So I would’ve agreed with you even a month ago, but then I was informed of the Rootclaim debate over the origins of Covid19 with $100,000 at stake. And oh boy, did that debate (and Daniel Filan’s helpful coverage!) change my mind on the likelihood of the lab-leak hypothesis. Franky, this is the minimum standard we should’ve held as to the inquiry of such an important topic as a society. Regardless, it change my mind from about 70% likelihood of a lab-leak to about 1-5%. Manifold seems to agree, given the change from ~50% probability of lab-leak winning to 6%.
EDIT: To clarify, this comment was a recommendation, not an argument. Second, I didn’t watch the whole debate. Instead, I watched the opening arguements, snippets of later parts of the debate, and read through Daniel’s thread which made sense given the content I had watched. I apologize for not making that clear. Mea culpa. Third, the debate covers the Defuse proposal. [1]
I still recommend looking at parts of the debate (they’re handily timestamped!) which consists of written, and verbal segments. Or you can wait until the condensed 2-hour version is released. Either way, the breadth of evidence considered, and the amount of detail analysed, was very high. To make things easier, I’ll describe the format of the debate and what each round was about. There were three rounds focusing on different aspects of Covid19′s origins. Each round was compsed of 3 parts: opening statements by both sides (about 90 mins) and a third part conisting of series of shorter debate segments the judges asking questions. 10 days before each round, slides were shared, with written questions from the judges, replies to judges and to each other’s 2 days before each round [1].
Round 1: Opening arguments from Peter (pro zoonotic origin) and Saar/Rootclaim (lab-leak), plus the debate segment with judges asking questions.
Round 2: Opening arguments from Yuri Deigin (siding with Rootclaim) and Peter. They focus on the genetic evidence for lab-leak and gain of function research, including the whole DEFUSE proposal.
Round 3: Peter vs Saaf again. Peter mostly summarizing his arguement here, and gives probabilities for a bunch of different things.[2] Saaf gives his final rebuttals, claiming every slide in Peter’s presentation has something wrong with it. Then the final debate segment.
There will be a shorter, edited version of the debate that I think will be released sometime in Febuary.
[1] Link to a market whose description contains links to all of the written documents.
The arguements against it were (IIRC) that the proposal didn’t happen at the WIV, the known virus in WIV, or those proposed in DEFUSE, weren’t actually that close genetically to what we got, likely suspects in lab-leak theories weren’t acting suspiciously before Covid blew up, Covid was first known to spread in the Wuhan market which closely resembled zoontic viruses spreading in wet-markets in other cities, the market was 10 milles across the river from the WIV were relevant labs were, there were multiple lineages which better match zoonosis compared to single lab-leak etc.
He gives total odds against a lab leak as 1 in 5^10^25, but I think he commited errors here. He made the conjuction fallacy and I don’t think he gave likelihood ratios, which is what we care about. Plus, I feel like he left out evidence favouring the lab-leak theory in this probabilistic calculation. Funnily enough, the judges noted that and said he had made the same criticism against some of Rootclaim’s probabilistic analyses.
Regardless, it change my mind from about 70% likelihood of a lab-leak to about 1-5%. Manifold seems to agree, given the change from ~50% probability of lab-leak winning to 6%.
Manifold updating on who will win the debate to that extent is not the same as manifold updating to that extent on the probabilty of lab-leak (which various other markets seem to roughly imply is about 50⁄50, though the operationalization is usually a bit rough because we may not get further evidence).
Could you please list your relevant object-level arguments for the lab-leak being unlikely?
(Posting a link to an extremely long, almost 17 hours, YouTube debate, and to bets on it based on a judgement of unknown judges, is not very helpful and doesn’t itself constitute a strong counterargument to the lab-leak arguments in this post. This is similar to how pointing to the supposed “winner” of a recent AI risk debate isn’t a strong argument against AI risk.)
I have only skimmed the early parts of the Rootclaim videos, and the first ~half of Daniel Filan’s tweet thread about it. So it’s possible this was discussed somewhere in there, but there’s something major that doesn’t sit right with me:
In the first month of the pandemic, I was watching the news about it. I remember that the city government of Wuhan attempted to conceal the fact that there was a pandemic. I remember Li Wenliang being punished for speaking about it. I remember that reliable tests to determine whether someone had COVID were extremely scarce. I remember the US CDC publishing a paper absurdly claiming that the attack rate was near zero, because they wouldn’t count infections unless they had a positive test, and then refused to test people who hadn’t travelled to Wuhan. I remember Chinese whistleblowers visiting hospitals and filming the influx of patients.
It appears to me that all evidence for the claim that the virus originated in the wet market pass through Chinese government sources. And it appears to me that those same sources were unequipped to do effective contact tracing, and executing a coverup. When a coverup was no longer possible, the incentive would have been to confidently identify an origin, even if they had no idea what the true origin was; and they could easily create the impression that it started in any place they chose, simply by focusing their attention there, since cases would be found no matter where they focused.
It appears to me that all evidence for the claim that the virus originated in the wet market pass through Chinese government sources
This is my concern.
Data from Wuhan in early 2020 is “dirty”. It had to pass through Chinese government hands, and then maybe also got filtered by the 2021 WHO investigation which was headed by… well you know who ;-)
But the government would need to have started the coverup while they were suppressing evidence. It’s weird to think they simultaneously were covering up transmission, and faking the data about the cases to make it fit the claim it originated in the wet market.
It is weird, but there are two different groups (China, Daszak/Ecohealth) with different incentives. In fact there are more than two different groups—Wuhan local authorities and Chinese central party officials had different incetives.
The Chinese initially wanted to cover it up, but they couldn’t keep that up forever. Daszak and Echohealth (and likely parts of the US intelligence agencies and military) desperately wanted this to not be a lab leak, as shown by FOIA’d emails from early 2020.
So, who faked what? Who molested the data before I get to see it?
Whoever publishes or sends out notices may or may not have others they check with. That’s sometimes the local health authority directly, but may go through the national government. I don’t know enough about how that works in China to say in general who might have been able to tell Wuhan Municipal Health Committee or WCDC what they were and were not supposed to say when they made their announcements. However, we have lots of information about what was said in the public statements and hospital records from that time, most of which is mentioned here. (You don’t need to trust him much, the descriptions of the systems and what happened when are well known.) But data is also disseminated informally through lots of channels, and I don’t know who would have been getting updates from colleagues or sending data to the WHO or US CDC.
Regarding cases at the Wuhan Central Hospital and HPHICWM, patients with a history of exposure at Huanan Market could not have been “cherry picked” before anyone had identified the market as an epidemiologic risk factor. Hence, there was a genuine preponderance of early COVID-19 cases associated with Huanan Market.
I see. So the claim is that these early cases were reported via channels that could not have been messed with, and they could not have been cherry picked because it was not known what the disease was.
But I suppose it is still possible that maybe these records were actually messed with, or that someone from WIV or SKVL or whatever deliberately infected the market with covid-19 as they knew it would make for a fairly bulletproof cover of an actual leak that they already knew about. Or something else weird like that—maybe intel did it on purpose for some convoluted set of reasons, knowing that it would create an ambiguous situation with some people pointing at a lab leak and some people pointing at the market.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying it’s implausible. (So if this is a necessary precondition for believing in a lab leak, it is clear evidence against it.)
Given that they were already caught in two separate coverups, it is not only not implausible it is highly likely that some kind of cover-up of the early cases was attempted. The only question is whether they succeeded to the extent of making it look like the wet market was the origin.
True, but you still need to demonstrate that your suppositions are more credible/reliable/falsifiable/etc… than someone else’s suppositions, in this case many someone else’s. Which you have not done yet.
Can you write down something actually rock-solid, (that requires more than a few dozen hours to credibly dismiss)?
That just shows different intel orgs have different ideas.
We know from declassified docs that the spate of UFO sightings in the 1940s and 1950s were caused by various US spy balloon projects, but different parts of the US military and intel are very heavily siloed from each other so even most of the military thought the UFOs were real.
There’s the state department’s effort to investigate the lab leak hypothesis by building some Bayesian model which was shut down because it might “open a can of worms”. From the memo notes:
Over the past months, members of Former Assistant Secretary Ford’s staff, and some AVC staff members, warned AVC leadership not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19. Both AVC and ISN staff members stated that AVC would “open a can of worms” if it continued.
There are also the whistleblower complaints that CIA analysts were bribed to rule against lab leak hypothesis.
The FBI analysts came to a different conclusion than the major US intelligence agencies while probably having similar access to evidence.
There are limits of how much the intelligence agencies can bias the findings by putting pressure on analysts. It seems that they didn’t totally rule out the lab leak hypothesis because that would be pretty hard to justify.
State department isn’t part of “US intelligence agencies and military,” and faces very, very different pressures. And despite this, as you point out there are limits to internal pressures in intel agencies—which at least makes it clear that the intel agencies don’t have strong and convincing non-public evidence for the leak hypothesis.
With the amount of leaking going on, I think it would have leaked if they had picked up through their surveillance efforts acknowledgments of how Chinese leaders admitted a lab leak to each other.
There seems to be some evidence of the unusual activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) with reduced cell phone traffic and possible roadblocks as mentioned in the NIH letter to the EcoHealth Alliance. The US intelligence community should have more details about this.
There also seems to be some evidence pointing towards three employees of the WIV being hospitalized with COVID-19 before the COVID-19 cases that we publically know about. This evidence seems to be illegally withheld from Congress. I see no reason for the intelligence agencies to violate the law and not disclose that evidence if they aren’t interested in discouraging people from believing in the lab leak hypothesis.
Sorry, I’m having trouble following. You’re saying that 1) it’s unlikely to be a lab leak known to US Intel because it would have been known to us via leaks, and 2) you think that Intel agencies have evidence about WIV employees having COVID and that it’s being withheld?
