Quote:
Originally Posted by DiracSpike
Exactly. How terrifying is this. Look at all the damage wrought by some obscure coronavirus they pulled from bats. While deadly and dangerous to a decent chunk of the population, most cases are like mine where if I hadn't lost smell for a few days I would have never thought I was sick. You won't be getting that with gain of function Ebola, you won't have statistically no danger to children with gain of function Ebola. That's why it's so critical to get as close to a conclusive answer on this as possible, because this is a world wide problem that needs to be addressed ASAP. There was already great hesitation and ethical concerns about this research before, and now we can see that this is no longer a theoretical drawback, it's a real concern and the world is exceedingly likely that this was overall a pretty mild pathogen. This is now the biggest story of the 21st century so far and we can't afford to sweep it under the rug for any reason.
|
You can be terrified by anything you imagine, that doesn't make it any more real.
This is the problem with a lot of this stuff. Take gain-of-function research, this was the posed theory:
"China
may not have been playing with the same rules and
may not have disclosed this research method"
It's a hypothetical. Here's your response:
"That's why it's so critical to get as close to a conclusive answer on this as possible, because
this is a world wide problem that needs to be addressed ASAP. There was already great hesitation and ethical concerns about this research before, and
now we can see that this is no longer a theoretical drawback,
it's a real concern and the world is exceedingly likely that this was overall a pretty mild pathogen."
In one response, we've gone from "maybe this could have happened, maybe" to "now we know this is a real concern."
I think it's crucial to get to the bottom of the origin as conclusively as possible. But what I'm seeing is a lot of guessing, a lot of near-conspiracy theory level reasoning, and a lot of jumping to conclusions.
The likelihood that this virus was naturally occurring is overwhelmingly high. Depending which scientists (not journalists) directly involved and experienced in labs like this you follow, the chances of it being lab-created are extremely low, and the chances of it being a lab leak are even slightly lower than that. Yet armchair scientists who spend an hour on google seem to have some wildly different theories because yes, I get it, you read something here or there and are connecting eight different dots that fit the narrative most compelling in your mind.
The best thing one can do is let people do the work. You're not going to solve it.
One of the many bad things that has occurred over the last year is the rise in scientific commentary by decidedly unqualified people. This line of reasoning is no different than people who are afraid of vaccines or believe the earth is flat. The circumstantial facts that drive this are little different than the WMD threat, which the US went to war over, and we know how that turned out. The theory may have a higher degree of plausibility than these other things, but until you know, you don't. And unless you're actually qualified to find out, you're mostly playing a fool's game devoid of fact-based reasoning and fully reliant on inference and leaping.
And ask yourself this question, honestly: would you accept no conclusion, or a conclusion that suggests the first theory is the most likely, and to be taken as correct in absence of hard evidence to the contrary? Because if you wouldn't, then you're not being reasonable. And if you would, your language around this doesn't reflect that kind of openness.