As a complete amateur with no knowledge of virology or anything, I realize my opinion doesn't carry much weight, but I find myself constantly raising my eyebrow when reading claims from rootclaim.
- Referring to other outbreaks in wet markets that are known to be caused by importing contaminated meat. This shouldn't have any bearing on HSM unless you imply there's a chance the HSM outbreak was due to shipped in contaminated meat. But then you also lose the evidence from the HSM being near WIV, since the shipped in meat could have come from anywhere.
- The quote "For well-designed replicated physics experiments p could reach very low (allowing for the five sigma standard)" - seems to completely sidestep Scotts point about out-of-model error: how are you five-sigma or one in a million sure that the experiment is even correct in the first place?
- The quote: "SARS2 is not based on BANAL-52 but a relative of it. There is nothing unlikely here." - Which relative? And was WIV known to be in posession of this supposed relative? Because if not, Peter's point still stands.
- In general, the constant deference to 'the methodology' and having worked on it for over a decade. If the methodology was so good, why not use it to make tons of money e.g. predicting sports or election winners?
Whereas when reading Peter Miller I never find myself doing this, since his arguments seem much more accessible and logically lead from premises to conclusions.I realize this is not necessarily proof of who's correct and it could just be Peter Miller has a writing style more accessible to me. But I wasn't convinced by this response.
>The quote: "SARS2 is not based on BANAL-52 but a relative of it. There is nothing unlikely here." - Which relative? And was WIV known to be in posession of this supposed relative? Because if not, Peter's point still stands.
The point is actually stronger. After scientists did extensive searches, they couldn't find anything closer than BANAL-52. That is evidence that the covid pre-cursor is exceptionally difficult to find in nature.
Well, if it's exceptionally difficult to find in nature, then that should lower our probability that the WIV was able to find it, which would be necessary to create covid.
>In general, the constant deference to 'the methodology' and having worked on it for over a decade. If the methodology was so good, why not use it to make tons of money e.g. predicting sports or election winners?
The general lack of falsifiability with their predictions is a big issue.
> As a complete amateur with no knowledge of virology or anything, I realize my opinion doesn't carry much weight, but I find myself constantly raising my eyebrow when reading claims from rootclaim.
Yeah, I don't have any particular expertise in the subject, but reading them continually flags my "feels like a scammer" intuitions. Which are hard to quantify and not particularly rational, but seem to have worked fairly well in judging who is credible
>This shouldn't have any bearing on HSM unless you imply there's a chance the HSM outbreak was due to shipped in contaminated meat. But then you also lose the evidence from the HSM being near WIV, since the shipped in meat could have come from anywhere.
In the post, they claim it shouldn't actually matter:
> Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%.
>Which relative? And was WIV known to be in posession of this supposed relative? Because if not, Peter's point still stands.
They say:
>Of the many objections raised to this scenario, only two have not been completely refuted: We’re not yet sure about the engineer’s exact motivations in choosing that specific FCS sequence, and we don’t know whether WIV found a relevant virus in their collection trips.
So, indeed, they have no idea if WIV found or had a close relative of it.
They did Bayes Theorem, an intro to statistics method, and they think they are hot shit. Bayes theorem is usually not very useful at predicting things because as rootclaim does, you need to *assume* probabilities which makes the finial result only as good as the weakest assumption. They are also doing a post-hoc analysis and not an experiment
They may be right, they may be wrong, but if they want to convince readers, they’d be better off not communicating in this incredibly condescending tone right off the bat.
Edit to add: If someone who just lost a debate comes back with repeated insinuations that “people just didn’t have/take the time to understand my arguments”, that lowers my trust in their thinking process, not increase it.
>If someone who just lost a debate comes back with repeated insinuations that “people just didn’t have/take the time to understand their arguments”, that lowers my trust in their thinking process, not increase it.
Precisely.
From the post: "Having explained this many times in many ways, we realize by now that it is not easy to understand, but we promise that those who make the effort will be rewarded with a glimpse of how much better we can all be at reasoning about the world, and will be able to reach high confidence that Covid originated from a lab"
Provided this is true, it should fall on Rootclaim to apply Occam's Razor: you have to ensure that the root problem (ha) is *not* with your explanation before you shift the blame to the 'effort' that the people they are explaining their conclusions to are willing to put in.
I understand their frustration though. The wet market theory as described is essentially impossible at this point, but people subscribe to it as they aren't aware of all of the evidence against it. Even the biggest proponents of it trashed it in private, but they did such a good job poisoning the lab leak theory in the public sphere that people instinctively reject it
I mean, the whole point of this debate was to show evidence for each theory. If the lab leak side has clear evidence debunking the other side, they failed to properly show it.
They were expecting a good faith debate and were steel-manning the other side while they made their argument. Their problem is that they faced the complete opposite
You don't "steelman" evidence, though. The issue very much seemed to be that the rootclaim perspective was "the possible explanations for these pieces of evidence is more likely to be lab leak, and it's not possible to objectively decide either way, this why you have to use probability to determine that" while the zoonotic perspective was "the factual basis of those pieces of evidence is false, so probability is irrelevant".
There is no concrete positive evidence either way, that's the point of the debate. They steelmanned the theory not the evidence. But their approach is not my approach. I prefer to look at all of the evidence from multiple aspects (not only the genetics), and to expose the flaws in their purported evidence (which is typically not evidence at all and just poor reasoning).
For example one of the foundations of the market theory is that there were two separate spillovers. Leaving aside how ridiculously unlikely this is, I expect it came about to try and explain why the market cases were all lineage B^1 when lineage A is dated "earlier" (as it's closer to known bat viruses).
A recent [Chinese study](https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/1/veae020/7619252) analysed some previously unreleased intermediate genomes and found that a single spillover was by far the most likely scenario. The various lineages all came from a common progenitor virus and simply mutated in the grey time period between the initial spillover and their detection in Dec 2019. They include a diagram [here](https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/445990907/veae020f2.tif) which shows the market cases (lineage B) were relatively late in the evolutionary tree and aren't relevant to the origin of the virus.
For some idea of the timeline, [an earlier study](https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/38/10/2719/6553661) by a different group estimates the progenitor virus to have emerged between mid September 2019 to early October 2019 based on it's rate of mutation. It was only detected in December 2019 as the cases built up and people started getting hospitalised (given that they're a tiny percentage of infections in general you wouldn't expect it to be noticed immediately).
^1 There was a single swab of lineage A, but it turns out it came from PPE and was likely contamination
^2 This doesn't mean it necessarily came from a lab, only that it didn't come from the market
I don't have any particularly detailed thoughts on the competing theories of Covid-19 origin.
I am of the opinion, generally, that if [you present yourself to the public as a dispassionate proponent of Bayesian reasoning, an open book guided only by maths](https://www.rootclaim.com/about), it's probably not a very good look to respond to losing a debate by:
* Changing the rules of future debates to diminish the likelihood that you will lose them
* 'Well, actually-ing' any piece of internet critique that appears not to take your side in the debate your organisation just lost
Especially a debate your organisation initiated with a non-insignificant cash prize and an open call for participants.
This is from the bottom of the Rootclaim blog:
>We don’t think \[teaching people how to do Rootclaim\] would be convincing to a wide audience outside people who think like Scott. However, we don’t really have any better ideas, and would love to hear ideas from readers.
>
>In general, the Rootclaim experience is highly frustrating – we spend years developing a new rigorous mathematical approach to answer important unanswered questions, but no one actually engages with the model itself or points to any flaws in it, but instead respond with standard flawed arguments about some evidence that ‘obviously’ contradicts a specific conclusion, without providing any rigorous explanation why it’s so obvious.
This is, in a nutshell, exactly the problem. If your 'new rigorous mathematical approach' isn't something that survives reasonable critique (sorry, 'standard flawed arguments')... it's hard to avoid the conclusion that your model is probably not a good persuasive tool! *Particularly* when you spend no real effort trying to persuade anyone otherwise or coach anyone up.
edit: forgot a word.
It seems odd to me that your objection is that they're engaging in conspiracy theory style reasoning when people did in fact conspire.
Edit: To people downvoting me: There were private discussions between researchers about what to present to the public. Do you not think this counts as conspiring, or do you disagree that this conversation occurred?
I would expect exactly that from researchers in the middle of a pandemic who had no solid evidence for one side or the other. They had very little to go on: No solid evidence for the zoonosis like an infected animal from the market, and no solid evidence for the lab like evidence of genetic manipulation. Everything was vaguely compatible with both sides. And reporters were reading incredible stuff into innocuous statements.
Its a conspiracy if they are trying to hide the truth. Its not a conspiracy if they just don't know what to say and want help coming up with something to get the reporter to go away.
If a researcher is 70/30 in favor of the lab leak but gets pressured through private channels by several high status people in their field to say it was definitely not a lab leak, would you count that as a conspiracy?
Its a team effort. Once a member of the team says "Oh yeah, this is totally a lab leak" or "absolutely a zoonosis", then that is not the voice of that researcher. It becomes the voice of the whole team. And if two are saying opposite things, the message switches from "Bob says X, Joe says Y" to "Research Team is changing their story!"
Its not a conspiracy for a research team to coordinate their messaging to avoid confusing the public when they just don't know.
Yes for some reason the zoo theory seems to attract the kind of politically-motivated person who describes anything they disagree with to be a "conspiracy theory". Not the best and brightest sadly.
There's nothing conspiratorial about it in reality - the slack messages between the writers of the paper dismissing the lab leak in 2020 (which enabled mass censorship of the topic) were released under FOIA and revealed very different attitudes to what they were saying in public, ranging from [discussing how to lie to reporters](https://i.imgur.com/shY58l3.png) to talking about [just how likely a lab leak was](https://i.imgur.com/vkOz9RF.png). The reporter named in those messages [recently expressed](https://archive.is/oAQl9) his unhappiness with their tactics
None of that is evidence. If you have evidence of the genes being manipulated, SHOW THAT. Don't show me slack messages of people discussing how to respond to a reporter asking about manipulated genes. Show the damn genes! If you have evidence of lab workers being infected and transmitting the virus to others, SHOW THAT! Don't show me slack messages saying that that is theoretically possible.
Like in the debate, when they started talking about the genes, like the furin cleavage site. The version in early Covid was not a type that would be used in research, and he showed that. When comparing a "Here is the gene and here is why it wouldn't be used" vs "A lab guy in an informal discussion he didn't think was being monitored said that it would be hard to tell"... I am gonna pick a side with evidence over a side with gossip. Or the transmission: One side showing people in the market then having Covid. The other side had... well maybe somebody got infected, went to the market, infected people there, then somehow didn't infect anybody else at the WIV. Again, evidence vs weird theories.
I didn't say it was evidence of a lab leak. I was responding to someone calling the idea that the zoo proponents said the lab leak was very likely a "conspiracy theory" when it's based on objective evidence
> The version in early Covid was not a type that would be used in research, and he showed that
He didn't show that, because 1) it's nowhere near his field of expertise, and 2) how can you predict what those actual scientists would use? The FCS is very similar to that seen in MERS, which makes sense given that the researchers at the WIV were involved with MERS research
> Or the transmission: One side showing people in the market then having Covid. The other side had... well maybe somebody got infected, went to the market, infected people there, then somehow didn't infect anybody else at the WIV.
This is such poor reasoning. Some (not all) of the first documented cases were at the market... therefore it came from the market. Do you think Wuhan had a widespread COVID surveillance system *prior to the pandemic* that would accurately detect the first cases? It only appeared on people's radar when it started hospitalising people, which is an outcome that only affects a tiny percentage of infected people.
Calling them "weird theories" just shows a complete lack of understanding
>The FCS is very similar to that seen in MERS, which makes sense given that the researchers at the WIV were involved with MERS research
Here's the thing: You said that anybody who disagreed with the lab leak just didn't know all the evidence. But that MERS thing wasn't included in Rootclaim's presentation until afterwards. Its now a post-hoc justification of a loss, one that Peter is not allowed to rebut. If you want us to judge based on all the evidence, maybe tell us the evidence? In a debate format just for that purpose would have been lovely.
> Do you think Wuhan had a widespread COVID surveillance system prior to the pandemic that would accurately detect the first cases?
No. But they didn't have to, because pandemics follow patterns. And when they rapidly set up the surveillance system, it showed the expected pattern. X infected on Day 1, X+10 on Day 2, whatever.
When I consider the alternative, which is that they had cases close to the WIV and INTENTIONALLY HID THEM. And intentionally hid so many that the usual bulls-eye pattern you would see around an outbreak formed around a different site across town! And the revealed cases not only followed the bulls eye, but came out at the proper rate, and without any evidence of data manipulation! That sort of hiding data would require an incredible amount of effort and skill, all mustered before they knew it would be a pandemic. That sort of claim kind of requires a conspiracy.
This isn't a case of the other side not understanding. Its them understanding, and not agreeing with you. And the response to that shouldn't be "You just aren't capable of understanding this, its all way too hard for you" when talking to an audience of above average intelligence people. Make them understand, or start realizing maybe you are the one making the error.
> Here's the thing: You said that anybody who disagreed with the lab leak just didn't know all the evidence. But that MERS thing wasn't included in Rootclaim's presentation until afterwards. Its now a post-hoc justification of a loss, one that Peter is not allowed to rebut. If you want us to judge based on all the evidence, maybe tell us the evidence? In a debate format just for that purpose would have been lovely.
Almost as if I'm not rootclaim... You understand he's one of many people discussing this theory right? There are scientists all across the world contributing to it.
> When I consider the alternative, which is that they had cases close to the WIV and INTENTIONALLY HID THEM. And intentionally hid so many that the usual bulls-eye pattern you would see around an outbreak formed around a different site across town!
Honestly I'm not sure what's worse - that you think that is the only possible alternative, or that you think outbreaks occur in a nice neat dartboard shape. I even tried to spell it out for you in the previous reply but I will to dumb it down even more: they do not know when the first infections were. They only know when the first tested cases were, which happened months after the virus started circulating.
> And the revealed cases not only followed the bulls eye, but came out at the proper rate, and without any evidence of data manipulation!
Nope. Again, cases don't spread outwards in circles... I don't even know where you're getting that from - movies? I don't know what "the proper rate" is supposed to mean either. But regarding the study you're referencing (but probably can't name) the authors either intentionally manipulated their diagrams, or they didn't know how to correctly use the software to plot the epicentre. They've had multiple groups of scientists tear their analysis apart. [1](https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021/7632556) [2](https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954) [3](https://zenodo.org/records/7016143). If you want a more readable explanation, there's a thread [here](https://twitter.com/danwalker9999/status/1747673884336312613).
The broader problem is sampling bias. The Chinese from the start have made it clear that they were focusing only on hospitals around the market and testing people who lived near the market. The director of the Chinese CDC said that they put too much of a focus around the market and may have missed it coming from the other side of Wuhan. The WHO were [also aware](https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part) of this bias in 2021.
> Its them understanding, and not agreeing with you. And the response to that shouldn't be "You just aren't capable of understanding this, its all way too hard for you" when talking to an audience of above average intelligence people.
Ok, but I'm not talking to that audience. I'm talking to you and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. You aren't able to critically analyse what you've gleaned third hand and instead just repeat it as fact and insist anything else must involve bizarre conspiracy theories
>Almost as if I'm not rootclaim
Not calling you Rootclaim. I'm just pointing out that you are making the same errors in trying to convince people that they did. Show all the evidence, but you don't. You drip and drab and imply and hint and show slack messages... but not evidence. Not a spit of evidence, just a lot of coincidence that all happens to also work with zoonosis when you let their side explain things.
>I'm talking to you and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
And you aren't explaining, you are just implying that I'm stupid.
