“Media has a strong incentive to cause hype over things that aren’t really dangerous trends.”
This was your mistake. If you didn’t believe your sources were trustworthy, then why didn’t you find sources you could trust?
There were plenty of trustworthy sources of information early in the pandemic. A lot of credible people were talking about Covid a month before the mainstream media started prioritizing their coverage.
Media has a strong incentive to cause hype over things that aren’t really dangerous trends
I think the inference here was ‘media has a strong incentive to cause hype over stuff that doesn’t matter, so surely they have an even stronger incentive to cause hype over stuff that is actually dangerous’. Empirically, this was wrong, but I’m confused about why!
I don’t think that’s an accurate statement to begin with. The media has a strong incentive to cause hype over anything that drives ratings, so using mainstream media coverage to forecast the severity of a once in a lifetime event such as a viral pandemic just seems like a bad idea in my opinion. There are much better ways.
I don’t know what you’re even implying about the Fauci email drop. If you dig even a little into that story it’s clear there was nothing there and it was the typical media tactic where they dig through thousands of emails and quote tiny snippets out of context to people who don’t know better and will take the bait. If stories like these are popping up in the media you consume, that means you’re consuming entertainment media, not actual journalism. Even if Fauci contradicted himself or made a mistake, who cares? He is one of the foremost public health experts in the world and his credentials are impeccable. If you listen to experts, you’re going to be on the right side of the vast majority of issues.
…which is why I don’t agree that trustworthy sources “no longer exist”. For people who are sufficiently motivated and good at doing research, it’s never been easier to find accurate, trustworthy information. Why would you bother going to the mainstream media for news on a virus when you can get that information directly from the world’s top physicians and research scientists? They’re all on Twitter and many of them have blogs or podcasts.
When you’re getting your Covid information from an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins or the Harvard School of Medicine, you aren’t worried that it’s poorly sourced, second hand information revolving around some political narrative.
If you dig even a little into that story it’s clear there was nothing there and it was the typical media tactic where they dig through thousands of emails and quote tiny snippets out of context to people who don’t know better and will take the bait.
That’s quite false. The emails are a lot more incriminating in context then without the context. Take the fact that Fauci emailed about the Baric&Shi paper from 2015 with “gain of function” in the file name. Taking alone that’s already bad. If you however read it in context, he did that hours after getting the email that told him that the virus being of natural origin is not in line with evolutionary theory.
Even if Fauci contradicted himself or made a mistake, who cares?
He made a mistake. He circumvented US government policy to fund gain of function research under his watch. We are now at the HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEEREPORT MINORITY STAFF concluding that the preponderance of evidence indicated that it was a lab leak due of a virus created via gain of function research.
Then he engaged in the coverup that you see in the Fauci emails. Calling it a mistake doesn’t really do it justice given that there was clear malicious intent.
It may be worth being clear what “House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff” means. (It wasn’t immediately obvious to me on reading this.)
The US House of Representatives has a Committee on Foreign Affairs. At present it has 27 Democratic members and 25 Republican members. The Committee Minority Staff means just the 25 Republican members of that committee.
So this is a strongly partisan group of people, and this is an explicitly political undertaking.
Exactly how much this means we should mistrust them (or, symmetrically, a group of Democrats acting similarly) depends on exactly how they got started. E.g., imagine that in a meeting of the whole committee someone said “We should look into the origins of Covid-19” and all the Democrats refused, so the Republicans decided to go it alone; while that would strongly suggest political polarization is at work, it would still be consistent with this being a group of people defined by their wish to investigate the issue, and whatever they produce might be our best chance of getting at the truth.
On the other hand, if what happened is that just the Republicans on the committee got together and decided that they would investigate the topic and write a report—well, that looks much more like a politically-motivated thing which will only by coincidence tell us anything useful, and whose bottom line was already written before they began.
So what’s the actual history? According to this latest report, the “Committee Minority Staff” decided in March 2020 to put together a report on the origins of Covid-19. They published their “House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff Final Report on The Origins of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic, Including the Roles of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization” in September 2020. Curiously, I can find on the internet little sign of any actual publication of that document. I did find what appears to be a copy of it, though. The latest thing is, formally, an addendum to the earlier report.
