppl like Cheryl) is leading a lot of folks to declare that zoonosis is the only possible origin.
Chetan Murthy
A different take on what Cheryl (rightly) wrote: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/08/daniel-daviess-one-minute-mba.html
Don’t trust liars, even if they appear to be telling the truth *this time*. Lots more, all good.
Alison Rose
@dmsilev: Yeah, and it’s frustrating because it makes me give less of a shit about what he has to see in the areas where he is actually skilled. Though I still love the line from Jim Newell back in……..whatever year it was that Silver made his basically perfect election predictions: “Nate Silver taught numbers how to fuck.”
quakerinabasement
@Alison Rose: Oh, boy, I’ve seen so many of these. You describe the syndrome perfectly. My first experience with this type was back in the 80s when I worked in retail. As soon as a 30-ish dude got promoted to a VP position, he suddenly became The Man Who Knows All.
Spanky
@joey5slice:
No expert is going to make absolute claims as to the absence of something, in this case evidence of a “lab leak”.
And this is where the anti-science people live and thrive. “Aha!” they say. “You can’t prove that it didn’t come from a lab”. Well, hell no, you can’t prove a negative. So that’s where they pound their point. And that’s what gets clicks and air time from the scientific illiterati.
Roger Moore
@BruceFromOhio:
I think the key idea is that if they can prove China did something wrong with the virus, it will exonerate Trump’s response. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me- Trump’s failed response to the virus is more or less independent of whether it was natural or artificial- but it seems to be the core idea. I think they’ve recognized this problem and are trying to expand the concept by setting up Faucci as a saboteur who is the reason for Trump’s failed response. Don’t be surprised when the rest of the people on Trump’s COVID taskforce get thrown under the bus, too.
Major Major Major Major
Another thing that bothers me is people pointing to China being secretive and evasive about this as evidence of wrongdoing, rather than evidence of China being an authoritarian Orwellian nightmare state where people are reluctant to even take credit for good things lest those good things one day suddenly be evil things.
Alison Rose
@quakerinabasement: Yep…TFG was basically the epitome of this. Except of course he had no knowledge or smarts in any area whatsoever, except maybe “How to be the most racist landlord ever”
Chetan Murthy
@joey5slice:
Do you agree that it’s possible that there are pink flying elephants? B/c sure, you haven’t seen any evidence that they exist, and sure, all reputable scientists agree that they have no evidence for their existence, but really, ya never know, amirite? The mistake you’re making, is in thinking that anything in science is certain. Nothing is certain: all is about the probabilities. When scientists rule out the possibility of a “lab escape”, they’re really saying “given all the evidence we have, and the history of other pathogens, we find this pretty damn unlikely.” And this is *precisely* the way a reputable scientist talks about the laws of gravitation: “sure, maybe tomorrow you’re gonna find a counter-example, but really, we pretty strongly doubt it, and would be happy to take the other side of any bet you wanna make, buddy.”
It should mean something that all the *actual* area experts have concluded that the probability of “lab escape” is minuscule at this point. And that the ones pushing this theory are either grifters, racists with an axe to grind, or various forms of nonspecialist.
And I return again: I am open to the possibility that when I drop my next apple, it will fall up; that is part of understanding how science works — to be open to that possibility. But I am also pretty convinced that it won’t, b/c I know about all the evidence for this.
Pretending that even in the absence of any evidence, and in the absence of any *history* of it happening in the past, that we have have to take this “lab escape” seriously, is the height of unseriousness.
ETA: And I remind you of what Keynes said: “When the facts change, I change my mind; what do you do, sir?” The difference between us rational people, and Tom Cotton, is that we’re actually willing to change our minds when new facts warrant; Cotton is not.
Steeplejack
I was somewhat surprised to see this story in the Post yesterday: “The media called the ‘lab leak’ story a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Now it’s prompted corrections—and serious new reporting.” Written by two “media reporters,” very both-sidesy—which tends to give the “lab leak” side more weight than it should have. Nicholas Wade and Donald McNeil are both quoted with only glancing references to their controversies.
My main reaction was that the story seemed to fan the “lab leak” flames merely by devoting so much ink to the “some say/others differ” “controversy.” It does feel like a push is coming from somewhere.
Cheryl Rofer
@Roger Moore: People are trying to launder their reputations of the Trump stink, too. I may write more about that later.
JoyceH
@MattF:
Me too. Fauci is more popular than any of the people bashing him. It might work with their base, but their base already dislikes Fauci. Outside the rabid ranks, their attacks will only make them less credible.
