In nature a virus benefits from the host being mobile [...]
Yes, that’s a reason why maybe lab-engineered viruses might be more lethal than naturally occurring ones. But that’s not what you said. You said that if SARS-CoV-2 originated naturally then we would be right to expect that any mutant versions of it would be less lethal, whereas if it was lab-engineered then we shouldn’t have that expectation. That is what I don’t see any justification for.
In fact, to whatever extent your argument here is right, we should expect lab-engineered viruses to have more reduction in lethality when they mutate, because that would be where the evolutionary pressures for less lethality that you mention would start to come in.
(My understanding—which is entirely second-hand so I am not suggesting anyone should trust it much—is that in fact the idea that mutations tend to make pathogens less lethal over time is mostly false, at least for things like SARS-CoV-2 that usually don’t kill their hosts and almost never kill them really quickly. So I wouldn’t, in fact, expect much difference between natural and lab-engineered viruses either in lethality or in change in lethality over time. Unless of course the lab-engineering was specifically aiming to make them more or less lethal; so far as I know there’s no good reason to believe that that was done in the case of SARS-CoV-2 if it did originate in a lab.)
The argument is rather: We expect this virus to behave similarly to the flu or SARS as far as transmission outdoors is concerned.
I think it was reasonable to expect it to be somewhat like SARS because the virus itself is very like the SARS virus. So far as I can tell, there’s no particular reason why thinking the virus was lab-engineered rather than zoonotic would change that.
Before the first BLM demonstration [...] we expected that the kind of meeting outdoors would produce a significant amount of infections.
My recollection is that (1) that was not universally expected and (2) at least some people argued—I forget whether it was before or after it transpired that there wasn’t a big increase in infections—that the effects of BLM demonstrations might be counterbalanced by other people staying home because they didn’t want to get caught up in demonstrations, rioting, crowds, etc.
I think “airborne transmission is more likely in a world with a lab leak” isn’t at all clear (assuming that it means that lab-engineered viruses are more likely to be able to spread that way), but I do agree that a lab leak is more likely if airborne transmission is possible, which means that Pr(airborne transmission | lab leak) > Pr(airborne transmission), a point that hadn’t occurred to me before you pointed it out. I don’t know enough about the mechanisms of actual lab leaks to have a good idea of how much bigger the probability becomes on conditionalizing on lab leak.
Whether or not it actually was a lab leak is independent from people lying except for Shi and a few other Chinese that actually know for certain
Surely that’s false. E.g., whether there actually was a leak surely isn’t independent of whether Daszak genuinely thought it hugely unlikely that there was a leak. (Because both correlate with how much work WIV was doing with SARS-CoV-2-like viruses, and with how good WIV’s safety practices were.)
But let’s return for a moment to the actual context. Zvi said that the origins of COVID-19 don’t matter much, and you said oh yes they do, because it matters that they lied to us. Your statement is actually responsive to Zvi’s only in so far as what they allegedly lied to us about is the origins of COVID-19 (as opposed to, say, how confident any particular scientist was at any particular point about how likely it is that it originated with a lab leak). Lies about that are absolutely not independent of whether or not it actually was a lab leak.
This sounds like a weird post-truth idea [...]
Obviously I wasn’t saying (and don’t believe) the silly thing you accuse me of saying. I do, however, believe the following two quite different things. (1) It has, in fact, not been conclusively established that “they lied to us” about the origin of COVID-19. (One reason for this, though not the most important, is that it’s entirely unclear who “they” are. Let’s have more precision and less political sloganizing here.) (2) While what’s true doesn’t depend at all on (though it correlates with) what other people around you find credible, what it’s reasonable to state flatly as if it’s common knowledge does depend on that. In the present case, accusing Zvi of “pretending it doesn’t matter that they lied to us” presupposes that Zvi agrees, or at least that he would agree if he were reasonable, that “they lied to us”; I don’t think either of those things is reasonable to presuppose.
