This market resolves once we have a definitive answer to this question. (i.e. "I've looked at all notable evidence presented by both sides and have upwards of 98% confidence that a certain conclusion is correct, and it doesn't seem likely that any further relevant evidence will be forthcoming any time soon.")
This will likely not occur until many years after Covid is no longer a subject of active political contention, motivations for various actors to distort or hide inconvenient evidence have died down, and a scientific consensus has emerged on the subject. For exactly when it will resolve, see /IsaacKing/when-will-the-covid-lab-leak-market
I will be conferring with the community extensively before resolving this market, to ensure I haven't missed anything and aren't being overconfident in one direction or another. As some additional assurance, see /IsaacKing/will-my-resolution-of-the-covid19-l
(For comparison, the level of evidence in favor of anthropogenic climate change would be sufficient, despite the existence of a few doubts here and there.)
If we never reach a point where I can safely be that confident either way, it'll remain open indefinitely. (And Manifold lends you your mana back after a few months, so this doesn't negatively impact you.)
"Come from a laboratory" includes both an accidental lab leak and an intentional release. It also counts if COVID was found in the wild, taken to a lab for study, and then escaped from that lab without any modification. It just needs to have actually been "in the lab" in a meaningful way. A lab worker who was out collecting samples and got contaminated in the wild doesn't count, but it does count if they got contaminated later from a sample that was supposed to be safely contained.
In the event of multiple progenitors, this market resolves YES only if the lab leak was plausibly responsible for the worldwide pandemic. It won't count if the pandemic primarily came from natural sources and then there was also a lab leak that only infected a few people.
I won't bet in this market.
1,000
3.00A reminder that there’s a set of questions on this topic that will actually resolve. I’m not betting on my own markets, but, in my opinion, it’s a good money making opportunity to vote yes.
My reasoning has nothing to do with expecting people to make a coherent case for lab leak and everything to do with the last month of American academia proving it will do whatever the President asks to keep their heads down and avoid becoming a target for spending cuts.
I suspect journal editors will fear being targeted in political witch hunts if they don’t send manuscripts concluding “lab leak” out for review and if they don’t publish them even if reviews are mediocre or worse.
For those not paying attention, scientific societies and universities are banning words and wiping web pages and records of previous programs. Zero reason imo to expect this to stop at language tangentially related to affirmative action and discrimination.
Are people here already familiar with the earlier draft of DEFUSE that provides more details on the plans to make a virus with the same features as COVID?
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/scientists-proposed-making-viruses-with-unique-features-of-sars-cov-2-in-wuhan/
I think that combined with the information that EcoHealth facilitated gain of function research at WIV is pretty strong evidence:
https://oversight.house.gov/release/breaking-hhs-formally-debars-ecohealth-alliance-dr-peter-daszak-after-covid-select-reveals-pandemic-era-wrongdoing/
The BsaI/BsmBI theory was disproven a month before the preprint came out in the same Twitter thread where most people learned about it (e.g. the same thread where Alex Washburne, an author of the paper, learned about it). The restriction sites are unambiguously natural. Found in viruses with shared ancestry. The opposite would be true for engineered sites.
Authors of the paper completely ignored this and continue to ignore it. They said they would address it once, but then decided to say that their answer is that all the other bat virus genomes (and pangolin virus genomes) must be fake.
SARS2 absolutely doesn’t match what’s proposed in this way. The shortest fragment from a BsmBI/BsaI digest is far shorter than any you’ll find in any coronavirus reverse genetics system — I checked them all. Retaining the sites in the construction like this has never been done before (someone might show up with a reference saying otherwise, but they didn’t read closely enough and are wrong).
The authors claim this is a perfect reverse genetics system. Yet, all around the world not a single lab used it. Instead, they made new systems. A global conspiracy of virologists to protect WIV? No, it’s just a shitty system. Prior work would suggest it will have problems because one fragment is generally unstable in plasmids in E. coli in previous work (Baric mentions this in his congressional testimony and it went over everyone’s head).
There’s a lot more that’s wrong in that article, but probably good just to focus on the frauds that Kopp and Ebright have promoted as proving a smoking gun.
Two other scientists were duped by the theory. Justin Kinney figured it out and decided to just never talk about it again and hope it goes away. Francois Balloux wrote a whole blog post about how he figured out it was wrong (in itself, kinda sad since he effectively copied someone else’s analysis and said it was a product of his own deep reflection).
@zcoli Thanks for replying, I'll look into that - If I'm understanding correctly, your response is against analyses based on covid and trying to determine natural vs human-mafe origins, rather than how closely covid matches what was in the earlier draft DEFUSE proposal, but please correct me if I've misunderstood.