First, I think you’re overestimating both how much information from highly sensitive sources would leak, and how much Chinese leaders would know if it were a lab leak. This seems on net to be mostly uninformative.
Second, if they have evidence about WIV members having COVID, (and not, you know, any other respiratory disease in the middle of flu/cold season,) I still don’t know why you think you would know that it was withheld from congress. Intel agencies share classified information with certain members of Congress routinely, but you’d never know what was or was not said. You think a lack of a leak is evidence that would have been illegally withheld from congress—but it’s not illegal for Intel agencies to keep information secret, in a wide variety of cases.
And on that second point, even without the above arguments, not having seen such evidence publicly leaked can’t plausibly be more likely in a world where it was a lab leak that was hidden, than it would be in a world where it wasn’t a lab leak and the evidence you’re not seeing simply doesn’t exist!
You’re saying that 1) it’s unlikely to be a lab leak known to US Intel
I’m not sure what you mean with “known to”. There’s evidence. If we believe reporting that at least some people within the intelligence agencies who were willing to leak information to Schellenberger/Taibbi believe that this evidence feels conclusive to some members of the intelligence agencies about three WIV employees being ill with COVID but it doesn’t seem conclusive to other people.
Evidence often is in a form where it looks conclusive to some people but not others, especially when some of the people engage in motivated reasoning.
Second, if they have evidence about WIV members having COVID, (and not, you know, any other respiratory disease in the middle of flu/cold season,) I still don’t know why you think you would know that it was withheld from congress.
The COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 puts a legal obligation on the Director of National Intelligence to disclose among other things:
(C) researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019, including for any such researcher-- (i) the researcher’s name; (ii) the researcher’s symptoms; (iii) the date of the onset of the researcher’s symptoms;
(iv) the researcher’s role at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; (v) whether the researcher was involved with or exposed to coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology; (vi) whether the researcher visited a hospital while they were ill; and (vii) a description of any other actions taken by the researcher that may suggest they were experiencing a serious illness at the time
The report that was created in response does not provide that information.
I think from the reporting we have, we can be relatively certain that the intelligence agencies have reports of three WIV employees falling ill. How strong the evidence happens to be that this was COVID-19 is not publically known but would be publically known if the Director of National Intelligence had followed the law.
There has to be some reason why the Director of National Intelligence decided not to follow the law passed by Congress and release that information in his report. The unwillingness shows that the Director of National Intelligence (as representative of the intelligence communities) is biased.
The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.
Thanks. I was unaware of the law, and yes, that does seem to be strong evidence that the agencies in question don’t have any evidence specific enough to come to any conclusion. That, or they are foolishly risking pissing off Congress, which can subpoena them, and seems happy to do exactly that in other situations—and they would do so knowing that it’s eventually going to come out that they withheld evidence?!?
Again, it’s winter, people get sick, that’s very weak Bayesian evidence of an outbreak, at best. On priors, how many people at an institute that size get influenza every month during the winter?
And the fact that it was only 3 people, months earlier, seems to indicate moderately strongly it wasn’t the source of the full COVID-19 outbreak, since if it were, given the lack of precautions against spread at the time, if it already infected 3 different people, it seems likely it would have spread more widely within China starting at that time.
I’m not as familiar with the details but I don’t see why a subpoena would have a stronger force of law than the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 when it comes to making information public. If they send a subpoena to the Director of Intelligence a subpoena I would expect him to claim executive privilege.
and they would do so knowing that it’s eventually going to come out that they withheld evidence?!?
They withheld evidence. The only question we don’t know is how strong the evidence they withheld happens to be. Congress specifically wrote the section into the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 because they know that there’s evidence about those three employees from the State Department quote from above.
Again, it’s winter, people get sick, that’s very weak Bayesian evidence of an outbreak, at best. On priors, how many people at an institute that size get influenza every month during the winter?
According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.
This suggests that the evidence was strong enough to convince some of the U.S. government officials with access to the evidence to convince them.
According to that article, the three employees of the WIV were not random members of the institute but working on coronavirus gain-of-function. They also seemed to be ill enough to go to the hospital which is not typical with influenza.
That kind of information wasn’t in previous government disclosures and wrote the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 to make the government disclose it. For some reason, the Director of Intelligence is withholding information for which Congress explicitly asked them.
Given that the Director of Intelligence is willing to withhold evidence that Congress can be certain to exist, they might also be withholding pieces of evidence over which we have no clue, and that might be protected enough that the sources with whom journalists talked didn’t know either or were unwilling to share.
months earlier
As far I remember previous reporting was about them being ill in November so not multiple months earlier.
FWIW: in the debate, Rootclaim don’t really push the line that alleged evidence for zoonosis is a Chinese cover-up, but mostly take reports as-is, and accept that one of the first outbreaks was at the Huanan Seafood Market. I think in some cases they allege that some cases weren’t tracked or were suppressed, and maybe they say that some evidence is faked in passing, but it wasn’t core to their argument.
My impression from that is that Peter Miller is engaging in sophistry and is very good at it, and Rootclaim is very bad at debating. But I don’t have 17 hours to get into the weeds of that exercise.
Edited: having skimmed the comments section on Manifold which is a lot faster than watching 17 hours of debates, it seems that Miller is just better at rationality than the Rootclaim guy. I don’t see anything there to lead me to believe that WIV is unconnected to covid-19, but it looks like Miller has the better arguments and considers things from many angles.
I think this kind of gladiatorial format is bad for getting at the truth; Miller and Rootclaim should just lay out their arguments in a hierarchical form so it’s easy for many eyes to spot the weak points.
I do not particularly want to dismiss Miller and Rootclaim’s arguments. They have just made it very difficult to see their arguments by burying them in a 17-hour long debate series.
My hourly rate is $200. I will accept a donation of $5000 to sit down and watch the entire Miller/Rootclaim debate and write a 2000 word piece describing how I updated on it and why, feel free to message me if you want to go ahead and fund this.
Alternatively, once it has been judged I’m sure someone will write it up and I can read that and potentially change my mind.
I’m not dismissing the complicated arguments. I’m dismissing a specific highly obfuscated bundle of data unless you pay me to un-obfuscate it or someone else does. I have addressed (some of, but not all) the complicated arguments in the post
I think it’s less your obligation to weed through a 17 hour debate than it is Algon’s obligation, who implies he watched the debate, to list here the arguments that convinced him that the lab-leak hypothesis is false.
I think it is Roko’s obligation to do a better job of researching and addressing counter-arguments before making a post like this one. It contains absolutely nowhere near sufficient justification for the accusations it is leveling.
So, from my perspective there are two different issues, one epistemic, and the one game-theoretic.
From the epistemic perspective, I would like to know (as part of a general interest in truth) what the true source of the pandemic was.
From the game-theoretic perspective, I think we have sufficiently convincing evidence that someone attempted to cover up the possibility that they were the source of the pandemic. (I think Roko’s post doesn’t include as much evidence as it could: he points to the Lancet article but not the part of it that’s calling lab leak a conspiracy theory, he doesn’t point to the released email discussions, etc.) I think the right strategy is to assume guilt in the presence of a coverup, because then someone who is genuinely uncertain as to whether or not they caused the issue is incentivized to cooperate with investigations instead of obstruct them.
That is, even if further investigation shows that COVID did not originate from WIV, I still think it’s a colossal crime to have dismissed the possibility of a lab leak and have fudged the evidence (or, at the very least, conflicted the investigations).
I think it’s also pretty obvious that the social consensus is against lab leak not because all the experts have watched the 17 hour rootclaim debate, but because it was manufactured, which makes me pretty unsympathetic to the “researching and addressing counter-arguments” claim; it reminds me of the courtier’s reply.
What the social consensus is and why it exists are not relevant to the point I was making. This post is accusing specific individuals of mass murder, claiming they are responsible for millions of deaths. If you just want to say that you don’t believe the expert consensus, that’s one thing, but that just leaves you in a state of uncertainty. This post expresses a tremendous amount of certainty, and the mere fact that debate was stifled cannot possibly demonstrate that the stifled side is actually correct.
I think it’s plausible—perhaps even likely—that the FBI, Secret Service, and various other agencies may have messed up the investigation in to the JFK assassination as well as acted or even colluded with each other to hide their own incompetence at protecting the president and during the aforementioned initial investigation. But this doesn’t mean they were the ones who assassinated him!
There is a large amount of material that is publicly available to be analyzed that might weigh on the question of Covid’s origins, as well as many arguments one could make. The Rootclaim debate covers much of it, but I’m sure not all. These data could be evaluated. Roko has not done that; the arguments and evidence here and in their other threads is extremely weak compared to the level of confidence that is expressed, or the level of confidence that would be required to level these accusations. Roko has clearly spent a lot of time making this post, his other 2 posts, various comments, and obnoxious comments on the Manifold thread about who would win the rootclaim debate, and has apparently done at least some research to support his claims. But when it’s pointed out that his grasp of the facts is lacking, his response is to say “pay me $200 an hour.” This is such obviously motivated reasoning that it is frankly an embarrassment for this post to have over 200 net upvotes.
I think the right strategy is to assume guilt in the presence of a coverup, because then someone who is genuinely uncertain as to whether or not they caused the issue is incentivized to cooperate with investigations instead of obstruct them.
This might have strategic usefulness, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. There are reasons why this video exists, one of which is because people don’t always behave rationally in situations like this.
That is, even if further investigation shows that COVID did not originate from WIV, I still think it’s a colossal crime to have dismissed the possibility of a lab leak and have fudged the evidence (or, at the very least, conflicted the investigations).
It was terrible, and likely backfired, but that isn’t “the crime of the century” being referenced, that would be the millions of dead people.
