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.
"The case for lying was based on cherry-picked quotes taken out of context"
I stopped going down covid conspiracy theory rabbit holes because they all turned out the same way.
Yup. The conspiracy theory / theories are non-falsifiable.
At some point Silver gave up on data and went with "the vibe" which in the case of COVID is basically the same as the creationist argument against evolution: I don't believe that such a marvelous thing could happen by "chance" therefore {God|Men} did it. There is absolutely nothing scientific about Silver's belief, it is pure argument from incredulity.
When your yardstick for truth is averaging lies vs factual observations, you're going to trend towards confabulation on any set that contains infinite lies.
Like +10!
Hail Kevin for having these arguments...these are difficult to deal with, but Kevin has the courage to wade in and....defend just being smart. Kudos to Kevin. Best Wishes, traveller....who has to go back to work on more prosaic matters...lol
👍👍👍👍👍
because silver's actually an idiot about everything that isn't purely in the field of statistics, and has no idea how real scientists - not the practitioners of bogus "data science" - actually do scientific research. that ignorance led him to a bunch of wildly idiotic conclusions about COVID research, and because he's also an egomaniac who's used to Serious People bowing and scraping before his undeniable genius, he just gets more and more dug in on the idiocy anytime an actually informed person contradicts him.
"I believe the problem began when he went from pollster to pundit. Expanding the brand into other…" — Relativicus http://disq.us/p/2wknr3p
There is an awful lot of exactly this kind of thing lately, where some people are highly susceptible to a point of view that's really an aesthetic, but they don't realize it because all the elements of it are literally to be found out there in the real world, not as imagination or an aspiration, and that will give them an impression of having found an empirical truth, --which yet isn't real and not objective because it's not complete and finds a conclusion in a simple comfort zone of no complexity and with an identifiable bad guy they can have a satisfying and safe conflict with.
Kevin, I know nothing about the material to which you referred, but I believe you over Nate Silver for one telling reason.
You wrote, "a team of researchers published an article titled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2".
"titled", not "entitled".
You win, hands down.
It's possible because you're giving Silver way too much credit. He has already made up his mind and has no interest in looking at the evidence in full. He claims the report he's relying on is persuasive, but when confronted with your posts, which show further communications between the scientists that provide fuller, and more accurate, context, he just runs back to the report he relied upon. For a man who built his reputation in following where the evidence goes (with respect to polls), he does just the opposite as a pundit.
Please note, everyone, that "lab leak" is NOT the opposite of "natural origin." Most of the legitimate speculation that it COULD have leaked from a lab still posit that it was a naturally occurring virus that may have been under STUDY at the Wuhan lab.
There is no, no, NO legitimate evidence that it was ARTIFICIALLY created or even modified from a natural virus.
This false dichotomy about "lab" vs "natural" was a result of terrible reporting by the clueless media, which created this impression by quoting "both sides" without explanation.
Again: there is NO substantiated scientific evidence that the SARS-Cov2 virus did not have a natural origin. There has been some debate about whether the naturally occurring virus may have been under study in a lab and a worker inadvertently picked it up. There is no evidence of that, but it cannot be 100% ruled out.
A good thing to remind people of.
Of course, to assume the lab leak, there has to be a study of two different viruses at once, one of which has no record of ever being studied.
They could have brought the wild virus to Wuhan to study, via bats, and/or a researcher could have picked up out in the Field and brought it back. The people in their study area have antibodies against covid-like viruses--so outsiders could take all the precautions going into caves to collect samples, only to pick up the virus at the gas station.
But the spread of the disease seems to center around the wet market, and they'd have a higher through put of animals.
"They could have brought the wild virus to Wuhan to study, via bats ..."
Actually, the Wuhan lab researchers DID "bring the wild virus to Wuhan to study" via fecal samples from bats.
The Wuhan lab had thousands of such samples and had analyzed many of them. The same lab, designed to accommodate level 4 bioresearch, was ordinarily run (according to some visitors to the lab before the outbreak) at level 2 and had some documented biomedical accidents.