Surely that’s false. E.g., whether there actually was a leak surely isn’t independent of whether Daszak genuinely thought it hugely unlikely that there was a leak.
In a world where there’s a lab leak it’s more likely that an expert like Daszak believes that there’s a lab leak. We however have information such as him hiding his role as the organizer of the paper that declared that there’s a consensus and everything besides that should be seen as a conspiracy theory. Why would someone engage in deceptive behavior like that when they have nothing to hide?
Lying is about saying things one believes to be untrue. Whether something is a lie doesn’t depend on it actually true or false. I do believe that lies about the state of the evidence where told to get Facebook/Twitter to censor content early in February 2020. When it comes to “they” and lied it’s hard to have a completely list, but Fauci, Farrar, Tedros and Daszak would be a good start as central players for February 2020.
I also see actions of Christopher Ashley Ford to stop the state department from building a Bayesian model of the chances of a lab leak and a natural origin because it would “open a can of worm” as purposefully misleading the public (and lying is the naive word for that).
(I also think that the Chinese constantly lie but that’s less interesting)
While what’s true doesn’t depend at all on (though it correlates with) what other people around you find credible, what it’s reasonable to state flatly as if it’s common knowledge does depend on that.
I do believe that it’s good to flately state the truth and not bend words according to what’s in the overton window. It feels like there’s some virus going around where infected people suddenly care a lot more about being within the overton window and I don’t like it on LessWrong.
I feel like I should begin by pointing out that the discussion is now entirely about one parenthetical side-remark I made, and that you’ve apparently given up defending all the arguments you made in support of the claim that if SARS-CoV-2 had been thought to be a lab release rather than a zoonosis from early on, it would have changed how we tried to fight it for the better. (I think it’s good that you’ve given up defending them, because I think they’re all completely wrong.)
Anyway. Once again, the point is not that I think no one ever lied about anything related to the lab-leak hypothesis. (That would be really surprising. There is always evidence for anything, whether it’s actually true or actually false, and if you point at a group of people and say “maybe you guys were responsible for killing millions of people and doing trillions of dollars of economic damage” you should expect that some of them, and some other people who don’t want them to look bad, will be less than forthcoming about any evidence supporting your claim. Whether there’s any truth to the claim or not.)
The point is that you accused Zvi of “pretending that it didn’t matter that they lied to us”, and that’s not a reasonable accusation unless (1) Zvi actually believes that “they lied to us” or at the very least (2) it’s so obvious that “they lied to us” that if Zvi doesn’t believe it then it can only be because he’s deceiving himself—where “they lied to us” means something for which it plausibly would matter if “they lied to us”. It’s not at all clear to me that either #1 or #2 is true.
Also: I think you are misunderstanding the structure of Zvi’s argument, because so far as I can see no matter what you take “they lied to us” to mean, and no matter how strong the evidence is that that’s so, Zvi is not in fact claiming that it doesn’t matter at all in any way whether “they lied to us”, he’s claiming only that the main conclusions from “COVID-19 started from a lab leak” and “there’s a 10% chance that COVID-19 started from a lab leak” and “COVID-19 was zoonotic, but lab safety was poor enough that it could have started from a lab leak” are pretty much identical: any of these means that the virus lab wasn’t being nearly careful enough, and any of them means that gain-of-function research is looking like a very poor cost-benefit tradeoff. Whether (say) Anthony Fauci is an honest person whose public statements can be trusted is much less important than those things. (For that matter, I’m pretty sure Zvi is already firmly in the “Anthony Fauci’s public statements cannot be trusted” camp, after what he said about masks early on, so learning that “they lied to us” on this score wouldn’t much change his opinion about that.) So (I claim) he was never making the statement you objected to.