Remember that the right spent eight years calling Obama a socialist. Upshot was that instead of making Obama less popular, they wound up making socialism more popular!
Cheryl Rofer
@Steeplejack: That was a horrible article. I called out the authors on Twitter, but no response.
Crusty Dem
@Tom Levenson:
THIS!!
I’m a professor at an R1 research university, a biologist who regularly uses viruses in my research, and I am vastly more knowledgeable on the subject than many of the regularly quoted “experts” driving the lab leak theory. I have an infinitesimal knowledge of virus genetics and study of wild viruses, but I can smell bullshit coming from those purporting “proof of” (or even evidence for) lab leak.
It’s really a political attack on true experts, as long as the water can be sufficiently muddied, blame can be directed at the outside (China) rather than Trump and the GOP. This started as an absurd accusation of biological warfare by the Chinese, which when it didn’t have traction rapidly evolved into it’s current form, which allows the ignorant to make a claim that appeals to everyone from the skeptical to the true conspiracy theorists. It’s vile propaganda that found a home with the “bros” who love to run their counter takes..
Roger Moore
@joey5slice:
I don’t follow all these guys, but I do follow Yglesias on Twitter, and he’s definitely talked about it a lot. And this is part of the objection. Even if someone like him is making his points perfectly*, spending a lot of time talking about it makes the issue seem more important than it is.
It’s the same basic objection as what we said about Hillary’s emails. Even if the reporting was 100% factual and correct, the amount of time spent on it exaggerated its importance and drove more important issues out of the news. If the lab escape issue is as unimportant as Chait says it is, then he shouldn’t devote much time to it. His explicit and implicit messages conflict.
*He isn’t. We all know Twitter tends to squash nuance, which is critical on this issue, and Yglesias loves to troll on Twitter, which makes it hard to figure out exactly what he’s trying to say.
Hoodie
One thing that particularly bugs me about this is that just because something is theoretically possible, that doesn’t make it likely. It’s like Occam’s Razor was thrown out the window when Barack Obama became president. Given the known vulnerability of the American public to stupid conspiracy theories, it’s not enough to provide a “balanced” approach in reporting this stuff, much less the clickbaity stuff put out by online personalities who have no expertise in this area. A responsible journalist is much more careful than that. This is the kind of story that should be handled by true science journalists who write for technical publications, not guys that predict baseball scores or write various noodlings about the virtues of licensing barbers.
The other thing is that, even if there was a lab leak, there is probably no way in hell we’ll ever get the Chinese to admit it. And, if it didn’t happen, there is nothing the Chinese can do to convince the wingnut world that it didn’t happen, so they won’t give out a bunch of sensitive information in an attempt to convince nutjobs on Fox or Newsmax. This is simply another Benghazi.
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: The only information of value I’ve really seen is that we (worldwide) apparently do research on viruses like this at a pretty meager biosafety level (BSL-2)? And like, it is documented that WIV was doing this. So maybe we should not do that.
Chetan Murthy
@Roger Moore: Or as John Oliver demonstrated about Climate Change, when he had a ‘statistically representative debate’: https://youtu.be/cjuGCJJUGsg?t=176
joey5slice
@Cheryl Rofer: I’ll take your word for it that Yglesias was selectively quoting Cotton; when I read his piece, I was surprised about how reasonable Cotton was sounding.
I carry no water for what Nate Silver or anyone else says on Twitter.
It sounds like you agree that it was a problem if anyone got the impression that zoonosis was the only possible origin, and my point is that I did get that impression, and I have Yglesias and Chait to thank for correcting that.
But per @Major Major Major Major: pushing back against the overcorrection is valuable work. To the extent folks like Silver are specifically telling us to ignore the experts and listen to them instead, they should get that push back. So thank you for that.
CaseyL
A lot of the problems dealing with stupid people is they don’t understand that “you can’t prove a negative.” They don’t understand logic, as a structure for thinking, at all.
OT: Did anyone else catch AG Garland’s announcement today? It was a good one.
He threw considerable (but very polite) shade at SCOTUS for the Shelby decision.
He’s throwing the entire weight of the DoJ Civil Rights Division into the fight over voting rights. He announced they’re doubling the number of lawyers in the Civil Rights division, and going after states enacting restrictive voting laws, against states and entities threatening election officials (all the way from Secs of State to volunteer poll workers), and also going after states allowing post-election audits which violate a whole lot of Federal laws protecting post-election processes and material.
He said Congress must act, but that the country can’t wait for Congress to act, so the DoJ will act – without a new VRA or S1, if necessary.
