OK let's get this on record. What percentage chance would you assign to a lab leak? Because there are a lot of credible people I'm reading from and talking to that consider it reasonably likely (at least 50%).https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1397807872033976323 …
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Replying to @NateSilver538
Not impossible but less than 1% for a lab leak of a natural isolate. Logs below that for an engineered virus.
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Replying to @florian_krammer @NateSilver538
We need to assess possibility of lab leak not in isolation, based purely on scientific likelihood, but also in context of what we know: the admittedly circumstantial facts that emerge.This is no longer a purely scientific judgement but a security assessment based on entire mosaic
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I feel like we're saying "odds of winning the lottery are very low" (true) to assess the causal path of a lottery winner (after it happened). Why did that person win this (terrible) lottery? Yes complex question but cannot be answered by examining the odds in a blank slate world.
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Replying to @zeynep @ScottGottliebMD and
So two questions: if we had no pandemic, given what we know, how would we expect the next one to happen? Now that we *do* have this one, how would we assess what did happen? This doesn't argue for a particular answer to the issue: just that these are different causal questions.
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Replying to @zeynep @ScottGottliebMD and
The former (pandemics in general) is very important obviously, but given that they are rare enough (thankfully) it would be helpful not to conflate priors with posteriors—the path to *this* pandemic, which already happened—in our causal analysis because it, too, can hold lessons.
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Replying to @zeynep @ScottGottliebMD and
(Now add in some magic dust to make it all a sane, grounded and empirically-oriented conversation, instead of what we have, and we're good).
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Replying to @zeynep @ScottGottliebMD and
but then also, please subtract the mis-information coming from motivated politicians, intelligence agencies, etc.
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Also, if I had that magic wand.
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