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Utopia Talk / Politics / And here is the media liberal bias
Habebe
Member
Wed Jul 08 21:28:00
So remember how track and tracers could not ask people if they attended a BLM protest, but then wemt and claimed the BLM protests showed no evidence.of spiking covid cases?

http://abc...-cases-tulsa/story?id=71680180

Now of you read through they later on also claim " the counter protests as well" and " several large events"

But its not the headline, the headline is "Trump rally caused covid surge"
Dukhat
Member
Wed Jul 08 23:56:30
*yawn* Bad argument and have to jump through too many hoops.
jergul
large member
Thu Jul 09 01:14:10
Indoor events are considered far more dangerous than outdoor events. For good reason.

The president being held to a higher standard than demonstrating mobs beyond that?

So unfair.
Pillz
Member
Thu Jul 09 08:36:31
Hard to track out door spread if you don't ask people if they've been in large out door groups dipshit
Dakyron
Member
Thu Jul 09 10:41:14
They should just be honest and say "Yes, the protests are spreading COVID-19, but we believe the message is worth the risk".

At least you could respect that opinion.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu Jul 09 10:48:25
Daky
It is also true that the evidence suggest Covid is very good at spreading indoors, to a degree that it has further fueled the theory that it is modified by people and escaped from a lab. It is also true that Covid is sensitive to incapacitation by UV light.

Thus all big gathers are not created equal. Of course virtually no one who is protesting knows this or cares, so the point is valid beyond practical consequences. Covid has shown that western societies have no limit on retardation and will politicize a virus.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu Jul 09 10:49:10
big gatherings*
Seb
Member
Thu Jul 09 13:10:08
Pillz:

Pretty easy actually, phone data can trvially map peoples travel, so you can work out if there are outbreak clusters in areas where people travelled to and from events.

Nim:

"o a degree that it has further fueled the theory that it is modified by people and escaped from a lab. It is also true that Covid is sensitive to incapacitation by UV light."

That's a bit of a leap for those people expressing that theory. Why would creation in a lab mean it is better at transmission in a room? Pretty much any virus that has the vector CV is supposed to have would be better in doors, and UV light fucks up most viruses.

Generally:

Indoor rallies are worse than protest marches:
indoors, often seated next to someone, with not much in the way of strong airflow - so you will get more exposure to one specific person, and if that person is infected, they are far more likely to infect you than if you are close to each other in a moving crowd outdoors that is well ventilated.

Seb
Member
Thu Jul 09 13:21:06
By no means conclusive, but wiki says there was only a few hundred people at a march in Tulsa on 30th May; compared to several thousand at the Trump rally on the 20th june, with the spike coming two weeks after the latter event.

Unless there were many more protests, that does seem to make the Trump event the likely candidate. More people, the setting is more dangerous, and the timing fits better.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu Jul 09 13:59:48
Seb
Because there is a specific sequence that makes covid-19 more transmissible and that gene was "inserted", not mutated. Insertions _can_ happen naturally, but humans in lab coats also insert things into genomes. Additionally there are flanking sites that code for arginine, that are unusual in nature.

For these things to happen in the wild (through recombination), you need an individual (bat or pangolin) to be infected by two different Covid virus. That can happen, but is not a high probability event. However, these peculiarities in the Covid genome can also happen in a lab using "gain of function research", where you increase the transmissibility so you can study the virus.

It is very important that we get this right, so the lab theory needs to be falsified, rather than dismissed.
Habebe
Member
Thu Jul 09 14:45:58
Seb, Do we have data on people tested from the protests/riots?

I know the protestors burnt down or otherwise destroyed 70 testing sites and numerous others claimed to close in fear of being damaged.

So lets go over this again.

1. Track tracers did not ask people about participation in the protests.

2. 70 test sites were destroyed by protestors. Obviously near the protests leading to fewer of these people getting tested anyway.

3. Even more sites closed down due to fear, likely sites near large protests.

We also have evidence that " super spreader events" even outdoor events like funerals and beach gatherings have greatly effected the spread.

A protest would be similar to funeral or beach event on steroids.

http://www...t-covid-19-spread1/%3famp=true



Dakyron
Member
Thu Jul 09 16:12:36
Seb -

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/watch-now-brookside-protest-in-response-to-minnesota-police-violence/article_8d799de6-caff-5685-ba8e-c1ae41dd61bc.html

"Standing on Peoria Avenue in midtown Tulsa’s Brookside neighborhood on Saturday, Vernon A.M.E. Rev. Robert Turner told at least 1,000 demonstrators that the United States was battling a disease that began long before the current pandemic.

“Before COVID-19, America’s virus was racism,” he said. “We are sick and tired of this disease. We demand a vaccine. Social distancing can’t kill racism. A face mask can’t kill racism. Nothing but the truth can cure it.”"
Seb
Member
Thu Jul 09 17:06:42
Nim:

Do you have a source for that? It sounds pretty extraordinary claim.

However I would point out improved indoor transmission is not particularly proof of that. Gain of function is normally impacting protein spikes, i.e. whether it can get into a cell.

Habebe:
I'm saying you don't need that information.
It will actually be more visible looking at cell phone data, disease clusters and timing of outbreak.

Do you have a source for this claim 70 test sites were destroyed. That sounds like fake news.

Dakyron:

Unfortunately blocked because of gdpr. What's the date on the article? Is it a separate event, or an update on numbers from hundreds to a thousand?


Dakyron
Member
Thu Jul 09 17:08:20
Date is May 31st
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu Jul 09 17:23:41
Seb
It is in fact, among others, the addition of protein spike at a "furin site", very well suited to infect human lungs. There are actually 6 "unusual" inserts in the genome.

This article is more recent and short. The scientific paper has yet to be published. He says he is 90% certain it is lab made.

http://www...comes-from-a-laboratory/361860

This one much lengthier

http://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748

This article I found today, 3 of the 8 questions for China is about lab activity and 1 of them about gain of function research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/health/coronavirus-origin-china-lucey.html

It is not something sinister like bioweapons, but the premise is that gain of function research (which is a controversial practice - the stuff of zombie apocalypse movies) has been used to to study corona virus in order to combat future pandemics. Basically a Africanized bee fuck up.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu Jul 09 17:28:42
Seb
Regarding spreading indoors, while not entirely obvious, it implies spreading among humans, indoors. It was merely a short answer to Dakyron that all gatherings are not equal in terms of spreading Covid.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu Jul 09 17:42:38
One of the things that have stuck inside my head is that evolutionarily speaking, when a virus jumps from one species to another, that is when the virus is the weakest. It goes from one specie, which it is adapted to and "great" at infecting and spreading within, to a totally new playing field.

So, it is rather strange that corona jumps from one specie to us and becomes a pandemic with a couple of months. As if it was tailored to spread in humans. It can happen, people win the lottery every day :)

Seb
Member
Thu Jul 09 18:49:08
Hmm

Well the last peer review paper to suggest this got ripped apart in the literature.

Wuhan lab did do these experiments in the past, though allegedly not on this virus. There was an interesting article in the Sunday times last week suggesting that covid 19 is a virus collected a few years back, or at least very likely related.

Though they also pointed out you have badly trained grad students collecting these viruses from bat caves and taking them back to the lab so there's more than one lab related vector than "mutated virus leaked by lab", such as "incompetent student gets infected in cave and brings disease back to city".

"when a virus jumps from one species to another, that is when the virus is the weakest."

That's not always true at all. It might be very good at spreading, but not have the right spike to break into our cells.
Seb
Member
Thu Jul 09 18:51:33
Dakyron:

So, again, the timing, with falling infections up to last week still doesn't really fit does it.

Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu Jul 09 20:30:20
Seb
Let's say, at this point we still know far too little about how this started and the lab theory while sensitive and controversial, isn't very extra ordinary. We have these strange things in the genome, there is an actual lab in Wuhan that studies Corona virus, and bats hibernate during winter.

The competing theory is that, it jumped between bats and pangolins, recombined with another pangolin endemic corona virus, that made it not very transmissible among pangolins, but very transmissible in humans. All of this is possible, but skeptic hippo is skeptic because it isn't the simplest explanation, it requires a lot of moving parts. Though, that is life, life finds a way in the most improbable ways, just to cover that again.

If human engineering had something to do with this and this is the unintended consequences of science, we need to know. That kind of research needs to be really really well regulated and conducted safely, if at all.

"That's not always true at all"

Virtually nothing is always true in systems where there is variation, with biological organisms many things are possible. It isn't however normal that any specie, virus or other, change environments drastically and flourish without additional evolution. And a virus changing species is a drastic change in environment.

Oswald most likely was the only assassin that day, but Epstein did not fucking kill himself. I just don't know which one Covid-1
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu Jul 09 20:30:50
9 is.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Jul 10 05:36:50
Im gonna revise my position, it is the "natural origins" that needs to be falsified, I now believe the most likely scenario is the lab escape:

Study from 2014 in the USA assessing the risk of lab under construction in Manhattan.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4128296/

National Research Council (14) overseeing the risk assessment remarked “The … estimates indicate that the probability of an infection resulting from a laboratory release of FMDv from the NBAF in Manhattan, Kansas approaches 70% over 50 years (see Figure 3-1) with an economic impact of $9–50 billion. The committee finds that the risks and costs could well be significantly higher than that…” While the DHS subsequently lowered the escape risk to 0.11% for the 50-year lifetime (14), the NRC committee (14) was highly critical of the new calculations: “The committee finds that the extremely low probabilities of release are based on overly optimistic and unsupported estimates of human error rates, underestimates of infectious material available for release, and inappropriate treatment of dependencies, uncertainties, and sensitivities in calculating release probabilities.” We have more trust in the NRC committee conclusions, as they have no skin in the game.

With this higher number, which we take as a worst-case scenario, the likelihood of at least one escape from 10 labs in 10 years becomes 91%, almost a certainty. It follows that, if the likelihood of one LAI leading to a pandemic is 30% in the worst-case scenario, the likelihood of an LAI-caused pandemic resulting from this whole research enterprise could be as high as 30 × 91% = 27%, a likelihood that is too dangerous to live with, as we noted. While this represents a worst-case scenario, it is not improbable.


From 2019 detailing all the fucks up in US labs.

http://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-biocontainment-labs-a-likely-pandemic-threat/

Human error is the main cause of potential exposures of lab workers to pathogens. Statistical data from two sources show that human error was the cause of, according to my research, 67 percent and 79.3 percent of incidents leading to potential exposures in BSL3 labs. These percentages come from analysis of years of incident data from the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) and from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). (Details may be found in the Supplementary Material document.)
****

2 labs in Wuhan, researching corona virus, known to have experimented with spike protein.

Strange genomic inserts.

The closest known Covid virus
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Jul 10 05:37:56
Dam it..

(96% match) Found in bats 1500 km from the Wuhan epicenter.

Wrath of Orion
Member
Fri Jul 10 06:20:39
Of course it has been researched (and is being researched) and not just dismissed.

http://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Wrath of Orion
Member
Fri Jul 10 06:28:37
If you want to know more details about differences between Sars-Cov-2 and RatG13, this is a good article.

http://www.nature.com/articles/s41594-020-0468-7

There really isn't much (any?) published evidence for a lab escape being the source. Lots of speculation from internet sources, little to no published evidence.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Jul 10 07:03:24
http://www...comes-from-a-laboratory/361860

The first link I posted is a news article with a Norwegian virologist, in talks to publish his study. He says 90% sure it escaped from a lab.

http://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748

The second link is an in-depth and lengthy article (blog with citations) that details down to genomic sequence the difference and similarities between covid and RatG13 and other closely related virus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/health/coronavirus-origin-china-lucey.html

The third link is a series of questions for China, which the author states he has received positive feedback on from the WHO fact finding mission going to China. 3 of those are about lab activity.

There isn't much published partly because of what the Norwegian mentions. Trump is a fucking disaster, but his opponents are almost equally retarded, so whatever he says, "I'm gonna do the opposite". Aligning with Trump has costs. As I said, the retardation in the west has no limits, we have politicized a virus and face masks.

From the very start, before we knew anything (besides the fact that there was a lab that studied bat corona) this theory has been labeled as a conspiracy theory. I would take nothing off the table, but my opinion has shifted on this. I may be wrong.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Jul 10 07:06:31
Norwegian link (in english)

http://www...comes-from-a-laboratory/361860
Seb
Member
Fri Jul 10 07:10:51
Nim:

Gain of function research has been prohibited in many countries and quite a lot of researchers generally think the cost to benefit of it borders on unethical.

I think it's quite possible there is some connection between the lab and the virus, but alongside accidental release of the virus, and accidental release of a virus that's been meddled with (whether engineered or via selecting pressure), you also need to consider that if there was a strain of covid in bats, people doing research could have brought it to the city. I.e. it didn't escape from the lab, lab workers brought the virus to Wuhan.

The main strength of ruling out lab release and gain of function is the lab records showing the virus samples haven't been used and that they haven't done gain of function research for years.

Now obviously that could be a lie, but you'd need some strong evidence to prove otherwise. Zoonotic diseases are the main way for novel diseases to arise, and they often are pretty good spreaders as some as they've adapted to actually infecting humans. Something adapted to spreading in bat colonies is likely to be good at spreading in doors, in enclosed spaces, and has no strong pressure to be good at surviving in sunlight.

Seb
Member
Fri Jul 10 07:46:58
WoO:

Thanks, that paper is interesting.

As far as I can make out, it's suggesting that:
1. Unlikely to be be engineered.
2. If due to being "bred" in culture, the adaptations imply an immune system, so would have to have been like that study where they got weasels to act as incubators and forced the spread between them by touching their noses. So an animal with similar receptor to humans. So would have to be a big cover up as that's a pretty large project to be running with a lot of animals involved.

So sounds to be more likely to have emerged in animals and spread to humans. The fact you have these people going to bat caves and sampling viruses means you have plenty of plausible explanations of a relative to the ratg13 adapting in another species and then infecting a lab worker while they are collecting samples.
Seb
Member
Fri Jul 10 07:59:47
Hmm. Not finding the arguments Sorensen using very convincing.

"The properties that we now see in the virus, we have yet to discover anywhere in nature. We know that these properties make the virus very infectious, so if it came from nature, there should also be many animals infected with this, but we have still not been able to trace the virus in nature."

Well, we know bats are undersampled and we know we have a bunch of people going film Wuhan to look for novel viruses in bat caves in the region where the ratg13 virus was found.

The nature article suggests it's not optimally configured for humans though.

Evidently very informed people can disagree, so one person being 90% sure isn't a hugely helpful piece of information.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Jul 10 08:06:59
Seb
I think good faith is reasonable, there is no sound argument that this, if connected to the lab, was anything other than an accident. I am surprised actually to find that such accidents are not uncommon around the world. So, it may be that China just happened to draw the short straw, that given the risks, this was going to happen sooner or later.

One interesting thing is that the Chinese found another Corona virus in 2013 called RaBtCoV/4991 that matches 100% with RatG13 on the part of the genome that has been published by the Chinese.

