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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5409 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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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.

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.

A Gish gallop is a performative one-sided dump of low-quality arguments which is designed to be superficially convincing if unrebutted and to be a lot harder to rebut than it is to generate.

The Rootclaim debate was adversarial, with both sides bringing their best. Multiple observers who found it worth their time to read the wall of text on ACX (I have done) or watch the multiple hours of video (I have not) have confirmed that the arguments being made are persuasive, and that most of them stand up to well-informed, well-resourced attempts at rebuttal. The vast majority of the people who have spent time engaging with it (including me) have come away with the conclusion that the zoonosis hypothesis is at least plausible given the publicly available information, and most (not including me, probably because a lot of the receipts are buried in the 30 hours of video or the documents cited in an already-long wall of text) have come away accepting the argument that zoonosis is orders of magnitude more likely than lab leak.

The Rootclaim debate matters because it involved two smart people with the resources and incentives to produce the best possible arguments based on the publicly available information, and a group of more-or-less neutral smart observers who precommitted to reading a wall of text and watching 30 hours of video, meaning that the debate would not be easily won with cheap debate tricks like Gish gallops (or "spreading", which is the equivalent technique used in actual competitive debate). It represents by far the largest concentration of IQ-point hours applied to the question of "Based on the publicly available information, what is the most likely COVID-19 origin story?"

Not every valid argument can be made comprehensible to Fat Tony. For an uncontroversial example, Fat Tony can't understand Bell's Inequality. That doesn't make hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics correct.

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.

FWIW, an entirely Fat Tony-comprehensible rebuttal of this argument is included in the ACX post summarising the Rootclaim debate. Understanding it might take as long as several minutes, which you apparently consider to constitute a Gish gallop. But the short answer is that a proposal that was not funded, to do research at a lab that was not the WIV, on viruses that the WIV did not have in its collection, is not smoking gun evidence that a modified virus leaked from WIV.

In fact, most of the arguments on either side of the Rootclaim debate are ones that Fat Tony could understand if he wanted to spend the time to do so. The basic lab leak argument is as @porkpiehat gives it. The first-round rebuttal is that the unnatural-looking furin cleavage site doesn't look human-designed either, and that the bat virus from which SARS-CoV-2 doesn't appear to have been at WIV at the time the alleged GoF research was being done (it wasn't found in the wild until after the pandemic). The basic zoonosis argument is that SARS-CoV-2 is awfully similar to OG SARS (which is known to be zoonotic) and that we found the origins of the pandemic in the very wet market stall which a western virologist visiting WIV had called out 5 years previously as high-risk for zoonotic virus transmission, with the first-round rebuttal being that nobody ever found the intermediate host. What Fat Tony struggles with is evaluating the relative strengths of the arguments (and the COVID-19 origins debate is very unusual for straightforward factual disputes in that there are still strong arguments on both sides after this much expenditure of IQ-point hours). In the context of the debate, it is actually the lab leakers who end up falling back on a Fat Tony-incomprehensible argument about why "A lab leak virus that looks plausibly zoonotic just happened to have its first superspreader event at a wet market 10km from the lab" is not an unlikely coincidence - see Rootclaim's post-debate rebuttal.

I'm not going to blame Fat Tony for falling back on "I distrust the clowns who think that vaccines cause autism less than the clowns who think men can cut their dicks off and become women" but the whole point of the Motte is to aspire to be more rational than Fat Tony.

The basic problem is it relies on accepting info from PRC (who wants to lie) and from US government (who through Fauci also lied). The rootclaim debate didn’t have the benefit of the Paul data dump that was pretty damning.

What was the Paul data dump?

There were a lot of emails from Fauci etc suggesting a concerted cover up. Of course we knew some but not all of this before.

Do you have a source for that?

NPR article

In his posts on X, Paul highlights a few select excerpts from Fauci's notes. For instance, he points to an entry on Jan. 26, 2020, not quite two months before the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, where Fauci writes, "the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier."

Paul notes in his post, "The wet market was already off the table in [Fauci's] own private notes."

But in that same journal entry, Fauci adds, "Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans."

Not quite a week later, in an entry penned on Feb. 1, 2020, Fauci listed the dozen researchers who participated in a conference call debating the origins of COVID-19. Specifically, they were talking about the plausibility that a key part of the SARS-CoV-2 genome could have evolved naturally.

According to his notes, only two of the scientists voiced support for a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. "The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible," he wrote, referring to the hypothesis that the virus was engineered in a lab.

In response to that passage, Paul wrote on X, "This was never a 50/50 room," suggesting that early scientific consensus considered a lab leak possible.

But Goodrum says that this meeting took place very early on, when scientists did not have as much data as they would later. The virologist points out that science is iterative and takes time to play out. What some of those scientists believed at the start gave way to a different consensus as more evidence emerged.

"We make the best conclusions we have with the data we have at the time, but then you're going to keep working," she says. "And then you're going to ultimately revise the original conclusions that you made. You will change your mind. That's absolutely fundamental to the way science is done. And it's something that Fauci wasn't really given any latitude to do."

Goodrum adds that it's possible that Fauci may have been less certain in private with his colleagues as they were racing to learn about the new virus than he was in public, where he had to assure a public panicking over the rapidly emerging pandemic.

Rand Paul press release

U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Chairman of the Senate HomelandSecurity and Governmental Affairs Committee, today released internal Slack messages exchanged among the authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”—Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes, and Andrew Rambaut. The messages, obtained as part of his ongoing COVID-19 origins investigation, are now available in The Reading Room at paul.senate.gov/readingroom.

The Proximal Origin paper, published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, was widely cited by public health officials and the media as the scientific authority for ruling out a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. The newly released messages show that behind closed doors, the paper’s own authors were far less certain than their public conclusions suggested.

In the messages, Andersen assigned a 30% probability to a lab origin. Holmes gave an estimate of 20%, later revising it down to 10%. Both numbers stand in direct contrast to the paper’s public assertion that there was no way the virus had been manipulated.

The documents also reveal extensive internal debate over the furin cleavage site, the genetic feature at the heart of the lab-leak question, with Andersen at one point telling colleagues that “some smoking(ish) guns” had emerged that made him “not comfortable,” and that he had “less confidence… at this stage.”

Separately, the messages show the authors coordinating directly with the U.S. intelligence community and NIH leadership during the same period they were publicly defending their conclusions. Andersen told his co-authors he expected to “have a handler” beginning that week as the intelligence community’s 90-day review was underway. Holmes repeatedly referenced a source in China he called “my spy.” Following the leak of the DARPA DEFUSE proposal, which detailed a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses, the group discussed the need to “stay off email” and to “carefully curate” their correspondence “for the FOI records,” while also noting the need to “get something back to Tony [Fauci]’s team at NIH.”

The release is part of Chairman Paul’s broader effort to make the underlying record of the COVID-19 origins investigation publicly available.

Thanks!

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