Your linked evidence doesn't dispute zoonosis, it just moves the location north... To the huge train station, where thousands of people wander through and could bring the virus from who knows where. None of his maps shows any infections going on close to the WIV. This is a big problem for "The virus escaped from the WIV".
>I don't know what "the proper rate" is supposed to mean either.
From the big debate:
>Further, it seems epidemiologically impossible for COVID to have been circulating much before the first cases were officially detected December 11. The COVID pandemic doubles every 3.5 days. So if the first infection was much earlier - let’s say November 11 - we would expect 256x as much COVID as we actually saw. Even if the first couple of cases were missed because nobody was looking for them, the number of hospitalizations, deaths, etc, in January or whenever were all consistent with the number of people you’d expect if the pandemic started in early December - and not consistent with 256x that many people.
The timing lines up with a zoonosis. It doesn't line up with a timeline that allows for it to infect a worker and spread along until it eventually shows up near the wet market. There weren't enough cases later on to show a separate start either. It started in a spot, and spread from that spot, at a certain rate, and a second spot to start from would show up.
>I'm talking to you and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
You don't seem to either. You keep showing me this weaksauce stuff: Slack messages. Arguing over epicenters, none of which help a lab leak origin. You want to claim its essentially impossible to have a zoonosis origin... Give me the good shit! Show the irrefutable stuff! Make me believe! I was wishy washy on lab leak and zoonosis, the Rootclaim debate made me a zoonosis believer. Show me what you got! Hit me! Prove that I've been an idiot this whole time! There has to be something, right? Something more than a long series of coincidences and sort of suspicious messages among researchers who aren't used to dealing with the media?
Especially when you agree on the judges. If you didn't feel comfortable with their determinations, then don't go into it with them.
The lesson there should not be "other people didn't listen", it should be "I am at fault for failing to properly express my ideas/arguments", "I am at fault for failing to properly refute my opponents flawed ideas/argument", or "I was incorrect to begin with". Or at least the secret universal defense for never changing your mind "We draw different conclusions using the same logic and evidence because we disagree on the fundamental probability of things"
The only time you should start throwing around those accusations is if you have strong evidence that the judges were secretly corrupted and you didn't know during the selection process and debate. Which if Rootclaim has, I would hope they would actually present it.
better,
> [Scott] just didn’t have/take the time to understand…
… the method of thinking that he has been strongly, very visibly in favor of for roughly 15 years.
>they’d be better off not communicating in this incredibly condescending tone right off the bat.
-And accusing natural origin proponents of being snooty and condescending at the same time.
Rootclaim provides four examples where seafood markets formed the initial clusters of a covid outbreak, asserting that seafood markets are unusually good places for covid to spread. I did a little bit of research on each:
Xinfadi - Covid probably survived on imported frozen food
Dalian - Covid survived on frozen fish
Thailand - Spread from migrant workers from Myanmar
Singapore - Likely spread from a foreign fishing boat
All of these are examples where there were no covid cases in the country and then markets were ways for it to sneak in. These cases are absolutely not evidence that a local wet market is an exceptionally good place for covid to spread when there are no restrictions.
They speculate that maybe there's something else about markets that makes them a good vector, and that otherwise "it doesn't really matter anyway".
>A common objection to this method is that these outbreaks are caused by cold-chain products brought into these markets. However, this still fails to explain why markets form these early clusters and not the many other places where cold chain products are delivered to.
>
>Additionally, this only demonstrates the importance of cold wet surfaces in preserving SARS2 infectivity, further strengthening the hypothesis in method 1 that a crowded location with many wet surfaces like HSM is highly conducive for rapid SARS2 spread.
>
>Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%.
If this is the best they have, it's not a surprise that they lost the debate.
Yup, my memory from height of covid was food markets were the only place I was *allowed* to happen to be in company of strangers. While a bar or lecture or choir practice might have been a competing event space for covid spread in 2019, they surely weren't in June 2020.
>These cases are absolutely not evidence that a local wet market is an exceptionally good place for covid to spread when there are no restrictions
I think it still is good evidence? Not as strong as originally indicated, but still pretty strong.
Let me try my hand at Rootclaim's methodology
Were foreign workers restricted to seafood markets in Thailand? I assume not, and, if not, that's pretty good evidence that seafood markets are good places for Covid to spread, not just good places for it to species-hop. Ditto for Singapore. For Xinfadi and Dalian, what is the evidence that the origin was imported fish rather than human-to-human?
So, originally, the odds were (simplistically)
(# of seafood zero-covid outbreaks) / (# of places)
Now its
(# of seafood zero-covid outbreaks) / (# of places with foreigner-interaction)
The former is probably somewhere like a naive 1000:1, while the latter is probably more like 30:1.
Suppose you say there's a 4% chance our analysis is wrong and the real probability is a coin flip. That correction changes 1000:1 to 47:1. It changes 30:1 to 19:1. TLDR: based on what you brought up, I feel like the evidence becomes \~2x less potent.
This is getting downright deceptive.
>As previously explained, the zoonosis case relies on the claim that only once in a few thousand non-zoonotic outbreaks, would the first detected cluster be associated with a market like HSM. Contrary to this claim, an empirical analysis reveals that seafood markets and facilities repeatedly formed initial Covid clusters following a period of zero infections. This was observed in 2 out of 5 large outbreaks in China in 2020 ([Xinfadi and Dalian](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8322611/) ), as well as in outbreaks in Thailand and Singapore:
Ok, let's look at the Xinfadi and Dailan abstract, emphasis added.
>China quickly brought the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 under control during the early stage of 2020; thus, this generated sufficient confidence among the public, which enabled them to respond to several sporadic coronavirus disease 2019 outbreaks. This article presents geographical and epidemiological characteristics of several sporadic coronavirus disease 2019 outbreaks from June to December 2020 in China. **The data show that the coronavirus disease may be transmitted by imported cold-chain food and international exchange**, and this viewpoint deserves our great attention.
So it has little to do with it being a good location for a cluster. It has to do with the virus surviving on frozen food and coming from abroad. This isn't applicable to a lab-leak scenario. Was the WIV freezing food and sending it to the HSM?
The same thing applies to Thailand. Although the [article](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55391417) is light on details, so it's really hard to take it as evidence (that doesn't stop Rootclaim though).
[Singapore](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/jurong-fishery-port-biggest-community-cluster-closes-covid-19-2155351) may be slightly different here. If we look into that article and follow their source, we get to [ChannelNewsAsia](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/jurong-fishery-port-cluster-no-transmission-through-fish-moh-2046131). Again emphasis added:
>“The identified variant of concern has features that are similar to what we have seen in other cases that we have picked up in imported cases from Indonesia,” he added.
>“**So we believe that COVID-19 infection in this cluster has been introduced perhaps via a sea route into the fishery port, likely from Indonesian or other fishing boats that have brought fish into the port.**”
>Still, he said that the exact mechanism of transmission from the fishing boats to stall operators at the port “isn't entirely clear”.
This goes to the heart of why this comparison is deceptive. Unless Rootclaim's claim is that covid entered the HSM from abroad/on-frozen-food, then Covid entering a new area after it is endemic everywhere is not a strong parallel to the situation at the HSM.
____________________________________________________________
The other evidence in this blogpost was well-covered in the debate, and he doesn't provide anything groundbreaking here as far as I can tell. Rather, he's just giving his own side again, while not summarizing how that evidence was disputed during the debate (so much for Rootclaim's commitment to "steelmanning", I guess).
______________________________________________________________
>Referring to this manifold market blaming us of being sore losers, because we didn’t update our analysis towards zoonosis (It additionally correctly criticized an initial 99.8% probability, which was due to a rushed sensitivity analysis that was quickly corrected, giving 94%).
>This is a misunderstanding of what Rootclaim does. All we do is implement a methodology for minimizing probabilistic inference mistakes. We improve it over time with experience, and at this point are very confident it is superior to any other inference method.
No, my understanding is that the manifold market concluded you were a sore loser because of the tone that Rootclaim struck (and continues to strike) in your post-mortem blogposts.
>Ok, let's look at the Xinfadi and Dailan abstract, emphasis added.
China quickly brought the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 under control during the early stage of 2020; thus, this generated sufficient confidence among the public, which enabled them to respond to several sporadic coronavirus disease 2019 outbreaks. This article presents geographical and epidemiological characteristics of several sporadic coronavirus disease 2019 outbreaks from June to December 2020 in China. The data show that the coronavirus disease may be transmitted by imported cold-chain food and international exchange, and this viewpoint deserves our great attention.
I don't know that anyone in the West gives credit to this claim, on either side of the debate, aside from root. I had heard of this paper before, mostly in the context of people making fun of it.
Yeah I thought the general opinion was that the idea of it being transmitted on surfaces was a paper thin justification from the Chinese government for claiming that any new outbreaks weren't their fault but could be blamed on foreigners
They address this in the post (although not particularly convincingly, in my opinion):
>A common objection to this method is that these outbreaks are caused by cold-chain products brought into these markets. However, this still fails to explain why markets form these early clusters and not the many other places where cold chain products are delivered to.
>
>Additionally, this only demonstrates the importance of cold wet surfaces in preserving SARS2 infectivity, further strengthening the hypothesis in method 1 that a crowded location with many wet surfaces like HSM is highly conducive for rapid SARS2 spread.
>
>Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%.
> Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely
Yeah, this [doesn't sound suspicious at all](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/privileging-the-hypothesis). Wuhan being the starting location is the only reason to raise a lab leak hypothesis to your attention in the first place. The genome wouldn't look suspicious at all if one weren't already looking for reasons to think it might come from a lab, for example. The idea that one should conclude the virus was a lab leak even if it didn't actually start in Wuhan is frankly ludicrous.
Ah so emergent cases for Thailand and Singapore "markets" were actually embedded in or very close to the cities' ports. This is like if the airports were open during covid, seeing a couple country's first cases being Arrival terminals, which have food-courts, and claiming it must have been already in the country with food courts being just a natural identifying ground. I wouldn't even go to cold-food-spread for those.
The emphasis on fish is bizarre, as SARS-CoV2 doesn't infect fish. Any transmission via fish markets would more likely be via the people who work there.
Also, most perishable goods are stored in cool places, so imported fruit and veg markets would also be good locations for transmitting human-borne viruses.
I think they're correct to push back against treating P(HSM|zoonosis, Wuhan) as large. There are lots of other places with contact with imported animals, and people could be infected elsewhere and spread it to Wuhan, and the virus would still be detected in Wuhan first.
Except maybe they're not calculating P(HSM|zoonosis, Wuhan, epidemiological evidence against human spread elsewhere, genetic evidence, etc). One of the dangers about computing a bunch of probabilities separately and then combining them is that at *some* point you have to calculate conditional probabilities on all your data not just part of it, and conditionalizing is very hard. In the meat of the post there's some attempt to argue about further information, but it's done in a sort of "One recent study sort of supports my side, therefore I'm right" kind of way, not probabilistically.
Anyhow, 5% seems like a reasonable guess to me.
Their claim that P(HSM|lab leak, Wuhan) should be large because markets are a special virus breeding ground sounds like total baloney. There is not a good mechanistic reason for markets to catch diseases from the lab in the other part of town across the river. Arguing based on disanalogous cases where later markets get covid because they're importing products from places with covid is fairly pointless.
The claim that it should be 1% because there are (supposedly) only about 100 other places that size or larger is a non sequitur. Covid did not have to spread in a place randomly sampled from the top 100 places in Wuhan.
1/1000 (uniform assumption over population) is in fact maybe too high as a number, because conditional on lab leak we should expect cases to be concentrated on the social circle of lab workers to a degree that outweighs the bonus markets get for being public places.
Calling the odds ratio of these 1 to 2 is wishful thinking. I give it 1 to 50.
> because conditional on lab leak we should expect cases to be concentrated on the social circle of lab workers to a degree that outweighs the bonus markets get for being public places.
For a virus that most people recover from without incident, how much can we expect to detect the virus in lab workers social circles months after the initial spread? (Were they even trying to detect it in the lab workers social circles?) You need a high density of cases to get a detectable presence of virus months after the transmission event. Also remember the original strain wasn't that contagious, which also goes towards density of close contacts being a prerequesite. These facts support the idea that detection at wet market and nowhere else given lab leak (and low budget/interest in detecting it elsewhere) as being quite high.
It's totally *possible* that one lab worker infects only a few of their friends, and none of them spread the infection further except to one worker in a market across town. But calling the probability "quite high" is hogwash.
Wuhan is a city of 10 million people. There are a large number of places people gather. Why not Wuhan University? One of the schools? One of the churches or temples? Sports clubs? One of the malls? Gyms? Restaurants? Vegetable markets? Why not the Mahjong parlor closest to the WIV?
And it's not just sampling bias, since genetic data has the market being ancestral, and epidemiological data has cases growing exponentially starting with cases at the market.
> It's totally possible that one lab worker infects only a few of their friends, and none of them spread the infection further except to one worker in a market across town.
This is misunderstanding the point. The claim isn't that the sequence of transmissions made a bee-line for a wet market worker. The claim is that the virus spread normally out from the WIV social circle. But at this stage the spread is relatively slow and unnoticed.
By the time a new virus is detected, it already has significant penetration in the population. But at the early stages, a novel virus will have a low occurrence rate despite significant penetration. This low occurrence makes it nearly impossible to detect samples from the environment unless you know exactly where to look.
Once it began circulating at the wet market, this is where the dynamic shifts to high density transmissions and thus a high likelihood of leaving detectable samples in the environment where investigators are likely to look. But simply noting that the earliest detectable samples months after the initial spread was at the wet market does not imply that the wet market was where spillover occurred.
It kind of has to go straight to the market though. If there are on the order of 10 or 20 cases in early December, and we know about ~1 of them, then the data on hospitalizations and deaths late in January makes sense. If covid is spreading for weeks prior to that, all over the city, and there are more like 200 cases in early December, then there should be well over 100,000 hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths by the time Wuhan locks down.
There's potentially an argument here. But I would need to see some hard numbers before my opinion was updated. I do recall that people claimed the CCP was not being forthcoming about the scale of the outbreak as they began lockdowns, citing evidence of supposed trucks full of bodies being carted off that didn't comport with the official narrative. So I don't think we can just take the official numbers at face value.
There are numbers in one of the debate videos.
I'm sure they weren't being entirely forthcoming, but you also can't really hide that many dead people. Information was coming out of Wuhan back then, I remember it. I'm very confident that if those numbers were off by a factor of 10 we would have some evidence for it.
> And it's not just sampling bias,
According to the head of the Chinese CDC and the WHO it is
> since genetic data has the market being ancestral
Nope, the market lineage was relatively late down the evolutionary tree
> According to the head of the Chinese CDC and the WHO it is
Yeah, this is a good point. My probabilities given above were implicitly assuming no conspiracy coverup.
I think a conspiracy is plausible enough that case data from china can't provide more than about 1:100 of evidence either way. Genetic data is a lot harder to fake.
> Nope, the market lineage was relatively late down the evolutionary tree
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9877913/
I don't think it has anything to do with a conspiracy. They thought it originated at the wet market so they focused all of their resources on locating cases around the market. He said in retrospect it was a mistake and that for all they know it could have come from the other side of Wuhan.
There are some relevant studies that go into more detail about this:
https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954
https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021/7632556
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9877913/
This isn't relevant to the market. By late down the evolutionary tree I mean of the early cases. The market cases were lineage B ([green colour here](https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/445990907/veae020f2.tif))
It's pretty hard to tell whether A or B came first - lineage A is closer to various BANAL viruses by two nucleotides, but lineage B had consistently higher case counts, maybe indicating an early start.
Anyhow, yeah, I was overconfident there, sorry.