Here is a pre-print suggesting that RaBtCoV/4991 strain is actually the same strain as RatG13 http://osf.io/wy89d/

Here is another Chinese pre-print questioning this as well:
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202006.0044/v1



"It is odd that in her 2020 paper on RaTG13 Shi Zhengli fails to mention RaBtCoV/4991 or cite her 2016 paper about its discovery, for which she is listed as the one who “designed and coordinated the study”. It is not like RaBtCoV/4991 was forgotten by her group, as it is mentioned in their 2019 paper, where it is included in a phylogenetic tree of other coronaviruses:"

https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748

>>Zoonotic diseases are the main way for novel diseases to arise<<

And this is where there seems to be no clear consensus, or if there is what this actually entails, because at the same time it said to:

"Because every virus has evolved to target a particular species, it’s rare for a virus to be able to jump to another species. When this does happen, it’s by chance, and it usually requires a large amount of contact with the virus."

https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-do-viruses-jump-from-animals-to-humans/

There are a lot coincidences and pre-prints. They can of course all be wrong, but right (IMO) it seems like the evidence is mounting.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Jul 10 08:16:58
Seb

Back up a bit:

“Firstly, this part of the virus is very stable; it mutates very little. That points to this virus as a fully developed, almost perfected virus for infecting humans.

Secondly..."

"Sørensen says that several of these changes in the virus are unique, and that they do not exist in other known SARS coronaviruses."

“Four of these six changes have the property that they are suited to infect humans. This kind of aggregation of a type of property can be done simply in a laboratory, and helps to substantiate such an origin,”

Each of these things you can accept as a random natural thing, it is when all these elements accumulate, that it becomes difficult.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Jul 10 08:26:12
Anyway! Lacking a PhD in virology and not having a dog in this fight, I should relent. A lot of new information has entered my brain in the past 48 hours that I need to digest before further venturing down this rabbit hole.

I think the world has to get its' shit together on this, we can not afford to politicize the next pandemic or if an asteroid is heading our way. I can see it, pillz and Rugian are gonna to be here telling us "pff it's only a 10% chance it will hit us, we can't kill the economy to finance Musk's deflection rocket, just nuke it!"
Seb
Member
Fri Jul 10 09:13:15
Nim:

Yes, the Ratg13 virus is the same as the other, that was covered in the article I mentioned from the Sunday Times

The coding system changed so it got renamed, so the story goes

Re papers, I don't find it that surprising. Group directors are often listed as authors while the work is all done by postgrads and PhD students. The degree to which, especially in big institutions, authors are attached to papers for the slightest of reasons (there are a bunch I discovered I was listed on when I had no awareness the paper was being published and have no idea why I was ever listed) and the near feudal approach to giving top billing on important papers to seniors who have had no real input at all is frankly absurd, but the natural consequence of the focus on publication metrics in career progression.

I would read that comment more as a dig from one scientist to another along the lines of "see, she's so famous and prestigious, lah de dah cat 4 lab lady, but she doesn't know shit or actually do any science, she's overrated manager" than an accusation of cover up.

Rivalries and politics in academic circles are poisonous. In my narrow area of flow probe measurements in fusion, there was a huge hoo-hah between Ian Hutchinson and Peter Stangeby on how to interpret probe data. Standby was, I think, wrong and Hutchinsons approach much better. But Hutchinson absolutely hated that Stangebys books sold better than his, and there was this ridiculous exchange of papers in Rev Sci Inst and PPFC where Hutchinson would try to get in as many personal references to stangeby and those using his approach "xx uses erstatz approach that mixes a method with b, but on analysis we see this results in an ad-hoc mathematical amstatz"; and then he basically used to harangue / humiliate any student of Stangeby whenever he got the opportunity (I.e. with impossible / unreasonable questions during conference q/as), I remember once he made some poor little MSc student cry with this brutal cross examination and put downs.

I digress... point is, unless there is an obvious smoking gun I reckon there will be a lot of chewing over of this in the literature for a couple of years before a strong scientific consensus emerges. I would settle down comfortably and keep an eye on it, but I think any attempt to draw a consensus at this stage will likely need to be revised a few times over. Someone will probably do the first decent review article weighing up all the published stuff on "where did it come from" about a year for now.

Re Sorensen, yes, I understand his argument, but that's his interpretation of the data and I think others exist also. So it's hard to say really.

The links WoO post suggest alternative interpretations, particularly what I think they are suggesting is recombination of two different viruses in an animal infected with both.

The big P politicisation certainly isn't helpful as it prevents lessons bring learned - that said I think gain of function is already frowned upon.

Culture wars are a truly shitty way to approach handling natural disasters, pandemics etc.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Fri Jul 10 10:10:29
The Norwegian is welcome to publish his study. Until then, it's just a blog.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Fri Jul 10 10:25:11
Also, this guy is a virologist? Where are his publications? I don't see any, though sometimes I admit it's a little harder to track down international publishers. If you can find them, please let me know.

But I'm assuming it's this guy? Yuri Deigin, CEO of Youthereum Genetics?

http://youthereum.io/#rec50875635

Yeah, he's listed an MBA.

Which is fine, but like I said, let me see the published version of his study and then we'll talk.
Average Ameriacn
Member
Fri Jul 10 13:28:30
Here is another example of media liberal bias. Trump said INJECT, he never said DRINK. It is unfair to connect him with these people:


http://www.../fake-coronavirus-cure-bleach/

July 9, 2020

Leader of fake church peddling bleach as covid-19 cure sought Trump’s support. Instead, he got federal charges.



July 9, 2020


In April, when President Trump mused whether injecting patients with disinfectant could kill the novel coronavirus, perhaps no one was more thrilled about the suggestion than Mark Grenon.

Grenon runs a fake church with his sons in Florida that sells people a life-threatening toxic bleach product he calls the Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), federal officials say, which he fraudulently claims cures everything from covid-19 to cancer.

“Trump has got the MMS and all the info!!! Things are happening folks!” Grenon, 62, wrote on Facebook on April 24, linking to Trump’s comments. “Lord help others to see the Truth!”

Grenon had made $500,000 in 2019 alone selling his solutions to thousands of vulnerable, sick people across the country, according to the Justice Department, even though the Food and Drug Administration had warned for years that people could die if they drank MMS products, which are essentially bleach.


Now, the feds say people have in fact been hospitalized and died from drinking MMS.

On Wednesday, Grenon and his three sons — Jonathan, Joseph and Jordan — were charged in the Southern District of Florida with conspiracy to defraud the United States and deliver misbranded drugs. The criminal charges come on the heels of civil action the FDA took against the Grenons and their “Genesis II Church of Health and Healing” in April, when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking them from selling MMS. Because they allegedly continued to promote and sell it anyway, the four men are also charged with criminal contempt.

The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida didn’t offer details about the reported deaths linked to the products, saying the FDA has “received reports of people requiring hospitalizations, developing life-threatening conditions, and dying after drinking MMS.”

“Not only is this MMS product toxic, but its distribution and use may prevent those who are sick from receiving the legitimate healthcare they need,” U.S. Attorney Ariana Fajardo Orshan said in a statement. “A United States District Court already has ordered the defendants to stop distributing this product; we will not sit idly by as individuals purposefully violate Court orders and put the public in danger.”

The Grenons could not immediately be reached for comment late Wednesday night.

The case is part of the DOJ and FDA’s crackdown on coronavirus-related scams profiting off fears during the pandemic by promising fraudulent cure-alls or immunity when there is in fact no cure or vaccine.

According to the criminal complaint, Mark Grenon founded the company as a church in 2010 “for the express purpose of cloaking their unlawful conduct” by framing all of their activities as protected religious freedoms.

