Scott Alexander recently accused Curtis Yarvin of selling out by embracing MAGA, even though Mencius Moldbug once warned of the dangers of right-wing populism.
My attitude is: If you can't convince people you'll govern better than the existing establishment, what are you even doing? This is why cultivating human capital is key. Excellent piece.
Nobody should tell Yarvin about the sex disparity in crime! It makes the racial disparity look like nothing. I guess we should blanket distrust men and make sure women are running everything. The racialist (racist?) "just asking quesions" musings about crime seem precisely to me like Dworkin-esque feminist man fear. Obsession with disparity as a meaningful metric for thinking about individuals is another uniting principle of the woke left and woke right.
This is why the crime/per capita/race stats people are so disingenuous. Biological sex is a far greater predictor of crime than race. Also, for the most part neighborhoods are racially self-segregated in the US. The greatest victims of per capita racial crime are other racial minorities. However, the conversation gets cut conveniently short to avoid discussing that stat.
‘Woke’ Left, ‘Woke’ Right. They’re all cut from a similar cloth.
A major part Yarvin's of whole thesis was that social evils are created by prestige-hungry, compromised intellectuals who blindly overthrow instutions of epistemic authority in favor of disordered, self-serving rabble governments. Et tu mencius?
“No, you see, it’s a good thing that Trump supporters will ignore anything bad he does, because then we get closer to fascism I mean democratic monarchy. Don’t worry, it won’t turn out like Hitler because… uhhh…. we don’t have the fuel for it.”
The latter part in particular is exactly the kind of “end of history” historical ignorance and hubris that Mencius Moldbug would’ve torn him to shreds for.
Moldbug's UR also degraded way back. He started out saying Republicans should all stop contesting elections, forcing the Democrats to take responsibility for a one-party state, as "formalism" was supposed to be about. Then he started fantasizing about President Palin and a "True Election".
It's true, they were always bad posts, but if you only had UR and knew nothing about Gray Mirror, that would look like bad phase. Late UR is very good and profound.
I bet somebody in the comments section told him that all one party states sucked. His usual reply (he surely replied this way) that dictatorships' violence and censorship was caused by their demotist nature wasn't that convincing.
Because censorship and repression has always existed even in absolute monarchies.
Why? Because ideas are always dangerous to rulers, because people act based on ideas.
The problem with Yarvinism is that it's trying to reinvent the wheel basically.
My recollection is that he explained the problem with contemporary dictatorships (vs old monarchies) was that they were insecure, because they lacked legitimacy. Hence they had to take extreme measures to stay in power.
He was initially recommending Austrian economists (perhaps because the LVMI was a big contrarian internet resource), then later did an about-face and said that Carlyle and the German Historical School had been correct, lauding the "wisdom" of statesmen above the standard economic critiques dating back to the 19th century.
Someone set up a fifteen hour debate with a prize of $100,000 on its origins and the three judges, all highly qualified in virology, all said the zoonotic dude won hands down.
Both Alexander and the guy who argued the zoonotic side had leaned towards lab leak, prior to Zoonotic Dude doing a crazy deep dive into the evidence.
I eventually settled on backing the zoonotic origin theory, after a lot of research, but before that I was more like 50/50 about the lab leak question.
But even when it seemed like a plausible idea to me, it was still obvious that the lab leak theory was being used by the populist right as a way to question science and authority in other ways.
And it was also clear that this story wasn't good for Trump, even if the lab leak theory turned out to be true, since he had ended the ban on gain of function research.
Back in 2021, I wrote an article kind of similar to yours, saying:
"It’s important to know where covid came from, because that could help us prevent a future pandemic. If the virus was actually a lab leak, we’d want to ban the type of research that created it. If it came from fur farming, maybe we’d want to avoid farming certain animals or change hygiene standards.
The reason most people talk about the lab leak theory has nothing to do with preventing pandemics. It has to do with politics.
Right wing news like to push the lab leak theory because it drives people to question authority.
If they can convince you the government is lying about the Wuhan lab, then you’re more likely to think the government is lying about vaccines or about ivermectin. It lets them ask if the government is also lying about the 2020 election results. It paints scientists as unreliable, so they can ask if global warming is real. It opens a window for doubt that can be used to push through other ideas.
Here’s the problem with this take: all that gain of function research happened while Trump was president.
Fauci has been in his role as the director of the NIAID since 1984. While Trump was president, people said he was fighting against the deep state, a set of unelected government officials. If anyone qualifies under that definition, it’s Dr Fauci.
After one lab did a questionable experiment on bird flu, the Obama administration banned gain of function research in 2014.
That ban lapsed in 2017, while Trump was president. If Rand Paul was concerned about the research, that would have been the time to say something. Some people did question the choice. Carl Bergstrom wrote a prescient opinion that this was a mistake.
So, the best case outcome for right-wing conspiracy theorists is they prove that Trump failed at controlling the deep state from funding deadly research. The worst is that the lab leak theory is wrong and we should really be worried about something else, like fur farming."
