Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
this thread appears to have attracted keyword-seeking bad posters. these fine posters have been escorted to the egress and may continue to enjoy their subthreads on other fediverse servers and not this one.
to clear up any confusion: if you’re a drive-by poster we’ve never seen before and you’re posting bullshit covid theories instead of anything related to what we discuss on this instance (Sam Altman being a fucker, for example), we can’t tell you apart from someone keyword searching threads to spread conspiracy bullshit en masse and the very funny part is, we don’t actually care how you got here
garbage is garbage, don’t post your trash here
we should post keyword honey pots every few months for culling
I have been meaning to make a vegan pitbull thread for just such an occasion
I mean it showed up in all for me.
read the room
I didn’t say anything on the topic and I can’t even see the negative ones. I don’t really know how many comments you guys usually get off-instance. I’m curious now if people actually care enough to just monitor shit and say dumb things.
this kind of keyword searching (sometimes via a discord bot or similar for coordination purposes) is ridiculously common — old r/SneerClub was an interesting Petri dish for it, cause you’d get accounts that only post about Urbit or on TheMotte every couple months barging into a SneerClub thread for the first time going “uhhh can you prove to me, whoever the fuck I am, that these people are fascists though?” and it was painfully obvious to everyone else what they were trying to do
It seems insane to me, but I used to do some useless shit online so I guess I shouldn’t find it so odd.
i meant that the discussion threads will still be present on non-home servers even as the users are blocked from here
it lets them have the last word but in a way that means nobody on awful.systems will have to see it
Ah. I should familiarize myself with instance/moderation specifics better.
the Fediverse is a network of software that doesn’t quite talk to each other, but just enough to stoke the drama
The leening tovver oph Bayble: the fedi experience
How do you determine if someone is coming across a post because they searched a keyword? I arrived here because I sort by new comments and someone must have just commented.
if the post tastes off I throw it out
LOL
Takes like this are one of the many things I pull out to point out how naive and misguided most x-risk obsessive people are. And especially Mr. Altman.
Despite wide fears of synthetic gain of function attacks, as it turns out, it’s actually really hard to create a new virus meaningfully stronger than the standard endemic ones that already exist. Many countries and labs have legitimately tried. Lots of papers and research. It’s, really really hard to beat nature at the microbiological scale; Viruses have to not only be virulent, but it has to contend with extremely unpredictable intermediate environments. The current endemic viruses got there through many mutations and adaptations inside environments that they were already at least successful (and not in vitro). And in the end, what would be the point? Once a virulent virus breaks out, you have very little control. Either it works really well and backfires or, even far more likely, it doesn’t do that much at all, but it does piss other nations off.
It’s not impossible. But honestly, yeah, I don’t comprehend x-riskers who obsess over this.
How dare you! Eternal torture in Virokos basilisk for you!
A second minor side point which shows you are prob right on this front, and which broadens it from the risks of biological warfare (which I would argue would be the reason to do research to this) are low to the risk from biological warfare and chemical warfare are low: Soldiers have beards again.
Now I know, that sound absolutely crazy as an argument. But iirc the reason soldiers were no longer allowed beards around the world wars era was due to gasmask (the pandemic also showed that facial hair make fitting masks hard). But nowadays beards are more and more allowed (and in the case of authoritarian militaristic societies a sign of their elite special forces ;) ))
To me this shows that at least on the military level they don’t really worry about the risks of artificial (wait, why do they say synthetic? Wouldn’t artificial be a better word? Is this some sort of signaling thing? Anyway) viral attacks in the near future.
But I could be wrong, just found it interesting, and somewhere some military theorist is prob screaming after reading this, this close to warthunderforuming this place.
I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic.
Gonna ignore the urge to sneer at the tinfoil hattery here. See the rest of this comment section for that.
I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience
Sam, you have a doomsday bunker and a bunch of cash. This was one of your dream scenarios. Don’t pretend like you’re one of us.
@swlabr He doesn’t have mirrorshade-wearing bodyguard goons wearing collar bombs to keep them in line after civilization collapses. Or a long pork sushi chef. Yet.
Yeah that’s probably what he meant by not a “great experience.” Our billionaire baby boy couldn’t get a nice night’s sleep without his hommes au jus.