This post expresses a tremendous amount of certainty, and the mere fact that debate was stifled cannot possibly demonstrate that the stifled side is actually correct.
Agreed on the second half, and disagreed on the first. Looking at the version history, the first version of this post clearly identifies its core claims as Roko’s beliefs and as the lab as being the “likely” origin, and those sections seem unchanged to today. I don’t think that counts as tremendous certainty. Later, Roko estimates the difference in likelihoods between two hypotheses as being 1000:1, but this is really not a tremendous amount either.
What do you wish he had said instead of what he actually said?
It was terrible, and likely backfired, but that isn’t “the crime of the century” being referenced, that would be the millions of dead people.
As I clarify in a comment elsewhere, I think we should treat them as being roughly equally terrible. If we would execute someone for accidentally killing millions of people, I think we should also execute them for destroying evidence that they accidentally killed millions of people, even if it turns out they didn’t do it.
My weak guess is Roko is operating under a similar strategy and not being clear enough on the distinction the two halves of “they likely did it and definitely covered it up”. Like, the post title begins with “Brute Force Manufactured Consensus”, which he feels strongly about in this case because of the size of the underlying problem, but I think it’s also pretty clear he is highly opposed to the methodology.
I don’t think that’s counts as tremendous certainty.
“Brute Force Manufactured consensus is hiding the Crime of the Century (emphasis mine). Although the post contains the statement “I believe” it doesn’t really express any other reservations, qualifiers, or uncertainty. It doesn’t present or consider any evidence for the alternatives.
For the love of Bayes! How many times do you have to rerun history for a naturally occurring virus to randomly appear outside the lab that’s studying it at the exact time they are studying it?
If it’s not a lot of evidence, then taking this post at face value, what would one conclude is the probability that covid came from a lab? edit: And if it’s not a lot of evidence, is it ok to accuse someone of mass murder with that amount of evidence?
I think we should treat them as being roughly equally terrible.
Well I think this is pretty wild, but that’s beside the point, as this isn’t what the post actually says:
prosecute what I believe is the crime of the century: a group of scientists who I believe committed the equivalent of a modern holocaust (either deliberately or accidentally) are going to get away with it. For those who are not aware, the death toll of Covid-19 is estimated at between 19 million and 35 million.
It would also be very strange for the post to have a bunch of content which is clearly supposed to be evidence that Covid was, in fact, a lab leak, and not just evidence that Peter Daszak tried to bury evidence if the point is simply that hiding evidence is bad.
It doesn’t present or consider any evidence for the alternatives.
So, in the current version of the post (which is edited from the original) Roko goes thru the basic estimate of “probability of this type of virus, location, and timing” given spillover and lab leak, and discounts other evidence in this paragraph:
These arguments are fairly robust to details about specific minor pieces of evidence or analyses. Whatever happens with all the minor arguments about enzymes and raccoon dogs and geospatial clustering, you still have to explain how the virus found its way to the place that got the first BSL-4 lab and the top Google hits for “Coronavirus China”, and did so in slightly less than 2 years after the lifting of the moratorium on gain-of-function research. And I don’t see how you can explain that other than that covid-19 escaped from WIV or a related facility in Wuhan.
I don’t think that counts as presenting it, but I do think that counts as considering it. I think it’s fine to question whether or not the arguments are robust to those details—I think they generally are and have not been impressed by any particular argument in favor of zoonosis that I’ve seen, mostly because I don’t think they properly estimate the probability under both hypotheses[1]--but I don’t think it’s the case that Roko is clearly making procedural errors here. [It seems to me like you’re arguing he’s making procedural errors instead of just combing to the wrong conclusion / using the wrong numbers, and so I’m focusing on that as the more important point.]
If it’s not a lot of evidence
This is what numbers are for. Is “1000-1” a lot? Is it tremendous? Who cares about fuzzy words when the number 1000 is right there. (I happen to think 1000-1 is a lot but is not tremendous.)
For example, the spatial clustering analysis suggests that the first major transmission event was at the market. But does their model explicitly consider both “transfer from animal to many humans at the market” and “transfer from infected lab worker to many humans at the market” and estimate probabilities for both? I don’t think so, and I think that means it’s not yet in a state where it can be plugged into the full Bayesian analysis. I think you need to multiply the probability that it was from the lab times the first lab-worker superspreader event happening at the market and compare that to the probability that it was from an animal times the first animal-human superspreader event happening at the market, and then you actually have some useful numbers to compare.
I would describe that as dismissing counter-evidence out of hand; it’s trivially easy to answer the question as stated, even if you don’t believe that particular story. In any event, this seems like arguing over semantics. I think that accusing someone of a being responsible for several million deaths requires quite strong evidence, and that a pretty key component of presenting strong evidence is seriously addressing counter-arguments and counter-evidence. None of Roko’s posts do that.
[It seems to me like you’re arguing he’s making procedural errors instead of just combing to the wrong conclusion / using the wrong numbers, and so I’m focusing on that as the more important point.
Sure. For example, he’s making the exact procedural error you describe in your footnote, by failing to consider how likely the genetic evidence is under the lab leak hypothesis, or if any other cities would look suspicious as the starting location of a pandemic, etc. He’s failing to apply consistent levels of skepticism to sources. But the biggest issue, in my mind, is still just not giving the question the level of consideration it requires. (I’m drafting an actual post so more detailed object-level arguments can go there when I’m done).
This is what numbers are for. Is “1000-1” a lot? Is it tremendous? Who cares about fuzzy words when the number 1000 is right there. (I happen to think 1000-1 is a lot but is not tremendous.)
I’m not sure what the point of arguing about the definition of “tremendous” is. If I had written “a lot” instead of “a tremendous amount” would anything substantial change?
I think the right strategy is to assume guilt in the presence of a coverup, because then someone who is genuinely uncertain as to whether or not they caused the issue is incentivized to cooperate with investigations instead of obstruct them.
There are two ways I can read this. The first is that when we catch people covering up evidence that points to them committing a crime, we should assume that they’re guilty of the underlying crime. That seems pretty bad because it’s not necessarily true (altho the coverup is some evidence for it). The second is that you should assume they’re guilty of the crime of covering up relevant info, and treat them as such. That does sound right, but it doesn’t justify you in talking about the underlying crime as if you know who’s guilty of it.
I think it’s also pretty obvious that the social consensus is against lab leak not because all the experts have watched the 17 hour rootclaim debate, but because it was manufactured
I agree that the virology and epidemiology communities didn’t watch the rootclaim debate, but I feel like this is jumping to the conclusion that they’re gullible, rather than that they’re just familiar with a bunch of data and are integrating it sensibly. The main thing that plays against it is low familiarity with the DEFUSE proposal in the GCRI survey, but I think that’s plausibly explained by people not having read the whole thing (it’s really long!).
I mean a third way, which is that covering up or destroying evidence of X should have a penalty of roughly the same severity as X. (Like, you shouldn’t assume they covered it up, you should require evidence that they covered it up.)
I feel like this is jumping to the conclusion that they’re gullible
I think you’re pushing my statement further than it goes. Not everyone in a group has to be gullible for the social consensus of the group to be driven by gullibility, and manufactured consensus itself doesn’t require gullibility. (My guess is that more people are complicit than gullible, and more people are refusing-to-acknowledge ego-harmful possibilities than clear-mindedly setting out to deceive the public.)
To elaborate on my “courtier’s reply” comment, and maybe shine some light on ‘gullibility’, it seems to me like most religions maintain motive force thru manufactured consensus. I think if someone points that out—”our prior should be that this religion is false and propped up by motivated cognition and dysfunctional epistemic social dynamics”—and someone else replies with “ah, but you haven’t engaged with all of the theological work done by thinkers about that religion”, I think the second reply does not engage with the question of what our prior should be. I think we should assume religions are false by default, while being open to evidence.
I think similarly the naive case is that lab leak is substantially more likely than zoonosis, but not so overwhelmingly that there couldn’t be enough evidence to swing things back in favor of zoonosis. If that was the way the social epistemology had gone—people thought it was the lab, there was a real investigation and the lab was cleared—then I would basically believe the consensus and think the underlying process was valid.
This is the kind of thing you do before you make a big post accusing someone of “the crime of the century.” I don’t know how you even thought this was remotely reasonable. This is basically just Pascal’s mugging, except that the worst you can do is harm the reputation of the community… “pay me or I might make really bad posts.”
I think it’s less your obligation to weed through a 17 hour debate than it is Algon’s obligation, who implies he watched the debate, to list here the arguments that convinced him that the lab-leak hypothesis is false.
I mean I am responsible for my own thoughts. If I am wrong it is my fault.
I read summaries and watched some of the debate, because I too am lazy. That’s why I linked to Daniel Filan’s thread on the debate. Also, Peter and Rootclaim are working on a condensed version of the three debates, which should be couple hours long.
I tried to look at Daniel Filan’s tweets. The roughly 240 posts long megathread is a largely unstructed stream of consciousness that appears hard to read. He doesn’t seem to make direct arguments so much as it is a scratchpad for thoughts and questions that occured to the author while listening to the debate. The mere act of pointing to such a borderline unreadable thread IMHO doesn’t itself constitute a significant counterargument, nor does the act of referring to the prospect of a future summary article. Reasonable norms of good debate suggest relevant counterarguments should be proportional in length and readability to the original argument, which in this case is Rokos compact nine-minute post.
Again, imagine me making a case for or against AI risk by pointing to a 17-hour YouTube debate and to an overly long and convoluted Twitter thread of the thoughts of some guy who listened to the debate. I think few would take me seriously.
I also note that you originally seemed to suggest you watched the debate in whole, while you now sound as if you watched only parts of it and read Daniel Filan’s thread. If this alone really got you “from about 70% likelihood of a lab-leak to about 1-5%”, then I think it should be easy for you to post an object-level counterargument to Roko’s post.