I had a look through the Congressional Record for March 2020, and (so far as I can tell this is all there is) the videos of House Committee on Foreign Affairs meetings. I didn’t find anything in either discussing the (prospective or already decided) formation of a group to investigate the origins of Covid-19. (There’s one video of a committee meeting about Covid-19, on 2020-02-27; nothing else prior to 2020-03-16. There was one tangential reference to the possible origins of the disease, but nothing remotely to do with any sort of US investigation of it. The Congressional Record turns up a few people complaining about the CCP being dishonest, but again nothing about a US investigation of any kind.) I don’t really know how these things work, so I don’t know how much evidence that is that there wasn’t an attempt to form a bipartisan group of this sort; it seems like it’s some evidence, though.
(Maybe it needs saying explicitly that there are reasons why Republican politicians might have wanted to do this, with something like the reports they’ve produced as an already-decided goal. For the earlier report: The Trump administration was keen to emphasize the Chinese-ness of Covid-19, and to blame China for its spread, from the very beginning; their political opponents responded by calling that racism; so making China look bad = making Republicans look good and Democrats bad. More generally, the Trump administration was very keen to be seen as tough on China, perhaps as a counterweight to accusations that they were soft on Russia. The Trump administration had been sharply critical of the WHO’s handling of Covid-19, and in April 2020 they announced that they were cutting off US funding to the WHO. Of course their political opponents condemned all that. So making the WHO look bad = making Republicans look good and Democrats bad. For the later addendum: for whatever reason the lab leak hypothesis was highly politically polarized, so supporting it = making Republicans look good and Democrats bad. The tension between Mr Trump and Mr Fauci is well documented, and of course now Fauci is working for a Democratic administration; so attacking Fauci = making Republicans look good and Democrats bad. To be clear, none of this is evidence in favour of China, the WHO, the animal-origin hypothesis, or Mr Fauci. What it is is reason to be suspicious about an all-Republican-politicians group that just happens to reach conclusions unfavourable to those; it would likewise be cause for suspicion if a group composed entirely of Democratic politicians reached the opposite conclusions.)
So what this (tentatively) looks like to me is a largely political thing, which is only tangentially interested in getting at the actual truth and whose bottom line was mostly written before it started. In order for its conclusions to be good evidence of anything for me, I would want reason to believe that their investigation was more honest than most partisan-from-the-outset investigations are. Do you know of reason to believe that? Or of other reasons why we should put any trust in their conclusions?
On the other hand, if what happened is that just the Republicans on the committee got together and decided that they would investigate the topic and write a report—well, that looks much more like a politically-motivated thing which will only by coincidence tell us anything useful, and whose bottom line was already written before they began.
Any congressional report is political. Even if the report would only reflect a clear consensus of the Republicans for the lab leak, that in itself is evidence of political pressure building up.
If there’s any committee started where the Republicans can invite witnesses they for example can invite Hugh Auchincloss on the stand and asking him why he thought that funding the Baric&Shi would have been expected to go through the P3 framework.
Then the follow up question of whether he thinks that Fauci thought at the time that the PDF that Fauci sent him with the title “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function” described any gain of function experiments.
I don’t see any way how Auchincloss could answer those questions in a way that wouldn’t be clearly look very bad for Fauci.
“Fauci’s college thought Fauci thought the Baric&Shi paper is gain of function research while Fauci tells congress under oath that it isn’t” would be a story that’s simple enough for everybody to understand.
I don’t really know how these things work, so I don’t know how much evidence that is that there wasn’t an attempt to form a bipartisan group of this sort; it seems like it’s some evidence, though.
A bipartisan group would actually need buy-in from the democracts. The decision to task the US intelligence community which writing their report likely removed the possibility to push for a congressional commission on the topic because democrats would just say “lets wait for the US intelligence community”. Tasking the intelligence community worked as a bipartisan way to get a report.
In order for its conclusions to be good evidence of anything for me, I would want reason to believe that their investigation was more honest than most partisan-from-the-outset investigations are. Do you know of reason to believe that? Or of other reasons why we should put any trust in their conclusions?
How about actually reading their arguments and evaluating the arguments based on their merits? I know that’s a strange idea, but maybe it’s worthwhile here. The report does contain some new information such as that which comes from US satellite surveilance.