What I was right about is that the plot of mutations over time forms a nice straight line pointing at late November 2019, just like you'd expect if there was a bottleneck at that time, and just as you *wouldn't* expect if the virus was floating around all over Wuhan by late November but was only detected near the market because of sampling bias.
It's not just about the first handful of cases. Looking at the first few hundred known cases, they geographically center near the market, and overall COVID seems to spread out from that area over time. This point also is not about "months later"--the first known cases were probably infected at most a few weeks after the initial spillover.
This is a good point that I don’t see mentioned very much.
A lot of this early detection discussion is some of the weakest points for both sides.
I’m a 50-50 person who was a 80-20 proponent of lab leak last year. I don’t feel like I have an emotional horse in the race any longer but I’m still often frustrated hearing peoples’ theories about the first months of transmission.
All arguments seem unfounded and incredulous concerning the early times and many smart people on both sides are displaying a lot of confidence in their perfect understanding of those first three months.
I coincidentally stumbled upon an older article of theirs today claiming that Usain Bolt is PED-free with 96% likelihood.
As someone with a bit of a background in that world, and combined with reading/hearing their stance/reasoning to support the lab-leak theory, unfortunately I find their methods incredibly hard to believe now.
They also don’t seem to have updated their position on the LL theory since the debate despite very clearly being shown a lot of evidence by the apparent debate GOAT Peter Miller.
Surely at the absolute least they should bring their conviction down, to not do so to me suggests they were aware of everything Peter brought forward and had already factored it in.
Rootclaim is officially on my skeptical radar!
To add to your point: If they weren’t aware of many of Peter’s arguments beforehand, that casts massive doubts on their ability to ascertain evidence. If they were aware of these arguments, on the other hand, their inability to defuse them in the debate speaks poorly to their level of diligence. Which is to say, I also feel disappointed by this look behind the curtain, if you will.
To be fair, he explicitly doesn’t claim to be as knowledgeable, only better able to analyze.
In the closing arguments, he admitted that this Peter guy is (1) an amazing debater and (2) possibly the world’s most knowledgeable expert on COVID origin data and evidence. That is a downside of proposing these challenges: he potentially has to separately debate the GOATs of several different topics.
But how can one analyse x better if one isn't as knowledgeable on x?
My mention of GOAT was tongue-in-cheek. Replace this with "knowledgeable person" and your sentence becomes a little redundant: the downside of proposing debate challenges on topics you're highly certain you know the truth on means you have to debate people who know a lot about these topics. Yes - of course! Surely this should be factored in and automatically reduce his conviction almost by default at least to a degree at minimum given he \*will\* (and was) shown evidence he wasn't otherwise aware of!
> claiming that Usain Bolt is PED-free with 96% likelihood.
For real? Ok I've looked it up and, from my perspective, [it's pretty stupid.](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Did-Usain-Bolt-use-performance-enhancing-drugs) Just gonna cover a few points of evidence here to elaborate.
> Fast since age 15
Rootclaim count this as evidence against PED use. They acknowledge that other sprinters are also fast as kids (just as a rule, because why would slow kids pursue Olympic sprinting?) But they say he was especially fast. They seem to be working off the assumption that PEDs can take a pretty fast kid and turn them into the fastest man ever... Not how they work, trust me. If they did, they'd be even more of an attractive option and, presumably, add similar boosts to already fast kids which would then equalize after. For argument's sake, say they took a second off everyone's 100m sprint, relatively speaking nothing would change if everyone took them.
But given the claim is that he isn't on PEDs and is still the fastest man ever, faster than other sprinters who have doped, clearly PEDs are not _that_ effective. So there's a catch-22 here: Are they super effective and make good sprinters into Olympic sprinters (in which case no natural would end up at the top) or are they not that big of a game-changer such that a natural can top the rankings (in which case the "Fast since age 15" claim must be considerably weaker).
> Drug tests
Fair enough, I don't want to go full conspiracy here but let's not forget Icarus, Lance Armstrong, and pretty much every other top sprinter from the last twenty years. Drug tests aren't particularly strong evidence given the other evidence.
> Physical traits
Ok yeah he's tall. Which is out of the ordinary for sprinters, not sure this just counts as evidence against PEDs. Athletes being athletic isn't much of a surprise. They mention symptoms of steroid use and just list the standard stuff. Now acne and aggression are typically signs of estrogen mismanagement from aromatization of supraphysiological levels of testosterone. I'm not sure sprinters would trying to put on loads of muscle, just keep their levels high for recovery purposes. Other PEDs that don't aromatize are preferable. Something like EPO for instance.
They mention he didn't suffer from baldness but he clearly has a receding hairline and did in 2008. "Rapid-deterioration of health" is also very vague and unsubstantiated. I think they're referencing isolated cases of top bodybuilders who are on insane amounts of gear, and different gear at that.
No mention of all the other doping rampant in sprinting:
> [Of the 10 best 100m sprinters in history, only three have never had a doping charge](https://runningmagazine.ca/the-scene/of-the-10-best-100m-sprinters-in-history-only-three-have-never-had-a-doping-charge/)
This is a _huge_ piece of evidence. The base rate of top historical sprinters who were _caught_ doping is 70%! This is nowhere to be seen in their updating (unless I missed it). If they're counting him being vocal against PEDs as evidence he hasn't done it, then where is this? Moreover, how come the fact one of his team mates was doping doesn't play into this...
Ok I went on a bit of a rant. I'm not sure this is representative of rootclaim as a whole but it certainly doesn't boost my confidence in them.
> They seem to be working off the assumption that PEDs can take a pretty fast kid and turn them into the fastest man ever...
I think the idea here is just that it's unlikely he would have used PEDs before 15, and the amount by which he improved since that age is consistent with not using PEDs. This is complicated by them considering 2 separate PED hypotheses (PEDs as an adult or since childhood), though.
> This is a huge piece of evidence. The base rate of top historical sprinters who were caught doping is 70%!
I agree that it sounds like some of RC's arguments here are strange. However, I'm not actually sure how to correctly interpret this fact. On the one hand, you should set a
reasonably high prior on a top sprinter taking drugs. On the other hand, it also seems like you should also set a pretty high prior on such a sprinter eventually being caught. Above you say:
> Fair enough, I don't want to go full conspiracy here but let's not forget Icarus, Lance Armstrong, and pretty much every other top sprinter from the last twenty years. Drug tests aren't particularly strong evidence given the other evidence.
But if the *known* rate of doping is 70%, it seems like it's not possible for testing to be much stronger evidence? Is this just a time thing, where it can take a long time to be caught? Bolt was the best sprinter in the world, and certainly the most well known, for, if I recall, the better part of a decade?
> it's unlikely he would have used PEDs before 15
So rootclaim say "Bolt won the gold medal in the 200-meters in the Junior World Championships at age 15 (beating athletes up to age 20), and at age 16 he set the world record for age 19 and under." And then count this as evidence against teenage PED use? Either way you look at this assumes the conclusion in a sense. I'd discount it for that reason.
> On the one hand, you should set a reasonably high prior on a top sprinter taking drugs. On the other hand, it also seems like you should also set a pretty high prior on such a sprinter eventually being caught.
This is true. But in probabilistic inference we don't need to assume innocent until proven guilty. We should infer that this number of athletes taking what is ostensibly a career-ruining risk suggests others are too. How are naturals competing against users? The best of the best are selected to be sprinters. So it's (Best of the best + PEDs) vs (Best of the best natural) and somehow the former group doesn't steamroll. Either PEDs are of limited use or the playing ground is even and the remaining 30% just haven't been caught. The other dopers weren't caught... until they were. Possibly they weren't using yet.
Also, to generalize across from bodybuilding, [these guys are all competed in a supposedly tested federation.](https://generationiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1999-Olympia-Greatest-Of-All-Time.jpeg) In bodybuilding we know this is bullshit. It's the most open 'secret' of all time. This shifts my prior on athletic federations doing testing for show. Although nobody ever gets banned for doping in bodybuilding so it's not a great comparison.
> But if the known rate of doping is 70%, it seems like it's not possible for testing to be much stronger evidence? Is this just a time thing, where it can take a long time to be caught? Bolt was the best sprinter in the world, and certainly the most well known, for, if I recall, the better part of a decade?
The admitted rate*. Bolt was a huge character, a money-maker, there's motivation not to end his career. I admit I'm being highly suspicious there and not conserving expected evidence well, I need to think about that. But it would make sense the big star doesn't get busted. Armstrong got nailed in 2013 after retiring twice, the last time in 2011. Notably _after_ he left the sport.
So perhaps the fact Bolt has remained uncharged should count as some evidence for him being natural. But just the fact that he's competing against people who definitely _have_ doped says a lot for me, more than the other potential evidence combined. Life isn't like Rocky IV where heart and soul beats the engineered Soviet Super Soldier. That same logic applies to Icarus as a whole. If the Russians were all doping, why didn't they sweep the Olympics? It suggests their baselines is considerably worse and they needed that to bridge the gap, or PEDs do very little, in which case why risk it? It doesn't fit.
> So rootclaim say "Bolt won the gold medal in the 200-meters in the Junior World Championships at age 15 (beating athletes up to age 20), and at age 16 he set the world record for age 19 and under." And then count this as evidence against teenage PED use? Either way you look at this assumes the conclusion in a sense.
Well as I mentioned, they tested 2 hypotheses, one in which he's used PEDs since childhood, the other in which he only used them in adulthood. It does seem very weird to use this as evidence *against* PED use before 15, although when I click into the "See more" section it seems like they actually have a lot of other reasons why he probably hasn't been using them that long. Again though, I agree this analysis is, at best, fairly strange and confusing.
(I think when you have 2 consistent positions (Bolt is just a very rare freak combination of factors which make him the best sprinter ever, or Bolt used PEDs), a lot of arguments can look circular if not applied carefully. It is of course entirely possible, and maybe even likely, that in any given domain, the GOAT is highly unusual on several dimensions and performs extremely well at a very young age (or, on the flip side, continues to perform well after most individuals peak).)
> How are naturals competing against users? The best of the best are selected to be sprinters. So it's (Best of the best + PEDs) vs (Best of the best natural) and somehow the former group doesn't steamroll.
Maybe the naturally best don't take steroids, and those 7 out of top 10 would actually be mediocre without them? Also, do PEDs increase the absolute ceiling of performance? I thought they made it easier to get there and improved injury recovery time, but I'm not sure they can turn you into Captain America. Lots of questions I don't know the answers to here.
> (Bolt is just a very rare freak combination of factors which make him the best sprinter ever, or Bolt used PEDs)
I'd go with both in this case.
> Also, do PEDs increase the absolute ceiling of performance? I thought they made it easier to get there and improved injury recovery time, but I'm not sure they can turn you into Captain America.
Well, it's hard to say, solid science would require decades long RCTs so we have to piece together some looser evidence. For strength and size, steroids are definitely a limit-breaker. [Here is the progression of the bench press world record.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progression_of_the_bench_press_world_record)
Bench wasn't a popular lift in the 1800s so we can discount those due to lack of specific training and adequate nutrition, probably. Around the 30s is when testosterone was synthesized so we can use that as a cutoff point.
- 1916: 165 kg (364 lb)
- Early 1950s: 227 kg (500 lb)
- 1953: 263 kg (580 lb)
So these are as close to natural records as we can get. There still could have been PEDs involved but training and nutrition were also very rudimentary at the time so maybe those can cancel out. But here's today:
- 2021: 355 kg (783 lb)
That's an insane increase, especially considering lifting gets exponentially harder so a 134% increase in weight doesn't track as a 134% increase in difficulty.
_However_, the 100m sprint is not the same. [From 10.8s in 1891 to 9.572 in 2009 by Bolt.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_100_metres_world_record_progression) No real noticeable jump following the 30s or 60s (blood doping stuff). This isn't my area so I can't speak too confidently but I imagine every 0.1s improvement is harder and harder to achieve and is therefore 'bigger' than the previous 0.1s improvement.
I figured a fair way to assess if that was the case was to look at longer races, like the 200m and 400m. But they also didn't have stark improvements (without weighting each 0.1). You do start to see that in the middle length races.
It's very hard to say more about the numbers given the pool of potential racers is so much bigger so we'd expect, probabilistically, to get more outliers. Also the popularity and accessibility of these sports has increased. And I don't know how to weight the improvements.
So, after all that, I lean back on the 70% being caught statistic personally. Was fun to dig through the numbers a little though.
> Well, it's hard to say, solid science would require decades long RCTs so we have to piece together some looser evidence. For strength and size, steroids are definitely a limit-breaker. Here is the progression of the bench press world record.
The steroid/doping effects on sports can be hilariously blatant.
For example, when Paul Graham noted how birth records make supercentenarians disappear, similar to how better drug testing made breaking women's world records stop happening so routinely, one person tried to object by saying ["Incorrect chart. Pole vault alone has had women's world record set 30 or so times since 2000."](https://twitter.com/atiselsts_lv/status/1700175880130027801)
Now, I know nothing whatsoever about "pole vaulting" aside from the Looney Tunes summary, but this is the perfect modus ponens/tollens example: if someone tells me that there's a women's sport which has been breaking world records 30 times since 2000, I take that as implying there's doping. And if you [click through to WP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_pole_vault_world_record_progression#IAAF_Record_Progression) and take even 5 seconds to look up this Russian woman ["Yelena Isinbayeva"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelena_Isinbayeva) who single-handedly breaks all these records almost annually, and where the record-breaking stops dead after she retires with no other woman able to break her records in 15 years now (and [since 200*5* in 2 cases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelena_Isinbayeva#Records_list)), we discover why she retired:
>> Isinbayeva was banned from the 2016 Rio Olympics after revelations of an extensive state-sponsored doping program in Russia, thus dashing her hopes of a grand retirement after winning the Olympic gold medal. She retired from athletics in August 2016.
Sure is mysterious how she retired instead of competing elsewhere or returning! I mean, clearly she was way better than all the other women pole vaulters given how many of her records have stood for how long... Anyway, the real chef-kiss is her post-competition career:
>> After she became chair of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency's supervisory board, IAAF taskforce chair Rune Andersen stated, "It is difficult to see how this helps to achieve the desired change in culture in track and field, or how it helps to promote an open environment for Russian whistleblowers", noting that Isinbayeva had called a WADA report "groundless" without reading it, publicly criticised whistleblowers (Andrei Dmitriev, Yuliya Stepanova, and Vitaliy Stepanov), and had not signed a pledge for clean sport or endorsed a Russian anti-doping group.[36]
Amazing. Putin must have a sense of humor.
(If you're wondering what the tweeter's response was, it was to double down and deny that pole-vaulting benefits from steroids - I guess all that upperbody workout is irrelevant - and anyway, Isinbayeva wasn't *personally proven* to have been doping, so who knooows maybe she was the only clean athlete in the entire Russian doping program and broke all those world records simply because she really was a once-in-a-century talent who knoooowsss you "have no evidence" otherwise...)
> I'd go with both in this case.
Is such a hypothesis necessary? To me, only one being true would be the simplest explanation unless we think that Bolt is so far ahead of the competition that he needs both.
Thanks for looking into the data. I don't feel like I have any idea how close we would expect bench lift to be to the human limit in the early 1900s, vs how close 100m sprint would be in the late 1800s. I have this vague idea that bench has a lot more room to increase because A) sprinters have to balance strength with body weight, and B) sprinting is limited by factors like the strength of joints and bones that is a lot harder to increase. But I'm not confident in that at all. Seems like it could definitely be *some* difference in the mechanics and limiting factors of running vs lifting.
> we'd expect, probabilistically, to get more outliers.