Suppose everything you claim about lab leaks and cover-ups is correct. What follows, and how is it actionable? 0. We conclude that the lab-leak hypothesis is at least credible. (This is indeed important, but this part is already widely credited, and it doesn’t at all depend on your claims about lies and cover-ups. And Zvi already acknowledges this bit; see previous paragraph.) 1. We conclude that Anthony Fauci is not perfectly honest with the public, when he thinks that misleading the public would do more good than harm. We already had good reason to think that, after the business with masks. You might say “so he should lose his job” but (a) I don’t think it’s very common for people in his sort of job to lose it for behaving in a way that suits the establishment and (b) I see no reason to think that anyone else in his position would behave differently. 2. We suspect … something? … about Tedros Adhanom. (Your post about this mentions that Fauci, Farrar et al talked about contacting him, maybe about things related to the lab-leak hypothesis, and then says that the WHO was going to work with social media companies to “counter misinformation”. It seems like you want to suggest that Adhanom was in on the conspiracy to suppress the lab-leak hypothesis and that he put pressure on social media companies to do likewise, but the evidence seems awfully thin.) 3. We conclude that Jeremy Farrar (of whom I had never heard before), like Fauci, is willing to mislead the public for their own good. I can’t think of any way in which I could actually use that information. (Note: I say “for their own good” because I don’t see any obvious way in which Farrar personally would be harmed if the lab leak hypothesis became generally accepted. Fauci’s situation might be a bit different, though the alleged connections seem pretty weak to me.) 4. We conclude that various other individual scientists (Daszak, Andersen) are willing to bend the truth to avoid looking bad. I can’t think of any way in which I could actually use that information. 5. We conclude that sometimes consensus can be engineered. I’m pretty sure we already knew that.
So I’m with Zvi on this: even assuming that all the claims and conjectures and insinuations in that post of yours are correct, the at-all-actionable conclusions from “lab leak and cover-up” and from “no lab leak, no cover-up, but it turns out that research on coronaviruses was being conducted in a way that could have led to a lab leak” are close to identical.
Note that “everyone around me is suddenly more concerned about being within the Overton window” is what being infected oneself by a conspiracy theory feels like from the inside. You could be right, of course. But it’s not obvious to me that “almost everyone else on LW falls into the same epistemic hole, while Christian doesn’t” is more likely than “Christian falls into an epistemic hole, while almost everyone else on LW doesn’t”. (It’s not as obviously less likely as that formulation may make it sound, of course. A widely prevailing narrative backed by the scientific establishment is likely to have an easier time capturing minds around here than a fringe-looking conspiracy-looking theory, conditional on the two having similar amounts of actual truth to them.)
Yes, that’s a reason why maybe lab-engineered viruses might be more lethal than naturally occurring ones. But that’s not what you said. You said that if SARS-CoV-2 originated naturally then we would be right to expect that any mutant versions of it would be less lethal, whereas if it was lab-engineered then we shouldn’t have that expectation. That is what I don’t see any justification for.
In fact, to whatever extent your argument here is right, we should expect lab-engineered viruses to have more reduction in lethality when they mutate, because that would be where the evolutionary pressures for less lethality that you mention would start to come in.
(My understanding—which is entirely second-hand so I am not suggesting anyone should trust it much—is that in fact the idea that mutations tend to make pathogens less lethal over time is mostly false, at least for things like SARS-CoV-2 that usually don’t kill their hosts and almost never kill them really quickly. So I wouldn’t, in fact, expect much difference between natural and lab-engineered viruses either in lethality or in change in lethality over time. Unless of course the lab-engineering was specifically aiming to make them more or less lethal; so far as I know there’s no good reason to believe that that was done in the case of SARS-CoV-2 if it did originate in a lab.)
I think it was reasonable to expect it to be somewhat like SARS because the virus itself is very like the SARS virus. So far as I can tell, there’s no particular reason why thinking the virus was lab-engineered rather than zoonotic would change that.
My recollection is that (1) that was not universally expected and (2) at least some people argued—I forget whether it was before or after it transpired that there wasn’t a big increase in infections—that the effects of BLM demonstrations might be counterbalanced by other people staying home because they didn’t want to get caught up in demonstrations, rioting, crowds, etc.
