“scientists who believed a lab leak idea was plausible couldn't muster up an argument that would hold up under peer review”
Scientists work with covid viruses, scientists accidentally contract virus when one of a thousand technical protocols accidentally slipped, scientists unknowingly spread virus.
I worked in a clean lab for years with, presumably, much lower tolerances than you would want at a lab studying deadly viruses. We had leaks all the time even with protocols in place. Scientists are smart, they aren’t perfect and make mistakes.
Now realize that publicly stating your lab had a protocol failure of this magnitude and you face career death, the possible eradication of your lab and it’s connections, etc.
You’re saying no lab leak claims “held up under peer review” and it’s “not supported by facts”. I’m not sure if you get this, but if this did leak from a lab then there would probably be zero way to trace that without speculation. You’re not going to go find a covid virus with a time stamp and location of where it came from or where it moved. How on Earth would one ever prove this?
I have a feeling that your terms of proof a priori make it impossible to ever conclude a lab leak was the cause…
From what I've read, their work on novel bat coronaviruses mainly consisted of sequencing samples, since culturing the viruses in the lab is notoriously hard. How are you going to infect yourself with a tiny, denatured sample used for sequencing? It would probably be quite a challenge to do this intentionally.
Just to be clear, I'm not commenting on if the lab leak theory is plausible or not, I'm commenting on how none of these folks were willing to go "on the record" about it in a way that would have to stand up to the level of scrutiny they know would come.
“ Now realize that publicly stating your lab had a protocol failure of this magnitude and you face career death, the possible eradication of your lab and it’s connections, etc.”
From my previous comment.
It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising that these researchers wouldn’t say it happened even if they had strong evidence it did.
The downsides are obviously not good for them nor their careers in any way. God forbid they themselves could be found connected to the responsibility and would inevitably become a scapegoat.
And if they did come out and nothing happened to them - what positives would occur? “Reforming safety protocols”? All that would do is create more red tape in the future and inhibit research even more.
I think you should better evaluate the context of what a scientist in that position would face and think. You really quickly see there’s a lot of grey area, and we can’t think very highly of our typical standards of proof.
Of course, i’m not saying “absolutely it was a leak”. Simply that you’re holding the theory to such high standards of proof as to be, imho, unreasonable.
It isn't clear to me that there are meaningful outward pressures on these folks to lie or misrepresent what they're able to credibly support.
And even if there were, it does nothing for the argument that it was a lab leak. You can imply and infer all day, but "surely there'd be proof if only people would be free to speak" isn't actually an argument in favor of an idea, just a plausible explanation for a lack of that argument.
On the other side of the spectrum - code reviews have never, not even one single time, given me any real opportunity to learn something of value. They have only ever been someone else shoving their preferences onto my coding style (for better or worse)
I was shocked at my first job to realize the code reviewer didn’t even read my code, merely glanced over and demanded style changes (which were not consistent from review to review in the slightest)
It really felt more like how you hand your advisor your thesis with obvious easy to fix errors so he doesn’t compulsively decide “well something must need improvement” and make you fix something difficult
From your multiple comments on threads it seems like your ego is strongly attached to your code - if you truly never, not even one time, derived value from a code review, either you always choose to work in toxic environment/s or you're not willing to accept feedback or defend your "coding style" well enough to align colleagues with your opinion. I desperately miss code review feedback at this point in my career after excellent engineers made me question my strong beliefs and empathise with theirs helped me build my path.
“ I look for readable, maintainable code, and try to make sure the writer is doing appropriate testing. But whether or not it works and is correct, that's not my job, that's the developer's job.”
And I personally refuse to work with this style of workflow anymore
Does the code do what it needs? That’s objective and it either does or doesn’t. I can manage that kind of review.
Does the code look pretty enough? This is subjective and guarantees i’ll waste hours of my life every month bc someone else felt anxious/neurotic/masochistic and wanted to dump a chore on me.
No thanks, if you have style guidelines i’ll follow them. I’m not your whipping boy that will ask how high when you say jump.