I agree with most of this, but think it's actually unimportant where COVID came from, at least assuming that we can't get more granular than "lab leak" or "zoonotic." We already know both can potentially lead to a pandemic. A single instance of one or the other leading to a pandemic shouldn't really result in our updating our priors on this. If you thought the benefits of GOF research (or just viral research, even if it was a lab leak, it wasn't necessarily GOF research) outweighed the risk, you probably still should. If you didn't, they you probably still shouldn't, even if we learn COVID was a zoonotic.
I agree with you that a lot of it was bad-faith efforts to shift the blame from Trump. I also think it was scaremongering by the anti-GOF research people, who want(ed) to use COVID as the poster child to scare people off GOF research without having to actually make the case, the same way MAGA uses the few crimes committed by immigrants to scaremonger over immigration.
The problem is that we don't have strong priors on the rates of either type of pandemic, so a single instance would actually update your priors substantially.
The annual risk of a gain of function caused pandemic is completely unknown, since that's something that's never happened before (other than possibly in the case of Covid-19). It could be almost zero. It could be 1 GoF pandemic in the last maybe 20 years that style of research has existed, so maybe 5% per year. The odds could even be higher, if labs were doing more such research in 2019 than the previous decades.
The difference between having zero gain of function pandemics vs. 1 every 20 years vs 1 every 10 years is substantial.
In the first scenario, we can just let the labs self regulate and nothing bad ever happens. In the last one, the world goes through a major disaster every 10 years, with millions of deaths, lockdowns, school closures, downstream political repercussions, etc.
It might be the case that such research is safe enough that we end up in the first scenario, regardless. But it might be the case that we need regulation to ensure we end up in that safe world.
On the natural side, we also don't have a good idea of the base rate -- we can make an estimate from history, but that could be wrong because our interactions with nature have changed, over time.
Covid is the worst respiratory virus since the Spanish flu:
So you might want to guess that a natural respiratory virus with Covid's severity comes every 100 years or so.
If that's true, we can just kind of ignore natural risks, and most people alive today will never experience another year like 2020.
But it's also possible that the rate has changed, because there are more people alive today, there are more animals farmed, there is more interaction with wildlife, and a pandemic can take off more easily in a crowded world.
Suppose that the natural rate is now more like 1 Covid like pandemic every 20 years, or every 10. You would then live through several more years like 2020, absent any effort to reduce the risks.
Since neither of these base rates are well known, confirming how Covid started would help substantially in understanding the odds and where to prioritize our efforts towards preventing another pandemic.
A quick skim is exactly the wrong way to deal with a technical issue. Here's the brief output of my long read of Scott's piece:
"Scott Alexander has now posted a lengthy Bayesian summary of his evaluation of the same debate. He obtains 17/1 odds favoring market ZW. He includes a net factor of 2000 based on the Worobey market location data. Any reasonable allowance for the chance that experts who do not themselves argue for LL (including then China CDC head Gao, current WHO chief scientist Farrar, inventor of the key synthesis techniques Baric) were correct in dismissing those biased data would shift Alexander’s odds to strongly favoring LL. Recognition of Wuhan’s particularly low share of the wildlife trade would shift these market-dependent odds even further toward LL."
No. You should have epistemic humility. This is entire reason why you shouldn't "do your own research" and instead "trust the experts."
The chain of reasoning is: I have followed Alexander for a long time. I trust that Scott Alexander is smart, tries very hard to be accurate, and was leaning towards lab leak ---> Scott listened to people who knew way more than him ---> Scott was strongly persuaded to the zoonotic theory ---> I trust Scott's conclusions.
This is the entire point. I'm not qualified to judge the origins. I have to rely on people I trust who have spent a lot more time on it than I have. In this case, that person in turn is trusting people who know way more than *him*.
Zoonotic Dude was bananas. Like, he'd read every single word ever written about COVID, and then researched the life histories of every single person even tangentially related to those writings.
And then he seamlessly switched to the molecular structure of every known COVID mutation. Complete savant.
He really was. It was a perfect example of an autistic hyper-focus really leading to a level of expertise I wouldn't have imagined possible in someone without the official training in such a specialized topic.
Just know that the reason Covid’s origins became important was because Trump supporters turned against first mitigation measures in 2020 and then against vaccines in spring 2021. So they believed Covid was developed in a lab in China…and they still preferred acquiring immunity from getting a virus they believe is manmade. So natural immunity was impossible according to Trump supporters—you either got immunity from an unnatural virus made in a lab in China…or you got it from an unnatural mRNA vaccine made in the West. MAGA believed unnatural immunity from a Chinese made virus with a little help from Fauci was superior to mRNA immunity.
And with immunity what they believe sort of makes sense. So if one believes mRNA vaccines are dangerous then you should just get the virus and get immunity from an unnatural virus. But once again, they started believing mitigation measures were ineffective before the vaccines were developed. So everyone did get Covid…but the data shows delaying getting Covid as long as possible to get vaccinated was the safest route…but low education Trump supporters reject the data and they rejected public health measures in late 2020. Wealthy older Republicans actually got vaccinated and did take Covid seriously and so it’s just low educated Republicans that have the terrible Covid death rates after the availability of the vaccines.
The key to the lab leak debate is that it has always been a red herring.
