Jimmy Higgins
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Covid-19 miscellany
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TSwizzle
Let's Go Brandon!
Go ahead and quote a post where I "call it a Chinese released plague".
TomC
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Perhaps not. Perhaps, at least one of the three posted the words "a China released plague". But I don't think so.
I'm pretty sure you're responding to something you interpreted, rather than what any of them actually posted. That's a strawman.
Tom
TSwizzle
Let's Go Brandon!
TomC
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Do private property owners still have the right to decide what happens on their own property?
Do employers have a right to decide who gets a paycheck?
Or is that tyrannical government overreach?
Tom
repoman
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Seems like King County, Washington is now safely in the new category of "Low" for all three metrics that the CDC uses going forward.
bilby
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The evidence most certainly does support my position. And reality isn't subject to democracy; Nor adjustable by debate. Your opinion on which side 'won' in a debate isn't grounds for determining which was correct, the only way to determine that is scientific.
The probability that Covid originated in a lab is vanishingly close to zero, and no sane and well informed person could conclude otherwise.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are very poorly informed indeed, and this thread illustrates why very effectively.
Not to anyone who has studied virology, genetics or molecular biology, it doesn't.
Non-experts are not capable of forming useful opinions on this question.
That leaves each of us with three options:
Either go out and put in the years of effort required to become an expert; Or take the word of those who did that; Or be wrong.
You and repoman have inexplicably chosen option three, which significantly lowers my estimate of your intelligence.
A respiratory virus with near zero outside transmission was created in a lab? Yeah, why would anyone think that?
bilby
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How do you mean 'deeply ingrained'? Is it passed on in the spiritual ether, or is it being taught? It is surely the case that most black people alive, and most black people that have ever lived, have never been 'lab rats'. Isn't it an irrational fear to think that a Democratic government is medically experimenting on black people with vaccines that have been given out to billions of people all over the world?Because they were lab rats in the mid 20th century. There is a deeply ingrained distrust in these sorts of things for them. It is difficult to overcome. One thing I have experienced, where I live, blacks wear masks much more than whites.Black people continue to have higher non-vaccination rates than white, Asian, or Hispanic people in America.
Latest Data on COVID-19 Vaccinations by Race/Ethnicity | KFF
KFF is collecting and analyzing data on COVID-19 vaccinations by race/ethnicity to gain increased insight who is receiving the vaccine and whether some groups are facing disparities in vaccination.www.kff.org
Why are black people such plague rats? What can we do to make black people less likely to choose to be plague rats? I think since plague rats violate everyone else's human rights, we should kidnap them and forcibly inject them with a vaccine.
COVID-19 is a pandemic. I have never called it a 'plague', as far as I know, because I don't have the predisposition and nastiness to call unvaccinated people 'plague rats'. I generally think of the bubonic plague when I hear the word 'plague'.
I've also never called it 'Chinese-related', though its origin was Wuhan, China.
repoman
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Bilby, Don2 who has a lot more knowledge than me, was spending time looking into details of the paper and you are spending your time and closed mind attacking us.
Will you listen to what Don2 has to say if it clashes with your current mindset?
Will you listen to what Don2 has to say if it clashes with your current mindset?
The thing is we have multiple examples of a closely related virus showing up in situations that clearly aren't lab leaks. SARS, MERS, the miners in 2012 were clearly zoonotic jumps. It's done it at a minimum 3 times and probably more--why in the world should we be thinking lab leak when it happens yet again?
And it looks like there might have been a previous Covid pandemic:
Was a 19th Century Global Pandemic a Case of COVID 1.0?
Medical historians suspect Russian flu was caused by a coronavirus and holds lessons for today
www.medpagetoday.com
It looks like a decline everywhere. Omicron swept through the population of people not being careful and the pool of vulnerable individuals is way down.
Angra Mainyu
Veteran Member
No, the evidence most certainly does not support your claim that the probability of the lab leak hypothesis on the basis of the available data is negligible. It is anything but that. And of course, reality is not subject to democracy or debate in the sense debate does not change it. On the other hand, debate can and often does affect the probabilistic assessments one should make.bilby said:
The probability that the pandemic originated in a lab (whether by the virus being engineered in a lab, or else by the virus being collected from the wild but scaping from a lab) is higher than 0.5, on the basis of the evidence I've seen (which isn't all the evidence there is, of course; I'm not an expert on viruses). It is not, however, close to 1 at this point. But that assessment might change in one direction or another on the basis of further reading - whether by new discoveries or just me reading all data that I haven't read yet.bilby said:
While the evidence you've seen is different from the evidence I've seen so a difference in rational probabilistic assessments would be unsurprising, "vanishingly close to zero" is just not a rational assessment given the evidence easily found 'in the wild' and even posted in this thread.