The fact that something is subjective does not mean that it is useless.
IMHO, writing maintainable code requires a lot of experience, which one cannot expect from all junior developers. Requiring style guidelines for everything is a bit pedantic, and does not even make sense when you stride in to new territories. The latter is increasingly becoming the only part of software development where I would like to go.
If all code and requirements would be so objective and so simple, then I'm afraid you'll soon be replaced by an AI agent :)
Readability is not "prettiness", it's minimizing the effort as much as feasible to understand what the code is doing. I don't care what lines the braces are on.
Yeah, this is an issue with way more science than anyone (esp scientists) is comfortable acknowledging
In grad school I encountered experiment after experiment, paper after paper where the authors went around emphasizing the parts which were statistically “sexy” while ignoring glaring issues like this
It’s almost like the methodology for creating science is more rigorous than the science itself
Sometimes the sample is too small. Sometimes they assume a correlation that doesn’t exist. It’s troubling and was a large part of why I left academia
I faced similar pressures in graduate school to leave out somewhat unfavorable results (which I thought were interesting and worth presenting even if they didn't flatter our approach). It wasn't the only thing that drove me away from academia, but it certainly contributed.
In the statistics department, of all places! Where the importance of being forthcoming with your data should be best understood!
Why not an extension that makes the "save" button cancel instead?
How can you put effort writing a comment if you know it will be deleted before people read it? How can you bear to keep your deleter enabled after you just posted a comment you thought interesting?
And quite frankly, how do you justify going into other people's threads and littering them with useless "[deleted]" comments on purpose?
I don’t really follow. There are billions/trillions of these creatures who are eaten alive every year in the wild. Why is it so significant that humans also do this?
Are we trying to make reality fit our wholesome romanced version of reality?
Not that I could stomach it myself, but I don’t really see this as much of a moral issue.
> There are billions/trillions of these creatures who are eaten alive every year in the wild. Why is it so significant that humans also do this?
Most animals eat other animals in such cruel ways because they don't have better means available to them and because if they didn't use the teeth and claws they have to catch prey they'd starve. Humans don't have to be needlessly cruel in order to eat an animal. For us, it's a choice.
I'd prefer that every hamburger I eat comes from a cow who lived a long happy cow life then died suddenly and without pain. There's no section in the meat department at my grocery store for "happy cows that died painlessly" though, so I'm left with what's available. I can accept that, but there's zero reason for me to torture a live cow and excuses like "well, a lion would have ripped it apart while it was alive" wouldn't justify my actions if I did.
By all means, eat animals! They're delicious! At a minimum though, we shouldn't go out of our way to make a living thing suffer.
> I can accept that, but there's zero reason for me to torture a live cow and excuses like "well, a lion would have ripped it apart while it was alive" wouldn't justify my actions if I did.
TBH I just see it as false platitudes since there's it's very likely the burger I'm eating wasn't some ethically raised and slaughtered cow. Sure, I didn't do it, so clearly I'm absolved of all fault there.
I know others who feel the way you do, and they're vegetarians because of it. I disprove of industrial farming practices, but I do take a lot of comfort in the fact that I, personally, am not inflicting suffering on a live animal. If I had to personally raise and slaughter every animal I ate, I doubt I'd do much meat eating.
When I have the option of choosing meat from a cow raised and slaughtered ethically I'll take that one every time, but usually I have no idea of the provenance of a particular hamburger patty and that likely does wonders for my peace of mind.
It's really hard for me to understand how you can so clearly understand how unethical all this is, and still choose to participate. You frame it as not having a choice, because there's no Wagyu/organic/"happy" beef available. Yet, almost always, there's the option of NOT eating the beef.
I find most "happy" beef is nothing more than an illusion for lazy rich people to pretend they're not doing a bad thing, but why not AT THE LEAST choose to eat that or not eat meat?
> When I have the option of choosing meat from a cow raised and slaughtered ethically I'll take that one every time, but usually I have no idea of the provenance of a particular hamburger patty and that likely does wonders for my peace of mind.
