@amyvdh

3/3

To me, the most important aspect of all this is: I have no idea how good the lab leak hypothesis is. I don't feel any need to defend it against competing theories. I don't have the resources nor the skills to do that research. And what seemed likely back in 2021 may be less so today (and vice versa). But I understand enough to know that it can't be dismissed (let alone suppressed) as a conspiracy theory, or as misinformation.

At the meta level, the fact that we're disagreeing so strongly about this supports the idea that efforts to identify and remove misinformation are a very bad idea: you would flag any content online that says “bio-engineered in a military laboratory” as misinformation, but I would not. Who's to decide? What useful ideas would be silence by mistake?

/cc @koalie

@amyvdh

“Why wouldn’t you dismiss it?”

You don't get my point. I might dismiss the lab-leak theory, okay. It's probably not the best one, given what we know now. What I think about this is irrelevant, and I don't want to impose my ideas on anyone.

The issue is: do you feel *that* confident about the “Huanan Seafood Market” theory, and about the potential danger of allowing competing theories to be communicated, as to label any departure as a “conspiracy theory” or “misinformation”, and defend that those posts should be flagged, hidden, or removed?

As for motivated reasoning and political purposes, those go both ways. Few sources are neutral, and anyone could throw the same accusation at proponents of other theories. Are nature and Wikipedia non-motivated and apolitical? It's a rhetorical question :)

@amyvdh

> _“There are facts and they matter. There is science and there are actual experts. It’s not just opinions.”_

Of course, I agree.

But telling facts and experts apart from mistakes and amateurs is very hard. We should discuss, promote, and criticise — but silence no-one.

Being wrong should be allowed. And sometimes those who seemed wrong initially end up being right.

> _“Who is to decide? Professionals, scientists, experts.”_

No special group should decide anything alone — experts and scientists inform the public and influence public policy. But in matters of _speech_, no “expert” should decide what can or cannot be communicated.

Experts get things wrong, too (of course). The scientific consensus would not move much if we removed all ideas that go against it.

@amyvdh

👍 Mostly agree.

To clarify: I do think that “deliberate floods of misinformation” cause harm. We agree on that, too. It's just that I think top-down efforts to label them and suppress them are usually counter-productive and have dangerous side-effects.

@tripu @amyvdh I think you should both kling to scientific standards if you want to avoid a religious discussion about what constitutes conspiracy and what constitutes misinformation.

To scientific standards, the evidence known so far gives a high probability that Covid originates in animals and has made the jump to infect humans. To scientific standards, it can not be excluded that it was some leak from the nearby virus lab, but the more evidence we get, the lower that probability.

@tripu @amyvdh so the scientifc answer is: "We don't know". But since Karl Popper we are allowed to work with a hypothesis until it is falsified. In this case high probability vs low probability

@amyvdh

“How useful are those ideas?”

All ideas are useful, including wrong ones (cf John Stuart Mill). No need to expand here on “the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion”, as he said.

What if someone has “an idea how x technology should work” and the idea is wrong? Why flag, hide, remove it?

@amyvdh

“That FBI report was specifically ‘low confidence’”

Yes. A hypothesis that three huge governmental institutions report to be the most likely, even with low confidence, cannot be a conspiracy theory, or misinformation. That was my point. The FBI etc necessarily had *even lower* confidence in all other competing theories, by definition.

I agree about the “military” bit. That is probably a stretch. I haven't found much pointing in that direction, specifically (only in the general sense of secret research being conducted there).