[arisAlexis]

Actually many people would like it to be false for personal profit or just human mentality. It's another ballpark of seriousness if that wasn't brought up by mother nature.

What kind of evidence do you need? This paper is full of evidence that if you combine the probability of each event happening, the probability that it was accidental is really small. So the burden of probability should be to prove that it wasn't leaked which isn't proven after 3 years.

[dathinab]

> for personal profit

it's not just personal profit, I mean if it's true how would you react to it? Putting aside how it would affect research, it also would make many people including such in power blame China for it. Which would be a political nightmare not just for China but also US, EU, etc.

So if any secret service has proof it was a leak you can be sue they wait until there is a major conflict with China. Like e.g. because China attacking Taiwan before the US/EU become more independent of TSMC. Through at that point of time there is also a lot of insensitive to just make up a "proof". So the public probably will never know for sure.

[ethbr0]

At what probability does the burden of proof shift?

[WithinReason]

An important question. For the sake of adjusting priors here is a list of biosecurity incidents:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

SARS itself leaked from the lab 4 times, once from a BSL-4 lab.

[ethbr0]

* SARS*, including the original SARS virus (3 times, per page) and SARS-CoV-2 (1 time, post-pandemic)

[WithinReason]

Actually I meant SARS-CoV-1 leaked 4 times, one of the events listed was actually 2 separate ones 2 weeks apart if you read the description.

[arisAlexis]

Although you can find a Bayesian answer for this which I am not qualified to calculate, it's irrelevant. The most pressing issue is not to dismiss it as zero probability as has been until know because it is viewed as a conspiracy. Even if the probability is very small we have to dig in deeper to prevent the next catastrophe.

[ethbr0]

> Even if the probability is very small we have to dig in deeper to prevent the next catastrophe.

There are very small chances of many catastrophes that we happily ignore.

Among the less small ones, off the top of my head: a large earthquake on the San Andreas fault and the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting.

[arisAlexis]

Can we prevent a volcano erupting? No. Can we prevent a lab leak? Yes. I wonder why people are soooo resistant to this idea and make up a myriad bad arguments.

[ethbr0]

Because we get annoyed when people insinuate that pointing out features of reality are evidence of a conspiratorial cabal.

Can we prevent a lab leak? Not really insofar as humans are less than perfect individuals.

Pretending we hadn't discovered atomic fission would have been just as dangerous as ignoring biological threats.

[igouy]

Can we prevent the live animal trade bringing people into daily proximity with novel viruses.