While I wasn't at 80% of a lab leak when Eliezer asseted it a month ago, I'm now at 90%. It will take a while till it filters through society but I feel like we can already look at what we ourselves got wrong.
In 2014, in the LessWrong survey more people considered bioengineered pandemics a global catastrophic risk then AI. At the time there was a public debate about gain of function research. On editoral described the risks of gain of function research as:
Insurers and risk analysts define risk as the product of probability times consequence. Data on the probability of a laboratory-associated infection in U.S. BSL3 labs using select agents show that 4 infections have been observed over <2,044 laboratory-years of observation, indicating at least a 0.2% chance of a laboratory-acquired infection (5) per BSL3 laboratory-year. An alternative data source is from the intramural BSL3 labs at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which report in a slightly different way: 3 accidental infections in 634,500 person-hours of work between 1982 and 2003, or about 1 accidental infection for every 100 full-time person-years (2,000 h) of work (6).
A simulation model of an accidental infection of a laboratory worker with a transmissible influenza virus strain estimated about a 10 to 20% risk that such an infection would escape control and spread widely (7). Alternative estimates from simple models range from about 5% to 60%. Multiplying the probability of an accidental laboratory-acquired infection per lab-year (0.2%) or full-time worker-year (1%) by the probability that the infection leads to global spread (5% to 60%) provides an estimate that work with a novel, transmissible form of influenza virus carries a risk of between 0.01% and 0.1% per laboratory-year of creating a pandemic, using the select agent data, or between 0.05% and 0.6% per full-time worker-year using the NIAID data.
Even at the lower bar of 0.05% per full-time worker-year it seems crazy that society continued playing Russian Roulette. We could have seen the issue and protested. EA's could have created organizations to fight against gain-of-function research. Why didn't we speak every Petrov day about the necessity to stop gain of function research? Organizations like OpenPhil should go through the 5 Why's and model why they messed this up and didn't fund the cause. What needs to change so that we as rationalists and EA's are able to organize to fight against tractable risks that our society takes without good reason?
I guess that's fair. I don't really think that way either, but I want to learn how. I think numbers become especially important when coordinating evidence with others like this. My older prior favored the natural origin hypothesis, because that's what was reported in the news. I heard the case for the lab leak and updated from there.
Authoritarians in general and the Chinese in particular would reflexively cover up anything that's even potentially embarrassing as a matter of course. I can't call a coverup more likely in a natural origin scenario, but it's still pretty likely, so this is weak evidence.
Didn't know this one, but that's pretty vague. Source?
The first confirmed case wasn't until December 8th, last I heard. Still, Wuhan is Wuhan. Even assuming a natural origin, we'd expect people from WIV to be more vigilant than the general public. Three at once is hardly more evidence than one, because they could have given it to each other. I do think this favors the leak hypothesis, because the timing is suggestive, but it seems weak. Could this have been some other disease? How early in November?
Again, coverup is a matter of course for these guys.
Not very strong by itself.
Need more details here.
I knew about this one. This combined with the fact that the biosafety 4 WIV is in Wuhan is most of what got me to thinking the leak was more likely than not.
Why? And does this have anything to do with whether it was a leak or not? These are primarily American companies that are already censored in China. This was during the Trump era, when the Left was trying to fight him any way they could. "Racist" has been their favorite ad hominem lately. Unless you can establish than China was behind this, and put in more effort than would be expected as a matter of course, I don't think this is evidence at all of anything other than normal American political bickering. But we've already counted the coverup as weak evidence. We can't count it again.
This doesn't seem to be saying anything new. Weinstein does at least have gears in his models, but seems dangerously close to crackpot territory. I don't think he's a conspiracy theorist yet, but he also seems subject to the normal human biases, and doesn't seem to be trying to correct for them the way a rationalist would. It's not obvious to me that his next most likely explanation is the next most likely.
Again, coverup as a matter of course. Nothing new here.
"Patient zero" is the earliest that could be identified, not necessarily the first to get it. That an employee of a lab studying coronaviruses would notice first doesn't seem that strange, even if it had been circulating in Wuhan for a bit before. This does seem to favor a leak. How strong this evidence is depends a lot on more details. I could see this being very strong or fairly weak depending on the exact circumstances.