We know that there can be zoonotic spillovers. We know that there can be lab leaks. Whether this was a zoonotic spillover or a lab leak is essentially a matter of luck and shouldn't cause people to update their priors significantly. People should be weighing the risk of GOF research (or otherwise working with live pathogens) against the possibility that it could leak. Even if we proved that it caused COVID, it shouldn't change much because we know it can cause something like COVID any more than hearing about someone getting HIV should change your calculus regarding whether to have unprotected sex. You should have already been factoring that risk into your calculations.
If we could get more transparency into what actually caused it, like the details, not just whether it was zoonotic or lab leak, that might be helpful, as it would let us evaluate whether there is more we could be doing to avoid a repeat, but its unlikely we will ever find that out and merely arguing about whether it was a lab leak or not isn't going to get us that information.
It's also pretty clear that lab leak was raised in bad faith to shift the blame from Trump's bad handling of COVID to the Chinese. That wasn't a great way to argue, and you should downweight your confidence in anyone who makes that sort of bad argument. That doesn't mean that it was or wasn't a lab leak or that it is important whether it was. A bad-faith argument about it being a lab leak is still flawed, even if it later turns out to be true.
It also wasn't good that it was censored. Free speech is good. There was particularly little justification here because it wasn't directly leading to people endangering themselves or others (there is more room to censor dangerous medical recommendations, such as drinking bleach to protect against COVID). However, censorship is problematic regardless of whether a lab leak occurred. The fact that people censored the lab leak theory also doesn’t prove that there was a lab leak.
Essentially, there is no actionable information to be gained from determining whether it was a lab leak. It's mostly just a zombie argument between two sides trying to prove they were right when both sides were wrong in how they addressed the issue in the first place.
Moreover, we probably will never know, and people need to be more comfortable with certain questions being unanswerable or at least unanswerable based on any information we can hope to gather. Saying "I don't know" usually beats assuming that you have a concrete answer because 51% of the available information points in one direction or the other. We use burdens of proof in court, where we need to reach a conclusion, but for something like this, there's no particular reason we need to reach a conclusion.
As an aside, I don't really think the general public should debate GOF research. I don't know whether its a good idea or a bad idea, but I also don't think its the sort of thing where most people (including me) can get a good sense of the potential benefits of it, or our ability to prevent against the risks. I also think that it's the sort of thing, like GMOs or IVF, that causes people to freak out way past the actual risks, detracting from their ability to debate it. Some things really are best left to the experts.
On updating priors- yes, reasonable priors wouldn't be changed much by this N=1 event. Unfortunately a major slice of the virology community and their science press followers had and still have unreasonable priors. I looked at what this N=1 probable lab leak does to a distribution of plausible priors and it just does the obvious- cuts off the low tail of the distribution of lab leak prior odds. Needless to say, zoonosis remains comparable (e.g. H5N1).
For some of us it was never politically driven in the sense that you mean. Politically a lab leak is inconvenient because it can distract from the already weak sense that we're all in this together and because the Trumpers grabbed ownership of that hypothesis. But once you head down the road of deciding between scientific hypotheses on the basis of convenience, you're getting into dangerous territory- Lysenko, Aryan physics, PoMo BS...
Fair, but I am genuinely interested in whether it was zoonotic! For me, it's mostly about how frequently conspiracy theories are right. I think they almost never are, and if it's a lab leak, I will be forced to take them more seriously going forward.
I joked early on I was going with zoonotic, because of the two, it's the only theory that can be definitively proved, ie, finding the resevoir. The lab leak, even if true, will never be definitively proved. Heads I win, tails who knows.
But yes, I largely agree with what you said. Leaving aside GoF, the case against wet markets was already very strong, and I don't believe anything is being done there. So.
I'm not sure Lab Leak is a good example of a conspiracy theory, though. It was, and always should have been, treated as just an alternative hypothesis, like the theory that there were no WMDs.
A sort of corollary to this is that people assume that the fact that there was somewhat of a cover-up means that there was a conspiracy. Instead, even if it turns out to be true, it's likely that most or all (not including the CCP) of the people trying to suppress the theory were doing so because they thought it was false and didn't want the false story getting around.
Disagree. It really does matter if GoF research caused a pandemic or not. Many things are possible in theory, but theories often don't survive contact with reality. If COVID was not GoF, then zero diseases have ever been caused by GoF. If nothing else, that should make you more comfortable with current lab safety standards. OTOH, if research into an only moderately dangerous virus brought the world to its knees, then GoF should be banned.
It seems clear that there was a conspiracy to cover up how serious it was when the first cases were discovered. So that leaves whether it originated from the same scientific hubris that invented the hydrogen bomb, or just bad luck.
Yeah, tho Scott acknowledged that my analysis (giving heavy odds favoring lab leak) was very good. He wrote that he skipped reading it in detail because I used logarithms!
1. He gets an enormous factor from Worobey's case location data, without considering it's weird statistical techniques (see Stoyan and Chiu in J Royal Stats Soc A) or its glaring data reliability problem (see me in JRSSA).
2,He uses a city location factor based on human population rather than the much smaller share of the wildlife trade.