Kobe and Wagyu beef are raised happily and slaughtered ethically in order to be the quality that they are, in theory.
I believe economics certainly plays a role here.
A pound of Wagyu Chuck costs $160 at a nearby grocery store but I can get Prime Chuck from the local big chain grocery store for just $12 (a 13x price difference).
For a long time I’ve wrestled with a deep-seated but welcome, albeit persistent, unease with food.
As a species we have and continue to inflict dramatic suffering and harm upon the non-human species on our planet. We do this variably to our own enrichment, or sometimes entertainment, but a lot of it is also to our own long-term detriment.
Even making the “good choice” comes with “bad points”. I tend not to go to seafood restaurants because I don’t want to give them money. I accept an invitation to Red Lobster because a family member wants to get a bite. I order a salad, horrified by my surroundings, and find it has shrimp in it.
I love the taste of shrimp, but I no longer eat it because I don’t know how it was handled. Humanely? Did the shrimp this shrimp came from suffer eyestalk ablation? I don’t know.
So I could pick it off to the side and waste it, or I could eat it so it didn’t die in vein.
This doesn't make sense to me; it sounds like you're suggesting I can't make my own moral judgment regarding your actions – that if you think what you're doing is okay, I have to think it's okay too.
Even if morality is only about answering the question, "how should I conduct myself", and not directly about how anyone else should conduct themselves, if one of my values is alleviating the suffering of others, I will need to recognize when other feeling things are being hurt. If you're the one causing the hurt, I suppose you could say that I'm not making a "moral judgment" about your actions (but rather some other kind of assessment), but regardless I will feel a duty to intervene.
Its a little hypocritical of you to try and force this perspective on others - if this is how you feel shouldnt you simply keep quiet and make your own decisions, to avoid forcing your choices onto others?
good lord, people are discussing their ethical considerations for making their own choices, nobody is forcing you to do anything. why is this reaction so immediate in literally every discussion about anything ever
I think that, apart from psychopaths, very few people wouldn't consider torturing an animal to be "cruel". There are extreme circumstances which may justify being cruel in that way, but making a youtube video isn't one of them.
> I don’t really follow. There are billions/trillions of these creatures who are eaten alive every year in the wild. Why is it so significant that humans also do this?
That tells us little on our moral obligations towards them and, for that matter, towards our fellow humans. Animals also murder other members of their own species, is murder hence ok?
Only if you believe they're automata. Which raises the question, are humans not automata as well? If we are, then we also don't murder as we also don't have intent. But if we have intent, what's the line that separates us (other than the obvious "not the same species") from other animals that renders them mere unintentional automata and us intentional non-automata?
Also, spend a few days with any animal, you'll see they have intentions. They're just harder to discern.
> Animals don't have malice.
Likewise some do have malice. It's just harder to discern as we lack the ability to communicate with them and they lack the ability to articulate to us what their feelings are.
I agree with your analysis, but while I can’t speak for the original commenter, I think their point was probably closer to:
“If we can all have this conversation together, it’s clearly a choice for us.”
I (am not being cute when I say I) truly wish I could talk _with_ my cat. I would ask if she murdered that bug or was operating on instinct. Did she kill for sport, defense, or hunger? Was she just pissed off? I don’t know and she can’t tell me, so I can only assume she’s just doing what cats do.
Among our own species I don’t think that “benefit of the doubt” (?) is defacto transferable.
I hope this makes sense. I am enjoying this conversation in an odd kind of way. I’ve been waiting for news like this for a long time.
Though the article and UKGOV articles are from 2021?
People do it regardless. It's not a justification, but it's also not a preventative measure to say "this is bad".
But in the grand scheme of things, I don't think honoring prey is even in the top 100 issues in terms of impacts humans have on marine ecosystems. Sorry if I sound belittling, but it does sound like this whole thing is more of a symbolic gesure than a means to really resolve the issues we have caused. That's why I don't take it quite as seriously.
Because in this case - they're not being devoured so someone can survive. But for the sheer gall and thrill of it.