Then the Chinese government was so eager to prevent, what -- disease? scandal? -- that they obliterated most of the evidence and shut down the research results website that until then had been accessible internationally. China stalled the WHO investigators and then did not permit them to inspect the Wuhan lab. All samples from the wet market were destroyed before outside investigators could inspect them.
So what gives? Do these facts make a conspiracy? Is Nicholas Wade, long-time science writer for the NY Times and Science magazine, a conspiracy theorist? Is Matt Ridley, noted science writer, a conspiracy theorist? Kevin trusts Dr. Michael Worobey to have the right answer, but Dr. Alina Chan doesn't know what she's talking about?
I don't know better than Kevin what really happened, but there were billions of dollars in research funds hanging in the balance for some of the writers of the article he and Silver were debating. Maybe that made no difference. But reasonable skepticism might well conclude that we still don't know the right answer. Taking sides without enough critical information seems pointless.
Yes, Nicolas Wade is a conspiracy theorist. On top of terrible science (the lamest Intelligent Design logic I’ve ever read) his written testimony to Congress from 8/March largely focused on the implausible and unfounded conspiracy theory that Fauci is a puppet master manipulating scientists for some reason or another.
Even if either of you actually said the sky was orange, you'd be right now and then.
Had a day or two like that in Santa Cruz three years ago, and I fear we'll have more.
I keep wondering how to make debate more like dialectic, in which both people tend to learn something, even if they disagree. Anchoring on the evidence helps, so hooray for your not only doing that, but (from your telling) being more honest about the way science happens without perfect knowledge.
That was a memorable day.
I rode to Santa Cruz and picked up barbecue to eat with a friend, and we sat under his porch lights and watched the shadows of the stratospheric clouds on the lower layers.
The air wasn't actually so bad down below the marine, but the light was so massively occluded by the smoke from Oregon.
see Kevin's photo in an earlier post today
😉
the smoke from oregon?? There was an active fire at the time in the santa cruz mountains, which are much closer to santa cruz than oregon.
LOLOLOLOL
Your certainty is guided by naivete. No one should be that certain.
I can be certain someone is wrong, even when I'm uncertain the truth.
Is this a strictly binary choice?
The assumption that the truth fits one of two 180 degree opposite views fails if the truth does not fit in either of these diametric narratives. It might be that everyone is partially wrong, not just "someone", or that many people were partially right.
I don’t see how this could be anything other than a binary choice. A thing (escape from a lab) either happened or it did not. I accept Kevin’s analysis that it did not happen and neither did the relevant scientists acknowledge it happened.
The relevant scientists worked for the Chinese government.
If you're asking "how did Nate Silver and I, two reasonable human beings, end up vehemently disagreeing after a discussion held on X, formerly known as Twitter", well, then I think you have your answer right there.
For what it's worth, I would pay to have the two of you engage in a debate _on your respective blogs_; that at least has a chance of a productive result.
Because you are both wrong.
The scientists found they could not rule out a lab leak at the time of publication. They were pressured to remove that because of the political environment. They did so. However AT THE SAME TIME they also considered a lab leak quite a bit less likely than natural origin but couldn't be definitive.
Some months later they came believe natural origin was overwhelingly likely so that lab leak was not worth considering absent new evidence. But they did not have that position at the time.
TLDR: Scientists were pressured to sound 100% certain it was natural origin when they were 98% certain it was natural origin. They succumbed to the pressure.
You've provided no evidence for your position they were pressured.
As Crissa says, you've provided no evidence that they were pressured. That said, *all* scientific conclusions as provisional and subject to falsification by experiment. There is no such thing as scientific "proof," only the weight of scientific evidence. Did anyone announce that a natural origin was "100% certain?" If so, that was an error. At this point, I'd say the null hypothesis is natural origin. I have yet to see an experiment that falsified that hypothesis.
Knowing the scientists involved helps one evaluate this kind of (unsupported) claim. I'd say it's ludicrous. If anyone tried to pressure either Kristian Andersen or Bob Garry, all they'd get would be a big 'Fuck you' in response.
