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by bbayles·3y ago·view on hn ↗
> It should matter, a lot, that even a group of scientists who believed a lab leak idea was plausible couldn't muster up an argument that would hold up under peer review

I think Nate would say that the problem is that the paper literally said that such a scenario was "implausible" while the authors believed the opposite.

In the "more studies are needed" section, the authors could have explained what questions remained and what data might have resolved them. I suspect Silver would have considered that more honest.

2 comments
> I think Nate would say that the problem is that the paper literally said that such a scenario was "implausible" while the authors believed the opposite.

Exactly. What brain block is preventing people from understanding this?

The paper made firm, overbroad claims not backed by evidence, and in private communications the authors themselves said they found the conclusions unpersuasive.

Could you list the exact messages (and their timestamps) where the authors are saying this in their private communications? Anything cited in the articles is very unconvincing to me.
This was discussed in the previous thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36821853

No, it wasn't. The quote is from a month after the publication. The comment above said:

> I think Nate would say that the problem is that the paper literally said that such a scenario was "implausible" while the authors believed the opposite.

Please show me the evidence that the authors believe the opposite when they wrote the paper.

Is the idea that they believed it was plausible before writing the paper, became convinced it was implausible during the writing, and then later switched back to plausible?
These are indeed the contortions people are going through. Basically, as the evidence for zoonotic original allegedly mounted and lab leak origins became less convincing, suddenly the Proximal origin authors become less convinced of their own arguments. Astounding.
I think Prof Francois Balloux, infectious disease epidemiologist, summarized it well [1]:

    I'm not convinced there’s a villain among the PO authors, but just a series of cock-ups and poor decisions, aligned with, and fuelled by, bad incentives, eventually engulfing everyone in its wake.
    It remains an embarrassing institutional failure, however we look at it.
    I disagree with those who try to rationalise their content and pretend that the authors changed their mind as they followed the science (sigh).
    There was never any new real evidence that could have triggered a change of opinion in that time period, anyway.
    The charge that the final version of Proximal Origins in Nature Medicine does not accurately reflect the PO authors’ doubts expressed in private feels fair to me.
[1] https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/16846724873243320...
Indeed this is what happened according to the chats. Check for example the posts on April 3rd.

This whole conspiracy theory relies on selective omission of context from the messages (I refuse to believe that Silver, Chan and co. are doing it out of incompetence). And of course nobody actually checks a 140 page source document. This also explains why no serious journalist has picked up the story. They do actually read sources.

The authors can believe what they want, isn't the whole point that if they're not willing to "commit" to those views, then they don't actually matter?

We don't know their mental state when writing those Slack messages, we don't know where they ended up after those thoughts, we don't know anything that could reasonably contextualize what we're seeing from the FOIA requests other than the raw text.

The path to discovery is not a straight line, and if researchers are now somehow beholden to every offhand statement they make, every argument they mull over, every notion/hunch that comes to them, regardless of their ability to apply rigor, don't we lose a substantial amount of value from the process of peer review?

I think this is veering pretty hard into the domain of politics where you kind of expect every politician to have a "public position" and an often contrary "private position." Science and scientists, in a functional society, should feel free to publicly say and discuss things as they see fit, whether it's in line with the norms of the time, or patently offensive to said norms.

Obviously these individuals did not feel free discussing these matters, at all. And that's really the problem. These sort of leaks aren't going to cause some sort of new chilling effect. They're leaks because there was already a dramatic chilling effect in play. That saying "I think plausible thing is plausible." is only available in a "leak" indicates something has already long since gone horribly wrong.

There is what you believe, and then there is what you prove. Science isn’t interested in the former, and Nate Silver understands that.

It’s got nothing whatsoever to do with politics, and scientists are free to think whatever they like; however, what they say formally is subject to the process of peer review.

We can speculate all day about why these folks committed to the position they did, but the published content is all that matters.

You can read the paper in question here [1]. In cases like this where there's little to nothing in the way of experimentation or generalizations, all they're doing is assessing the evidence and offering their opinion on whatever they believe is most likely. The catch being in this case, what they said they believe is probably not what they did.

[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

I think it is representative of where they landed, but not of where they were the entire process. Folks often argue one thing but come to believe another over time, and what we see is only the end product of that journey (unless someone FOIAs our conversations).

Are they retracting the paper? Are they publishing anything else to qualify their opinion or change their stance, formally? If not why not?

There's a really interesting article with a lot more relevant information here. [1] They (Andersen and Rambaut) describe exactly where they "landed", and how [1]:

---

Andersen: “Natural selection and accidental release are both plausible scenarios explaining the data – and a priori should be equally weighed as possible explanations. The presence of a furin [cleavage site] a posteriori” — the furin cleavage site was the characteristic of the virus that the scientists thought was indicative of engineering or other lab origin — “moves me slightly more towards accidental release, but it’s well above my paygrade to call the shots on a final conclusion.”

Rambaut: "Given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possible distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content to with ascribing it to natural processes."

Andersen: "Yup, I totally agree that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstance. We should be sensitive to that."

---

Outside of this, another major issue (which they lied to congress about - these are some really stand up guys...) is that they had a grant for millions of dollars awaiting final approval from Fauci. Fauci is a major advocate for gain of function research, and Andersen was also worried that him digging further into lab leak could leave him being pinned as hostile to gain of function research.

Defacto censoring science is how we destroy science.

[1] - https://theintercept.com/2023/07/21/covid-origin-nih-lab-lea...

Sorry but if these people aren’t willing to say this in a way that invites peer scrutiny, then I don’t give a shit what they mumble back and forth to one another, and you shouldn’t either.

We saw this with election fraud claims from the Trump admin and his supporters; wild fraud claims in the media, but not a single legitimate peep in an actual courtroom. Same thing here, wild claims in informal settings but refusal to hold those claims up to scrutiny, knowing they wouldn’t survive.