gattsuru
2yr ago
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.
gattsuru
2yr ago
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.
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.
gattsuru
2yr ago
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"?
gattsuru
2yr ago
That's fair; there's certainly a lot more romance and skill to hand tools or conventional power tools, and seeing a full CNC machine used for glorified bowl or crosscut work gets me a little disappointed myself. And it's definitely the sort of tradework that you have to love the process of doing it to really get the most out of a piece, and it's hard to do that when it's all gcode.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Yeah, Android 10+ made that a default on behavior, and iOS 14 did the same. I think both defaults to persisting the same MAC address per-network SSID, though, so there's still some potential for tracking depending on your level of paranoia.
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.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I'd expect a lot of that chessboard depends on how heavily you're committed to the bit. If it just needs to look right from the top but you want the grain patterns to look intact, that's a great place to rent some time on a cnc to make an inlay or even just use a bunch of veneer or burl and a sharp exacto knife. Would still require a lot of chisel or marking knife work to get those precise corner angles, but it'd save you a ton of material and a lot of really finicky jigsaw work or sanding.
gattsuru
2yr ago
It's... complicated. There are several different categories of information, available through different means and at different levels of anonymization.
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Cell tower location data, which identifies where your specific SIM card (or eSIM) and cell phone IMEI was, based on the cell signal returns to a specific tower or towers. This information is not especially precise in general -- there are certain situations where the triangulation works just perfectly or a specific tower covers only a tiny area (especially common for subway or convention center towers) that can be a couple hundred meters, but it's usually only good for five hundred meters, sometimes not even that. This is stored by your cellular provider. Historically, it could be provided to police in the United States on a mere request, but Carpenter v. United States in 2018 largely blew that apart, and now requires a warrant (or... uh, parallel construction). Standards in other countries vary. As a matter of law, cell phone providers are supposed to have enough information to connect the SIM data to a specific person who purchased the account (IMEIs are less controlled by law, though in practice they also are usually tied to a seller).
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Cell signal interceptors (aka StingRays), which operate by spoofing a conventional cell tower for smaller areas, again tying to the SIM (or eSIM) and IMEI. Law enforcement have testified these can be accurate down to six feet, but law enforcement will testify to a lot, and the antenna and location matters a bunch. There's probably at least academic versions that can get within that range consistently, and might be commercial ones, based on more complicated antenna technologies, but it's not clear whether they've been commercially deployed. In this case, whoever operated the StingRay has the data immediately. It's... very far from clear what the legal environment for these things are.
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Cell phone GPS location data. On iPhone, "find my iphone", on Android, "find my device". This takes the GPS (or, on newer phones, GPS data fused with magnetic, imu, and mapped wifi) on your phone and uploads it to centralized servers at Apple or Google. This is more accurate outdoors and in horizontal space (theoretically within a few feet) than indoors or in vertical space, but it's very precise. Update rate is usually tied to movement. Carpenter /probably/ requires a warrant for police to ask for it, but I don't think the specific question has risen yet. It's also (supposed to be) possible to turn this off on the phone itself, depending on how much you trust Apple or Google. This ties directly to your Apple or Google account, which will have your name and phone number and usually address as a matter of practice.
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"Advertising Information". The same location services that provide cell phone GPS location data can be accessed by other software on the phone, including user-installed software and sometimes even web browser ads, who can then store the data wherever they want. Anyone selling ads can do it, and they can store the data in any location they want. Location quality varies; apps that are running in the background can send updates with similar levels of fidelity to the official location services, but stuff that gets backgrounded can end up only updating during someone's leisure or workplace time, and some people won't have anything going up at all. In theory, this stuff is supposed to be anonymized -- each user is converted into an "Advertising ID" that's not supposed to be individually identifiable, and should be mixed into groups before buyers can use it to tie an advertising ID to an individual -- but practice varies. You, personally, can buy city-wide scales of this data today; it's usually a couple thousand dollars. It's not clear what the legal status post-Carpenter is, especially since the sellers can probably individually identify a large portion of their database.
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Wifi data. If you go near a ground Wifi site, you'll expose your MAC Address to it. It's possible (and sometimes easy) to spoof the MAC address, and probably no one has a database of who owns what MAC address, but it's at least theoretically possible. Not very accurate, only tied to the specific access point you're connecting to (or for corporate-run access points, their auth gateway), most devices won't save this at all.
