zlacker

>>codech+(OP)
The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill.

On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.

There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break. The oppression complex is really out of control, as if people were being visited by the secret police and forced to immediately cease all discussion about the lab leak theory. It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence. As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that.

Really seems many want to feel like they've been oppressed and silenced when that couldn't be further from reality, reaching absurd levels of delusion here.

>>sbagel+EN
The rational thing was to agree the lab leak was a perfectly decent theory from the beginning.

Saying you have ‘no evidence’ of something is not a reason to discard a hypothesis. On the contrary, it is a reason to figure out how to get more data, a reason to figure out how to falsify the hypothesis.

It’s a common logical fallacy to conflate absence of evidence with evidence of absence.

>>whidde+nT
When there is no evidence, the discussion is purely in the sphere of priors. And that doesn't make it very fruitful to discuss, as different people will likely have different priors. I think I agree that the likelihood of lab-leak was downweighted previously probably too strongly, but in the same time, I still don't see too much evidence in favor of it now.

>>sega_s+uV
What was the evidence of it occurring naturally in the seafood market?

>>whitep+pX
Uh, nobody ever claimed that the seafood marked was some sort of natural reservoir.

It was just the earliest suspected point of where the animal to human transmission happened, the reservoir was always presumed to be somewhere else.

>>Siempr+M11
The point I was trying to make is that the idea of it naturally occurring was mainstream. If you tried to guess it might have come from the lab, it'd be just dismissed completely. However, both of these claims had no evidence, so why was just one claim labeled as a conspiracy theory and dismissed entirely by the mainstream media?

Do you disagree? Do you think it might have been political?

>>whitep+n41
Historically, and happy to be proven wrong here, we've never seen a lab-leak of a novel virus cause a widespread outbreak. We have seen zoonotic transmission cause an epidemic/pandemic. So at least for me, I was working off of, "Is it likely that we're seeing something for the first time? Or is it likely this happened the way it's happened before?"