I am hopeful about this development.
joey5slice
@Chetan Murthy: I don’t have the expertise, but my understanding is that people who do have expertise would not put “lab escape” and “pink flying elephants” in the same category. Or even the same ball park.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the consensus here, but I think most experts would say “lab escape” is reasonably possible but unlikely, where as the experts in whatever field covers “pink flying elephants” would say that they are theoretically possible but we are as certain as we can be that they do not exist.
Those are very different.
joey5slice
@Roger Moore: This is a fair point. Again, I don’t go on Twitter – I’ve only seen Yglesias write about it once. If this is a constant drum beat, that’s wrong. I do think in general the subject is getting way more attention than it deserves.
joey5slice
ETA: Accidentally posted the same comment twice. Is this where I say “FYWP”? I’m still new at this.
Chetan Murthy
@joey5slice: Indeed, you’re correct. My point is, that *nobody* says that any physical “law” is ironclad. We’re *all* open to the possibility that some new behaviour will arise. And so, it is all about judging the probabilities.
And as you wrote, you “don’t have the expertise” to judge. Now, that’s not a sin. When I, a computer scientist in a specialized sub-field, want to understand the state of play in another sub-field, I consult *experts* in that sub-field. I don’t read NYT reporters screeds on the subject and pretend that that can help me reach an informed judgment.
Everyone you cite, is precisely that: various forms of nonspecialist or pundit.
ETA: or worse.
Chetan Murthy
@joey5slice: I think it would be instructive to go read Dan Davie’s “one minute MBA”. It’s about why your first reaction should be to recoil from believing something that has Tom Cotton and Roger Stone pushing it.
Roger Moore
@joey5slice:
I would say the key way lab escape and pink flying elephants are similar is that they’re both theoretically possible but there’s no actual evidence for either one. Lab escape is more plausible, but it’s not enough for something to be possible. Before I spend much mental effort on it, I want some positive evidence to support it. That evidence has been sorely lacking.
jl
@Chetan Murthy: My take is that the virology people think probability of a natural zoonotic event is something >> 95%, and lab leak would be very freaky accidental release event due to a viable virion someplace in the Wuhan lab that even they didn’t know they had. Or, a worker in the lab bringing contamination to the lab from field work, which they don’t consider really a lab leak, but just the same thing as risk from people who work in meat and fur industry.
What is missed in the discussion is that they are finding viruses in nature from Japan, through southern China all the way down to Malaysia that are more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than anything that the Wuhan lab had, or could have had, given the areas where they were collecting specimens of bat spit and poop.
So, more evidence coming in that prospective ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 are widespread throughout the region.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
The only “evidence” I’ve heard is that three researchers in the lab got sick at the same time.
But I also recently read that there was a mine where a bunch of people got sick, suggesting they got it from bats or other creatures in the mine.
Even if a substantial portion of the country wasn’t easily subject to propaganda, it does make sense to figure out the origins of the virus. But I understand that process could take years.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud:
This is right. We need to know. IIRC, either SARS-1 or MERS, it took 7yr to find the animal intermediary host.
rikyrah
@CaseyL:
I thought that there would be a post about it.
jl
@Baud: The workers getting sick and going to the hospital doesn’t mean that much until we get more specific info. There was a serious flue epidemic in China around that time, and in big cities in China, people are formally admitted to hospitals for things that would be clinic or urgent care visit here with no acute care admission.
And in the Robert Garry interview, he said that apparently intelligence officials specializing in sources and methods had serious problems with the sick lab workers report.
Cheryl Rofer
@Baud: The mine thing is addressed here.
Cheryl Rofer
I’m headed out to my piano lesson. Will check in later.
Baud
I also think pundits who write about subjects that they know are being weaponized by propagandists have a responsibility to not just provide “straight” analysis, but also to affirmatively push back on the misuse of their articles by propagandists. But I think they care more about clicks.
Another Scott
@Soprano2: It seems to have taken off when noted liar KAC used the expression in January 22, 2017 and yet she kept being validated with a mass-media platform for months and months and months afterward.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
jl
Also important to note that the initial lab engineering or lab release theories were contradicted by historical facts, or more research into the genetics of SARS-CoV-2.
So the conspiracy theorists changed their story, like all good BSers do. Now their alleged conspiracy, or crimes, or whatever, and cover up, go back almost ten years. All the way back to a large number of people and organizations covering up the discovery of a secret virus almost identical to SARS-CoV-2 in a special sinister mine shortly after 2010.
