Item — HN Reader

The article (by Matt Yglesias) is more nuanced than the title may suggest. Here’s a quote that gets at the gist of the piece:

“The evidence really does show pretty clearly that there were one or more superspreader events at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. I just don’t think that’s really what the lab leak debate is about; it’s about why there was a superspreader event at the market. Did an infected animal pass it to people there or did a person who got infected at the lab pass it to people there?”

3 comments

Thank you for including the "by Matt Yglesias". Yglesias periodically admits to trolling, but as near as I can tell, also wants to be taken Very Seriously sometimes. I personally think he comes too close to "trolling" a lot of the time he wants to be taken Very Seriously, so I have to be careful when reading his takes. I would advise other people to also read Matt Yglesias carefully to decide if he's trolling in any given article.

While I am an Yglesias fan, I don’t think your take is unfair. Matt often describes himself as a professional take-haver, and admits to trying to put out somewhat contrarian takes on topics. One of my favorite recent columns of his was a love letter to the “Slatepitches” that Slate.com used to be known for, as an example of unique voice and differentiation in mainstream media that may be going by the wayside in the age of social media: “ Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses. At its best, Slate championed unpopular causes and provoked fantastic debates. At its worst, Slate seemed to be deliberately stretching to come up with indefensible ideas.”

https://www.slowboring.com/p/slatepitch?s=r

> Slate.com used to be known for, as an example of unique voice and differentiation in mainstream media that may be going by the wayside in the age of social media: “ Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses.

How the hell is that unique either in "MSM" or online media? He basically just described Gawker, BoingBoing, DailyKos, and a slew of other "hot take" sites. In terms of traditional media, every city has the garbage tabloid-level paper.

Nobody claimed it was unique. Slate was just particularly egregious, to the point that virtually every article was like "Was Chattel Slavery Entirely Bad?" The article text would largely dodge the take in order to make some mild pointless observation, but I'm pretty sure articles were accepted based on the ability to write that kind of headline for them, and rejected if they couldn't come up with one.

Is Running the New Smoking?

I know we're not supposed to ask why people are downvoted but I'd be fascinated to know why you were downvoted.

I like Matt Yglesias, I think his Very Serious work is usually at least interesting, and I find some of his trollish witticisms very appealing. But I think you've hit the nail on the head; he creates a sort of Poe's Law situation around his own work because of them.

In this case I think he's overreaching a little.

But then I also think the lab leak theory was discredited and avoided partly from well-meaning applications of the wrong reasons, because even if you make a serious review of it as a professional accident, the Wrong People will definitely like and share your work for their own awful/vile/violent reasons. And nobody wants to be part of that.

I can't recall an actual article where he's trolling. That's more of a twitter thing.

I don't think you have to read the tea leaves of "trolling intent" to evaluate a Yglesias take. Whatever his intent, he lays out his reasoning transparently, and you can decide for yourself if it holds water.

I wouldn't blindly adopt a Slow Boring headline as my own opinion because Matt Said It, but I wouldn't do that for any other opinion-haver either.

I'd rather have a well-argued contrarian take that the author doesn't really believe, than a badly-argued one that the author genuinely believes.

poisoning the well

Why would those be mutually exclusive? Ie it could have originated in the lab, somehow got out into the local environment, and then started spreading in the market through an infected animal.

I think your comment is in keeping with Matt’s point, that virus spread among humans or animals at the Wuhan seafood market doesn’t on its own contradict the possibility of a lab leak.

Yes. Some more quotes might clarify:

> These papers fill in some interesting details about the early outbreak at the market in Wuhan where the epidemic was first identified, but they don’t identify an intermediate host species that caught the virus from bats and then spread it to humans. Nor do they identify a precursor virus in a population of wild bats that lives near Wuhan or near farms supplying the Wuhan market. They show that the virus was introduced to the market at some point, but that could have been by humans who got the bug at a lab.

> And so we’re left with the exact same dueling origin theories: it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market, but it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses. It’s a genuinely weird situation.

> And that is the Covid-19 origin puzzle in a nutshell: how did a bat virus from a cave in Yunnan end up hundreds of miles away in Wuhan?

...

> It’s thanks to the hard work and diligent efforts of those WIV researchers that we know about Bat RaTG13. But this work also offers an explanation for how a bat virus could have traveled 700 miles from rural Yunnan to Wuhan: it was transported years ago by virus researchers.

> So did the virus travel from Yunnan to Hubei a second time in an unrelated voyage, this time bound for the seafood market rather than the virus lab? Or did it travel from the lab to the market?

> [...] the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).

I would not take anything Matt Yglesias says seriously, at all.

Why?

I genuinely thought Matt Yglesias was a satirist until recently. It's entirely possible that I'm not the first one to infer that from his "professional take haver" persona (which I thought was a caricature.)

I don't have a strong opinion about him as a journalist in general because I'm not intimately familiar with most of his work, but I found this particular article kind of underwhelming. It reads as a direct extension of the title, Breaking News: Local Man Feels Unconvinced About COVID Origins... like, okay? It comes across a bit navel-gazing to frame a "News" piece as an update on one's personal opinion, especially considering doing so provides the author cover to say "Well I was just riffing!" later if he happens to be conclusively disproved.