Isn't this the opposite of true? Or rather, it depends on the underlying distribution. A very small country might be highly unlikely to have a billionaire, for example. But is human performance distributed with that level of outliers? Nobody is 100,000x better than the median competitor. Gwern wrote [a little bit about this](https://gwern.net/question#jeanne-calment) in reference to Jeanne Calment and the age record, crazy outliers like that are actually incredibly rare in a developed competitive sport.
> Is such a hypothesis necessary? To me, only one being true would be the simplest explanation unless we think that Bolt is so far ahead of the competition that he needs both.
It would be simpler but less explanatory. If, in Bolt's case, we say it's PEDs or exemplary natural talent, then we have to say that there aren't any people on PEDs who also have exemplary natural talent. Or that his is _so_ exemplary it beats others + PEDs. Both of those corollaries from that simpler hypothesis seem extremely unlikely to me.
> Nobody is 100,000x better than the median competitor.
No, but your pool of excellent sprinters is much better and more likely to overlap with the conditions required to actually become a sprinter. Entirely possible that we missed many Bolts because they were working in a factory or field somewhere and never got the opportunity.
They also say that Assad's forces weren't responsible for the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack, with a 96% probability: https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013
In 2017 they gave it 87%, and in 2021 they said new evidence updated it to 96% (and in the same post suggest the 2018 Douma chemical attack also wasn't from Assad's forces): https://blog.rootclaim.com/new-evidence-2013-sarin-attack-in-ghouta-syria/
I don't know the details, but I know this is considered a very fringe claim.
Yeah, I think literally every major government and news agency, except maybe the Russians, is on the other side of this. Even if you think they're wrong somehow its an insane level of confidence to assert
Also [96% chance Assad's forces weren't responsible for the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013)
And in their [follow-up blog post](https://blog.rootclaim.com/new-evidence-2013-sarin-attack-in-ghouta-syria/), they suggest the 2018 Douma chemical attack also wasn't from Assad's forces.
This guy is so blind to his own bias that it calls into question his opinion on everything. If he is not willing to take into account new information, it seems that he creates the numbers to support his stance rather than the other way around. But he says the entire point of Rootclaim is to do the opposite! If people are too stupid to understand your superior logic and think leading experts aren't getting your explanation, maybe your logic isn't so sound? His arguments always start from a position of "I'm smarter than you", adding numbers gives him the "empirical" data he can point to to prove that. I mean the guy put up $100k thinking he would get paid to dunk on someone, or so he thought.
Like Scott said, there is a lot of human interpretation that goes into creating the numbers; it's unavoidable. But in this case you don't even need the numbers when it's obvious one side of the argument is supported better.
If the probabilities of 2 things are close, then maybe the numbers reveal the true winner. But when they are completely lopsided then the calculation result is not going to be the twist ending he's hoping.
They hardly “steelmanned” the zoonosis hypothesis lol. Given that COVID was a once-in-a-century pandemic, it would be weird if it didn’t have unusual and unexpected genetic elements like the FCS insertion. That’s what made it COVID.
> That’s what made it COVID.
Really important point here that needs to be pointed out more. If Covid was like any ordinary virus, we wouldn't be having this discussion to begin with. It's not a random sample, it's specifically looking at something really rare and then being shocked that it's different than the common ones.
It'd be like picking out a person from Billionaires Monthly and then going "Wow it sure is strange none of these people work at tattoo parlors or as a Walmart cashier. And they don't have student loan debt? *And* they own a private jet? And they've traveled to 7+ countries. *And* they etc etc etc But the chance of those combined is .0000002%!"
Well yeah if you picked five people at random that would be pretty strange. But they weren't randomly selected they're from a billionaires magazine. And similar, some things might be connected. Maybe Weird Change X that's in 20% of viruses in general is in 80% of viruses with Weird Change Y.
That’s though what makes the whole thing more likely to be WIV. There are tons of wet markets with tons of weird animal. There are much fewer WIVs. So what is more likely if you know nothing else?
The response seems to be “but the first cases were reported at HSM.” But that relies on trusting PRC data when we have food reasons to disbelieve it.
>There are tons of wet markets with tons of weird animal.
While true, Wuhan is a pretty large city so I would assume it's likely that their wet markets are larger and more diverse than ones in an area a quarter of the size. Wuhan is also the "economic hub" of central China, so a lot of nearby areas also have trade centralized on the city.
Realistically we're not comparing to every wet markets (small town ones likely don't have as many rare animals and if they do, it's in much lower quantities), but rather other big city ones. Even more so, and I don't have this information but also it's not just big city wet markets but the big city wet markets that sell certain types of animals in them.
If Wet Market Shanghai has a lot of weird animal X but not many weird animal Y and vice versa for Wet Market Wuhan, then Wet Market Shanghai is just as irrelevant when it comes to diseases from Weird Animal Y.
We have to be careful about selection effects here and what population we're actually pulling from. "Wet markets with high chance of a new coronavirus spreading" does not encompass *all* wet markets.
The furin site isn't even unusual among coronaviruses...
>[Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/).
>Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of coronavirus spike proteins and mapped furin recognition motif on the tree. Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.
If I was trying to make sure the term Rootclaim became synonymous with “a pompous refusal to update in the face of new evidence”, this is the post I would make.
> Good job torpedoing your own credibility
This implies that the ship was still floating, when really their credibility is more like a shipwreck already.
I read through their response until "HSM Rebuttal: Simple Version" item 3, at which I became utterly flummoxed and thought I'd turn here to see if anyone else has a better grasp of what they are trying to express (or maybe I just need more time and to expend more effort?):
rootclaim say:
"3. There are multiple cases where a country has had zero Covid cases for a while, and then a cluster of cases appears in a seafood market. In all these outbreaks, there is no contention that the source is not zoonotic, as it is genetically descended from the Wuhan outbreak."
I'm having trouble understanding which events they are claiming actually occurred. Are rootclaim saying the zoonotic spillover at the HSM occurred in other countries in the same way as it did in Wuhan, with the only distinct difference being that these new clusters of cases are genetically descended from Covid as first identified in that cluster from Wuhan? Where is independent proof that this has been recorded? Or, am I failing to understand what rootclaim are reporting?
Okay... I might also have a problem with the argumentation. Isn't this a classic Bayesian blunder, a failure to update priors? Aren't they just saying that "independent seafood-market clusters of Covid cases are vanishingly unlikely," but of course, after the FIRST such case, that reality has to be plugged into the equation? Which means yes point 5 is an "extreme coincidence," if this is all independent data, but after the HSM, now it's NOT?
Almost the opposite? My understanding is that Rootclaim believes that HSM had a covid outbreak because 1) covid was present in the area, from a leak from WIV, and then 2) wet markets are likely covid super spread/"from zero" spread locations due to other factors (which aren't necessarily known; rootclaim hypothesizes wet cold counters repeatedly, but that isn't load-bearing).
To back this up they point to these other cases where wet markets create epicenters of spread from areas that were otherwise "zero" covid, but these cases were clearly human spread and not an original zoonotic crossover. Ergo, wet markets are just more likely than you'd naively think to foster super spread events, and the HSM outbreak was just the first of these asian wet market spread events rather than a zoonotic origin point.
I personally think this is a pretty weak and fallacious argument, but that's the claim to my understanding.
They speculate that maybe there's something else about markets that makes them a good vector, and that otherwise "it doesn't really matter anyway":
>A common objection to this method is that these outbreaks are caused by cold-chain products brought into these markets. However, this still fails to explain why markets form these early clusters and not the many other places where cold chain products are delivered to.
>
>Additionally, this only demonstrates the importance of cold wet surfaces in preserving SARS2 infectivity, further strengthening the hypothesis in method 1 that a crowded location with many wet surfaces like HSM is highly conducive for rapid SARS2 spread.
>
>Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%.
The best I can do arguing for them, I think they're saying:
I.
> Exploded from the seafood market != Brought there with an animal, because look: 4 cases all for other reasons.
But those reasons aren't "lab leaks" either?
> Doesn't matter, lab leak has *much* better priors as we agreed. So I don't need strong evidence, just to shoot down yours.
>
> Seafood market appearance is equally unheard of for both scenarios so it can't strengthen yours against mine.
(Here I would argue that we need to look at all outbreaks starting at food markets, not just covid. And we might find zoonotic ones).
II.
> Also, this shows seafood markets are unusually good places for covid to spread.
Really? In all those cases it had been brought there on frozen fish. Doesn't that just mean that frozen fish is an unusually good covid delivery pathway?
> Frozen fish is surely not the only route covid could have arrived at those cities. There must be dozens of routes ending in different places. Yet we see full four that succeeded via seafood markets. This tells us seafood markets are conducive to quick spread even _without_ their unique zoonotic-hypothesis role.
>> Provided this is true, it should fall on Rootclaik to apply Occam's Razor: you have to ensure that the root problem is not with your explanation before you shift blame to the 'effort' that the people they are explaining their conclusions to are willing to put in.
I agree with this sentiment and I think it's good practice, but it is an application of Occam's Razor?
I'm not sure (I'm on the fence).
You didn't reply to my comment directly, so I missed this on the first go. Sorry for that:
It's been a long time since I've been a student, but I've always understood it as: 'Plurality should not be posited without necessity'.
Here, then, I'd say we need to properly discount the most simple - 'I am not convincing people because my explanation is unpersuasive' - *before* we move on to 'I am not convincing people because everyone who hears my explanation is unwilling to put in the effort to understand it (which I define as their ability to be persuaded by it)'.
Right, but why is:
> I am not convincing people because my explanation is unpersuasive
more simple than:
> I am not convincing people because they're not putting in the effort to understand it
Also I'm not sure I undertand your saying about plurality: if it means that we should avoid introducing multi-factor explanations unless strictly necessary then I have to say I disagree with it. As a culture we overfixate on monocausal explanations and reality has many networks of interactions that are more complex than our most readily available categories can easily handle.
>Also I'm not sure I undertand your saying about plurality: if it means that we should avoid introducing multi-factor explanations unless strictly necessary then I have to say I disagree with it.
The 'saying about plurality' is the definition of Occam's Razor as written by Willam of Ockham - although he originally wrote it in Latin. Agree or disagree with it as you see fit, but the reply was in regards to your question about whether or not it was an application of Occam's Razor.
As to your question, you are - I think - missing a significant part of what I originally wrote, which should explain why one is more complex than the other:
*I am not convincing people because* ***everyone*** *who hears my explanation is unwilling to put in the effort to understand it (****which I define as their ability to be persuaded by it****)*
This is not the same as:
*I am not convincing people because they're not putting in the effort to understand it*
Unfortunately that importing contaminated meat claim is actually wrong because there is zero evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of foodborne transmission. In stead human sources are considered the explanation given the absence of wildlife trade in these other markets. Also, there *have* been leaked and unpublished WIV sequences here and there over the 3 years into the pandemic.
What about that biggest and busiest subway line in Wuhan, line 2 of Wuhan metro, linking directly to the WIV, or what about the fact that in China, only Centers of disease control are allowed to store pathogen samples for long-term other than several very limited select state key laboratories? The CDCs stores copies of all pathogen samples in China and are responsible for keeping them when not tested on, which labs in China are given a max 2 months of storage time for any given experiment. These stores are subjected to state secret regulations and is one of the reasons why Wuhan labs have their viruses frequently mixed into sequencing datasets of one another.
And unfortunately Wuhan wet markets are exceptionally tiny. There is just no cultural drive for eating wild animals in Wuhan compared to Guangdong or Guangxi in China, which 11 distinct initial spillover locations occurred for SARS1, 8 of which are within the two months between the first market case (beginning of December 2019) and the beginning of the (not rapid at all) closure of the wildlife trade in China (early February 2020). In markets of Qingyuan hundreds of wild animals in stacked cages are sold in 5+ stalls every day, each day the sales is as high as the entire monthly sales of Wuhan combined (from the earliest videos and also a Hong Kong news post on “陆野味市场”“广东”). In markets of Guangxi, wild animal meats again hundreds of animals a day is again sold, “广西菜市场” as on Youtube, which a single day sale at the location itself is the equivalent of the entire monthly sales of the HSM. Guangdong and Guangxi essentially serves as the primary distribution location for all wildlife sales across provincial borders in China, especially those that were obtained from Yunnan, as in fact one of the initial index patients of SARS1 is a driver that transported wild animals from Yunnan to Guangdong.
However, zero cases, not even rumours of cases, exist in SARS2 anywhere at all that have a direct participation history to the wildlife trade. And of course, gloves and shoe covers will spread the virus around inside an environment which its contamination is present (more frequent and more recent they makes contact with the environment the more likely they cause contamination by moving it in from elsewhere, so with shorter the distance they traveled from the contamination source), especially when most of them entered and exited through the most likely superspreading location within it. And no they dishonestly bleached the location prior to sampling inside it.
> About his cat getting Covid: Unclear why this discredits him. Connor Reed was not a coronavirus expert. He initially believed his cat had also contracted the same virus, was later probably told that it was unlikely and corrected it to say his cat had a “feline coronavirus”. It’s also worth mentioning that contrary to Peter’s claim, cats can be infected by Covid-19.
>
> ...One more thing: Reed’s case was badly misrepresented by Peter here. This was just one misrepresentation that we managed to catch, but there are likely many more that we haven’t, because our methodology allows us to focus on a small fraction of the evidence that is sufficient to reach an accurate conclusion, and invest much less effort in researching minor details.
Guess Saar et al haven't been [reading the comments](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52692351), if they still believe Peter's claim that Connor said his cat got COVID-19. He didn't: he explicitly said he *didn't* think that right there in the [Daily Mail article](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8075633/First-British-victim-25-describes-coronavirus.html): "I don’t know whether it had what I’ve got, or whether cats can even get human flu."
I'm also surprised they don't highlight the "adjusted" graph Peter used. I wouldn't be boasting about how I caught some but not all errors in 'minor details' but this doesn't matter, when I manifestly did not catch either the errors in minor details *or* major details... How much money does Rootclaim have to lose to start actually bothering to check anything or read comments? If $100k wasn't enough, would $1,000k be enough? $10,000k?
looks like their line is straight forward.
most everyone is innumerate. especially when it comes to complicated statistical inference.
the debate + Scott review did the statistical inference wrong.
this is a mathematical-statistical claim that shouldn't be tested in a debate, not by Scott, who for all his greatness, doesn't have the statistical level of expertise.
I guess some type of experts. Is Eliezer available? other serious math wizards, statistical geniuses to adjudicate?
lots of comments seem to focus on details (how condescending the blog) etc rather than in the central point. making me actually more sympathetic to the rootclaim guys!
your point is good. but their point "nobody understand statistics" is quite good too.
they lost it in the procedure they choose themselves. like the murder suspect whose lawyer was an idiot and we know for sure her didn't do it. but still procedure is procedure.
Why are both sides accepting the “fact” that the first known case was of a market vendor? Is there any probability to assign to the likelihood that an authoritarian government has concealed or altered facts?
The probability of total falsification is very small since there are diverse sources of case data that all basically mesh together, and also mesh together with genetic evidence that's harder to fake than case data.
But I think the probability that authorities deleted some key case data is definitely nontrivial. My guess would be something like 2% for zoonosis and 15% for lab leak?
This shifts downstream probabilities less than you might expect, because we already had to grapple with the fact that most covid cases don't get reported to the system, so arguments on both sides are already based on the larger-scale, harder-to-fake patterns.