I think “airborne transmission is more likely in a world with a lab leak” isn’t at all clear (assuming that it means that lab-engineered viruses are more likely to be able to spread that way), but I do agree that a lab leak is more likely if airborne transmission is possible, which means that Pr(airborne transmission | lab leak) > Pr(airborne transmission), a point that hadn’t occurred to me before you pointed it out. I don’t know enough about the mechanisms of actual lab leaks to have a good idea of how much bigger the probability becomes on conditionalizing on lab leak.
Surely that’s false. E.g., whether there actually was a leak surely isn’t independent of whether Daszak genuinely thought it hugely unlikely that there was a leak. (Because both correlate with how much work WIV was doing with SARS-CoV-2-like viruses, and with how good WIV’s safety practices were.)
But let’s return for a moment to the actual context. Zvi said that the origins of COVID-19 don’t matter much, and you said oh yes they do, because it matters that they lied to us. Your statement is actually responsive to Zvi’s only in so far as what they allegedly lied to us about is the origins of COVID-19 (as opposed to, say, how confident any particular scientist was at any particular point about how likely it is that it originated with a lab leak). Lies about that are absolutely not independent of whether or not it actually was a lab leak.
Obviously I wasn’t saying (and don’t believe) the silly thing you accuse me of saying. I do, however, believe the following two quite different things. (1) It has, in fact, not been conclusively established that “they lied to us” about the origin of COVID-19. (One reason for this, though not the most important, is that it’s entirely unclear who “they” are. Let’s have more precision and less political sloganizing here.) (2) While what’s true doesn’t depend at all on (though it correlates with) what other people around you find credible, what it’s reasonable to state flatly as if it’s common knowledge does depend on that. In the present case, accusing Zvi of “pretending it doesn’t matter that they lied to us” presupposes that Zvi agrees, or at least that he would agree if he were reasonable, that “they lied to us”; I don’t think either of those things is reasonable to presuppose.
In a world where there’s a lab leak it’s more likely that an expert like Daszak believes that there’s a lab leak. We however have information such as him hiding his role as the organizer of the paper that declared that there’s a consensus and everything besides that should be seen as a conspiracy theory. Why would someone engage in deceptive behavior like that when they have nothing to hide?
Lying is about saying things one believes to be untrue. Whether something is a lie doesn’t depend on it actually true or false. I do believe that lies about the state of the evidence where told to get Facebook/Twitter to censor content early in February 2020. When it comes to “they” and lied it’s hard to have a completely list, but Fauci, Farrar, Tedros and Daszak would be a good start as central players for February 2020.
I also see actions of Christopher Ashley Ford to stop the state department from building a Bayesian model of the chances of a lab leak and a natural origin because it would “open a can of worm” as purposefully misleading the public (and lying is the naive word for that).
(I also think that the Chinese constantly lie but that’s less interesting)
I do believe that it’s good to flately state the truth and not bend words according to what’s in the overton window. It feels like there’s some virus going around where infected people suddenly care a lot more about being within the overton window and I don’t like it on LessWrong.
I feel like I should begin by pointing out that the discussion is now entirely about one parenthetical side-remark I made, and that you’ve apparently given up defending all the arguments you made in support of the claim that if SARS-CoV-2 had been thought to be a lab release rather than a zoonosis from early on, it would have changed how we tried to fight it for the better. (I think it’s good that you’ve given up defending them, because I think they’re all completely wrong.)
Anyway. Once again, the point is not that I think no one ever lied about anything related to the lab-leak hypothesis. (That would be really surprising. There is always evidence for anything, whether it’s actually true or actually false, and if you point at a group of people and say “maybe you guys were responsible for killing millions of people and doing trillions of dollars of economic damage” you should expect that some of them, and some other people who don’t want them to look bad, will be less than forthcoming about any evidence supporting your claim. Whether there’s any truth to the claim or not.)
