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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31722 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Since my 'don't trust Science' threads were already toeing the line between 'Pepe Silvia!' and schizophrenic (fair!) (I didn't even touch the four-part follow-up), Nate Silver summarizes better than I can :

Here’s the scandal. In March 2020, a group of scientists — in particular, Kristian G. Andersen the of The Scripps Research Institute, Andrew Rambaut of The University of Edinburgh, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Robert F. Garry of Tulane University — published a paper in Nature Medicine that seemingly contradicted their true beliefs about COVID’s origins and which they knew to be misleading. The paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, has been cited more than 5,900 times and was enormously influential in shaping the debate about the origins of COVID-19.

We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public. There’s also good context around the messages here (very detailed) or here and here (more high-level).

((Silver's links carry the touchstones of conspiracy paranoia, like an emphasis on coverups and literally-by-the-minute analysis of claimed coordinated action, which would normally discourage me from pointing to them, except they also happen to be reasonable factual descriptions.))

To be clear, this isn't a case of some barely-related scientists from nearby offices in slightly-related fields being somewhat more open-minded. These documents demonstrate each and every single author of the paper held some of the exact same concerns about the proposed wet market origin as piles of shitposters and too-online dogs, often pointing to the exact same evidence... privately. In public, they named opponents giving these possibilities conspiracy theorists for naming options they were accepting privately, or drawing out a web that actually existed. Jeremy Farrar would send e-mails giving 50:50 odds on natural (and non-natural, mostly serial passage) origins at the same day he was shopping around early drafts of the paper; while he isn't on the author list, that's its own mess. To be fair, they do change positions in private, as information comes around and as debate occurred. But they remain far from as convinced as they pretended in public, not just during publication but months later, and it's exceptionally clear that the political and pragmatic ramifications drive that.

Nor was this filled with caveats and used or intended to be used solely as a small opinion piece. It contains a few limited cautions about available data's ability to discriminate from evolution at the wet market from cryptic adaptation among humans, but serial passage was actively dismissed by an incoherent mush that steps from animal models to purely in vitro considerations. The paper's authors and 'unrelated' academics (who had been heavily involved in discussions with the paper's authors behind closed doors) cited this not-a-paper at length to justify treating anyone even considering the possibility of just serial passage or an accidental lab leak to be a conspiracy theory that must be shut down, all the way from casual shitposters to federal politicians, including those who advocated specifically serial passage or a purely transport-focused accident. These private messages make clear that wasn't some unintentional side effect, but a if not the specific goal.

Nor was this limited to the broadest strokes: at best, these otherwise closely-knit scientists did mention important information not widely available to random shitposters to each other, such as the rarity of live pangolin trafficking, or the animal makeup of the wet market's official shipments, or a variety of information about possible serial passage techniques, all of which were carefully excluded from the final paper. Some writers received confidential notice of discovery of RmYNO2, and after finding that it wasn't itself more helpful to their point than other already-known genomes, decided to instead obliquely reference it as possible to make a 'prediction', because the Texas Sharpshooter's approach would have been too on the nose.

And that's the stuff that came through FOIA-able emails or broad and leakable Slack channels. The messages show many people involved transitioning to private e-mails, to phone calls, to unrecorded Zoom meetings, often dropping to very clipped wording during that transition: they knew this could eventually be public, and they knew other conversations would not.

None of this amounts, as many COVID skeptics are calling it, to research fraud; I'm not even sure it fits most definitions of academic misconduct. But that's mostly because the publication didn't have enough numbers or analysis to need to actively lie: this paper has no pixels to check for signs of photoshopping, nor specific population numbers to hit with GRIM. Silver has joined calls to retract the paper, but Nature's staff have already said that "Neither previous out-of-context remarks by the authors nor disagreements with the authors’ stated views, are, on their own, grounds for retraction." It ain't happening.

Silver proposes that the scientists were motivated by some combination of :

  • Evidence of a lab leak could cause a political backlash — understandably, given that COVID has killed almost 7 million people — resulting in a reduction in funding for gain-of-function research and other virological research. That’s potentially important to the authors or the authors’ bosses — and the authors were very aware of the career implications for how the story would play out;
  • Evidence of a lab leak could upset China and undermine research collaborations;
  • Evidence of a lab leak could provide validation to Trump and Republicans who touted the theory — remember, all of this was taking place during an election year, and medical, epidemiological and public health experts had few reservations about weighing in on political matters.

These aren't exactly the most charitable framings for each possibility, if perhaps more charitable than focusing on Anderson's certainty this paper got him tenure. But with a more forgiving description, I get something along the lines of :

  • Prohibitions on gain-of-function and other virological research could undermine pandemic responses (and we wouldn't know about past prevented pandemics, after all), or drive research to locations with worse biosecurity or oversight (than BSL2?).
  • Bad relations with China could undermine future pandemic responses or escalate to a 'hot' war.
  • Trump and Republicans responding to a China with marginal scientific research could result in another Korematsu, undermine future pandemic responses, or escalate to a 'hot' war.

Perhaps @Chrisprattalpharaptor can do better. But even if these somewhat earnest reasons that business or political tribe might have controlled what these scientists were willing to say publicly, or if there was some more noble cause that they held above providing an accurate model of the world, it's still something other than providing an accurate model of the world. Which is what, supposedly, was their job.

Worse, few of these matters stop here. Trivially, a lot of academics and casual observers are saying that even if the Nature op-ed authors were playing fast-and-loose with the facts at the time, we since have a ton of evidence in favor the wet market/natural origin side and very little recently published in favor of serial passage or any intentional manipulation, and normally drawing big charts claiming almost all the experts in a field were conspiracy to hide The Truth would be the sorta thing you do shortly before the nice men give you a coat with extra-long sleeves and take you to get some anti-psychotics. Except all of the above.

Evidence of a lab leak could cause a political backlash — understandably, given that COVID has killed almost 7 million people — resulting in a reduction in funding for gain-of-function research and other virological research. That’s potentially important to the authors or the authors’ bosses — and the authors were very aware of the career implications for how the story would play out;

Not just a political backlash - a personal backlash. Peter Daszak was heavily involved in both the cover-up efforts and the initial funding that lead to the GoF research performed in China. If the lab-leak theory became prominent and publicly accepted, those seven million deaths and all the liability can be pinned very squarely on a few people.

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698#ack

Here's the GoF research paper produced at the Wuhan institute of virology, where they had a look at bat coronaviruses and did some gain-of-function research to see if they'd be dangerous in humans. Now even at first glance this paper looks extremely bad for the natural origins crew - it looks like the Wuhan Institute was actually performing GoF research on bat coronaviruses, the exact type of research that could lead to the creation of COVID-19 if an accident happened. But while that's an interesting datapoint, the reason I bring it up is that if you have a look at the funding of this paper you're going to see some of the people who are directly responsible for COVID if the lab-leak theory is true.

Funding: This work was jointly funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (81290341, 31621061) to ZLS, China Mega-Project for Infectious Disease (2014ZX10004001-003) to ZLS, Scientific and technological basis special project (2013FY113500) to YZZ and ZLS from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDPB0301) to ZLS, the National Institutes of Health (NIAID R01AI110964), the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT program to PD and ZLS, CAS Pioneer Hundred Talents Program to JC, NRF-CRP grant (NRF-CRP10-2012-05) to LFW and WIV “One-Three-Five” Strategic Program (WIV-135-TP1) to JC and ZLS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

So, contra to certain public statements under oath, the NIH actually did fund GoF research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. You can look up the specific grant in question too, and what do you find? https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_R01AI110964_7529 It went through the Eco-Health alliance run by Peter Daszak, who was also credited in that paper for providing funding.

Remember when they put out a statement in the Lancet talking about how we need to stop talking about conspiracy theories related to the origin of the virus? https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext Great statement... but hang on a second, one of those names in the author list looks familiar - Peter Daszak! The person who was in charge of getting US government money spent on gain of function research on bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan institute of virology was a prominent figure letting everyone know that the idea that the US government funded GoF research on bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan institute of virology could have accidentally produced and leaked the exact kind of modified bat coronavirus they were studying is a baseless conspiracy theory.

