You’re shorting again, aren’t you? It’s getting worse. Maybe posters are right to be concerned about your failing mental health.
Is there a market for that? Among conservatives, I mean.
~Max
Did that.
That’s not a major media source or public health official saying it was impossible it was a lab escape. That’s a Vanity Fair article claiming that an article in the Lancet said it was impossible it was a lab escape. Vanity Fair links to that article, as is proper – and the article says nothing of the sort. What the Lancet said was:
We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and [analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),
and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,
That statement makes it entirely clear that they’re not saying it couldn’t have escaped from a lab that was studying it; what they’re saying is that it wasn’t engineered by humans, but instead has a natural origin. There is nothing in the rest of the statement by the Lancet (you can follow the link through for yourself) which says that it couldn’t have been a lab escape of a naturally occuring virus.
I don’t know why Vanity Fair misread it, or misrepresented it. But they did.
They then proceed to discuss that inquiries into the lab itself were hampered by political considerations. That may have been an actual problem; but their drastic misreading of the Lancet statement leaves me in doubt about the accuracy of the rest of their reporting on the subject. In any case, it doesn’t affect my point; which was that the media and public health experts weren’t saying a lab escape was impossible, only that a lab escape was (and is) unproven, and that deliberate human engineering was impossible.
Oh, good grief. I see it all the time. Are you seriously claiming that everyone who’s disagreed with you on this board [ETA: or even in this forum] hates you?
And I’ve seen all sorts of various degrees of opposing, some vehement and others not; at least, unless by “vehemently opposing” you just mean “disagreeing”; in which case, no, it isn’t possible to disagree without disagreeing, here or anywhere else. But in any case, there’s nothing wrong with “vehemently opposing” something that one significantly disagrees with; unless you’re using some drastically different definition of the word than I am. What do you mean by “vehemently”?
Maybe you could start demonstrating disagreeing with others without misrepresenting them?
Probably not, which is why I don’t understand why certain conservatives are acting so shocked and offended because the SDMB liberals don’t want screeds filled with right wing thought-terminating cliches disrupting our conversations on liberal positions and policies.
To be clear, I only have a problem with about a half dozen SDMB conservatives and you are NOT one of them.
The virtue signaling on conservative hive message boards is a sight to behold.
I know, I read the Lancet letter even before I read the article. The point is the political considerations that hampered the investigation and muzzled the discourse. So I guess it would be more accurate to say public health officials obfuscated than that they lied (I though the Director of the WHO had actually denied it, but I must have misremembered). But there certainly were headlines saying the idea was debunked, and articles saying otherwise were censored from social media. For example:
And this is what Fauci said on the matter:
When asked if there could have been a scenario where scientists found the virus outside the lab, brought it back and then it escaped, Fauci shut the line of questioning down.
“But that means it was in the wild to begin with. That’s why I don’t get what they’re talking about [and] why I don’t spend a lot of time going in on this circular argument,” he said.
No, it’s an exaggeration for effect. What is true is that if you step too far outside the ideological lines, there will be a significant number of posters who attack you - enough that you can’t ignore them. It’s not much fun being the target of the 2 minutes’ hate.
That’s a fucking joke considering how many tossers regularly slander me for things I neither said nor believe. What am I misrepresenting, in your opinion?
Yeah, I agree too. As I noted, there are conservatives that one can forget that they are simply because they do not go for bottom of the barrel cites to make their case.
The use of the term “virtue signaling” to apply to conservatives is long long overdue. It is the last pure form of it in the world.
No conservative should be allowed to say this in public without being smothered with heaps of ridicule and reputational damage.
This is the core of it right here.
Conservative conspiracy theorists first started harping on the “lab leak” theory in a sort of “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” defense of Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus response. As in, “Why are we blaming Trump when it’s those dastardly Chinese who probably engineered an unstoppable superweapon,” while at the same time claiming that the superweapon didn’t actually exist and existed but was mostly harmless.
When scientists quickly shut down that conspiracy theory due to there being no evidence of genetic manipulation, conservatives pivoted to this notion that it could have been naturally occurring but escaped from the lab. And, as has been pointed out, nobody really denied that possibility. Maybe you can find an article here or there, or a poorly worded response to a question every once in a while, but there was never any great effort to deny that as a possibility.
What you’re upset about, then, is that certain people didn’t spend enough time humoring this possibility – talking about it, agreeing emphatically that sure, it was possible, putting focus back on China and the WHO. But the response to that is quoted in your own post here, when Fauci says, “Who cares?”
That’s the way we feel. That’s not enough for you, and I guess you find that dissatisfying, and you want to spin that into some sort of justification for distrusting scientists. But for most of us, that’s a perfectly reasonable response from Fauci. Who cares if it came from a wet market directly, or from a wet market via a lab? Who cares if talk of the lab leak theory was “muzzled” by people too otherwise busy fighting this thing to engage in speculation that didn’t matter to them?
That’s not what I asked you for, though; or what your original claim was.
The NPR article you next cite is the closest you’ve come. That one still doesn’t say a lab leak of a natural virus is impossible; it does say that it’s a lot less likely than transmission outside the lab, and gives a likely method not including the wet market for that to happen.
