I've never been super invested in this debate, but to me one of the most striking features is that almost all the evidence we have available is filtered through people who have a strong incentive for bias in favour of the zoonosis side. The chinese establishment seems to favour a variant of zoonosis with a heavy implication of coming from somewhere abroad, the local chinese lab favors zoonosis for obvious reasons, and even the global biomedical establishment is hardly unbiased on the matter. Further, I find the justifications on the biggest coincidence, the failed grant for a similar furin-cleavage site, very poor - I'm literally currently working on a project which I failed a grant on. I know how labs operate in the west and almost all of the claims that they would never do this or that are ... just BS, honestly. And chinese labs have a well-deserved reputation to be even worse.
I also agree with the rootclaim guy that the wild overconfidence of the zoonosis side is a very poor look. I really don't get how many people apparently got convinced by this debate, though I only read Scott's textual account, not the full video debate.
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Notes -
I've never been super invested in this debate, but to me one of the most striking features is that almost all the evidence we have available is filtered through people who have a strong incentive for bias in favour of the zoonosis side. The chinese establishment seems to favour a variant of zoonosis with a heavy implication of coming from somewhere abroad, the local chinese lab favors zoonosis for obvious reasons, and even the global biomedical establishment is hardly unbiased on the matter. Further, I find the justifications on the biggest coincidence, the failed grant for a similar furin-cleavage site, very poor - I'm literally currently working on a project which I failed a grant on. I know how labs operate in the west and almost all of the claims that they would never do this or that are ... just BS, honestly. And chinese labs have a well-deserved reputation to be even worse.
I also agree with the rootclaim guy that the wild overconfidence of the zoonosis side is a very poor look. I really don't get how many people apparently got convinced by this debate, though I only read Scott's textual account, not the full video debate.
Rootclaim currently assigns a 93% probability to lab leak or bioweapon, which isn't any more overconfident than Scott's 90%.
I was talking about Peter who assigned something ridiculous, though now he claims he was just trolling with that one.
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