It adds to the evidence about the Chinese fight against the virus before it was officially announced and thus puts the allegations into a form where China not answering them is more incriminating.
Yes, any congressional report is political, but some are more purely political than others, which is why I pointed out that this one is produced by people all on one side of the aisle (which makes it likely to be more than averagely political) and considered how we might tell whether it’s likely to be better than most things produced by people all on one side of the aisle (which it doesn’t).
Your previous comment didn’t look to me as if it was commenting on the level of political pressure, and to whatever extent it was it was therefore nonresponsive to its parent, which was commenting on whether in fact Dr Fauci did bad things, not on whether there is political pressure to admit/deny/insist/etc. that Dr Fauci did bad things.
Imaginary scenarios in which someone gives testimony before Congress that’s damaging to Dr Fauci may be fun to imagine, but imaginary scenarios don’t provide real evidence.
I can read the arguments in the report and evaluate them, but I can’t so easily tell what arguments they aren’t presenting because they don’t lead the way they want, and I can’t tell what evidence they aren’t presenting because it points the wrong way, and I don’t know how trustworthy the people they quote are, and if the report makes some claim about something that happened in China in 2019, or about alleged genetic evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is likely the result of engineering, then I can’t readily tell whether that claim is true or false. So, alas, “just read the report and evaluate it for yourself” is a much less effective strategy than one might hope.
In any case, your great-grandparent comment didn’t say “this report makes a strong argument, namely X”. It just offered the report’s conclusions as evidence:
He made a mistake. He circumvented US government policy to fund gain of function research under his watch. We are now at the HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEEREPORT MINORITY STAFF concluding that the preponderance of evidence indicated that it was a lab leak due of a virus created via gain of function research.
I’m trying to understand whether there’s actually any reason to think that this report’s conclusions are any evidence of anything, or even that they’re likely enough to be evidence that it’s worth putting in the (substantial) effort it would take to tell whether the investigation and reporting are competent and honest, given that my prior for such things is that they are extremely unlikely to be so. I would expect a group composed entirely of Republican politicians to say Covid-19 was probably the result of a lab-leak of an artificial virus, and that China covered it up, and so forth, pretty much regardless of whether any of that is true, and pretty much regardless of the state of the evidence.
(I had a quick look at the report. It’s 83 pages long and does indeed appeal to all sorts of alleged evidence I am not readily able to evaluate; my initial impression of its logic is not good; its authors seem to be excessively ready to jump from suggestive hand-waving to “so it is reasonable to conclude that …”. But I would expect it to be like that even if the conclusions are correct, because it is written by a partisan group of politicians and such groups are rarely very honest even when the claims they are making are true.)
If the House Republicans would have a clear position that the lab leak theory is true, why wouldn’t the prewritten conclusion be “It’s clear beyond reasonable doubt that the lab leak theory is true?” The fact that the settled on the preponderance of evidence standard suggests to me that there wasn’t a clear prewritten conclusion. The claim is also more specific then just the lab leak happening. It’s specific about the timing of early September. It wouldn’t need that specifity for the political purpose.
I think you have a model where the House Republicans only care about what the media says that’s inaccurate. Accross party lines there are powerful people in DC that don’t want the lab leak theory out in the open. That’s why the Trump administration never managed to publish a report like the one that the HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE REPORT MINORITY STAFF published. There was just to much opposition in his administration to do so even if Trump wanted it.
my initial impression of its logic is not good
What isn’t good about the logic? If we take the unpublished database. Why unpublish the database at that point and then say it was unpublished during the pandemic because of cyber attacks?
Western money went into the creation of that database. It was created to help us fight pandemics and the Chinese took it down and didn’t give access to it during the pandemic thereby making it harder to fight the pandemic.
I don’t see what you mean with handwaving. What kind of evidence wouldn’t be handwaving? I have the impression that you are partisan about the issue and there’s no evidence that would convince you.
