The frustrating thing about the discussion about the origins is that people seldom show recognition of the priorities here, and all get lost in the weeds.
You can get n layers deep into the details, and if the bottom is at n+1 you’re fucked. To give an example I see people talking about with this debate, “The lab was working on doing gain of function to coronaviruses just like this!” sounds pretty damning but “actually the grant was denied, do you think they’d be working on it in secret after they were denied funding?” completely reverses it. Then after the debate, “Actually, labs frequently write grant proposals for work they’ve already done, and frequently are years behind in publishing” reverses it again. Even if there’s an odd number of remaining counters, the debate doesn’t demonstrate it. If you’re not really really careful about this stuff, it’s very easy to get lost and not realize where you’ve overextended on shaky ground.
Scott talks about how Saar is much more careful about these “out of model” possibilities and feels ripped off because his opponent wasn’t, but at least judging from Scott’s summary it doesn’t appear he really hammered on what the issue is here and how to address it.
Elsewhere in the comments here Saar is criticized for failing to fact check the dead cat thing, and I think that’s a good example of the issue here. It’s not that any individual thing is too difficult to fact check, it’s that when all the evidence is pointing in one direction (so far as you can tell) then you don’t really have a reason to fact check every little thing that makes total sense so of course you’re likely to not do it. If someone argues that clay bricks weigh less than an ounce, you’re going to weigh the first brick you see to prove them wrong, and you’re not going to break it open to confirm that it’s not secretly filled with something other than clay. And if it turns out it is, that doesn’t actually matter because your belief didn’t hinge on this particular brick being clay in the first place.
If it turns out that a lot of your predictions turn out to be based on false presuppositions, this might be an issue. If it turns out the trend you based your perspective on just isn’t there, then yeah that’s a problem. But if that’s not actually the evidence that formed your beliefs, and they’re just tentative predictions that aren’t required by your belief under question, then it means much less. Doubly so if we’re at “there exists a seemingly compelling counterargument” and not “we’ve gotten to the bottom of this, and there are no more seemingly compelling counter-counterarguments”.
So Saar didn’t check if the grant was actually approved. And Peter didn’t check if labs sometimes do the work before writing grant proposals. Or they did, and it didn’t come through in the debate. And Saar missed the cat thing. Peter did better on this game of “whack-a-mole” of arguments than Saar did, and more than I expected, but what is it worth? Truth certainly makes this easier, but so does preparation and debate skill, so I’m not really sure how much to update here.
What I want to see more than “who can paint an excessively detailed story that doesn’t really matter and have it stand up to surface level scrutiny better”, is people focusing on the actual cruxes underlying their views. Forget the myriad of implications n steps down the road which we don’t have the ability to fully map out and verify, what are the first few things we can actually know, and what can we learn from this by itself? If we’re talking about a controversial “relationship guru”, postpone discussions of whether clips were “taken out of context” and what context might be necessary until we settle whether this person is on their first marriage or fifth. If we’re wondering if a suspect is guilty of murder, don’t even bother looking into the credibility of the witness until you’ve settled the question of does the DNA match.
If there appears to be a novel coronavirus outbreak right outside a lab studying novel coronaviruses, is that actually the case? Do we even need to look at anything else, and can looking at anything else even change the answer?
To exaggerate the point to highlight the issue, if there were unambiguously a million wet markets that are all equivalent, and one lab, and the outbreak were to happen right between the lab and the nearest wet market, you’re done. It doesn’t matter how much you think the virus “doesn’t look engineered” because you can’t get to a million to one that way. Even if you somehow manage to make what you think is a 1000:1 case, a) even if your analysis is sound it still came from the lab, b) either your analysis there or the million to one starting premise is flawed. And if we’re looking for a flaw in our analyses, it’s going to be a lot easier to find flaws in something relatively concrete like “there are a million wet markets just like this one” than whatever is going into arguing that it “looks natural”.
So I really wish they’d sit down and hammer out the most significant and easiest to verify bits first. How many equally risky wet markets are there? How many labs? What is the quantitative strength of the 30,000 foot view “It looks like an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey Pennsylvania”? What does it actually take to have arguments that contain leaks to this degree, and can we realistically demonstrate that here?