(Apart from that, Daniel Filan himself says he is 75-80% convinced of the zoonosis hypothesis, in contrast to your 95-99%, while also noting that this estimate doesn’t even include considerations about genetic evidence which he apparently expects to favor the lab-leak hypothesis. He also says: “Oh also this is influenced by the zoonosis guy being more impressive, which may or may not be a bias.” Though pointing to other people’s credences doesn’t provide a significant argument for anything unless there is also evidence this individual is unusually reliable at making such judgements.)
> Reasonable norms of good debate suggest relevant counterarguments should be proportional in length and readability to the original argument, which in this case is Rokos compact nine-minute post.
This seems entirely *un*reasonable to me. Some arguments simply can’t be properly made that concisely, and this principle seems to bias us towards finding snappy, simplistic explanations rather than true ones.
Someone else mentioned ‘The Pyramid and the Garden’, but I’m reminded of the sort of related argument about Atlantis in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ : sometimes, boring reality and ‘it’s actually just a series of coincidences’ requires a lot more explaining than a neat little conspiracy theory. Not to tar the lab leak hypothesis by calling it a conspiracy theory- while of course it literally is one, it doesn’t deserve to be demeaned by the term’s modern connotation of zany insane-person nonsense- but it is easy to see why ‘these facts seems unlikely to be a coincidence’ might be easier to argue concisely than its rebuttal, and a norm where the person that can state their argument more persuasively in shortform wins doesn’t seem like one that’s going to promote optimal truth-seeking.
The problem with “lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate” is that it is too short an argument, not a too long one. Arguments don’t get substituted by merely referring to them. The expression “the Riemann hypothesis” is not synonymous with the Riemann hypothesis. The former just refers to the latter. You can understand one without understanding the other.
On average, every argument gets more indirect the less accessible it is, and inaccessibility is strongly dependent on length, as well as language, intelligibility, format etc.
It may be that the 17-hour debate cannot be summarized adequately (depending on some standard of adequacy) in a nine-minute post, but a nine-minute post would be much more adequate than “lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate”.
The problem with “lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate” is that it is too short an argument, not a too long one.
It isn’t an argument, it’s a citation.
I don’t think a 17 hour debate is “inaccessible” to someone who is invested in this issue and making extremely strong, potentially very seriously libellous claims without having investigated some of the central arguments on the question at hand.
A foundational text in some academic field might take 17 hours to read, but you would still expect someone to have read it before making a priori wild claims that contradicted the expert consensus of that field very radically. I don’t think you’d take that person seriously at all if they hadn’t, and would in fact consider it very irresponsible (and frankly idiotic) for them to even make the claims until they had.
That’s not to say that this debate should be treated as foundational to the study of this question, exactly, but… well, as I said elsewhere:
This debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly.”
I think that makes familiarising yourself with those arguments (whether from the debate or another equivalent-or-better source) a prerequisite for making the kind of strong, confident claims Roko is making. At the moment, he’s making those claims without the information necessary to be anywhere near as confident as he is.
A foundational text in some academic field might take 17 hours to read, but you would still expect someone to have read it before making a priori wild claims that contradicted the expert consensus of that field very radically.
There’s a good reason why the foundational text in an academic field would be a text and not a video. Evaluating arguments is easier to do when they are done via text.
I think that makes familiarising yourself with those arguments (whether from the debate or another equivalent-or-better source)
I don’t think anyone has shown that the debate contains specific arguments that Roko is unfamiliar with.
Evaluating arguments is easier to do when they are done via text.
Isn’t there a transcript? In any case, this seems to be highly subjective, and in my opinion not hugely relevant anyway. To extend the analogy, your expectation of someone’s having read foundational texts before making strong claims would hardly be lessened by the objection that the texts were hard to read.
I don’t think anyone has shown that the debate contains specific arguments that Roko is unfamiliar with.
Do we need to positively show that? As I mentioned, many intelligent, thoughtful people who were already very familiar with this question and its relevant facts updated significantly based on the debate. And Roko certainly hasn’t explicitly addressed all of the arguments therein. Isn’t that enough to suggest that he should at least watch it?
It’s equivalent to watching a season of a TV show- is that really such an onerous requirement for making incredibly strong, potentially libellous claims about a contentious issue with serious real-world ramifications?
If you watch a debate the way you would a TV show where you aren’t critically evaluating everything, that’s not a good basis for forming beliefs about the real world.
Youtube videos tend to encourage you to consume them in that way, but that doesn’t make it a good epistemic practice and that’s part of the reason why scientific debates usually happen in text.
Yep, the tweet thread is just me jotting down thoughts etc while watching the debate.
I was 75-80% convinced when I tweeted that, which was before I had finished the debate. After watching the debate, I made a sketchy Bayesian calculation that got me to 96%, but I’ve since backed off to maybe 66%.
Basically: the key question for me is whether you think one of the first outbreaks of COVID happened at the Huanan Seafood Market. Rootclaim conceded this, and as far as I can tell if this is true then it’s dispositive evidence, but I have since began to doubt it.
Sure, my post doesn’t rebut Roko’s. It isn’t an arguement, after all. It is a recommendation for some content.
Yep, I didn’t watch the whole debate. I apologize if I gave that impression. Mea culpa.
How much you update on the evidence depends on your priors, no? Daniel went from “probably lab-leak” to “probably zoonosis”, and I went from “IDK” to “quite probably lab-leak”. That is the similairity I was pointint at.
I found Daniel’s thread helpful after watching some hours of the debate, as he noticed numerous points I missed. Plus, I had watched enough that the rest of the data in the thread made sense to me. So you’re right, Daniel’s thread probably isn’t that helpful. At least, not without watching e.g. the opening arguements by rootclaim and peter miller.
I honestly think most people who hear about this debate are underestimating how much they’d enjoy watching it.
I often listen to podcasts and audiobooks while working on intellectually non-demanding tasks and playing games. Putting this debate on a second monitor instead felt like a significant step up from that. Books are too often bloated with filler as authors struggle to stretch a simple idea into 8-20 hours, and even the best podcast hosts aren’t usually willing or able to challenge their guests’ ideas with any kind of rigor. By contrast, everything in this debate felt vital and interesting, and no ideas were left unchallenged. The tactic you’ll often see in normal-length debates where one side makes too many claims for the other side to address doesn’t work in a debate this long, and the length also gives a serious advantage to rigor over dull rhetorical grandstanding- compared to something like the Intelligence Squared debates, it’s night and day.
When it was over, I badly wanted more, and spent some time looking for other recordings of extremely long debates on interesting topics- unsuccessfully, as it turned out.
So, while I wouldn’t be willing to pay anyone to watch this debate, I certainly would be willing to contribute a small amount to a fund sponsoring other debates of this type.
I don’t think someone should need to pay you thousands of dollars to engage with full arguments for and against a proposition before you claim near-certainty about it. It’s just sort of a pre-requisite for having that kind of confidence in your belief, or having it be taken seriously. Perhaps particularly when you’re not only disagreeing with the expert consensus, but calling that expertise into question because they disagree with you.
That seems to generalize to “no-one is allowed to make any claim whatsoever without consuming all of the information in the world”.
Just because someone generated a vast amount of content analysing the topic, does not mean you’re obliged to consume it before forming your opinions. Nay, I think consuming all object-level evidence should be considered entirely sufficient (which I assume was done in this case). Other people’s analyses based on the same data are basically superfluous, then.
Even less than that, it seems reasonable to stop gathering evidence the moment you don’t expect any additional information to overturn the conclusions you’ve formed (as long as you’re justified in that expectation, i. e. if you have a model of the domain strong enough to have an idea regarding what sort of additional (counter)evidence may turn up and how you’d update on it).
That seems to generalize to “no-one is allowed to make any claim whatsoever without consuming all of the information in the world”.
I would say that it generalises to ‘one shouldn’t make a confident proclamation of near-certainty without consuming what seems to be very relevant information to the truth of the claim’. Which I would agree with.
I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly. I think it’s reasonable to expect someone to consume that information before claiming near-certainty on the question.
I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly.
I’m not sure who you’re referring to and can’t think of examples, but in case it’s me, I wasn’t already very engaged with the topic or in possession of carefully-formed views.
I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly. I think it’s reasonable to expect someone to consume that information before claiming near-certainty on the question.
The arguments there seem like they have to be worth at least familiarising yourself with and considering before you claim as high a confidence as you are claiming (especially given that most people seem to have been swayed in the opposite direction to your claim).
In other words: yes, you have to select a finite subset to engage with, and I think there is good reason to include this debate within that subset.
For the claim that people generally seem to have updated towards zoonotic origin as a result of the debate? No formal evidence, of course, but do you spend much time on LW/ACX/other rationalist internet spaces? It seems an unavoidable conclusion, if a difficult one to produce evidence of.
Only the other day there was a significant debate on /r/ssc about whether the emphatic win for the zoonotic side meant that we were logically compelled to update in that direction, due to conservation of evidence (I argued against that proposition, but I seemed to be in the minority).
Here is the end of a tweet thread with links to all the slides, as well as questions the judges asked and the debaters’ answers. IDK if they count as being in a ‘hierarchical format’.
Rootclaim sold the debate as a public good that would enhance knowledge but ultimately shirked responsibility to competently argue for one side of the debate, so it was a very one-sided affair that left viewers (and judges) to conclude this was probably natural origin. Several people on LW say the debate has strongly swayed them against lab leak.
The winning argument (as I saw it) came down to Peter’s presentation of case mapping data (location and chronology) suggesting an undeniable tie to the seafood market. Saar did little to undercut this, which was disappointing because the Worobey paper and WHO report have no shortage of issues. Meanwhile, Peter did his homework on basically every source Saar cited (even engaging with some authors on Twitter to better understand the source) and was quick to show any errors in the weak ones, leaving viewers with the impression that Rootclaim’s case stood on a house of cards.