In one interview in February, according to the complaint, Grenon explained that he told his followers in a seminar in 2010, “ ‘Listen, we’re going to start a church.’ … And man, they flipped out. Everybody hated the idea. And we said, you’ve got to do this, folks, or you’re going to go to jail."

The family business, which has set up chapters across the globe, pulled in around $32,000 in profit each month last year, selling travel-size bottles of MMS for a required “donation” of $40 and large bulk packages of the fake miracle cure for a “donation” of $900.

Profits soared in March, when Genesis started falsely claiming that MMS could cure covid-19, too. They raked in roughly $123,000 that month, a nearly 400 percent increase in revenue, according to the feds.

“The Coronavirus is curable! Do you believe it? You better!” one Genesis newsletter said, with dosing instructions for “wiping out” the virus, according to the complaint.

A judge issued a temporary restraining order on April 17, leading Grenon to claim during a broadcast days later that he had mailed a letter to Trump about Genesis and MMS, asking him to “intervene” in his case.

On April 23, when Trump wondered about injecting disinfectant during a coronavirus daily briefing, Grenon suggested that the president knew about MMS, as the Guardian reported, although it’s not clear that Trump ever read or received any letter from Grenon.

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute,” Trump said during a coronavirus press briefing. “And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

Trump claimed the next day that the remarks were sarcastic. But Grenon was already mobilizing his followers.

On Facebook after the briefing, Grenon urged people to contact the White House.

“Everyone write the President with your testimonies,” he wrote. “They speak the loudest! The fake news hates the Truth!”

Around the same time, according to the complaint, Grenon and his sons wrote a threatening letter to U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams, who issued the temporary restraining order. He said that his church would resist her order as an act of “civil disobedience” but that “the 2nd Amendment is there in case it can’t be done peaceably.” In a later podcast, Grenon warned Williams that she could be “taken out.”

The Grenon family is representing themselves in the civil case.

“The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing has actively and deliberately placed consumers at risk with their fraudulent Miracle Mineral Solution,” Catherine Hermsen, assistant commissioner of the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations, said in a statement. “The FDA will continue our efforts to make sure these and other like-minded sellers do not jeopardize the health of Americans during this pandemic and in the future.”
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Jul 10 23:51:45
WoO
Birger Sørensen

http://www...comes-from-a-laboratory/361860

Seb
Do you have a link to the article that explains these are the same virus and that the name/code changed?


The issue here is that since the very start the lab theory was labeled a conspiracy and a lot of the scientific effort has gone into disproving that. Not until the market theory has been declared dead and failing to find any evidence in the wild has the lab theory gained traction again. The lab theory given that there is a lab there should have been the first theory to be falsified, it is the simplest answer.

Yuri Deigin (biotech entrepenur) explains what is wrong with the conclusions of the Nature article WoO posted. At best it says the virus (if created in a lab) was not ”optimal”. But no one has said the wuhan lab tried to create the optimal virus, but a chimera of strains found in nature, which virologist have done many times. It seems the nature article is trying to disprove the bioweapon theory.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 05:24:33
I found one that isn’t behind a paywall.

https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-related-sars-cov-2-found-chinese-mine-2013-was-sent-wuhan-lab-1515625

So, ok, that would explain that.

This guy ”Peter Daszak” is everywhere on this topic and he is on record saying he has ”no conflict of interest” while at the same time working with the Wuhan lab. Not saying he is a fraud, but everything he says should be viewed through that lens, here is one of his words of wisedom.

"The conspiracy folks are saying there's something suspicious about the change in name, but the world has changed in six years—the coding system has changed."

Uhm yes it is strange that two virus closely related to Covid-19 are in the records and one of them with only part of the genome that matches 100% with the other. Without any further information that is strange, him not granting this and dismissing it as ”conspiracy folklore” is fuel for the fire. Often these fools are their own worst enemy. Like the experts who adamantly said there was nothing strange with what we saw on the videos of WTC 13 collapsing. Yes there was, it _looked_ exactly like a demolition in the videos, but that still doesn’t mean it _was_ a demolition. Coincidences happen.

"However, the genetic differences between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 are such that it is highly unlikely that an accidental release of the RaTG13 virus would have led to the current pandemic."

You can speed up this rate of mutation artificially in a lab! It also takes for granted that the Wuhan lab are not lying, which if we are to seriously entertain the theory must assume they are. The name change and ”forgetting” they found a virus in 2013 does not make this whole thing look better. Them not being more transparent does not help either and Trumps aggressive posture, I bet, has not made anyone in China more willing.

I agree this is speculative and each and every thing could happen naturally, coincidence happen, but so many of them? That could also happen, but no one should assume that it did.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 05:25:38
WTC 7*
Seb
Member
Sat Jul 11 06:15:19
Nim:

I find the logic circular - we must assume the lab is lying why exactly? It would be a given *IF* the lab was knowingly at fault, but then that means it can't be used as an assumption to prove the lab was at fault.

I think it would be hard to cover up gain of function research, particularly if the changes seem to suggest selective pressure from an immune system was at play, as it means recycling the virus through a living creature not cell culture. So it would have quite the visible logistical trail.

Honestly, if Batlady had been conducting research to create a chimeric virus, it would be very high profile: she would have been advertising it before the release and publishing update papers, and the authorities would know, rivals in the lab would know, the authorities would have found out from them, and frankly she'd have probably mysteriously died by now.

She wouldn't be doing in on the quiet, that would not make much sense to me. So if it was happening in the lab, it would have been without her knowledge. Which points to ambitious young researcher. Such would require poor supervision, a senior leadership distracted and not operating effective governance etc.

As I said, coding changes, "forgetting" they have a particular sample all sound relatively plausible to me. All you need for that is a high turnover of staff (aka PhD students), sloppy and inconsistent record keeping and knowledge & information management, and a hierarchical culture where first authors barely read the papers they are listed on) all of this is perfectly common in many well run Western facilities.

And indeed the theory that someone conducted an illicit (otherwise would have been published) research to create a chimeric or otherwise accelerated strain of ratg13 and then accidentally released it relies on all the same antecedents that explanations for "forgetting" about ratg13 without a coverup do: PhDs doing work seniors may not be aware of, poor record management, poor procedures.

So rather than evidence of malfeasance being covered up, these features of coding name changes and forgetting about certain viruses can also be explained as natural consequences of other assumptions that this hypothesis requires, and people running around like headless chickens after the outbreak. Or it could equally be a coverup where the lab did know about the virus, didn't conduct such research, but knows how it all looks and is trying to avoid attention being drawn to the issue.

I don't think this circumstantial "lab Kremlinology" helps that much - it's all very circumstantial and can be made consistent with all the scenarios.

Ultimately all depends on how likely it is for such a virus to exist naturally or evolve. The mere presence of the lab creates a number of ways for that to have happened other than deliberate creation and accidental release, even if it existing in the wild is disproven (and that is hard to disprove given under sampling).

Keep an open mind, but I think it's going to be a while before scientific consensus on the physical evidence sides crystallises.


Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 07:23:38
Seb
”I find the logic circular - we must assume the lab is lying why exactly? It would be a given *IF* the lab was knowingly at fault, but then that means it can't be used as an assumption to prove the lab was at fault.”

If the virus escaped from the lab and there is no immediate evidence, here is a degree of cover up (or severe incompetence), until such a time that the hypothesis is falsified. The assumption that it escaped from a lab, is based on the fact that there IS a lab, researching corona virus a couple of hundred meter away from what was originally thought of as ground zero, that actually has had the closest relative to Covid-19 since 2013. Further that escapes are not uncommon and the risk is relatively high. There are even scenarios where the virus (RatG13) could have evolved into Covid 19 in the lab and escapes due to human error, with the Chinese not even knowing 100% that they this happened. They would obviously suspect it, knowing they were conducting such work.