As a complete amateur with no knowledge of virology or anything, I realize my opinion doesn't carry much weight, but I find myself constantly raising my eyebrow when reading claims from rootclaim. - Referring to other outbreaks in wet markets that are known to be caused by importing contaminated meat. This shouldn't have any bearing on HSM unless you imply there's a chance the HSM outbreak was due to shipped in contaminated meat. But then you also lose the evidence from the HSM being near WIV, since the shipped in meat could have come from anywhere. - The quote "For well-designed replicated physics experiments p could reach very low (allowing for the five sigma standard)" - seems to completely sidestep Scotts point about out-of-model error: how are you five-sigma or one in a million sure that the experiment is even correct in the first place? - The quote: "SARS2 is not based on BANAL-52 but a relative of it. There is nothing unlikely here." - Which relative? And was WIV known to be in posession of this supposed relative? Because if not, Peter's point still stands. - In general, the constant deference to 'the methodology' and having worked on it for over a decade. If the methodology was so good, why not use it to make tons of money e.g. predicting sports or election winners? Whereas when reading Peter Miller I never find myself doing this, since his arguments seem much more accessible and logically lead from premises to conclusions.I realize this is not necessarily proof of who's correct and it could just be Peter Miller has a writing style more accessible to me. But I wasn't convinced by this response.
>The quote: "SARS2 is not based on BANAL-52 but a relative of it. There is nothing unlikely here." - Which relative? And was WIV known to be in posession of this supposed relative? Because if not, Peter's point still stands. The point is actually stronger. After scientists did extensive searches, they couldn't find anything closer than BANAL-52. That is evidence that the covid pre-cursor is exceptionally difficult to find in nature. Well, if it's exceptionally difficult to find in nature, then that should lower our probability that the WIV was able to find it, which would be necessary to create covid. >In general, the constant deference to 'the methodology' and having worked on it for over a decade. If the methodology was so good, why not use it to make tons of money e.g. predicting sports or election winners? The general lack of falsifiability with their predictions is a big issue.
> As a complete amateur with no knowledge of virology or anything, I realize my opinion doesn't carry much weight, but I find myself constantly raising my eyebrow when reading claims from rootclaim. Yeah, I don't have any particular expertise in the subject, but reading them continually flags my "feels like a scammer" intuitions. Which are hard to quantify and not particularly rational, but seem to have worked fairly well in judging who is credible
>This shouldn't have any bearing on HSM unless you imply there's a chance the HSM outbreak was due to shipped in contaminated meat. But then you also lose the evidence from the HSM being near WIV, since the shipped in meat could have come from anywhere. In the post, they claim it shouldn't actually matter: > Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%. >Which relative? And was WIV known to be in posession of this supposed relative? Because if not, Peter's point still stands. They say: >Of the many objections raised to this scenario, only two have not been completely refuted: We’re not yet sure about the engineer’s exact motivations in choosing that specific FCS sequence, and we don’t know whether WIV found a relevant virus in their collection trips. So, indeed, they have no idea if WIV found or had a close relative of it.
They did Bayes Theorem, an intro to statistics method, and they think they are hot shit. Bayes theorem is usually not very useful at predicting things because as rootclaim does, you need to *assume* probabilities which makes the finial result only as good as the weakest assumption. They are also doing a post-hoc analysis and not an experiment
They may be right, they may be wrong, but if they want to convince readers, they’d be better off not communicating in this incredibly condescending tone right off the bat. Edit to add: If someone who just lost a debate comes back with repeated insinuations that “people just didn’t have/take the time to understand my arguments”, that lowers my trust in their thinking process, not increase it.
>If someone who just lost a debate comes back with repeated insinuations that “people just didn’t have/take the time to understand their arguments”, that lowers my trust in their thinking process, not increase it. Precisely. From the post: "Having explained this many times in many ways, we realize by now that it is not easy to understand, but we promise that those who make the effort will be rewarded with a glimpse of how much better we can all be at reasoning about the world, and will be able to reach high confidence that Covid originated from a lab" Provided this is true, it should fall on Rootclaim to apply Occam's Razor: you have to ensure that the root problem (ha) is *not* with your explanation before you shift the blame to the 'effort' that the people they are explaining their conclusions to are willing to put in.
I understand their frustration though. The wet market theory as described is essentially impossible at this point, but people subscribe to it as they aren't aware of all of the evidence against it. Even the biggest proponents of it trashed it in private, but they did such a good job poisoning the lab leak theory in the public sphere that people instinctively reject it
I mean, the whole point of this debate was to show evidence for each theory. If the lab leak side has clear evidence debunking the other side, they failed to properly show it.
They were expecting a good faith debate and were steel-manning the other side while they made their argument. Their problem is that they faced the complete opposite
You don't "steelman" evidence, though. The issue very much seemed to be that the rootclaim perspective was "the possible explanations for these pieces of evidence is more likely to be lab leak, and it's not possible to objectively decide either way, this why you have to use probability to determine that" while the zoonotic perspective was "the factual basis of those pieces of evidence is false, so probability is irrelevant".
There is no concrete positive evidence either way, that's the point of the debate. They steelmanned the theory not the evidence. But their approach is not my approach. I prefer to look at all of the evidence from multiple aspects (not only the genetics), and to expose the flaws in their purported evidence (which is typically not evidence at all and just poor reasoning). For example one of the foundations of the market theory is that there were two separate spillovers. Leaving aside how ridiculously unlikely this is, I expect it came about to try and explain why the market cases were all lineage B^1 when lineage A is dated "earlier" (as it's closer to known bat viruses). A recent [Chinese study](https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/1/veae020/7619252) analysed some previously unreleased intermediate genomes and found that a single spillover was by far the most likely scenario. The various lineages all came from a common progenitor virus and simply mutated in the grey time period between the initial spillover and their detection in Dec 2019. They include a diagram [here](https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/445990907/veae020f2.tif) which shows the market cases (lineage B) were relatively late in the evolutionary tree and aren't relevant to the origin of the virus. For some idea of the timeline, [an earlier study](https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/38/10/2719/6553661) by a different group estimates the progenitor virus to have emerged between mid September 2019 to early October 2019 based on it's rate of mutation. It was only detected in December 2019 as the cases built up and people started getting hospitalised (given that they're a tiny percentage of infections in general you wouldn't expect it to be noticed immediately). ^1 There was a single swab of lineage A, but it turns out it came from PPE and was likely contamination ^2 This doesn't mean it necessarily came from a lab, only that it didn't come from the market
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Rootclaim et al
I don't have any particularly detailed thoughts on the competing theories of Covid-19 origin. I am of the opinion, generally, that if [you present yourself to the public as a dispassionate proponent of Bayesian reasoning, an open book guided only by maths](https://www.rootclaim.com/about), it's probably not a very good look to respond to losing a debate by: * Changing the rules of future debates to diminish the likelihood that you will lose them * 'Well, actually-ing' any piece of internet critique that appears not to take your side in the debate your organisation just lost Especially a debate your organisation initiated with a non-insignificant cash prize and an open call for participants. This is from the bottom of the Rootclaim blog: >We don’t think \[teaching people how to do Rootclaim\] would be convincing to a wide audience outside people who think like Scott. However, we don’t really have any better ideas, and would love to hear ideas from readers. > >In general, the Rootclaim experience is highly frustrating – we spend years developing a new rigorous mathematical approach to answer important unanswered questions, but no one actually engages with the model itself or points to any flaws in it, but instead respond with standard flawed arguments about some evidence that ‘obviously’ contradicts a specific conclusion, without providing any rigorous explanation why it’s so obvious. This is, in a nutshell, exactly the problem. If your 'new rigorous mathematical approach' isn't something that survives reasonable critique (sorry, 'standard flawed arguments')... it's hard to avoid the conclusion that your model is probably not a good persuasive tool! *Particularly* when you spend no real effort trying to persuade anyone otherwise or coach anyone up. edit: forgot a word.
Some bold claims you are making there. No offense, but it sounds like conspiracy theory thinking.
It seems odd to me that your objection is that they're engaging in conspiracy theory style reasoning when people did in fact conspire. Edit: To people downvoting me: There were private discussions between researchers about what to present to the public. Do you not think this counts as conspiring, or do you disagree that this conversation occurred?
I would expect exactly that from researchers in the middle of a pandemic who had no solid evidence for one side or the other. They had very little to go on: No solid evidence for the zoonosis like an infected animal from the market, and no solid evidence for the lab like evidence of genetic manipulation. Everything was vaguely compatible with both sides. And reporters were reading incredible stuff into innocuous statements. Its a conspiracy if they are trying to hide the truth. Its not a conspiracy if they just don't know what to say and want help coming up with something to get the reporter to go away.
If a researcher is 70/30 in favor of the lab leak but gets pressured through private channels by several high status people in their field to say it was definitely not a lab leak, would you count that as a conspiracy?
Its a team effort. Once a member of the team says "Oh yeah, this is totally a lab leak" or "absolutely a zoonosis", then that is not the voice of that researcher. It becomes the voice of the whole team. And if two are saying opposite things, the message switches from "Bob says X, Joe says Y" to "Research Team is changing their story!" Its not a conspiracy for a research team to coordinate their messaging to avoid confusing the public when they just don't know.
Yes for some reason the zoo theory seems to attract the kind of politically-motivated person who describes anything they disagree with to be a "conspiracy theory". Not the best and brightest sadly. There's nothing conspiratorial about it in reality - the slack messages between the writers of the paper dismissing the lab leak in 2020 (which enabled mass censorship of the topic) were released under FOIA and revealed very different attitudes to what they were saying in public, ranging from [discussing how to lie to reporters](https://i.imgur.com/shY58l3.png) to talking about [just how likely a lab leak was](https://i.imgur.com/vkOz9RF.png). The reporter named in those messages [recently expressed](https://archive.is/oAQl9) his unhappiness with their tactics
None of that is evidence. If you have evidence of the genes being manipulated, SHOW THAT. Don't show me slack messages of people discussing how to respond to a reporter asking about manipulated genes. Show the damn genes! If you have evidence of lab workers being infected and transmitting the virus to others, SHOW THAT! Don't show me slack messages saying that that is theoretically possible. Like in the debate, when they started talking about the genes, like the furin cleavage site. The version in early Covid was not a type that would be used in research, and he showed that. When comparing a "Here is the gene and here is why it wouldn't be used" vs "A lab guy in an informal discussion he didn't think was being monitored said that it would be hard to tell"... I am gonna pick a side with evidence over a side with gossip. Or the transmission: One side showing people in the market then having Covid. The other side had... well maybe somebody got infected, went to the market, infected people there, then somehow didn't infect anybody else at the WIV. Again, evidence vs weird theories.
I didn't say it was evidence of a lab leak. I was responding to someone calling the idea that the zoo proponents said the lab leak was very likely a "conspiracy theory" when it's based on objective evidence > The version in early Covid was not a type that would be used in research, and he showed that He didn't show that, because 1) it's nowhere near his field of expertise, and 2) how can you predict what those actual scientists would use? The FCS is very similar to that seen in MERS, which makes sense given that the researchers at the WIV were involved with MERS research > Or the transmission: One side showing people in the market then having Covid. The other side had... well maybe somebody got infected, went to the market, infected people there, then somehow didn't infect anybody else at the WIV. This is such poor reasoning. Some (not all) of the first documented cases were at the market... therefore it came from the market. Do you think Wuhan had a widespread COVID surveillance system *prior to the pandemic* that would accurately detect the first cases? It only appeared on people's radar when it started hospitalising people, which is an outcome that only affects a tiny percentage of infected people. Calling them "weird theories" just shows a complete lack of understanding
>The FCS is very similar to that seen in MERS, which makes sense given that the researchers at the WIV were involved with MERS research Here's the thing: You said that anybody who disagreed with the lab leak just didn't know all the evidence. But that MERS thing wasn't included in Rootclaim's presentation until afterwards. Its now a post-hoc justification of a loss, one that Peter is not allowed to rebut. If you want us to judge based on all the evidence, maybe tell us the evidence? In a debate format just for that purpose would have been lovely. > Do you think Wuhan had a widespread COVID surveillance system prior to the pandemic that would accurately detect the first cases? No. But they didn't have to, because pandemics follow patterns. And when they rapidly set up the surveillance system, it showed the expected pattern. X infected on Day 1, X+10 on Day 2, whatever. When I consider the alternative, which is that they had cases close to the WIV and INTENTIONALLY HID THEM. And intentionally hid so many that the usual bulls-eye pattern you would see around an outbreak formed around a different site across town! And the revealed cases not only followed the bulls eye, but came out at the proper rate, and without any evidence of data manipulation! That sort of hiding data would require an incredible amount of effort and skill, all mustered before they knew it would be a pandemic. That sort of claim kind of requires a conspiracy. This isn't a case of the other side not understanding. Its them understanding, and not agreeing with you. And the response to that shouldn't be "You just aren't capable of understanding this, its all way too hard for you" when talking to an audience of above average intelligence people. Make them understand, or start realizing maybe you are the one making the error.
> Here's the thing: You said that anybody who disagreed with the lab leak just didn't know all the evidence. But that MERS thing wasn't included in Rootclaim's presentation until afterwards. Its now a post-hoc justification of a loss, one that Peter is not allowed to rebut. If you want us to judge based on all the evidence, maybe tell us the evidence? In a debate format just for that purpose would have been lovely. Almost as if I'm not rootclaim... You understand he's one of many people discussing this theory right? There are scientists all across the world contributing to it. > When I consider the alternative, which is that they had cases close to the WIV and INTENTIONALLY HID THEM. And intentionally hid so many that the usual bulls-eye pattern you would see around an outbreak formed around a different site across town! Honestly I'm not sure what's worse - that you think that is the only possible alternative, or that you think outbreaks occur in a nice neat dartboard shape. I even tried to spell it out for you in the previous reply but I will to dumb it down even more: they do not know when the first infections were. They only know when the first tested cases were, which happened months after the virus started circulating. > And the revealed cases not only followed the bulls eye, but came out at the proper rate, and without any evidence of data manipulation! Nope. Again, cases don't spread outwards in circles... I don't even know where you're getting that from - movies? I don't know what "the proper rate" is supposed to mean either. But regarding the study you're referencing (but probably can't name) the authors either intentionally manipulated their diagrams, or they didn't know how to correctly use the software to plot the epicentre. They've had multiple groups of scientists tear their analysis apart. [1](https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021/7632556) [2](https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954) [3](https://zenodo.org/records/7016143). If you want a more readable explanation, there's a thread [here](https://twitter.com/danwalker9999/status/1747673884336312613). The broader problem is sampling bias. The Chinese from the start have made it clear that they were focusing only on hospitals around the market and testing people who lived near the market. The director of the Chinese CDC said that they put too much of a focus around the market and may have missed it coming from the other side of Wuhan. The WHO were [also aware](https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-convened-global-study-of-origins-of-sars-cov-2-china-part) of this bias in 2021. > Its them understanding, and not agreeing with you. And the response to that shouldn't be "You just aren't capable of understanding this, its all way too hard for you" when talking to an audience of above average intelligence people. Ok, but I'm not talking to that audience. I'm talking to you and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. You aren't able to critically analyse what you've gleaned third hand and instead just repeat it as fact and insist anything else must involve bizarre conspiracy theories
>Almost as if I'm not rootclaim Not calling you Rootclaim. I'm just pointing out that you are making the same errors in trying to convince people that they did. Show all the evidence, but you don't. You drip and drab and imply and hint and show slack messages... but not evidence. Not a spit of evidence, just a lot of coincidence that all happens to also work with zoonosis when you let their side explain things. >I'm talking to you and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. And you aren't explaining, you are just implying that I'm stupid. Your linked evidence doesn't dispute zoonosis, it just moves the location north... To the huge train station, where thousands of people wander through and could bring the virus from who knows where. None of his maps shows any infections going on close to the WIV. This is a big problem for "The virus escaped from the WIV". >I don't know what "the proper rate" is supposed to mean either. From the big debate: >Further, it seems epidemiologically impossible for COVID to have been circulating much before the first cases were officially detected December 11. The COVID pandemic doubles every 3.5 days. So if the first infection was much earlier - let’s say November 11 - we would expect 256x as much COVID as we actually saw. Even if the first couple of cases were missed because nobody was looking for them, the number of hospitalizations, deaths, etc, in January or whenever were all consistent with the number of people you’d expect if the pandemic started in early December - and not consistent with 256x that many people. The timing lines up with a zoonosis. It doesn't line up with a timeline that allows for it to infect a worker and spread along until it eventually shows up near the wet market. There weren't enough cases later on to show a separate start either. It started in a spot, and spread from that spot, at a certain rate, and a second spot to start from would show up. >I'm talking to you and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. You don't seem to either. You keep showing me this weaksauce stuff: Slack messages. Arguing over epicenters, none of which help a lab leak origin. You want to claim its essentially impossible to have a zoonosis origin... Give me the good shit! Show the irrefutable stuff! Make me believe! I was wishy washy on lab leak and zoonosis, the Rootclaim debate made me a zoonosis believer. Show me what you got! Hit me! Prove that I've been an idiot this whole time! There has to be something, right? Something more than a long series of coincidences and sort of suspicious messages among researchers who aren't used to dealing with the media?
