zlacker

Recent related threads:

How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184998 - May 2021 (235 comments)

More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160898 - May 2021 (341 comments)

The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (537 comments)

Edit: also these:

Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452 - April 2021 (618 comments)

Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540458 - March 2021 (985 comments)

The Lab Leak Hypothesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 - Jan 2021 (229 comments)

>>dang+(OP)
@dang An hour into this submission, this was flagged despite ~100 upvotes. Was there anything off about the flagging behaviour?

It seemed like a reputed source article of interest to a lot of folks here, so I was surprised.

>>actuat+9h
Anonymous "intelligence sources".... Sounds as legit as the super micro back door.

Meanwhile the actual real people on the WHO team said they investigated and didn't find anything more than seasonal flu.

>>elp+Hn
> Meanwhile the actual real people on the WHO team said they investigated and didn't find anything more than seasonal flu.

The thing is people doesn't trust WHO.

I think people have somewhat good reasons not to trust WHO blindly now.

I can't say however if this is a good or a bad thing.

>>skinke+uo
Yes. You would be excused for trusting WHO a year ago, with lots of good faith.

If you do not share even a small dose of doubt over WHO by now, well I guess we could label it as agree to disagree.

>>actuat+9h
I tend to flag most of the COVID lab leak stories. They’re perfect fodder for pointless flame wars: no one here is in a position to confirm or disprove the theory, and there are no consequences for being wrong. So everyone can just argue their point of view vociferously, while no one learns anything.

If the lab leak theory was easy to confirm, it would have been done already. Maybe someday it will be confirmed or ruled out and I’ll happily upvote that story. This isn’t it, though, even if it is the WSJ.

>>elp+Hn
Ah yes the same WHO that refuses to even say the word Hong Kong.

>>snowwr+2D
yes, especially these stories have been nearly entirely poo-flinging, but most covid stories largely exhibit the same tribalist impulses rather than critical examination of not only mechanisms, risks, and likelihoods, but also sociologies and real-world empirical evidence. ideally, commenters would present evidence without adding any ‘us vs. them’ color, but those underlying emotional impulses are hard to ignore, especially with various media relentlessly prodding it on for their own benefit.

>>snowwr+2D
> If the lab leak theory was easy to confirm, it would have been done already.

If a zoonotic event in the wild with SARS-COV2 was easy to confirm, it would have been done already.

Either hypothesis has circunstancial evidence. But there isn't an equal effort of investigate both candidate theories.

>>snowwr+2D
snowrestler says>"If the lab leak theory was easy to confirm, it would have been done already. Maybe someday it will be confirmed or ruled out and I’ll happily up-vote that story. "

Yes. These medical researchers are very good and very persistent so I trust them to do their detective work. They have always been my heroes.

For example, a recent claim is that they have found the earliest case of AIDS/HIV in humans. An excerpt:

"^By DANIEL Q. HANEY, AP Medical Editor, CHICAGO (AP)

Scientists have pinpointed what is believed to be the earliest known case of AIDS an African man who died in 1959 and say the discovery suggests the virus first infected people in the 1940s or early '50s...

The virus in the sample had degraded, but the scientists were able to isolate four small fragments of two viral genes. One gene holds instructions for assembling the outer coat of the virus, while the other is code for one of the proteins the virus needs to reproduce...

HIV mutates quickly. About 1 percent of its genetic material changes each year. So the scientists compared the genes from the 39-year-old sample of HIV with those carried by current versions of HIV."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-earliest-aids-case/

Take time to read the (short) article. It is a credit to our medical/biomedical scientific researchers and explorers and a glowing tribute to what good science can do.

>>actuat+9h
The flags look normal. All but one or two of the users who flagged it are legit HN contributors who have been here for years. We can only guess why users flag things, but if I look at their flagging histories it seems clear that, as usual, (a) some have a strong view about the topic which causes them not to want the story to be on HN, while (b) others just have a problem with sensational/inflammatory topics or otherwise feel the post wasn't in keeping with the site guidelines. In my experience, the A-flags usually aren't enough to win out over upvotes on a story; it takes a coalition between A-flags and B-flags.

HN's front page is mostly determined by a tug of war between upvotes and flags [1]. It's common, indeed typical, for a sensational story to get a lot of initial upvotes, make the front page, and then provoke a "WTF why is this on HN" reaction from others, who flag it. With enough of the latter, the story falls off the front page, leading to a wave of "WTF why is HN censoring this story" from the first crowd. This is the cycle of life on HN. Recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27240048.

We do sometimes intervene to switch off flags, but only when a story is intellectually interesting and contains enough significant new information (SNI) to create conditions for a substantive discussion [2]. I considered doing that in this case but decided not to, because (a) it's not obvious that this is SNI, and (b) there have been several lab-leak threads recently. The most important thing to understand is that interestingness decays under repetition [3, 4].

If there hadn't been major threads on the topic recently, would we have turned off flags on this one? Well, the odds of that would be higher—but I still think probably not, because the new information in the story probably isn't enough to support a substantive discussion. If you look at those past discussions, you'll notice that in nearly all the cases, the articles themselves were among the most substantive ones that exist on the topic, and in most cases included SNI.

My GP comment had two purposes: it points people to interesting relevant discussions, but it also pre-empts the objection "WTF why is HN censoring this story". Users who post the latter have usually not yet learned to use the search box at the bottom of every page: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

>>DoingI+731
Natural emergence of a disease obviously has far stronger priors. Two possibilities are not equally likely just because there are two of them.

>>dang+(OP)
@dang, just wanted to say thank you for providing related threads, and also thank you for your even-handed moderation even on items you might disagree with; your care really shows on contentious threads and certainly elevates the level of discourse on HN.

>>dang+GL1
Thanks for the clarification. :)

>>dang+(OP)
I posted this 17 days ago. Also flagged and probably died because of that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27089774

Washington Examiner does not have the pedigree of a NYT but the writer discussed in that piece wrote for NYT and Science. I think it is a topic is noxious hence I will flag it thing. :shrug: