[tripletao]

A group of authors including Ralph Baric, the father of modern coronavirology, published a letter in Science calling for investigation of all possible origins of the pandemic, explicitly including a research accident:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj0016

Last I checked, Baric still thought a natural origin was more likely; but the point is that he considers an unnatural origin sufficiently likely that an open investigation is required. The FBI assessed with "moderate" confidence that the pandemic had unnatural origin, while some other agencies assessed with "low" confidence that it was natural and the rest declined to judge.

We don't know how the pandemic originated. Nothing is proven in either direction, but mainstream consensus now absolutely includes the possibility that it originated from such a research accident. Your dismissal of that as "FUD and propaganda" now puts you in a position as fringe as the opposite would have been eighteen months ago. From your other comment, I guess you think I should have been censored for entertaining it back then. But given that the mainstream consensus has since changed--apparently without you realizing--do you believe that you should be censored for rejecting it now?

Unless you somehow become our dictator, you are unlikely to find that the censors' arbiter of truth always agrees with you. Specifically on this website, I believe that Paul Graham is our dictator; and from his Twitter account, I'm pretty sure he disagrees with you on this matter:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396787092726984707

He surely can afford to moderate as strictly as he wants. But he doesn't seem too inclined to censorship, so you got to post your comment. I'm fine with that, among other reasons because it gave me the chance to explain the basis for my beliefs, and possibly change your mind (or that of someone else reading).

As to your link, I assume you're aware that the host and guests on TWiV have advocated for and performed exactly the kind of high-risk research that may have caused this pandemic? That certainly gives them special expertise that deserves attention, but to trust only them on this question is like trusting only Monsanto on herbicide safety.

[berdario]

These are some fair points, but I have some objections:

> mainstream consensus now absolutely includes the possibility...

I don't think this is the case... Your belief is obviously different to Ralph Baric's which is yet different to the belief of those who worked in the Wuhan laboratory.

I.e. the scientific consensus was that it was extremely unlikely, Baric now says that this is less likely than the zoonotic origin, and you say "entirely possible".

You can use the catch-all "includes the possibility" to treat all of them together, but if you had to pick numbers for the probability of the lab leak, you'd likely pick different numbers than Baric or others.

I.e. just because something is not impossible but merely "extremely unlikely" it's still reckless to have our media talk about it in the way it has.

If anything, if the real consensus is that we don't know... The media should not carelessly talk about any hypothesis without also mentioning the others, and why they are more/less likely.

This is not a topic that needs to he hashed and rehashed every few weeks: the consequence of treating this like it has been done, is that now a bunch of people think that the lab peak is what actually happened, and just today I've seen another article which defends Joe Rogan by saying that there's "consensus on the lab leak hypothesis"...

I.e. if there should be censoring about this, both me and you should be censored, for not being concrete and impartial enough.

> I'm pretty sure he disagrees with you on this matter

I'm not sure what this appeal to authority wants to imply. Of course the decision process for how/when to censor it's a delicate one, and ideally left far away from millionaires who think that they are more competent than they actually are.

To clarify, just because a private person owns a platform, it doesn't mean that they should be the only ones to make rules on what contents are allowed. They can make things stricter, but they shouldn't be able to make things laxer by allowing what's otherwise illegal (obviously, that depends on jurisdiction, which is why countries censor websites via DNS or routing)

> I assume you're aware that the host and guests on TWiV have advocated for and performed exactly the kind of high-risk research

The only people who describe this as "high-risk" are also the people who believe in a lab leak being actually what happened

Do you think that EVERY "gain of function" experiment is high risk?

[tripletao]

> If anything, if the real consensus is that we don't know... The media should not carelessly talk about any hypothesis without also mentioning the others, and why they are more/less likely.

As I said in my previous comment in exactly those words, "We don't know how the pandemic originated". So I'd certainly agree that the media should make that clear. (I mean that as my personal opinion, not a call for censors to force them to.)

Given that we don't know, regardless of whether one thinks a research accident caused the pandemic with p = 0.01 or p = 0.99, I believe that an investigation of all possible causes is required. Ralph Baric and I probably disagree on the exact probabilities, but we agree on the investigation. There are many significant unexplored paths for that, even without the PRC's cooperation, including subpoenas for the records of the WIV's American collaborators.

With millions dead, such an investigation is inevitably political. You'd probably rather the investigation were left to scientific experts, and I would too; but someone has to choose those experts. In a democracy, that job goes to elected politicians. The performance of those politicians is ultimately judged by the voters. Without open discussion, I don't see how the voters could make an informed choice. (I guess the politicians could decide what information the voters deserve to know, and the voters could judge the politicians according to that filtered information; but I assume you see the flaw in that system.)

> I'm not sure what this appeal to authority wants to imply. Of course the decision process for how/when to censor it's a delicate one, and ideally left far away from millionaires who think that they are more competent than they actually are.

I mentioned Paul Graham's beliefs not because they were specially valuable in themselves, but because under present American law, he's probably the person with authority to decide what is censored on this site. If he were inclined to censor, then I don't think he'd decide in your favor.

It seems like you believe American law should be changed, by amending the constitution to eliminate the First Amendment, and the American government should exercise strong powers of censorship over such forums directly. That seems very unlikely to happen. But even if it did, a majority of Americans (including a majority of Democrats) believe not only that an unnatural origin of COVID is possible, but that it's the most likely explanation:

https://www.newsweek.com/most-republicans-democrats-believe-...

So if the American government were censoring, then do you really think they'd be censoring in your favor? If you think stronger government censorship early in the pandemic might have changed public opinion now, then remember that Trump was president at that time. If his government had had that power, then I can't imagine you'd have been pleased with how they used it.

It seems like you're hoping for censorship in the abstract, in service of perfect truth. That can't exist. Censors are humans, and censorship is subject to the same mistakes and corruption as any other human endeavor, especially those affecting the flow of political power. All of this requires human judgment; and once the wrong humans get the job, any apparatus designed to suppress falsehood works just as well to suppress truth.

> Do you think that EVERY "gain of function" experiment is high risk?

Almost any biological experiment involving genetic engineering (or even just culture with artificial selective pressure) may be reasonably anticipated to cause some gain of function. Most such experiments present minimal risk.

The research of concern is the search for deadlier and faster-spreading human potential pandemic pathogens, whether by laboratory gain of function or by collection from nature in areas with minimal other human traffic and thus minimal risk of natural spillover. This was a concern even before this pandemic, and is absolutely a concern even to those who believe that's not the origin of this pandemic:

> “That’s screwed up,” the Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, who coauthored the seminal paper arguing that covid must have had a natural origin, told the journalist Donald McNeil Jr. “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

[berdario]

> It seems like you believe American law should be changed...

Probably yes, especially since the rest of the world still often takes inspiration from what the US does.

But frankly, I don't live in the country in which I was born, and neither of those are the US. It would be enough for the law to be changed in my relevant jurisdictions

and then, if news.ycombinator.com but especially other sites with user generated content (e.g. Facebook) are not compliant, they could just be blocked (forcing me an others to use a VPN, if we'd still want to interact with these sites)

> Censors are humans, and censorship is subject to the same mistakes and corruption as any other human endeavor, especially those affecting the flow of political power. All of this requires human judgment; and once the wrong humans get the job, any apparatus designed to suppress falsehood works just as well to suppress truth.

Definitely true, but not censoring anything is not a neutral decision (just like deciding to censor is not a neutral decision). There are risks either way.

To tie back to your previous point:

> The performance of those politicians is ultimately judged by the voters. Without open discussion, I don't see how the voters could make an informed choice.

But do they make an informed choice, on aggregate?

Are people like Trump and Biden legitimately the best that the US could muster? Isn't this facet of democracy mostly a popularity contest, in which popularity is hugely affected by which claims are most often repeated in the media (and less on the actual compentences, policies espoused and reliability track record of those political figures)?

I think democracy can be achieved in a different way (but this is getting out of topic)

> https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...

That's very informative, thank you. I knew about the BSL-{1,2,3,4} rating... But I didn't know that the Wuhan labs were only BSL2

I'll look up more info now, but this is definitely something that should be addressed (and I'd be surprised if something hasn't been done about it already)

Edit: the issue of the BSL level of the laboratories in question seems to have already been addressed:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien...

[tripletao]

If you think there's a way to have a democracy without an informed electorate, then it makes sense that you'd be less concerned with censorship. I don't see how that could work, though. I'm not impressed with Biden, and significantly less so with Trump; but I'm also unaware of any system that works better. I didn't grow up in the USA, and I'd prefer a parliamentary system to the USA's republic; but that's a minor question compared to democratic vs. nondemocratic systems, and we're depending--however fragilely--on an informed electorate either way.

> Edit: the issue of the BSL level of the laboratories in question seems to have already been addressed:

I'm not sure what you think is addressed there? In that interview, Dr. Shi confirms that they were working with bat coronaviruses at BSL-2. Various papers published by her group before the pandemic also confirm this. They also had a BSL-4 lab for animal experiments, but experiments on the viruses in cultured cells were continuing at BSL-2. That's what Lipkin thought was "screwed up" (i.e., presented an unacceptable risk, regardless of whether it actually caused this pandemic).

As far as we know, all of Dr. Shi's work was performed in compliance with her institution's safety standards. The question is whether those safety standards were adequate, though--her standards were already a step below Ralph Baric's, and long before this pandemic academics like David Relman thought Baric's experiments were at or beyond the edge of acceptable risk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s

Baric and the WIV later submitted a proposal to perform exactly the same kind of research as in Relman's hypothetical, not with SARS-1 and MERS but with novel bat viruses collected by the WIV:

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

> “We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,” referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.

That proposal was rejected by the American government for safety reasons, but there's no way to know what work continued in the WIV with other funders.