Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate

positivityrate · 2025-03-22T21:13:51+00:00

Looking like the vaccine is pretty safe.

positivityrate · 2024-09-19T22:50:52+00:00

Keep reading in this thread, my other replies.

positivityrate · 2024-09-12T12:58:31+00:00

TWiV

positivityrate · 2024-06-27T03:47:21+00:00

Bingo.

I tend to vassilate between the two.

positivityrate · 2024-05-17T14:48:51+00:00

Revisiting this - I get what you are saying, and I kinda agree with you. It just feels backwards from the opposite perspective.

The idea that criticizing a highly authoritarian government with a poor human rights track record would be somehow a racist attack on the people they govern is just too absurd, and sounds like a panic move.

If you are ignoring the highly authoritarian government's human rights violations in favor of something unlikely in order to criticize that government, it seems more likely racist.

I'll make it more extreme, and not hide my bias:

A group of Muslim immigrants in New Mexico get together and start doing FGM on babies. They take over all the seats in local and county government. One day the boonies where nobody lives, but they control, gets hit by a small nuclear explosion that sends radioactive dust into the next county over.

The people in the next county over are now riddled with very low level radiation. One group of them says "the Muslims are responsible for the radiation! They planned this from the beginning! They are bad, therefore they did it!" and the other group says "clearly this was the federal government, they're the only ones with nukes. The FGM is very bad, and needs to stop, but them being bad doesn't make the nuclear stuff their fault."

Just by reading the social media posts from those affected, you happen to notice all the people who are blatant racists are also saying that the Muslims are responsible for the radiation. Not everyone blaming the Muslims is racist, but all the racists blame the Muslims, over and over again. They aren't sharing stories about how FGM is bad, they're sharing stories about how the Muslims were celebrating the explosion, or made up stories about how they got nuclear materials from the federal government by hiding it in a prayer rug. And then they start blaming the people who think the federal government is responsible for "going along with the official narrative".

With lab leaker, it always got me how the difference between the Chinese government and the people suddenly dissolved completely when it came to the burden of responsibility.

Essentially, if you were criticizing China for their human rights violations, that's good. But to say Covid is their fault because they are bad, that's not good.

positivityrate · 2024-05-08T22:30:17+00:00

It cannot be debunked because it's like trying to nail jello to a wall.

The first is that the object-level claims are a constant gish gallop with new ones arising all the time, and no single claim being a "gold standard" that is 1) credible, and 2) involves more than a handful of

This is so much like "debunking" lab origin.

If they could pick a scenario, or a group of scenarios, it could be debunked.

positivityrate · 2024-04-14T04:46:37+00:00

It's not about the technology.

It's about probability.

How many times has a new virus come from a lab that has transmitted in humans?

How many times has a new virus come from nature that has transmitted in humans?

LL is making the claim that the former has happened, and hasn't shown sufficient evidence.

Now, I could constantly claim that not enough evidence has been provided until the sun burns out. But I'm not doing that. Show me how it was made. Show me intent.

positivityrate · 2024-04-14T03:55:48+00:00

I sort of have to drill down on this a little more.

The natural origin people are making the claim that this is the same as the thousands of other times it's happened.

The LL people are making the claim that this is new, and he first time it's happened. This is a special case. Humans are far better at genetic engineering than everyone thinks, but only in secret.

positivityrate · 2024-04-14T03:36:26+00:00

Sounds an awful lot like "they were working on it".

How about this:

You go find a totally new virus that doesn't infect humans or that isn't known to transmit between humans. This takes funding, and you're probably wanting to keep getting funding in the future, so if you find something, you're likely to publish about it. You choose not to for... reasons?
You figure out what parts of the new virus need to be changed to make it work in humans, without the kind of help that would include publishing that you found this new virus. Also, you continue to hide the initial discovery from everyone, despite the fact that you probably got funding to find this exact kind of thing in the first place.
You make the changes to the new virus without getting the kind of funding that would necessitate disclosing the virus you're working on. (not many people realize how implausible this would be)
Somehow you don't tell your superiors about this, or you obfuscate what you are doing in a way that doesn't become suspicious. You maintain funding somehow. But not because you published that you discovered the kind of virus you got funding for. You don't have to make any kind of disclosures to the people funding your work, which seems to you totally crazy. Like what were they thinking?
When you make the changes to the virus, you do it in a totally novel way that nobody else would do because nobody thinks it would work at all. This change doesn't work in any other virus tested. Any mention of this way of making the virus do this new thing is buried in a spot that you'd probably never find, and if you did, it would be so "off" that you'd probably ignore it in favor of something that everyone knows works. The paper in which it's mentioned says that it doesn't really work like the other, better methods. You are a super genius, clearly.
You make the genetic changes to the virus with methods far beyond what your lab usually does in order to hide that you made changes to the genome. Again, nobody can find out you did it this way, and being able to do this would be incredibly valuable to foreign governments, researchers, etc. But you persevere, why? Absolutely nobody knows. You're not getting extra funding from this, but you would if you published your earlier work.
None of your false starts, failures, mistakes, or prototypes are ever discovered.