How about the location of the furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 boundary?
@DanielNadolny My response is that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't closely match what was in the DEFUSE proposal. You've been duped by the fraud of Bruttel et al if you think so. Sorry.
Additionally, DEFUSE doesn't propose to insert random sequences at the S1/S2 site in random viruses. People are misreading this part of DEFUSE:
This part: "where clear mismatches occur, we will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites." This means they'll make point mutations to what doesn't match. It doesn't mean they'll insert 4 new amino acids. For example, if they stumbled on RaTG13, they might've made HTQRNSR^STS to give the RxxR cleavage motif. If they stumbled onto SARS-CoV, they might've made HTVRLLRSTS. See this figure (borrowed from a fraudulent anti-vax paper I'm not going to link):
Here's an example of doing this at S2' for SARS-CoV - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21435673/
A proteolytic cleavage site at S1/S2 isn't surprising. Inserts with similar lengths and compositions occur throughout the pandemic and occasionally increase viral fitness (maybe you've heard of CGG-CGG being suspicious? there've been CGG-CGG-CGG inserts elsewhere).
It's such a small insert that it will probably always be a bit of a mystery where it came from. It could've happened step by step with inserts of a few nucleotides at a time and various mutations. Mutate a single amino acid in RaTG13 and other viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 and you get a predicted functional cleavage site that's predicted to be as good as the one in SARS-CoV-2 (probably it's not as good; predictions aren't perfect; no one's done the experiment afaik).
If you've ever heard the term "God of the gaps", you're looking at the world's tiniest God of the gaps. If you haven't heard the term, look it up and see how it's applicable to this question.
Look, I don't think you're really debating in good faith here, but this is a prediction market site, not a mathematical proof, and the point here is to reason from a position of uncertainty, not to prove something beyond all reasonable doubt (which we'll probably never get in this particular case anyway).
The point isn't that COVID is exactly what you'd get if you followed Defuse to the letter. The point is that if you tried to predict what researchers that accidentally released COVID would have put in a grant proposal, Defuse is about as close as what you'd conceivably imagine!
-Research labs typically only do about 1/2 of what they promise in grants, and only about 1/2 of what they do is explicitly laid out in the grant.
-Research labs typically begin new areas of research before they apply for and receive grant funding.
-Grant proposals are often rushed, edited incongruously by several people, and are weird mishmashes of different ideas. It's very unsurprising that Defuse would be quite similar to but not identical to the procedure or motivation behind gain of function research that could lead to COVID.
-Moreover, the phase space of lab leak includes cases where the virus is unmodified, in which case Defuse is from a Bayesian perspective even more likely in these worlds to be evidence for the possession of a COVID-like virus.
@DanielNadolny The restrictions sites thing didn't really get discussed in the Rootclaim debate, since Saar didn't think that paper was actually worth introducing as evidence. I did briefly respond in the written section of the debate, starting on slide 32 here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N2IKOelaTz9c1unWGQ2VjXcFSwAPm5Xx/view
Yes, I included some ad hominem attacks. No, I don't regret it. Washburne and Bruttel do not conduct themselves like trustworthy people. Their theory doesn't make sense either, but understanding the science is kind of hard and understanding who's a bullshitter is comparatively easy -- if Bruttel thinks that monkeypox was a lab leak and Omicron was a lab leak, you might not want to also trust his paper on restriction sites.
When scientists did point out an obvious problem with his paper (the same sites were found in other natural viruses), he retreated to, "maybe those other viruses are all fake".
What's happened since the debate is someone found another document on the DEFUSE grant which describes making a virus in 6 pieces. And the Washburne/Bruttel theory also said 6 pieces.
Does that confirm that the theory was right all along?
I think the actual answer is that every paper Baric published before said 6 pieces, so Washburne+Bruttel made a theory with 6. And then when another document from Baric's lab saying 6 came up, they declared it an amazing coincidence.
But I'm not sure. I haven't read every paper on restriction sites, so I don't know how consistent the 6 segments thing is. Maybe @zcoli knows the answer.
I think the WIV didn't actually even use the same methods that Baric did, for making their viruses, but I also haven't dug into that topic enough to say for sure.
@benshindel I'm arguing in good faith. There's nothing in DEFUSE that leads to SARS-CoV-2. The Bruttel et al paper on BsaI/BsmBI is a fraudulent paper.
