@IsaacKing I would argue it was actually stable at about 75% before the debate. After the debate, it corrected to about 67% (this seems reasonable, I guess? It didn't really persuade me but I can see how it might have been persuasive to the Manifold audience).

I think since then (about May 2024), given the continued lack of evidence of any natural reservoirs for the virus, along with general bipartisan global consensus that a lab leak was more likely than a natural release, the market should have moved ever so slightly North towards lab leak.

However, I think most Manifold whales realized that one user on this market was willing to spend upwards of a million mana on a market that was unlikely to ever resolve, consistently on a month-by-month basis to earn league profits. So, they wisely did not put any mana into this market. If there was an equally zealous lab-leak believer on Manifold who also had millions of mana at their disposal, I think the market would have reached an equilibrium closer to 67%, where it sat just over a year ago.

@IsaacKing i think this post and the one by @zcoli below are a good illustration of why this market is doomed. The writing has been on the wall for a while. There will be no single, agreed-upon event that will serve as a resolution. I did benefit from some informative posts, but all you are going to have here is a forum for news updates or opinion sharing.

@bens this is not what really happened... before the debate this market was being pumped up by AK. He was also pumping up the debate market and lost a lot of mana there. After Peter won the debate this market crashed because AK rage quit and many people dumped their winnings from the debate market here. Then Mike appeared and started posting gpt-2 recycled twitter garbage. He bought a bunch of mana to pump the market back up but now it looks like he has also given up so the market is trending down. Oh and guess another reason might be that destiny watched the debates and interviewed Peter and Saar on stream recently and there are some DGGers here.

@bens Where is the natural reservoir for pangolin coronavirus MP789? Found once in a batch of confiscated pangolins and never again.

Do you know what the natural reservoir was for SARS before it started spreading between civets, humans, and other animals in Guangdong province markets? For MERS before it was endemic in camels?

Why can't anyone write a solid scientific paper looking at the evidence and concluding that a lab leak origin is more likely than not?

I'm also curious what evidence there is for a general global consensus. Literally everything I've read about what intelligence agencies think is dramatically overstated or just wrong (especially the MI6 thing). Take the vaunted DIA analysis, for example: it was Yuri Deigin's spring 2020 lab leak theory. It was definitively disproven a few years ago.

@zcoli if you push too hard you will be met with Ben’s personal appraisal of his expertise in how wet labs operate which apparently he thinks ought to be very convincing.

@zcoli

"Why can't anyone write a solid scientific paper looking at the evidence and concluding that a lab leak origin is more likely than not?"

There's also no scientific paper on why JFK was killed by a single assassin, or why 9/11 was caused by planes hitting the towers, but we still are fairly confident in those hypotheses. I think you misunderstand the role of scientific publishing pretty dramatically.

@BW ya, I actually think that it's kind of a big deal that natural release conspiracy theorists insist that dozens of ppl in the lab must have known about a single experiment, lol. They don't know how labs work.

@bens describe what kind of experiment you have in mind and whether you are referring to an engineered or unmodified virus and any evidence that supports your theory.

@BW “my theory” lol

I’ve litigated this enough. Scroll down in the comments to when I was writing page-long arguments 2 years ago. There’s plenty there.

@bens no problem, I will trust that you have a theory. Correction, the one true theory.

@bens

There's also no scientific paper on why JFK was killed by a single assassin, or why 9/11 was caused by planes hitting the towers, but we still are fairly confident in those hypotheses. I think you misunderstand the role of scientific publishing pretty dramatically.

There are tons of scientific papers asking exactly that question about JFK's assassination; here's the beginning of the conclusion section from one from 2022.

The presented simulations support the official commission reports regarding origin and direction of the fatal head shot to John F. Kennedy. From a mechanical standpoint, based on computational simulation, JFK’s head was hit by a single bullet from the rear originating from the direction and height of the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

Not sure what you mean by the question of how "9/11 was caused by planes" since I'm probably not the only one here that watched the second one hit live on TV. So let's assume you mean scientific papers with theories in which buildings, especially building 7, collapse for reasons that do not include some sort of demolition that was covered up (the most common 9/11 truth theory, I think).

