I am unconvinced by both of the arguments in your first paragraph. (1) To whatever extent the bottom line was pre-written, the expected result is that their conclusion would be as confident as they could convince themselves the evidence justifies and that others might believe. Everyone knows that a lot of what might be crucial evidence is unavailable; they couldn’t e.g. credibly say “we know for sure that it was a lab leak”. But they do say it was a lab leak, not just that it probably was. (2) For most readers, being more specific makes a claim more plausible rather than less. (As Gilbert and Sullivan had one of their characters say: “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”.) So neither of the things you describe seems to me unexpected if this is politically motivated and had a basically-prewritten bottom line.
I don’t at all think that the House Republicans only care about what the media says, and I have no idea what I said to give that impression. The rest of your second paragraph sounds to me like pure conspiracy-mongering.
The specific example of handwaving and poor logic I was looking at when I wrote what I did about those is on page 26. “Therefore it is reasonable to conclude, based on the WIV’s extensive sample library and history of genetically manipulating coronaviruses, that in early September, one or more researchers became infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the lab and carried it out into the city.” The material in the previous pages doesn’t constitute anything remotely like a justification of this claim, so far as I can tell.
For instance, they present graphs showing traffic around some Wuhan hospitals and Baidu searches for “cough” and “diarrhea” (presumably actually for Chinese equivalents of those, but they don’t give details). The pattern of searches for “cough” and for “diarrhea” is very different, which to me suggests that they can’t both be signals of the spread of Covid-19 (and in the time period they’re talking about, unless I’m confused, there is no increase in searches for the latter; but there are increases before and a big spike after; I can’t help suspecting that they are hoping to confuse). When writing about these graphs they refer to “the hospitals that show a rise in traffic with patients complaining of COVID-19 symptoms”, suggesting that they have evidence that people at those hospitals were complaining of COVID-19 symptoms, but they’ve presented no such evidence.
This sort of thing is typical of writing whose goal is to persuade rather than to find the truth. It looks superficially like reasoning but when you look more closely all the actual logical steps are missing or broken. They show some graphs involving hospitals and COVID-19 symptoms, and then a paragraph later they are talking about “hospitals … with patients complaining of COVID-19 symptoms”, and if you aren’t reading carefully you might think they have actual evidence of that. They show evidence that people at the WIV worked on coronaviruses, that they have some history of poor safety procedures, and that an online database of WIV samples was taken offline in 2019-09 -- all of which, I completely agree, is highly suggestive—and jump from that to “it is reasonable to conclude that in early September one or more WIV researchers became infected with SARS-CoV-2″. Sure, that’s one possible story consistent with the evidence, but you need more than that to say something’s “reasonable to conclude”, and it looks to me as if they haven’t even tried to justify their reasoning. Handwave, handwave, confident conclusion.
Your impression of me is symmetrically matched by my impression of you (on this specific issue). I hope at least one of us is wrong.
I am unconvinced by both of the arguments in your first paragraph. (1) To whatever extent the bottom line was pre-written, the expected result is that their conclusion would be as confident as they could convince themselves the evidence justifies and that others might believe. Everyone knows that a lot of what might be crucial evidence is unavailable; they couldn’t e.g. credibly say “we know for sure that it was a lab leak”. But they do say it was a lab leak, not just that it probably was. (2) For most readers, being more specific makes a claim more plausible rather than less. (As Gilbert and Sullivan had one of their characters say: “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”.) So neither of the things you describe seems to me unexpected if this is politically motivated and had a basically-prewritten bottom line.
I don’t at all think that the House Republicans only care about what the media says, and I have no idea what I said to give that impression. The rest of your second paragraph sounds to me like pure conspiracy-mongering.
The specific example of handwaving and poor logic I was looking at when I wrote what I did about those is on page 26. “Therefore it is reasonable to conclude, based on the WIV’s extensive sample library and history of genetically manipulating coronaviruses, that in early September, one or more researchers became infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the lab and carried it out into the city.” The material in the previous pages doesn’t constitute anything remotely like a justification of this claim, so far as I can tell.
For instance, they present graphs showing traffic around some Wuhan hospitals and Baidu searches for “cough” and “diarrhea” (presumably actually for Chinese equivalents of those, but they don’t give details). The pattern of searches for “cough” and for “diarrhea” is very different, which to me suggests that they can’t both be signals of the spread of Covid-19 (and in the time period they’re talking about, unless I’m confused, there is no increase in searches for the latter; but there are increases before and a big spike after; I can’t help suspecting that they are hoping to confuse). When writing about these graphs they refer to “the hospitals that show a rise in traffic with patients complaining of COVID-19 symptoms”, suggesting that they have evidence that people at those hospitals were complaining of COVID-19 symptoms, but they’ve presented no such evidence.
This sort of thing is typical of writing whose goal is to persuade rather than to find the truth. It looks superficially like reasoning but when you look more closely all the actual logical steps are missing or broken. They show some graphs involving hospitals and COVID-19 symptoms, and then a paragraph later they are talking about “hospitals … with patients complaining of COVID-19 symptoms”, and if you aren’t reading carefully you might think they have actual evidence of that. They show evidence that people at the WIV worked on coronaviruses, that they have some history of poor safety procedures, and that an online database of WIV samples was taken offline in 2019-09 -- all of which, I completely agree, is highly suggestive—and jump from that to “it is reasonable to conclude that in early September one or more WIV researchers became infected with SARS-CoV-2″. Sure, that’s one possible story consistent with the evidence, but you need more than that to say something’s “reasonable to conclude”, and it looks to me as if they haven’t even tried to justify their reasoning. Handwave, handwave, confident conclusion.
Your impression of me is symmetrically matched by my impression of you (on this specific issue). I hope at least one of us is wrong.