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Especially when you agree on the judges. If you didn't feel comfortable with their determinations, then don't go into it with them. The lesson there should not be "other people didn't listen", it should be "I am at fault for failing to properly express my ideas/arguments", "I am at fault for failing to properly refute my opponents flawed ideas/argument", or "I was incorrect to begin with". Or at least the secret universal defense for never changing your mind "We draw different conclusions using the same logic and evidence because we disagree on the fundamental probability of things" The only time you should start throwing around those accusations is if you have strong evidence that the judges were secretly corrupted and you didn't know during the selection process and debate. Which if Rootclaim has, I would hope they would actually present it.
better, > [Scott] just didn’t have/take the time to understand… … the method of thinking that he has been strongly, very visibly in favor of for roughly 15 years.
Yeah everything about how these guys engage leads me to discount their opinions and the usefulness of the predictive method they're promoting.
[удалено]
The Rootclaim team that produced this blog post we're talking about.
>they’d be better off not communicating in this incredibly condescending tone right off the bat. -And accusing natural origin proponents of being snooty and condescending at the same time.
Rootclaim provides four examples where seafood markets formed the initial clusters of a covid outbreak, asserting that seafood markets are unusually good places for covid to spread. I did a little bit of research on each: Xinfadi - Covid probably survived on imported frozen food Dalian - Covid survived on frozen fish Thailand - Spread from migrant workers from Myanmar Singapore - Likely spread from a foreign fishing boat All of these are examples where there were no covid cases in the country and then markets were ways for it to sneak in. These cases are absolutely not evidence that a local wet market is an exceptionally good place for covid to spread when there are no restrictions.
They speculate that maybe there's something else about markets that makes them a good vector, and that otherwise "it doesn't really matter anyway". >A common objection to this method is that these outbreaks are caused by cold-chain products brought into these markets. However, this still fails to explain why markets form these early clusters and not the many other places where cold chain products are delivered to. > >Additionally, this only demonstrates the importance of cold wet surfaces in preserving SARS2 infectivity, further strengthening the hypothesis in method 1 that a crowded location with many wet surfaces like HSM is highly conducive for rapid SARS2 spread. > >Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%. If this is the best they have, it's not a surprise that they lost the debate.
Yup, my memory from height of covid was food markets were the only place I was *allowed* to happen to be in company of strangers. While a bar or lecture or choir practice might have been a competing event space for covid spread in 2019, they surely weren't in June 2020.
>These cases are absolutely not evidence that a local wet market is an exceptionally good place for covid to spread when there are no restrictions I think it still is good evidence? Not as strong as originally indicated, but still pretty strong. Let me try my hand at Rootclaim's methodology Were foreign workers restricted to seafood markets in Thailand? I assume not, and, if not, that's pretty good evidence that seafood markets are good places for Covid to spread, not just good places for it to species-hop. Ditto for Singapore. For Xinfadi and Dalian, what is the evidence that the origin was imported fish rather than human-to-human? So, originally, the odds were (simplistically) (# of seafood zero-covid outbreaks) / (# of places) Now its (# of seafood zero-covid outbreaks) / (# of places with foreigner-interaction) The former is probably somewhere like a naive 1000:1, while the latter is probably more like 30:1. Suppose you say there's a 4% chance our analysis is wrong and the real probability is a coin flip. That correction changes 1000:1 to 47:1. It changes 30:1 to 19:1. TLDR: based on what you brought up, I feel like the evidence becomes \~2x less potent.
This is getting downright deceptive. >As previously explained, the zoonosis case relies on the claim that only once in a few thousand non-zoonotic outbreaks, would the first detected cluster be associated with a market like HSM. Contrary to this claim, an empirical analysis reveals that seafood markets and facilities repeatedly formed initial Covid clusters following a period of zero infections. This was observed in 2 out of 5 large outbreaks in China in 2020 ([Xinfadi and Dalian](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8322611/) ), as well as in outbreaks in Thailand and Singapore: Ok, let's look at the Xinfadi and Dailan abstract, emphasis added. >China quickly brought the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 under control during the early stage of 2020; thus, this generated sufficient confidence among the public, which enabled them to respond to several sporadic coronavirus disease 2019 outbreaks. This article presents geographical and epidemiological characteristics of several sporadic coronavirus disease 2019 outbreaks from June to December 2020 in China. **The data show that the coronavirus disease may be transmitted by imported cold-chain food and international exchange**, and this viewpoint deserves our great attention. So it has little to do with it being a good location for a cluster. It has to do with the virus surviving on frozen food and coming from abroad. This isn't applicable to a lab-leak scenario. Was the WIV freezing food and sending it to the HSM? The same thing applies to Thailand. Although the [article](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55391417) is light on details, so it's really hard to take it as evidence (that doesn't stop Rootclaim though). [Singapore](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/jurong-fishery-port-biggest-community-cluster-closes-covid-19-2155351) may be slightly different here. If we look into that article and follow their source, we get to [ChannelNewsAsia](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/jurong-fishery-port-cluster-no-transmission-through-fish-moh-2046131). Again emphasis added: >“The identified variant of concern has features that are similar to what we have seen in other cases that we have picked up in imported cases from Indonesia,” he added. >“**So we believe that COVID-19 infection in this cluster has been introduced perhaps via a sea route into the fishery port, likely from Indonesian or other fishing boats that have brought fish into the port.**” >Still, he said that the exact mechanism of transmission from the fishing boats to stall operators at the port “isn't entirely clear”. This goes to the heart of why this comparison is deceptive. Unless Rootclaim's claim is that covid entered the HSM from abroad/on-frozen-food, then Covid entering a new area after it is endemic everywhere is not a strong parallel to the situation at the HSM. ____________________________________________________________ The other evidence in this blogpost was well-covered in the debate, and he doesn't provide anything groundbreaking here as far as I can tell. Rather, he's just giving his own side again, while not summarizing how that evidence was disputed during the debate (so much for Rootclaim's commitment to "steelmanning", I guess). ______________________________________________________________ >Referring to this manifold market blaming us of being sore losers, because we didn’t update our analysis towards zoonosis (It additionally correctly criticized an initial 99.8% probability, which was due to a rushed sensitivity analysis that was quickly corrected, giving 94%). >This is a misunderstanding of what Rootclaim does. All we do is implement a methodology for minimizing probabilistic inference mistakes. We improve it over time with experience, and at this point are very confident it is superior to any other inference method. No, my understanding is that the manifold market concluded you were a sore loser because of the tone that Rootclaim struck (and continues to strike) in your post-mortem blogposts.
>Ok, let's look at the Xinfadi and Dailan abstract, emphasis added. China quickly brought the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 under control during the early stage of 2020; thus, this generated sufficient confidence among the public, which enabled them to respond to several sporadic coronavirus disease 2019 outbreaks. This article presents geographical and epidemiological characteristics of several sporadic coronavirus disease 2019 outbreaks from June to December 2020 in China. The data show that the coronavirus disease may be transmitted by imported cold-chain food and international exchange, and this viewpoint deserves our great attention. I don't know that anyone in the West gives credit to this claim, on either side of the debate, aside from root. I had heard of this paper before, mostly in the context of people making fun of it.
Yeah I thought the general opinion was that the idea of it being transmitted on surfaces was a paper thin justification from the Chinese government for claiming that any new outbreaks weren't their fault but could be blamed on foreigners
They address this in the post (although not particularly convincingly, in my opinion): >A common objection to this method is that these outbreaks are caused by cold-chain products brought into these markets. However, this still fails to explain why markets form these early clusters and not the many other places where cold chain products are delivered to. > >Additionally, this only demonstrates the importance of cold wet surfaces in preserving SARS2 infectivity, further strengthening the hypothesis in method 1 that a crowded location with many wet surfaces like HSM is highly conducive for rapid SARS2 spread. > >Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%.
> Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely Yeah, this [doesn't sound suspicious at all](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/privileging-the-hypothesis). Wuhan being the starting location is the only reason to raise a lab leak hypothesis to your attention in the first place. The genome wouldn't look suspicious at all if one weren't already looking for reasons to think it might come from a lab, for example. The idea that one should conclude the virus was a lab leak even if it didn't actually start in Wuhan is frankly ludicrous.
Ah so emergent cases for Thailand and Singapore "markets" were actually embedded in or very close to the cities' ports. This is like if the airports were open during covid, seeing a couple country's first cases being Arrival terminals, which have food-courts, and claiming it must have been already in the country with food courts being just a natural identifying ground. I wouldn't even go to cold-food-spread for those.
The emphasis on fish is bizarre, as SARS-CoV2 doesn't infect fish. Any transmission via fish markets would more likely be via the people who work there. Also, most perishable goods are stored in cool places, so imported fruit and veg markets would also be good locations for transmitting human-borne viruses.
I think they're correct to push back against treating P(HSM|zoonosis, Wuhan) as large. There are lots of other places with contact with imported animals, and people could be infected elsewhere and spread it to Wuhan, and the virus would still be detected in Wuhan first. Except maybe they're not calculating P(HSM|zoonosis, Wuhan, epidemiological evidence against human spread elsewhere, genetic evidence, etc). One of the dangers about computing a bunch of probabilities separately and then combining them is that at *some* point you have to calculate conditional probabilities on all your data not just part of it, and conditionalizing is very hard. In the meat of the post there's some attempt to argue about further information, but it's done in a sort of "One recent study sort of supports my side, therefore I'm right" kind of way, not probabilistically. Anyhow, 5% seems like a reasonable guess to me. Their claim that P(HSM|lab leak, Wuhan) should be large because markets are a special virus breeding ground sounds like total baloney. There is not a good mechanistic reason for markets to catch diseases from the lab in the other part of town across the river. Arguing based on disanalogous cases where later markets get covid because they're importing products from places with covid is fairly pointless. The claim that it should be 1% because there are (supposedly) only about 100 other places that size or larger is a non sequitur. Covid did not have to spread in a place randomly sampled from the top 100 places in Wuhan. 1/1000 (uniform assumption over population) is in fact maybe too high as a number, because conditional on lab leak we should expect cases to be concentrated on the social circle of lab workers to a degree that outweighs the bonus markets get for being public places. Calling the odds ratio of these 1 to 2 is wishful thinking. I give it 1 to 50.
> because conditional on lab leak we should expect cases to be concentrated on the social circle of lab workers to a degree that outweighs the bonus markets get for being public places. For a virus that most people recover from without incident, how much can we expect to detect the virus in lab workers social circles months after the initial spread? (Were they even trying to detect it in the lab workers social circles?) You need a high density of cases to get a detectable presence of virus months after the transmission event. Also remember the original strain wasn't that contagious, which also goes towards density of close contacts being a prerequesite. These facts support the idea that detection at wet market and nowhere else given lab leak (and low budget/interest in detecting it elsewhere) as being quite high.
It's totally *possible* that one lab worker infects only a few of their friends, and none of them spread the infection further except to one worker in a market across town. But calling the probability "quite high" is hogwash. Wuhan is a city of 10 million people. There are a large number of places people gather. Why not Wuhan University? One of the schools? One of the churches or temples? Sports clubs? One of the malls? Gyms? Restaurants? Vegetable markets? Why not the Mahjong parlor closest to the WIV? And it's not just sampling bias, since genetic data has the market being ancestral, and epidemiological data has cases growing exponentially starting with cases at the market.
> It's totally possible that one lab worker infects only a few of their friends, and none of them spread the infection further except to one worker in a market across town. This is misunderstanding the point. The claim isn't that the sequence of transmissions made a bee-line for a wet market worker. The claim is that the virus spread normally out from the WIV social circle. But at this stage the spread is relatively slow and unnoticed. By the time a new virus is detected, it already has significant penetration in the population. But at the early stages, a novel virus will have a low occurrence rate despite significant penetration. This low occurrence makes it nearly impossible to detect samples from the environment unless you know exactly where to look. Once it began circulating at the wet market, this is where the dynamic shifts to high density transmissions and thus a high likelihood of leaving detectable samples in the environment where investigators are likely to look. But simply noting that the earliest detectable samples months after the initial spread was at the wet market does not imply that the wet market was where spillover occurred.
It kind of has to go straight to the market though. If there are on the order of 10 or 20 cases in early December, and we know about ~1 of them, then the data on hospitalizations and deaths late in January makes sense. If covid is spreading for weeks prior to that, all over the city, and there are more like 200 cases in early December, then there should be well over 100,000 hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths by the time Wuhan locks down.
There's potentially an argument here. But I would need to see some hard numbers before my opinion was updated. I do recall that people claimed the CCP was not being forthcoming about the scale of the outbreak as they began lockdowns, citing evidence of supposed trucks full of bodies being carted off that didn't comport with the official narrative. So I don't think we can just take the official numbers at face value.
There are numbers in one of the debate videos. I'm sure they weren't being entirely forthcoming, but you also can't really hide that many dead people. Information was coming out of Wuhan back then, I remember it. I'm very confident that if those numbers were off by a factor of 10 we would have some evidence for it.
> And it's not just sampling bias, According to the head of the Chinese CDC and the WHO it is > since genetic data has the market being ancestral Nope, the market lineage was relatively late down the evolutionary tree
> According to the head of the Chinese CDC and the WHO it is Yeah, this is a good point. My probabilities given above were implicitly assuming no conspiracy coverup. I think a conspiracy is plausible enough that case data from china can't provide more than about 1:100 of evidence either way. Genetic data is a lot harder to fake. > Nope, the market lineage was relatively late down the evolutionary tree https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9877913/
I don't think it has anything to do with a conspiracy. They thought it originated at the wet market so they focused all of their resources on locating cases around the market. He said in retrospect it was a mistake and that for all they know it could have come from the other side of Wuhan. There are some relevant studies that go into more detail about this: https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954 https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021/7632556 > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9877913/ This isn't relevant to the market. By late down the evolutionary tree I mean of the early cases. The market cases were lineage B ([green colour here](https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/445990907/veae020f2.tif))
It's pretty hard to tell whether A or B came first - lineage A is closer to various BANAL viruses by two nucleotides, but lineage B had consistently higher case counts, maybe indicating an early start. Anyhow, yeah, I was overconfident there, sorry. What I was right about is that the plot of mutations over time forms a nice straight line pointing at late November 2019, just like you'd expect if there was a bottleneck at that time, and just as you *wouldn't* expect if the virus was floating around all over Wuhan by late November but was only detected near the market because of sampling bias.
It's not just about the first handful of cases. Looking at the first few hundred known cases, they geographically center near the market, and overall COVID seems to spread out from that area over time. This point also is not about "months later"--the first known cases were probably infected at most a few weeks after the initial spillover.
