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.
Disclaimer, I haven't looked into this topic at all. I just think there's a point that's often missed in these discussions:
When we're thinking about the likelihood of a novel virus emerging, we need to be anchored on a distribution according to population, not time, because each new human being is a new opportunity for a virus to take form. The relevant figure is: What percentage of the people who have ever lived are alive today? Seems like it's about 7%. So, the number of novel human viruses we should expect to see arise in our lifetime is about 7% of however many have arisen in all of history. Those are some good odds, if you're a virus!
But (more speculatively) it's worse than that, because viruses emerge from the interaction of more than one organism, not necessarily of the same species. A plasmid might emerge from a bat, land in a pangolin, then later escape with a mixture of bat and pangolin DNA, etc. Therefore, depending on how many steps it takes, the number of opportunities for viruses to arise will increase as the Nth power of population, with an extra bonus for the density of humans and animals all crammed into one small place. I would venture to say that the amount of genetic material being shuffled around nowadays in places like Wuhan is a situation without precedent in the whole history of life on Earth.
That's an interesting thought. But then, naively, wouldn't we expect diseases to form almost exclusively in places like India or Africa where density is high and medical treatment is poor? Why haven't we seen more diseases?
One possible explanation: Even though today's humans represent 7% of all the humans the have ever existed, we represent a tiny fraction of all the mammals that have ever existed.
This would seem to contradict the previous idea as there aren't that many pangolins. Bats seem pretty good at serving as disease reservoirs, being numerous and close together. If Covid-19 emerged close to a population of bats known to harbor coronaviruses, the zoonosis case would make more sense. Sure wet markets an all that, but now we're chaining together multiple things that have to "go right" to create Covid. The lab leak theory on the other hand seems quite straightforward.
Haven't you watched the news in like the last decade or few at all?
Ebola, Zika, Mpox, plain old HIV.
Diseases form all the damn time in Africa.
And HIV too of course. But these viruses have been around since at least the 1970s, realistically much longer. Africa today has a population far greater than when these diseases developed. Why aren't we seeing like 10x the number of new diseases?
And why not India which even today has the same population as Africa and historically was much more populated.
Clearly there is more to disease formation than just raw human population.
I don't think HIV was well-known until well into the 80s, even if it was recorded earlier. There are plausibly a dozen or two documented-but-small-scale diseases today that will blow up in the next decade or two. Mpox wasn't new, but the mutation that was spreading was, AFAIK.
True though that also raises the question how modern air-travel hasn't led to way more random diseases surging around than actually have. You can get from Bumfuck Africa to an international hub in like 24 hours now. I'm pretty sure even in Africa the majority of the population could get to Dubai within 2 days if they really needed to.
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