”Honestly, if Batlady had been conducting research to create a chimeric virus”

I don’t think she herself must have been involved. More importantly the closest ancestor to Covid-19 was in the Wuhan labs possession since 2013 and they did not disclose this until 2020, so obviously not everything is publicized or of it is, it may be in Chinese and not accessible to the world. Coincidence I am sure, names change and with so much research you are bound to forget this when a pandemic of a related virus actually hits. It tests one’s faith in coincidences.

Shi Zhengli herself has said she has laid sleepless wondering if the virus escaped from her lab. At this point though, she is not the problem nor do I think she ever was. She is one little cog in the Chinese machinery and her scientific integrity would not stand a chance. This pandemic is not just a matter of internal western politics it is a matter of geopolitics. We may never find out the truth and that would be bad for all of us.

”Keep an open mind, but I think it's going to be a while before scientific consensus on the physical evidence sides crystallises.”

I promise, but think about your own reaction when I started writing, ”extra-ordinary claim”, I don’t think you think that anymore. This isn’t really claiming you saw a T-rex walking down the street.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 08:27:33
Cool, I look forward to Sorensen's peer reviewed paper on the subject.

He claims they split his paper in two so that the first (published in June) is about the vaccine and the second will be about the origin of the virus.

Like I said, when that one passes peer reviewed muster at a reasonable journal, I'll happily take the time to look into his claims. Until then, it's just a blog.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 08:39:42
Oh, btw, it would *not* be difficult to get a properly supported paper accepted to a major journal. That is pure bullshit and it's not a good sign for this guy in terms of what I would consider being a respected source.

Journals would fall all over themselves to publish a paper that made a legitimate case for the virus (or specific components of the virus) originating from a non-natural source.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 09:07:58
WoO
So, first I wrote 3 paragraphs about the DNA double helix and peer review, but I know you have trouble reading more than a tweet. This is better and to the point.

Muh peer review!
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 09:11:08
You've definitely just made the argument I expected from you.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 09:14:13
Waaaa I am WoO I can't read things and form an opinion because I am dumb, uninteresting and a big pussy who cares what people on UP think. I can't risk my reputation as some kind of scientist on UP! Wow man, you must one the most boring people IRL, if you can't even talk on UP without the permission of muh peer review :,(
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 09:14:18
The Crick-Watson argument is tired and fairly misunderstood by those who don't navigate the water of academic publishing. I can explain it if you want me to.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 09:14:35
Ditto!
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 09:15:29
Has your explanation been peer reviewed? Otherwise I will just wait for the peer reviewed paper you will publish on it.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 09:19:02
Yes, I'm sure you do believe that discussing the genetics and biochemistry of a virus is equivalent to understanding whether or not Watson and Crick could have published in Nature today based on what they initially had.

I see you've picked another idiotic hill to die on.
Seb
Member
Sat Jul 11 09:19:31
Nim:

"The assumption that it escaped from a lab,"

Yes, but the presence of the lab necessitates researchers collecting virus samples from locations thousands of miles away and returning to the lab.

They could equally have been infected by a wild strain and brought it with them.

Indeed, one of the researchers had previously been infected by a virus and had to go into quarantine after such an expedition.

"I promise, but think about your own reaction when I started writing, ”extra-ordinary claim”"

That the lab had something to do with the breakout I can believe.

What was extraordinary was the virus was created in the lab, I still think that requires as long or longer chain of suppositions as other options, both in interpreting the structure of the virus as well as what would have needed to happen, and I'm not seeing strong evidence that supports only that scenario.

Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 09:20:45
At least I pick them WoO. I don't give a shit if I am wrong when I speculate, peer reviewed or not. You must REALLY care what we think about you. Sad.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 09:22:17
Ah yes, the old, "I attack you and then criticize you for defending yourself on the internets."

lol
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 09:25:38
Btw, I'm pretty sure my position is already clear. I don't see any real evidence to support this as being a lab escape. I see a lot of supposition, guessing, and "maybe this, then that, then this."

The idea for this being strictly from the wild requires a lot of that, too. So they're essentially equal on that footing.

Where they're not equal is in the published works where we actually have peer reviewed works citing evidence that this was not engineered in some way (partially or fully). We don't have the opposite, yet. We'll see what Sorensen's paper looks like when it's out.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 09:26:11
Seb
"What was extraordinary was the virus was created in the lab"

It is not even close to extra-ordinary, given that created in a lab can be anything from intentional creation to unintentional creation. Extra-ordinary would be to say it was engineered by aliens.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 09:31:17
WoO
You must have had a stroke. The attacks are on your unwillingness to think for yourself without the magic wand of peer review. Despite now clearly saying both theories are speculative. You keep pretending like you actually know things and stuff, but will never actually spill it out. I told you this, mm I don't know a couple years ago over göbekli tepe, nothing has changed.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 09:37:01
Nobody on this board (to my knowledge) is in a position to really evaluate the technical contents of material about the genetics and functionality of viral genomes and structures.

So examining those aspects through the lens of peer review only makes sense, because scientists can (just like everyone else) make mistakes and misinterpret data. Peer review at least helps lessen that possibility since it is being reviewed by (presumably) experts in the field.

Some scientists say there is no real evidence of human manipulation in what they see. Dr. Sorensen disagrees. The difference is, he has not published yet.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 09:38:07
And the funniest part about all this is somehow you got triggered and went into attack mode by the above. I have no idea why, but if anything is sad, it's that.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 09:54:13
WoO
You have a uniquely retarded standard for having a conversation about things. Thank you for proving all my assumptions. Just think, all this bullshit you have written, could have been something interesting. You bore me and boring people trigger me immensely.

Now go do what you do best and call habebe retard rod 2.0
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 10:01:24
I'm not sure how using peer reviewed sources when applicable and generally avoiding pure speculation can be viewed as "uniquely retarded," but ok?
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 10:08:51
I knew you would have trouble with that, but this is not a normal conversation to have with people about their opinion. You are "unique" in many ways.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 10:18:03
People that are afraid of using peer review when appropriate are difficult to understand, yes.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 10:48:36
There is no one like that here though, only someone who is afraid of talking and giving opinions non peer reviewed and non-academic data. We have spend many hours here talking about peer reviewed results and peer reviewed nonsense.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 10:58:44
Not at all, despite your claims, I've given plenty of opinions on topics that don't include peer reviewed data.

Dr. Sorensen's claims, though, are not an appropriate topic for that. Many of them are impossible to even begin to evaluate for a lay person, or even a scientist outside that specific field. They are too technical and based on too much specific experience in that field. So as I've already explained, they need to be viewed through the lens of peer review. Once that happens, then you at least have equal footing to start talking about his evidence vs. other published evidence.

And as I've already said, the rest of this discussion is pure speculation at this point, so it doesn't interest me. Once it moves out of the realm of pure speculation (careful, this doesn't imply the need for peer reviewed data), I may take more of an interest.

However, while I have not added to that part of the discussion, neither have I detracted from it or attacked anyone for participating in it in this thread. I guess that's boring and triggered you, like you said? Ok...
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 11:22:02
Shift of goal posts, in this thread I am not interested in all the times you have given your opinions about Trump voters, rat dogs and habebe being hotrod 2.0. All very interesting and thought provoking. It is incredible how many times in the past few months you have had to tell people "I give my opinions on stuff all the time".

