I got into a Twitter altercation last night with Nate Silver, and I need to get it off my chest because it's just so damn weird.
Background: As you know, shortly after the pandemic started a team of researchers published an article titled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2." It concluded that the COVID virus was almost certainly natural, not a lab leak. The article was highly influential and read by millions.
Then, earlier this year, a large cache of internal emails and Slack messages among the researchers was leaked. This started a huge controversy: did the scientists privately believe a lab leak was likely while publicly saying it wasn't? After a while I finally got curious enough to read the entire archive of messages, along with multiple stories outlining the argument that they had lied. In the end, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing there. The case for lying was based on cherry-picked quotes taken out of context; timelines that hopped back and forth; and deliberately bad-faith interpretations. In reality, all that happened is that the researchers communicated openly with each other about doubts and differences of opinion along the way, with those opinions changing as new evidence came in. My summary, which I presented in a clear timeline with all the relevant context, is here and here.
That's where the argument with Nate starts. Here it is:
NS: People in the scientific community have to stop being wimps and call shit like this out. It is *incredibly obvious* that Proximal Origin was a bogus, unscientific political exercise. This has been an Emperor Has No Clothes Moment for the scientific community. It's depressing.
KD: There is no evidence whatsoever for that. You've gone off your nut on this subject.
NS: Kevin I respect you but that article I linked to contains 10k words of exceptionally detailed and persuasive reporting. The authors of the paper are literally saying they don't believe the conclusion. You have a real blind spot here that I'm having trouble understanding. I would ask you to take a fresh look at the topic. The evidence is not ambiguous.
KD: I agree! The evidence isn't ambiguous. The article you linked to is the usual cherry picking and deliberate misinterpretation. If you're willing to read a few thousand more words, here's my take after reading every last email.
NS: Yeah I've read those and I think you are just self-evidently, insisting-the-sky-is-orange wrong here. It's OK I have lots of friends who have some obviously wrong beliefs and we're still friends. It's probably time to agree to disagree here.
Nate is a smart and careful guy who, as far as I know, had no special axe to grind when he began looking at this issue.
But so am I. And yet, we don't just disagree on what should be a fairly simple factual dispute, we completely, totally, 180 degrees disagree. Nate thinks I'm sky-is-orange wrong and I think the same of him. It's mind blowing to me that we could end up here.
Keep in mind that we aren't disagreeing about a subtle scientific issue. This isn't a question of whether the natural origin theory of COVID is true or not.¹ It's a simple look at an archive of messages to see if a team of human beings said the same thing in private that they said in public. You need to have a reasonable grasp of the science to understand what they're talking about, but that's all.
And yet we are where we are. How is this possible?
¹In the years since "Proximal Origin" was published, I'd say the evidence for a natural origin of COVID has become almost insurmountable. But that doesn't matter for our present purposes. All that matters is what the researchers knew in March 2020 and how they went about presenting it.
"Nate is a smart and careful guy who ... had no special axe to grind ... But so am I. And yet, ... on what should be a fairly simple factual dispute, we ... 180 degrees disagree. ... It's mind blowing to me ... How is this possible?"
Because everyone seems to have forgotten an inconvenient truth that everyone should know in elementary school, which is the concept, as distinct from the method, of science.
In science, we make potentially but not necessarily erroneous assumptions, then we draw a conclusion, then we defend the conclusion and the assumptions when they are challenged. If the defense fails, then we learn from our failures and use what we've learned.
If you're doing that, then you're doing science. If you're not doing that, then you're not defending your assumptions. Instead, you're finding some way to protect your assumptions so they can't be challenged.
Nate Silver may be smart, but so are a lot of MAGA Republicans. I'm not saying he's doing what a MAGA Republican is doing, but I am saying that they're two variations on the same "turn science inside out and upside down" theme.
If you're an advocate for a specific conclusion, you don't get to reflexively dismiss evidence that "coincidentally" conflicts with your conclusion.
Kevin ... I'm not sure what to be more surprised about, that this is blowing your mind, or that you're letting this idiot get away with this crap. Not only are you enabling his ignorance, but his ignorance is enabling the Republican party's ignorance. Again ... if it's okay for Nate Silver to be ignorant, then it's okay for everyone, including Donald and Speaker Mike.
Nate Silver does have an agenda. His agenda is "look at me!" he could try lying on his back, arms and legs flailing in the air, yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs in a busy grocery store. That works too, but I guess it's not lucrative.
If only we could plus one comments here, because this deserves a plus one.
I'm not sure how Kevin is letting Nate get away with anything, or what him not letting Nate get away with whatever even means.
'Plausible' doesn't make a thing true, it just provides a scenario to disprove until it becomes 'not plausible'.