3. He misses key sequence features caught right away by the Defense Medical Intelligence agency. (All links are in my long substack.)
I hate citing authority, but there's a reason that the French National Academy of Medicine just voted overwhelmingly to accept a report that said the evidence favored a lab leak.
And one of the judges wrote out a response to your response.
If we're going to appeal to authority, I'm going to take the three judges who slogged through the entire debate, as well as the consensus of everyone who watched it.
That's why Peter Miller's performance was so impressive and necessary. Substack responses to responses to responses are necessarily piecemeal. Miller spent 15 hours going through every single piece of evidence. It's all well and good to try to pick at one of his contentions, but ultimately a regular person is going to fizzle out parsing the details of the third blog article. Then they throw up their hands and say "I guess we'll never know." It obfuscates, rather than clarifies.
Get Peter Miller to do a debate with you for $200k, with three qualified judges. If they say you won, I'll switch to lab leak.
Again, I'm not qualified to assess the quality of your work, and I'm not going to bother, especially since I would then have to read the judge's critique of your work, and most likely, someone else's critique of that critique, and so on.
But he backed out, because he thinks he's equivalent to Galileo, Semmelweis, and Einstein all put together, and that means that qualified scientists would not be able to appreciate his brilliant arguments:
Whoops- It's "National Center for Medical Intelligence" that prepared the report for the Defense Intelligence Agency. I shouldn't try to type so quickly!
The origins of Covid-19 are one of the most studied things about Covid (for the obvious reason that it’s very important to know where it came from) and yeah the bat-via-pangolin hypothesis is by far the most accepted theory.
Yes it is a coincidence that a virology lab that studies coronaviruses happened to be in the same city, but it’s a bit less of a coincidence when you consider that this research began after the SARS outbreak in 2002, which also came from bats. Turns out China just has a lot of bats that produce a lot of coronaviruses in close proximity to a lot of humans.
I don't know if you checked out Alexander's analysis, but it featured a photo of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market taken in *2014*, as an example of a place that could spark an epidemic. 😭
Unqualified Reservation's arguments degraded before Trump even came on the scene. He started fantasizing about President Palin and a "True Election", after earlier scoffing at populism and saying Republicans should all quit to force Democrats to take responsibility for a one-party state.
I feel like I missed the "Curtis Yarvin is smart and interesting arc" and now every take i see from him sounds like a high schooler who hates the world because he can't get laid.
On point analysis. Yarvin is saying that Trump is good because he opposes a corrupt elite and he’s willing to Koolaid man through norms that might get in the way of this fight.
But where’s the argument that this would be an improvement?
Somehow, i’m not reassured by Yarvin saying they’re too weak and ineffectual— that they lack the fuel— to inflict suffering at scale, while they otherwise revel in cruelty and stupidity
The problem with this and Scott's post is that it tries to engage with Yarvin as though his belief system is founded on ideas. He is a conflict theorist who dresses up in arguments to cosplay as an intellectual. Arguing with him about ideas is like explaining to a furry that they aren't a real dog.
Correct about Yarvin, though I'm guessing you've never met an actual furry before because the analogy doesn't make any sense. I know multiple furries, and zero of them think they are animals.
I think you're missing the point with the fuel analogies. He's not saying that right-wing populism is not dangerous because the fuel is weak. He's saying society is dead because the fuel has become weak in general. He wants right-wing populism to destroy stuff, get people really upset and ignite some long forgotten fuel across the board that will then lead us to a golden era (presumably destroying the dumb right-wing populism that ignited it).
This is like burning down your own house because you feel like you got too comfy and are not working hard enough. It's pretty dumb, but different from the dumbness you're assuming.
When people in charge complain rather than take responsibility I am reminded of this old Russian joke:
Moscow, 1953. Stalin calls in Khrushchev.
“Niki, I’m dying. Don’t have much to leave you. Just three envelopes. Open them, one at a time, when you get into big trouble.”
A few years later, first crisis. Khrushchev opens envelope 1: “Blame everything on me. Uncle Joe.”
A few years later, a really big crisis. Opens envelope 2: “Blame everything on me. Again. Good luck, Uncle Joe.”
Third crisis. Opens envelope 3: “Prepare three envelopes.”
Did you get that story from the movie “Traffic”?
My attitude is: If you can't convince people you'll govern better than the existing establishment, what are you even doing? This is why cultivating human capital is key. Excellent piece.
Nobody should tell Yarvin about the sex disparity in crime! It makes the racial disparity look like nothing. I guess we should blanket distrust men and make sure women are running everything. The racialist (racist?) "just asking quesions" musings about crime seem precisely to me like Dworkin-esque feminist man fear. Obsession with disparity as a meaningful metric for thinking about individuals is another uniting principle of the woke left and woke right.
This is why the crime/per capita/race stats people are so disingenuous. Biological sex is a far greater predictor of crime than race. Also, for the most part neighborhoods are racially self-segregated in the US. The greatest victims of per capita racial crime are other racial minorities. However, the conversation gets cut conveniently short to avoid discussing that stat.
‘Woke’ Left, ‘Woke’ Right. They’re all cut from a similar cloth.