None of this amounts, as many COVID skeptics are calling it, to research fraud; I'm not even sure it fits most definitions of academic misconduct. But that's mostly because the publication didn't have enough numbers or analysis to need to actively lie: this paper has no pixels to check for signs of photoshopping, nor specific population numbers to hit with GRIM. Silver has joined calls to retract the paper, but Nature's staff have already said that "Neither previous out-of-context remarks by the authors nor disagreements with the authors’ stated views, are, on their own, grounds for retraction." It ain't happening.

I totally agree on that point - this doesn't fall into the category of research fraud. They didn't do a bad, fraudulent study to back up their claims, they just didn't do any study at all. But much like saying that I didn't commit perjury when I said that I was 12 feet tall because I wasn't under oath, making it clear that you didn't commit a specific type of deception doesn't mean that you were being 100% truthful. It wasn't research fraud, but there was absolutely deceptive behaviour taking place, the exact kind of which can't be figured out until the non-published conversations they had when they realised the conversations were being recorded are published.

They went looking for an excuse to avoid the obvious answer that was staring them in the face because that obvious answer meant that they had fucked up in a massive way. If you're one of the people who put your name on this research and made it happen, that means that a lab-leak is potentially your fault... and I think that people are willing to go to an awful lot of lengths to avoid considering themselves responsible for (and appearing responsible for to the public) a number of deaths that's on par with the holocaust. For the record, my view is that all of this cover-up and perfidy surrounding the origins of COVID constitutes the greatest piece of evidence for the lab-leak theory - where's the motivation for lying under oath and dragging the name and reputation of science as a field through the mud if natural origins was actually correct?

For the record, my view is that all of this cover-up and perfidy surrounding the origins of COVID constitutes the greatest piece of evidence for the lab-leak theory - where's the motivation for lying under oath and dragging the name and reputation of science as a field through the mud if natural origins was actually correct?

I agree that a lot of the behaviors here stink, but just as I'm hesitant to assume reversed 'stupidity' is intelligence, I think there are a lot of risks to reverse dishonesty to find the truth. There's too many other plausible explanations, even and maybe especially if you think Daszak is a bad actor.

If Daszak genuinely in his heart-of-hearts believed that the clearest form of natural origin wet-market result was true but unprovable -- not an impossible thing even if you have high priors for a weak lab connection, since by nature a viral origin completely separate from the lab wouldn't have a lot of genetic testing happening everywhere, along with low trust in the CCP's data -- I don't see why he'd do anything different. Hell, even if he thought eventually the natural origin wet-market connection would have slam-dunk proofs discovered and that those proofs would be generally trusted, the same economic and political motivations would have pushed him to smother alternatives simply to keep his research field's hands clean during the couple years of investigation. That's kinda the problem with someone of his stature making so clear that he thinks the research field is so much more important than anything current.

That's no argument against more lab-connected theories (whether active manipulation, serial passage, or simple lab-tied zoonosis), but it does leave limits to how much you can extrapolate from him.

I don't see why he'd do anything different. Hell, even if he thought eventually the natural origin wet-market connection would have slam-dunk proofs discovered and that those proofs would be generally trusted, the same economic and political motivations would have pushed him to smother alternatives simply to keep his research field's hands clean during the couple years of investigation.

I have to disagree here. If he was certain that those undeniable proofs were coming, he should have been open and honest about what he was doing. If the facts and evidence back you up, then you don't actually need to do anything deceptive and it actually hurts you in the long run! Sure, keeping the field's hands clean for a few years is a decent motivation, but the only way that tracks is if you assume he already knows he is going to die before the proof comes out and he doesn't care about the field's health in the long run and just wants to maximise trust in the field for the remainder of his life. When people get lied to, they get angry - and even if those slam-dunk proofs showed up in the future, that wouldn't change the damage done to the field's reputation when all of this stuff came out anyway. To use a financial metaphor, why would you take out a loan with a terrible interest rate when you already have enough money to just buy it outright? That thinking is just so short-sighted that I have trouble believing anyone with scientific literacy would act that way, and I know he's not that stupid by virtue of what he's actually done. But the biggest issue for me, the one that makes dishonesty and deception the most likely motivation, is the refusal to disclose conflicts of interest - I just can't see a hypothetical true-believer making such a ruinously short-sighted decision.

That's no argument against more lab-connected theories (whether active manipulation, serial passage, or simple lab-tied zoonosis), but it does leave limits to how much you can extrapolate from him.

I agree that there's only so much informational value that you can extract from behaviour like this - we might be living in the comedy timeline where these scientists are acting deceptively because they wrongly believe in the lab-leak hypothesis even though the natural origin theory is correct. But despite it being a technically fallacious argument from credulity, I just can't comprehend how someone would both genuinely believe that the natural origins hypothesis is correct and behave in the same way that he did.

where's the motivation for lying under oath and dragging the name and reputation of science as a field through the mud if natural origins was actually correct?

Few options here:

  1. (semi-idealistic) If you are overconfident in your abilities and not especially aware of the burning-the-commons risk, you might think that ending the debate quicker on the right side is good even if that means you have to lie. This is related to the reasons behind police perjury.

  2. (cynical) Even if natural origins is correct, that doesn't mean Daszak/others automatically know it's correct. Their incentives are only somewhat attenuated if they think there's e.g. a 20% chance lab-leak is correct.

  3. (maximally uncharitable) It's not immediately obvious that doing this hurt the Blue Tribe overall; certainly it helped complete the purge of Wikipedia, which is a big deal and hard to undo, and certainly the MSM is pretty decent at memory-holing things like this. Also, it's not exactly like the people most pissed about this - the Red and Grey Tribes - have many levers to punish Daszak/others for this.

I don't actually believe #3 played a significant role; it's hard to reconcile that kind of analysis with actually believing the Blue Tribe narrative.

I don't have any particularly useful commentary to give. I only had half an hour to spare and I spent it trying to get through some of the source material, but one of the citations literally leads to a 3,000 page dump of Fauci's emails and many others lead to cascading substack articles.

Do you know the source of these quotes, and where I can read them in context? Reading this slack post comes across as much less damning than the substack article would have you believe. Moreover, the slack post captioned there was written a month after the Nature Medicine paper, no?

These aren't exactly the most charitable framings for each possibility, if perhaps more charitable than focusing on Andersen's certainty this paper got him tenure.

I'm skeptical they had severe financial or tenure-related conflicts of interest. Kristian Andersen's lab doesn't seem to engage in any kind of research that would remotely be affected by stricter regulations of GoF bans. The piles of money in Nwallins' video are bitterly funny after spending a solid chunk of my life earning a graduate stipend with 5-6 roommates. Perhaps if they had pushed the lab leak hypothesis at that point they may have suffered negative consequences, although it's worth noting that Alina Chan, Ruslan Medzhitov and numerous other scientists who pushed it later are doing fine. Overall, I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to why they'd be compromised beyond TDS or groupthink.

Regardless, none of the above is written to try and worm out of the fact that the scientific community has earned some lumps on the topic.

Do you know the source of these quotes, and where I can read them in context? Reading this slack post comes across as much less damning than the substack article would have you believe. Moreover, the slack post captioned there was written a month after the Nature Medicine paper, no?

Yeah, unfortunately all of the 'cites' are just the single giant unsearchable e-mail archive, or Slack archive, and the quality is marginal enough that OCR and scanning for individual quotes kinda sucks.

I'll see if I can get find a better breakdown later today or tomorrow for the relevant quotes, their context, and their timing, but it is fair to say that the ones more open to serial passage or lab-tied zoonosis are usually earlier in the discussions. If all Andersen et all had done was to emphasis that as the less likely cause by March, I think this would have been more reasonable. But that's really not how he was behaving publicly.

The Slack post from Andersen laying out those three possibilities that's gotten the most attention was from April 17th; this (cw: giant image, bad formatting) is most of the relevant surrounding context, though it might be easier to just download the full PDF and look starting around 3/4ths of the way down. I think Andersen is being far too clever by half when he defends his surrounding behavior; the Slack messages were responding to the cable allegations, but there were a lot of other reasons he cited contemporaneously for even considering a serial passage option (Shi's sequencing, past bad biosafety practices, the furin cleavage site stuff), and there were other matters that were known at the time, many of which dated back to late February, none of which he seems to consider context.

Andersen et all were also pretty aggressively slamming against any form of lab connection publicly throughout this time period; it's not like the paper was a one-and-done, or even the first thing, nor the last thing.

