The point of Occam's Razor is you can't prove the things the Razor leans you to. Not in a way sufficient to remove the need to invoke the Razor. But you can say that one explanation is simpler than another (such as a pandemic virus being more closely patterned to every other pandemic in human history than to a novel mechanism that has never become a pandemic before).
I see a bright glow on the eastern horizon about 7AM and it's probably the sun coming up. It could be the first strike in a world-ending nuclear exchange. I can't prove it isn't.
That's going to come down to an individual observer's priors on probabilities of "pandemic virus being more closely patterned to every other pandemic in human history" vs. "pandemic introduced via a novel mechanism that has never become a pandemic before."
Wasn't the lab working with coronaviruses? So maybe some of it escaped. I really don't see how that's an unnecessary multiplication of entities. Is the objection simply that, pandemics have emerged from markets, but not labs? But we know that an escape of a coronavirus could lead to a pandemic.
I see nothing needlessly complex here, and certainly not extraordinary.
I don’t believe anyone is saying it’s needlessly complex, but Occam’s Razor isn’t “the second simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”
On one hand you have the market which housed animals that throughout its history some have had and spread different coronaviruses naturally. Every prior pandemic has been believed to have been from animal to human transmission, it’s seemingly the simplest explanation.
The lab leak theory of course assumes a lab accident. Biolab accidents are fairly rare, some years have no recorded accidents, others a handful. They’ve all been successfully contained with no more than a couple fatalities each.
It’s not that it’s needlessly complex. It’s that you have a market with animals who have coronaviruses and you have a lab that studies coronaviruses. Both are reasonable explanations, but a pandemic similar to all other prior pandemics and lots of humans being exposed to lots of potential virus carriers with no protection _is_ a simpler explanation.
Having said that, I’ve remained open minded and willing to consider both reasonable and unproven. Some pandemic will be the first from a lab leak, this may have been it. We will probably never definitively know.
> It’s not that it’s needlessly complex. It’s that you have a market with animals who have coronaviruses and you have a lab that studies coronaviruses. Both are reasonable explanations, but a pandemic similar to all other prior pandemics and lots of humans being exposed to lots of potential virus carriers with no protection _is_ a simpler explanation.
The likelihood a lab accident is independent of "all other prior pandemics", because it is not adjusted by whether there have been two natural pandemics, or two million of them. Rather, it's adjusted by the safety practices at the lab.
It's still not obvious that the wet market explanation is simpler than the lab leak. I don't see Occam's Razor making a selection here.
Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.
Put another way, the simplest explanation that fits the available evidence is most likely to be correct.
At this point it seems to me that a lab origin that superspreads at a market looks rather simpler than a market origin with double zoonosis and no trace of an intermediate host.
I see a bright glow on the eastern horizon about 7AM and it's probably the sun coming up. It could be the first strike in a world-ending nuclear exchange. I can't prove it isn't.
... but it's probably not.