The various contributions to the building collapses (including, obviously, the airplanes) were the subject of a massive NIST investigation. Understanding of the causes in greater detail and how we can reduce the likelihood that something similar occurs in the future continues to be studied e.g. in this recent paper on the WTC 7 collapse.

Neither of these things are topics I've thought about before in any detail. For both I hypothesized that you were full of shit, and it was an interesting way to spend a few minutes confirming it. I don't plan on writing that investigation up as a scientific manuscript.

@zcoli blocked for failing to uphold basic conversational norms

@bens I tend to place a higher value on people not making things up when they’re having a debate than writing “shit” when it comes to my preferred norms, but to each their own.

@bens Just one thing to keep in mind (I'm not arguing with BW or anything)

The 9/11 attacks and JFK assassination both happened in a country with free press.

Comparing an event that happened in communist China to these events and grouping them up as "conspiracy theories" may be a little unfair.

Consider the Uyghur mistreatment, which is often labeled as a conspiracy theory. If you group that observation with something crazy like flat earth theory you do it a huge injustice.

Anyway, I don't want to bring any disrespect. I've noticed that "conspiracy theorists" have been treated pretty badly sometimes and I'm more skeptical about that label now. (I'm not one of these people by the way.)

@Mrdudeguy no doubt there is a difference between masking of evidence of market outbreak by Chinese authorities and claims of cover up of lab leak by western scientific establishment to hide their purported role.

So why is this market trending down? Was stable around 50% for almost a year, what changed?

@IsaacKing Every single bit of evidence that's emerged since the zoonotic origin at Huanan market hypothesis was first posed by a random Wuhan citizen at the end of 2019 has supported that hypothesis. Evidence continues to come in in that same direction.

The only arguments in favor of lab leak here come from people who post whatever they see on X lately; typically stuff that's simply false; the latest one in Bob Kadlec's report concluding that SARS-CoV-2 was an accident of secret Chinese experiments to develop a mind control bioweapon.

The trend looks monotonically down to me with occasional blips when people get their hopes up about false promises of some deus ex machina evidence from some intelligence agency or another. Over on X, folks haven't quite figured out what conspiracy theory they'll eventually settle on to explain the lack of promised evidence.

Anyone care to explain how this differs in any way from the rationalizations of JFK, UFO, and other conspiracy theories with respect to knowing that their conclusion is right and that the supporting evidence to prove it is covered up by government elites?

@zcoli As to what conspiracy theory they'll eventually settle on. Related market

https://manifold.markets/PeterMillerc030/if-covid-is-a-lab-leak-which-lab-di?r=Q2h1bWNodWx1bQ

@zcoli It's always another conspiracy. Lab leak camp's faith in undisclosed evidence shows how this is all motivated reasoning. Not to mention lab leak citing intelligence agencies as proof and intelligence agencies apparently relying on social media posts by DRASTIC etc as evidence.

Since folks are getting antsy in a market that won't resolve, here's a reminder that there are markets that will resolve.

Can anyone write a defensible scientific paper that looks at the available evidence and concludes lab leak origins are more likely than not?

Why are people so passionate about this...

@ItsMe 20 million people died?

@MachiNi I'm talking about the debate regarding the cause, not the pandemic itself. Unless you believe that the virus was intentionally and maliciously leaked, this debate would seem to be technical in nature, and I would expect it to only really concern people in the scientific community. But for some reason millions of people have taken this as a cause celebre.

@ItsMe well, most reasonable people think that there's some chance of it being either natural or lab release, meaning that we should shore up efforts to prevent both forms of pandemics! But if, like Peter, you're at 99.9% certainty of a natural release, you probably think gain of function research is not dangerous, but rather helpful in preparing for future natural pandemics.

@ItsMe the leak doesn't have to have been intentional, let alone malicious, to be a major fuckup for which heads should roll.

