LESSWRONG
LW

All of Mike P's Comments + Replies

[Linkpost] Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
Mike P01

A problem with the debate format is mistakes that may be picked up if submissions were filed in advance can get missed. For example, the claim serial passage would show N501Y mutations that are not seen in SARS-CoV-2 was incorrect. It would in BALB/c mice but not hACE2 mice which is what WIV had.

In terms of getting to the truth of the matter since the debate several new papers have undermined the core arguments relied on from Worobey et al and Pekar et al. for Huanan Seafood Market origin:

  1. Spatial statistics experts Stoyan and Chiu (2024) find the statis

... (read more)
Reply11
1Mateusz Bagiński
missing subject, who was performing? I guess WIV?
On coincidences and Bayesian reasoning, as applied to the origins of COVID-19
Mike P00

***In fact, there appear to have been 2 separate spillover events. No early cases cluster around any other location, such as the WIV, so this already suspicious event essentially happened twice! ***

Note these claims have been seriously challenged in the past few months:

  1. Spatial statistics experts Stoyan and Chiu (2024) dispute the analysis that Huanan Seafood Market was necessarily early epicenter. https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139/7557954

  2. Lv et al (2024) find the multiple spillover theory is unlikely

... (read more)
Reply
1viking_math
Brand new account, reposting old arguments? Not suspicious at all.  "Just because the market was the epicenter doesn't mean the pandemic started there," while technically true, is fairly meaningless. If the center were at the lab every lab leak proponent would be shouting at the top of their lungs this conclusively proves the lab leak theory. Debating one particular statistical analysis doesn't disprove the very elementary technique of "look at the data, it's obvious" aka https://xkcd.com/2400/. The multiple spillover theory might be wrong. But then again, so might all of the analyses that Roko cited in his initial post, including the paper about genetic engineering, the Richard Ebright tweet, the RTK estimates, etc. The point of that part was to show that it's very easy to generate high Bayes factors if you highball favorable pieces of information, ignore unfavorable ones, make convenient assumptions, and multiply numbers together.  This analysis is obviously heavily biased. No Bayes factor at all for the cases being at the market? Again, no LL supporter would seriously say the BF would be one if the cases were clustered near the WIV. This is the exact same sort of highly motivated reasoning that Rootclaim applied, and neither of the judges bought it, for the same reason. The CGG analysis is just wrong, etc.