thing that has happened a reasonable amount: lab accidents thing that has not happened before: lab accidents resulting in the release of a previously unknown virus thing that has happened a lot before: zoonotic transfer producing previously unknown viruses
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
Your reasoning is flawed in two ways here. First, it would go through if there were regular novel virus pandemics, but they are rare, and so you can't make this inference. Second, lab accident release does not preclude zoonotic transfer as the original origin.
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Replying to @Pinboard
novel viruses are rare but there have been a lot! novel viruses that produce pandemics is a tiny category. on the second, sure, it's possible but ... why imagine an extra step that we have no evidence for, instead of just good old, has happened a bunch zoonotic transfer
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Replying to @BeijingPalmer
*Pandemics* are a tiny category so you can't reason back the way you did. On the second point, there's a virus lab that studies these viruses in the NYC-sized city where the pandemic started. This is not the remote wilds of Yunnan where weird animals abound. That's suggestive.
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Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
A lot of this discussion implies that there's a perfectly well-documented zoonotic pathway that is being shouted down by conspiracists but that's not my understanding. The virus lab leak hypothesis answers the difficult question of how a weird zoonotic strain ended up in Wuhan
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Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
This is not a convincing argument at all that the virus was released from a lab. But it is absolutely a plausible candidate explanation in the same realm of probability as direct transfer, which is not how you are framing it. We need evidence to decide which (if either) is true
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Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
I think the mistake here is in assuming "same realm of probability" because the evolutionary throughput of nature/in-the-wild dwarfs all laboratories on earth combined. Similarly total amount of catalogued and/or captive organisms and sequences is a sliver compared to nature.
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The stuff from nature is collected and put in the laboratories to study. I don't think anyone except kooks argues against the ultimate zoonotic origin of this virus.
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Replying to @Pinboard @BeijingPalmer
Even non-kooks have some cognitive bias that wants to believe that somewhere in the chain of events leading up to global pandemic there is something NOT just random occurrences. This is exacerbated by our poor intuition for rare events on timescale > lifespan.
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