But that is false. It is very easy to find virologists who assign high probability to the lab leak hypothesis. The evidence is all over the place, just look it up.bilby said:
This is not true. It is true that non-experts cannot form opinions as informed of that of experts. However, non-experts, like anyone else, can, do and should make probabilistic assessments on the basis of the evidence available to them. That includes the opinions of experts of course. But it's not just that: if you have, say, 70% of experts saying A and 30% saying ¬A, the rational assignment is not necessarily .7 to A. In fact, in cases of expert disagreements, factoring in how experts' opinions might be shaped by which group of experts they're with, when you have that kind of 70/30 split or things like that, I would be closer to 0.6 to A, or something like that, all other things equal. Now, not all other things are equal, because even non-experts can take a look at potential sources of biases for the experts - surely, either the 30% are wrong, or the 70% are wrong, so a lot of experts are wrong in a case like that -, and even read the arguments to see whether the experts on one side even address those on the other side - still, this takes time, and one non-expert may well not have that much to dedicate.bilby said:
As for this case, I do not know what the expert split is. It was almost entirely on the side of non-leak at first. In retrospect, that seems to have been to a considerable extent in-group bias, but I did not know it at the moment, so rationally I assigned very little probability to the lab leak hypothesis. Things have changed ever since, though of course people who strongly said the lab leak hypothesis is obviously false are generally biased not to change their mind (instinctive face-saving perhaps), especially if they are experts.
You are far off on this one. And significantly lower your estimate of my intelligence is not rational even if your data were correct. Have you not seen religion, ideology, in-group thinking, defensiveness after defending a position? It's all over the place among humans, even very intelligent ones. Even if the evidence were on your side - it is not -, your estimate should be lowered only slightly.bilby said:
I, on the other hand, am not going to lower my estimate of your intelligence on the basis of this, as it is not an epistemic mistake I haven't seen you made before.
That aside, as I said in another thread, how about we take a look at this again in, say, 2 years? Or better yet, 4 years? As I said, things take time given a number of biases, but I would expect more people - experts, of course - to change their minds in time, as some already have.
By the way, given that you are not a virologist, how are you assessing which virologists to listen to?
blastula
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Show your math.
That's not the point. Even the scientists who think a lab leak is unlikely or even the least likely explanation do not think it is impossible in the same way the earth being flat is impossible.
bilby is gaslighting people when he compares the scenarios.
As it happens, I went to Costco today maskless, as my local jurisdiction ended the mask mandate for stores yesterday at 6pm.
The problem is not that some people choose to wear masks when there is no mandate, nor that a particular store decides that masks are a condition of entry. The problem is that some people want to use the force of the State to ensure there be no free association at all - for example, no unvaxxed person having the right to go shopping, even if the shop would allow them in.
My boys have been invited to a birthday party for their half- brother, age 4-8, at a Chuck e cheese.
My wife is immune compromized and is not yet elligible for her booster. She also read that because she had mono when she was a kid she is at greater risk of long covid. I told my boys that their mother plans to stay at my parent's unoccupied house for several days to protect herself. And so she is not going to be here to drive one to high school at 7:30an and not here to drive the other to commuter rail at 6am. I am not. They can ride their bikes.
If I had a plan to do something that was such concern to my wife she would feel the need to move out for several days to protect herself I would change my plans.
I am really disappointed with my boys.
And frankly their birthmom (we adopted them when she was deemed unfit) is in my opinion, a moron to do this at chuck e cheese.
What is even more nuts is that my boys were planning to go tomorrow without knowing anything about it. My daughter said she will drive them and I learned from her. She is not planning to go in. I can't imagine planning to go to an event with zero knowlege on the situation.
Teenager truly are stupid and as I said, I am really disapointed that they are Ok putting my wife in a situation where she feels to need to temporarily move out of the house to protect herself.
My wife is immune compromized and is not yet elligible for her booster. She also read that because she had mono when she was a kid she is at greater risk of long covid. I told my boys that their mother plans to stay at my parent's unoccupied house for several days to protect herself. And so she is not going to be here to drive one to high school at 7:30an and not here to drive the other to commuter rail at 6am. I am not. They can ride their bikes.
If I had a plan to do something that was such concern to my wife she would feel the need to move out for several days to protect herself I would change my plans.
I am really disappointed with my boys.
And frankly their birthmom (we adopted them when she was deemed unfit) is in my opinion, a moron to do this at chuck e cheese.
What is even more nuts is that my boys were planning to go tomorrow without knowing anything about it. My daughter said she will drive them and I learned from her. She is not planning to go in. I can't imagine planning to go to an event with zero knowlege on the situation.
Teenager truly are stupid and as I said, I am really disapointed that they are Ok putting my wife in a situation where she feels to need to temporarily move out of the house to protect herself.
How old are your boys? You are disappointed in them because they were invited to and want to attend a family member's birthday party?