I think Michael Weissman’s v5.7 research/analysis might be exactly what you are looking for. I’ve been searching for a long time for analysis that makes a compelling case in either direction, especially for the absolutely most important core components of the debate. In a sea of high-effort research and analysis, Michael’s post is the first one that has convinced me. He dives into very similar points to what you’re searching for.
Even if you don’t read it in full (it’s long), I still see value in searching for specific elements to see his analysis on those points, such as his discussion about the wet market. For example, if you search for “animals/year” and “HSM” (Huanan Seafood Market), you’ll see he goes into the animal trade numbers specifically at the HSM when compared to numbers for other wet markets in China. There are many other topics he analyzes that you might find similarly interesting.
Like you, I am wary of getting distracted too much with lines of evidence that may ultimately carry little weight. I appreciate that Gwern likely was motivated by the cat evidence to demonstrate to everyone how Peter may misrepresent evidence/arguments; I also think this evidence is so insignificant to the overall debate that it’s not important enough to get bogged down in.
This is an oversimplification, but for brevity, I think the case really rests on two components: the wet market as the origin, and the DEFUSE proposal. The wet market is so foundational to a Zoonosis argument that if it were disproved, it really seems like the closest thing we’ve got right now to a “does the DNA match?” question.
Here’s a brief list of some recent information (some as recent as March 2024) that updated me towards lab leak and added crucial evidence for what we actually “know”. This is for the sake of explaining my thoughts to others, but is in no way all-encompassing. Michael does a far superior job of explaining these in great depth.
Study published March 5th, 2024 finding intermediate sequences between Lineage A and B. This research shows that Lineage B very likely came from Lineage A. All cases in the market were Lineage B, but none were Lineage A. In short, the research shows that a single spillover is much more likely than a double-spillover Zoonotic event. The double-spillover theory is a foundational argument of the ZW theory that Peter Miller and others use. This is a massive blow to the probability that the wet market was the origin of the virus, to the point where it now seems extremely unlikely that the wet market was the origin.
Wildlife trade in Wuhan is significantly less than Wuhan’s percentage of the population, which significantly changes the probabilities downwards of a ZW origin in the bayesian calculations that Peter Miller and others use.
Although the DEFUSE proposal leaked in 2021, more recent drafts were discovered in 2024 which contain what appears to be damning evidence. New information included their approach using restriction enzymes (BsaI/BsmBI) that ultimately matched precisely with what Bruttel et al. (2022) found as the assembly process that would create exactly this virus, years before this DEFUSE draft leak was even public. Michael describes the degree of how unlikely this would be if the origin was Zoonotic. The DEFUSE budget leak confirms that they were purchasing these enzymes. To your point about focusing on things that we “know”, the BsaI/BsmBI restriction enzyme information is new and now falls in the category of actual high-weight evidence for a high-weight core component of the overall debate. Additionally, the new documents contained draft comments that were not available in the original leaked proposal. Among many other things, the comments show that the research work was actually planned to be done at the WIV at BSL-2 levels for cost reduction, but they edited the final document to “BSL-3″ because they thought “US researchers will likely freak out” if they knew this research was being done in lower safety BSL-2 labs. The researchers seemed to think the distinction didn’t matter for their research and that it was bureaucratic tape slowing them down, so they fudged the proposal to hide this. Considering BSL-2 labs are not sufficiently designed to contain airborne disease (whereas BSL-3 labs are), this does not seem to be an insignificant point in this whole debate.
The DEFUSE proposal is especially difficult because it’s uncertain and very much in the realm of “how much can we really know”, but it seems so incredibly relevant and high-weight to the debate that I really think it still should be considered at the core and should be hammered out as much as possible. When looking at how SARS-CoV-2 ended up, they are unbelievably spot-on with describing specifically what they were working on, how precisely they would do it, the restriction enzymes they would use, the Furin cleavage site, the locations they would do it, the unsafe biosecurity levels the research would be done at, their motivations for the research, and much more. My understanding is that there were only 3 institutions in the world that were doing this exact research, and two of them (WIV and UNC) were involved with this proposal. The proposal describes a research plan that uncannily resembles the precise sequence of events and conditions one would anticipate if a pandemic were to emerge from a laboratory incident at or near the WIV. It really is almost as close a match as you could possibly expect.
I hope this helps. I’m curious what you and others think.
