Edit: Because the former doesn't sound like much of a conspiracy, aside from a cover-up afterwards.
From there, the only safe bet is to act as if it were intentional.
This is a controversial concept, but it is the rational choice. Never assume that someone who harms you is doing it accidentally. Even though it is more often than not the case, you still have to protect yourself with the possibility of malice in mind.
I believe there's a logical fallacy for that:
Motivation affects how we react to a theory with no evidence, when coming from Tom Cotton vs. a former CDC director.
Btw, Tom Cotton's claim was that it was a government biochemical weapon's lab, that's not Redfield's theory.
I have edited my comment to reflect that.
> Motivation affects how we react to a theory with no evidence, when coming from Tom Cotton vs. a former CDC director.
There's another fallacy for that:
Understandably, there are few researchers who would like their scientific speculation to become part the often colourful narratives Donald Trump and his followers tell each others.
Edit: edited to reduce snarkiness and polemic phrases
[1] For an example of Trump trying to find "material" that he can use for the stories he tells his following, see this transcript of Trumps call to the Georgia election official at the bottom of the page: https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr...
Just like assassination of Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand brought domino effect and caused First World war the same would happen now.
The news prints these stories then they become the truth in the minds of many people.
Let's go with "hypothesis" for the sake of argument:
In this case, we have a basket of competing hypotheses, none of which have any solid evidence going for them.
Yet, some of these hypotheses have not been dismissed as conspiracy theories. Those were the hypotheses that conveniently fit a "humans encroach on wildlife"-narrative.
I'm just pointing this out as "interesting", I'm not arguing that this circumstance gives validity to one hypothesis over another.
For one, if we assume it was released from a lab and that was intentional, the what was the intent?
If it was to do what happened — kill millions and devastate the global economy — then the right reaction is a very severe cold war or possibly outright war. We literally could not allow it to happen again.
But if it was released from a lab unintentionally, the right reaction is to spare no expense, regulation and treaty to secure such labs from this ever happening again. This would go for all labs like this, not just Chinese ones.
These are entirely different reactions with entirely different costs and long-term ramifications for peace and stability for our world.
Not to mention, the intentional release scenario doesn’t really make sense. E.g., China couldn’t damage our economy without damaging their own. And if you’re going to choose where to start the pandemic, why start it in your own country near a bio-research lab? If it was started intentionally, it makes more sense that China was framed. (Still doesn’t make a lot of sense though because what’s the rational motivation?)
So we have prior evidence...so we give more weight...
The investigators should examine all possibilities, of course.
Repeating the most “exciting” theory on Opinion News night after night...
Dismissing the theory outright has never and will never be an option. I don’t like that this is what the team decided to do, and I suspect there is a lot of tension in this investigation.
You must've missed out on previous HN discussions. I remember these guys in particular being paraded around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBQplOe8-LE
I did find their tone quite dismissive, and the verdict in the title leaves little room for interpretation.
> What was dangerous was pointing the finger at China and saying “this is all their fault!” without any evidence.
True, but that's irrelevant to the plausibility of the hypothesis.
> There STILL is not evidence, but that doesn’t mean it should not be investigated as a source.
Arguably, it's still dangerous to do exactly that.
Assigning weights to these circumstances can be done arbitrarily, to the point where the lab escape hypothesis becomes the most plausible one:
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...
There was at least one paper calling it "natural selection", and some folks who read it agreed that it ruled out laboratory accidents:
"The high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246597925288816640
https://www.newsweek.com/claim-that-coronavirus-came-lab-chi...
> Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republicans have a favorable view of QAnon, according to a recent YouGov poll. According to other polls, more than 70 percent of Republicans believe Mr. Trump legitimately won the election, and 40 percent of Americans — including plenty of Democrats — believe the baseless theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-...
https://stratechery.com/2021/mistakes-memes-and-foreign-grou...
Working with the default hypothesis of "everybody is out there to destroy me" is not only a sign of paranoia, but in most cases also wrong (because in reality not everything is about you and accidents happen).
So starting with the default hypothesis of malice has the serious downside that you will constantly feel threatened even if looking back there was no rational reason to feel threatened. This is not only incredibly exhausting, it also will lead to a "crying wolf"-type of problem, if the perceived threat rarely turns out to be one. And when something really dangerous is going to happen, you might not be able to react in a rational way (because all your previous reactions were irrational ones).
What I think is important to rationally tackle that question is also to factor in confidence. I will always assume innocence (just because it makes me a happier person), but that doesn't mean my confidence in the other person being innocent is always big. If there are signs that other person is acting in malice, my confidence that they are innocent will shrink. Once that confidence crosses a certain threshold I will assume malice. This can also happen within a split second, so I don't see how this would not be the rational way to do this. If you go get bread at the bakery, you wouldn't assume the baker wants to poison you per default right? So you would assume their innocence unless there are clear indicators they are a baker that poisons their customers. The other way around, if a man jumps out of a bush in a dark alley and comes at you with a knife, you wouldn't assume they are innocent, because there are really strong indicators they are not.
So what is irrational is to have incredible high confidence in either innocence or malice when in fact you are in a situation with lack of evidence to either direction. And this is the case in this situation.
> The poll gave people a sort of test to see if they could spot misinformation like the coronavirus was created in a lab or that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.
> 40% of poll respondents believe one of the biggest conspiracy theories that's out there about the virus, that it was made in a lab in China. There is no evidence for this. And scientists say that the virus was transmitted to humans from another species. But I talked to people all over the country who responded to our poll and they still believe this.
That's literally what a gain-of-function experiment is. These are done to study how viruses interact with humans so that we can deal with them better. There's nothing sinister about it, such experiments are happening all over the world and they did happen in Wuhan.
No, because at the same time they'd simultaneously make it look accidental; with a dictatorial, authoritarian country like China they could keep the evidence that it was premedicated from coming to light _and_ they could count on their politically fractured victims reacting in such a way as to further their goals.
I notice that the matter of HCQ getting effectively shut down in the US due to the fraudulent Surgisphere paper and it _didn't raise any alarms at HN where someone asked WHY someone went through the trouble of planting a fake paper IN THE LANCET_.
It's been brought up here but noone notices the implications.
When did Hacker News become so damn intellectually incurious about these sorts of things?
The latter is simpler—it is reasonable to think a lab that maintains and studies viruses similar to Covid-19 accidentally allowed one to be released. It does not imply an intent to misuse the virus.
I have not watched the video, I’m sorry. I’ll try and get to it later.
Did you just reply to the sentence I quoted or did you click the links? The tweets are very obviously not limited to that: https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246598376377831425
And honestly, it's hard to go from "this happened via natural selection" to "nobody dismissed this coming from a lab". Even if it's technically possible, surely you can understand why readers' message from this is not "this could have come from a lab".
Speculate all you want.
I’ve never heard of the escapes. Perhaps we watch different news sources and you spend a lot of time reading different stories.
I’ve got 55 years of hearing about viruses jumping from animals so my priors are different.
AIDS, SARS, swine flu,...
By the way, the last thing I want to be shown is some random sight on the Internet as evidence. Climate change deniers live by these sites
It doesn't imply intent to use as a bioweapon, much less release it in their own population.
The hypothesis that this was a gain-of-function experiment that went awry due to lax security still does put a lot of pressure on Chinese authorities, on top of the poor handling at the beginning of the outbreak.
> Wait, what was that last one? “The baseless theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab”? I feel pretty certain that COVID-19 wasn’t deliberately manufactured and deployed as some sort of biological attack, but where does “gain-of-function” experiments end and “manufacturing” begin? Even if it ends up being true that the lab-leak hypothesis is wrong there is actually zero question that the Wuhan lab was manipulating coronaviruses to make them more lethal. To that end, the primary evidence we have that the lab-leak hypothesis is false is that China says it is false.
This gives a new perspective to Roose’s recommendations (well technically, the recommendation of the experts he consulted, which all happen to align with Roose’s previously stated beliefs) that the Biden administration set up a “truth commission”, appoint a “reality czar”, audit tech company algorithms, and “fix people’s problems” with a social stimulus.
The lab was doing gain of function experiments, which most people would agree would constitute “being made in a lab”.
I don’t necessarily think the lab leak hypothesis is the truth, but it certainly is a real possibility. And if it was an accidental leak then it would very likely have been a virus modified via gain of function.
expanded abilities of law enforcement to surveil, including by tapping domestic and international phones;
eased interagency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counterterrorism efforts; and
increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify someone to be charged with terrorism.[1]
The critic of Bush who spent the first three years of his term under investigation by the US's intelligence agencies was. If they'd have been doing their job maybe we'd know more about who commissioned the Surgisphere paper, and it would have actually made the news.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note these:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
$TOPIC -> Trump -> Hitler is a textbook example of what that last guideline is asking you not to do. We're trying for an end state other than default internet hell.