Alexander body slammed him and he got embarrassed. He’s literally become everything he warned about.
A major part Yarvin's of whole thesis was that social evils are created by prestige-hungry, compromised intellectuals who blindly overthrow instutions of epistemic authority in favor of disordered, self-serving rabble governments. Et tu mencius?
“No, you see, it’s a good thing that Trump supporters will ignore anything bad he does, because then we get closer to fascism I mean democratic monarchy. Don’t worry, it won’t turn out like Hitler because… uhhh…. we don’t have the fuel for it.”
The latter part in particular is exactly the kind of “end of history” historical ignorance and hubris that Mencius Moldbug would’ve torn him to shreds for.
“The right isn’t here to pay off its friends” is amazing. Does he know who the FBI Director is?
Broke: Never meet your heroes.
Woke: Never ever, ever look at your hero's Twitter account 🤦
Curtis shouldn't have been your hero even back when he was saying:
> As a boomer, I am not and nor will I be on any “Twitter,”
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/scott-alexander-the-disappointed
My hero was Moldbug, not Curtis Yarvin.
Moldbug's UR also degraded way back. He started out saying Republicans should all stop contesting elections, forcing the Democrats to take responsibility for a one-party state, as "formalism" was supposed to be about. Then he started fantasizing about President Palin and a "True Election".
It's true, they were always bad posts, but if you only had UR and knew nothing about Gray Mirror, that would look like bad phase. Late UR is very good and profound.
I bet somebody in the comments section told him that all one party states sucked. His usual reply (he surely replied this way) that dictatorships' violence and censorship was caused by their demotist nature wasn't that convincing.
Because censorship and repression has always existed even in absolute monarchies.
Why? Because ideas are always dangerous to rulers, because people act based on ideas.
The problem with Yarvinism is that it's trying to reinvent the wheel basically.
My recollection is that he explained the problem with contemporary dictatorships (vs old monarchies) was that they were insecure, because they lacked legitimacy. Hence they had to take extreme measures to stay in power.
I still remember your comments on the old ur blog, TGGP. They were excellent.
And I agree with you, also his economics turned from libertarian to some vague corporatism with articles like “Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot”
He was initially recommending Austrian economists (perhaps because the LVMI was a big contrarian internet resource), then later did an about-face and said that Carlyle and the German Historical School had been correct, lauding the "wisdom" of statesmen above the standard economic critiques dating back to the 19th century.
They are the same person.
FYI, Scott Alexander is now 90% sure COVID's origins are zoonotic: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim
Someone set up a fifteen hour debate with a prize of $100,000 on its origins and the three judges, all highly qualified in virology, all said the zoonotic dude won hands down.
Both Alexander and the guy who argued the zoonotic side had leaned towards lab leak, prior to Zoonotic Dude doing a crazy deep dive into the evidence.
Yeah I haven't looked into it and that could be right.
I eventually settled on backing the zoonotic origin theory, after a lot of research, but before that I was more like 50/50 about the lab leak question.
But even when it seemed like a plausible idea to me, it was still obvious that the lab leak theory was being used by the populist right as a way to question science and authority in other ways.
And it was also clear that this story wasn't good for Trump, even if the lab leak theory turned out to be true, since he had ended the ban on gain of function research.
Back in 2021, I wrote an article kind of similar to yours, saying:
"It’s important to know where covid came from, because that could help us prevent a future pandemic. If the virus was actually a lab leak, we’d want to ban the type of research that created it. If it came from fur farming, maybe we’d want to avoid farming certain animals or change hygiene standards.
The reason most people talk about the lab leak theory has nothing to do with preventing pandemics. It has to do with politics.
Right wing news like to push the lab leak theory because it drives people to question authority.
If they can convince you the government is lying about the Wuhan lab, then you’re more likely to think the government is lying about vaccines or about ivermectin. It lets them ask if the government is also lying about the 2020 election results. It paints scientists as unreliable, so they can ask if global warming is real. It opens a window for doubt that can be used to push through other ideas.
Here’s the problem with this take: all that gain of function research happened while Trump was president.
Fauci has been in his role as the director of the NIAID since 1984. While Trump was president, people said he was fighting against the deep state, a set of unelected government officials. If anyone qualifies under that definition, it’s Dr Fauci.
After one lab did a questionable experiment on bird flu, the Obama administration banned gain of function research in 2014.
That ban lapsed in 2017, while Trump was president. If Rand Paul was concerned about the research, that would have been the time to say something. Some people did question the choice. Carl Bergstrom wrote a prescient opinion that this was a mistake.
So, the best case outcome for right-wing conspiracy theorists is they prove that Trump failed at controlling the deep state from funding deadly research. The worst is that the lab leak theory is wrong and we should really be worried about something else, like fur farming."
https://medium.com/p/52271c5c9b11
I agree with most of this, but think it's actually unimportant where COVID came from, at least assuming that we can't get more granular than "lab leak" or "zoonotic." We already know both can potentially lead to a pandemic. A single instance of one or the other leading to a pandemic shouldn't really result in our updating our priors on this. If you thought the benefits of GOF research (or just viral research, even if it was a lab leak, it wasn't necessarily GOF research) outweighed the risk, you probably still should. If you didn't, they you probably still shouldn't, even if we learn COVID was a zoonotic.
