This market resolves once we have a definitive answer to this question. (i.e. "I've looked at all notable evidence presented by both sides and have upwards of 98% confidence that a certain conclusion is correct, and it doesn't seem likely that any further relevant evidence will be forthcoming any time soon.")
This will likely not occur until many years after Covid is no longer a subject of active political contention, motivations for various actors to distort or hide inconvenient evidence have died down, and a scientific consensus has emerged on the subject. For exactly when it will resolve, see /IsaacKing/when-will-the-covid-lab-leak-market
I will be conferring with the community extensively before resolving this market, to ensure I haven't missed anything and aren't being overconfident in one direction or another. As some additional assurance, see /IsaacKing/will-my-resolution-of-the-covid19-l
(For comparison, the level of evidence in favor of anthropogenic climate change would be sufficient, despite the existence of a few doubts here and there.)
If we never reach a point where I can safely be that confident either way, it'll remain open indefinitely. (And Manifold lends you your mana back after a few months, so this doesn't negatively impact you.)
"Come from a laboratory" includes both an accidental lab leak and an intentional release. It also counts if COVID was found in the wild, taken to a lab for study, and then escaped from that lab without any modification. It just needs to have actually been "in the lab" in a meaningful way. A lab worker who was out collecting samples and got contaminated in the wild doesn't count, but it does count if they got contaminated later from a sample that was supposed to be safely contained.
In the event of multiple progenitors, this market resolves YES only if the lab leak was plausibly responsible for the worldwide pandemic. It won't count if the pandemic primarily came from natural sources and then there was also a lab leak that only infected a few people.
I won't bet in this market.
1,000People are also trading
@George don’t stop there. Have more conversations with your AI chatbot
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Marietjie Venter, the group’s chair, said on Friday that most scientific data supports the hypothesis that the new coronavirus jumped to humans from animals.
But she added that after more than three years of work, SAGO was unable to get the necessary data to evaluate whether or not COVID was the result of a lab accident, despite repeated requests for detailed information made to the Chinese government.
“Therefore, this hypothesis could not be investigated or excluded,” she said, however adding, “It was deemed to be very speculative, based on political opinions and not backed up by science.”
Venter also said there was no evidence to prove that COVID had been manipulated in a lab, nor was there any indication that the virus had been spreading before December 2019 anywhere outside of China.
“British intelligence” = guy who resigned in shame over 20 years ago for getting the major intelligence question of the day wrong and a gang of cranks with very bad ideas about SARS2 vaccines and SARS2 origins that all proved wrong.
Here’s what Dearlove fell for last time. Somehow it was even stupider this time around.
how it feels to log in and check net worth every day for the last 5 months
@BrendanFinan If you're holding out, try this market
https://manifold.markets/PeterMillerc030/if-covid-is-a-lab-leak-which-lab-di?r=Q2h1bWNodWx1bQ
@BrendanFinan Make it all back if someone can make a defensible case for a lab leak being more likely than not based on the available evidence in the next 2.5 months.
@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.
"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.
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.
@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.
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 found Peter Miller very persuasive. Is there any person who has responded to Peter Miller's stuff in a thorough way online somewhere, or who would be a good person to match Peter Miller with in a YouTube-debate or something like this?
I'm not aware of any other person on either side of this debate who impresses me, beyond Peter Miller. But it's not as if I have a good overview of the people who are involved in this space.
@TorBarstad ya, he’s a good debater. If he had taken the position of defending lab leak and Saar had taken the position of defending natural release, then the lab leak side would have won. A debate is not a particularly good way at getting to truth.
@IsaacKing If you read the comments of the judges, the Saar side did make the best case for lab leak as described by many here and elsewhere on social media. The problem was with the strength of the position.
Judge Will summarizing the Saar side of the debate "“The WIV is a leader in coronavirus research. Its personnel had prior experience with SARS1 and access to caves hosting many coronaviruses of which it acquired a large sample over more than 15 years. The WIV collaborated with Ralph Baric’s lab in UNC on Gain-of-function (GoF) research particularly with MERS with many publications from 2015 onwards. Thus they had technical expertise on coronavirus engineering, including insertion of FCSs and swapping spike genes. The DEFUSE grant proposal was written in collaboration with EcoHealth and Baric’s lab documenting some of the work that was in progress. A virus accidentally escaped without the knowledge of a lab worker around September 2019. The worker is asymptomatic and the virus spreads through the community undetected. At some point, the virus is brought by someone to the HSM where it becomes a super-spreading event.”"
@IsaacKing did you have any experience with high school debate?
Two sides are randomly assigned a position before the debate. The judges are tasked to side with whomever "wins" the debate. This is completely uncorrelated -- by necessity of the format -- with which side is "true" or "right"?
I think this debate was only a very slight improvement upon this format.
We of course have better tools than "an organized, judged debate" for obtaining the truth. There's a reason that the entire venture of science avoids debates like this, and that when they are done, these debates are generally not judged in a formalized manner, are aimed at educating the public about a subject rather than ascertaining truth, and also typically don't have an outcome correlated with which side is "correct" in hindsight, anyway.
@bens I agree with Ben that in general debates can be a place for rhetoric or extemporaneous thinking or many of the other skills that Ted Cruz for instance demonstrated as described here. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/us/politics/ted-cruz-honed-political-skills-in-princeton-debate-club.html
This was an 18 hour debate though, and Peter synthesized the dominant arguments made in literature. There just isn’t enough literature out there representing the lab leak side. Proponents no doubt see a conspiracy in that fact.