Kevin,
Not sure if it's the source of the confusion here, but in general if you're going to debate this topic with people you really should be explicit about what you mean by "lab leak".
You tend to use the term to mean "genetically engineered virus leaked from the lab". I really do think many people use the term to mean "natural virus found in a cave 1000 miles away, brought to the lab for experimentation, only for it to somehow find its way down the street at the market".
Who uses it to mean that? Not the average person.
Also, there's no evidence for it to be a lab leak.
There is also serial passage, which is not exactly like a genetically engineered virus, but nonetheless sped up on the evolutionary timeline.
+1
The lack of definition of a central concept in the discussion shows you it is not a serious discussion.
Why do you think Kevin means "genetically engineered virus"? I always thought he meant the cave thing.
Follow his “almost insurmountable” link at the bottom of the post…. his third reason once again indicates he’s referring to a man-made virus when discussing the lab leak.
It seems like most of the hard science refuting the lab leak theory revolves around disproving it was man-made, which is actually a different question in my mind.
The “proximal origins” paper that Drum and Silver argued about discusses various possibilities for the origin of COVID-19. In context, the term “lab leak” refers to the possibility that COVID-19 was created in a laboratory experiment, and there was subsequently “an inadvertent laboratory release.” Probably Kevin should have used a different term for the benefit of people who haven't seen the paper. “The theory that the virus was created in a lab” is longer than “the lab leak theory,” but the additional clarity seems worth it.
It's that "reasonable grasp of science" where NS falls down. After all, he wandered into politics from being a football guy and into what passes for science over there by being a political football guy. In science, he is an amateur and his opinion is amateurish. I know enough to know that though I am a scientist, that particular science is way out of my field and I'm suitably cautious about what I think I understand. Silver thinks reading a similarly science illiterate journalist's take makes him an expert. So he is not only amateurish, he is cluelessly amateurish.
Bingo
+1
>> How is this possible?<<
I feel Kevin’s confusion here. A number of years ago at work I was chatting with a co-worker around Lincoln’s birthday and mentioned his Gettysburg Address. She “corrected” me and said it was Thomas Jefferson who wrote/delivered the Gettysburg address. (This was prior to the internet being widely available at work). I told her she was wrong. I told her why Lincoln made the speech there. I recited the first part. I told her that a “Score” was twenty and thus 87 years. She refused to accept it and stuck to her guns, it was Thomas Jefferson’s Gettysburg address. She even convinced a co- worker who was there!
To her credit the next day she told me that when she went home she told her daughter about our conversation. She expected her daughter to share a laugh at my lack of knowledge. Instead, her daughter looked at her wide eyed and said “MOM!” and at that instant she realized she made a fool of herself.
But the thing that got me was that she had been adamant that it was Jefferson with utterly nothing to back it up. But (I thought) I had clearly demonstrated that I knew what I was talking about. My take on it was that she had a “feeling” she was right and there is no way to overcome that.
Is that feeling the same thing as faith?
I keep wishing that at some point Trump supporters will have a “Mom!” moment and they’ll all realize they’ve made fools of themselves. But I suppose that’s like wishing for “world peace” or a ”cure for cancer”.
I remember similar shit being peddled in the wake of "Climategate". Most of the emails (and I read or skimmed them all) were scientists arguing amongst themselves about what the evidence showed and slowly coming to a consensus. From the Slack conversations I've seen in this case, it seems to be pretty much the same thing.
And, oh yeah, Nate is so fucking wrong.
Bingo.
When you pre-conceived notion that some one changing their mind in light of new evidence is "pressure", then all bets are off.
In this case they made arguments that they knew to be incorrect though. For example, they used Ron Fouchier's argument that WIV would have used a well characterised reverse genetics system if it was engineered. But Andersen pointed out WIV had in fact been creating these on "a whim" so that argument was incorrect. Andersen later pointed out a group of German researchers did it in a week. They used the argument anyway.