And note that if there were bats flying around into mines and caves with direct ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 where the Wuhan lab was sampling bats and intermediary species, that in itself increases the probability that the crossover to humans was a natural zoonotic event, and increases the probability that it could travel from the mine to close to the lab.
And, it is just impossible to ignore the fact that a large element of the lab leak proponents have malicious, ideological motives, or just plain insane and obsessive (I think the point of mental impairment) issues.
jl
@Cheryl Rofer:
” I’m headed out to my piano lesson. Will check in later. ”
I think it’s pretty suspicious that an anti-lab leaker has a very convenient piano lesson, just as the instant expert BJ sleuths are really digging into the mystery.
Major Major Major Major
@jl: I don’t get why it’s so hard to evaluate the question directly. Why do I have to care what Pompeo says? I can read actual scientists.
Hoodie
@Baud: I assume your tongue was firmly planted in your cheek. Pundit ethics? From friends who work in the journalism business, the economics are brutal. Everything is about generating clicks and building a brand, even for relatively straight reporters. The US media space is so thoroughly commercialized, their ethics are starting to resemble those of the Ferenghi.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: What I meant was the the lab leaker proponents and the sad-sack pundits need to remember that the lab leak theory has been, is, and will be, used dishonestly by a bunch of the usual Trumpster subjects.
And laypeople trying to educate themselves need to remember that too.
There is some conflict of interest in the virology community. But there is always some element of that in these kind of disputes, and very small potatoes compared to carnival of BS and bad faith on the other side.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
Because questions of *fact*, where the proponents of one view are known liars and fabricators, have a history of being decided in favor of other views.
Or as Dan Davies put it: “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.” Also: “Fibbers’ Forecasts Are Worthless.”
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/08/daniel-daviess-one-minute-mba.html
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: I replied before your addendum. Indeed, you can read actual scientists; that’s what I do. But most people read NYT reporters and Nate Fucking Silver. So it’s important to note that when these jokers quote known liars, we can discard their writings and move on. B/c reputable scientists don’t quote known liars.
jl
@Baud: I absolutely agree. I should have just referenced your concise and very on-point comment.
But, so out of character for Baud XXXX!!, I guess it didn’t register with me at first.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy:
That can be your heuristic, I’ll read what the scientists have to say.
ETA: ah, I see we got our wires crossed. I think I’m just kind of over complaining about Nate Silver I guess. It doesn’t help me personally find truth, though obviously it’s great when eg Cheryl calls him out.
Roger Moore
@Chetan Murthy:
FWIW, when referencing the “1 minute MBA” blog post, it would be polite to link back to the original blog post rather than a secondary source citing it.
Another Scott
@joey5slice: Repost – WHO.int April 2021 report (120 page .pdf)
These terms have particular meanings and were chosen carefully.
“Extremely unlikely” means not impossible, but way, way out there on the distribution curve. Probably much less than 1% chance (is my guess).
(Yes, the WHO team didn’t have as much access as they wanted. But the international scientists on the team live on their reputations. They’re not going to throw their reputations away with wild assertions that are not backed up by evidence. The WHO management and directors have a political position that has different constraints.)
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tom Levenson
@Crusty Dem: Exactly.
The goal here is to ramp up anti-Chinese sentiment and to whitewash the failures of Trump and GOPsters more generally.
Everything else is just noise.
Tom Levenson
@Chetan Murthy: 14 years for SARS. Basically we now understand MERS, but not all the holes have been filled in yet.
jl
” The simple question is where the bros got their tips and whether those tips are related to the disinformation campaign developed in Ford’s shop. Certainly the zone is being flooded with mis- and disinformation, as Steve Bannon recommended. ”
I also think it is clear that it hasn’t occurred to the ‘lab leak’ pundits to start some research on the relevant topics, like even go to Wikipedia to read up on the history of natural zoonotic events, historical lab escapes, how viruses work, how to read DNA and RNA coding… Naah, just go from an easy to understand hot take they see. Also, too much work to follow the details of how the conspiracyy theorists theories and accusations have changed, and become ever more implausible, as more establish facts emerge that contradict their previous stories.
For example, I can believe that maybe the Chinese government covered up some serology from lab workers. I can’t believe there is a gigantic ten year conspiracy covering up a mystery virus, that the Wuhan lab created fake viral genetic codes out of whole cloth and put them into registries and published research articles and used them for funded grant proposals. Now we are in ‘moon landing was faked by NASA’ territory.
trollhattan
Speaking of idiots, this is the least surprising thing you’ll learn
todaythisweekall year,I’d bet the house that MTG knows not thing one in the Bible.
jl
@Tom Levenson: From my reading, there are more suspected natural zoonotic diseases for which we are still haven’t determined the ancestral crossover bug, than for which we have high confidence.