I have 0 respect for people who cling to peer review, something that is a recent introduction to science imported from medicine. Mainly gaining popularity as a way to keep getting government funding without having legislators judge what is good or junk science. It is actually quite bad at everything it tries to do.

But whatever, this is a waste of time.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 11:27:17
Holy shit... lmfao
Seb
Member
Sat Jul 11 17:21:54
Nim:

"It is not even close to extra-ordinary"

I'm afraid we disagree - it is an extraordinary claim both in itself and the implications. It needs strong evidence.

As WoO and I have both pointed out, both scenarios (it being from the wild and created in the lab) rely on a string of fairly tenuous suppositions.

Obviously, one is correct, the other not. But there isn't a strong case to be made for one over the other.

Absent documentary or other evidence of it being created, it will rely on a scientific consensus based on what can be inferred from the structure of the virus. Lots of arguments are swimming around and while there are people with strongly held opinions, there doesn't appear to be a consensus and I'm not in a position to evaluate differing claims.

So I'll have to wait for a strongly cited review article.

Seb
Member
Sat Jul 11 17:26:14
Nim:

"I have 0 respect for people who cling to peer review, something that is a recent introduction to science imported from medicine"

Um, what now? I don;t know if the formalism of it came from medicine, but the practice of writing articles and sending them out to peers to discuss and chew over dates back to the 17th century.
Seb
Member
Sat Jul 11 17:31:04
I mean, yes, it is interesting to speculate as to whether it came from the Lab or not, but in so far as the clinching evidence depends on the probability that such a virus could have come to be outside of the lab vs in the lab;' that's a highly technical question that requires substantial expertise to assess.

And if people with that expertise are still arguing, it's kinda stupid to pick a side at this point. X says these 6 things couldn't come to exist independently so quickly absent meddling. Y says actually they could.

Obviously, if someone comes up with a lot of evidence that supports the idea that active gain of function research was happening in the lab on a similar virus contemporaneously to the release, that would be a different matter.

But so far we have no real evidence of that happening, and instead we are relying on the absence of such evidence being explained by a cover up.

Which is really weak and circular, as such cover-up would only happen if the research was happening and the virus escaped.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sat Jul 11 18:37:22
Seb
There are several great books on the history of science and peer review, one by a Melinda Baldwin. The fact that the phenomena of review by peers has existed for longer is not contested. It was however not part of science journals in any meaningful way until very recently. As in 50-60 years, the Lancet only introduced it in the 80’s, Nature in the 60’s. Much of Eisteins work was not peer reviewed, the double helix was very speculative, as well as distortions in gravity waves discovered by a telescope, people laughed at that one because it was not peer reviewed.

It is an incrementalist approach that fits institutional thinking. It all sound great on paper, until it became institutionalized ”pal review”. The thing with institutions, is that once they are around for long enough, everyone starts thinking we can’t do without them, they end up preserving the problem they are the ”solution” to. Then people start saying things like ”extra ordinary claims” about rather mundane, but controversial (upsetting) findings.

Peer review as it is means almost nothing, what means something are experiments, replication and open discussion with your peers. You can throw the gate keepers down the well.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sat Jul 11 18:46:27
Like I said... Holy shit. Seb, don't even bother - you can't fix that level of stupid.
Seb
Member
Sat Jul 11 19:31:33
Nimatzo:

That's a very particular perspective.

Normally critiques of peer review boil down to "unreasonable exclusion of novel ideas", which can have some merit but generally these are merely a roadblock to good novel iftar and are more citied by people peddling ideas that are being displaced by better ones. One. Losers lament.

The second is that they are not that effective at weeding out bad theories or outright flaws.

But neither of those obviate the need for extremely deep experience (in most fields) to be able to meaningfully assess issues such as these.

In these circumstances, the layperson, as we are, is still best served by looking at peer reviewed research as a minimum standard for consideration and, beyond that, a consensus to emerge in the literature.

None of the criticisms of peer review really lend credence to the idea we can just pick and choose a blog to read and form an opinion, a valid one at least, of an issue that's beyond our expertise.

Now, you might claim to have the capacity to discern why Sorensen's claims that the six features he identified couldn't likely emerge naturally, but WoO is quite within the realms of reason to say "well, others with a strong background in this area disagree and think for various reasons this is not so surprising, I can't easily say which is right, and I don't really trust your opinion, but at the very last the guys saying it's perfectly reasonable have passed peer review, which at means at least some people have done a bare minimum of kicking the tires, whereas Sorenson's not so, for now, I give more weight to those guys. We will talk about Sorenson when he's on the same footing."

Generally the mistake is to overweight peer review, but as a first pass filter it's not a bad criteriab to say anything that's not passed peer review can be ignored by non experts. It might be right, it might be wrong, but the lay person isn't likely going to be able to tell.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sun Jul 12 03:30:14
Seb
I don’t care when WoO feels secure enough to tell us an opinion. I have been very clear that what I have presented is speculative, not hard evidence and that the other theory of emerging in nature is possible. That is all that needs to be said.

He decided to die on this hill, when all it really required was an opinion, not a professional assessment, not a scientific opinion, just an opinion. He is WELL within his right to die on this hill. ”I am not interested in this” he said. Ok. I just gave him my opinion of people who die on the hill of peer review. I am well aware this is a popular hill for institutional people to die on. Booooorriiiing. I don’t have time for boring.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sun Jul 12 03:39:34
WoO taking potshots from behind seb’s skirt. You had your chance WoO, it’s over!

For all my disagreements with Seb, many things I could call him, boring is not one, he will defend critical theory on racist math and sexist city planning. Although to give you a point, those are usually peer reviewed, some journal has actually approved the methodology as ”sound”.

1. Experiment
2. Open source
3. Open dialogue with peers in and outside the instutional walls
4. Replication by peers

There I just gave you a quality control, order of magnitude better.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sun Jul 12 12:13:40
You keep missing points, doing selective reading, and just making shit up. Pretty bad.
Habebe
Member
Sun Jul 12 12:32:56
"You keep missing points, doing selective reading, and just making shit up"

Hi I'm habebe, welcome to UP.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sun Jul 12 12:37:18
Oh look the boring guy is back to keep boring us with his boring tweets.
Seb
Member
Sun Jul 12 12:52:36
Nim:

I think there are degrees of speculation.

It's certainly possible to speculate that it might have come from the lab. One can speculate also on how that might have happened.

But theres not enough information available to reasonably speculate on whether it's more or less likely than the other possibilities. Peer review is generally a good way of determining the when someone says "these six things are unrelated and it's unusual for them all to emerge at the same time so quickly" that, e.g. it is not the case that 4 of those things were likely present before hand, and that the other two are highly correlated so it's likely that both would emerge together. Peer review won't always pick such things up, but it is normally pretty good at picking up leaps of logic that are not evidenced, and arguments relying on methods or assumptions that wildly differ from common understanding in a field.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sun Jul 12 13:19:55
"Oh look the boring guy is back to keep boring us with his boring tweets."

And yet you keep engaging me.

Keep in mind that I simply pointed out that Dr. Sorensen's work had not yet been published, that other work contrary to his views already had, and that the technical level of the science involved in trying to evaluate all that really was extremely high and at least waiting for peer review was a good idea. The other stuff is 100% speculation on both sides (not even partial speculation, 100% speculation) and therefore isn't interesting to me.

You then got triggered, went on the attack, and when you couldn't make any headway, spouted some of the dumbest shit about peer review that I've seen in a long time and then basically threw your toys down and said you were done.

But here you are back at it.

