This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You don't need wild hypotheticals about a lab leak that probably didn't happen to find negligence leading to the COVID-19 pandemic. China actively covered it up for weeks (months?); not sure that's really even "negligence" at that point. Although the US's CDC not catching on sooner due to removing the person whose job it was to keep them honest in July 2019 probably does count.
And the leading scientific theory (spillover resulting from improper handling of market animals) implies that COVID-19 is due to Chinese government negligence. After SARS they clamped down on live animal markets, but over time, while they remained illegal, the government didn't seriously enforce the laws against them. In other words, they knew what they had to do to stop a pandemic, tried, and failed (or gave up). That makes them look culpable and/or incompetent, so they don't want too high a confidence assigned to that theory.
It's hardly a wild hypothetical - we know the closest biological origin was a bat in Laos. We know Wuhan Lab was bringing sick bats from Laos back to Wuhan, where they were interested in putting furin cleavage sites inside bat coronaviruses. The key difference between COVID and its precursor was the introduction of a furin cleavage site. It was also unusually good at infecting humans, almost as though it was bred on humanized mice - another thing Wuhan lab was doing.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger/
How does a sick bat from Laos travel 1000 miles to Wuhan market and infect a pangolin or some other animal there, before adeptly spreading to humans? Why not some city in Southern China or Laos itself? Of all the myriad wet markets in China, it has to be the one right next to the primary bat coronavirus-studying BSL-4 biolab? This is a bit too convenient of a theory.
I'm afraid I can't access any counterarguments from your video since it's nearly 2 hours long. Furthermore, there's a huge bias from the medical community against a lab leak. If it's a lab leak, they'll endure massive public hatred, crippling regulations and endless legal hearings about who knew what when. They have every incentive to suppress the lab-leak story, that's why Daszak from Ecohealth (at the center of it all) was organizing a letter in the Lancet denouncing it as a 'conspiracy theory'.
BTW, the show notes point to the research papers discussed on the podcast if you would rather see the arguments in that format (providing quote from the internet archive because the TWiV website appears to be down for me at the moment):
The podcast is an interview with the lead author on the papers going over the arguments, although presumably in less detail than the papers themselves.
My understanding is that the first paper shows that the cases show a pattern that strongly suggests the first human cases occurred at the market and not at the lab. And the second paper shows there were multiple spillovers both at the market, which is also inconsistent with the source being the lab.
This link predates the publication of those papers by a few months. I acknowledge that the lab leak theory wasn't a total nonsense conspiracy theory, but the accumulated evidence points pretty strongly against it at the moment. And, more importantly, whether or not it's right, it's a distraction from actions we already know we should be taking (but aren't) to prevent future pandemics.
What does this mean? Nobody here is making policy based on our discussions, what actions should we be taking instead of talking about things we want to talk about? And if lab leak turned out to be true - which you acknowledge is not outside the realm of possibility - why would that not be an important thing to investigate, never mind so unimportant as to be a distraction?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link