I agree with you that a lot of it was bad-faith efforts to shift the blame from Trump. I also think it was scaremongering by the anti-GOF research people, who want(ed) to use COVID as the poster child to scare people off GOF research without having to actually make the case, the same way MAGA uses the few crimes committed by immigrants to scaremonger over immigration.
The problem is that we don't have strong priors on the rates of either type of pandemic, so a single instance would actually update your priors substantially.
The annual risk of a gain of function caused pandemic is completely unknown, since that's something that's never happened before (other than possibly in the case of Covid-19). It could be almost zero. It could be 1 GoF pandemic in the last maybe 20 years that style of research has existed, so maybe 5% per year. The odds could even be higher, if labs were doing more such research in 2019 than the previous decades.
The difference between having zero gain of function pandemics vs. 1 every 20 years vs 1 every 10 years is substantial.
In the first scenario, we can just let the labs self regulate and nothing bad ever happens. In the last one, the world goes through a major disaster every 10 years, with millions of deaths, lockdowns, school closures, downstream political repercussions, etc.
It might be the case that such research is safe enough that we end up in the first scenario, regardless. But it might be the case that we need regulation to ensure we end up in that safe world.
On the natural side, we also don't have a good idea of the base rate -- we can make an estimate from history, but that could be wrong because our interactions with nature have changed, over time.
Covid is the worst respiratory virus since the Spanish flu:
https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/1492179265223282692
So you might want to guess that a natural respiratory virus with Covid's severity comes every 100 years or so.
If that's true, we can just kind of ignore natural risks, and most people alive today will never experience another year like 2020.
But it's also possible that the rate has changed, because there are more people alive today, there are more animals farmed, there is more interaction with wildlife, and a pandemic can take off more easily in a crowded world.
Suppose that the natural rate is now more like 1 Covid like pandemic every 20 years, or every 10. You would then live through several more years like 2020, absent any effort to reduce the risks.
Since neither of these base rates are well known, confirming how Covid started would help substantially in understanding the odds and where to prioritize our efforts towards preventing another pandemic.
Alexander's piece is quite convincing. You should take a quick skim.
A quick skim is exactly the wrong way to deal with a technical issue. Here's the brief output of my long read of Scott's piece:
"Scott Alexander has now posted a lengthy Bayesian summary of his evaluation of the same debate. He obtains 17/1 odds favoring market ZW. He includes a net factor of 2000 based on the Worobey market location data. Any reasonable allowance for the chance that experts who do not themselves argue for LL (including then China CDC head Gao, current WHO chief scientist Farrar, inventor of the key synthesis techniques Baric) were correct in dismissing those biased data would shift Alexander’s odds to strongly favoring LL. Recognition of Wuhan’s particularly low share of the wildlife trade would shift these market-dependent odds even further toward LL."
No. You should have epistemic humility. This is entire reason why you shouldn't "do your own research" and instead "trust the experts."
The chain of reasoning is: I have followed Alexander for a long time. I trust that Scott Alexander is smart, tries very hard to be accurate, and was leaning towards lab leak ---> Scott listened to people who knew way more than him ---> Scott was strongly persuaded to the zoonotic theory ---> I trust Scott's conclusions.
OK. let's humbly defer to the legendary computational biologist Nick Patterson.
https://npatterson.substack.com/p/yet-more-on-covid-origins
Why would I? I've never heard of him. Or you.
This is the entire point. I'm not qualified to judge the origins. I have to rely on people I trust who have spent a lot more time on it than I have. In this case, that person in turn is trusting people who know way more than *him*.
I was surprised how convincing it was.
Zoonotic Dude was bananas. Like, he'd read every single word ever written about COVID, and then researched the life histories of every single person even tangentially related to those writings.
And then he seamlessly switched to the molecular structure of every known COVID mutation. Complete savant.
He really was. It was a perfect example of an autistic hyper-focus really leading to a level of expertise I wouldn't have imagined possible in someone without the official training in such a specialized topic.
Just know that the reason Covid’s origins became important was because Trump supporters turned against first mitigation measures in 2020 and then against vaccines in spring 2021. So they believed Covid was developed in a lab in China…and they still preferred acquiring immunity from getting a virus they believe is manmade. So natural immunity was impossible according to Trump supporters—you either got immunity from an unnatural virus made in a lab in China…or you got it from an unnatural mRNA vaccine made in the West. MAGA believed unnatural immunity from a Chinese made virus with a little help from Fauci was superior to mRNA immunity.
lol, good point. Just layers and layers of stupidity. Like a baklava.
And with immunity what they believe sort of makes sense. So if one believes mRNA vaccines are dangerous then you should just get the virus and get immunity from an unnatural virus. But once again, they started believing mitigation measures were ineffective before the vaccines were developed. So everyone did get Covid…but the data shows delaying getting Covid as long as possible to get vaccinated was the safest route…but low education Trump supporters reject the data and they rejected public health measures in late 2020. Wealthy older Republicans actually got vaccinated and did take Covid seriously and so it’s just low educated Republicans that have the terrible Covid death rates after the availability of the vaccines.