People reading "[w]e do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible" would be surprised to read Andersen even in April 2020 saying "the furin site could still have been added" and "clearly creating the reverse genetics system isn't hard" given the arguments and definitive language in Proximal Origin.
Recall the definitive conclusions shocked David Relman and a recently surfaced Dept of Defense Working Paper from 26 May 2020 found their conclusions were based on "unwarranted assumptions".
We now know from their correspondence that part of this was to avoid a "sh!tshow" if anyone suggested a lab in China had accidentally leaked it.
Nature also rejected their more balanced initial version. So their conclusion that a lab origin wasn't "necessary" was changed on 4 March to "not plausible" despite their correspondence clearly indicating it was very plausible and consistent with the research undertaken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which had not (and continues to refuse) shared its records.
The furin cleavage site was created by an out of frame insertion of “CTCCTCGGCGGG” creating the (P)RRAR, a suboptimal polybasic cleavage site that is important for expanding virus host range, transmission and pathogenesis. Fragments like this come and go in this virus family. Could come about by (a) mutation, (b) polymerase slippage, (c) template switching, (d) recombination.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210527162603/https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507230848032772?s=20
...as far as I know, had no special axe to grind when he began looking at this issue.
Ahem. I'm not sure it's the case that NS doesn't have an axe to grind. He seems to be about 20% of the way toward Greenwaldism if you ask me (perhaps embittered by his firing?). Mind you, thankfully I doubt he'll go the other 80%. But whatever it is that gets people to start A) getting mad at the "liberal" establishment, and, B) demonstrating this in their work/actions, it seems to have reached Silver.
This isn't a question of whether the natural origin theory of COVID is true or not
Nate and Kevin may have only been having a discussion about some communications among scientists regarding the origin of covid, but the former has made it clear he leans toward "lab leak" as the actual origin of the pandemic (just as Kevin leans toward zoonotic spillover). The difference, of course, is that the opinion Kevin holds is one backed up by actual evidence (as confirmed by the overwhelming bulk of specialist opinion).
No, no, no, no, no. KD believes there is nearly 100% certainty that it was a natural spillover. That is not a "lean".
There are very few experts who claim such certainty on either side.
All of my post on this subject has been to try to encourage people to maintain an open mind, willing to accept new, contrary data, rather than just confirmation. KD only ever posts data he believes confirms his beliefs. Not once has he ever posted data that might be contrary.
Separately, the main issue (I've dismissed the other issues as too minor to bother) of Proximal Origins is that the narrative was guided by a couple of people with a vested interest in the narrative, and that wasn't necessarily conveyed to the other co-authors. We know this because one person at issue asked to have his name excluded so that the opinion piece would not carry the potential taint of his name.
Prove it. Offer some kind of evidence that there are few experts who believe that it was 99.8% or more likely that the virus was a zoonotic spillover. Bard tells me that the best guess for a virus leaking from a biosafety three level lab is about 2 in 1,000. Which would suggest that, in fact, most experts believe with nearly 100% certainty in the natural spillover theory.
" Bard tells me that the best guess for a virus leaking from a biosafety three level lab is about 2 in 1,000. "
" virus leaking from a biosafety three level lab " Obviously already happened in various cases (Bing listed three known cases), so the probability of this statement is 1. The question must have been something else.
What was it?
Did Bard said what the estimation is based on?
The odds are much, much higher that the virus leaked from a wet market where wild animals of uncertain origin were processed and sold for food than leaked from a level three bio-safety lab.
What does a "vested interest" in a virus origin theory mean? Are you suggesting they had some kind of professional or financial stake in pushing the conclusions one direction or another? Cui bono?
KD believes there is nearly 100% certainty that it was a natural spillover. That is not a "lean".
So does a huge majority of the virology community, which is obviously a big part of why Kevin Drum—a non scientist—likewise holds this view. In any event I'd call that "leaning" as long as you stipulate "nearly."