I'm skeptical they had severe financial or tenure-related conflicts of interest. Kristian Andersen's lab doesn't seem to engage in any kind of research that would remotely be affected by stricter regulations of GoF bans.

I think the problem from Andersen et all is... well, the reason I linked this in the secondary post. The centralization from NIH grants, along with the general limitations of academia, has kinda made the entire field a little incestuous; even to the extent Andersen's work itself isn't tied to strict-definition gain-of-function research, he's constantly interacting with and eventually going to have his grants okayed and papers reviewed by people who do or did or plan to in the future.

((Beyond that, I think Andersen's highly negative response to Tom Cotton is, as much as the simple Red Tribe Blue Tribe, downstream of Cotton's "America First" perspective, which would matter more to his lab. But that's still an honest disagreement of perspectives; Andersen didn't go into international epidemiology research for the dollars.))

Perhaps if they had pushed the lab leak hypothesis at that point they may have suffered negative consequences, although it's worth noting that Alina Chan, Ruslan Medzhitov and numerous other scientists who pushed it later are doing fine.

That's true, though it's a very wide definition of 'fine', here. Still, compared to situations where people were actively canceled or defellowed, it does allow for more serious discussion.

Overall, I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to why they'd be compromised beyond TDS or groupthink.

Folk who consider themselves my betters want to insulate me from a truth* that they don't think I can handle, and so deceive me 'for my own good.' Many such cases. The authors of that paper must have felt so vindicated when the first Sinophobic hate crimes started occurring. How much worse might that have been, they must have thought, had we not strangled the lab leak hypothesis in the crib.

Many of my normie friends refused to even discuss COVID origins. The lab-leak hypothesis was a thought crime to them; the sort of thing that conspiritards and racist loons spouted, little different to "Jews did 9/11". That's the environment deliberately created by Andersen et al and the rest of team science. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they also knew how to arse cover if and when the charade fell over. The strenuous denials that they 'ackchually never said that the lab leak hypothesis was off the table' are backed up by a lifetime of practice hedging in the small print.

*The truth being, not that COVID was a lab leak, but that there was a good chance that COVID was a lab leak. Far too subtle a point to expect the plebs to understand.

Courtesy Taibbi and Orfalea:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PhAGPQE0H-U

I believe this was just another manifestation of TDS. We basically went years where the left or establishment opposed anything Trump did.

This reminds me of election denialism and martrymades famous rant that if votes were changed etc the media and everyone would tell us it was impossible and the cleanest election of all time. We’ve just had far too many scandals lately where the official people were lying to us. Just the like the fbi/cia basically did an op that Bidens laptop was fake but actually had verified it’s contents a year ago.

Maga is never going to die because of all these scandals.

You can always find something your enemies think is stupid. There are things I believe that are stupid. There are certainly things the median American staunch conservative believes that are stupid. But does that mean their views on other things - on the essential elements of human nature, for example - are wrong?

The world is more than 6,000 years old. But evangelical conservatives are more right than they are wrong. On Covid, scientists were unwilling to admit the lab theory because the labs running GoF experiments were doing the same thing in China as they were in the USA. It’s as simple as that. It could have happened in America, blaming “the Chinese” was nonsensical.

On Covid, scientists were unwilling to admit the lab theory because the labs running GoF experiments were doing the same thing in China as they were in the USA. It’s as simple as that. It could have happened in America, blaming “the Chinese” was nonsensical.

The above screed (that you're replying to) was written by someone who rather than consider just how difficult it is to tell the truth to an inflamed populace would prefer to lean into an ideological mistrust of 'blue tribe' targets.

To the extent that this place is attempting to be 'conservative' it's essentially lost all semblance of responsibility as a virtue.

  • -16

screed

This is not a neutral word; it's a sneer.

rather than consider just how difficult it is to tell the truth to an inflamed populace would prefer to lean into an ideological mistrust of 'blue tribe' targets

@gattsuru assembled evidence and critiqued specific rather than general groups; you are accusing them of not doing that, but you don't actually provide evidence or argument for it.

To the extent that this place is attempting to be 'conservative'

"This place," assuming you mean the Motte, explicitly forbids recruiting for a cause and sneaking in "consensus building" language. It's a "place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas," and so, Conquest's Laws notwithstanding, "this place" is definitely not "attempting to be 'conservative.'" Also: you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. It's always a mistake to post on the Motte to make sweeping claims about what "the Motte" is (or is trying to be) if you are excluding yourself from that claim.

This is not the kind of engagement we're looking for here, don't do this.

The above screed (that you're replying to) was written by someone who rather than consider just how difficult it is to tell the truth to an inflamed populace would prefer to lean into an ideological mistrust of 'blue tribe' targets.

I was under the impression that using the credibility attached to a prestigious domain (like science) for the purposes of deceiving the public for political reasons was a bad idea. Once the truth comes out you've heavily damaged the credibility of scientific research and made it harder to convince people on important issues - because they are correctly judging you as a political entity whose expertise cannot be trusted and is effectively meaningless.

It's easy to tell the truth. You just... tell the truth. As for ideological mistrust... here's The Intercept blaming Trump and Mike Pompeo for pushing the lab leak theory and claiming that this is what's preventing investigations into COVID's origins. Beam in thine own eye and all of that.

Isn't there evidence that despite the Congressional ban, there was US-funded GoF research going on at WIV? I at least recall seeing links here to grant requests to do so.

The world is more than 6,000 years old. But evangelical conservatives are more right than they are wrong. On Covid, scientists were unwilling to admit the lab theory because the labs running GoF experiments were doing the same thing in China as they were in the USA. It’s as simple as that. It could have happened in America, blaming “the Chinese” was nonsensical.

Yes, this was actually extremely relevant and in my view a huge contributing factor to why the "coverup" happened, though not exactly - the GoF research couldn't actually be done in the USA, which is why it was shipped to China. Peter Daszak is the person you're looking for and the missing piece to this puzzle - him and the Eco-Health alliance were directly involved in spinning up Gain-of-Function research in China so that they could bypass the regulations and restrictions put on this kind of research in the west, and he also played a very prominent and direct role in the natural origins paper controversy.

It could have happened in America, blaming “the Chinese” was nonsensical.

People don't assign blame (or credit) in a purely probabilistic fashion based on expected outcomes. Maybe you think they should, maybe I'm inclined to agree that considering the role of luck and chance is important, but the guy that makes the game-winning three is still going to be considered clutch and awarded accordingly, even though it was only a 35% chance and his opponent might have made the shot the next time around. Most drunk drivers don't kill anyone, but we punish the ones that actually do kill people more harshly.

Perhaps more importantly, refusing to assign blame based on actual outcomes misaligns incentives with regard to risk.

What’s the most-cited paper you know which airs such doubts?

I don’t think you make it into Nature (or the Lancet, or whatever) without acting like your work is the Real Deal. You can see a similar selection bias in Scott’s reviews of effect size, where even a moderate effect has to be touted as a miracle cure. It’s marketing, sure, but it’s not unique to COVID.

Don’t get me wrong—this is an obvious example of “consensus” crystallizing out of a bunch of incentives that aren’t just “the truth.” I would like for those incentives to be much better aligned!

But if you took away the fear of funding backlash, the geopolitics, the burgeoning CW lines…I expect you’d still see just as much confidence in the final paper.

Yeah, it's... getting buried a little, but that's kinda the worst-case scenario I touched here:

Even worse still, there's the possibility that even if the "Proximal Origins" authors were factually wrong -- still not proven! they could have been right by accident! -- they weren't exactly wrong about this being science-as-usual. The paper was ghost-written by an author who used his 'remove' from the publication to burnish its and his credibility, with preconceived result and a thumb being aggressively applied to hurry review? Well, "preconceived notion" is just an uncharitable way of saying, there's always a little bit of Kevin Bacon problem in reviewers for smaller fields, and that Nature bit about ghostwriting was more about aspirations than specific standards. There's no rule against using non-public information to make accurate 'predictions' after-the-fact, so long as you avoid preregistration requirements. Favor what would be nice if it were true? Well, if you aren't publishing data disproving it side-by-side, what's the problem?

Nate Silver points to his early disagreements with KG Anderson as signs that it's possible to notice extreme partisans, but a) very few people did, contemporaneously, and b) even now, quite a lot of people Silver wasn't getting into Twitter Tiffs with are defending the conduct here. And Anderson was only one of the bullshitters. What happens if it doesn't need WWIII, or Korematsu II: Electric Boogaloo, or Trump's Revenge?