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?
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.
gattsuru
2yr ago
You'd have to rebind keys from the arrow buttons, and it's a little jank, but SweetHome3d looks to have that capability built-in.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I've been working on a top-level comment trying to branch off of Nate Silver's analysis. It's been pretty depressing, not just on the question of lab-leak or no, or COVID-specific censorship or gain-of-function research, or even of the reliability of scientific researchers, but about broader problems of governance and oversight.
I think you could make the argument that it points to a lot of the broader problems for "COVID hawks" -- as a more libertarian one, the combination of bad acts by and absolute resistance to any review of the highest-profile technical experts favoring the mainstream response to COVID has removed much of the relevant discussion space. There are still policy questions that matter, but they're not actually being discussed when the policy questions that actually get applied are apparently going to include bans on religious meetings or having police hold down people to apply vaccines or going full Korematsu.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Beyond the vaccination rates that gdanning points toward (though I'm skeptical of those numbers too), the Zhejiang data is three months of official data during a single surge. If you believe China had managed to completely block any and all fatalities before 2023, these numbers kinda work; if you're at all skeptical of the official Chinese COVID numbers, this analysis only provides an increase over the earlier increase beyond base rates.
((There's also some outside risks that historical malnutrition made younger (eg 45-65) Chinese people in the more rural provinces more vulnerable to COVID than those elsewhere, if still not as vulnerable as 65+s, in which case the Economist's napkin math starts to fall apart. But that's reading tea leaves from India, and China isn't India.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
It's not really that I'm deriding them as fakes, just that I'm deriding them as irrelevant.
I guess that's fair, if not what you said before, although in turn I'm not sure it is irrelevant, unless you really only care about the gay sex. You don't stop being bisexual just if you go a week without sucking a variety of genitals, any more than hets stop being het when they're not in the middle of reproducing, and there's a variety of norms that end up different in bisexual (even socially-bi) places.
And that's assuming that things keep the way they are; there's reason to suspect at least some amount of falling-into-het-relationships as downstream of simple selection effects, which could be less prominent if at least some portion of the newly-bi people are more 'haven't' than 'wouldn't' or 'couldn't'. I've written a bit in the past about spaces that turned high-prevalence bisexual and then had a lot of gay sex precipitate out.
I'd appreciate if you would explain this, the link just seems to take me to the same joke about Arsenic on Twitter.
There are a lot of people who have different norms of behavior when solely around people who aren't capable of seeing them as sexually attractive, even if there's no actual interest or chance of interest. Worse, they will become retroactively uncomfortable and consider it a betrayal of trust if they are 'tricked' into doing something outside of the bounds of these norms.
The classical variant of this for a lot of gay and bi guys is public- or semi-public showers, such as in gyms or dorm rooms. Where and when I grew up, it was considered immature or gay to be uncomfortable stripping for these environments. But at least some people also considered Incorrect to strip in front of a gay or bi guy.
((The broader LGBT movement calls this generally homophobic, and sometimes it is, but it's often from people who'd have the exact same objections in front of a heterosexual or bisexual woman other than their wives.))
One solution was for those gay or bi guys to be in the closet: keep your eyes up, think cold day thoughts, get in and out, done; what people don't know can't hurt their feelings. Does not always work out in practice. Another option is to disclose, either explicitly or through very well-known signals. People who aren't comfortable with it can change their behaviors (or make clear that you'll wait until they're out to go in); people who don't care don't even have to notice.
Public- and semi-public showers aren't the most common environment, but they're also not the only such example. It's not uncommon for businesses to put two same-sex coworkers into a single hotel room for conventions or travel (and especially older folks have often uncomfortable behaviors when doing that). I've had friends or coworkers invite me to certain types of 'themed restaurant' once and then when the only pleats I was looking at in the Tilted Kilt were on the host rather than the waitresses, and sometimes that doesn't matter to them a ton, and sometimes it does.
((I have strong reasons to believe there are equivalents for lesbian and bisexual women, but I've only heard them second-hand.))