As they say in Australia, he is cooked.
yor mums a lab leek
why are the comments on this post such a disaster. who are these people
Gotta admit I’m checking back here every couple of hours or so just out of morbid curiosity
keyword seeking fuckwits maybe
This was just on All.
fuck, I stop looking for one Thanksgiving and this happens
My thanksgiving was drama-free (blurring the distinction between pleasant and boring) and just now finding what was going down here. 😭
There’s a good possibility that it was due to a lab leak, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be synthetic. This was a lab taking too many liberties handling a virus that was already at risk of making the jump to humans, is it “lab-leak covid truther” to claim the inevitable under those circumstances would happen?
Who gives a fuck. Let’s not turn this guy into a new Elon Musk.
uh huh off you fuck
Everyone who is saying virus spread from bats to humans - you do realize there were people researching on bats in Wuhan, right? If it’s from a bat, that doesn’t automatically mean from a bat in nature.
your stupid ass found this old thread by searching for covid (no this shit isn’t in all anymore) and this is the best you can do? fuck off.
holy fuck. for anyone still reading this thread, check that post history
Holy shit, that shitshow in the Elon thread.
Randomly capitalizing “FIAT”, the mark of a true Coiner.
@gerikson Or an Italian.
Wait, I’ve been out for a bit - what was the actual consensus on Covid? I genuinely thought there was a Wuhan Lab that this all originated from?
I’m not a nut job, I can be reasoned with, i just need to update my beliefs with new info
I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.
The “lab leak theory”, while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China’s fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.
The racist connotations about the lab I knew about, but I didn’t think it made it less true.
That being said, I just checked wikipedia:
Most scientists agree that, as with many other pandemics in human history,[1][2][3] the virus is likely derived from a bat-borne virus transmitted to humans via another animal in nature or during wildlife trade such as that in food markets.[11] Many other explanations, including several conspiracy theories, have been proposed.[12][13][14] Some scientists and politicians have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory. This theory is not supported by evidence.[15]
SARS-CoV-2 has close genetic similarity to multiple previously identified bat coronaviruses, suggesting it crossed over into humans from bats
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_COVID-19
and I think I remember seeing a study that showed the similarity of the sequence to other known sequences and it wasn’t that dramatic a change.
The racist connotations about the lab I knew about, but I didn’t think it made it less true.
this is an absolute fuck of a sentence and seeing as how you keep JAQing off in a way that platforms conspiracy bullshit, you can just fuck off too
In the absence of any actual evidence, it does make it less true. Believing otherwise means ignoring all the obvious (but admittedly circumstantial) evidence that racism is super-fucking-popular. So Occam’s Razor says if two theories have equal levels of zero evidence and one is inherently appealing to lizard brain, that one will gain prevalence so if you want to correct for that bias you have to bias in the opposite direction. How hard? Roll dice.
grounded in racist attitudes towards China
I don’t understand why that’s considered racist? Why is a conspiracy theory that China has a world class biolab capable of a global pandemic racist?
A crazy conspiracy that a foreign power has biotech superiority isn’t racism.
I guess most people aren’t up to date with this subject. There has been plenty of discussion with experts that point to the possibility of a lab leak. The wet market hypothesis has so many holes in it that it’s impossible to take seriously.
There is an institute of virology in Wuhan, but it is most likely that Covid-19 spread naturally from bats to humans.
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Bat coronaviruses are common in the South China - Thailand - Myanmar region, and viruses jump host species all the time.
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Labs that handle human pathogens are maintained under very high security. The one in Wuhan is BSL4, the highest security rating, and had prior experience handling coronaviruses. Also, the viruses themselves would be marked with radioactive isotopes. Even if they somehow got out of the building, it would be possible to find and quarantine all those exposed to it.
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If it was released on purpose, then we can narrow the list of suspects down to the countries that can reliably make bioweapons and antidotes with close to 100% certainty. That’s the US, China and maybe Russia. The US and Russia were among the worst affected, and China wouldn’t have released the virus in China.
So the most likely explanation is that it is a bat virus that jumped hosts.
the viruses themselves would be marked with radioactive isotopes.
Is that true? Once the virus replicated in a cell, the new copies wouldn’t be tagged, right?
The new ones wouldn’t. But the original radioactive atoms would still be in your body, and they can be detected (within a reasonable amount of time).