The frustrating thing about the discussion about the origins is that people seldom show recognition of the priorities here, and all get lost in the weeds.
You can get n layers deep into the details, and if the bottom is at n+1 you’re fucked. To give an example I see people talking about with this debate, “The lab was working on doing gain of function to coronaviruses just like this!” sounds pretty damning but “actually the grant was denied, do you think they’d be working on it in secret after they were denied funding?” completely reverses it. Then after the debate, “Actually, labs frequently write grant proposals for work they’ve already done, and frequently are years behind in publishing” reverses it again. Even if there’s an odd number of remaining counters, the debate doesn’t demonstrate it. If you’re not really really careful about this stuff, it’s very easy to get lost and not realize where you’ve overextended on shaky ground.
Scott talks about how Saar is much more careful about these “out of model” possibilities and feels ripped off because his opponent wasn’t, but at least judging from Scott’s summary it doesn’t appear he really hammered on what the issue is here and how to address it.
Elsewhere in the comments here Saar is criticized for failing to fact check the dead cat thing, and I think that’s a good example of the issue here. It’s not that any individual thing is too difficult to fact check, it’s that when all the evidence is pointing in one direction (so far as you can tell) then you don’t really have a reason to fact check every little thing that makes total sense so of course you’re likely to not do it. If someone argues that clay bricks weigh less than an ounce, you’re going to weigh the first brick you see to prove them wrong, and you’re not going to break it open to confirm that it’s not secretly filled with something other than clay. And if it turns out it is, that doesn’t actually matter because your belief didn’t hinge on this particular brick being clay in the first place.
If it turns out that a lot of your predictions turn out to be based on false presuppositions, this might be an issue. If it turns out the trend you based your perspective on just isn’t there, then yeah that’s a problem. But if that’s not actually the evidence that formed your beliefs, and they’re just tentative predictions that aren’t required by your belief under question, then it means much less. Doubly so if we’re at “there exists a seemingly compelling counterargument” and not “we’ve gotten to the bottom of this, and there are no more seemingly compelling counter-counterarguments”.
So Saar didn’t check if the grant was actually approved. And Peter didn’t check if labs sometimes do the work before writing grant proposals. Or they did, and it didn’t come through in the debate. And Saar missed the cat thing. Peter did better on this game of “whack-a-mole” of arguments than Saar did, and more than I expected, but what is it worth? Truth certainly makes this easier, but so does preparation and debate skill, so I’m not really sure how much to update here.
What I want to see more than “who can paint an excessively detailed story that doesn’t really matter and have it stand up to surface level scrutiny better”, is people focusing on the actual cruxes underlying their views. Forget the myriad of implications n steps down the road which we don’t have the ability to fully map out and verify, what are the first few things we can actually know, and what can we learn from this by itself? If we’re talking about a controversial “relationship guru”, postpone discussions of whether clips were “taken out of context” and what context might be necessary until we settle whether this person is on their first marriage or fifth. If we’re wondering if a suspect is guilty of murder, don’t even bother looking into the credibility of the witness until you’ve settled the question of does the DNA match.
If there appears to be a novel coronavirus outbreak right outside a lab studying novel coronaviruses, is that actually the case? Do we even need to look at anything else, and can looking at anything else even change the answer?
To exaggerate the point to highlight the issue, if there were unambiguously a million wet markets that are all equivalent, and one lab, and the outbreak were to happen right between the lab and the nearest wet market, you’re done. It doesn’t matter how much you think the virus “doesn’t look engineered” because you can’t get to a million to one that way. Even if you somehow manage to make what you think is a 1000:1 case, a) even if your analysis is sound it still came from the lab, b) either your analysis there or the million to one starting premise is flawed. And if we’re looking for a flaw in our analyses, it’s going to be a lot easier to find flaws in something relatively concrete like “there are a million wet markets just like this one” than whatever is going into arguing that it “looks natural”.
So I really wish they’d sit down and hammer out the most significant and easiest to verify bits first. How many equally risky wet markets are there? How many labs? What is the quantitative strength of the 30,000 foot view “It looks like an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey Pennsylvania”? What does it actually take to have arguments that contain leaks to this degree, and can we realistically demonstrate that here?
