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Since my 'don't trust Science' threads were already toeing the line between 'Pepe Silvia!' and schizophrenic (fair!) (I didn't even touch the four-part follow-up), Nate Silver summarizes better than I can :
((Silver's links carry the touchstones of conspiracy paranoia, like an emphasis on coverups and literally-by-the-minute analysis of claimed coordinated action, which would normally discourage me from pointing to them, except they also happen to be reasonable factual descriptions.))
To be clear, this isn't a case of some barely-related scientists from nearby offices in slightly-related fields being somewhat more open-minded. These documents demonstrate each and every single author of the paper held some of the exact same concerns about the proposed wet market origin as piles of shitposters and too-online dogs, often pointing to the exact same evidence... privately. In public, they named opponents giving these possibilities conspiracy theorists for naming options they were accepting privately, or drawing out a web that actually existed. Jeremy Farrar would send e-mails giving 50:50 odds on natural (and non-natural, mostly serial passage) origins at the same day he was shopping around early drafts of the paper; while he isn't on the author list, that's its own mess. To be fair, they do change positions in private, as information comes around and as debate occurred. But they remain far from as convinced as they pretended in public, not just during publication but months later, and it's exceptionally clear that the political and pragmatic ramifications drive that.
Nor was this filled with caveats and used or intended to be used solely as a small opinion piece. It contains a few limited cautions about available data's ability to discriminate from evolution at the wet market from cryptic adaptation among humans, but serial passage was actively dismissed by an incoherent mush that steps from animal models to purely in vitro considerations. The paper's authors and 'unrelated' academics (who had been heavily involved in discussions with the paper's authors behind closed doors) cited this not-a-paper at length to justify treating anyone even considering the possibility of just serial passage or an accidental lab leak to be a conspiracy theory that must be shut down, all the way from casual shitposters to federal politicians, including those who advocated specifically serial passage or a purely transport-focused accident. These private messages make clear that wasn't some unintentional side effect, but a if not the specific goal.
Nor was this limited to the broadest strokes: at best, these otherwise closely-knit scientists did mention important information not widely available to random shitposters to each other, such as the rarity of live pangolin trafficking, or the animal makeup of the wet market's official shipments, or a variety of information about possible serial passage techniques, all of which were carefully excluded from the final paper. Some writers received confidential notice of discovery of RmYNO2, and after finding that it wasn't itself more helpful to their point than other already-known genomes, decided to instead obliquely reference it as possible to make a 'prediction', because the Texas Sharpshooter's approach would have been too on the nose.
And that's the stuff that came through FOIA-able emails or broad and leakable Slack channels. The messages show many people involved transitioning to private e-mails, to phone calls, to unrecorded Zoom meetings, often dropping to very clipped wording during that transition: they knew this could eventually be public, and they knew other conversations would not.
None of this amounts, as many COVID skeptics are calling it, to research fraud; I'm not even sure it fits most definitions of academic misconduct. But that's mostly because the publication didn't have enough numbers or analysis to need to actively lie: this paper has no pixels to check for signs of photoshopping, nor specific population numbers to hit with GRIM. Silver has joined calls to retract the paper, but Nature's staff have already said that "Neither previous out-of-context remarks by the authors nor disagreements with the authors’ stated views, are, on their own, grounds for retraction." It ain't happening.
Silver proposes that the scientists were motivated by some combination of :
These aren't exactly the most charitable framings for each possibility, if perhaps more charitable than focusing on Anderson's certainty this paper got him tenure. But with a more forgiving description, I get something along the lines of :
Perhaps @Chrisprattalpharaptor can do better. But even if these somewhat earnest reasons that business or political tribe might have controlled what these scientists were willing to say publicly, or if there was some more noble cause that they held above providing an accurate model of the world, it's still something other than providing an accurate model of the world. Which is what, supposedly, was their job.
Worse, few of these matters stop here. Trivially, a lot of academics and casual observers are saying that even if the Nature op-ed authors were playing fast-and-loose with the facts at the time, we since have a ton of evidence in favor the wet market/natural origin side and very little recently published in favor of serial passage or any intentional manipulation, and normally drawing big charts claiming almost all the experts in a field were conspiracy to hide The Truth would be the sorta thing you do shortly before the nice men give you a coat with extra-long sleeves and take you to get some anti-psychotics. Except all of the above.
You can always find something your enemies think is stupid. There are things I believe that are stupid. There are certainly things the median American staunch conservative believes that are stupid. But does that mean their views on other things - on the essential elements of human nature, for example - are wrong?
The world is more than 6,000 years old. But evangelical conservatives are more right than they are wrong. On Covid, scientists were unwilling to admit the lab theory because the labs running GoF experiments were doing the same thing in China as they were in the USA. It’s as simple as that. It could have happened in America, blaming “the Chinese” was nonsensical.
The above screed (that you're replying to) was written by someone who rather than consider just how difficult it is to tell the truth to an inflamed populace would prefer to lean into an ideological mistrust of 'blue tribe' targets.
To the extent that this place is attempting to be 'conservative' it's essentially lost all semblance of responsibility as a virtue.
This is not a neutral word; it's a sneer.
@gattsuru assembled evidence and critiqued specific rather than general groups; you are accusing them of not doing that, but you don't actually provide evidence or argument for it.
"This place," assuming you mean the Motte, explicitly forbids recruiting for a cause and sneaking in "consensus building" language. It's a "place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas," and so, Conquest's Laws notwithstanding, "this place" is definitely not "attempting to be 'conservative.'" Also: you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. It's always a mistake to post on the Motte to make sweeping claims about what "the Motte" is (or is trying to be) if you are excluding yourself from that claim.
This is not the kind of engagement we're looking for here, don't do this.
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I was under the impression that using the credibility attached to a prestigious domain (like science) for the purposes of deceiving the public for political reasons was a bad idea. Once the truth comes out you've heavily damaged the credibility of scientific research and made it harder to convince people on important issues - because they are correctly judging you as a political entity whose expertise cannot be trusted and is effectively meaningless.
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It's easy to tell the truth. You just... tell the truth. As for ideological mistrust... here's The Intercept blaming Trump and Mike Pompeo for pushing the lab leak theory and claiming that this is what's preventing investigations into COVID's origins. Beam in thine own eye and all of that.
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