Edit: But if the new viruses infect another person, they wouldn’t have the radioactivity. So usually, in case of a leak, the plan would be to quarantine anyone exposed to the viruses (as detected by radioactivity) and anyone who has been with them that day.
For the lab leak theory to work you have to assume not only that some workers at the lab got infected, but also that they spread it all over the city before anybody noticed, such that by the time anyone did notice, they were several degrees of contact from the lab workers.
@emergencyfood @Evinceo Naw. People have some radioactive atoms in their bodies all the time. But the viruses are marked in another way: they have particular genetic sequences. And with the march of technology the Wuhan Institute of Virology would have sequenced the viruses they were studying and been able to compare the sequences on file with the Covid-19 pathogen.
the viruses themselves would be marked with radioactive isotopes. Even if they somehow got out of the building, it would be possible to find and quarantine all those exposed to it.
China wouldn’t have released the virus in China
You don’t know that. Nobody knows that, because China destroyed all the evidence. If this was true, they could have proved it, they could have shown the world! “Behold our innocence!!” Why didn’t that happen?
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In come the posters who never posted here before to explain that the leak theory is true!
While I have no real input re the whole lab leak conspiracy theory, I do have a fun anacdote from then. I remember pretty quickly after the lab leak option was dropped somebody came with proof for it saying ‘we have the telephone data, and the day virus started all the telephones from the lab stayed in one place clearly manipulated!’. This story has a few holes, note first the whole ‘we have the telephone data’ which is already weird (esp as china refused to cooperate), then also we don’t have just one day, perhaps this behavior of phones in a lab is normal. Almost like people are forced to put their personal phones in storage when they suit up (iirc often standard practice in those kinds of rooms). Of course the person bringing up the phones theory didn’t think about this. I knew we were in for a wild ride of conspiracies after that one, as it was ‘throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks’ contrarian theories land. (a thing you often see after a tragedy happens, extremely common in far right circles when the far right does an atrocity, where it is often sort of ingroup signal and signal of cruelty). Anyway, that is just an interesting thing I remembered which I wanted to share, on the subject at hand my opinion is I doubt it was a lab leak, but I also don’t think we will ever know for sure, and also we will never find enough evidence that it wasn’t a lab leak to convince the people who convinced themselves it was one.
I’m on your page at least - best evidence we had was that it leaked from a Wuhan lab.
Not sure what the conspiracy here is, other than “Rich man has thoughts that come close to an opinion on vaccines. Get the pitchforks!”
Missing the forest for the trees, it feels like - The man has a good point about synthetic viruses.
Check my comment above. More scientists believe it was due to a random mutation (the similarity of the sequence to other bat coronaviruses was extremely similar, and this one was a small change that just happened to be potent), though there are also many scientists who find the wuhan lab more than circumstantial.
What
They’re lemmy.ml users, best course of action is to just ignore and move on.
Thx, I’m kinda new to the lemmyverse so I haven’t really figured out who is worth listening and replying to.
I’m sad nobody posted Good News, They Let Dumb Sluts into Mensa Now (also in podcast longform) in reaction to that user mentioning Mensa.
synthetic virus bad
Im sorry, this is an anti-memetic zone. You seem to have used a thought ending memetic sentence, please report to the blue room for punishment. You are to sit in the black chair. Your social standing has decreased.
This is an automated message, further replies to this message can and will increase the severity of your punishment. They also will be ignored.
worse than your posting?
Now that he needs to be cancelled such things are popping up like crazy!
off you fuck
Wtf are you talking about, we already talked about his sister story a while back (with your ‘such things’). Just because you are not aware of things doesn’t mean they suddenly pop up.
Here, a post from a month ago with data going further back. (also I do hope you get why as people become more powerful and popular in various ways they also attract more scrutiny, and how that isn’t bad. You shouldn’t care much that namename8numbers believes in the great replacement theory, but you should worry a lot when one of the richest people in the world starts shouting about that bs)
@Dirk @Architeuthis seethe
I think it’s a fairly credible claim, that the coronavirus originated in a lab. There’s been leaks in the past, of similar pathogens - once in the USA and once in Taiwan, I think. Not a very interesting conspiracy theory. Equally, animal agriculture is ripe for the development of zoonoses, regardless of the country. I don’t think it’s especially important, ultimately, unless it informs better practices in both areas.