Peter was just infinitely more prepared for the debates, had counterpoints for anything Saar said, and seemingly made 10 logical arguments in the time it took Saar to form a coherent sentence. It wasn’t exactly like watching Mayweather fight Michael Cera, but it wasn’t not that. Didn’t seem a fair fight.
It seems to me we should have a strong prior that it was lab-produced by the immediate high infectiousness. What evidence does Peter Miller provide to overcome that prior?
2nd edit after that: hmm that’s evidence against direct genetic manipulation but not necessarily against evolution within a lab. Back to being rather uncertain.
3rd edit: The “apparently” in the following seems rather suspicious:
COVID is hard to culture. If you culture it in most standard media or animals, it will quickly develop characteristic mutations. But the original Wuhan strains didn’t have these mutations. The only ways to culture it without mutations are in human airway cells, or (apparently) in live raccoon-dogs. Getting human airway cells requires a donor (ie someone who donates their body to science), and Wuhan had never done this before (it was one of the technologies only used at the superior North Carolina site). As for raccoon-dogs, it sure does seems suspicious that the virus is already suited to them.
I would like to know what the evidence is that these characteristic mutations don’t arise when cultured in raccoon-dogs. If that claim is false, it would be significant evidence in favour of a lab leak (if it’s true, it’s weaker but still relevant evidence for natural origin).
So I would’ve agreed with you even a month ago, but then I was informed of the Rootclaim debate over the origins of Covid19 with $100,000 at stake. And oh boy, did that debate (and Daniel Filan’s helpful coverage!) change my mind on the likelihood of the lab-leak hypothesis. Franky, this is the minimum standard we should’ve held as to the inquiry of such an important topic as a society. Regardless, it change my mind from about 70% likelihood of a lab-leak to about 1-5%. Manifold seems to agree, given the change from ~50% probability of lab-leak winning to 6%.
EDIT: To clarify, this comment was a recommendation, not an argument. Second, I didn’t watch the whole debate. Instead, I watched the opening arguements, snippets of later parts of the debate, and read through Daniel’s thread which made sense given the content I had watched. I apologize for not making that clear. Mea culpa. Third, the debate covers the Defuse proposal. [1]
I still recommend looking at parts of the debate (they’re handily timestamped!) which consists of written, and verbal segments. Or you can wait until the condensed 2-hour version is released. Either way, the breadth of evidence considered, and the amount of detail analysed, was very high. To make things easier, I’ll describe the format of the debate and what each round was about. There were three rounds focusing on different aspects of Covid19′s origins. Each round was compsed of 3 parts: opening statements by both sides (about 90 mins) and a third part conisting of series of shorter debate segments the judges asking questions. 10 days before each round, slides were shared, with written questions from the judges, replies to judges and to each other’s 2 days before each round [1].
Round 1: Opening arguments from Peter (pro zoonotic origin) and Saar/Rootclaim (lab-leak), plus the debate segment with judges asking questions.
Round 2: Opening arguments from Yuri Deigin (siding with Rootclaim) and Peter. They focus on the genetic evidence for lab-leak and gain of function research, including the whole DEFUSE proposal.
Round 3: Peter vs Saaf again. Peter mostly summarizing his arguement here, and gives probabilities for a bunch of different things.[2] Saaf gives his final rebuttals, claiming every slide in Peter’s presentation has something wrong with it. Then the final debate segment.
There will be a shorter, edited version of the debate that I think will be released sometime in Febuary.
[1] Link to a market whose description contains links to all of the written documents.
The arguements against it were (IIRC) that the proposal didn’t happen at the WIV, the known virus in WIV, or those proposed in DEFUSE, weren’t actually that close genetically to what we got, likely suspects in lab-leak theories weren’t acting suspiciously before Covid blew up, Covid was first known to spread in the Wuhan market which closely resembled zoontic viruses spreading in wet-markets in other cities, the market was 10 milles across the river from the WIV were relevant labs were, there were multiple lineages which better match zoonosis compared to single lab-leak etc.
He gives total odds against a lab leak as 1 in 5^10^25, but I think he commited errors here. He made the conjuction fallacy and I don’t think he gave likelihood ratios, which is what we care about. Plus, I feel like he left out evidence favouring the lab-leak theory in this probabilistic calculation. Funnily enough, the judges noted that and said he had made the same criticism against some of Rootclaim’s probabilistic analyses.
Manifold updating on who will win the debate to that extent is not the same as manifold updating to that extent on the probabilty of lab-leak (which various other markets seem to roughly imply is about 50⁄50, though the operationalization is usually a bit rough because we may not get further evidence).
Could you please list your relevant object-level arguments for the lab-leak being unlikely?
(Posting a link to an extremely long, almost 17 hours, YouTube debate, and to bets on it based on a judgement of unknown judges, is not very helpful and doesn’t itself constitute a strong counterargument to the lab-leak arguments in this post. This is similar to how pointing to the supposed “winner” of a recent AI risk debate isn’t a strong argument against AI risk.)
I have only skimmed the early parts of the Rootclaim videos, and the first ~half of Daniel Filan’s tweet thread about it. So it’s possible this was discussed somewhere in there, but there’s something major that doesn’t sit right with me:
In the first month of the pandemic, I was watching the news about it. I remember that the city government of Wuhan attempted to conceal the fact that there was a pandemic. I remember Li Wenliang being punished for speaking about it. I remember that reliable tests to determine whether someone had COVID were extremely scarce. I remember the US CDC publishing a paper absurdly claiming that the attack rate was near zero, because they wouldn’t count infections unless they had a positive test, and then refused to test people who hadn’t travelled to Wuhan. I remember Chinese whistleblowers visiting hospitals and filming the influx of patients.
It appears to me that all evidence for the claim that the virus originated in the wet market pass through Chinese government sources. And it appears to me that those same sources were unequipped to do effective contact tracing, and executing a coverup. When a coverup was no longer possible, the incentive would have been to confidently identify an origin, even if they had no idea what the true origin was; and they could easily create the impression that it started in any place they chose, simply by focusing their attention there, since cases would be found no matter where they focused.
This is my concern.
Data from Wuhan in early 2020 is “dirty”. It had to pass through Chinese government hands, and then maybe also got filtered by the 2021 WHO investigation which was headed by… well you know who ;-)
But the government would need to have started the coverup while they were suppressing evidence. It’s weird to think they simultaneously were covering up transmission, and faking the data about the cases to make it fit the claim it originated in the wet market.
It is weird, but there are two different groups (China, Daszak/Ecohealth) with different incentives. In fact there are more than two different groups—Wuhan local authorities and Chinese central party officials had different incetives.
The Chinese initially wanted to cover it up, but they couldn’t keep that up forever. Daszak and Echohealth (and likely parts of the US intelligence agencies and military) desperately wanted this to not be a lab leak, as shown by FOIA’d emails from early 2020.
So, who faked what? Who molested the data before I get to see it?
Whoever publishes or sends out notices may or may not have others they check with. That’s sometimes the local health authority directly, but may go through the national government. I don’t know enough about how that works in China to say in general who might have been able to tell Wuhan Municipal Health Committee or WCDC what they were and were not supposed to say when they made their announcements. However, we have lots of information about what was said in the public statements and hospital records from that time, most of which is mentioned here. (You don’t need to trust him much, the descriptions of the systems and what happened when are well known.) But data is also disseminated informally through lots of channels, and I don’t know who would have been getting updates from colleagues or sending data to the WHO or US CDC.
I see. So the claim is that these early cases were reported via channels that could not have been messed with, and they could not have been cherry picked because it was not known what the disease was.
But I suppose it is still possible that maybe these records were actually messed with, or that someone from WIV or SKVL or whatever deliberately infected the market with covid-19 as they knew it would make for a fairly bulletproof cover of an actual leak that they already knew about. Or something else weird like that—maybe intel did it on purpose for some convoluted set of reasons, knowing that it would create an ambiguous situation with some people pointing at a lab leak and some people pointing at the market.
Weird things happen in the murky world of human conflicts.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying it’s implausible. (So if this is a necessary precondition for believing in a lab leak, it is clear evidence against it.)
Given that they were already caught in two separate coverups, it is not only not implausible it is highly likely that some kind of cover-up of the early cases was attempted. The only question is whether they succeeded to the extent of making it look like the wet market was the origin.
True, but you still need to demonstrate that your suppositions are more credible/reliable/falsifiable/etc… than someone else’s suppositions, in this case many someone else’s. Which you have not done yet.
Can you write down something actually rock-solid, (that requires more than a few dozen hours to credibly dismiss)?
Credibly dismiss? What?
If your confused about something in the prior comment, can you specify the exact issue?
As I said in another comment, that seems very, very hard to continue to believe, even if it might have seemed plausible on priors.
That just shows different intel orgs have different ideas.
We know from declassified docs that the spate of UFO sightings in the 1940s and 1950s were caused by various US spy balloon projects, but different parts of the US military and intel are very heavily siloed from each other so even most of the military thought the UFOs were real.
There’s the state department’s effort to investigate the lab leak hypothesis by building some Bayesian model which was shut down because it might “open a can of worms”. From the memo notes:
There are also the whistleblower complaints that CIA analysts were bribed to rule against lab leak hypothesis.
The FBI analysts came to a different conclusion than the major US intelligence agencies while probably having similar access to evidence.
There are limits of how much the intelligence agencies can bias the findings by putting pressure on analysts. It seems that they didn’t totally rule out the lab leak hypothesis because that would be pretty hard to justify.
