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by jsnell
2002 days ago
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That seems like just a fancier way of expressing TWIV's "we can't possibly know anything without lab experiments that establish the exact mechanisms, so we should do nothing" philosophy. The undeniable fact is that this variant has successfully replaced other already highly prevalent variants. That needs to be explained somehow. Could it be a founder effect? No. Could it be random chance? No. Of course a stochastic process could converge like this even with no selective advantage eventually. But the change has been too fast and too consistent in this case. Could it be a super-spreading event? No. The change has been continuous, and a single event would cause just a step-change in relative prevalance. Could it be the new variant being more transmissive, or having another similar selective advantage? Yes. Could it be an unspecified emergent behavior? I guess it could. But how are we supposed to reason about something that vague? We have a simple explanation that's consistent with the known facts, I feel that anyone proposing that it's just emergent behavior should be at least a little bit more specific. |
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Sometimes it rains when we predicted it wouldn't, sometimes we get a full blown storm we didn't see coming... And that's using advanced techniques developed over decades on a continually available complex system for which there is demand to be able to predict on a daily basis. The very nature of these things is to have unpredictable behavior... That does not mean we necessarily do not understand the governing rules, but that the emergent behavior is not reducible into a simplified description.
> We have a simple explanation that's consistent with the known facts
It's simple and correlated, but highly suspect when a significant degree of chaos adds massive error bars to the significance of that correlation.