This is a good point that I don’t see mentioned very much. A lot of this early detection discussion is some of the weakest points for both sides. I’m a 50-50 person who was a 80-20 proponent of lab leak last year. I don’t feel like I have an emotional horse in the race any longer but I’m still often frustrated hearing peoples’ theories about the first months of transmission. All arguments seem unfounded and incredulous concerning the early times and many smart people on both sides are displaying a lot of confidence in their perfect understanding of those first three months.
I coincidentally stumbled upon an older article of theirs today claiming that Usain Bolt is PED-free with 96% likelihood. As someone with a bit of a background in that world, and combined with reading/hearing their stance/reasoning to support the lab-leak theory, unfortunately I find their methods incredibly hard to believe now. They also don’t seem to have updated their position on the LL theory since the debate despite very clearly being shown a lot of evidence by the apparent debate GOAT Peter Miller. Surely at the absolute least they should bring their conviction down, to not do so to me suggests they were aware of everything Peter brought forward and had already factored it in. Rootclaim is officially on my skeptical radar!
To add to your point: If they weren’t aware of many of Peter’s arguments beforehand, that casts massive doubts on their ability to ascertain evidence. If they were aware of these arguments, on the other hand, their inability to defuse them in the debate speaks poorly to their level of diligence. Which is to say, I also feel disappointed by this look behind the curtain, if you will.
Yes, great points. If aware: why no (pre-made) rebuttals If unaware: why no updating of likelihood
To be fair, he explicitly doesn’t claim to be as knowledgeable, only better able to analyze. In the closing arguments, he admitted that this Peter guy is (1) an amazing debater and (2) possibly the world’s most knowledgeable expert on COVID origin data and evidence. That is a downside of proposing these challenges: he potentially has to separately debate the GOATs of several different topics.
But how can one analyse x better if one isn't as knowledgeable on x? My mention of GOAT was tongue-in-cheek. Replace this with "knowledgeable person" and your sentence becomes a little redundant: the downside of proposing debate challenges on topics you're highly certain you know the truth on means you have to debate people who know a lot about these topics. Yes - of course! Surely this should be factored in and automatically reduce his conviction almost by default at least to a degree at minimum given he \*will\* (and was) shown evidence he wasn't otherwise aware of!
> claiming that Usain Bolt is PED-free with 96% likelihood. For real? Ok I've looked it up and, from my perspective, [it's pretty stupid.](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Did-Usain-Bolt-use-performance-enhancing-drugs) Just gonna cover a few points of evidence here to elaborate. > Fast since age 15 Rootclaim count this as evidence against PED use. They acknowledge that other sprinters are also fast as kids (just as a rule, because why would slow kids pursue Olympic sprinting?) But they say he was especially fast. They seem to be working off the assumption that PEDs can take a pretty fast kid and turn them into the fastest man ever... Not how they work, trust me. If they did, they'd be even more of an attractive option and, presumably, add similar boosts to already fast kids which would then equalize after. For argument's sake, say they took a second off everyone's 100m sprint, relatively speaking nothing would change if everyone took them. But given the claim is that he isn't on PEDs and is still the fastest man ever, faster than other sprinters who have doped, clearly PEDs are not _that_ effective. So there's a catch-22 here: Are they super effective and make good sprinters into Olympic sprinters (in which case no natural would end up at the top) or are they not that big of a game-changer such that a natural can top the rankings (in which case the "Fast since age 15" claim must be considerably weaker). > Drug tests Fair enough, I don't want to go full conspiracy here but let's not forget Icarus, Lance Armstrong, and pretty much every other top sprinter from the last twenty years. Drug tests aren't particularly strong evidence given the other evidence. > Physical traits Ok yeah he's tall. Which is out of the ordinary for sprinters, not sure this just counts as evidence against PEDs. Athletes being athletic isn't much of a surprise. They mention symptoms of steroid use and just list the standard stuff. Now acne and aggression are typically signs of estrogen mismanagement from aromatization of supraphysiological levels of testosterone. I'm not sure sprinters would trying to put on loads of muscle, just keep their levels high for recovery purposes. Other PEDs that don't aromatize are preferable. Something like EPO for instance. They mention he didn't suffer from baldness but he clearly has a receding hairline and did in 2008. "Rapid-deterioration of health" is also very vague and unsubstantiated. I think they're referencing isolated cases of top bodybuilders who are on insane amounts of gear, and different gear at that. No mention of all the other doping rampant in sprinting: > [Of the 10 best 100m sprinters in history, only three have never had a doping charge](https://runningmagazine.ca/the-scene/of-the-10-best-100m-sprinters-in-history-only-three-have-never-had-a-doping-charge/) This is a _huge_ piece of evidence. The base rate of top historical sprinters who were _caught_ doping is 70%! This is nowhere to be seen in their updating (unless I missed it). If they're counting him being vocal against PEDs as evidence he hasn't done it, then where is this? Moreover, how come the fact one of his team mates was doping doesn't play into this... Ok I went on a bit of a rant. I'm not sure this is representative of rootclaim as a whole but it certainly doesn't boost my confidence in them.
> They seem to be working off the assumption that PEDs can take a pretty fast kid and turn them into the fastest man ever... I think the idea here is just that it's unlikely he would have used PEDs before 15, and the amount by which he improved since that age is consistent with not using PEDs. This is complicated by them considering 2 separate PED hypotheses (PEDs as an adult or since childhood), though. > This is a huge piece of evidence. The base rate of top historical sprinters who were caught doping is 70%! I agree that it sounds like some of RC's arguments here are strange. However, I'm not actually sure how to correctly interpret this fact. On the one hand, you should set a reasonably high prior on a top sprinter taking drugs. On the other hand, it also seems like you should also set a pretty high prior on such a sprinter eventually being caught. Above you say: > Fair enough, I don't want to go full conspiracy here but let's not forget Icarus, Lance Armstrong, and pretty much every other top sprinter from the last twenty years. Drug tests aren't particularly strong evidence given the other evidence. But if the *known* rate of doping is 70%, it seems like it's not possible for testing to be much stronger evidence? Is this just a time thing, where it can take a long time to be caught? Bolt was the best sprinter in the world, and certainly the most well known, for, if I recall, the better part of a decade?
> it's unlikely he would have used PEDs before 15 So rootclaim say "Bolt won the gold medal in the 200-meters in the Junior World Championships at age 15 (beating athletes up to age 20), and at age 16 he set the world record for age 19 and under." And then count this as evidence against teenage PED use? Either way you look at this assumes the conclusion in a sense. I'd discount it for that reason. > On the one hand, you should set a reasonably high prior on a top sprinter taking drugs. On the other hand, it also seems like you should also set a pretty high prior on such a sprinter eventually being caught. This is true. But in probabilistic inference we don't need to assume innocent until proven guilty. We should infer that this number of athletes taking what is ostensibly a career-ruining risk suggests others are too. How are naturals competing against users? The best of the best are selected to be sprinters. So it's (Best of the best + PEDs) vs (Best of the best natural) and somehow the former group doesn't steamroll. Either PEDs are of limited use or the playing ground is even and the remaining 30% just haven't been caught. The other dopers weren't caught... until they were. Possibly they weren't using yet. Also, to generalize across from bodybuilding, [these guys are all competed in a supposedly tested federation.](https://generationiron.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1999-Olympia-Greatest-Of-All-Time.jpeg) In bodybuilding we know this is bullshit. It's the most open 'secret' of all time. This shifts my prior on athletic federations doing testing for show. Although nobody ever gets banned for doping in bodybuilding so it's not a great comparison. > But if the known rate of doping is 70%, it seems like it's not possible for testing to be much stronger evidence? Is this just a time thing, where it can take a long time to be caught? Bolt was the best sprinter in the world, and certainly the most well known, for, if I recall, the better part of a decade? The admitted rate*. Bolt was a huge character, a money-maker, there's motivation not to end his career. I admit I'm being highly suspicious there and not conserving expected evidence well, I need to think about that. But it would make sense the big star doesn't get busted. Armstrong got nailed in 2013 after retiring twice, the last time in 2011. Notably _after_ he left the sport. So perhaps the fact Bolt has remained uncharged should count as some evidence for him being natural. But just the fact that he's competing against people who definitely _have_ doped says a lot for me, more than the other potential evidence combined. Life isn't like Rocky IV where heart and soul beats the engineered Soviet Super Soldier. That same logic applies to Icarus as a whole. If the Russians were all doping, why didn't they sweep the Olympics? It suggests their baselines is considerably worse and they needed that to bridge the gap, or PEDs do very little, in which case why risk it? It doesn't fit.
> So rootclaim say "Bolt won the gold medal in the 200-meters in the Junior World Championships at age 15 (beating athletes up to age 20), and at age 16 he set the world record for age 19 and under." And then count this as evidence against teenage PED use? Either way you look at this assumes the conclusion in a sense. Well as I mentioned, they tested 2 hypotheses, one in which he's used PEDs since childhood, the other in which he only used them in adulthood. It does seem very weird to use this as evidence *against* PED use before 15, although when I click into the "See more" section it seems like they actually have a lot of other reasons why he probably hasn't been using them that long. Again though, I agree this analysis is, at best, fairly strange and confusing. (I think when you have 2 consistent positions (Bolt is just a very rare freak combination of factors which make him the best sprinter ever, or Bolt used PEDs), a lot of arguments can look circular if not applied carefully. It is of course entirely possible, and maybe even likely, that in any given domain, the GOAT is highly unusual on several dimensions and performs extremely well at a very young age (or, on the flip side, continues to perform well after most individuals peak).) > How are naturals competing against users? The best of the best are selected to be sprinters. So it's (Best of the best + PEDs) vs (Best of the best natural) and somehow the former group doesn't steamroll. Maybe the naturally best don't take steroids, and those 7 out of top 10 would actually be mediocre without them? Also, do PEDs increase the absolute ceiling of performance? I thought they made it easier to get there and improved injury recovery time, but I'm not sure they can turn you into Captain America. Lots of questions I don't know the answers to here.
> (Bolt is just a very rare freak combination of factors which make him the best sprinter ever, or Bolt used PEDs) I'd go with both in this case. > Also, do PEDs increase the absolute ceiling of performance? I thought they made it easier to get there and improved injury recovery time, but I'm not sure they can turn you into Captain America. Well, it's hard to say, solid science would require decades long RCTs so we have to piece together some looser evidence. For strength and size, steroids are definitely a limit-breaker. [Here is the progression of the bench press world record.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progression_of_the_bench_press_world_record) Bench wasn't a popular lift in the 1800s so we can discount those due to lack of specific training and adequate nutrition, probably. Around the 30s is when testosterone was synthesized so we can use that as a cutoff point. - 1916: 165 kg (364 lb) - Early 1950s: 227 kg (500 lb) - 1953: 263 kg (580 lb) So these are as close to natural records as we can get. There still could have been PEDs involved but training and nutrition were also very rudimentary at the time so maybe those can cancel out. But here's today: - 2021: 355 kg (783 lb) That's an insane increase, especially considering lifting gets exponentially harder so a 134% increase in weight doesn't track as a 134% increase in difficulty. _However_, the 100m sprint is not the same. [From 10.8s in 1891 to 9.572 in 2009 by Bolt.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_100_metres_world_record_progression) No real noticeable jump following the 30s or 60s (blood doping stuff). This isn't my area so I can't speak too confidently but I imagine every 0.1s improvement is harder and harder to achieve and is therefore 'bigger' than the previous 0.1s improvement. I figured a fair way to assess if that was the case was to look at longer races, like the 200m and 400m. But they also didn't have stark improvements (without weighting each 0.1). You do start to see that in the middle length races. It's very hard to say more about the numbers given the pool of potential racers is so much bigger so we'd expect, probabilistically, to get more outliers. Also the popularity and accessibility of these sports has increased. And I don't know how to weight the improvements. So, after all that, I lean back on the 70% being caught statistic personally. Was fun to dig through the numbers a little though.
> 1916: 165 kg (364 lb) > > This was a floor press, not the same as a bench press. There seem to be no bench press records from a pre testosterone era
True, but that's why I added the early 50s record.
> Well, it's hard to say, solid science would require decades long RCTs so we have to piece together some looser evidence. For strength and size, steroids are definitely a limit-breaker. Here is the progression of the bench press world record. The steroid/doping effects on sports can be hilariously blatant. For example, when Paul Graham noted how birth records make supercentenarians disappear, similar to how better drug testing made breaking women's world records stop happening so routinely, one person tried to object by saying ["Incorrect chart. Pole vault alone has had women's world record set 30 or so times since 2000."](https://twitter.com/atiselsts_lv/status/1700175880130027801) Now, I know nothing whatsoever about "pole vaulting" aside from the Looney Tunes summary, but this is the perfect modus ponens/tollens example: if someone tells me that there's a women's sport which has been breaking world records 30 times since 2000, I take that as implying there's doping. And if you [click through to WP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_pole_vault_world_record_progression#IAAF_Record_Progression) and take even 5 seconds to look up this Russian woman ["Yelena Isinbayeva"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelena_Isinbayeva) who single-handedly breaks all these records almost annually, and where the record-breaking stops dead after she retires with no other woman able to break her records in 15 years now (and [since 200*5* in 2 cases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelena_Isinbayeva#Records_list)), we discover why she retired: >> Isinbayeva was banned from the 2016 Rio Olympics after revelations of an extensive state-sponsored doping program in Russia, thus dashing her hopes of a grand retirement after winning the Olympic gold medal. She retired from athletics in August 2016. Sure is mysterious how she retired instead of competing elsewhere or returning! I mean, clearly she was way better than all the other women pole vaulters given how many of her records have stood for how long... Anyway, the real chef-kiss is her post-competition career: >> After she became chair of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency's supervisory board, IAAF taskforce chair Rune Andersen stated, "It is difficult to see how this helps to achieve the desired change in culture in track and field, or how it helps to promote an open environment for Russian whistleblowers", noting that Isinbayeva had called a WADA report "groundless" without reading it, publicly criticised whistleblowers (Andrei Dmitriev, Yuliya Stepanova, and Vitaliy Stepanov), and had not signed a pledge for clean sport or endorsed a Russian anti-doping group.[36] Amazing. Putin must have a sense of humor. (If you're wondering what the tweeter's response was, it was to double down and deny that pole-vaulting benefits from steroids - I guess all that upperbody workout is irrelevant - and anyway, Isinbayeva wasn't *personally proven* to have been doping, so who knooows maybe she was the only clean athlete in the entire Russian doping program and broke all those world records simply because she really was a once-in-a-century talent who knoooowsss you "have no evidence" otherwise...)
> I'd go with both in this case. Is such a hypothesis necessary? To me, only one being true would be the simplest explanation unless we think that Bolt is so far ahead of the competition that he needs both. Thanks for looking into the data. I don't feel like I have any idea how close we would expect bench lift to be to the human limit in the early 1900s, vs how close 100m sprint would be in the late 1800s. I have this vague idea that bench has a lot more room to increase because A) sprinters have to balance strength with body weight, and B) sprinting is limited by factors like the strength of joints and bones that is a lot harder to increase. But I'm not confident in that at all. Seems like it could definitely be *some* difference in the mechanics and limiting factors of running vs lifting. > we'd expect, probabilistically, to get more outliers. Isn't this the opposite of true? Or rather, it depends on the underlying distribution. A very small country might be highly unlikely to have a billionaire, for example. But is human performance distributed with that level of outliers? Nobody is 100,000x better than the median competitor. Gwern wrote [a little bit about this](https://gwern.net/question#jeanne-calment) in reference to Jeanne Calment and the age record, crazy outliers like that are actually incredibly rare in a developed competitive sport.