I think even for the first SARS, we don’t have an animal and a whole viable virion that is the culprit, we do have some sites, with bats and critters, where there are also a bunch of viruses with all the ingredients and > 99 percent similarity.
If any BJ expert has the precise story, please let me know.
Major Major Major Major
@jl: I thought we knew SARS1 was was from bats via civet cats.
jl
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, but I don’t think we have a population of animals with a specific virus fingered. Just a population of bats and civets rolling around in a viral population that is almost identical SARS and which also have all the genetic material that is in SARS.
If anyone can give more exact info, please post. I’m trying to remember where I heard or read that.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
I would take that bet. I’m confident she knows some of the most popular Bible stories- Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, etc.- even if she doesn’t know any details. I wouldn’t be surprised if she knows nothing more of the Bible than what you’d get in a child’s book of Bible stories, though.
jl
@Roger Moore: I think she knows far more about which talking points about the Bible sells the best with her political base.
Anoniminous
I find it curious the phrase “I am not an expert” is never followed by “so I will shut up and learn something.”
puzzling
MattF
@Roger Moore: Davies has a nice, breezy style— but he deals with hard questions and has to be read carefully. That said, I recommend his recently published book, ‘Lying For Money’. Lots of fascinating information about various con artists.
Chetan Murthy
@MattF: I haven’t read the book, but I did read his Guardian longread article on the same subject. 100% agree with you. And he has interesting conclusions — surprising too. Well worth the read. Also, everything he writes is worth reading. Everything.
WhatsMyNym
Speaking of unreliable media sources –
Uncle Cosmo
@Matt McIrvin:
Only if you’re a terrorist intent on killing for killing’s sake.
If you’re including BW as part of a military operation against a determined enemy, you use incapacitating agents. A dead body lies there until Graves Registration gets around to “tagging and bagging.” A live but extremely ill soldier is decidedly uninterested in fighting and might just surrender at the first opportunity. Even if s/he doesn’t, a casualty ties up significant personnel and transport resources to stabilize, evacuate, hospitalize and treat – resources that could otherwise be lobbing ordnance in your troops’ direction.
IIUC, back when the USA had an offensive BW program, one significant agent in the BW arsenal was able, in very low concentrations, to inflict a nasty influenza-like illness on basically healthy young & middle-aged people such as would be found in an opposing army. It could cause death in the very young, very old, or immuno-compromised – but those weren’t the ones targeted.
(NB These are my recollections from the better part of 15 years working under contract to the US Army in CB defense.)
Bill Arnold
@susanna:
What we learn is how to spot (probabilistically; no certainty generally possible) the puppet strings and thence the possible puppeteers, without falling into a illusory pattern perception[1] (also called apophenia) rabbit hole. The puppet strings are usually present; “organic” emergence/amplification is rare when stakes are high/motives are strong.
Doable. One approach is to continuously randomly disregard links (including one’s emotionally favorite bits) in the inference network(the “theory”) to see if it still works. (In machine learning “dropout” is a related method.)
(Adam may have links to established methods.)
[1] e.g. Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural (2017, Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Karen M. Douglas, Clara De Inocencio)
jl
@Uncle Cosmo: From what I’ve read, that is why so much research into anthrax as a biological weapon. It’s known from natural events (poorly understood large explosions of spores from grasslands) how anthrax can kill mass quantities of livestock. We also know methods to control and limit the effects. Can develop strains of anthrax that are very difficult to transmit between humans. We have some unpleasant but effective vaccines
My interpretation is that an anthrax bioweapon can be engineered to work like a WWI gas attack. Good choice for a depraved and sleazy weapon of mass human destruction that can be controlled.
MattF
@Bill Arnold: My view is that people generally misunderstand the meaning of ‘random’. It’s commonly thought that ‘random’ means ‘without any pattern’. But real random data is full of patterns— in fact, maximizing entropy means you will see all possible patterns.
Anoniminous
@jl:
The UK Research and Innovation Organization:
“The new SARS-CoV-2, is most closely related to a group of SARS-CoVs found in humans, bats, pangolins and civets.”
joey5slice
@Anoniminous: I’m not sure if this was directed at me, but if so – me commenting here for the first time in over 10 years was my attempt to learn something.
