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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.
No. Like other good conspiracy theories, we already have more or less all the evidence we’re going to get. If that wasn’t enough to settle it there’s not going to be a smoking gun in 10 years.
This is conspiracy 101: partition everybody into free-thinkers and sheep. You, dear reader, must be intelligent and brave to have seen through the sidelining and even ridicule! Unfortunately, having critics does not actually mean that someone is right.
The difference between lab leak debates and the Challenger investigation comes from skin in the game. Remember that almost nobody arguing for or against lab leak had any expectation of consequences, moral or material. “I don’t want their blood on my hands” has different incentives than “I want to prove this asshole wrong.”
Tell him somebody ate a diseased bat in west China. Epicycles about Laos and pangolins and steel beams are beside the point; Fat Tony don’t care.
I didn’t bother to watch this either. I read Scott’s summary and the followup. Do that if it sounds like fun, because it’s not likely to change your mind.
But I’d still say it’s the opposite of a Gish gallop. Both sides went in with the expectation of throwing a bunch of shit at the wall. Good for them.
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