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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 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.
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.
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