I read Balloon Juice because it keeps me informed and calls attention to stories that are important but often over-looked by my other sources of information. But this series of Cheryl’s has been very surprising to me.
I thought that Yglesias and Chait’s pieces on this topic were enlightening, so I was surprised to see Cheryl call them useful idiots. I wanted to know more, so I asked.
Since then, most responses I’ve received have assumed a level of bad-faith trolling that I certainly didn’t intend. It seems like you would have preferred I not comment at all. Frankly, I think I would have, too. Maybe I shouldn’t post this comment, either.
Oh well. I appreciate the good-faith efforts of Another Scott, Major Major Major Major, Roger Moore, and Cheryl to help broaden my view on this topic. I’m going to stop reading the comments section now, though – it turns out I’m probably not cut out for the rough-and-tumble life of a Jackal, and I’ll just go back to lurking.
sab
@Roger Moore: I remember nearly twenty years ago, when Yglesias was a very young pup, he and his friends online discussimg whether an emergency room trip for a dogbite who be free or not. This was when he was writing about healthcare policy. I think he tries to be accurate, but jumping in on subjects way over his head has never fazed him.
jl
@Anoniminous: I not sure I understand your comment. I was talking about the first SARS. And the fact that no one has found a specific virus that has an extremely high probability of being THE cross over bug. We just found population of animals and viruses living together that have a very high probability of producing the crossover bug and the animal that carried it to humans.
So the idea that we found a population of viable virions that is the specific culprit is a little inaccurate.
Uncle Cosmo
Homo sap will go extinct due to the vast majority’s utter inability to comprehend probability and statistics.
(Edward Teller claimed the cause would be the species’s “inability to emotionally understand the exponential function.” He was wrong – we will kill ourselves off long before that betting a livable climate on the environmental equivalent of drawing to an inside straight.)
Major Major Major Major
@joey5slice:
You’ll have that on certain topics now and then. Don’t let it get to you, stick around! We need fresh blood :D
jl
@Major Major Major Major: Hope that person comes back to comment. As we see here, accusations of bad faith burn bridges. Should be quite sure about situation and have a very good case you can argue before making an accusation of bad faith. IMHO.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
Containing all patterns is indistinguishable in practice from containing no patterns at all. The problem is that people have a wrong idea of what randomness really looks like. For example, when people are asked to generate a random set of coin flips, they wind up having fewer long runs of heads or tails than truly random data. IOW, we naively expect random data to be negatively correlated rather than uncorrelated; this is so common it’s known as the gambler’s fallacy. Because of that, we read more into truly random data than we ought to.
Amir Khalid
@WhatsMyNym:
As a Liverpool FC fan and a journalist, I agree that The Sun is a worthless newspaper.
Roger Moore
@joey5slice:
Please don’t give up yet. People around here have a tendency to be suspicious of new nicknames, and they’ll often assume bad faith when someone new shows up and “just asks questions”. If you keep commenting, people will know you’re a member in good standing and will be a lot more likely to cut you some slack when you ask honest questions.
Fair Economist
@Major Major Major Major:
Zoonosis isn’t the only *possible* origin, but it’s the only origin which merits investigation at this point. Right now any attention to lab escape is like looking for brain cancer in a person with appendicitis symptoms. I mean, it’s *possible* their agonizing cramps and fever are just a side effect of brain damage, right?
IMO the #1 priority is cataloguing coronaviruses at raccoon dog and mink farms in China. If you’re looking for something that “can’t possibly be a coincidence” then the #1 feature is that this thing was capable of spreading in those farmed animals from the get-go.
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
I’m not sure if I would go quite that far. Zoonosis should be the null hypothesis, and that’s where we should focus most of our attention, but lab escape is enough of a possibility that it should be investigated.
James E Powell
@Spanky:
This is what I recall reading from Nate Silver along with his conclusion that “if you can’t disprove that it came from the lab, then it’s a 50/50 chance that it came from the lab.” I found that to be strikingly absurd.
Uncle Cosmo
@jl: Pulmonary anthrax is the deadly variety: the deep lung is an ideal locus for spores to multiply unmolested to the point where antibiotic therapy is ineffective. (IIUC when the infectious burden has gotten large enough, the bacilli killed by the antibiotics release enough toxins to kill the host. That’s why they started anyone who might’ve been exposed to the anthrax letters on cipro ASAP.)