State department isn’t part of “US intelligence agencies and military,” and faces very, very different pressures. And despite this, as you point out there are limits to internal pressures in intel agencies—which at least makes it clear that the intel agencies don’t have strong and convincing non-public evidence for the leak hypothesis.
With the amount of leaking going on, I think it would have leaked if they had picked up through their surveillance efforts acknowledgments of how Chinese leaders admitted a lab leak to each other.
There seems to be some evidence of the unusual activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) with reduced cell phone traffic and possible roadblocks as mentioned in the NIH letter to the EcoHealth Alliance. The US intelligence community should have more details about this.
There also seems to be some evidence pointing towards three employees of the WIV being hospitalized with COVID-19 before the COVID-19 cases that we publically know about. This evidence seems to be illegally withheld from Congress. I see no reason for the intelligence agencies to violate the law and not disclose that evidence if they aren’t interested in discouraging people from believing in the lab leak hypothesis.
Sorry, I’m having trouble following. You’re saying that 1) it’s unlikely to be a lab leak known to US Intel because it would have been known to us via leaks, and 2) you think that Intel agencies have evidence about WIV employees having COVID and that it’s being withheld?
First, I think you’re overestimating both how much information from highly sensitive sources would leak, and how much Chinese leaders would know if it were a lab leak. This seems on net to be mostly uninformative.
Second, if they have evidence about WIV members having COVID, (and not, you know, any other respiratory disease in the middle of flu/cold season,) I still don’t know why you think you would know that it was withheld from congress. Intel agencies share classified information with certain members of Congress routinely, but you’d never know what was or was not said. You think a lack of a leak is evidence that would have been illegally withheld from congress—but it’s not illegal for Intel agencies to keep information secret, in a wide variety of cases.
And on that second point, even without the above arguments, not having seen such evidence publicly leaked can’t plausibly be more likely in a world where it was a lab leak that was hidden, than it would be in a world where it wasn’t a lab leak and the evidence you’re not seeing simply doesn’t exist!
I’m not sure what you mean with “known to”. There’s evidence. If we believe reporting that at least some people within the intelligence agencies who were willing to leak information to Schellenberger/Taibbi believe that this evidence feels conclusive to some members of the intelligence agencies about three WIV employees being ill with COVID but it doesn’t seem conclusive to other people.
Evidence often is in a form where it looks conclusive to some people but not others, especially when some of the people engage in motivated reasoning.
The COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 puts a legal obligation on the Director of National Intelligence to disclose among other things:
The report that was created in response does not provide that information.
I think from the reporting we have, we can be relatively certain that the intelligence agencies have reports of three WIV employees falling ill. How strong the evidence happens to be that this was COVID-19 is not publically known but would be publically known if the Director of National Intelligence had followed the law.
There has to be some reason why the Director of National Intelligence decided not to follow the law passed by Congress and release that information in his report. The unwillingness shows that the Director of National Intelligence (as representative of the intelligence communities) is biased.
EDIT: According to the State Department:
Thanks. I was unaware of the law, and yes, that does seem to be strong evidence that the agencies in question don’t have any evidence specific enough to come to any conclusion. That, or they are foolishly risking pissing off Congress, which can subpoena them, and seems happy to do exactly that in other situations—and they would do so knowing that it’s eventually going to come out that they withheld evidence?!?
Again, it’s winter, people get sick, that’s very weak Bayesian evidence of an outbreak, at best. On priors, how many people at an institute that size get influenza every month during the winter?
And the fact that it was only 3 people, months earlier, seems to indicate moderately strongly it wasn’t the source of the full COVID-19 outbreak, since if it were, given the lack of precautions against spread at the time, if it already infected 3 different people, it seems likely it would have spread more widely within China starting at that time.
I’m not as familiar with the details but I don’t see why a subpoena would have a stronger force of law than the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 when it comes to making information public. If they send a subpoena to the Director of Intelligence a subpoena I would expect him to claim executive privilege.
They withheld evidence. The only question we don’t know is how strong the evidence they withheld happens to be. Congress specifically wrote the section into the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 because they know that there’s evidence about those three employees from the State Department quote from above.
Michael Schellenberger et al suggest:
This suggests that the evidence was strong enough to convince some of the U.S. government officials with access to the evidence to convince them.
According to that article, the three employees of the WIV were not random members of the institute but working on coronavirus gain-of-function. They also seemed to be ill enough to go to the hospital which is not typical with influenza.
That kind of information wasn’t in previous government disclosures and wrote the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 to make the government disclose it. For some reason, the Director of Intelligence is withholding information for which Congress explicitly asked them.
Given that the Director of Intelligence is willing to withhold evidence that Congress can be certain to exist, they might also be withholding pieces of evidence over which we have no clue, and that might be protected enough that the sources with whom journalists talked didn’t know either or were unwilling to share.
As far I remember previous reporting was about them being ill in November so not multiple months earlier.
FWIW: in the debate, Rootclaim don’t really push the line that alleged evidence for zoonosis is a Chinese cover-up, but mostly take reports as-is, and accept that one of the first outbreaks was at the Huanan Seafood Market. I think in some cases they allege that some cases weren’t tracked or were suppressed, and maybe they say that some evidence is faked in passing, but it wasn’t core to their argument.
My impression from that is that Peter Miller is engaging in sophistry and is very good at it,and Rootclaim is very bad at debating. But I don’t have 17 hours to get into the weeds of that exercise.Edited: having skimmed the comments section on Manifold which is a lot faster than watching 17 hours of debates, it seems that Miller is just better at rationality than the Rootclaim guy. I don’t see anything there to lead me to believe that WIV is unconnected to covid-19, but it looks like Miller has the better arguments and considers things from many angles.
I think this kind of gladiatorial format is bad for getting at the truth; Miller and Rootclaim should just lay out their arguments in a hierarchical form so it’s easy for many eyes to spot the weak points.
My impression is that this is motivated reasoning.
I’m reminded of https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-garden/ . Dismissing complicated arguments out of hand, and instead directing attention to a single fact that is either meaningful or a 1 in 100 coincidence, doesn’t have a great track record.
It’s not 1 in 100, it’s 1 in 4000.
I do not particularly want to dismiss Miller and Rootclaim’s arguments. They have just made it very difficult to see their arguments by burying them in a 17-hour long debate series.
My hourly rate is $200. I will accept a donation of $5000 to sit down and watch the entire Miller/Rootclaim debate and write a 2000 word piece describing how I updated on it and why, feel free to message me if you want to go ahead and fund this.
Alternatively, once it has been judged I’m sure someone will write it up and I can read that and potentially change my mind.
I’m not dismissing the complicated arguments. I’m dismissing a specific highly obfuscated bundle of data unless you pay me to un-obfuscate it or someone else does. I have addressed (some of, but not all) the complicated arguments in the post
I think it’s less your obligation to weed through a 17 hour debate than it is Algon’s obligation, who implies he watched the debate, to list here the arguments that convinced him that the lab-leak hypothesis is false.
I think it is Roko’s obligation to do a better job of researching and addressing counter-arguments before making a post like this one. It contains absolutely nowhere near sufficient justification for the accusations it is leveling.
So, from my perspective there are two different issues, one epistemic, and the one game-theoretic.
From the epistemic perspective, I would like to know (as part of a general interest in truth) what the true source of the pandemic was.
From the game-theoretic perspective, I think we have sufficiently convincing evidence that someone attempted to cover up the possibility that they were the source of the pandemic. (I think Roko’s post doesn’t include as much evidence as it could: he points to the Lancet article but not the part of it that’s calling lab leak a conspiracy theory, he doesn’t point to the released email discussions, etc.) I think the right strategy is to assume guilt in the presence of a coverup, because then someone who is genuinely uncertain as to whether or not they caused the issue is incentivized to cooperate with investigations instead of obstruct them.
That is, even if further investigation shows that COVID did not originate from WIV, I still think it’s a colossal crime to have dismissed the possibility of a lab leak and have fudged the evidence (or, at the very least, conflicted the investigations).
I think it’s also pretty obvious that the social consensus is against lab leak not because all the experts have watched the 17 hour rootclaim debate, but because it was manufactured, which makes me pretty unsympathetic to the “researching and addressing counter-arguments” claim; it reminds me of the courtier’s reply.
What the social consensus is and why it exists are not relevant to the point I was making. This post is accusing specific individuals of mass murder, claiming they are responsible for millions of deaths. If you just want to say that you don’t believe the expert consensus, that’s one thing, but that just leaves you in a state of uncertainty. This post expresses a tremendous amount of certainty, and the mere fact that debate was stifled cannot possibly demonstrate that the stifled side is actually correct.
I think it’s plausible—perhaps even likely—that the FBI, Secret Service, and various other agencies may have messed up the investigation in to the JFK assassination as well as acted or even colluded with each other to hide their own incompetence at protecting the president and during the aforementioned initial investigation. But this doesn’t mean they were the ones who assassinated him!
There is a large amount of material that is publicly available to be analyzed that might weigh on the question of Covid’s origins, as well as many arguments one could make. The Rootclaim debate covers much of it, but I’m sure not all. These data could be evaluated. Roko has not done that; the arguments and evidence here and in their other threads is extremely weak compared to the level of confidence that is expressed, or the level of confidence that would be required to level these accusations. Roko has clearly spent a lot of time making this post, his other 2 posts, various comments, and obnoxious comments on the Manifold thread about who would win the rootclaim debate, and has apparently done at least some research to support his claims. But when it’s pointed out that his grasp of the facts is lacking, his response is to say “pay me $200 an hour.” This is such obviously motivated reasoning that it is frankly an embarrassment for this post to have over 200 net upvotes.
This might have strategic usefulness, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. There are reasons why this video exists, one of which is because people don’t always behave rationally in situations like this.