These issues arise even and sometimes especially with people the gay or bisexual guy isn't actually going to be attracted to, just because the theoretical possibility is enough to matter, whether for "Caeser's wife must be above suspicion" reasons or just because they don't believe it. I've had people who I found absolutely repulsive, either on a physical or personality or both level, that insisted on changing room arrangements after I had to disclose for unrelated matters.
gattsuru
2yr ago
My objection's more at the bar between individual and group considerations.
As a metaphor, at the level of a species, "harvest crops" or "pumping water" played a fundamental role in the daily survival of literally every human on the planet. But most people don't do that often, and some don't do it ever in their entire lives. Sure, they'd be physically capable, for the most part -- but even the gayest guy or most gold star lesbian can find a turkey baster even if they couldn't lie back and think of England, and before that we had the invention of fingers.
But describing people as unhealthy because they don't want to harvest crops isn't even wrong, and wrong even beyond the (already obnoxious) tendency to conflate things like lack-of-exercise and the results of lack-of-exercise. Here, the problem isn't lack-of-hetero-fucking or even the lack of individual-results-of-hetero-fucking -- most men historically never reproduced, either! -- but some gauzy results-of-results matter. Society is downstream of individual actions, but "healthy" as measuring individual actions in how they effect humanity is less comparable to annoying advice to reduce bacon consumption and more like annoying advice to vote Properly.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Yeah, I'm increasingly skeptical of current uses of puberty blockers as the scale and scope of their use has escalated. Some of the discussion seems to get taken out of context when repeated in socon circles -- afaict, Maria Bower's concerns and claims are specifically about Tanner Stage 2-3 vs 3-5, rather than all uses of puberty blockers, which is especially annoying since Tanner 4 and 5 are those which tend to be what trans people point to as particularly dysphoric -- but the rather blaise response by WPATH et all isn't encouraging.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Your cite is from this discussion, discussing philosophy during 1983 by doctors, written in 1996 from interviews in 1992-1995. The same piece also describes out, from the exact same time period (though a different doctor):
Moss: I drew that line with a thick felt tip, and I thought: My house is inside the line. So what's going to happen? Are they going to put barbed wire around this line? Are they going to have a cordon sanitaire? See, at this point, we didn't know how infectious the disease was. And one thing that starts happening in 1983 is major infectious disease paranoia: Are we all going to get it? Is everybody going to get it?
Now, if it was as infectious as hepatitis B, then 5 to 10 percent of the medical staff would have died of AIDS, because that's the infection rate of hepatitis B. We didn't know it was only transmitted sexually and by blood. It could have been multiply transmitted. Everybody could have gotten it. For all we knew, the entire population of San Francisco could have been infected, or could have been threatened.
Now, if that had been true, then they would have put that fence around the Castro. They would have razed a six-block area around it, and left the gays inside it.
Hughes: In the late twentieth century, they would have done that?
Do you know about Ebola virus and Marburg virus? There are viruses that kill everybody. Now, suppose it [the infectious agent] is airborne, and you can get it by walking through the Castro. Now, how do you think people would have taken that?
Hughes: Well, there was a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Oleske on the casual household transmission of AIDS, which apparently caused a real ruckus.
Moss: Well, there were many ruckuses. There's a two-year period in 1983 and '84 when nobody knows what's happening, and the concern level has risen very high. And that's when this fear of stigmatization is going on. It makes everybody very paranoid indeed, because who knows who's getting it, and who knows what the political consequence will be? What if it really is like pneumatic plague, where you breathe on people and they get it? Or TB [tuberculosis]? We didn't know whether that was the case. Nobody knew that. And it was a reasonable speculation that it could be at least as infectious as hepatitis B, and that would have been really bad.
So paranoia was very high, and I'm drawing this line [around the Castro], and I'm having paranoid fantasies about what might happen as a result of this line. Pat Norman had the same reaction. She gets scapegoated for this, but lots of people were having the same reaction: Wait a minute. I don't want to hear this. I'm just going to quietly leave town now, before you publish it.
The interview references Oleske, but another certain famous asshole had outsized influence.
Obviously, homosexuality is not infertility of the gonads. But homosexuals (at least if they are strict about their homosexuality) must rely on artificial reproductive technologies for sexual reproduction in the way that people with poor vision must wear glasses to see.