And the Fauci article, despite the headline, says that Fauci was debunking the claims that the virus was human-made, not that he said it couldn’t have been a lab escape of a natural virus. Even the bit quoted basically says that an escape from the lab was possible, but that Fauci thinks it doesn’t matter, because it couldn’t have escaped from the lab if it weren’t already in the environment to start with.
OK, so you’re backing down from this claim, then?
And headlines are notorious for misrepresenting what’s in the article. I wouldn’t claim that the media’s saying something based just on the headlines; though a lot of the headlines I saw did make it clear. And the NPR article you just cited is describing a serious attempt at just such an investigation as you seem to be calling for; so it seems odd to me to cite it as evidence that the media didn’t try to investigate.
The thing is, it’s called a novel coronovirus for a reason. Because it’s new, there’s a lot that wasn’t known about it to start, and there’s a lot that still isn’t known. As more is learned, more information comes out. That’s not a failure; that’s an essential part of the process.
For what effect? For the effect that everyone who disagrees with you should feel accused of hatred?
And if you feel you’re entitled to that sort of exaggeration, why are you complaining if others use it?
What you’re calling an “exaggeration for effect” is what I was calling a misrepresentation.
What’s the term for the rhetorical device of: Make an authoritative claim. Then, when called on to support the claim, make an appeal to authority in the same breath that you admit you can’t actually find evidence the person of authority actually said the thing you claim?
Attacking the public health Drs when they are wrong during a pandemic, by saying they are either incompetent or corrupt is just so horrible.
People and Drs will be wrong during health crises. Anyone who plays this card is just trying to smear democratic politicians and achieve permanent minority republican rule.
But that doesn’t prove that the cognitive/emotional states of the brain are DETERMINISTICALLY produced by physical mechanisms, which is what octopus was claiming back in post #1600.
Like I said, if you’re arguing that mental states like whether or not you love your wife are 100% deterministically governed outcomes of physical law, then you need to explain exactly how that determination is operating through specific physical mechanisms.
Saying “Well physical law governs everything in the universe so it must be responsible for your mental states too” doesn’t cut it. That’s not a valid justification of the philosophical position of extreme determinism, which has very specific implications for the existence of fully deterministic mechanisms. If you can’t provide a model that explicitly explains the observed phenomena by means of such specific mechanisms, then you’re just spouting vaguely sciencey waffle.
I have always assumed this premise, when relied upon, is presented as fundamental:
physical law governs everything
or more commonly,
everything is physical
ETA: My point being, I don’t think you will ever find a ‘valid justification’ for it.
~Max
You’re saying political ideology falls under the category of “religion or belief”? That does not seem to be a unanimously held opinion about the UK Equality Act 2010.
Even within a rigidly rational-materialist epistemological framework, where it is assumed that all reality is governed solely by physical law and all physical laws are rationally comprehensible (an assumption that I personally subscribe to, btw), it does not necessarily follow that the operation of physical law is 100% deterministic.
Probably not. Primarily because it’s probably not true. But you would think there would be fewer people trying to make arguments about physics based on the unsupported assumption that it is true.
People like determinism because it implies the universe is consistent, dependable, IMO. Stochastic interpretations of statistical mechanics tear away at one’s hope to acquire minute knowledge of all things.
~Max
Yes it does. Why is the human brain of all things in the universe not governed by physical law? And no, we don’t have to demonstrate the exact mechanism of how a physical system works to know that it’s governed by physical laws. That’s absolutely an absurd requirement. The burden is on you to prove that humans are governed by some supernatural entity that allows humans to violate basic physics.
Your argument is nothing but sophistry.
Nobody’s saying that the brain’s not governed by physical law. The point is that physical laws aren’t necessarily deterministic.
I think you’re misunderstanding the implications of the term “governed” in this context: it doesn’t necessarily imply 100% deterministic causality.
You made the claim in post #1600 that the universe is deterministic, which is not necessarily true, and which is not the same thing as being governed by physical law. If you want to retract that unsupported (and, evidently, ill-informed) claim, feel free to do so.
Nobody said we did. What I said, correctly, is that we have to demonstrate the exact mechanism of how a physical system works in order to know that it’s entirely deterministic.
If you cannot entirely and exactly describe the causal mechanisms of such a system, you can’t tell whether or to what extent it’s deterministic rather than stochastic.
Sigh. Nobody here is suggesting in any way that “humans are governed by some supernatural entity”. The physical universe can be not totally deterministic while still being affected solely by physical laws, and without involving any supernatural entities whatsoever.
Again, octopus, I think the problem here is that you’re misunderstanding the implications of the term “governed”. And I’m starting to think you probably haven’t really grasped the meaning of “deterministic” in the physics context either.
You seem to think that any physical system that isn’t totally deterministic has to allow for the existence of some non-physical or supernatural causality, which is completely false. There can be physical laws and processes which are totally material and non-supernatural while still not being entirely deterministic.
No, my argument is valid; the problem is that understanding my argument requires some basic comprehension of technical concepts in physics like “deterministic” and “stochastic”, which you don’t seem able to supply.
I think you two are arguing at cross purposes. It sounds like Octopus is trying to say the universe is governed by physical laws, rather than having a supernatural element. It makes no difference whether those physical laws are deterministic or include a truly random aspect; neither allow for any kind of mind-body duality or non-material explanation for love. The issue you are arguing is irrelevant to the point.