If DEFUSE happened even though it wasn't funded, that's evidence against an engineered lab leak! Because there's no path through DEFUSE to an engineered SARS-CoV-2.
If you want to argue for an unmodified lab leak, please do. It's far more likely. Just quit it with the intelligent design appeals to how impossibly unique the furin cleavage site is and so on. DEFUSE doesn't lend support for an unmodified lab leak, either. It describes work everyone already knows WIV was doing from their published work when it comes to sampling. It describes work that's less likely to have a lab leak that's successfully covered up than what WIV did previously, because constructing a small number of viruses from reverse genetics is both less risky than trying to isolate viruses from culturing a bunch of samples, it's also impossible to have a lab leak for a sequenced virus without leaving a huge paper trail that's hard to cover up.
https://x.com/Devlinside123/status/1892262539373006957?t=XFtEciu3u8FjGMwsGN_ITg&s=19
The old refrain around Covid is there’s no smoking gun that proves Covid was designed in a lab…
Of course not, there’s no gun…but there’s a country that lied again and again, a lab that was set up to engineer Covid viruses, and a virus itself that had all the telltale signs in its construction and genetic hallmarks with an agency that was bragging that creating just this kind of virus was what they did.
No smoking gun, but the bullet that killed the host had the serial number of the Wuhan lab printed on the casing…
@George It would be easier and your argument might be more persuasive if you focused on factual information instead of meaningless prose and regurgitated nonsense.
@Predictor I am quoting someone else. See link if interested, if not then don't. I am not making an argument. I'm linking to commentary by others. Hope that helps.
@George What other rambling bigots do want to cite in lieu of having any evidence to support your position?
@zcoli I had to look it up...
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/women-police-use-force-and-against-female-officers?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/findings-role-officer-gender-violent-encounters-citizens?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://giwps.georgetown.edu/resource/men-women-and-police-excessive-force-a-tale-of-two-genders/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Maybe someone can double check with Grok to rule out "woke AI lies to favor women".
@aashiq The problem with markets like this is that evidence for zoonosis is likelier to come out in the far-term while evidence for lab leak is more likely to come in the short-term, which creates more people wanting to buy lab leak for better returns
@aashiq Ratcliffe repeatedly demanding that Biden release the evidence. Now he’s been in power for a month and there’s no evidence. David Asher shifted from demanding evidence to saying that, really, the strongest evidence is the open source data.
There is no secret evidence pointing to any lab and you will be disappointed.
Proof of this is that different agencies conclude different labs. If there were evidence pointing to one lab or the other, all agencies concluding “lab leak” would obviously conclude the same lab.
@ShadowyZephyr Evidence for zoonosis comes out every time there‘s a paper reporting more related genomes sampled from animals and every time there’s a paper with more SARS2 genomes sampled from humans. It just doesn’t make the news because it’s boring to report results conform to expectations from previous data.
@zcoli The bar for evidence that is likely to move this market is very low. You only need admissions that certain key people thought it was a lab leak at various points in the past. There are lots of incentives to produce such evidence, such as agitprop against China
@aashiq I agree it’s an irrational market in that respect where the implied probability blips up every time someone exudes confidence without showing any evidence to base it on.
Or perhaps it’s a rational market in that respect since, the last time we heard from the judge, he was on the fence about Lyme disease being a lab leak based on whatever idiotic thing he happened to Google first.
@zcoli I don’t even know what it means for a market to be rational in the sense that I think you mean it. The sense in which I mean it is that it’s a martingale, which it never is (but it might nearly be)
@zcoli it's an irrational market because like 70% of the NO shares are held by one individual who is ideologically invested in the listed probability of this market, Z...
@benshindel pretty easy to profit massively from this market then if it's clearly irrational, no?
What's keeping all the rational profit-driven betters from betting this market up to where you think it should rationally be?
-Because there’s probably like a 50-80% chance that it never resolves
-even if it does resolve, it’s not likely to resolve within a decade
-the discount rate on this platform is probably between 5 and 10% (See the UFO market for an example of this)
-thus, even if my true probability for this market is at 99% or 1% (it isn’t, I’m probably at like 75-80% lab leak), there’s no incentive for me to bet in this market, because there’s an expected return of like 2% per year.
@benshindel however, if you are in fact interested in making the probability shown on this market seem different than the true probability, that’s a completely different incentive! I’m not really invested in that, whereas Peter is, which is why he is by far the largest shareholder in this market!
@JonathanMannhart for example, this market should not be at 92%, but it’s not worth correcting for a 2% annual return.
This market doesn’t even end in 4 years like that one!!! It could go on indefinitely!