Pulmonary anthrax is not readily transmissible between people. The human respiratory system is damn good at intercepting and killing off stuff trying to invade it. Droplets released by an infected person are rarely of the (very restricted) proper size range to reach and lodge in the deep lung of whoever breathes them in. Again IIUC, Bacillus anthracis can be grown in a bathtub; depriving it of moisture causes it to sporulate, and it is then readily “freeze-dried.” However, releasing those spores as aerosols in that size range (which is what biological-defense folks mean by “weaponization”) is a damn difficult (and highly classified) process. (What freaked the CBD community out about the anthrax letters was when they found the spores wafting out of the corners of the envelopes, because they were in the proper size range – and had clearly been engineered by someone who knew how to weaponize them.)
The other thing to understand is that the body’s defenses are good enough that it takes a respiratory dose of roughly 10,000 spores for the victim to have an even chance of contracting pulmonary anthrax. That’s known as the median lethal dose, or LD50, and it can be found in the unclassified literature. (Then again, so can the socalled Teller-Ulam configuration for a thermonuclear device…)
The other notable thing about anthrax spores is that they are very, very hardy. Gruinard Island off Scotland, where the Brits tested anthrax bombs against tethered animals during WW2, was napalmed several times later to decontaminate it, with scant success. Unprotected people were not allowed onto the island until 1990.
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: Evidence currently supports the null hypothesis (so for conspiracy nuts it’s proof of a lab leak) but yeah, that doesn’t mean like, stop looking into things. I feel like most of the virologists I read are on the same page here.
Uncle Cosmo
Those innocent of probability and statistics like to cite the misnamed Law of Averages that things tend to even out, so if a coin flip produces a “head,” it’s natural to expect the next one to produce a “tail.” The proper name for the phenomenon is the Law of Large Numbers – because it can take one fuck-ton of trials before the cumulative results approach in relative frequency the event probabilities. The first rule that Robert P. Abelson propounds in his excellent book Statistics as Principled Argument is
ETA: When I taught Stat 101 I’d tell the class, I just flipped this coin 9 times and got 9 straight heads. What do you think I’ll get if I flip it again? Of course most of them said “tails.” Then we’d work out the probability of getting the prior result with a “fair” coin (0.5 to the 9th or about .002). And I’d ask them, What is more likely, a result that only happens once in 200 times – or that the coin is actually biased to come up “heads”? Maybe even has two heads?? And the light would dawn…
Like quantum mechanics and relativity, probability and statistics go against the way our hominid brain is wired. And that’s odds-on ;^D to render H. sap one with the dodo and the dinosaurs someday soon…
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
The key, to me, is that you have to test your hypotheses by looking at evidence that might contradict them. So even if we believe it was most likely zoonosis, we sill have to look at alternative theories to make sure we haven’t gone down a blind alley. That doesn’t mean we need to give those alternative theories equal effort, but investigating the lab is likely to be a lot less effort than finding the natural host in any case.
catclub
@James E Powell:
Wow.
Thus, if you cannot prove it did not come from a blue asteroid lined up with the big dipper, then that possibility is ALSO a 50-50 shot.
James E Powell
@catclub:
This is from his tweet explaining his rationale:
Not exactly evidence-based, statistical analysis
Bill Arnold
@Hoodie:
See also The opposite mental process to Occam’s razor — avoiding simplicity and making as many (potentially) unnecessary assumptions as possible — is sometimes referred to as Occam’s duct tape.
And also How conspiracy theories emerge—and how their storylines fall apart (June 26, 2020, Jessica Wolf)
[1] Long not-completely-convincing paper, looking at Bridgegate and Pizzagate as examples.
An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and storytelling on the web (Timothy R. Tangherlini, Shadi Shahsavari, Behnam Shahbazi, Ehsan Ebrahimzadeh, Vwani Roychowdhury, June 16, 2020)
Roger Moore
@James E Powell:
Absolutely a lazy heuristic. An ordinary person might have an excuse to use such a lazy heuristic, but not a journalist whose job is to understand the issues and explain them to their audience. A decent journalist should dig deeper! Investigate the experts’ credentials to see who actually knows what they’re talking about and who’s talking through their hat. Or maybe develop some actual expertise on the issue yourself so you can judge their arguments by their quality rather than their tone.
Major Major Major Major
@James E Powell: this is what too much time on Twitter does to your brain. Amazing stuff.
TKH
Having the expertise, but no communication skills is also a problem. David Baltimore knows his virology, but he stepped right in it and fanned the flames of “lab creation”. He has walked it back, but that of course does not make the news. Pamela Bjorkman wrote to the TWIV crew expressing regret about the phrasing of the Science letter she signed that fanned the flames of the lab leak hypothesis.
