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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and here is the diff with the bit that codes the furin cleavage site between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 highlighted. I had to look for myself.
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This is what actually got me a bit convinced. The coincidence seemed too convenient.
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I noticed lots of people fell into the trap: Lab leak? -> media says deliberate lab leak is ridiculous -> makes sense -> finished. Media reports glossed over accidental lab leak possibility. So "accident" got bundled up with deliberate leak, and dismissed
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