Litany of Grenlin is nice and all, but especially when combined with past discussions suggesting on low-prominence papers, what sort of answer do you take away if the problem isn't "partisans are undermining trust in science" but "you can't trust it"?

The guys who authored the paper testified before a maximally hostile Congress last week. I was ready for them to get torn apart and surprisingly it left me less convinced of the criticisms against them.

The pangolin thing, as covered by the Public Substack and other places I've seen it repeated, seems to be misframed. The scientists never claimed that it was the actual origin of Covid; they explicitly says it's a different virus, just similar in structure. The argument is that no one (including any of the lab leak proponents, to my knowledge) seems to think the pangolin coronavirus variant, 600 miles away from the Wuhan lab, was also man-made, which raises the odds that a virus very similar to Covid-19 could arise naturally.

The distance in time between the scientists saying they weren't certain about how something like the Receptor Binding Domain in Covid-19 could manifest in nature, and them changing their minds and publicly supporting a natural origin theory, wasn't an abrupt turn around of a few days, as alleged, but rather forty five days. During that timeframe the pangolin samples with similar RBDs were discovered, raising odds that this kind of thing could be naturally evolved. In contrast, the site being studied in the EcoHealth proposal was genuinely different than that in Covid-19.

Beyond that, the main thrust of their argument is that the first samples were found in the Hanan market and the first cases in the area surrounding the market, not in the areas surrounding the Wuhan Virology Center. As far as I know nobody has contradicted this, though I don't really follow it and could be wrong.

I think the concerns about how the process was politicized, especially by bueaucrats worried about conflict with China, are still valid - welcome to government though. Claims of a vast Orwellian conspiracy on part of our neoliberal overlords I think are a little unconvincing given that our government has also argued that it probably was a lab leak. In fact, right now six agencies have weighed in and none agree - the DOE and FBI think a lab leak was most plausible, four other agencies plus the NSC suspect natural origins. Almost all of them have framed their results with "low confidence," but you can pick whichever result you like and still say the government agrees with you.

I personally consider the lab leak somewhere between possible and likely, but don't really care where Covid came from. Even if it was caused by research conducted by China and America, the two most powerful countries on earth are obviously not going to pay any kind of penalty.

I think the concerns about how the process was politicized, especially by bueaucrats worried about conflict with China, are still valid - welcome to government though

I think the issue is the effect the politicization has on scientists. Just saying 'welcome to the government' sidesteps the whole point.

The scientists never claimed that it was the actual origin of Covid

OK, but any other theory was called a conspiracy theory (at best). So they put forth one possibility and suppressed anything else... You don't see a problem here? It's the theory version of 'You can have a model T in any color, as long as it's black'.

The distance in time between the scientists saying they weren't certain ... but rather forty five days

The world is a big place, 45 days isn't slow. And again, look at how other ideas were treated. Look at how youtube and twitter reacted to people floating different ideas. It's very easy to focus on the people shooting at 5G towers but that ignores actual doctors and scientists who were labeled racists for saying it might of come from a lab.

The world is a big place, 45 days isn't slow.

The claim on the part of the skeptics is that the scientist made an abrupt 180 on their views in only a few days because of pressure from the NIH. Instead they had a month and half during which relevant research was published that overturned the main cited uncertainty.

OK, but any other theory was called a conspiracy theory (at best). So they put forth one possibility and suppressed anything else... You don't see a problem here?

This is what the scientists had to say about the lab leak theory vs the market:

As many early cases of COVID-19 were linked to the Huanan market in Wuhan, it is possible that an animal source was present at this location....

Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible. More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another.

Pretty reasonable imo. Anyone is welcome to dispute their scientific claims. Again, the same government you're accusing of supressing the lab leak has also repeatedly endorsed the lab leak. Seems like a pretty sloppy coverup imo.

The thing that frustrates me about the pangolin argument is that it is like reverse zebra with hooves.

As one of the scientist put it before, he was worried about the recombination as he hadn’t seen that before but then he found out it happened once in a pangolin so it is logical to assume it happened here. Sure, that raises the odds slightly. But if I studied horses and many times when I hear hooves I see horses but once I see a zebra doesn’t mean it is likely that on the 101th time I hear hooves I should suspect a zebra; especially when I am located in a place that is painting horses black and white.

Imo it's more like if we had only seen horses, then one day we saw a Zebra and were like "woah, what gives, the only explanation is some crazy guy must have painted that horse."

But then later we went to Kenya and saw a bunch of Zebras and were like "huh, I guess that is possible by the laws of evolution and doesn't require man-made intervention".

I don’t disagree with your conclusion. But at the same time, the existence of zebras in Kenya doesn’t mean zebras are super likely elsewhere which is what the scientist inferred.

the existence of zebras in Kenya doesn’t mean zebras are super likely elsewhere which is what the scientist inferred.

Is this case we're not in a totally random elsewhere though. They haven't only demonstrated that zebras are a natural thing, and that the stripes don't look like human paintbrushes, they've also isolated the original zebra sightings to a safari/wet market, not the paint store/lab. Given this context, we would want some active evidence or rationale to consider that it's actually paint. Even so, in their paper they clearly note normal scientific limitations:

Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible. More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another.

  1. They didnt isolate the findings to a specific wet market. They are relying primarily on the PRC’s claims regarding the spread which is highly dubious. They are basically taking at face value the claim of the paintbrushers about where the zebras started. This despite there is decent evidence that is not where zebras were first seen.

  2. They privately noted serial passage was an easy way to make it look like humans and Wuhan knew of those techniques. So they knew the paintbrushers could’ve used technique A but publicly claim no.

  3. This of course ignores all of the other evidence (including the furin cleavage site which was unknown to this particular family of coronaviruses but happened to be found in this coronavirus along with the only found in a pangolin sequence). Yet despite all of that they say lab leak isn’t plausible despite saying differently in private?

They didnt isolate the findings to a specific wet market. They are relying primarily on the PRC’s claims regarding the spread which is highly dubious.

No, the wet market samples are from two different international team of western scientists who went to Hanan market and found Covid samples on multiple different animals:

researchers swabbed walls, floors, metal cages and carts often used for transporting animal cages.

In samples that came back positive for the coronavirus, the international research team found genetic material belonging to animals, including large amounts that were a match for the raccoon dog, three scientists involved in the analysis said.

This was later matched with data reported by the Chinese CDC, as part of a study that specifically did not endorsed the market as the origin of the pandemic but rather just as a vector. Once the American scientists noticed a closer look suggested different conclusions, rather than signal boost this information the Chinese took the data down:

The swab taken from a cart there in early 2020, the research team found, contained genetic material from the virus and a raccoon dog.

“We were able to figure out relatively quickly that at least in one of these samples, there was a lot of raccoon dog nucleic acid, along with virus nucleic acid,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah who worked on the new analysis. (Nucleic acids are the chemical building blocks that carry genetic information.)

After the international team stumbled upon the new data, they reached out to the Chinese researchers who had uploaded the files with an offer to collaborate, hewing to rules of the online repository, scientists involved with the new analysis said. After that, the sequences disappeared from GISAID.

It is not clear who removed them or why they were taken down.

For the case spread, what we consider the first cases are from their hospital system and were before anyone understood what Covid was, including the Chinese, and before the Chinese government claimed that the wet market was the origin. The bulk of it comes from WHO backdated assessments of patients that China explicitly did not report as "Covid cases" in their system, but that outside scientists have categorized by retroactively assessing symptoms.

Of the initial 41 people hospitalized with unknown pneumonia by 2 January 2020, 27 (66%) had direct exposure to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market (hereafter, “Huanan market”). These first cases were confirmed to be infected with a novel coronavirus, subsequently named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and were suffering from a disease later named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The initial diagnoses of COVID-19 were made in several hospitals independently between 18 and 29 December 2019. These early reports were free from ascertainment bias because they were based on signs and symptoms before the Huanan market was identified as a shared risk factor (5). A subsequent systematic review of all cases reported to China’s National Notifiable Disease Reporting System by hospitals in Wuhan as part of the joint WHO-Chinese “WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part” (hereafter, “WHO mission report”) showed that 55 of 168 of the earliest known COVID-19 cases were associated with this market...

