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.’
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is an institute of virology in Wuhan, but it is most likely that Covid-19 spread naturally from bats to humans.
Bat coronaviruses are common in the South China - Thailand - Myanmar region, and viruses jump host species all the time.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://awful.systems/comment/220469
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?
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.