I usually don't agree with the shit you post, but goddamn, it's like you've lost your mind. I hope it's just a bad weekend or something like that.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sun Jul 12 13:21:10
Seb
One point I am making, criticism of peer review aside, is that we can read the data and (or a pre-print) go "taken at face value" or "provided the papers is in this form after review and the methodology is sound" then x y an z.

This is what I have done. I can skate it with a cursory understanding from a biotech degree from 16 years ago. I had never heard of GFO research, but I remember spike proteins, protease and recombination.

One interesting thing in the wake of Covid-19 will be the effect of all these pre-prints. Many publishers who did not, have opened up the pre-prints and ultimately out sourced the "picking things apart", because we need to solve a problem fast. There are of course other more systematic efforts to open source science like that, but probably not near this scale right now.

My reaction to that is, exactly if you want progress, you need to rethink the peer review system. It seems, even the journals understand that to some degree, but they are too invested in this systems to really to anything profound about it.

It is slow and not very good, junk gets through and good ideas die because you refuse to participate in the circle jerk. And frankly, there are just too many people with PhDs doing useless things, even in STEM.

Science publishing suffers from all the same problems of regular publishing. You want grants? Give us awesome and ground breaking results! Uhm, I don't have it. Well, you better get some! That is compounded by an increase in competition for a relatively small number of positions in academia. It has become a racket that produces click bait.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sun Jul 12 13:23:11
Woo woo
I am not surprised you perceive tweet sized insults as "engaging" someone.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sun Jul 12 13:30:23
Woo woo
By the way *I* let it go and was willing to talk with seb, but then you decided to *not engage* me by giving pro advice to seb. Passive aggressive as you are, did you feel you had not said everything you needed? I had, but you pulled me back in.

I may be triggered by boring people, but I don't cling on, like a turd underneath your shoes.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sun Jul 12 14:09:21
Except my "tweet sized insults" pulled you back in to actually engage, lol. Something is really not right with the way you're thinking the last couple days.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Sun Jul 12 14:13:56
You can have that ”victory”, it’s on the house.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sun Jul 12 14:24:34
Erm, victory? Ok...

Regardless, at least your latest post on publishing is a little more sane. Preprints are a good thing and we need more journals to keep doing it.

Some of your other ideas about publishing are either flat out wrong or really only applicable in certain disciplines. Publishing antics varies wildly depending on your discipline.

That's also true of getting grants. A better criticism of grants as a whole is that very often you need some demonstration of application is many disciplines, not really anything ground breaking.
Wrath of Orion
Member
Sun Jul 12 14:25:57
Oops, which means that in many disciplines very important basic science is getting harder and harder to get funded without some demonstrated link to application.
Seb
Member
Mon Jul 13 03:04:08
Nim:

I've seen too many obviously dodgy pre-prints.

You can certainly look at them, and as an alternative to peer review some of them generate enough buzz to either get useful comments to improve or be critiqued to death.

But many just sit there. And I've definitely seen it abused by alt-energy types pedalling cold fusion or other non-conventional fusion:
"yes, my nonsense is respectable, it is here on ArXiv in a format dripping with conventional authority, it is in pre-print, nature will be publishing it any day now".

Another forum I used to frquent, Nextbigfuture, is full of people who got suckered by a few of those schemes, particularly Eric Lerner. These are well educated techy types, just in the wrong techy field, and they were easily suckered, and started investing through crowd funding vehicles. A sprinkle of cargo-culting real science, and conspiracy theory nonsense about big-govt science and how small, agile, and open-minded teams could do an end-run because they weren't sucking on the govt teat.

I'm all for trying to figure out a peer reviewed articles (baring in mind that there is always likely to be conflicting views in the literature, so one needs to be careful of confirmation bias), but it is really easy to be led very far astray with pre-prints with even only a little bit of adjacency from the field you study.
Seb
Member
Mon Jul 13 03:08:15
"My reaction to that is, exactly if you want progress, you need to rethink the peer review system"

Depends what you want. Peer review is optimised for accuracy, not speed. And that works in the sense that effective resource allocation is what the current science funding prioritises most, and what ultimately matters in the long run, with no other considerations coming into play.

If you want rapid progress on a thorny and urgent problem, what you want to do is pursue many lines of inquiry in parallel, and if some turn out to be utter junk, that's ok.

You fund all the vaccines and see which works.

Understanding the origin of the disease though seems firmly in the first category. It won't really help us tackle the crisis - and a lot weighs on it in terms of liability and lessons learned, so more important we get it right.
Seb
Member
Mon Jul 13 03:11:13
WoO:

"Oops, which means that in many disciplines very important basic science is getting harder and harder to get funded without some demonstrated link to application."

Yes, this is utterly asinine unfortunately. And helps create fertile grounds for fraud (not of grant bodies but investors) as you have blue skies research touting technologies that won't be possible for decades, and then fraudsters promising them tomorrow.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Mon Jul 13 04:35:15
"I've seen too many obviously dodgy pre-prints."

We have all seen too many dodgy peer reviewed articles. Quantitative nonsense, not just the usual suspects of social science. Like in medicine, where there are tons of money to be made, so there is a preference for positive results over negative ones. These effects are the result of the culture and culture follows from structure.

"Depends what you want."

Much faster progress. Our specie is facing huge problems that we need to solve rather quickly. Apart from the existential threats of pandemics and space rocks, we have global warming and the general destruction of this planet, socio economic problems, resource scarcity etc. problems that are accumulating under the very real threat of major violent conflict. Things are moving at a snails pace, because that is how things have been structured.

There is an open source, transparent and mass collaborative platform yet to be invented that would. Science publishing has yet to use the power of the Internet in any meaningful way. Still stuck in a place where 1 or a handful of reviewers are doing the work on a paper. And they are not getting paid usually, so might as well have hundreds of people do it and not get paid.

Compare the expensive encyclopedia your parents bought, all 25 volumes (!), with wikipedia. There is still a huge variation in the quality of wikipedia article, but wikipedia has studied this in themselves. Turns out that the articles with high quality, are the ones with a lot contentious discussions. Where you have "red team" vs "blue team" duking it out. They undergo a rather harsh public peer review and it makes the articles better.

In this future science publishing platform, the lay peoples contribution will still be relatively small, but it will be significant, you will have some very prolific lay people. The vast majority of the work would still be from other scientist, but it would happen in the open. Things would not die before they saw the light of day.
Seb
Member
Mon Jul 13 06:03:11
Nim:

"We have all seen too many dodgy peer reviewed articles."

Indeed, peer review merely screens out some bullshit. Which is why "Look at my peer reviewed article" can also be treated with scepticism rather than the gospel according to Science.

However, this does not mean that it's as safe to take blog posts or pre-prints.

"Much faster progress"
You tend to get slower progress overall if you dive down blind allies.

And let's be honest, the lack of progress on climate change has fuck all to do with peer review.

"There is an open source, transparent and mass collaborative platform yet to be invented that would."

It's been invented lots of times. The problem is, like conventional publishing is predicated on the free time of researchers which is finite. The limited value add that conventional journals bring is an editorial board that can prioritise where to spend that resource and orchestrate and follow up people to actually give attention to review a paper.

The big problem with open platforms is that very very few researchers think it's worth their time debunking shit.

They will invest their precious time if they are asked to do so by a journal with a reputation.

They aren't going to be on an open platform wading through tides of crap.

So most stuff on a fully open platform is going to be bunkum that goes unchecked. And of course you can astroturf support.

Wikipedia just about works as it is a secondary source, and effectively the content editorial can be turned into an algorithm/ set of principles people can agree to on assessing sources and citations.