The 2021 WHO mission report identified 174 COVID-19 cases in Hubei Province in December 2019 after careful examination of reported case histories (7). Although geographical coordinates of the residential locations of the 164 cases who lived within Wuhan were unavailable, we were able to reliably extract the latitude and longitude coordinates of 155 cases from maps in the report (figs. S1 to S8).

Although early COVID-19 cases occurred across Wuhan, most clustered in central Wuhan near the west bank of the Yangtze River, with a high density of cases near to, and surrounding, the Huanan market

It goes on to list other ways they approached the data, non-Covid social media check ins to control for population density, downloads of Covid apps, etc.

Perhaps China was so ahead of the curve they before they recognized they had a viral disease and took any steps to respond to its containment they preemptively censored a bunch of hospital records from nearby to the lab and carefully left lists of symptoms concentrated around certain areas such that they would produce statistical signifigance across a variety of tests in order to lead researchers down the wrong path, but combined with finding the samples at the Hanan market it seems less likely.

To be clear though, this paper does not even say that Covid originated from the market. The point of the paper is to show that what were considered non-natural characteristics of Covid requiring human-intervention-based explanations actually do have examples occuring in nature. This is the sum total of what they have to say on the market:

As many early cases of COVID-19 were linked to the Huanan market in Wuhan, it is possible that an animal source was present at this location.

Back to you:

This despite there is decent evidence that is not where zebras were first seen.

What evidence?

They privately noted serial passage was an easy way to make it look like humans and Wuhan knew of those techniques. So they knew the paintbrushers could’ve used technique A but publicly claim no.

Nobody, especially including the authors, argues that it is outside the realm of literal scientific capability for Covid to be man-made. I think your comment is blurring two things though:

  1. Are we able to 100% determine whether it Covid was natural or man-made? The answer is of course no, which is why our research has focused on determining whether covid's human-binding characteristics (the RBD and polybasic furbin cleavage site) are novel characteristics that would suggest human creation, or whether they appear naturally which suggests a more parsimonious explanation.

  2. Do the things we can observe about Covid show signs that would suggest human intervention or natural evolution? The answer seems to be the latter:

As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone

Back to you:

This of course ignores all of the other evidence (including the furin cleavage site which was unknown to this particular family of coronaviruses but happened to be found in this coronavirus along with the only found in a pangolin sequence).

They did indeed cite research demonstrating that polybasic furin cleavage sites can arise naturally. They also point out that polybasic furin cleavage sites are unlikely to come about via laborotory cultures without being inculated in living hosts. Is there other evidence you're thinking of?

Yet despite all of that they say lab leak isn’t plausible despite saying differently in private?

You're responding to my parent comment where I pointed out that their main uncertainty was that they had never seen an RBD site like Covid-19's in nature, then more research emerged showing exactly that, then a month and a half later they came with a stronger stance incorporating the new relevant evidence.

I honestly don’t have time to respond to you in full right now but the basic problem is you are talking about data from early 2020 after covid had been spreading in Wuhan for at least one month. That doesn’t show anything re origination.

Intelligence communities seem to believe the leak occurred in perhaps October near Wuhan.

As for China being ahead of the curve, remember all of this videos of a seemingly healthy person walking in the street and then collapsing from covid? That suggests the Chinese government was aware and started bullshiting.

With respect to furin cleavages, read what Wuhan lab were proposing! It was what occurred.

Finally, the whole recombinant point was according to one author of the paper when he appeared on the Megyn Kelley podcast something that cane out after he spoke with Fauci (well before the paper was finalized). That was, it was a matter of a few days. Maybe you are right but that means there was yet another lie in the timeline.

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The distance in time between the scientists saying they weren't certain about how something like the Receptor Binding Domain in Coronavirus could manifest in nature, and them changing their minds and publicly supporting a natural origin theory, wasn't an abrupt turn around of a few days, as alleged, but rather forty five days.

The "Proximal Origin" official release was March 17th, but the preprint was publicly released February 17th and was heavily used at that time, including by a Lancet Feb 19th paper (see popsci coverage here) and by individual relevant experts. So it's a pretty fast turn-around, and before some of the stuff they've since cited as cause was known for internal discussions.

The pangolin thing, as covered by the Public Substack and other places I've seen it repeated, seems to be misframed. The scientists never that it was the actual origin of Covid; they explicitly says it's a different virus, just similar in structure. The argument is that no one (including any of the lab leak proponents, to my knowledge) seems to think the pangolin coronavirus variant, 600 miles away from the Wuhan lab, was also man-made, which raises the odds that a virus very similar to Covid-19 could arise naturally.

I think this would be reasonable if the takeaway from "Proximal Origin", either the February or March versions, was merely to say that in-pangolin or in-human or in-some-unknown-species evolution of the necessary genome was possible, and that was it. It's even somewhat fair to use Occam's Razor and say that, if both the natural origin and a lab leak were both possible, favor the natural origin one simply out of priors. But that's not really how the paper was written, nor was read. Even the February version starts with the claim that "this analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus." Meanwhile, Andersen specifically worried about serial passage in private into April!

For the most part, the more conspiracy-minded people tend to focus on some chain of custody and data reliability issues for RmYN02 et all, but I think the more immediate problem's that the 600-miles criticism goes the other direction.

Raising the odds a highly similar virus could have evolved nearer Wuhan or from an animal species that was being brought to the wet market, assuming another species with similar environmental conditions to provides the same RCBs were available, still has to face the counterfactual of some guy from the building devoted to collecting viruses from 600+ miles away picked up samples and did some testing with it without sufficient caution. Sure, that's the sorta thing that rests so heavily on priors that I'd not be certain much one way or the other. But I'm not the guy who called any possibility a conspiracy theory that shouldn't even be entertained.

Even that on its own would just be a systems-level problem, except it's not just that Andersen et all were incorrectly calibrated. After all, I was incorrectly calibrated, even if I didn't go on national television about it. The problem's that these texts make incredibly clear that he and the other researchers weren't so clearly certain in private; they just clearly went into the publication wanting to have a specific answer, and doing so for pretty overtly pragmatic reasons.

The problem's that these texts make incredibly clear that he and the other researchers weren't so clearly certain in private

Here's the timeline as I understand it:

On February 1 the scientists email Fauci saying they're uncertain if the RBD could be emerge naturally from evolution. Then, supposedly, he calls a conference where pressure is applied to them to change their results.

Both scientists testified under oath that this characterization of the conference is a misrepresentation - neither Fauci nor Dr. Collins organized or requested the conference, neither really spoke, and no pressure was applied to change results or push for any outcome. Maybe they lied under oath, but it seems like a silly thing to risk prison for.

On February 17 the preprint comes out with a less definitive thesis, not arguing they've disproven the lab leak but that "this analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus." - which it does.

On February 19 the latest data on coronavirus in pangolins gets released, demonstrating that this particular human binding characteristic can emerge naturally. This removes the uncertainty they mentioned on the 1st. They incorporate it into their research.

On March 17 the final version is released and comes out with a stronger position: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," because the main lab leak argument seems pretty disproven.

In between the time they were uncertain and the time they have claimed a strong final analysis, over a month and a half have passed and new, directly applicable research has emerged. I do assume that politicization is baked into this stuff, and this study is certainly no exception, but there's nothing highly suspicious about getting new evidence and updating your position.

Also, as Nate Silver grudgingly points out, even in their final report they do not write off the possibility of the lab leak, only say that present evidence offers it no support: “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another”.

still has to face the counterfactual of some guy from the building devoted to collecting viruses from 600+ miles away picked up samples and did some testing with it without sufficient caution. Sure, that's the sorta thing that rests so heavily on priors that I'd not be certain much one way or the other. But I'm not the guy who called any possibility a conspiracy theory that shouldn't even be entertained.

The scenario here would be that Covid came from a scientist driving out 600 miles (or maybe up to 3000 miles, because these are imports from Malaysia) to find pangolins to test, took them back another 600-3000 miles, studied their RBD, and tried to make something similar? All I can say is it's not an argument I've heard anyone make before. Either way this scenario would still remove the skeptics' main argument that we should assume Covid is man-made because its RBD can't happen in nature; clearly it can.

Edit - removed post because of a misinterpretation. Rewording and posting elsewhere.

I wonder when Nate Silver will be labeled far right the way he is going ... his insistence of following facts is quickly turning him into apostate. Colbert in 2006 joked that reality has a well known liberal bias. How tables have turned.

