I’ll be honest: I’m still a little shaken over how dismissive I was on the lab leak hypothesis last year.
I’m not sure what the lesson is here, other than, ‘always double check the expert consensus’, but then to what degree?
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There’s this saying that I keep thinking about: “the line between conspiracy theory and critical thinking is very thin.”
(Yes, yes, I’m fully aware that I’m an epistemology nerd, so of course this is the sort of thing I think about at 10am in the morning.)
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To be fair, it DID take a 10k word piece to change my mind: nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covi
And Wade bent over backwards to be believable.
I know, I’m not the only one who believed in the expert consensus, but I thought I would be more critically minded than that. 🤷♂️
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Maybe a variation is to flip our burden of proof bias - easy to have lower burden of proof for claims that agree with our in-group / intuitions, and so potentially larger danger of falling prey to blind spots?
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I guess my problem with that is that my intuition was “listen to the expert consensus”. Which is usually a good intuition/prior to have!
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One lesson here could be, if your first prior (most prior prior 😀) on a topic is not about that topic itself, you're taking eyes off the ball.
Can't start with outside view as first prior. Rather, start with prior that's immediate to qn, and then "update hard" on outside view.
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Here, my 1st prior (zero marks coz didn't predict publicly) was on "Of 1000s of wet-markets world over, what is the likelihood the virus originated at one right next to a premier virology institute?" conditional on it leaking from said institute vs. not
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I had jotted down a prediction in Jul 2020 (on my @RoamResearch, since you ask), that by Dec 31 2021, general consensus will be that COVID originated in a lab (confidence level 70%).
Didn't account for the US funding the alleged research 
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thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-or
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thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-orShow this thread
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An old boss of mine had a great saying about analysis: The most dangerous result is the one you want to hear.
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Experts are also subject to cognitive biases
Gellman Amnesia
Inside view - mckinsey.com/business-funct
if experts use pathos or ethos arguments instead of logos, are they experts?
How much of a role was sensemaking in creating the consensus?
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Think the lesson is not to silence people who disagree with the consensus. If they're wrong, it will soon be apparent.
Also, no one is 100% right. A better method would be to see how much and where their argument is wrong.
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