It’s not about the strength of the debaters. There is a good reason why 80% of scientists believe in natural origins, a number that will only grow with time. Since certainty can not be achieved there will always be a (shrinking) minority on the lab leak side.
@BW I'm assuming you're talking about the one (only remotely high-quality at least) survey of virologists + epidemiologists.
Even among these scientists, the median respondent still assigned 21% odds to the lab leak scenario!! You could imagine a question like "will a six-sided die land on the numbers 1-4?" and 100% of respondents would think that it is more likely than landing on the numbers 5-6, and yet that doesn't say that there's a 100% chance a die will land on 1-4.
But I think there are reasons to believe that virologists and epidemiologists should not have a monopoly on the scientific consensus around this.
For one, if you were to poll intelligence experts, op-sec experts, international relations experts, or forensics scientists, you'd likely get much higher support for lab leak.
@bens I disagree that the intelligence agencies have relevant arguments to make. We have some idea based on what Bannan said or the DIA report said. They cannot agree on the location of leak even. And the arguments could be considered worthy of scientific evaluation in 2021. But they don’t seem to have updated since as some of the claims that these sources used as important have been debunked. Stating that they could have incriminating evidence as proof of the argument is not a falsifiable position. In the best possible political climate, they seem to be embarrassed to disclose information(blacked out references to websites for example) even though they are bound to by law as passed by the Biden admin.
This is completely uncorrelated -- by necessity of the format -- with which side is "true" or "right"?
No? Why would it be?
We of course have better tools than "an organized, judged debate" for obtaining the truth. There's a reason that the entire venture of science avoids debates like this
The entire venture of science doesn't avoid debates like this in the slightest, that's how science progresses. It's just usually done in written format via published papers over many months or years.
@bens Besides that survey here are some others:
41 author paper: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.01240-24
78 author paper: https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/jvi.01791-23
276 author paper: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.00089-23
Tetlock superforecasters: https://goodjudgment.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Superforecasters-Covid-Origin-20240311.pdf
@BW John Ratcliffe nodded his head with grave concern when asked whether WIV purchasing a PCR machine — singular — was reason to suspect lab leak.
Can we just be honest about this and agree no deus ex machina lab leak evidence from the US government is being suppressed? It’s just silly.
If there was anything to release, it would’ve been released with the covid dot gov refresh. Instead, they just rehashed Alina Chan’s lame op-ed from a year earlier. They’ve got absolutely nothing except a gullible audience that wants to believe.
@BW we also know what Bloom, Relman and Patterson on the Science paper calling for investigation have said. Their suspicions based on Ratg13 or deleted sequences have been debunked and they never acknowledge this. Or their understanding of what Defuse proposed shows that scientists are just as capable of lazy thinking as normies.
@IsaacKing I think in "entertainment" style debates where people yell over each other with no fact-checking, the skill of the debater matters more than the position. But if the format is organized and rigorous, the strength of the position will often be the deciding factor.
@BW having summarized what I believe to be a concise representation of the lab leak side, this is my understanding of a concise representation of the natural origin side:
1. Epidemiology: The spatial and temporal patterns of early cases radiate outwards from the Huanan Seafood Market, but not from the WIV. Evidence supports at least two separate zoonotic spillover events which would be extremely difficult to explain via lab leak requiring two separate leaks or two infected individuals independently going to the same market.
2. Genomics: The SARS-CoV-2 genome does not show definitive 'fingerprints' of genetic engineering. Features like the suboptimal PRRAR Furin Cleavage Site (FCS), recombination patterns and restriction sites, have plausible natural precedents and explanations. Phylodynamic evidence shows that the pandemic most recent common ancestor (MRCA) is the same as the market MRCA. Modeling shows that there were likely an estimated median of only 3 infected people before the virus emerged at one of only four markets selling wildlife in a city the size of Wuhan.
3. Timing: Phylogenetic analysis essentially rules out pre-November 2019 circulation; there is no serological or hospital evidence of earlier outbreak.
4. Wildlife presence confirmed: Genetic evidence shows susceptible animals were at the market
5. Circumstantial Evidence: Claims regarding sick WIV researchers, a database taken offline,, intelligence reports and the DEFUSE grant proposal do not hold up to scrutiny when contextualized with other evidence.
6. Historical precedent - SARS-1 also emerged in a similar market setting, ~1000km from Yunnan
@IsaacKing if the winner of the debate was correlated with which side of the debate was “true,” then debate would be a very unfair activity! You have to argue both for and against resolutions, in different rounds of a tournament, for example.
@IsaacKing and yes, science absolutely DOES avoid debates like these.
It’s not meaningful in my opinion, to describe scientific publishing (a flawed process for other reasons but still much less flawed) as “debate” in anything but the colloquial sense.
I think Kuhn’s model for how science progresses (through paradigm shifts and periods of iterative research) is a map that lies much closer to the territory than describing scientific progress as “debates settled by judges of other scientists” or some such thing. That’s just not at all a way that science or our understanding of the world moves forward.
Debates can be very informative to the general public! And they can be interesting or entertaining or exciting! But they’re not truth-finding exercises in the slightest.
@bens granted that published literature is the best way for truth seeking. But comparing with high school debates is not fair to the root claim debate. And an insistence on undisclosed information as being the strong suit for lab leak is very much not a falsifiable position. It’s a belief system.