It was terrible, and likely backfired, but that isn’t “the crime of the century” being referenced, that would be the millions of dead people.
Agreed on the second half, and disagreed on the first. Looking at the version history, the first version of this post clearly identifies its core claims as Roko’s beliefs and as the lab as being the “likely” origin, and those sections seem unchanged to today. I don’t think that counts as tremendous certainty. Later, Roko estimates the difference in likelihoods between two hypotheses as being 1000:1, but this is really not a tremendous amount either.
What do you wish he had said instead of what he actually said?
As I clarify in a comment elsewhere, I think we should treat them as being roughly equally terrible. If we would execute someone for accidentally killing millions of people, I think we should also execute them for destroying evidence that they accidentally killed millions of people, even if it turns out they didn’t do it.
My weak guess is Roko is operating under a similar strategy and not being clear enough on the distinction the two halves of “they likely did it and definitely covered it up”. Like, the post title begins with “Brute Force Manufactured Consensus”, which he feels strongly about in this case because of the size of the underlying problem, but I think it’s also pretty clear he is highly opposed to the methodology.
“Brute Force Manufactured consensus is hiding the Crime of the Century (emphasis mine). Although the post contains the statement “I believe” it doesn’t really express any other reservations, qualifiers, or uncertainty. It doesn’t present or consider any evidence for the alternatives.
It certainly seems like it’s supposed to a lot:
If it’s not a lot of evidence, then taking this post at face value, what would one conclude is the probability that covid came from a lab? edit: And if it’s not a lot of evidence, is it ok to accuse someone of mass murder with that amount of evidence?
Well I think this is pretty wild, but that’s beside the point, as this isn’t what the post actually says:
It would also be very strange for the post to have a bunch of content which is clearly supposed to be evidence that Covid was, in fact, a lab leak, and not just evidence that Peter Daszak tried to bury evidence if the point is simply that hiding evidence is bad.
So, in the current version of the post (which is edited from the original) Roko goes thru the basic estimate of “probability of this type of virus, location, and timing” given spillover and lab leak, and discounts other evidence in this paragraph:
I don’t think that counts as presenting it, but I do think that counts as considering it. I think it’s fine to question whether or not the arguments are robust to those details—I think they generally are and have not been impressed by any particular argument in favor of zoonosis that I’ve seen, mostly because I don’t think they properly estimate the probability under both hypotheses[1]--but I don’t think it’s the case that Roko is clearly making procedural errors here. [It seems to me like you’re arguing he’s making procedural errors instead of just combing to the wrong conclusion / using the wrong numbers, and so I’m focusing on that as the more important point.]
This is what numbers are for. Is “1000-1” a lot? Is it tremendous? Who cares about fuzzy words when the number 1000 is right there. (I happen to think 1000-1 is a lot but is not tremendous.)
For example, the spatial clustering analysis suggests that the first major transmission event was at the market. But does their model explicitly consider both “transfer from animal to many humans at the market” and “transfer from infected lab worker to many humans at the market” and estimate probabilities for both? I don’t think so, and I think that means it’s not yet in a state where it can be plugged into the full Bayesian analysis. I think you need to multiply the probability that it was from the lab times the first lab-worker superspreader event happening at the market and compare that to the probability that it was from an animal times the first animal-human superspreader event happening at the market, and then you actually have some useful numbers to compare.
I would describe that as dismissing counter-evidence out of hand; it’s trivially easy to answer the question as stated, even if you don’t believe that particular story. In any event, this seems like arguing over semantics. I think that accusing someone of a being responsible for several million deaths requires quite strong evidence, and that a pretty key component of presenting strong evidence is seriously addressing counter-arguments and counter-evidence. None of Roko’s posts do that.
Sure. For example, he’s making the exact procedural error you describe in your footnote, by failing to consider how likely the genetic evidence is under the lab leak hypothesis, or if any other cities would look suspicious as the starting location of a pandemic, etc. He’s failing to apply consistent levels of skepticism to sources. But the biggest issue, in my mind, is still just not giving the question the level of consideration it requires. (I’m drafting an actual post so more detailed object-level arguments can go there when I’m done).
I’m not sure what the point of arguing about the definition of “tremendous” is. If I had written “a lot” instead of “a tremendous amount” would anything substantial change?
There are two ways I can read this. The first is that when we catch people covering up evidence that points to them committing a crime, we should assume that they’re guilty of the underlying crime. That seems pretty bad because it’s not necessarily true (altho the coverup is some evidence for it). The second is that you should assume they’re guilty of the crime of covering up relevant info, and treat them as such. That does sound right, but it doesn’t justify you in talking about the underlying crime as if you know who’s guilty of it.
I agree that the virology and epidemiology communities didn’t watch the rootclaim debate, but I feel like this is jumping to the conclusion that they’re gullible, rather than that they’re just familiar with a bunch of data and are integrating it sensibly. The main thing that plays against it is low familiarity with the DEFUSE proposal in the GCRI survey, but I think that’s plausibly explained by people not having read the whole thing (it’s really long!).
I mean a third way, which is that covering up or destroying evidence of X should have a penalty of roughly the same severity as X. (Like, you shouldn’t assume they covered it up, you should require evidence that they covered it up.)
I think you’re pushing my statement further than it goes. Not everyone in a group has to be gullible for the social consensus of the group to be driven by gullibility, and manufactured consensus itself doesn’t require gullibility. (My guess is that more people are complicit than gullible, and more people are refusing-to-acknowledge ego-harmful possibilities than clear-mindedly setting out to deceive the public.)
To elaborate on my “courtier’s reply” comment, and maybe shine some light on ‘gullibility’, it seems to me like most religions maintain motive force thru manufactured consensus. I think if someone points that out—”our prior should be that this religion is false and propped up by motivated cognition and dysfunctional epistemic social dynamics”—and someone else replies with “ah, but you haven’t engaged with all of the theological work done by thinkers about that religion”, I think the second reply does not engage with the question of what our prior should be. I think we should assume religions are false by default, while being open to evidence.
I think similarly the naive case is that lab leak is substantially more likely than zoonosis, but not so overwhelmingly that there couldn’t be enough evidence to swing things back in favor of zoonosis. If that was the way the social epistemology had gone—people thought it was the lab, there was a real investigation and the lab was cleared—then I would basically believe the consensus and think the underlying process was valid.
I’m open to sponsorship to do further research at $200/hr. DM me if you’re interested.
This is the kind of thing you do before you make a big post accusing someone of “the crime of the century.” I don’t know how you even thought this was remotely reasonable. This is basically just Pascal’s mugging, except that the worst you can do is harm the reputation of the community… “pay me or I might make really bad posts.”
I mean I am responsible for my own thoughts. If I am wrong it is my fault.
well your shapley value on your own thoughts is certainly the highest, but others’ input isn’t zero
I read summaries and watched some of the debate, because I too am lazy. That’s why I linked to Daniel Filan’s thread on the debate. Also, Peter and Rootclaim are working on a condensed version of the three debates, which should be couple hours long.
I tried to look at Daniel Filan’s tweets. The roughly 240 posts long megathread is a largely unstructed stream of consciousness that appears hard to read. He doesn’t seem to make direct arguments so much as it is a scratchpad for thoughts and questions that occured to the author while listening to the debate. The mere act of pointing to such a borderline unreadable thread IMHO doesn’t itself constitute a significant counterargument, nor does the act of referring to the prospect of a future summary article. Reasonable norms of good debate suggest relevant counterarguments should be proportional in length and readability to the original argument, which in this case is Rokos compact nine-minute post.
Again, imagine me making a case for or against AI risk by pointing to a 17-hour YouTube debate and to an overly long and convoluted Twitter thread of the thoughts of some guy who listened to the debate. I think few would take me seriously.
I also note that you originally seemed to suggest you watched the debate in whole, while you now sound as if you watched only parts of it and read Daniel Filan’s thread. If this alone really got you “from about 70% likelihood of a lab-leak to about 1-5%”, then I think it should be easy for you to post an object-level counterargument to Roko’s post.
(Apart from that, Daniel Filan himself says he is 75-80% convinced of the zoonosis hypothesis, in contrast to your 95-99%, while also noting that this estimate doesn’t even include considerations about genetic evidence which he apparently expects to favor the lab-leak hypothesis. He also says: “Oh also this is influenced by the zoonosis guy being more impressive, which may or may not be a bias.” Though pointing to other people’s credences doesn’t provide a significant argument for anything unless there is also evidence this individual is unusually reliable at making such judgements.)
> Reasonable norms of good debate suggest relevant counterarguments should be proportional in length and readability to the original argument, which in this case is Rokos compact nine-minute post.
This seems entirely *un*reasonable to me. Some arguments simply can’t be properly made that concisely, and this principle seems to bias us towards finding snappy, simplistic explanations rather than true ones.
Someone else mentioned ‘The Pyramid and the Garden’, but I’m reminded of the sort of related argument about Atlantis in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ : sometimes, boring reality and ‘it’s actually just a series of coincidences’ requires a lot more explaining than a neat little conspiracy theory. Not to tar the lab leak hypothesis by calling it a conspiracy theory- while of course it literally is one, it doesn’t deserve to be demeaned by the term’s modern connotation of zany insane-person nonsense- but it is easy to see why ‘these facts seems unlikely to be a coincidence’ might be easier to argue concisely than its rebuttal, and a norm where the person that can state their argument more persuasively in shortform wins doesn’t seem like one that’s going to promote optimal truth-seeking.
The problem with “lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate” is that it is too short an argument, not a too long one. Arguments don’t get substituted by merely referring to them. The expression “the Riemann hypothesis” is not synonymous with the Riemann hypothesis. The former just refers to the latter. You can understand one without understanding the other.
On average, every argument gets more indirect the less accessible it is, and inaccessibility is strongly dependent on length, as well as language, intelligibility, format etc.