Meanwhile, humans have a huge empathy problem in regard to animals (and other types of species) - perhaps its most categorical failing, and the driver for the most pressing crises of our time, in fact.
Whenever people are doing too well they invent hardships for themselves. No one who is struggled find food will come up with random rules about should and shouldn't be eaten.
Another way of saying "inventing hardships" is "raising the bar". People who struggle to find food might do all kinds of horrible things in order to survive - for example at the expense of other humans competing for the same food. When it becomes easier to source food, they can raise their moral standards. Do you think that's some kind of fallacy? That the standard should be the same, no matter how hard it is to source food (or, in the context of this discussion, alternative foods)?
Morally, it's pretty significant that we make conscious decisions (as a process that we often see as distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom) to kill and eat thousands of other animals mostly for the sake of taste, rather than for the sake of necessity, which is why most other animals hunt.
We may need to try and be better than them.
I think that is the point, at least for me.
I'm no vegetarian, and I like to indulge myself with some 'pulpo a la gallega', But one thing is killing an animal because we are at the top of the food chain, and another thing is killing in the name of sport or culture.
Animals don't have the mental capacity reason about moral philosophy, so we can't really judge them for not behaving in another way. But we humans have, and yes, we can judge other humans for causing unnecessary suffering towards others.
Animals devour to survive. Humans (in first world countries at least) don't need to do that. We eat meat because we like it, not because we need to. And we have the choice to do otherwise. In fact, plant based alternatives are healthier for us (look up the China study), and for the planet (most Amazon deforestation is to grow cattle feed). There is no need for most of us to eat any animal products at all.
One of the great things we are capable of as humans is NOT doing what has always been done just because. People who think that is a justification or clever quip could be argued to be barbaric and without any creative imagination.
Because there is a difference between being eaten in the wild by other animals who survive on those and humans expoliting the wild life or marine life.
Necessity, which is also the important difference between murder and self defense.
I so wish people would think of dog or cat meat in these supposedly difficult questions. What's the difference between killing and eating a dog for survival and doing it for fun, or because it tastes good?
Orca TikTok would be a hell of a ride. I'd love to doom scroll the the kid orcas wearing their salmon hats and the adults making reactions videos to their grandkids reviving a dead trend.
Or an orca declaring "I'm Donny Rocksville and this is rock the boat!!" before him and all his friends capsize a ship off of Spain.
Orca behaviour does seem to indicate they inflict pain/misery on other creatures largely for the "fun" of it. But we don't really know, and certainly don't know whether they're capable of properly understanding that their victims are suffering.
I know we don't know for sure but it there is evidence to suggest orcas may have equal or better emotional processing than humans.
In Blackfish one of the most interesting attacks was against a trainer, Ken Peters, who was also a trained diver. The orca seemed to know the limits of the trainer and how long she could keep him underwater. When she brought him up she gave him time to breathe and compose himself before dunking him under again. She could have easily killed him if that was her intent but it didn't seem to be.
I have to assume through some form of leptogensis or similar that we could engineer our galaxies or maybe entire universe so that this feature is at least delayed much longer, if not avoided entirely
Scientists work with covid viruses, scientists accidentally contract virus when one of a thousand technical protocols accidentally slipped, scientists unknowingly spread virus.
I worked in a clean lab for years with, presumably, much lower tolerances than you would want at a lab studying deadly viruses. We had leaks all the time even with protocols in place. Scientists are smart, they aren’t perfect and make mistakes.
Now realize that publicly stating your lab had a protocol failure of this magnitude and you face career death, the possible eradication of your lab and it’s connections, etc.
You’re saying no lab leak claims “held up under peer review” and it’s “not supported by facts”. I’m not sure if you get this, but if this did leak from a lab then there would probably be zero way to trace that without speculation. You’re not going to go find a covid virus with a time stamp and location of where it came from or where it moved. How on Earth would one ever prove this?
I have a feeling that your terms of proof a priori make it impossible to ever conclude a lab leak was the cause…