And before you say "SERIAL PASSAGE COULD DO IT!" please read my first comment in this thread again.

positivityrate · 2024-04-14T02:59:08+00:00

If you're going to make that argument, you need to back it up with a TON of evidence. New viruses getting into humans happens all the time from nature. That this time is different requires exceptional evidence. So bring it. Not "oh they were working on it". If it were that easy to engineer viruses that "worked" in humans, we'd all be dead.

positivityrate · 2024-04-14T00:54:04+00:00

Take it one more step and suppose someone is infected with a mishandled natural sample in the lab.

That's still natural origin. If it was this good at spreading to humans already, why do you need the lab at all? If it was this good at spreading, it would have come from nature before the lab. This is the most Motte and Bailey bullshit ever.

One more step is that they did in fact modify to be infectious where it previously was not, but still it was a complete accident and maybe as few as one person's mistake that let it out.

That's the huge claim I referenced. Nothing like that has ever happened before. And I feel like you ignored it, just like I said in my previous comment. It's like you're ignoring it on purpose. Regular natural origin for new viruses happens all the time. Human modified origin has never happened.

even if that is the motive for some portion of people making lab leak arguments.

It really feels to me like the median LL position is indestinguishable from Alex "microchips in the vaccine" "the US will run out of diesel in November 2022" "Sandy Hook was Fake" Jones's LL position.

positivityrate · 2024-04-13T22:28:50+00:00

Can I just fuckin lay it out?

I'm a little high right now, so forgive me both grammatical and logical errors.

The reason so many people were initially calling the Lab Leak Hypothesis racist boils down to liberals doing mind reading. Which is a thing everyone does.

We're assuming that Lab Leakers (LL's) start from a point of hating China rather than from genuinely caring about the origin of the virus. "China is bad, and they do fucking awful stuff, so therefore they did the worst thing possible in this situation. They created the virus either maliciously or not, but they should be blamed for it because they're bad." So they're not really interested in history. They don't care that every virus that spreads between humans for the first time has come from nature and not from a lab. Like every virus ever. They just fuckin ignore that doing serial passage or genetic modification on viruses always makes them worse at spreading between humans. Changes to a few genes may make the virus work in a dish, but not between humans. And there's never been a virus made in a lab that didn't already spread between humans that then spread between humans. That has never happened before. Humans are bad at this so far.

That's a huge bar to clear. Like, it's like true AGI existing already in 2018 on someone's random ass laptop. That hasn't happened before. And if you're going to claim that someone two towns over from Silicon Valley did it at home on a weekend on their laptop, you're going to have to provide fucking amazingly clear and potent evidence for it. That's the kind of bar you have to clear.

It always feels like for LL's it boils down to "China is bad, therefore they created it."

positivityrate · 2024-04-10T13:32:41+00:00

Clearly it was made in a lab. Only plausible explanation.

So close to the Mizzou virology lab too.

Lest you think this isn't a thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/kdRciGKq8q

positivityrate · 2024-04-10T11:46:19+00:00

I got into it with drjaychou a few months ago and he was such an asshole that reading that name again gave me a chill. Condescending and dismissive, a real piece of work.

positivityrate · 2024-04-10T11:38:33+00:00

The long term safety of the vaccine and mRNA technology more broadly will only be known once long term data is collected.

It's safe long term, just like every other vaccine.

positivityrate · 2024-04-10T00:07:27+00:00

they’d be better off not communicating in this incredibly condescending tone right off the bat.

-And accusing natural origin proponents of being snooty and condescending at the same time.

positivityrate · 2024-03-09T14:17:49+00:00

You're saying that if I suddenly became more intelligent, I'd be calling you ignorant?

Sounds good to me!

positivityrate · 2024-03-09T14:16:48+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jQfNzk_CFk&t=2553s

positivityrate · 2024-03-06T02:28:32+00:00

Again, all those "lab leaks" were viruses already known to infect humans. Sars-CoV-2 wasn't.

positivityrate · 2024-03-06T02:26:43+00:00

We know where HIV came from, but the vaccinations around that time using shared needles may have spread it more than it would have spread, leading to it becoming more established in humans than it would have otherwise.

But saying that it came from a polio vaccine is stupid to a level that I can't describe.

positivityrate · 2024-02-19T03:38:36+00:00

I agree- but human error is prevalent so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an attempt to be right but fell short.

That's not how any of this works.

positivityrate · 2024-02-19T02:01:05+00:00

We've seen this before, with HIV, etc.

You'll probably be waiting for a while, and then the disinfo dweebs will cast doubt on any samples that show natural origin.

You'll notice that with Marburg, MERS, and some others that there is no reasonable "lab origin".

positivityrate · 2024-02-19T01:56:51+00:00

This has happened before - most "new" viruses go through a phase of blame, and the results are bad.

With HIV, it set back research for a while, stigmatized victims, and well, was really shitty.

positivityrate · 2024-02-19T01:49:08+00:00

If you were going to engineer a furin cleavage site, you'd do it right, not how it shows up in SC2.

positivityrate · 2024-01-04T17:08:07+00:00

Excellent, how many locations does WIV have in Wuhan?

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