For the revelations - it was obvious even at the time.

If you went back in time to 2015 and told people that the left had become so extreme that Nate Silver, Mathew Ygglesias, and Glen Greenwald were all considered far-right fascists, you'd have been locked up in a psych ward tossed into a homeless encampment.

I already saw people saying he'd gone MAGA or comparing him to Glenn Greenwald in the comments on that twitter thread.

Colbert in 2006 joked that reality has a well known liberal bias. How tables have turned.

Is it a turning of tables, or merely the difference between 'liberal' and 'left'?

Colbert in 2006 joked that reality has a well known liberal bias.

These same people think reality’s socially constructed.

You are referring to an extreme form of constructivism. The mainstream of constructvism has important insights in many fields.

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Could you point out where in that article (or elsewhere) there is any important insight provided by the mainstream of constructvism? I do not have a positive view of constructivism as a useful way to analyze the world or predict future events, and that article further cemented my view since it mostly seems like a posthoc justification for obviously-true statements whenever it's testable: "Constructivists argue that states can have multiple identities that are socially constructed through interaction with other actors." is untestable, "500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than five North Korean nuclear weapons" is obvious without constrictivism.

"Constructivists argue that states can have multiple identities that are socially constructed through interaction with other actors." is untestable,

I don't know why you think it is untestable. A variable like "identity" is difficult to measure, but that does not make the claim untestable.

"500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than five North Korean nuclear weapons" is obvious without constrictivism.

But is not obvious why it is obvious. IR schools of thought such as realism predict that the US would respond the same way to the development of nukes by the UK as to the development of nukes by North Korea. Constructivism provides an answer. As it says, "nuclear weapons by themselves do not have any meaning unless we understand the social context."

In addition, as the article notes, constructivists argue that "the social relation of enmity between the United States and North Korea represents the intersubjective structure (that is, the shared ideas and beliefs among both states), whereas the United States and North Korea are the actors who have the capacity (that is, agency) to change or reinforce the existing structure or social relationship of enmity. This change or reinforcement ultimately depends on the beliefs and ideas held by both states. If these beliefs and ideas change, the social relationship can change to one of friendship. This stance differs considerably from that of realists, who argue that the anarchic structure of the international system determines the behaviour of states."

Then there is the discussion in the article about social norms and how they affect state behavior. After all, all else being equal, which country would you predict would be more likely to intervene to stop a genocide: Sweden, or Nazi Germany? Realists, et al, would say that they are equally likely, but constructivists would disagree. Why do countries tend to support countries whose majorities are ethnically similar? And what the heck is all this stuff about the "special relationship" between the US and the UK? Would the UK have backed the US in Iraq so strongly in its absence? Surely the UK's interest were served no more by the Iraq war than were French or German interests.

I'm not educated on these terms and this whole school of thought, and right now the gap between my understanding of how the world works and what you've linked/described about Constructivism is too great for me to understand your points. I do not see a reason why I'm not allowed to conclude that nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea should elicit a different international response than nuclear weapons in the hands of Great Britain without the constructivist need to claim that the nature of the nuclear weapons is different between the two. Like, I can change my opinions, reactions, and decisions between a good adult friend and the 14-year-old across the street when each asks to borrow my car. I'm allowed to do that without needing to believe that my car has changed. And there are inherent truths about nuclear weapons and cars that would be true regardless of social context: nuclear weapons make a big explosion when successfully activated, and cars have 4 wheels. A society that believes the will of a supernatural entity is the only cause of fire is unable to modify a nuclear detonation through prayer no matter how important the supernatural entity is in their society. A society that believes the number 4 to be bad luck and that refuses to allow anything to have that number of wheels is allowed to collectively say a car has 3 wheels, but that doesn't make it true.

Where are you getting your definition of "realists"? In the colloquial meaning of "realist", I don't see why they would conclude that a country whose government has committed genocide would be less likely to intervene to stop another genocide. The obvious conclusion seems like it could be reached by observing the real world, with real, testable things that really exist, regardless of social constructs. Measure: has each country committed genocide, and have they intervened to stop another genocide. Calculate: historically, what's the chance a country that has committed genocide will intervene to stop another genocide versus one that hasn't. Predict: given two countries, one that has committed genocide and one that hasn't, which is more likely to intervene to stop this particular genocide. The answer is independent of social context.

Again, I'm ignorant here. I want to understand why there is any benefit for believing that social context changes the reality of objects, or that we're not allowed to consider any actor as different than any other actor without constructivism. Because the downstream effects of constructivism I see are awful: college professors claiming that aboriginal interpretations of the world are just as valid as the scientific method, and the superweapon of unfalsifiable "lived experiences" that trump rational debate. I want to stop those things, and from my perspective shunning constructivism - making it costly and embarrassing to believe and support - seems to be a good solution. I don't see any loss, because what you're saying constructivism adds all seem like common sense that we could figure out without that structure.

Where are you getting your definition of "realists"? In the colloquial meaning of "realist"

I don’t mean to sound impatient, but why not spend two minutes googling realist school of IR before asking that? That is, after all, what I explicitly referred to. Not to the colloquial meaning. As for "I don't see why they would conclude that a country whose government has committed genocide would be less likely to intervene to stop another genocide," first, the difference I meant to highlight was not that Nazi Germany committed genocide but Sweden did not, but rather that they have different norms. See the topic sentence of the paragraph in question. Second, realists don’t make that prediction. Rather, they would think they are exactly equally likely, because realists don't consider norms at all when discussing state behavior.

do not see a reason why I'm not allowed to conclude that nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea should elicit a different international response than nuclear weapons in the hands of Great Britain without the constructivist need to claim that the nature of the nuclear weapons is different between the two

Two points. First, previous IR schools like realism were unable to predict that the responses would be different. In contrast, constructism can. That’s what I meant when I said it had some useful insights. Second, constructivists do not say that the nature of the weapons is different, but rather that the meaning of the weapons is different (eg, one is a threat), and it is the meaning assigned thereto, not the inherent nature thereof, which determines how a state will respond.

I want to understand why there is any benefit for believing that social context changes the reality of objects, or that we're not allowed to consider any actor as different than any other actor without constructivism

Those are both strawmen. As I mentioned, in its non-extreme form, constructivists do not talk about the reality of objects, but the meaning attached to objects, and also to concepts. After all, important concepts in IR like "threat" and "ally" are not objects at all. As for whether we are not allowed to consider some actors as different from others without constructivism, no one said otherwise. There are other schools of IR which treat states as nonunitary actors whose behavior is a function of internal factors. Constructivism's contribution is re the role of norms, identity, and other ideas.

For anyone following along, some handy Wikipedia links:

I do not believe that Googling Constructivism, IR, or realist would have got me there within 2 minutes, but mea culpa. I should have tried harder to figure it out from context.

I don't care about the philosophy of international relations, so I can't claim an educated opinion on whether "previous IR schools like realism were unable to predict that the responses would be different." That sounds stupid to me as a layman. Other times I have heard that an entire field has failed to notice something obvious, the error has been with the person making the claim and not with the field itself. Gdanning, I appreciate your attempts to explain it to me, but I remain unconvinced that "The mainstream of constructvism has important insights in many fields". If I need to understand the history of the philosophy of international relations in order to see the important insights of Constructivism, then I'm comfortable dismissing its insights as "not actually important in the grand scheme of things", which I will file in the Constructivism folder in my mind next to "that stupid philosophy that people are referring to when they say 'reality is a social construct'".

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Oh, really? Who would that be?

How many would you like me to direct you to? I have a character limit here. The whole mainstream progressive wing of the left, including mainstream punditry. The liberal stranglehold over the whole Ivy League. Most people living in deeply blue state’s, with ties to the Democratic Party. What are you looking for? Lol.

Your conduct throughout this thread has been pretty belligerent, condescending, and full of sneering, but this one stands out for the obnoxious "Lol" at the end, so this is the one I'm attaching a warning to. Calm down and be less antagonistic.

I was hoping you’d have a smoking gun of Colbert saying reality was “socially constructed.”

I’ll settle for any major politician or pundit saying that. I don’t believe it’s actually a common sentiment. Not among people who’ve worked a non-advocacy job.

I’ll settle for any major politician or pundit saying that. I don’t believe it’s actually a common sentiment.