I'll try to skip over the what-ifs -- though the alternate-universe where ~10% of XX-chromosone'd people went FTM in the '70s and early internet mpreg was drastically less bizarre is a funny thought -- but I really don't think this is a useful metric here, or for many matters involving the brain. People aren't livestock; to the extent any telos can be relevant on statistical levels, it doesn't really make sense at an individual one.
People also go to doctors get have ridiculous breast implants or sizable breast reductions, to reduce weight or help maintain it, so on and so forth. Even for matters pretty heavily tied to reproduction and fully autonomous, "what is the optimal time to start and stop lactating" for a mother doesn't have one Set and Correct Answer, and it's not even coherent to propose one. And the act of reproduction, despite the best effort of whiptail lizards and teenage boys first learning about lotion, is typically at least a two-player task: no matter how functional one person might be as an epitome of 'natural order', they're going to have a pretty rough time making a baby.
Reproduction might be more a telos than hair color (but don't red-heads have higher skin cancer incidence?), but it's not in the same category as eyes having a telos of seeing.
gattsuru
2yr ago
While mandated by the Hayes Code for media purposes, having separate bedrooms was a common (if upperclass) behavior until it started to be stigmatized in the 1950s and 1960s.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Didn't he point out that the issue of AIDS and other STDs is already preventable? If he hates them, it seems to stem from the lack of precautions they are taking, rather than them being gay.
There's a lot of bad information on the effectiveness of condoms for preventing HIV transmission. They're useful, but it's probably closer to an order of magnitude difference for perfect-use, rather than a complete barrier.
((And any look back that includes pre-1986 also has the problem the other direction: a lot of the explosive transmission of HIV and YOLO-esque behavior came about during the Ryan White-era, where people believed that standing too close to or using the same bathroom as a gay man could transmit HIV. Despite the wikipedia summary, they believed that because a lot of mainstream experts were cautioning about it! The devil-may-care behavior regarding condoms during a lot of that time period makes more sense when people reasonably believed that would have little impact.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
There's some utility to distinguishing between 'practicing' and 'non-practicing', and there's probably some number of 'socially-bisexual' who wouldn't pull the trigger for anyone short of a movie star dropping naked into their beds, but this framework risks defining a lot of monogamous or virgin bisexuals as 'fakes' in a way that obscures more than it hides. Even from a pure pragmatics perspective, there are a lot of places where it matters even for people I would rather gargle arsenic than see pantless, and that's before problems like "you don't want to see my internet browsing history" or "oh, you had some custom artwork prints framed, can I see them- no?"
((And, conversely, measuring just by activity redefines a lot of actually-gay people into bisexuals or 'straight', even if they absolutely didn't enjoy it and don't plan on trying again and might not have even been able to complete the act.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
The day when it's possible to turn a natal male or female into the other gender while being biologically indistinguishable on the metrics I care about, we have no room for disagreement at all.
That's potentially interesting, though there's a lot of feeling from the pro-trans side that this is a space where goalposts either get set to pretty unusual places or moved there pretty rapidly. Some of that's due to nutpicking -- one particular radfem mistaking her own silhouette for a transwoman's is nearly a year old now and still goes around the tumblr-sphere, and there's a general class of people who start grabbing the phrenologist tools -- but on the other hand at least part of the drive toward earlier transition reflects adult transitioners who had an unpleasant puberty but also had some side effects from it that were either difficult to change or incompletely changed. And a lot of trans people regularly celebrate whenever tech related to things like cloned organs or less invasive surgical interventions are proposed or developed.
On the flip side, it kinda raises a "what about now" question. Not in a 'dissolve the question' pure-philosophy sorta way, but were it an actual possible proposal would it be acceptable. Presuming no massive technological or engineering changes in the near future, would you have issues if we instead had them put X (malex?/womenx? would at least be less dumb than latinx) as gender ID, widely available transition-as-currently-developed, and otherwise only have trans-specific rules for places where those metrics you care about are directly exposed? Do you think the general populace of trans-skeptics would?
((In practice, I don't think the trans side or the trans-skeptic side has enough trust to make such a compromise, or even the group coherency to make a decision on the matter -- you're going to have different perspectives from the socon catholics, just as the average trans dude's going to have different ones from the high priests of transdom. It seems relevant to explore.))