@MachiNi ya, I think there's something <<1% of any intentional or malicious lab leak, and probably also <10% any kind of large-scale institutional cover-up by China. Insofar as there was a cover-up, it was likely just 1-3 researchers keeping a secret, and it's also quite plausible that they didn't even know what they'd done.

@bens reckless GOF (US + China) negligence, destruction of evidence, obstruction of investigations (in China), and lies and obfuscation (in the US) all fall short of intentional coverup, much less malicious release, but are all sufficiently likely that it adds up to a quite significant chance of being one of the most major fuckups of the century.

@bens More than 1-to-3 researchers would know about it, especially in all of these gain of function scenarios. The only scenario where people wouldn't know what they'd done is trying to simply culture virus from a sample. In that scenario you have to throw out all the cherry picked post hoc stuff about how SARS2 is suspiciously unique in one way or another.

@ItsMe this is not different from the climate science debate. There was a credentialed scientist like Lindzen of MIT on the skeptics side there and Bloom, Relman etc here. Like with climate the binary question of origins is more of a sociological phenomenon than a scientific debate at this point. At a popular level the political biases relative to climate science are less prominent but many people are dug into their priors.

Additionally, contrarians on this one issue tend to be low probability contrarians on a few other issues as well.

@BW

Relman

There's a 2021 documentary that Relman appears in, where he says:

Put yourself in 2012. You have an institute dedicated to the study of emerging viruses for the primary purpose of warning the world about the next pandemic. If that's your mission and you see three people die and three others barely escape with their lives where you now find a bunch of very interesting, previously unknown viruses, why don't you tell the world immediately? In fact, why don't you tell the world that six people got deathly ill, three of whom died, and we don't know the cause but we're working on it really hard!

In fact, this was reported in the news, the first paper on samples from the mine (from a team in Beijing [1]) discussed those deaths, and a paper from Zhengli Shi's group said that their samples came from "the same mineshaft in Mojiang."

Lots of credentials but no genuine interest in getting the facts right. I guess that's OK when the people you're accusing are on the other side of the world.

[1] Yes this mine was sampled by a team in Beijing -- bat samples included. If a pandemic had originated in Beijing I promise you'd be hearing a lot more about this and how the authors had mysteriously not reported coronaviruses in their bat samples. It's trivial to do the same sort of thing for many other places in China.

@zcoli Have you by chance worked in a research lab? I worked in a physical science wet lab, my gf works in a neuroscience lab with extensive shared facilities. It's absolutely plausible that as few as even 1 researcher could have driven the bulk of the work and others in the lab would not be familiar with what they'd done. In fact, it's almost unthinkable that more than a few researchers would have really been privy to such an experiment. It's just not how things work in real labs. I know people have this idea in their head of collaborative science where dozens of people in a single research lab work together. It's a Hollywood fantasy.

@bens I recall you making that same appeal to anecdata before and it's nonsense in this instance.

@BW Where do you ppl come from?

@bens a laboratory

@zcoli it's not an appeal to anecdote, it's an appeal to a basic understanding of how academic research labs operate.

@bens I would guess that the average number of other ppl in my lab group of ~20 ppl that could have clearly articulated what kind of research I was doing on any given project was about 2-3-ish (including myself), and I was very much not hiding it from anyone. My gf does much more sophisticated microbio research much closer to the kind that a virology lab would partake in, and I'd guess that for her it's a similar number.

@bens Try to spell out your lab leak scenario from beginning to end where only one person is involved.

@bens probability they are paid by someone who has a vested interest in this >5%.

@zcoli PhD student or staff scientist was culturing a virus and got infected. QED.

@MachiNi as I said, conspiracy theorists generally believe in more than one conspiracy theory.

@BW I don't think you got the memo that we aren't allowed to say "conspiracy theory" or "conspiracy theorist" anymore because people who consider themselves rationalists find it offensive.

@bens

@zcoli PhD student or staff scientist was culturing a virus and got infected. QED.

Yes, like I said above, that's the only scenario where there's a lab leak no one in the lab ever knows about.