It being dead center at the heart of woke ideology is good enough for me. But if that doesn’t do it for people, I suppose virtually nothing will. That has been obvious now for over a decade.

While she does not say, "I am a strict constructivist", I think this clip of Kentanji Brown-Jackson makes it clear that she adheres strongly to constructivism. It's also possible that she's simply lying to avoid question, but her mannerisms and verbiage are consistent with a sincere belief that "woman" isn't really something that one could define based on their perception of the world, but strictly requires additional context.

That’s a pretty good point. I should have thought about the legal profession.

I have a sense that some jobs—activists, blog-journalists, certain academics—have postmodernism in the job description. Law feels like it’s in that category. I want to discount them, but in the interest of not moving the goalposts, I guess I’m convinced.

As a lawyer I can confirm, but there's nothing inherently right-wing or left-wing about any of it. I have a deposition tomorrow where I'm going to ask some poor retiree about 500 questions, the vast majority of which I know he doesn't know the answer to and that he knows I couldn't possibly think he knows the answer to. I'm going to ask him for specific details about pieces of insustrial machinery he says he worked with in the 1970s. For instance, if he brings up a particular brand of industrial compressor I'm going to ask him when the first time he saw the brand was, how he was able to identify the brand, when the last time he saw it was, how many of that brand were in the facility, what each one he remembered specificly did, if he associated it with any particular color, detailed description of what it looked like, how it worked, what it was used for. And if he has the misfortune of actually being able to answer any of these questions in the affirmative then it will only lead to more questions pushing for more specifics. But I need to do this because whenever I go into negotiations with opposing counsel I can't just assume he doesn't know all of this (it's good for my client that he doesn't know), because if I do opposing counsel will ask to see where on the record it is that he says he doesn't know and now I don't have as much negotiating power. Every detail matters, every term must be defined, every hair must be split. If I don't do all that it's a disservice to my client.

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Do you think if you asked Joe Biden “what is a woman” that he would say a biological woman or “someone who identifies as a woman?” Biden might fuck up the answer but still.

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Great post! Forgive a slight nitpick:

These documents demonstrate each and every single author of the paper, directly, to the exact same concerns about the proposed wet market origin as piles of shitposters and too-online dogs, often pointing to the exact same evidence... privately.

The structure of this sentence boggles my brain.

Oof. Yeah, that got turned into a slurry some point in a rewrite. I think switched "tie" to "demonstrate", but even if that was a real sentence it wasn't a good one. Probably should be something more like :

These documents demonstrate each and every single author of the paper held some of the exact same concerns about the proposed wet market origin as piles of shitposters and too-online dogs, often pointing to the exact same evidence... privately.

normally drawing big charts claiming almost all the experts in a field were conspiracy to hide The Truth would be the sorta thing you do shortly before the nice men give you a coat with extra-long sleeves and take you to get some anti-psychotics.

Have you considered that this might be true largely because the people who engage in conspiracies have made it so? (There is, of course, a conspiracy theory to this effect).

How would one distinguish this from “the G-men really just want schizophrenics and psychotics medicated?”?

I think P(mentally ill | spends lots of time on conspiracy corkboards) is probably high, even if the theories are sometimes right.

You'd have to look at the evidence; too bad it's been decreed that doing so makes you ipso facto a lunatic.

Drawing a bunch of connections that indict the credibility of The Science sounds an awful lot like sluggish schizophrenia to me, Comrade.

Oh, absolutely. Speaking Truth to Power is no longer fashionable - it's illegal and demonized. As @official_techsupport mentioned elsewhere, the fashion is now to speak Power to Truth.

How could you say something so controversial, yet so brave?

“Speaking truth to power” became a cultural touchstone precisely because it was always demonized. It is social technology, and like any technology, there is an immense hindsight bias. Of course firms which implemented Stop Work Authority outperformed those which didn’t. Of course armies which lost turned out to be full of yes-men. Winning ideas are oh so obvious in hindsight.

As a corollary, no one* tries to “speak power to truth.” It is unfashionable, and to most Americans, signals something akin to a cult.

Curiously, cults continue to exist. Overbearing workplaces were never eliminated. People kept doing things they knew were wrong untrue, because social incentives are a helluva drug. This was true for every decade which could later be praised as the peak of freedom.

What do you think is so special about this one?

* Yeah, yeah. I’m sure there’s at least one countersignaling contrarian who disagrees. And they’re probably on this board.

As a corollary, no one* tries to “speak power to truth.” It is unfashionable, and to most Americans, signals something akin to a cult.

I think you can make a compelling case that the suppression and treatment of HBD et al as a field constitutes speaking power to truth. HBD theories aren't suppressed because they're wrong - rather, they would not need to be suppressed if they were wrong.

Is it really more likely that academics believe HBD but resolve to fight it anyway? I think genuine disbelief is more parsimonious. That would include feeling motivated not to look too closely.

Is it really more likely that academics believe HBD but resolve to fight it anyway?

Yeah, when surveyed anonymously only about 15-20% believe that there's no genetic component in the Black-White achievement gap in the US.

http://lepo.it.da.ut.ee/~spihlap/snyderman@rothman.pdf - 1987 survey.

https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301886 - 2020 survey.

This contrasts with practically nobody saying this in public and consequently the public (exemplified by you here) believing that this reflects on the actual privately held beliefs of scientists.

And, specifically, if you want to see how an example of speaking power to truth looks like in this context, https://www.chronicle.com/article/racial-pseudoscience-on-the-faculty (paywall bypass: https://archive.li/ZxVYk)

If you genuinely believe X -- as in, all the evidence you've seen points towards X, you have no inkling that X might be false, you would be willing to bet at strong odds that X is true -- then there may not be any motivation to look any more closely but there certainly isn't any motivation to avoid looking closely -- because what's the worst that can happen? You find more evidence that you're right?

In order to know that you need to be motivated to not look to closely, you need to know that there's at least a significant chance of learning that a thing you want to be true is not true. And that means you know that you already know there's at least a significant chance of this thing not being true. At this point, if you act as if you "believe" X with any confidence then you are merely acting.

Genuine (dis)belief and motivated reasoning do not fit together.

Sure there is. You’ve got a limited amount of time on this earth, and aren’t obligated to spend it debating people you think are trolls or at least cranks. The worst that can happen is you waste your time, feel stupider for having engaged, or encourage your opponents. It’s also possible to tar yourself as an outsider, because tribalism isn’t always (ever?) open-minded.

There is some level of belief where it becomes rational to write off the rest as a rounding error, rather than spend time on it. There is a lesser level at which most people start to do this!

If I think something is 99% likely to be true, and I don’t want to spend time debating heretics, it’s still fair to say that I believe that thing.

You’ve got a limited amount of time on this earth, and aren’t obligated to spend it debating people you think are trolls or at least cranks. [...] There is some level of belief where it becomes rational to write off the rest as a rounding error, rather than spend time on it.

This is justification for not having any motivation to talk to them. It is not motivation to avoid looking more closely at your beliefs.

I believe the earth is round. I could be wrong, but I find it sufficiently unlikely that I'm going to learn anything worthwhile from the average flat earther that I'm not really interested in debating them. However, if I ever find myself wanting to debate them, and also feeling like I need to avoid doing that, then that's a sign that something about what I claim to believe is wrong.

Having watched a couple actual debates on this topic, it's often that the "round earther" has no idea how to justify their (correct, IMO) beliefs, and instead of honestly admitting that they are essentially taking people's words for it, are trying to pretend that they actually understand things more than they do. That cognitive dissonance doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong on the object of contention, but it's a pretty good bet that you're wrong somewhere (perhaps in how confident and justified you actually are), and this sign marks the trailhead.

feel stupider for having engaged, or encourage your opponents.

These are both signs that your story isn't adding up. Why did you feel tempted to do something stupid? What roped you in?

Why would your opponent leave feeling "encouraged" rather than humiliated? If you actually know the topic so well, and their beliefs so dumb, shouldn't you be able to address their points so well that they are the ones that leave feeling dumb?

If I think something is 99% likely to be true, and I don’t want to spend time debating heretics, it’s still fair to say that I believe that thing.

That's 99% fair. And that 1% lie can be an acceptable rounding error.

But that 1% lie can also be a part of a much bigger lie to avoid having to deal with the fact that it's a hell of a lot more than 1% motivated and likely to be false.