I am unconvinced by both of the arguments in your first paragraph. (1) To whatever extent the bottom line was pre-written, the expected result is that their conclusion would be as confident as they could convince themselves the evidence justifies and that others might believe. Everyone knows that a lot of what might be crucial evidence is unavailable; they couldn’t e.g. credibly say “we know for sure that it was a lab leak”. But they do say it was a lab leak, not just that it probably was. (2) For most readers, being more specific makes a claim more plausible rather than less. (As Gilbert and Sullivan had one of their characters say: “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”.) So neither of the things you describe seems to me unexpected if this is politically motivated and had a basically-prewritten bottom line.
I don’t at all think that the House Republicans only care about what the media says, and I have no idea what I said to give that impression. The rest of your second paragraph sounds to me like pure conspiracy-mongering.
The specific example of handwaving and poor logic I was looking at when I wrote what I did about those is on page 26. “Therefore it is reasonable to conclude, based on the WIV’s extensive sample library and history of genetically manipulating coronaviruses, that in early September, one or more researchers became infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the lab and carried it out into the city.” The material in the previous pages doesn’t constitute anything remotely like a justification of this claim, so far as I can tell.
For instance, they present graphs showing traffic around some Wuhan hospitals and Baidu searches for “cough” and “diarrhea” (presumably actually for Chinese equivalents of those, but they don’t give details). The pattern of searches for “cough” and for “diarrhea” is very different, which to me suggests that they can’t both be signals of the spread of Covid-19 (and in the time period they’re talking about, unless I’m confused, there is no increase in searches for the latter; but there are increases before and a big spike after; I can’t help suspecting that they are hoping to confuse). When writing about these graphs they refer to “the hospitals that show a rise in traffic with patients complaining of COVID-19 symptoms”, suggesting that they have evidence that people at those hospitals were complaining of COVID-19 symptoms, but they’ve presented no such evidence.
This sort of thing is typical of writing whose goal is to persuade rather than to find the truth. It looks superficially like reasoning but when you look more closely all the actual logical steps are missing or broken. They show some graphs involving hospitals and COVID-19 symptoms, and then a paragraph later they are talking about “hospitals … with patients complaining of COVID-19 symptoms”, and if you aren’t reading carefully you might think they have actual evidence of that. They show evidence that people at the WIV worked on coronaviruses, that they have some history of poor safety procedures, and that an online database of WIV samples was taken offline in 2019-09 -- all of which, I completely agree, is highly suggestive—and jump from that to “it is reasonable to conclude that in early September one or more WIV researchers became infected with SARS-CoV-2″. Sure, that’s one possible story consistent with the evidence, but you need more than that to say something’s “reasonable to conclude”, and it looks to me as if they haven’t even tried to justify their reasoning. Handwave, handwave, confident conclusion.
Your impression of me is symmetrically matched by my impression of you (on this specific issue). I hope at least one of us is wrong.
I think the answer here is pretty cut and dry.
“Media has a strong incentive to cause hype over things that aren’t really dangerous trends.”
This was your mistake. If you didn’t believe your sources were trustworthy, then why didn’t you find sources you could trust?
There were plenty of trustworthy sources of information early in the pandemic. A lot of credible people were talking about Covid a month before the mainstream media started prioritizing their coverage.
I think the inference here was ‘media has a strong incentive to cause hype over stuff that doesn’t matter, so surely they have an even stronger incentive to cause hype over stuff that is actually dangerous’. Empirically, this was wrong, but I’m confused about why!
I don’t think that’s an accurate statement to begin with. The media has a strong incentive to cause hype over anything that drives ratings, so using mainstream media coverage to forecast the severity of a once in a lifetime event such as a viral pandemic just seems like a bad idea in my opinion. There are much better ways.
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I don’t know what you’re even implying about the Fauci email drop. If you dig even a little into that story it’s clear there was nothing there and it was the typical media tactic where they dig through thousands of emails and quote tiny snippets out of context to people who don’t know better and will take the bait. If stories like these are popping up in the media you consume, that means you’re consuming entertainment media, not actual journalism. Even if Fauci contradicted himself or made a mistake, who cares? He is one of the foremost public health experts in the world and his credentials are impeccable. If you listen to experts, you’re going to be on the right side of the vast majority of issues.
…which is why I don’t agree that trustworthy sources “no longer exist”. For people who are sufficiently motivated and good at doing research, it’s never been easier to find accurate, trustworthy information. Why would you bother going to the mainstream media for news on a virus when you can get that information directly from the world’s top physicians and research scientists? They’re all on Twitter and many of them have blogs or podcasts.