I'm certainly not trans, for what that's worth.
Yeah, it's definitely far from a universal pattern among transhumanists, and not even all transhumanists with the associated philosophical and aesthetic characteristics have the pattern, and some small portion who otherwise have the pattern aren't trans or don't identify as trans (or gender-whatever).
gattsuru
2yr ago
The 'social contagion' theory isn't implausible, although I think no small number of pro-trans people would frame it instead as people who were already trans but now realized that they were and that it was possible to do something about it. And they're not exactly wrong : it's rude to make guesses about people before/unless they come out, but the transhumanist philosophy (and even transhumanist aestheticists) has had no small number of people who have had decades-long fascinations with body transformation as a form of self-improvement who weren't exactly a surprise when they turned out to be trans.
((FTM examples exist, but are small-crowd enough that I'm not hugely comfortable linking them.))
There's some important philosophical and pragmatic arguments about this even within the pro-trans framework -- not everyone who thinks those thoughts actually wants them, some who want something end up in some non-binary variant, and there are a variety of tradeoffs and physical limitations of existing technology such that even people who want to transition might be better-served by using some things and not others in a way that's getting obfuscated by a lot of mainstream discourse.
However, even outside of that, both perspectives have missed that they're looking at a metric, not a measure. You don't have a magical "this many people are trans" marker any more than you have a good definition of what being "trans" even is, but under that you don't really have good measures on even specific events. "How many people are using Tavestock" isn't the same thing as even "how many people are injecting sex hormones", as anyone who's noticed bodybuilders can guess. There already was a small industry of XX-chromosone'd people injecting testosterone, going butch as hell, and wanting to be called "sir" in the late-90s; there's some fun discussions about whether they're more trans now that they've been able to get hysterectomies easier, but it's not exactly the most practical of questions.
And there's been a lot of moving these to be higher-visibility, both in the general sense (trans pride) and in the seeing-like-a-state one (required coverage for insurance providers, changing rules for various government IDs). I don't think it's enough to explain the entire change, but it makes any attempt to use the metrics without acknowledging their limitations more than a little frustrating.
They have a website, a partially-linked and far more professional looking second paper, and a this video, and this less janky one. It's not obviously cranks coming out of the woodwork.
The Hirsch-Diaz feud and grifting's primed me to expect a lot of process-level-jank at best whenever new claims of high-temperature superconductivity come about, but this looks like it would either have to be incredibly overt fraud, the real thing, or some new electromagnetic behavior that would itself be very noteworthy if not as big a deal (eg, unusually high diamagnetic forces for a lead-copper compound, or even compared to graphites). You get a lot of current and resistance measurement problems with thin films, but the magnetic behavior is something different.
The biggest wierdness is how extremely simple the synthesis is. This isn't the first 'supermaterial' I've seen with the sort of production process that would be too easy for the Applied Science guy, but even if the process is picky as fuck and the yield tiny, these guys have a problem. If it's a fraud, a ton of materials labs will have disproved it by the weekend; if it's not, they're got patents on a material that are going to be Very Interesting to enforce. And not just for the 'you and what army' problems: if this approach works I don't see any clear reasons it'd be the only one.
EDIT: I'm seeing play-money bets around 15-30%, and I'd probably put some petty cash on the higher range, maybe 20-25% real, ~20% intentional fraud, remainder some incredibly specific measurement error or new weird thing. Which probably sounds a little pessimistic, but given how fucky this field's big names are, that's relatively impressed. The corporate stuff is still sketchy, though, and they're looking at indirect-enough measurements that "just amazingly diamagnetic" is definitely an option.
EDIT2: Even if true, I will note that all the critical currents are low so far. May be a production artifact, but if insurmountable would prevent some useful applications, especially if it can't scale up or can't scale up at reasonable costs. Still would be important.
EDIT3: Looks like they have one paper published in a (tiny) peer-reviewed journal on this already, albeit primarily in Korean and looking at lower-if-still-roomish-temps. I've got a low enough opinion on peer review that I don't think it changes much. Sorta thing you might do if trying to bilk naive investors as much as if serious.
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