The key to the lab leak debate is that it has always been a red herring.
We know that there can be zoonotic spillovers. We know that there can be lab leaks. Whether this was a zoonotic spillover or a lab leak is essentially a matter of luck and shouldn't cause people to update their priors significantly. People should be weighing the risk of GOF research (or otherwise working with live pathogens) against the possibility that it could leak. Even if we proved that it caused COVID, it shouldn't change much because we know it can cause something like COVID any more than hearing about someone getting HIV should change your calculus regarding whether to have unprotected sex. You should have already been factoring that risk into your calculations.
If we could get more transparency into what actually caused it, like the details, not just whether it was zoonotic or lab leak, that might be helpful, as it would let us evaluate whether there is more we could be doing to avoid a repeat, but its unlikely we will ever find that out and merely arguing about whether it was a lab leak or not isn't going to get us that information.
It's also pretty clear that lab leak was raised in bad faith to shift the blame from Trump's bad handling of COVID to the Chinese. That wasn't a great way to argue, and you should downweight your confidence in anyone who makes that sort of bad argument. That doesn't mean that it was or wasn't a lab leak or that it is important whether it was. A bad-faith argument about it being a lab leak is still flawed, even if it later turns out to be true.
It also wasn't good that it was censored. Free speech is good. There was particularly little justification here because it wasn't directly leading to people endangering themselves or others (there is more room to censor dangerous medical recommendations, such as drinking bleach to protect against COVID). However, censorship is problematic regardless of whether a lab leak occurred. The fact that people censored the lab leak theory also doesn’t prove that there was a lab leak.
Essentially, there is no actionable information to be gained from determining whether it was a lab leak. It's mostly just a zombie argument between two sides trying to prove they were right when both sides were wrong in how they addressed the issue in the first place.
Moreover, we probably will never know, and people need to be more comfortable with certain questions being unanswerable or at least unanswerable based on any information we can hope to gather. Saying "I don't know" usually beats assuming that you have a concrete answer because 51% of the available information points in one direction or the other. We use burdens of proof in court, where we need to reach a conclusion, but for something like this, there's no particular reason we need to reach a conclusion.
As an aside, I don't really think the general public should debate GOF research. I don't know whether its a good idea or a bad idea, but I also don't think its the sort of thing where most people (including me) can get a good sense of the potential benefits of it, or our ability to prevent against the risks. I also think that it's the sort of thing, like GMOs or IVF, that causes people to freak out way past the actual risks, detracting from their ability to debate it. Some things really are best left to the experts.
On updating priors- yes, reasonable priors wouldn't be changed much by this N=1 event. Unfortunately a major slice of the virology community and their science press followers had and still have unreasonable priors. I looked at what this N=1 probable lab leak does to a distribution of plausible priors and it just does the obvious- cuts off the low tail of the distribution of lab leak prior odds. Needless to say, zoonosis remains comparable (e.g. H5N1).
See https://michaelweissman.substack.com/i/142625697/the-prior-next-time
For some of us it was never politically driven in the sense that you mean. Politically a lab leak is inconvenient because it can distract from the already weak sense that we're all in this together and because the Trumpers grabbed ownership of that hypothesis. But once you head down the road of deciding between scientific hypotheses on the basis of convenience, you're getting into dangerous territory- Lysenko, Aryan physics, PoMo BS...
And I should add to the people who let political convenience dictate scientific results: RFK Jr, Jay Bhattacharya, Vinay Prasad....
I think we'd have a better chance of warding those guys off if we played straight with the evidence and the reasoning.
Fair, but I am genuinely interested in whether it was zoonotic! For me, it's mostly about how frequently conspiracy theories are right. I think they almost never are, and if it's a lab leak, I will be forced to take them more seriously going forward.
I joked early on I was going with zoonotic, because of the two, it's the only theory that can be definitively proved, ie, finding the resevoir. The lab leak, even if true, will never be definitively proved. Heads I win, tails who knows.
But yes, I largely agree with what you said. Leaving aside GoF, the case against wet markets was already very strong, and I don't believe anything is being done there. So.
I can't argue against curiosity.
I'm not sure Lab Leak is a good example of a conspiracy theory, though. It was, and always should have been, treated as just an alternative hypothesis, like the theory that there were no WMDs.
A sort of corollary to this is that people assume that the fact that there was somewhat of a cover-up means that there was a conspiracy. Instead, even if it turns out to be true, it's likely that most or all (not including the CCP) of the people trying to suppress the theory were doing so because they thought it was false and didn't want the false story getting around.
Disagree. It really does matter if GoF research caused a pandemic or not. Many things are possible in theory, but theories often don't survive contact with reality. If COVID was not GoF, then zero diseases have ever been caused by GoF. If nothing else, that should make you more comfortable with current lab safety standards. OTOH, if research into an only moderately dangerous virus brought the world to its knees, then GoF should be banned.
It seems clear that there was a conspiracy to cover up how serious it was when the first cases were discovered. So that leaves whether it originated from the same scientific hubris that invented the hydrogen bomb, or just bad luck.