When you’re getting your Covid information from an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins or the Harvard School of Medicine, you aren’t worried that it’s poorly sourced, second hand information revolving around some political narrative.
That’s quite false. The emails are a lot more incriminating in context then without the context. Take the fact that Fauci emailed about the Baric&Shi paper from 2015 with “gain of function” in the file name. Taking alone that’s already bad. If you however read it in context, he did that hours after getting the email that told him that the virus being of natural origin is not in line with evolutionary theory.
If you want to see the emails in context, I did the work at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wQLXNjMKXdXXdK8kL/fauci-s-emails-and-the-lab-leak-hypothesis
He made a mistake. He circumvented US government policy to fund gain of function research under his watch. We are now at the HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEEREPORT MINORITY STAFF concluding that the preponderance of evidence indicated that it was a lab leak due of a virus created via gain of function research.
Then he engaged in the coverup that you see in the Fauci emails. Calling it a mistake doesn’t really do it justice given that there was clear malicious intent.
It may be worth being clear what “House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff” means. (It wasn’t immediately obvious to me on reading this.)
The US House of Representatives has a Committee on Foreign Affairs. At present it has 27 Democratic members and 25 Republican members. The Committee Minority Staff means just the 25 Republican members of that committee.
So this is a strongly partisan group of people, and this is an explicitly political undertaking.
Exactly how much this means we should mistrust them (or, symmetrically, a group of Democrats acting similarly) depends on exactly how they got started. E.g., imagine that in a meeting of the whole committee someone said “We should look into the origins of Covid-19” and all the Democrats refused, so the Republicans decided to go it alone; while that would strongly suggest political polarization is at work, it would still be consistent with this being a group of people defined by their wish to investigate the issue, and whatever they produce might be our best chance of getting at the truth.
On the other hand, if what happened is that just the Republicans on the committee got together and decided that they would investigate the topic and write a report—well, that looks much more like a politically-motivated thing which will only by coincidence tell us anything useful, and whose bottom line was already written before they began.
So what’s the actual history? According to this latest report, the “Committee Minority Staff” decided in March 2020 to put together a report on the origins of Covid-19. They published their “House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff Final Report on The Origins of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic, Including the Roles of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization” in September 2020. Curiously, I can find on the internet little sign of any actual publication of that document. I did find what appears to be a copy of it, though. The latest thing is, formally, an addendum to the earlier report.
I had a look through the Congressional Record for March 2020, and (so far as I can tell this is all there is) the videos of House Committee on Foreign Affairs meetings. I didn’t find anything in either discussing the (prospective or already decided) formation of a group to investigate the origins of Covid-19. (There’s one video of a committee meeting about Covid-19, on 2020-02-27; nothing else prior to 2020-03-16. There was one tangential reference to the possible origins of the disease, but nothing remotely to do with any sort of US investigation of it. The Congressional Record turns up a few people complaining about the CCP being dishonest, but again nothing about a US investigation of any kind.) I don’t really know how these things work, so I don’t know how much evidence that is that there wasn’t an attempt to form a bipartisan group of this sort; it seems like it’s some evidence, though.
(Maybe it needs saying explicitly that there are reasons why Republican politicians might have wanted to do this, with something like the reports they’ve produced as an already-decided goal. For the earlier report: The Trump administration was keen to emphasize the Chinese-ness of Covid-19, and to blame China for its spread, from the very beginning; their political opponents responded by calling that racism; so making China look bad = making Republicans look good and Democrats bad. More generally, the Trump administration was very keen to be seen as tough on China, perhaps as a counterweight to accusations that they were soft on Russia. The Trump administration had been sharply critical of the WHO’s handling of Covid-19, and in April 2020 they announced that they were cutting off US funding to the WHO. Of course their political opponents condemned all that. So making the WHO look bad = making Republicans look good and Democrats bad. For the later addendum: for whatever reason the lab leak hypothesis was highly politically polarized, so supporting it = making Republicans look good and Democrats bad. The tension between Mr Trump and Mr Fauci is well documented, and of course now Fauci is working for a Democratic administration; so attacking Fauci = making Republicans look good and Democrats bad. To be clear, none of this is evidence in favour of China, the WHO, the animal-origin hypothesis, or Mr Fauci. What it is is reason to be suspicious about an all-Republican-politicians group that just happens to reach conclusions unfavourable to those; it would likewise be cause for suspicion if a group composed entirely of Democratic politicians reached the opposite conclusions.)