It's also a scenario with no gain of function and in which there's no longer anything all that remarkable about the coincidence that WIV is in Wuhan.

Edit: of course, people working in the lab were antibody negative, so you've still got a cover up after the fact involving probably more than 3 people.

@BW the only thing dumber than people who believe in absurd conspiracy theories are people who use ‘conspiracy theory’ in lieu of arguments and instead of seeing conspiracies everywhere see conspiracy theories everywhere. Pick your poison.

@MachiNi Right, we are going to convince a conspiracy theorist here (or elsewhere) using arguments.

@BW That’s exactly what a meta-conspiracist like you would say. If you see conspiracy theories everywhere, then everyone is a conspiracist, so you can only use insults.

@MachiNi see you are again letting your imagination run wild.

@zcoli I mean, "gain of function" is a poorly defined term, but there are a whole host of activities you could perform on viruses in a lab on a spectrum between "precise insertion of furin cleavage site" and "keeping viruses frozen in storage." Even just culturing viruses introduces tons of mutations!

@BW I think describing about 2/3 of global intelligence agencies as "conspiracy theorists" is certainly a take

@bens have you seen the evidence? Are you aware of how the mi6 report came about? Have you listened to Bannan of the fbi?

At least for the fbi, it’s bad analysis. But the bedrock of many theories leads to a cover up by the scientific establishment.

@BW ya, as I've stated for the last couple years, I think it's very unlikely that intelligence agencies have any secret information. They're just far better at coming to low-confidence conclusions on complex problems than, say, random virologists and microbiologists. And certainly far better than random software engineers LARPing as microbiologists and trying to win 100k

@bens as far as we know fbi scientists like Bannan were involved. As lab leak folks on social media (eg Massey) noted, they are reproducing social media arguments.

@BW Specifically, Bannan's lab leak theory is the lab leak theory in a DIA report that was disproven long, long ago. Continue to believe it shows he's totally unfamiliar with actual evidence from the past few years or, well, a conspiracy theorist. You can watch him ranting about theses and unfunded grant proposals in this event at Brookings and make up your mind which it is: https://www.brookings.edu/events/biosafety-and-the-origin-of-covid-19-evidence-and-policy-implications/

@BW

Are you aware of how the mi6 report came about?

Just in case people aren't aware, any time you hear this, it's not an "MI6 report" -- it's a bunch of elderly cranks in the UK with a particularly stupid and somewhat racist version of a lab leak theory that they tried to sell a movie script about, after first failing to cash in on pandemic blank checks for their similarly bad idea for a vaccine.

@zcoli reminds me of the nyt article ‘the civil heretic’ featuring Freeman Dyson, where it was clear his knowledge of the literature was dated. Needless to say his credentials are of the highest order.

@ItsMe Even believing that it was an accidental lab leak means China covered it up and censored info (which either way they seem to have most likely done), meaning the CCP is at least partially responsible for the death it caused. (Possibly by making it harder to trace the source and create a vaccine)

Let me know if I missed something here.

@Mrdudeguy The CCP (or likely the local govt) did cover up zoonotic origins at the HSM which has made it harder to trace the intermediate host. Researchers in China made the sequence available within weeks of the outbreak based on which the vaccine was created.

@BW Thanks for the clarification.

@zcoli This thread is great. We need to ban gain of function research but also the virus came from culturing random samples, with no gain of function research involved?

Also good to know that only 1-3 people in China know about the lab leak. I guess we can stop talking about that DEFUSE grant and submitting FOIA requests for US scientists' e-mails.

@BW Researchers in China sent the first sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to GenBank on 28-Dec-2019 for a sample collected on 24-Dec-2019 and sequenced on 27-Dec-2019. Their submission was rejected by GenBank quality control.

The fact that the sequencing data was first available on 27-Dec has been known since early 2020. The fact that they tried to submit it to a US database was not known until late last year. Somehow, the new fact still was mostly reported as evidence that China was covering up the sequence 🙃

@zcoli guys, get a room. Peter can pay for it.