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Michael Weissman's avatar

This makes me think that basic Bayesian reasoning needs to be taught early. People argue as if the various factors (location, properties of previous new viruses,...) are all on different planes, so you just pick your favorite factor and ignore the others. But Bayes provides an obvious systematic way to combine different pieces of evidence, whether they point the same way or opposite ways. Most of the chances for non-lab crossover would occur elsewhere, so we can rule them out. In this case, with Wuhan having a little less than 1% of China's population and not being located in a viral hot spot, you'd take whatever odds you had based on other factors and multiple the Lab/Non-Lab odds ratio by ~100. That's not the ~infinite factor Jon Stewart seems to use but it's also not an irrelevant coincidence.

What would those other odds, not involving location, be? Some people say that there are so many more chances for nature to make new combinations that they are less than 1/100. Others say the lab was a good place for different strains to recombine, so they are more than 1/100. I don't know enough to comment on that. But including the location in the odds calculation is the easiest part to get very roughly right.

As you say, the name-calling adds nothing to the estimate!

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Nicholas Weininger's avatar

What's our excuse? Probably the social and psychological rewards of the sneering, poorly-thought-through Twitter dunk. The platform makes it so easy and satisfying to come up with a snarky response that sounds intellectually superior, and the culture that has grown up around the platform has normalized those kinds of responses so thoroughly, that even intelligent, well-informed people like Koerth yield to temptation. I've seen it in political as well as scientific disputes; I've seen the smartest people I know retweet dunks that are easily seen, on non-confirmation-biased reflection, to not really answer the argument they're dunking on. It's more evidence that Twitter culture is undermining both our cognition and our moral sense.

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