So what this (tentatively) looks like to me is a largely political thing, which is only tangentially interested in getting at the actual truth and whose bottom line was mostly written before it started. In order for its conclusions to be good evidence of anything for me, I would want reason to believe that their investigation was more honest than most partisan-from-the-outset investigations are. Do you know of reason to believe that? Or of other reasons why we should put any trust in their conclusions?
Any congressional report is political. Even if the report would only reflect a clear consensus of the Republicans for the lab leak, that in itself is evidence of political pressure building up.
If there’s any committee started where the Republicans can invite witnesses they for example can invite Hugh Auchincloss on the stand and asking him why he thought that funding the Baric&Shi would have been expected to go through the P3 framework.
Then the follow up question of whether he thinks that Fauci thought at the time that the PDF that Fauci sent him with the title “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function” described any gain of function experiments.
I don’t see any way how Auchincloss could answer those questions in a way that wouldn’t be clearly look very bad for Fauci.
“Fauci’s college thought Fauci thought the Baric&Shi paper is gain of function research while Fauci tells congress under oath that it isn’t” would be a story that’s simple enough for everybody to understand.
A bipartisan group would actually need buy-in from the democracts. The decision to task the US intelligence community which writing their report likely removed the possibility to push for a congressional commission on the topic because democrats would just say “lets wait for the US intelligence community”. Tasking the intelligence community worked as a bipartisan way to get a report.
How about actually reading their arguments and evaluating the arguments based on their merits? I know that’s a strange idea, but maybe it’s worthwhile here. The report does contain some new information such as that which comes from US satellite surveilance.
It adds to the evidence about the Chinese fight against the virus before it was officially announced and thus puts the allegations into a form where China not answering them is more incriminating.
Yes, any congressional report is political, but some are more purely political than others, which is why I pointed out that this one is produced by people all on one side of the aisle (which makes it likely to be more than averagely political) and considered how we might tell whether it’s likely to be better than most things produced by people all on one side of the aisle (which it doesn’t).
Your previous comment didn’t look to me as if it was commenting on the level of political pressure, and to whatever extent it was it was therefore nonresponsive to its parent, which was commenting on whether in fact Dr Fauci did bad things, not on whether there is political pressure to admit/deny/insist/etc. that Dr Fauci did bad things.
Imaginary scenarios in which someone gives testimony before Congress that’s damaging to Dr Fauci may be fun to imagine, but imaginary scenarios don’t provide real evidence.
I can read the arguments in the report and evaluate them, but I can’t so easily tell what arguments they aren’t presenting because they don’t lead the way they want, and I can’t tell what evidence they aren’t presenting because it points the wrong way, and I don’t know how trustworthy the people they quote are, and if the report makes some claim about something that happened in China in 2019, or about alleged genetic evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is likely the result of engineering, then I can’t readily tell whether that claim is true or false. So, alas, “just read the report and evaluate it for yourself” is a much less effective strategy than one might hope.
In any case, your great-grandparent comment didn’t say “this report makes a strong argument, namely X”. It just offered the report’s conclusions as evidence:
I’m trying to understand whether there’s actually any reason to think that this report’s conclusions are any evidence of anything, or even that they’re likely enough to be evidence that it’s worth putting in the (substantial) effort it would take to tell whether the investigation and reporting are competent and honest, given that my prior for such things is that they are extremely unlikely to be so. I would expect a group composed entirely of Republican politicians to say Covid-19 was probably the result of a lab-leak of an artificial virus, and that China covered it up, and so forth, pretty much regardless of whether any of that is true, and pretty much regardless of the state of the evidence.
(I had a quick look at the report. It’s 83 pages long and does indeed appeal to all sorts of alleged evidence I am not readily able to evaluate; my initial impression of its logic is not good; its authors seem to be excessively ready to jump from suggestive hand-waving to “so it is reasonable to conclude that …”. But I would expect it to be like that even if the conclusions are correct, because it is written by a partisan group of politicians and such groups are rarely very honest even when the claims they are making are true.)
