zlacker

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It all comes down to burden of proof. The more circumstantial evidence of a lab leak piles up, the more reasonably open-minded people will tend to shift their priors in that direction.

You will only accept hard evidence, yet you are aware that parties in China have actively removed some possible evidentiary sources. And others in USA promoted a campaign to shut down lines of enquiry, whilst withholding relevant information.

Many disciplines use Bayesian statistical models. In this case it may be the only way to "prove" a lab leak - assuming that were actually true.

I understand how this makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. I hate that. It would certainly be better to have hard evidence. I belive we have to reserve judgement in it's absence. And keep investigating both avenues.

>>loveme+(OP)
Statistical models work great for well defined problem spaces like the probability of rolling a die in a particular way. You can reason in your own mind the probability of aliens or extinction events or lab leaks or anything really, but it doesn't get you very far (IMO) in proving anything.

To paraphrase Wernher von Braun - "Hard data is worth a thousand expert opinions." :)

>>passiv+U5
You seem to be conflating subjective and opinion on the one hand with statistical on the other.

Actually, Bayes statistics works great in poorly defined problem spaces where we can update our priors as new information becomes available. Just like in the issue under discussion.

Your example of rolling dice is Frequentist, not Bayesian. We wouldn't use Frequentist stats in this domain, for the reasons you mention.

>>loveme+(OP)
For me the things that sticks out is that they found the origin of the original sars in mere months, but nothing when it comes to Sars-cov-2. I don’t know how big animal reservoirs can be tbh.

Btw A conspiracy theorist doesn’t change his conspiracy when new evidence comes to light. So if you are a critical thinker, you just want to know what happened there, whether lab or natural origin (or a combination of both?)

>>prox+8s
As I remember for SARS-1 it was bats via palm civets sold in wet markets.

It would be interesting to see an updating Bayesian model played out over 18 months of investigation into SARS-COV-19 natural origin with no result so far. Absence of evidence is not proof of non-natural origins, but it does shift one's priors.

Thanks. I guess beyond the stereotypes there's no actual conspiracy theorists. Just people reasoning imperfectly with imperfect data.

>>loveme+Zh
>Actually, Bayes statistics works great in poorly defined problem spaces where we can update our priors as new information becomes available. Just like in the issue under discussion.

Can you give me a few comparable scenarios where it worked great?

>>passiv+WU
One of the techniques is Bayesian search https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/dmr/Notes2019/7-Ba...

I don't know whether Bayesian search is currently being used to search for the unknown reservoir species from which SARS-COV-19 jumped to infect humans (assuming a natural cause).

Under this approach, the longer the search goes on, the more we may lessen our confidence in the prior assumption that it was a natural infection.