The reason you will find extremely few people with actual credentials in the science we're discussing in these discussions is that working scientists don't have the time or will to get into these debates with people who wouldn't have the faintest idea how to actually conduct the research they're criticizing.
That post I linked took like dozens and dozens of man hours to write, workshop, source, and edit.
And I wrote it so I could link it in situations like this, and not repeat myself dozens or hundreds of times.
Personally, I'm studying for the biggest exam of my professional life at the moment, and I'm procrastinating here because I find these discussions so horrifying.
This entire thread could be a valuable case study in the Dunning Krueger effect.
Not saying it's not worth talking about, but rather that the amount of time and effort it takes to refute bullshit is several magnitudes more than the amount of effort it takes to create it.
In my case, that's 10+ years studying viruses so people on the internet with no credentials can tell me I'm wrong.
And I linked to a literal mountain of evidence describing both my credentials on this topic and then an extremely detailed and heavily sourced set of arguments.
I'm not talking out of my ass, I'm sorry it sounds that way. After you have several hundred of these discussions and they keep popping up with zero new evidence, it tends to color your attitude.
Please accept my apologies
Good luck on your exam as well.
She's a geneticst or biochemist. She just uses some viruses in her research sometimes, like basically all biochemists.
Calling her qualified in virus biosafety is like saying someone with a PhD in Visual Arts is qualified as an expert in ballpoint pens because they've used them to draw. Sure they know some things about using ballpoint pens and which ones they prefer, but would you trust them to tell you how to design one from scratch? Or how to fix pens?
Not as much as some guy with a PhD in engineering and design at Mont Blanc, get what I'm saying?
I have also responded to her criticisms substance elsewhere, but she makes some big leaps in judgment that show she hasn't ever worked in a BSL4 lab before. Or studied the nitty gritty of virus genetics in nature before.
> The reason you will find extremely few people with actual credentials in the science we're discussing in these discussions is that working scientists don't have the time or will to get into these debates with people who wouldn't have the faintest idea how to actually conduct the research they're criticizing.
We have such a big problem with public perception of science. I think many people are willing to be educated, but internet forums tend to degenerate into arguments between people who think they know a lot more than they do (even in (especially?) places like HN).
Controversial idea: I think in the future we should pay researchers to spend x% of their time just interacting with people on internet forums answering questions and correcting misperceptions. The amount of disinformation out there is staggering.
The National Science Policy Network has a good Q&A site where credentialed scientists answer public questions about their subject area. I forget the URL but a google search should turn it up in a few pages.
There's a similar one called the Science Creative Exchange where scientists sign up to talk to writers in hollywood and work through scripts and make the science in fiction more accurate wherever possible.
I love both of these and have spent lots of time on them in my (ever dwindling) free time. But I'm also the guy who's commenting on a HN post when I should be studying for the biggest exam in my career (USMLE Step 1), so I'm not the best example.
You can always respond to those if you want.
Sorry if I come off as condescending but when you have this argument several dozen or hundred times, it gets really really repetitive.
And it's difficult to avoid sounding like a dick. It's not my intent, I promise.
I have pursued most of what OP posted on reddit, I am not qualified to judge the finer points, but it doesn't mesh up with what I have seen presented by other independent expert sources or common sense. So I discounted it for that reason not the one you gave.
Sorry. :(
I don't have the time or bandwidth to re-write it at the moment. But a lot of her arguments are similar to Dr. Degerin's and also Dr. Ebright over at Rutgers. They are a small minority, like the OP says.
I tend to rely on expert consensus when it makes mechanistic sense like this one does.
Nothing, no evidence we have, makes either possibility impossible. The lab leak just requires a lot more cloak and dagger and new assumptions. Occam's razer tells me to favor the hypothesis with the least new assumptions. Hence zoonotic release is more likely in my opinion. That's truly the crux of it, the rest of it is arguing over the number of angels on the head of a pin.
The problem with having expertise is the ability to see how wrong, not-even-wrong, or sideways everyone else sounds when chatting about the subject.
The problem with a phd is making sure everyone knows how little you think of them.