If the House Republicans would have a clear position that the lab leak theory is true, why wouldn’t the prewritten conclusion be “It’s clear beyond reasonable doubt that the lab leak theory is true?” The fact that the settled on the preponderance of evidence standard suggests to me that there wasn’t a clear prewritten conclusion. The claim is also more specific then just the lab leak happening. It’s specific about the timing of early September. It wouldn’t need that specifity for the political purpose.
I think you have a model where the House Republicans only care about what the media says that’s inaccurate. Accross party lines there are powerful people in DC that don’t want the lab leak theory out in the open. That’s why the Trump administration never managed to publish a report like the one that the HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE REPORT MINORITY STAFF published. There was just to much opposition in his administration to do so even if Trump wanted it.
What isn’t good about the logic? If we take the unpublished database. Why unpublish the database at that point and then say it was unpublished during the pandemic because of cyber attacks?
Western money went into the creation of that database. It was created to help us fight pandemics and the Chinese took it down and didn’t give access to it during the pandemic thereby making it harder to fight the pandemic.
I don’t see what you mean with handwaving. What kind of evidence wouldn’t be handwaving? I have the impression that you are partisan about the issue and there’s no evidence that would convince you.
I am unconvinced by both of the arguments in your first paragraph. (1) To whatever extent the bottom line was pre-written, the expected result is that their conclusion would be as confident as they could convince themselves the evidence justifies and that others might believe. Everyone knows that a lot of what might be crucial evidence is unavailable; they couldn’t e.g. credibly say “we know for sure that it was a lab leak”. But they do say it was a lab leak, not just that it probably was. (2) For most readers, being more specific makes a claim more plausible rather than less. (As Gilbert and Sullivan had one of their characters say: “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”.) So neither of the things you describe seems to me unexpected if this is politically motivated and had a basically-prewritten bottom line.
I don’t at all think that the House Republicans only care about what the media says, and I have no idea what I said to give that impression. The rest of your second paragraph sounds to me like pure conspiracy-mongering.
The specific example of handwaving and poor logic I was looking at when I wrote what I did about those is on page 26. “Therefore it is reasonable to conclude, based on the WIV’s extensive sample library and history of genetically manipulating coronaviruses, that in early September, one or more researchers became infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the lab and carried it out into the city.” The material in the previous pages doesn’t constitute anything remotely like a justification of this claim, so far as I can tell.
For instance, they present graphs showing traffic around some Wuhan hospitals and Baidu searches for “cough” and “diarrhea” (presumably actually for Chinese equivalents of those, but they don’t give details). The pattern of searches for “cough” and for “diarrhea” is very different, which to me suggests that they can’t both be signals of the spread of Covid-19 (and in the time period they’re talking about, unless I’m confused, there is no increase in searches for the latter; but there are increases before and a big spike after; I can’t help suspecting that they are hoping to confuse). When writing about these graphs they refer to “the hospitals that show a rise in traffic with patients complaining of COVID-19 symptoms”, suggesting that they have evidence that people at those hospitals were complaining of COVID-19 symptoms, but they’ve presented no such evidence.
This sort of thing is typical of writing whose goal is to persuade rather than to find the truth. It looks superficially like reasoning but when you look more closely all the actual logical steps are missing or broken. They show some graphs involving hospitals and COVID-19 symptoms, and then a paragraph later they are talking about “hospitals … with patients complaining of COVID-19 symptoms”, and if you aren’t reading carefully you might think they have actual evidence of that. They show evidence that people at the WIV worked on coronaviruses, that they have some history of poor safety procedures, and that an online database of WIV samples was taken offline in 2019-09 -- all of which, I completely agree, is highly suggestive—and jump from that to “it is reasonable to conclude that in early September one or more WIV researchers became infected with SARS-CoV-2″. Sure, that’s one possible story consistent with the evidence, but you need more than that to say something’s “reasonable to conclude”, and it looks to me as if they haven’t even tried to justify their reasoning. Handwave, handwave, confident conclusion.
Your impression of me is symmetrically matched by my impression of you (on this specific issue). I hope at least one of us is wrong.