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I dislike how he brushes over 'lab leaks'. That should've been the real story, it's more important than all other factors and especially more important than feeling sad about the death toll.
Nothing was learnt from COVID. Literally nothing, gain of function research is still continuing. Everyone knows that gain of function research caused this disaster. But nobody can be bothered to do anything about it, Trump has frozen federal funding into gain of function. A funding freeze is not remotely proportionate for the megadeath machine.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14711269/ebola-lab-placed-shutdown-halting-disease-research.html
This is a BSL-4 lab by the way, America's top people. Wuhan was BSL-3. These doctors have been behaving like clowns with the most dangerous technology on the planet. There's no sign of any professionalism, considering the danger of their work. The acceptable number of lab leaks is zero, it's the same as the acceptable number of accidental nuclear strikes. The AI community seems to care more about bioweapon risk, that's a big part of the whole AI safety rhetoric. But why should anyone care about whether AIs can synthesize bioweapons when the experts are already doing it so carelessly?
This stuff should be done out on South Georgia island near the south pole, or somewhere incredibly remote with a huge mandatory quarantine period, if and only if it's absolutely necessary. Otherwise, anyone who tries to do gain of function, especially with humanized mice like they were doing for COVID (like Daszak boasted about in his tweets) should be treated like Osama Bin Laden, with special forces coming in to shoot them on sight.
The right of scientists to publish cool papers and do interesting research in convenient locations does not come above the right to life, freedom and property for tens, hundreds of millions.
Nearly all of us also want GoF shut down, to be clear.
There is, however, some significant difference between "a vaccine-resistant smallpox pandemic", as bad as that would be, and the true final form of bioweapons that a superintelligent AI could possibly access.
The absolute best-case of what that looks like, as in "we know 100% that this can be done, we just don't know how yet" is an incompatible-biochemistry alga with reduced need for phosphate and a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO (we know RuBisCO is hilariously bad by the standards of biochemistry; C4 and CAM plants have extensive workarounds for how terrible it is because natural selection can't just chuck it out and start over). Release this, it blooms like crazy across the whole face of the ocean (not limited to upwelling zones; natural algae need the dissolved phosphate in those, but CHON can be gotten from water + air), zooplankton don't bloom to eat it because of incompatible biochemistry, CO2 levels drop to near-zero because of better carbon fixation, all open-air crops fail + Snowball Earth. Humanity would probably survive for a bit, but >99% of humans die pretty quickly - and of course the AI that did it is possibly still out there, so focussing only on subsistence plausibly gets you knocked over by killer robots a few years later.
Medium-case is grey goo.
Worst-case is "zombie wasps for humans"/"Exsurgent Virus"; an easily-spread infection that makes human victims intelligently work to spread it. To be clear, this means it's in every country within a week of Patient Zero due to airports, and within a couple more weeks it's worked its way up to the top ranks of government officials as everyone prioritises infecting their superiors. Good. Luck. With. That.
It is possible for things, like normal GoF, to be extremely bad and yet still be a long way from the true, horrifying potential of the field.
All of those sound bad, but also very speculative?
We have a recent worked example of what can happen with GoF (true regardless of the true origins of covid-19); shouldn't we prioritize making sure that doesn't happen again over "stop Skynet"/"Butlerian Jihad Now" type stuff?
It's like hearing that Ford Pintos can explode due to their fuel tank design and responding with "OMG, cars can explode! Terrorists might start planting car bombs, I should work on anti-terrorism!"
The last one is very speculative; I have a suspicion it might be impossible. The middle one is somewhat less speculative; something akin to it is probably possible, but there are degrees of success and you're probably looking at more like "eats organic matter at a foot a day" than the "lol eats planet in minutes" sci-fi shit. The first one is proven possible by PNA, the aforementioned terribility of RuBisCO, and the wide variety of possible biomolecules only some of which are used. Anybody who knows second-to-third-year biochem knows that that design is 100% chemically and physically possible; the roadblock is the incredible difficulty of designing a full biochemistry ex nihilo (it'll be a while before anyone succeeds at this without AI aid, although I'd still rather nobody tried). I get that not everyone does know this, but seriously, this is uncontroversial in terms of "is this possible, given a blueprint?"; it is. That's why I said it's the best-case of "what the final form of bioweapons looks like"; they can be worse, but they can't be better.
I mean, I'd rather that 200 million people die next year from a pandemic over everyone dying 10 years from now. I'd rather that even if I'm one of the 200 million. I'm not seeing the issue.
The issue is that you are prioritizing problems that are arguably possible (well, one of them) but have never manifested in an even directionally similar way over one that just happened a few years ago, repercussions of which were quite severe and still being felt.
I resisted "millenarian cultist" analogies so as not to be uncharitable, but you didn't want to talk about Ford Pintos, so fuck it:
It's certainly possible that Jesus will descend and start casting the goats (that's you) into a lake of fire at any moment -- this is roughly the worst thing that could happen (for you); shouldn't you prioritize Christian worship more highly than (I assume) you do?
