This piece by Dan Rather is a good example of the motivated reasoning that has poisoned the discussion over covid origins, and ironically a very unscientific approach. Whether science is under attack or not should have zero bearing on investigating how the pandemic started.https://twitter.com/DanRather/status/1406611921256828930 …
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So Stewart is in fact applying scientific principles in his hypothesis—in this case Occam's Razor. Check out the novel virus lab down the street from the novel virus spreading event, he says, and don't let political or social considerations derail your inquiry. That's science.
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If millions of people died because research into preventing a pandemic created the conditions for starting one, that is the most important lesson we could learn from covid. Getting the answer right, one way or the other, is the only way to prevent this all from happening again.
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I'm not asking anyone to believe the evidence we have right now is adequate. But I wish commentators like Rather would stop conditioning their beliefs on the consequences of one answer or the other being right, and stop attacking the question itself as somehow harmful.
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The one thing that science is supposed to be best at—updating beliefs based on new evidence—is something we've consistently failed at all through the pandemic. The mantra of "believe the science" revealed itself as just an argument from authority dressed up in a lab coat.
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End of conversation
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The tendency for some to avoid even the possibility of uncovering inconvenient truths is troubling
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You're well on your way towards a conspiracy theory, but I will say this: the answer to the question of whether or not COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan has no bearing whatsoever on whether there is currently an iatrogenic pandemic risk from any facility you could regulate.
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Agree with all your points above, but what’s this one? Which is the iatrogenic pandemic you’re referring to? (You’re not referring to Covid, right?) There’s been SARS, MERS, Zika, swine flu, Ebola, errr.. none of those is iatrogenic? Only one’s pandemic?
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What five are you counting here?
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