Conspiracy theorists will hang their hat on no one being able to convince them, and I think it's plausible they're like that because otherwise they'll have to think about how their first impression mislead them and that would threaten a bonfire of anxiety.
How do they cope? Faith.
Nate Silver is desperate to stay relevant after being dumped by 538, so he has decided to make money by selling Substack subscriptions to conspiracy theorists. I fully expect him to go full Qanon.
There is one more point to make: I you judge a scientific publication you base that judgement on the arguments presented and the experiments carried out or the reliability of the data used. This paper was widely accepted in the scientific community because the arguments were convincing.
Going back and researching the history of how those arguments came to be made is maybe an interesting study on how teams of s cineasts work together. But it does not alter the quality of their product.
Imagine a writer who wrote a great novel. You find out he was always intoxicated when he was working on the novel. This discovery does not change the fact that the novel is great.
" This paper was widely accepted in the scientific community because the arguments were convincing."
Which paper?
It can be easy to just outright dismiss the person you agree with, and I appreciate that you didn't do that here. I do think you have to consider the source, and while I don't think Nate is dumb, I have noticed over the last year or two, he's become a garden variety pundit rather than a data-driven one. And he seems to have these opinions that he thinks are just "fact" when they're really just his personal opinions, and sometimes based on very little data.
You at least went through the record and wrote a lengthy piece on why you thought there was nothing to this politicization charge. He disagrees with it, which is fine, but he's not really presenting a counter argument other than "You're just wrong." He could go point by point and make arguments why your analysis is wrong, and he doesn't seem to be doing that, so there's not much that can be resolved.
I haven't read the record myself, so I'm admittedly going off just what you presented. Even based on that, I think it's possible (though not arguing for it) that these scientists may have colored their presentation of their conclusions based on some of the political implications, possibly downplaying already unlikely lab leak theory and overstating the case for natural causes. I'm not saying they did, but they're human and it's not unthinkable that the tone and emphasis they used when presenting their case wasn't colored by their personal feelings, fears, or biases.
If that's what Nate's up in arms about, I hate to tell him, but there's really nothing anyone in the field of science can do about that. It's hard enough to fight against outright data biases, but when you get into presentational emphasis, there's no purely objective way they can write papers. You can't erase the humanity from humans. We're subjective creatures. It's not always ideal, but how the lab leak theory was analyzed is one of the least concerning biases we see in science. There are much deeper problems elsewhere.
If Nate, on the other hand, feels that these scientists outright falsified their conclusions due to political pressure, I just haven't seen any evidence of that. I don't think there's any evidence that the paper didn't substantially reflect their privately held conclusions or that the paper was compromised. If Nate thinks otherwise, he has to dig into the record for his evidence and make a better case.
This. Maybe I've missed it, but as far as I'm aware, Silver has not rebutted or even engaged with Kevin's argument. "you are just self-evidently, insisting-the-sky-is-orange wrong" is not an argument (Monty Python notwithstanding) it's just contradiction.
Maybe Silver has a convincing case, but if he does I have yet to read it. Especially given how controversial his claim is, I'd expect and hope that he'd be crystal clear about what backs and informs his belief. That he's failed to do so is telling.
NS is smart about a very particular, narrow thing and a real idiot about pretty much everything else.
"It's a simple look at an archive of messages to see if a team of human beings said the same thing in private that they said in public."
So you read "yeah I've read those" as saying he read the whole archive? That's interesting, because I read the weaker claim that he had read only your posts about reading the archive. So there's an example of two good faith readings of a simple sentence that are pretty different.
It’s unclear that Silver even read the USRTK piece that he claims to find damning. If he had read it, he would have read the ridiculous conspiracy theory about how an Ebola outbreak began which is in both the article and the timeline document. USRTK cherry picks from what they FOIA to spin conspiracy theories and, beyond cherry picking, regularly misinterprets (or lies about) the science in ways that don’t require much expertise to get right, and often present six degrees of Kevin Bacon level connections as evidence of a conspiracy. It’s a total joke and it does not take long for anyone with an open mind and an ounce of intelligence to see so.
So Silver either read that stuff and agrees with it, did not look closely and is uncritically passing on what he considers supporting evidence, or is knowingly presenting terrible work as evidence with the confidence that he can once again dip a toe into this, call people frauds, present no evidence, not engage with his critics, and repeat this every few months to get attention by defaming scientists in ways he can’t back up.
Nate is indeed a smart and usually careful guy, but everyone (present company included) is subject to confirmation bias. Nate developed an affection for the lab leak theory of COVID awhile ago, and I think confirmation bias colors his reasoning on this topic, as it does with some other people I respect such as Jon Stewart. Both of them are smart in their fields (statistics and comedy, respectively), but neither is a virologist, so they are not where I go to get my understanding of this topic.