That does not work very well at all for assessing the worth of academic publications of novel discoveries at all.
Seb
Member
Mon Jul 13 06:06:17
Tl;Dr you might find the great value of conventional journals is that they actually draw attention to novel and contentious results and get them looked at and publicised whereas in an open system they might otherwise be ignored as another lunatic claiming they've invented a perpetual motion machine.

Rather than journals reputation being the pre-requisite for entry, it would shift to the institution conducting the research, slowing progress and increasing group think.

Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Mon Jul 13 11:42:49
So, a parody reading of what I am saying, a world where we dive down blind alleyways and read blogposts uncritically. Yea let’s not do that and let’s not straw man what the other is saying.

1. I did not only mention climate change as areas for global concern where we need progress
2. I did not say climate change _acceptance_ is hampered by peer review. It is another issue that has fallen victim of politics.

But I do believe climate change must be solve with innovation. I don’t want to get stuck on climate change, since I mentioned a bunch of things we all should worry about and solve, quickly. To answer ”depends on what you want”. I want to solve pressing issues.

Can you point me to 3 examples where what I am saying has ”already been invented”? I am curious.

Apart from that you go on to argue my case, or something I would argue. That the reason scientist want to publish in Nature or the Lancet is because it is Nature and Lancet, the brand, the name, the fame. It’s the same question that has already been studied on the top schools of the world. The best student and teachers go there, because of the name and fame, not because there is actual magic within the walls of MIT and Harvard. It is a bug light for smart people. You publish or go and become a consultant. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, just to be clear.

Things I am not saying:
Peers should not review their peers work
We should have chaos.
Read blog posts and pre-prints uncritically.

Things I am saying:
Use hundred and thousands of peers instead of a handful
Use the amateurs.
Crush the elitism that is the antithesis of science

It may shock many of my detractors on UP, but I engage with scientist online and offline and have on numerous occasions asked relevant questions they did not think about and given valuable feedback. And I am by all accounts slightly more intelligent than the average bear. Hmm. There is a certain kind of elitism going on in many circles (not shocking) that is an impediment to progress.

Wikipedia, is an encyclopedia, a very good one, and it blows any of the things I had growing up, into atoms. I mentioned it, because it is a great example of how successful crowd sourcing can be in doing what once was the sole domain of gigantic institutions and publishers, where a small editorial elite decided (to the best of their ability and with the best of intentions) what made it into the books and not. Beyond that, the new medium opened up a new world of ”Talk page” and ”Discussion section” that just simple were not possible in print.

Institutions can not solve the problems inherent to the institutions. It is like asking someone to rationalize themselves out of their own job. And I do believe many of the problems we have today are engrained in the structures themselves. Sometimes that is solved with a new technological paradigm, other times it is a matter of unraveling old traditions and organizations.
Seb
Member
Mon Jul 13 12:33:12
Nim:

Most people aren't going to be able to critically evaluate blog posts in a meaningful way.

It is very difficult to do so unless you are already intimately familiar with the subject matter and current state of the research.

The reality is even people who think they are reading it difficult will do so at a level that's less effective at weeding out crap than peer review.

"Can you point me to 3 examples where what I am saying has ”already been invented”? I am curious."

Why 3? sounds like you are trying to give me a test. You can look up the many and multifarious attempts that have been made to try and replace journals with self organising crowdsourced models to varying success. I looked into it in 2012 when I was working on the resrarch section of the govts white paper that ultimately led to open access requirements. I don't recall too much detail but the fundamental issues is a broad range of scientists didn't think they worked, despite being eager to break out of the journal model.

I'm sure you can find points of differentiation with your precise concept but I think in bulk they all suffer from reputation deficit or need for editorial boards and funding model.

"That the reason scientist want to publish in Nature or the Lancet is because it is Nature and Lancet, the brand, the name, the fame."

Equally though, that's because those journals tend to accept only the highest, most impactful research. It creates a cycle.

From a rent seeking and cost of access point of view it's bad. From a quality perspective, it works.

"Use hundred and thousands of peers instead of a handful"

The biggest delay in peer review is finding reviewers and getting them to review. They get no credit in time, money or accumen.

So why alternative model needs to account for that in how you get "hundreds of thousands" of researchers to review a document. It's hard enough just getting three.

At the moment the main basis for investing time to do peer review as a reviewer is little more than a warm buzz of being felt worthy of doing so. But that relies heavily on the journal. When I was a researcher, I was happy to review a ppfc article. I declined "opportunities" from journals that were clearly paper mills I'd never heard of.

How will an open model work to incentives researchers doing the completely unrewarded work of actual review?

If it's double blind and anyone can submit an article, how much time will I spend flipping through dross to find something actually worth critiquing?

And given those factors, when I'm looking to do a literature review, am I going to look through the existing journals where it will be easy to find stuff that is not nonsense, how will that work on an open platform where it's much harder?

And when it comes to citing a source to support part of my argument, why would I use one from an open platform that may only have been reviewed by amateurs who may not know their arse from their elbow.

You say elitism, I say qualified.

Sure intelligent, educated amateurs may ask good questions now and then, but it's no substitute for people doing the same research who can point out things that will ellude those less familiar.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Mon Jul 13 15:36:38
I asked for 3 because you said it has been done lots of times and you are apparently aware of them. It's a BS test, yes. One should be able to pass without even trying given what you said.

I could easily just have said "no, it has not".

No, it has not.

"but it's no substitute for people doing the same research"

And this is exactly what I proposed, when I enumerated what I am saying and not saying, that we substitute peers with amateurs.

Your BS has outrun the valuable inputs you have.
Seb
Member
Mon Jul 13 16:39:59
Nim:

I used to know various proofs of Pythagoras theory. I do not recall them, and would have to either work them out again, or look then up, but I do know there were at least three. And it isn't necessary for me to give them to you in detail as they will turn up in Google if you Google them; as will various attempts to replace peer review with open crowdsourced alternative models.

Literally Google "Crowdsourced alternatives to peer review"; you will even find peer reviewed review articles attempting to measures whether they are better or worse.

It is a very silly hill to die on.

"And this is exactly what I proposed, when I enumerated what I am saying and not saying, that we substitute peers with amateurs."


"Things I am saying:
Use hundred and thousands of peers instead of a handful
Use the amateurs.
Crush the elitism that is the antithesis of science"

Let me be clear again: you haven't explained where these hundreds of thousands of academics are going to come from, why they are going to spend their time on your platform, critiquing papers.

Absent that, it's going to be swamped by shit (no gatekeepers for the cranks) and reviewed by amateurs that will add very little value.

I'm sorry your idea sucks, but you could say least try to explain how you intend to overcome those flaws rather than just insisting that it's been misunderstood.

Your reaction is precisely why such platforms don't work. They don't meet the actual needs of those employed in research for sources of information where the shit has been weeded out already. You can call this elitest but that's just the nature of it.
jergul
large member
Mon Jul 13 16:50:56
mkay, I am probably to blame here. Peer review is not that great.

Actual vetting is successfully done at grant levels. The EU is fucking brilliant at it, but has other drawbacks (you will not get a grant if your project is not multi disciplinary, multi national, and - more often than not - applied).
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Mon Jul 13 17:02:55
Seb
So you were BSing. I am under no obligation to make the prosecutions case against me. You engaged, I give you the benefit of doubt that you sorta kinda know what you are talking about. Evidently that isn't the case. OK.

Also, I am flattered, but I don't have all the answers, nor do I claim I do. I don't need to have all the practicalities solved to point out the problems and the principle foundation for solving them.

Your elitism is noted.
Habebe
Member
Mon Jul 13 18:20:44
I'll end the thread I started, thought I posred a response to Deb, it didmt go through I guess and by then I had no idea where thw thread went and just gave up. Im way too lazy to read all that.
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