It may be that the 17-hour debate cannot be summarized adequately (depending on some standard of adequacy) in a nine-minute post, but a nine-minute post would be much more adequate than “lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate”.
It isn’t an argument, it’s a citation.
I don’t think a 17 hour debate is “inaccessible” to someone who is invested in this issue and making extremely strong, potentially very seriously libellous claims without having investigated some of the central arguments on the question at hand.
A foundational text in some academic field might take 17 hours to read, but you would still expect someone to have read it before making a priori wild claims that contradicted the expert consensus of that field very radically. I don’t think you’d take that person seriously at all if they hadn’t, and would in fact consider it very irresponsible (and frankly idiotic) for them to even make the claims until they had.
That’s not to say that this debate should be treated as foundational to the study of this question, exactly, but… well, as I said elsewhere:
I think that makes familiarising yourself with those arguments (whether from the debate or another equivalent-or-better source) a prerequisite for making the kind of strong, confident claims Roko is making. At the moment, he’s making those claims without the information necessary to be anywhere near as confident as he is.
There’s a good reason why the foundational text in an academic field would be a text and not a video. Evaluating arguments is easier to do when they are done via text.
I don’t think anyone has shown that the debate contains specific arguments that Roko is unfamiliar with.
See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZdNyKE5yC4YjXGzfG/a-back-of-the-envelope-calculation-on-how-unlikely-the?commentId=cWCMuMpMQ98gqRB2G
Which to me strongly suggest Roko was unfamiliar with multiple (imo) strong evidence for the zoonosis origin.
Isn’t there a transcript? In any case, this seems to be highly subjective, and in my opinion not hugely relevant anyway. To extend the analogy, your expectation of someone’s having read foundational texts before making strong claims would hardly be lessened by the objection that the texts were hard to read.
Do we need to positively show that? As I mentioned, many intelligent, thoughtful people who were already very familiar with this question and its relevant facts updated significantly based on the debate. And Roko certainly hasn’t explicitly addressed all of the arguments therein. Isn’t that enough to suggest that he should at least watch it?
It’s equivalent to watching a season of a TV show- is that really such an onerous requirement for making incredibly strong, potentially libellous claims about a contentious issue with serious real-world ramifications?
No transcript, but the judges have documents where they outline their reasoning:
Will van Treuren’s doc
Eric Stansifer’s doc
If you watch a debate the way you would a TV show where you aren’t critically evaluating everything, that’s not a good basis for forming beliefs about the real world.
Youtube videos tend to encourage you to consume them in that way, but that doesn’t make it a good epistemic practice and that’s part of the reason why scientific debates usually happen in text.
I watch TV in a pretty focused way where I take things in.
But I wasn’t suggesting you watch it like a TV show; just that’s a similar time commitment (ie not an unreasonable one).
Notes:
Yep, the tweet thread is just me jotting down thoughts etc while watching the debate.
I was 75-80% convinced when I tweeted that, which was before I had finished the debate. After watching the debate, I made a sketchy Bayesian calculation that got me to 96%, but I’ve since backed off to maybe 66%.
Basically: the key question for me is whether you think one of the first outbreaks of COVID happened at the Huanan Seafood Market. Rootclaim conceded this, and as far as I can tell if this is true then it’s dispositive evidence, but I have since began to doubt it.
One thing in favour of my judgements is that I’m at number 5 on Metaculus’ leaderboard of how accurate predictors were compared to their peers, altho that mostly comes from predictions made between 2016 and April 2020, when I burnt out from forecasting on Metaculus.
I’m currently in the Diamond league on Manifold, which is much less impressive, and in part driven by my prediction of which way the debate would go.
Oh—it could be that my peer score is artificially high due to using Metaculus back when there were fewer peers who were good at forecasting.
Sure, my post doesn’t rebut Roko’s. It isn’t an arguement, after all. It is a recommendation for some content.
Yep, I didn’t watch the whole debate. I apologize if I gave that impression. Mea culpa.
How much you update on the evidence depends on your priors, no? Daniel went from “probably lab-leak” to “probably zoonosis”, and I went from “IDK” to “quite probably lab-leak”. That is the similairity I was pointint at.
I found Daniel’s thread helpful after watching some hours of the debate, as he noticed numerous points I missed. Plus, I had watched enough that the rest of the data in the thread made sense to me. So you’re right, Daniel’s thread probably isn’t that helpful. At least, not without watching e.g. the opening arguements by rootclaim and peter miller.
I honestly think most people who hear about this debate are underestimating how much they’d enjoy watching it.
I often listen to podcasts and audiobooks while working on intellectually non-demanding tasks and playing games. Putting this debate on a second monitor instead felt like a significant step up from that. Books are too often bloated with filler as authors struggle to stretch a simple idea into 8-20 hours, and even the best podcast hosts aren’t usually willing or able to challenge their guests’ ideas with any kind of rigor. By contrast, everything in this debate felt vital and interesting, and no ideas were left unchallenged. The tactic you’ll often see in normal-length debates where one side makes too many claims for the other side to address doesn’t work in a debate this long, and the length also gives a serious advantage to rigor over dull rhetorical grandstanding- compared to something like the Intelligence Squared debates, it’s night and day.
When it was over, I badly wanted more, and spent some time looking for other recordings of extremely long debates on interesting topics- unsuccessfully, as it turned out.
So, while I wouldn’t be willing to pay anyone to watch this debate, I certainly would be willing to contribute a small amount to a fund sponsoring other debates of this type.
I don’t think someone should need to pay you thousands of dollars to engage with full arguments for and against a proposition before you claim near-certainty about it. It’s just sort of a pre-requisite for having that kind of confidence in your belief, or having it be taken seriously. Perhaps particularly when you’re not only disagreeing with the expert consensus, but calling that expertise into question because they disagree with you.
That seems to generalize to “no-one is allowed to make any claim whatsoever without consuming all of the information in the world”.
Just because someone generated a vast amount of content analysing the topic, does not mean you’re obliged to consume it before forming your opinions. Nay, I think consuming all object-level evidence should be considered entirely sufficient (which I assume was done in this case). Other people’s analyses based on the same data are basically superfluous, then.
Even less than that, it seems reasonable to stop gathering evidence the moment you don’t expect any additional information to overturn the conclusions you’ve formed (as long as you’re justified in that expectation, i. e. if you have a model of the domain strong enough to have an idea regarding what sort of additional (counter)evidence may turn up and how you’d update on it).
I would say that it generalises to ‘one shouldn’t make a confident proclamation of near-certainty without consuming what seems to be very relevant information to the truth of the claim’. Which I would agree with.
I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly. I think it’s reasonable to expect someone to consume that information before claiming near-certainty on the question.
I’m not sure who you’re referring to and can’t think of examples, but in case it’s me, I wasn’t already very engaged with the topic or in possession of carefully-formed views.
Well it wouldn’t be you then, would it?
The full arguments for a proposition can be arbitrarily long. You have to select a finite subset to even engage with.
This is fair, but as I said elsewhere:
The arguments there seem like they have to be worth at least familiarising yourself with and considering before you claim as high a confidence as you are claiming (especially given that most people seem to have been swayed in the opposite direction to your claim).
In other words: yes, you have to select a finite subset to engage with, and I think there is good reason to include this debate within that subset.
What evidence do you have for that claim?
For the claim that people generally seem to have updated towards zoonotic origin as a result of the debate? No formal evidence, of course, but do you spend much time on LW/ACX/other rationalist internet spaces? It seems an unavoidable conclusion, if a difficult one to produce evidence of.
Only the other day there was a significant debate on /r/ssc about whether the emphatic win for the zoonotic side meant that we were logically compelled to update in that direction, due to conservation of evidence (I argued against that proposition, but I seemed to be in the minority).
Here is the end of a tweet thread with links to all the slides, as well as questions the judges asked and the debaters’ answers. IDK if they count as being in a ‘hierarchical format’.
Rootclaim sold the debate as a public good that would enhance knowledge but ultimately shirked responsibility to competently argue for one side of the debate, so it was a very one-sided affair that left viewers (and judges) to conclude this was probably natural origin. Several people on LW say the debate has strongly swayed them against lab leak.
The winning argument (as I saw it) came down to Peter’s presentation of case mapping data (location and chronology) suggesting an undeniable tie to the seafood market. Saar did little to undercut this, which was disappointing because the Worobey paper and WHO report have no shortage of issues. Meanwhile, Peter did his homework on basically every source Saar cited (even engaging with some authors on Twitter to better understand the source) and was quick to show any errors in the weak ones, leaving viewers with the impression that Rootclaim’s case stood on a house of cards.
Peter was just infinitely more prepared for the debates, had counterpoints for anything Saar said, and seemingly made 10 logical arguments in the time it took Saar to form a coherent sentence. It wasn’t exactly like watching Mayweather fight Michael Cera, but it wasn’t not that. Didn’t seem a fair fight.
It seems to me we should have a strong prior that it was lab-produced by the immediate high infectiousness. What evidence does Peter Miller provide to overcome that prior?
edited to add:
on reading https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim , I found the discussion on how the Furin cleavage site was coded significantly changed my view towards natural origin (the rest of the evidence presented was much less convincing).
2nd edit after that: hmm that’s evidence against direct genetic manipulation but not necessarily against evolution within a lab. Back to being rather uncertain.
3rd edit: The “apparently” in the following seems rather suspicious:
I would like to know what the evidence is that these characteristic mutations don’t arise when cultured in raccoon-dogs. If that claim is false, it would be significant evidence in favour of a lab leak (if it’s true, it’s weaker but still relevant evidence for natural origin).
Rootclaim’s value as a source of truth to me will remain at “essentially zero” so long as they continue to have this on their homepage.