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Scott had an extraordinarily in-depth lab leak post in 2024, I'm not sure there was anything more for him to say on the topic unless he'd changed his mind about it. Naturally, saying "everyone knows that gain of function research caused this" is putting it way too strongly: Scott isn't convinced and neither am I. But I think about this very often -
…and it does follow that we should probably treat gain-of-function research as if it had caused COVID, because "we can't ever know for certain if it caused COVID, but the two hypotheses are neck-to-neck" is bad enough if we're talking about future caution.
That's a fair conclusion, but not really Scott's conclusion, and I have to wonder what the underlying motivation is to be so committed that lab leak is wrong when there's more interesting topics to discuss around COVID.
It's unfortunate that this is rarely stated clearly, but I figure the crux is that COVID was a watershed moment for governments, with the backing of a technocratic expert caste, imposing novel restrictions on personal and social freedoms. The narrative the globalist-technocratic complex and its supporters want to prevail is that this was good and necessary - the freedoms are a relic of a more innocent age, somewhere in the class of letting gentlemen scientists enrich uranium in their bedrooms, and in our age of global networks and megacities it is important to endow experts and elected representatives with emergency powers to restrict them according to their superior judgement to protect the people from danger.
This narrative is a lot more compelling if COVID was a natural catastrophe and the official response at least constituted a reasonable attempt to minimise the risk of bad outcomes, than if COVID was a result of irresponsible actions by the same technocrat clique that wants to arrogate itself emergency powers to immamentize its "superior judgement". (See: the old pattern of creating a problem and selling the solution)
Underlying this all is a quiet disagreement about what was even the "problem" - one group of people sees a dangerous disease that society was worryingly incompetent in containing and wonders why it even matters where exactly it came from, while the other sees "free" societies happily going on the North Korea spectrum overnight over a cold and wonders why it even matters how bad the cold was.
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I thought the general consensus was that it was a lab leak, even if it can't be proved due to much of the evidence mysteriously disappearing (which is itself a certain signal). This seems to be the position of the US intelligence apparatus. Frankly it should've been obvious back in March of 2020 given the proximity of the lab, the nature of its COVID research and all the anomalous activity going on there.
Anyway, I also agree with your second point.
Lab leak has a few things going for it, but these are always presented in isolation and no pushback. It is worth to read through Scotts Lab-Leak-Megapost, which is itself only a summary/review of the 15 hours of Lab-Leak-debate videos. I wouldn't rule out Lab-Leak completely, but I downgraded its probability.
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His post continued to ignore the fact that governments seem to have info that they buried that supports the lab leak (eg Germany).
From the linked post:
I don't know what more you'd want. He knows perfectly well that disingenuous actors in the China and in the west conspired to cover up anything that could have pointed at a lab leak. Given the nature of the leaked evidence, however, he thinks the bad actors did this in case it turned out to be a lab leak, without themselves being certain.
Well, I would say the more you had separate groups with apparent intelligence that was buried (eg Germans), the more you look foolish for saying they did solely prophylactically.
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He told you: an acknowledgment that lab leak was the likely origin of COVID according to various western governments' own assesments. We're not talking about virologist speculations in the early stages of the pandemic. The passage you quoted is a perfect example of Scott doing exactly of what he's being accused of.
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Really, really disappointed with that post of his.
-Civil war era US had a tenth of present day US population. Scott surely knows this.
-mostly old people died now so low QALY losses compared to say, Spanish flu.
He knows all this, he's smart, we know this, yet he doesn't say it. Why?
Ironically, most of US lab leaker proponents are (probably) brushing over a the fact that covid was not made by the 'bat woman' Shi Zhengli in Wuhan, but was made in a US lab in Montana as part of a project to 'Defuse' bat coronaviruses in wild bat populations by circulating particular strains of viruses in them.
This seems outrageous and is perhaps a coverup of something darker, nevertheless there's fairly compelling evidence for it such as the animals in which covid easily spreads are not typical Chinese lab animals.
This is a complex set of claims which it'd take some serious effort to verify, but it does seem plausible and explains anomalies such as the disclosure of the genome by Shi in early '20 etc.
Anyway on the link there's an entire podcast episode that goes over it in detail.
I've always maintained that responsibility is shared between the superpowers, that's a huge part of why nobody's prepared to accept what happened or do anything. The Chinese have eagerly been saying 'oh it was made in America' and vis versa. But neither is prepared to do anything about it, they want to pretend it never happened lest the enormity of the disaster waft back onto them. Propaganda is all they're willing to do.
This applies especially to the community of experts (that Scott is a member and cheerleader for), full realization would be shattering to their authority. This disaster was made by the experts, whether in China or America or both, it was them.
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He literally talks about this in the post.
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He changed that paragraph from "deadliest" to "highest fatality" when several people in the comments pointed out that the civil war was still more lethal per capita.
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