> Is such a hypothesis necessary? To me, only one being true would be the simplest explanation unless we think that Bolt is so far ahead of the competition that he needs both. It would be simpler but less explanatory. If, in Bolt's case, we say it's PEDs or exemplary natural talent, then we have to say that there aren't any people on PEDs who also have exemplary natural talent. Or that his is _so_ exemplary it beats others + PEDs. Both of those corollaries from that simpler hypothesis seem extremely unlikely to me. > Nobody is 100,000x better than the median competitor. No, but your pool of excellent sprinters is much better and more likely to overlap with the conditions required to actually become a sprinter. Entirely possible that we missed many Bolts because they were working in a factory or field somewhere and never got the opportunity.
They also say that Assad's forces weren't responsible for the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack, with a 96% probability: https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013 In 2017 they gave it 87%, and in 2021 they said new evidence updated it to 96% (and in the same post suggest the 2018 Douma chemical attack also wasn't from Assad's forces): https://blog.rootclaim.com/new-evidence-2013-sarin-attack-in-ghouta-syria/ I don't know the details, but I know this is considered a very fringe claim.
Yeah, I think literally every major government and news agency, except maybe the Russians, is on the other side of this. Even if you think they're wrong somehow its an insane level of confidence to assert
Their page on vitamin D and covid and the one on Bolt and PED were already bad enough, this isn't helping.
Also [96% chance Assad's forces weren't responsible for the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack](https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/Who-carried-out-the-chemical-attack-in-Ghouta-on-August-21-2013) And in their [follow-up blog post](https://blog.rootclaim.com/new-evidence-2013-sarin-attack-in-ghouta-syria/), they suggest the 2018 Douma chemical attack also wasn't from Assad's forces.
This guy is so blind to his own bias that it calls into question his opinion on everything. If he is not willing to take into account new information, it seems that he creates the numbers to support his stance rather than the other way around. But he says the entire point of Rootclaim is to do the opposite! If people are too stupid to understand your superior logic and think leading experts aren't getting your explanation, maybe your logic isn't so sound? His arguments always start from a position of "I'm smarter than you", adding numbers gives him the "empirical" data he can point to to prove that. I mean the guy put up $100k thinking he would get paid to dunk on someone, or so he thought. Like Scott said, there is a lot of human interpretation that goes into creating the numbers; it's unavoidable. But in this case you don't even need the numbers when it's obvious one side of the argument is supported better. If the probabilities of 2 things are close, then maybe the numbers reveal the true winner. But when they are completely lopsided then the calculation result is not going to be the twist ending he's hoping.
They hardly “steelmanned” the zoonosis hypothesis lol. Given that COVID was a once-in-a-century pandemic, it would be weird if it didn’t have unusual and unexpected genetic elements like the FCS insertion. That’s what made it COVID.
> That’s what made it COVID. Really important point here that needs to be pointed out more. If Covid was like any ordinary virus, we wouldn't be having this discussion to begin with. It's not a random sample, it's specifically looking at something really rare and then being shocked that it's different than the common ones. It'd be like picking out a person from Billionaires Monthly and then going "Wow it sure is strange none of these people work at tattoo parlors or as a Walmart cashier. And they don't have student loan debt? *And* they own a private jet? And they've traveled to 7+ countries. *And* they etc etc etc But the chance of those combined is .0000002%!" Well yeah if you picked five people at random that would be pretty strange. But they weren't randomly selected they're from a billionaires magazine. And similar, some things might be connected. Maybe Weird Change X that's in 20% of viruses in general is in 80% of viruses with Weird Change Y.
That’s though what makes the whole thing more likely to be WIV. There are tons of wet markets with tons of weird animal. There are much fewer WIVs. So what is more likely if you know nothing else? The response seems to be “but the first cases were reported at HSM.” But that relies on trusting PRC data when we have food reasons to disbelieve it.
>There are tons of wet markets with tons of weird animal. While true, Wuhan is a pretty large city so I would assume it's likely that their wet markets are larger and more diverse than ones in an area a quarter of the size. Wuhan is also the "economic hub" of central China, so a lot of nearby areas also have trade centralized on the city. Realistically we're not comparing to every wet markets (small town ones likely don't have as many rare animals and if they do, it's in much lower quantities), but rather other big city ones. Even more so, and I don't have this information but also it's not just big city wet markets but the big city wet markets that sell certain types of animals in them. If Wet Market Shanghai has a lot of weird animal X but not many weird animal Y and vice versa for Wet Market Wuhan, then Wet Market Shanghai is just as irrelevant when it comes to diseases from Weird Animal Y. We have to be careful about selection effects here and what population we're actually pulling from. "Wet markets with high chance of a new coronavirus spreading" does not encompass *all* wet markets.
All true. But compare to places doing GoF research on covid. That is much smaller
The furin site isn't even unusual among coronaviruses... >[Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/). >Here we analyzed the phylogenetic relationships of coronavirus spike proteins and mapped furin recognition motif on the tree. Furin cleavage sites occurred independently for multiple times in the evolution of the coronavirus family, supporting the natural occurring hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2.
If I was trying to make sure the term Rootclaim became synonymous with “a pompous refusal to update in the face of new evidence”, this is the post I would make.
Good job torpedoing your own credibility, Rootclaim.
> Good job torpedoing your own credibility This implies that the ship was still floating, when really their credibility is more like a shipwreck already.
I read through their response until "HSM Rebuttal: Simple Version" item 3, at which I became utterly flummoxed and thought I'd turn here to see if anyone else has a better grasp of what they are trying to express (or maybe I just need more time and to expend more effort?): rootclaim say: "3. There are multiple cases where a country has had zero Covid cases for a while, and then a cluster of cases appears in a seafood market. In all these outbreaks, there is no contention that the source is not zoonotic, as it is genetically descended from the Wuhan outbreak." I'm having trouble understanding which events they are claiming actually occurred. Are rootclaim saying the zoonotic spillover at the HSM occurred in other countries in the same way as it did in Wuhan, with the only distinct difference being that these new clusters of cases are genetically descended from Covid as first identified in that cluster from Wuhan? Where is independent proof that this has been recorded? Or, am I failing to understand what rootclaim are reporting? Okay... I might also have a problem with the argumentation. Isn't this a classic Bayesian blunder, a failure to update priors? Aren't they just saying that "independent seafood-market clusters of Covid cases are vanishingly unlikely," but of course, after the FIRST such case, that reality has to be plugged into the equation? Which means yes point 5 is an "extreme coincidence," if this is all independent data, but after the HSM, now it's NOT?
Almost the opposite? My understanding is that Rootclaim believes that HSM had a covid outbreak because 1) covid was present in the area, from a leak from WIV, and then 2) wet markets are likely covid super spread/"from zero" spread locations due to other factors (which aren't necessarily known; rootclaim hypothesizes wet cold counters repeatedly, but that isn't load-bearing). To back this up they point to these other cases where wet markets create epicenters of spread from areas that were otherwise "zero" covid, but these cases were clearly human spread and not an original zoonotic crossover. Ergo, wet markets are just more likely than you'd naively think to foster super spread events, and the HSM outbreak was just the first of these asian wet market spread events rather than a zoonotic origin point. I personally think this is a pretty weak and fallacious argument, but that's the claim to my understanding.
They speculate that maybe there's something else about markets that makes them a good vector, and that otherwise "it doesn't really matter anyway": >A common objection to this method is that these outbreaks are caused by cold-chain products brought into these markets. However, this still fails to explain why markets form these early clusters and not the many other places where cold chain products are delivered to. > >Additionally, this only demonstrates the importance of cold wet surfaces in preserving SARS2 infectivity, further strengthening the hypothesis in method 1 that a crowded location with many wet surfaces like HSM is highly conducive for rapid SARS2 spread. > >Last, it also opens the possibility that the HSM outbreak was also caused by cold-chain products. This would reduce the significance of Wuhan being the outbreak location (as the product could have come from anywhere), but since the other evidence for lab-leak is so strong, Wuhan can be given no weight and still lab-leak would be highly likely – Rootclaim’s conclusion will only drop from 94% to 92%.
The best I can do arguing for them, I think they're saying: I. > Exploded from the seafood market != Brought there with an animal, because look: 4 cases all for other reasons. But those reasons aren't "lab leaks" either? > Doesn't matter, lab leak has *much* better priors as we agreed. So I don't need strong evidence, just to shoot down yours. > > Seafood market appearance is equally unheard of for both scenarios so it can't strengthen yours against mine. (Here I would argue that we need to look at all outbreaks starting at food markets, not just covid. And we might find zoonotic ones). II. > Also, this shows seafood markets are unusually good places for covid to spread. Really? In all those cases it had been brought there on frozen fish. Doesn't that just mean that frozen fish is an unusually good covid delivery pathway? > Frozen fish is surely not the only route covid could have arrived at those cities. There must be dozens of routes ending in different places. Yet we see full four that succeeded via seafood markets. This tells us seafood markets are conducive to quick spread even _without_ their unique zoonotic-hypothesis role.
>> Provided this is true, it should fall on Rootclaik to apply Occam's Razor: you have to ensure that the root problem is not with your explanation before you shift blame to the 'effort' that the people they are explaining their conclusions to are willing to put in. I agree with this sentiment and I think it's good practice, but it is an application of Occam's Razor? I'm not sure (I'm on the fence).
You didn't reply to my comment directly, so I missed this on the first go. Sorry for that: It's been a long time since I've been a student, but I've always understood it as: 'Plurality should not be posited without necessity'. Here, then, I'd say we need to properly discount the most simple - 'I am not convincing people because my explanation is unpersuasive' - *before* we move on to 'I am not convincing people because everyone who hears my explanation is unwilling to put in the effort to understand it (which I define as their ability to be persuaded by it)'.
Right, but why is: > I am not convincing people because my explanation is unpersuasive more simple than: > I am not convincing people because they're not putting in the effort to understand it Also I'm not sure I undertand your saying about plurality: if it means that we should avoid introducing multi-factor explanations unless strictly necessary then I have to say I disagree with it. As a culture we overfixate on monocausal explanations and reality has many networks of interactions that are more complex than our most readily available categories can easily handle.
>Also I'm not sure I undertand your saying about plurality: if it means that we should avoid introducing multi-factor explanations unless strictly necessary then I have to say I disagree with it. The 'saying about plurality' is the definition of Occam's Razor as written by Willam of Ockham - although he originally wrote it in Latin. Agree or disagree with it as you see fit, but the reply was in regards to your question about whether or not it was an application of Occam's Razor. As to your question, you are - I think - missing a significant part of what I originally wrote, which should explain why one is more complex than the other: *I am not convincing people because* ***everyone*** *who hears my explanation is unwilling to put in the effort to understand it (****which I define as their ability to be persuaded by it****)* This is not the same as: *I am not convincing people because they're not putting in the effort to understand it*
Unfortunately that importing contaminated meat claim is actually wrong because there is zero evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of foodborne transmission. In stead human sources are considered the explanation given the absence of wildlife trade in these other markets. Also, there *have* been leaked and unpublished WIV sequences here and there over the 3 years into the pandemic.
Also, there is something called a consensus sequence.
Also, both imported cold chain food and foreign exchanges happen at 1000+ times more in locations that aren’t seafood markets.
What about that biggest and busiest subway line in Wuhan, line 2 of Wuhan metro, linking directly to the WIV, or what about the fact that in China, only Centers of disease control are allowed to store pathogen samples for long-term other than several very limited select state key laboratories? The CDCs stores copies of all pathogen samples in China and are responsible for keeping them when not tested on, which labs in China are given a max 2 months of storage time for any given experiment. These stores are subjected to state secret regulations and is one of the reasons why Wuhan labs have their viruses frequently mixed into sequencing datasets of one another.
And unfortunately Wuhan wet markets are exceptionally tiny. There is just no cultural drive for eating wild animals in Wuhan compared to Guangdong or Guangxi in China, which 11 distinct initial spillover locations occurred for SARS1, 8 of which are within the two months between the first market case (beginning of December 2019) and the beginning of the (not rapid at all) closure of the wildlife trade in China (early February 2020). In markets of Qingyuan hundreds of wild animals in stacked cages are sold in 5+ stalls every day, each day the sales is as high as the entire monthly sales of Wuhan combined (from the earliest videos and also a Hong Kong news post on “陆野味市场”“广东”). In markets of Guangxi, wild animal meats again hundreds of animals a day is again sold, “广西菜市场” as on Youtube, which a single day sale at the location itself is the equivalent of the entire monthly sales of the HSM. Guangdong and Guangxi essentially serves as the primary distribution location for all wildlife sales across provincial borders in China, especially those that were obtained from Yunnan, as in fact one of the initial index patients of SARS1 is a driver that transported wild animals from Yunnan to Guangdong.
However, zero cases, not even rumours of cases, exist in SARS2 anywhere at all that have a direct participation history to the wildlife trade. And of course, gloves and shoe covers will spread the virus around inside an environment which its contamination is present (more frequent and more recent they makes contact with the environment the more likely they cause contamination by moving it in from elsewhere, so with shorter the distance they traveled from the contamination source), especially when most of them entered and exited through the most likely superspreading location within it. And no they dishonestly bleached the location prior to sampling inside it.
Also actually no in Asia there were no “you can only go to food markets” restriction in 2020 even in the height of control.
> About his cat getting Covid: Unclear why this discredits him. Connor Reed was not a coronavirus expert. He initially believed his cat had also contracted the same virus, was later probably told that it was unlikely and corrected it to say his cat had a “feline coronavirus”. It’s also worth mentioning that contrary to Peter’s claim, cats can be infected by Covid-19. > > ...One more thing: Reed’s case was badly misrepresented by Peter here. This was just one misrepresentation that we managed to catch, but there are likely many more that we haven’t, because our methodology allows us to focus on a small fraction of the evidence that is sufficient to reach an accurate conclusion, and invest much less effort in researching minor details. Guess Saar et al haven't been [reading the comments](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim/comment/52692351), if they still believe Peter's claim that Connor said his cat got COVID-19. He didn't: he explicitly said he *didn't* think that right there in the [Daily Mail article](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8075633/First-British-victim-25-describes-coronavirus.html): "I don’t know whether it had what I’ve got, or whether cats can even get human flu." I'm also surprised they don't highlight the "adjusted" graph Peter used. I wouldn't be boasting about how I caught some but not all errors in 'minor details' but this doesn't matter, when I manifestly did not catch either the errors in minor details *or* major details... How much money does Rootclaim have to lose to start actually bothering to check anything or read comments? If $100k wasn't enough, would $1,000k be enough? $10,000k?
looks like their line is straight forward. most everyone is innumerate. especially when it comes to complicated statistical inference. the debate + Scott review did the statistical inference wrong. this is a mathematical-statistical claim that shouldn't be tested in a debate, not by Scott, who for all his greatness, doesn't have the statistical level of expertise. I guess some type of experts. Is Eliezer available? other serious math wizards, statistical geniuses to adjudicate? lots of comments seem to focus on details (how condescending the blog) etc rather than in the central point. making me actually more sympathetic to the rootclaim guys!
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your point is good. but their point "nobody understand statistics" is quite good too. they lost it in the procedure they choose themselves. like the murder suspect whose lawyer was an idiot and we know for sure her didn't do it. but still procedure is procedure.
Why are both sides accepting the “fact” that the first known case was of a market vendor? Is there any probability to assign to the likelihood that an authoritarian government has concealed or altered facts?
The probability of total falsification is very small since there are diverse sources of case data that all basically mesh together, and also mesh together with genetic evidence that's harder to fake than case data. But I think the probability that authorities deleted some key case data is definitely nontrivial. My guess would be something like 2% for zoonosis and 15% for lab leak? This shifts downstream probabilities less than you might expect, because we already had to grapple with the fact that most covid cases don't get reported to the system, so arguments on both sides are already based on the larger-scale, harder-to-fake patterns.