Yeah, tho Scott acknowledged that my analysis (giving heavy odds favoring lab leak) was very good. He wrote that he skipped reading it in detail because I used logarithms!
I describe Scott's errors in detail.
https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-probability-v57
tl;dr:
1. He gets an enormous factor from Worobey's case location data, without considering it's weird statistical techniques (see Stoyan and Chiu in J Royal Stats Soc A) or its glaring data reliability problem (see me in JRSSA).
2,He uses a city location factor based on human population rather than the much smaller share of the wildlife trade.
3. He misses key sequence features caught right away by the Defense Medical Intelligence agency. (All links are in my long substack.)
I hate citing authority, but there's a reason that the French National Academy of Medicine just voted overwhelmingly to accept a report that said the evidence favored a lab leak.
BTW, I think this was a great substack by RH.
And one of the judges wrote out a response to your response.
If we're going to appeal to authority, I'm going to take the three judges who slogged through the entire debate, as well as the consensus of everyone who watched it.
That's why Peter Miller's performance was so impressive and necessary. Substack responses to responses to responses are necessarily piecemeal. Miller spent 15 hours going through every single piece of evidence. It's all well and good to try to pick at one of his contentions, but ultimately a regular person is going to fizzle out parsing the details of the third blog article. Then they throw up their hands and say "I guess we'll never know." It obfuscates, rather than clarifies.
Unlike Scott or Peter, I have a real published paper specifically on the key statistical evidence, the source of their big Bayes factpr.
https://doi.org/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae021
Non-paywalled version here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08680
Get Peter Miller to do a debate with you for $200k, with three qualified judges. If they say you won, I'll switch to lab leak.
Again, I'm not qualified to assess the quality of your work, and I'm not going to bother, especially since I would then have to read the judge's critique of your work, and most likely, someone else's critique of that critique, and so on.
Yeah, most of these people won't actually bet on it...
Valentin Bruttel and I briefly discussed doing a debate:
https://x.com/tgof137/status/1913312058277499101
But he backed out, because he thinks he's equivalent to Galileo, Semmelweis, and Einstein all put together, and that means that qualified scientists would not be able to appreciate his brilliant arguments:
https://x.com/VBruttel/status/1913498526543127007
Just saw this, seems relevant!
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Whoops- It's "National Center for Medical Intelligence" that prepared the report for the Defense Intelligence Agency. I shouldn't try to type so quickly!
The origins of Covid-19 are one of the most studied things about Covid (for the obvious reason that it’s very important to know where it came from) and yeah the bat-via-pangolin hypothesis is by far the most accepted theory.
Yes it is a coincidence that a virology lab that studies coronaviruses happened to be in the same city, but it’s a bit less of a coincidence when you consider that this research began after the SARS outbreak in 2002, which also came from bats. Turns out China just has a lot of bats that produce a lot of coronaviruses in close proximity to a lot of humans.
I don't know if you checked out Alexander's analysis, but it featured a photo of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market taken in *2014*, as an example of a place that could spark an epidemic. 😭
The problem is that adherence/allegiance to MAGA drops one's IQ by 30 points. Of course Yarvin would degenerate into an incoherent mess by doing so.
Unqualified Reservation's arguments degraded before Trump even came on the scene. He started fantasizing about President Palin and a "True Election", after earlier scoffing at populism and saying Republicans should all quit to force Democrats to take responsibility for a one-party state.
Yarvin:
The elites! The elites!!!
5 minutes later...
"mmmmm Monarchy."
I feel like I missed the "Curtis Yarvin is smart and interesting arc" and now every take i see from him sounds like a high schooler who hates the world because he can't get laid.
The 2025 Yarvin Doctrine: Fire is a dangerous servant and a terrible master, and boy is that inspiring!
On point analysis. Yarvin is saying that Trump is good because he opposes a corrupt elite and he’s willing to Koolaid man through norms that might get in the way of this fight.
But where’s the argument that this would be an improvement?
Somehow, i’m not reassured by Yarvin saying they’re too weak and ineffectual— that they lack the fuel— to inflict suffering at scale, while they otherwise revel in cruelty and stupidity
Also, Trump is the epitome of corrupt elite.
The problem with this and Scott's post is that it tries to engage with Yarvin as though his belief system is founded on ideas. He is a conflict theorist who dresses up in arguments to cosplay as an intellectual. Arguing with him about ideas is like explaining to a furry that they aren't a real dog.
Correct about Yarvin, though I'm guessing you've never met an actual furry before because the analogy doesn't make any sense. I know multiple furries, and zero of them think they are animals.
I think you're missing the point with the fuel analogies. He's not saying that right-wing populism is not dangerous because the fuel is weak. He's saying society is dead because the fuel has become weak in general. He wants right-wing populism to destroy stuff, get people really upset and ignite some long forgotten fuel across the board that will then lead us to a golden era (presumably destroying the dumb right-wing populism that ignited it).
This is like burning down your own house because you feel like you got too comfy and are not working hard enough. It's pretty dumb, but different from the dumbness you're assuming.
I guess that could be right, but this is a lesson in why you write to try to be understood.
The vaugeness is a feature, not a bug when guru is your schtick.