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 -
Will we ever get the truth about the origins of Covid?
Venture investor Bill Gurley recently appeared at the All-In Summit to give a talk about how journalists and investigators uncovered the truth about various disasters like the Challenger Space Shuttle and the Boeing 737 Max. He talks about searchers, who look for the truth, and blockers, who try to keep people from finding it.
Then he talks about the origins of Covid.
While admitting he does not personally have a definitive explanation for the origins of Covid, he talks about how people who questioned the zoonosis hypothesis were repeatedly sidelined and ridiculed.
He gives one intriguing example of something which is not exactly a smoking gun, but still a giant blinking arrow pointing at the problem.
In 2018, there was a proposal made to DARPA called DEFUSE, in which bat coronaviruses would be studied. Human-specific cleavage sites would be added. Transmissability would be increased via gain-of-function. And this would happen in the United States in collaboration with, you guessed it, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. DARPA ultimately rejected the $14 million proposal.
In the word of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, please explain this to Fat Tony and tell him that Covid-19 wasn't a lab leak. Tell him that a bat (living in Laos) spread it to an animal (possibly a Pangolin!) and then from there to a wet market in Wuhan, the exact city where they (definitely weren't) doing the exact research that would allow Covid-19 to be created.
"But Fat Tony, I only had the exact idea for how to create Covid-19 in a lab. I didn't actually do it. It was the pangolins. Tony, no, please, not the blowtorch.... "
I'm also aware of the Root Claim debate which I've encountered as a wall of text and like 30 hours of videos. I'd love an explanation of why this debate matters, but my tendency is to dismiss it as a gish gallop.
In any case, I recommend giving the Bill Gurley talk a listen. He's got a nice drawl.
The only way a lab leak will be “officially confirmed” is by the CCP / Chinese government since it would have happened at a CCP-sanctioned facility and they stringently deny it.
Since this will never happen (for both liability and national pride reasons) this (‘almost certainly a leak’) is as good as it will get. It seems to me that most intelligent people, even on the libleft, have now updated to this.
I wish they would also update that it wasn't just bad protocol at Chinese labs, it was also irresponsible behavior by people like Dr. Fauci who were pushing gain of function research in the first place. Even though everyone knows it's a lab leak now, no one is acting like it. People on the left still treat Dr. Fauci like a hero.
Frustratingly, unless your primary concern is assigning blame (which seems likely to fall on both China and the US, and nobody is practically going to be paying out for this), the final assessment of origin isn't even that meaningful. If your goal is to avoid a similar recurrence, the fact that it seems plausible to have been a lab leak should be sufficient for enacting the same set of rule changes as if we knew it was. We can just make sure the next one is not a lab leak, and it costs us relatively little. For what it's worth, we can try to avoid future zoonosis too.
Just as public health authorities did themselves no favors by being misleading and overly restricting, COVID skeptics do themselves no favors by overstating the case - both explanations make sense and are plausible, and any conclusive evidence is likely gone. Focus on patching the vulnerabilities over assigning blame and asserting informational superiority.
People are giving AIs access to a wetlab. Nothing has been learned. Nothing has been patched.
Assigning blame serves an important function for vulnerability patching. If no one involved is ever responsible than why would they spend the effort to fix anything?
Given the existence of two plausible origin theories, both of which involve large-scale idiocy rather than individual criminality (which is not to say that nobody committed a crime - just that under both theories there is no criminality needed to end up with a pandemic), attempting to assign blame makes vulnerability patching harder because it creates high-powered incentives to hide the root causes. In practice, it also makes it harder to create common knowledge about root causes and appropriate responses because you require a higher standard of proof to assign blame to individuals than to identify patchable vulnerabilities.
In fact this is a more general point. If a disaster requires systemic vulnerabilities (whether in place of or in addition to individual culpability) then attempting to identify culpable individuals after the fact makes root cause identification, and therefore vulnerability patching, harder. There is a reason why both medicine and aviation try as far as possible to have blame-free accident investigation processes.
At some point you boil up the responsibility to a nation state. China should be paying reparations. The reparations should be based on how unsafely they acted.
If they don't allow foreign investigators full access to an immediate investigation then they are assumed to be maximally guilty.
Individual nations can then set punishments for their people internally for fucking up.
More options
Context Copy link
Going after people who tried to censor one of these theories, coordinated to attack anyone who came out to say it actually is plausible, and to hide relevant information, sounds like a pretty good approach to vulnerability patching. No matter which theory is ultimately true, you do not want anyone like that in any sort of position of responsibility.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link