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Nobel peace prize winners can been frankly weirdly wrong on these topics when they overextend from their own specific domain. Think back to the AIDs crisis, where Peter Duesberg, an award winning molecular biologist, thought that AIDs couldn't possibly be caused by HIV. He was outside of his peer group that came to realize that AIDs is in fact caused by HIV. Experts can be wrong, but that is why science is not just a process, but an institution. Peer review is how we deal with these discrepancies, and "doing your own research" without expert mentorship is not a substantial substitute.

I have a PhD in bioinformatics, and yet I know that my personal expertise (and ability to consume) information about viral engineering is limited. I therefore have to rely on experts, and make a substantial effort to tune my priors to ensure I'm listening to the right sources. A single medium blog from a reporter without any editorial supervision is not an adequate substitute. When I have questions about how to adjust my priors for this subject, I have been in communication with colleagues whose expertise and knowledge are qualified to answer questions. And from all of this, there has been a general consensus from these scientists that while they cannot specifically rule out lab origin hypothesis, there does not even begin to approximate the amount of evidence we need in order to "prove" it. Remember in science we are trying to make claims that are by nature testable- if you cannot test a hypothesis, it's then just pure speculation.

If you want to waste your mental effort on "doing your own research" and making baseless speculation, fine, waste your time. Go off the deep end and find amusement of the sort of baseless conspiracy theory folks that appear on Joe Rogan. But do not for a moment bring baseless speculation into the realm of science. Too many people have spent too much time to waste it on people who cannot intellectually appreciate the differences between testable scientific hypothesis and a baseless speculative claim.




I don't know who you think is asserting that lab origin is "proven"? The claim is that sufficient evidence exists that it should be investigated, not that investigation of all other possibilities should stop.

For a specific example, the WIV had a database of viral genomes, available on the public Internet. There was also a private, password-protected section. That entire database went offline in September 2019, and hasn't come back. The WIV has cited "hacking attempts" as the reason.

Do you find that reason credible? Do you believe that the contents of that database should be obtained and publicly disclosed, for open scientific review? If yes, then you share your desired policy action with the "baseless conspiracy folks". If no, then you share it with the CCP.

And since you say "priors": knowing that a pandemic emerged but nothing else, what's your prior that it emerged due to lab activity? I assume you're aware that the 1977 flu pandemic was probably a lab escape, and depending how you count we've had perhaps a dozen pandemics in the last fifty years; so I don't see how you can claim less than ~5%. That's far from negligible, so what evidence takes you from there to dismissing it as "baseless speculation"? It can't be the novelty of the pathogen, since a distinctive part of the WIV's research was specifically their collection of novel pathogens from nature (about 900 miles away, to be clear; Wuhan wasn't in an expected natural spillover zone).




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