I think Michael Weissman’s v5.7 research/analysis might be exactly what you are looking for. I’ve been searching for a long time for analysis that makes a compelling case in either direction, especially for the absolutely most important core components of the debate. In a sea of high-effort research and analysis, Michael’s post is the first one that has convinced me. He dives into very similar points to what you’re searching for.
Even if you don’t read it in full (it’s long), I still see value in searching for specific elements to see his analysis on those points, such as his discussion about the wet market. For example, if you search for “animals/year” and “HSM” (Huanan Seafood Market), you’ll see he goes into the animal trade numbers specifically at the HSM when compared to numbers for other wet markets in China. There are many other topics he analyzes that you might find similarly interesting.
Like you, I am wary of getting distracted too much with lines of evidence that may ultimately carry little weight. I appreciate that Gwern likely was motivated by the cat evidence to demonstrate to everyone how Peter may misrepresent evidence/arguments; I also think this evidence is so insignificant to the overall debate that it’s not important enough to get bogged down in.
This is an oversimplification, but for brevity, I think the case really rests on two components: the wet market as the origin, and the DEFUSE proposal. The wet market is so foundational to a Zoonosis argument that if it were disproved, it really seems like the closest thing we’ve got right now to a “does the DNA match?” question.
Here’s a brief list of some recent information (some as recent as March 2024) that updated me towards lab leak and added crucial evidence for what we actually “know”. This is for the sake of explaining my thoughts to others, but is in no way all-encompassing. Michael does a far superior job of explaining these in great depth.
Study published March 5th, 2024 finding intermediate sequences between Lineage A and B. This research shows that Lineage B very likely came from Lineage A. All cases in the market were Lineage B, but none were Lineage A. In short, the research shows that a single spillover is much more likely than a double-spillover Zoonotic event. The double-spillover theory is a foundational argument of the ZW theory that Peter Miller and others use. This is a massive blow to the probability that the wet market was the origin of the virus, to the point where it now seems extremely unlikely that the wet market was the origin.
Wildlife trade in Wuhan is significantly less than Wuhan’s percentage of the population, which significantly changes the probabilities downwards of a ZW origin in the bayesian calculations that Peter Miller and others use.
Although the DEFUSE proposal leaked in 2021, more recent drafts were discovered in 2024 which contain what appears to be damning evidence. New information included their approach using restriction enzymes (BsaI/BsmBI) that ultimately matched precisely with what Bruttel et al. (2022) found as the assembly process that would create exactly this virus, years before this DEFUSE draft leak was even public. Michael describes the degree of how unlikely this would be if the origin was Zoonotic. The DEFUSE budget leak confirms that they were purchasing these enzymes. To your point about focusing on things that we “know”, the BsaI/BsmBI restriction enzyme information is new and now falls in the category of actual high-weight evidence for a high-weight core component of the overall debate. Additionally, the new documents contained draft comments that were not available in the original leaked proposal. Among many other things, the comments show that the research work was actually planned to be done at the WIV at BSL-2 levels for cost reduction, but they edited the final document to “BSL-3″ because they thought “US researchers will likely freak out” if they knew this research was being done in lower safety BSL-2 labs. The researchers seemed to think the distinction didn’t matter for their research and that it was bureaucratic tape slowing them down, so they fudged the proposal to hide this. Considering BSL-2 labs are not sufficiently designed to contain airborne disease (whereas BSL-3 labs are), this does not seem to be an insignificant point in this whole debate.
The DEFUSE proposal is especially difficult because it’s uncertain and very much in the realm of “how much can we really know”, but it seems so incredibly relevant and high-weight to the debate that I really think it still should be considered at the core and should be hammered out as much as possible. When looking at how SARS-CoV-2 ended up, they are unbelievably spot-on with describing specifically what they were working on, how precisely they would do it, the restriction enzymes they would use, the Furin cleavage site, the locations they would do it, the unsafe biosecurity levels the research would be done at, their motivations for the research, and much more. My understanding is that there were only 3 institutions in the world that were doing this exact research, and two of them (WIV and UNC) were involved with this proposal. The proposal describes a research plan that uncannily resembles the precise sequence of events and conditions one would anticipate if a pandemic were to emerge from a laboratory incident at or near the WIV. It really is almost as close a match as you could possibly expect.
I hope this helps. I’m curious what you and others think.