On the other end of spectrum, Kristian Andersen from Scripps, who had a great twitter feed (and I hate Twitter) deleted his account as he got tired of dealing with the conspiracy mongers who engaged in character assassination.
J R in WV
@joey5slice:
You realized that YOU WERE WRONG??? No dude! You made a serious error in giving those bros any credibility whatsoever!!! They are NOT epidemiologists, not virologists, no background in biology, genetics, science of any sort.
You were WRONG when you took anything those amateurs had to say serious. Bull Shit, you have fallen for it and are spreading it here and now. For Shame!
I have many friends in the bio sciences, none of them believe this crap for a hot flash~!!~
J R in WV
@JoyceH:
Fauci is more successful, more scientifically accurate, more educated, more experienced than any of the people bashing him.
Fixed that for you. Popularity doesn’t matter AT ALL in this instance! Accuracy matters. Success matters. Saving lives matters. Fauci is successful, and saves lives. The people bashing him, not so much, not at all~!~
Roger Moore
@TKH:
I’m not very sympathetic to the “poor communication” argument. Communication is an essential part of science, especially when you get in the the echelons where Baltimore plays.
Roger Moore
@J R in WV:
It does in the court of public opinion. Trying to defame someone much more popular than you is very, very tricky.
J R in WV
@Tom Levenson:
But never forget — nothing can whitewash the failures of Trump and the GQP ~!!~ Nothing! Their failure is 600,000 fatalities just here in America, at least, and very probably way more than that already.
Because we know the GQP is lying about their fatality numbers!
joey5slice
@J R in WV: wow, man – why are you so angry at me? Seriously, I’ve already been beaten into submission – was it really necessary to come at me this hard?
What did I say that made you so upset? I’m sincerely asking. And before you answer, try to remember I’m a human being, one who, by the way, has been a 10+ year balloon juice reader and who, until today, thought he was a member of this community. A silent one, sure, but a member none the less. I’ve donated to a bunch of DougJ’s fundraisers, I celebrated Richard Mayhew’s conversion to David Anderson, I followed along with sadness and then increasing joy at Lily’s cancer diagnosis and then remarkable recovery. I felt like I fit in here.
You and your fellow commenters have made it clear that I do not belong and I am not welcome, and I doubt I’ll ever comment again. But before I sign off for good, I want to know – what did I say that got you so upset? I really didn’t mean to make anyone upset. What did I say?
Steeplejack
@joey5slice:
I don’t think you should leave. Not all the commenters gave you a rough time, although there are some that reflexively bristle at the appearance of an unfamiliar nym. And, as Major^4 said, we can always use new voices.
And J R has been known to go into red-faced rant mode from time to time. This one was undeserved.
TKH
@Roger Moore: It’s not an argument I am making, it is an observation.
Apparently the ability to say “Thank you, but no thank you” when the WaPo or the FTNYT calls for a snappy quote is not widely distributed.
way2blue
Thank you. To me, the whole ‘lab leak’ extravaganza seems much like a dog chasing its tail.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@MattF: another proud marquette university alumnus, mike nearman.
maybe mike gousha & charles franklin can launder nearman’s rep with a sinecure at the mu school of government. i bet 538 blatherer julie azzari will be down with it.
LongHairedWeirdo
To expand on this, I’m a database support engineer, and I can tell you, this doesn’t just refer to epidemiology – there are a lot of people who know precisely enough to be dangerous. (You may have heard the quote, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so drink deeply, or taste not the pieirian stream…”)
If people have trouble connecting to the database, they *always* assume the database must be at fault – even though it’s almost *never* at fault. (two exceptions: MySQL with a mismatched packet size, and SQL Server with TCP Chimney)
People always assume memory will help – that’s not a *bad* assumption, but it should never be your first guess.
High CPU is *not* a performance problem – unless you have higher CPU, without getting more work done.
These aren’t stupid people – some are great programmers, or system administrators. But they simply don’t get databases, on a gut level. They just don’t know enough. They know all the concepts they need to know, but they haven’t spent months, years or even decades, finding out how those concepts apply specifically to database engines. That’s why a good support engineer is worth his or her weight in whatever is expensive per unit mass.
There are some questions that need just ordinary knowledge to work with – others need people who know how to deal with those specific questions.
It’s important to note that there’s no specific reason to think Covid-19 escaped from a lab. There are reasons to think it didn’t – there are bits that anyone engineering a virus would have included, that aren’t present in Covdi-19. But sure, it’s *possible*. We shouldn’t ignore the possibility – we should just remember there’s no evidence supporting that hypothesis.