The point is that you accused Zvi of “pretending that it didn’t matter that they lied to us”, and that’s not a reasonable accusation unless (1) Zvi actually believes that “they lied to us” or at the very least (2) it’s so obvious that “they lied to us” that if Zvi doesn’t believe it then it can only be because he’s deceiving himself—where “they lied to us” means something for which it plausibly would matter if “they lied to us”. It’s not at all clear to me that either #1 or #2 is true.
Also: I think you are misunderstanding the structure of Zvi’s argument, because so far as I can see no matter what you take “they lied to us” to mean, and no matter how strong the evidence is that that’s so, Zvi is not in fact claiming that it doesn’t matter at all in any way whether “they lied to us”, he’s claiming only that the main conclusions from “COVID-19 started from a lab leak” and “there’s a 10% chance that COVID-19 started from a lab leak” and “COVID-19 was zoonotic, but lab safety was poor enough that it could have started from a lab leak” are pretty much identical: any of these means that the virus lab wasn’t being nearly careful enough, and any of them means that gain-of-function research is looking like a very poor cost-benefit tradeoff. Whether (say) Anthony Fauci is an honest person whose public statements can be trusted is much less important than those things. (For that matter, I’m pretty sure Zvi is already firmly in the “Anthony Fauci’s public statements cannot be trusted” camp, after what he said about masks early on, so learning that “they lied to us” on this score wouldn’t much change his opinion about that.) So (I claim) he was never making the statement you objected to.
Suppose everything you claim about lab leaks and cover-ups is correct. What follows, and how is it actionable? 0. We conclude that the lab-leak hypothesis is at least credible. (This is indeed important, but this part is already widely credited, and it doesn’t at all depend on your claims about lies and cover-ups. And Zvi already acknowledges this bit; see previous paragraph.) 1. We conclude that Anthony Fauci is not perfectly honest with the public, when he thinks that misleading the public would do more good than harm. We already had good reason to think that, after the business with masks. You might say “so he should lose his job” but (a) I don’t think it’s very common for people in his sort of job to lose it for behaving in a way that suits the establishment and (b) I see no reason to think that anyone else in his position would behave differently. 2. We suspect … something? … about Tedros Adhanom. (Your post about this mentions that Fauci, Farrar et al talked about contacting him, maybe about things related to the lab-leak hypothesis, and then says that the WHO was going to work with social media companies to “counter misinformation”. It seems like you want to suggest that Adhanom was in on the conspiracy to suppress the lab-leak hypothesis and that he put pressure on social media companies to do likewise, but the evidence seems awfully thin.) 3. We conclude that Jeremy Farrar (of whom I had never heard before), like Fauci, is willing to mislead the public for their own good. I can’t think of any way in which I could actually use that information. (Note: I say “for their own good” because I don’t see any obvious way in which Farrar personally would be harmed if the lab leak hypothesis became generally accepted. Fauci’s situation might be a bit different, though the alleged connections seem pretty weak to me.) 4. We conclude that various other individual scientists (Daszak, Andersen) are willing to bend the truth to avoid looking bad. I can’t think of any way in which I could actually use that information. 5. We conclude that sometimes consensus can be engineered. I’m pretty sure we already knew that.
So I’m with Zvi on this: even assuming that all the claims and conjectures and insinuations in that post of yours are correct, the at-all-actionable conclusions from “lab leak and cover-up” and from “no lab leak, no cover-up, but it turns out that research on coronaviruses was being conducted in a way that could have led to a lab leak” are close to identical.
Note that “everyone around me is suddenly more concerned about being within the Overton window” is what being infected oneself by a conspiracy theory feels like from the inside. You could be right, of course. But it’s not obvious to me that “almost everyone else on LW falls into the same epistemic hole, while Christian doesn’t” is more likely than “Christian falls into an epistemic hole, while almost everyone else on LW doesn’t”. (It’s not as obviously less likely as that formulation may make it sound, of course. A widely prevailing narrative backed by the scientific establishment is likely to have an easier time capturing minds around here than a fringe-looking conspiracy-looking theory, conditional on the two having similar amounts of actual truth to them.)