I'm having a hard time with the "sky-is-orange wrong" meme because sometimes the sky is orange.
illilillili....lol...the person is correct...with great frequency it is orange. This angle on the discussion never occurred to me. Thanks for the head's up...Skyward. Traveller
It's going to take one hell of a lot of evidence before I'll believe a theory proposed by conspiracy loving racist Magats.
It's strange that Silver isn't going with the odds-on-favorite here: evolution. How many new organisms have resulted from evolution? How many from human beings tinkering with genetic codes? New viruses have been evolving constantly since forever.
New viruses have been evolving constantly since forever.
And zoonotic spillover has happened countless times in our species's history. I was just watching a video the other day explaining how scientists are pretty confident our species got genital herpes from a chimp or chimp ancestor.
(And no, it's not what you think: the most plausible transmission event involved one of our ancestors preparing dinner.)
"And zoonotic spillover has happened countless times in our species's history."
But such spillovers were not so transmissible as Sars-cov-2 is. That is the thing that is surprising about it.
That doesn't support lab leaks, but does suggest more hidden transmission (and hence evolution) in humans before the first identified cases.
Yup - I read a long time ago that AIDs probably originated in green monkeys in Africa - and likely was transmitted when someone's knife slipped during the skinning process (they are considered food animals).
I just want to know: how in the hell are there any more axes left to grind?
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It's clear that Silver has never been part of a scientific research process. This is simply how things get hashed out. Moreoever, I have personally been involved in conversations *precisely* around how to frame the publication of conclusions on a sensitive topic in a way so that lazy journalists and Twitter cranks wouldn't latch on to them and either misinterpret them or use them to push their own agendas. It wasn't about massaging the data or the conclusions, but making clear what you could and could *not* take away from them.
Apparently, the human species is just due for another Dark Age. Instead of human knowledge being outright lost or destroyed, this one will be characterized by all of us being overwhelmed by disinformation to the point where we can't distinguish truth from lies. Our disagreements on what is reality* will inevitably lead to wars, and then whoever survives will get to define reality however they see fit over the next couple centuries. Assuming of course, anybody survives.
*Even in situations like this, where it doesn't much matter how covid began because it's here now to stay and it's not like anybody has the power to punish the alleged perpetrators of it anyway. That's what I find the saddest detail of America's imminent decline: we're all violently arguing about stuff that sometimes doesn't even matter anyway. Covid's origins, what to do about the debt, etc.
"Assuming of course, anybody survives."
...and AI doesn't takes control.
If the question is who’s being weir here, him or me?, the answer is him.
Reminds me of that pathetic "Climategate" brouhaha from a couple of decades ago.
A few speculative e-mails from non-famous professors in a place most Americans couldn't find on a map (East Anglia) were spun into "proof" that global warming was just a hoax perpetrated by liberal academics.
Hey - like all of us, scientists throw ideas around when they are developing interpretations of evidence. If you take early speculations out-of-context you can spin pretty much any kind of conspiracy theory. It's the conclusions that matter.
Silver has went off the deep end, especially re COVID, long ago. "How did this happen" IMHO is the same question as "what happened to" when you engage with Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Glem, etc etc. The sub-questions are whether they're dumb or lying and why if the latter.
I've run into this before. Just yesterday, there was someone who was certain that (2+3)^2 = 13 (hint, it's 25).
My wife will sometimes contradict me with something similar to "Jefferson gave the Gettysburg Address". I have to be very cautious with those, saying, "that's nutty!" is not going to play well.
I'm not really sure where that comes from.
However, positions, such as Nate Silver's here, that a large group of scientists all lied about something, seems so unlikely to me as to be laughable. Scientists are harder to herd than cats. They get promotions and prestige from being contrarian, if they do it well.
When governments alter scientific findings, they do it by controlling final reports, in situations where ongoing work product is classified. Neither of those apply here.
However, positions, such as Nate Silver's here, that a large group of scientists all lied about something, seems so unlikely to me as to be laughable. Scientists are harder to herd than cats.
Yep. Occam's razor strikes again.