Any time you find yourself actively wanting to avoid engagement (and not simply lacking motivation to engage), you're actively up against the part of your belief which isn't genuine. Even if it's only 1%, it's proven that it's not small enough to be irrelevant. And if it's making itself relevant, that's good evidence that it isn't really as small as you might like to believe.

they would not need to be suppressed if they were wrong.

This isn't true.

For instance, the British in India faced a rumor that cartridges were greased with pig and cow fat, which helped start an uprising. It was wrong, but it needed to be suppressed.

A couple of points.

  1. This puts to lie “trust the experts.” If the experts are willing to lie even if for supposedly noble reasons, then you cannot trust what they are telling you is accurate. No, you need to trust that what they are telling you is for the common good but why would those so called experts be more of an expert of what is the common good compared to you? It also wouldn’t be entirely surprising if they believed that the common good is consistent with what they do (eg I am trying to prevent a future pandemic and therefore what I do is good and anything that gets in the way is bad). But that’s largely self deceit.

  2. If we know what the institutional pressures are within this area, then it is entirely reasonable to assume publications would skew towards not a lab leak. The fact that people publish evidence supporting not a leak is consistent with the incentive structure people in this field clearly possess. It is akin to being SHOCKED that Phillip Morris’s research indicated no cancer due to smoking. That doesn’t mean they are wrong, but we aren’t looking at honest open science.

It is akin to being SHOCKED that Phillip Morris’s research indicated no cancer due to smoking. That doesn’t mean they are wrong, but we aren’t looking at honest open science.

I really think there should be a nice, pithy word that describes this kind of behavior - where you aren't strictly lying, but are using and presenting facts in a deceptive way in order to trick people.

Intellectual dishonesty?

deleted

On one hand I want to say that surely, being able to recognize and admit misconduct is private is better than not being able to do so, so this leak is bad. On the other hand, this is a pretty impressive level of self-delusion even so, and we do want to push back on misconduct when we become aware of it.

But I guess my synthesis would be: if the only way we have of noticing misconduct in a topic as impactful as a world-wide pandemic is a leak of private messages where the scientists involved literally admit to it, then science has much, much bigger problems than these people's misconduct.

It's pretty ironic that in attempting to push 'Trust the Science' they have had the opposite effect to those that are paying attention (which lets be honest, unfortunately isn't the majority.)

I don't think it's ironic at all. It's just what's obviously going to happen if 1) it needs to be said in the first place and 2) you can't think of a more persuasive thing to say.

"Don't ask us to support our reasoning" is not trust building discourse.

But I guess my synthesis would be: if the only way we have of noticing misconduct in a topic as impactful as a world-wide pandemic is a leak of private messages where the scientists involved literally admit to it

"Random shitposters" noticed the misconduct pretty much right away, based mostly on perception of conflicts of interest and also the point that pangolins weren't sold at the Wuhan wet market. But obviously could not prove it to the arbitrarily high standards it takes to demonstrate fraud from respected scientists.

But while the excuses are more obvious, when the researchers in question are sure that they aren't going to have the actual facts proven or even provable, and certain that certain politicians might flip their lids, but not that much more obvious. On the specific matter of COVID, a certain personality will point to the coincidental last-minute delays in vaccine approval, but it's not like COVID is the only research question with massive pragmatic questions. On politics, one doesn't have to think long before coming up with a long list of political matters like educational theory, environmentalism, public safety, countless others where tens or hundreds of thousands of lives quite likely rest -- sometimes, in the modern courts, cite -- individual papers. It's not even as though Nature, specifically, has otherwise avoided making public positions based on their pragmatic and political aspects. Doesn't even have to be political or even the sort of matters that drive the Culture Wars: research often matters because it could have so broad an impact.

The ethical ramifications of intentionally fudging things would be mind-boggling, of course! And there's no way to prove the internal motivations of a man, even assuming he or she knew it to start with. There's certainly been a long and unavoidable history of popular or 'obviously right' claims being subject to far less scrutiny than needed. But there's something worse, deeply and critically and baldly worse, where this crosses over into intentional behavior. To borrow from McArdle, once you've persuaded someone you're willing to tell them anything to win, you've lost the ability to persuade them of anything else.

((And, while it's possible that the people providing this data have carefully excised any exculpatory considerations otherwise, there's nothing yet showing even the slightest introspection on the matter of public trust. Sure hope that undermining any level of scientific honesty doesn't have costly side effects!))

Even worse still, there's the possibility that even if the "Proximal Origins" authors were factually wrong -- still not proven! they could have been right by accident! -- they weren't exactly wrong about this being science-as-usual. The paper was ghost-written by an author who used his 'remove' from the publication to burnish its and his credibility, with preconceived result and a thumb being aggressively applied to hurry review? Well, "preconceived notion" is just an uncharitable way of saying, there's always a little bit of Kevin Bacon problem in reviewers for smaller fields, and that Nature bit about ghostwriting was more about aspirations than specific standards. There's no rule against using non-public information to make accurate 'predictions' after-the-fact, so long as you avoid preregistration requirements. Favor what would be nice if it were true? Well, if you aren't publishing data disproving it side-by-side, what's the problem?

Nate Silver points to his early disagreements with KG Anderson as signs that it's possible to notice extreme partisans, but a) very few people did, contemporaneously, and b) even now, quite a lot of people Silver wasn't getting into Twitter Tiffs with are defending the conduct here. And Anderson was only one of the bullshitters. What happens if it doesn't need WWIII, or Korematsu II: Electric Boogaloo, or Trump's Revenge?

Lastly, this... hasn't exactly come across as a highlight of civilian governance, so much as a bunch of scenes from the blooper reel. Anti-Fauci partisans have been regularly pointing to ties between the several high-profile individuals here and vital grant institutions that they Tots Weren't Under The Thumb Of, but Andersen's testimony here is an absolute mess, with a large portion of his claims directly contradicted. It's not like we ever prosecute real people for lying to Congress, and that "knowing and willfully" bar can be a pretty high range to hit anyway. But in many ways that's missing the trees for the forest: these releases paint almost the entire field as an incestuous mess. That's most overt on a partisan level, where it looks like they could have locked the entire field's more conservative branch into a single broom closet without removing the brooms, and tried in every sense but the literally. But you have an official NIH prohibition on funding of gain-of-function research, which in practice got so many exceptions and cutouts and narrow definitions that it's the punchline to the "it's only X if it's from the Y region" snowclone. There was a big press release about the US funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology a week ago, continuing on a pause dating back to 2020, which would be a lot more impressive if I had more trust regarding a certain Alliance that had funded them in the past.

Normally, I'm libertarian enough to enjoy when a private individual's response to Congress is a slightly more polite 'sit on it and spin', but few if any of these individuals are private actors by any meaningful sense of the word. Hence why much of this could be FOIA'd, and much of the remainder are so heavily funded by grants and indirect subsidy that they honestly should be. I've given my rants before about other government sectors that have flipped the bird to attempts at oversight, but at least with the FBI everyone paying attention knew that we had a police agency that had jurisdiction over its own Congressional oversight; when talking the NSA, the whole classification and natsec issues were public at the time, even if they were lying to our faces. Nor is the problem here limited to merely Congressional oversight; the NIH is at least theoretically under the executive branch, and it's not clear the early-2020 Trump administration would have cared or even disagreed with this manipulative tactic, but just in case, the Trump-appointed director of the CDC, an early proponent of the lab leak theory, is pretty heavily cut out of the loop from any of these discussions and the paper was used at length to paint him as a nutjob. Even beyond the general issues with judicial review, trying to bring anything related to this matter into a court would be incoherent.

Virology experts as a fourth estate? Or is that closer to fortieth?

Virology experts as a fourth estate? Or is that closer to fortieth?

It's more like Scientists as a fourth estate. Scientism has rushed in to fill the void of a lack of religion and faith, which is ironic because science is supposed to be above all that. Unfortunately once you turn science into an ideology/religion/cult whatever you want to call it, it loses the vast majority of its explanatory power.

Maybe we'll see a 'fundamentalist' turn in science, where scientists insist we have lost the true path and return to our roots.

I don’t see how that can work when access to academia in general and science in particular is completely gate-kept. If you’re not working for a university or the government, you don’t count, and therefore your criticism won’t be heard. So it’s a self-protection thing. Only people sold out enough to the system can get enough power to criticize the system.

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