I don’t think that’s true. There’s information available online but a lot of information isn’t. A person who had access to the US cables showing security concerns at the WIV, who had access to NSA surveilance that picked might have get alarmed that there’s something problematic happening when the cell phone traffic dropped in October 2019 and they took their database down.
On the other hand I don’t think that there’s any way I could have known about the problems at the WIV in October of 2019 by accessing public information. Completely unrelated, it’s probably just a councidence that October 2019 was also the time when the exercise by US policy makers about how a Coronavirus pandemic played out was done.
I don’t think there’s any public source that I could access that tells me about whether or not it was a coincidence. It’s not the most important question but it leaves questions about how warning signs are handled open.
The information that Dong Jingwei just gave the US government is more like a buried chest.
I mean, fair enough—but I wasn’t claiming that there aren’t any buried-chest secrets. I’ll put it this way: Superforecasters outperformed US intelligence community analysts in the prediction tournament; whatever secrets the latter had access to, they weren’t important enough to outweigh the (presumably minor! Intelligence analysts aren’t fools!) rationality advantage the superforecasters had!
When doing deep research I consider it very important to be mindful of information for a lot just not being available.
I think it’s true that a lot can be done with publically available information but it’s important to keep in mind the battle that’s fought for it. If an organization like US Right to Know wouldn’t wage lawsuits, then the FOIA requests they make can’t be used to inform out decisions.
While going through FOIA documents I really miss Julian. If he would still be around, Wikileaks would likely host the COVID-19 related emails in a nice searchable fashion and given that he isn’t I have to work through PDF documents.
Information on how the WHO coordinate their censorship partnership on COVID-19 with Google and Twitter in a single day on the 3rd of February 2020 to prevent the lab-leak hypothesis from spreading further, needs access to internal documents. Between FOIA requests and offical statements we can narrow it down to that day, but there’s a limit to the depth that you can access with public information. It needs either a Senate committee to subpena Google and Twitter or someone in those companies leaking the information.
How much information is available and how easy it is to access is the result of a constant battle for freedom of information. I think it’s great to encourage people to do research but it’s also important to be aware that a lot of information is withheld and that there’s room for pushing the available information further.
whatever secrets the latter had access to, they weren’t important enough to outweigh the (presumably minor! Intelligence analysts aren’t fools!) rationality advantage the superforecasters had!
There might be effect like the enviroment in which intelligence analysts operate train them to be biased towards what their boss wants to hear.
I also think that the more specific questions happen to be the more important specialized sources of information become.
I don’t think that’s true. There’s information available online but a lot of information isn’t. A person who had access to the US cables showing security concerns at the WIV, who had access to NSA surveilance that picked might have get alarmed that there’s something problematic happening when the cell phone traffic dropped in October 2019 and they took their database down.
On the other hand I don’t think that there’s any way I could have known about the problems at the WIV in October of 2019 by accessing public information. Completely unrelated, it’s probably just a councidence that October 2019 was also the time when the exercise by US policy makers about how a Coronavirus pandemic played out was done.
I don’t think there’s any public source that I could access that tells me about whether or not it was a coincidence. It’s not the most important question but it leaves questions about how warning signs are handled open.
The information that Dong Jingwei just gave the US government is more like a buried chest.
I mean, fair enough—but I wasn’t claiming that there aren’t any buried-chest secrets. I’ll put it this way: Superforecasters outperformed US intelligence community analysts in the prediction tournament; whatever secrets the latter had access to, they weren’t important enough to outweigh the (presumably minor! Intelligence analysts aren’t fools!) rationality advantage the superforecasters had!
When doing deep research I consider it very important to be mindful of information for a lot just not being available.
I think it’s true that a lot can be done with publically available information but it’s important to keep in mind the battle that’s fought for it. If an organization like US Right to Know wouldn’t wage lawsuits, then the FOIA requests they make can’t be used to inform out decisions.
While going through FOIA documents I really miss Julian. If he would still be around, Wikileaks would likely host the COVID-19 related emails in a nice searchable fashion and given that he isn’t I have to work through PDF documents.
Information on how the WHO coordinate their censorship partnership on COVID-19 with Google and Twitter in a single day on the 3rd of February 2020 to prevent the lab-leak hypothesis from spreading further, needs access to internal documents. Between FOIA requests and offical statements we can narrow it down to that day, but there’s a limit to the depth that you can access with public information. It needs either a Senate committee to subpena Google and Twitter or someone in those companies leaking the information.
How much information is available and how easy it is to access is the result of a constant battle for freedom of information. I think it’s great to encourage people to do research but it’s also important to be aware that a lot of information is withheld and that there’s room for pushing the available information further.
There might be effect like the enviroment in which intelligence analysts operate train them to be biased towards what their boss wants to hear.
I also think that the more specific questions happen to be the more important specialized sources of information become.