Taiwan is not a Chinese province, you bat-eating, dog-beating, grave-robbing, ethnic cleansing, police state cockwomble of a stolen Nazi uniform.
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Samizdata quote of the dayApril 20th, 2020 |
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Talking of bat-eating, have y’all noticed all those articles debunking claims made “without evidence” that it’s possible that the virus escaped from a Wuham lab. Not claims that it did, mind, nor claims that it was an engineered bioweapon, just claims that it might have escaped from a research facility.
And the total absence of articles debunking claims made “without evidence” that the virus originated in a Wuham wet market.
I dunno what the origin was, though just on a common sense basis an escape from a lab researching bat viruses doesn’t seem that far fetched to me.
But the rapid piling on with the debunking articles does illustrate that the usual suspects are really anxious about any possible Chinese responsibility. Since they can’t all be being paid by the Chinese, one wonders why ?
China is a Taiwanese province (in involuntary revolt). FTFY.
Oh, me likee! I am going to start referring to Beijing as “Taiwanese Peking” :))
“But the rapid piling on with the debunking articles does illustrate that the usual suspects are really anxious about any possible Chinese responsibility.”
When the theory was mooted that it was developed in an American bioweapons lab and released in China to discredit the Chinese government and reduce the Chinese population, there was a similar piling on with debunking articles, as if people were worried about the story taking hold. I wonder why?
Anyway, everyone knows it was the Bavarian Illuminati in league with the Knights Templar that did it, as part of their secret plot to take over the world!
Yeah, all four of those scenarios seem equally plausible, I … guess?
And then there’s the theory the giant lizard aliens did it, one that it came from outer space released in a giant meteorite fireball that fell over China last October, the theory that it is spread by 5G mobile phone transmissions, that it’s caused by vaccinations, that Bill Gates did it, that it’s the result of eating genetically modified crops, that it’s Big Pharma ginning up a panic planning to sell a ‘cure’, that it’s no coincidence the Disney Channel released their new service timed to the start of the lock-down, that it’s a marketing scheme by hand sanitizer companies, the one popular in the Middle East, that the Israelis did it, or that it is a punishment from God for the sins of the world, a sign of the end times and the coming of the Day of Judgement (views differ on the identity of the anti-Christ…), or the one that it’s just a bad case of flu, combined with fake news propaganda, and is all a collective power grab by the world governments operating through the World Health Organisation. All those scenes from hospitals? – Done in TV studios. Like the way the moon landings were faked. The evidence is being covered up by those men in black suits and dark sunglasses working for the government.
This one is spooky!
https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/1237924116486688768
When there’s no evidence, you can believe whatever you like.
There isn’t no evidence.
There are these pieces of evidence:
1) The outbreak started in Wuhan, China.
2) There is a wet market in Wuhan that sells bat meat, which is associated with coronavirus.
3) There is also a research lab right next to the wet market that deals with these types of viruses.
4) The CCP are inveterate liars.
Is that conclusive? No, but it’s not no evidence either. I propose that a reasonable person could lean more toward a Wuhan virus lab origin than a 5G or Bill Gates origin, in precisely the same way that if I find my hamburger missing from the table and mustard on my dog’s muzzle, it is reasonable to lean toward suspecting my dog as the culprit rather than suspecting that some random person broke into my house and stole my burger.
1) There’s no evidence that it started in Wuhan. That’s where it was first *noticed*. It may have started elsewhere, and somebody coming to market from there then spread it to a much larger number.
2) There’s no evidence that the wet market was selling bats. The coronavirus is most closely related to one found endemic in bats, but there are other animals it can transfer to, including civets, pigs, pangolins, cats, cows, buffalos, goats, sheep and pigeons. Pangolins have been identified as a possibility, since they are often illegally traded in bushmeat markets, but it could equally well have been pigs. Other bat coronavirus jumps to pigs have occurred previously, and China recently had half its pig population wiped out by Swine Flu.
3) There are also research labs in America, and Israel, and lots of other places with reason not to like China.
4) All politicians are inveterate liars, not just the Chinese ones. So are lots of other people.
It’s like one of those inkblot tests. What you see is more a reflection of your pre-existing beliefs than the evidence. There’s lots of scientific evidence on the human tendency to spot patterns in random data. It’s called pareidolia.
Nobody knows where it came from, or how it got to where it did. It’s quite probable we never will.
There are also research labs in America, and Israel, and lots of other places with reason not to like China.
The disease was first observed in Wuhan, not in those other places. So if it was an accidental leak from a lab, the odds on an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab is orders of magnitude higher than a leak from an American or Israeli lab.
But if it was planted by a daring operation by the CIA, though, we have to postulate that Trump can get the CIA to secretly engineer a worldwide pandemic, wrecking the US economy in an election year, pinning the blame on China, while keeping the whole thing ultra hush hush. While he is unable to prevent the CIA leaking anti-Trump stories to the press almost daily for four years. This seems, at best, unlikely.
Your inkblots are obviously more interesting than mine.
Occam’s Razor anyone?
I blame Narnia myself.
Isn’t the Chinese popuation going to drop anyway because of the one child policy they had for 30 odd years. Or did CIA agents go round China murdering the first born?
Statistical odds, there are 1000+ wet markets in Vietnam, probably 10,000 in China and goodness knows how many in SE Asia as a whole.
So given all those other markets, it just happened to be first noticed in the town with a wet market a couple of hundred metres from China’s only level 4 biowarfare research lab.
Care to calculate the probability on that?
“Your inkblots are obviously more interesting than mine.”
The inkblots look random to me. But I’m well aware that people who are disposed to suspect America see an American conspiracy, and find it perfectly convincing, and people disposed to suspect China see a Chinese conspiracy, and there is an equal lack of evidence or plausibility for either. Viruses are highly unlikely to escape from a level 4 lab. That’s the point of them. And there’s absolutely no reason to think they did, when such viruses are circulating freely in the wild. (That, after all, being the only place the lab could have got this one in the first place.)
Nobody knows exactly where it came from or how it got there, but it’s most likely to be what all the virologists assume it is: a transfer from some animal species that may well have been circulating for some time unnoticed before it got to Wuhan. (Given 90% only show flu-like symptoms, even a few isolated deaths among the elderly might have been dismissed as ordinary pneumonia, you’d expect it to have had to have spread quite far before anyone noticed a significant cluster of hospitalisations/deaths in one place all with the same symptoms.) But I’m sure that’s not going to stop people coming up with theories. And not just ones blaming China.
“So given all those other markets, it just happened to be first noticed in the town with a wet market a couple of hundred metres from China’s only level 4 biowarfare research lab.”
It’s not a biowarfare research lab.
It was either deliberate or an accident.
If it was deliberate, cui bono?
If it was an accident, then it originates at or near by where it was first noticed.
It was first “spotted” in Wuhan.
By China or was it spotted by somebody else
I thought a Chinese doctor first spotted it, in his patients in Wuhan. When he tried to warn people, the Commies told him to stop spreading rumours. He later died, probably from the Coronavirus.
“If it was an accident, then it originates at or near by where it was first noticed.”
Not necessarily.
Suppose, hypothetically, it originated in some small rural place in the middle of nowhere. No doctors, no big cities, no transport. Because there is so little contact between people, as they can’t travel far, it spread very slowly, with R0 close to 1, and the number who had it at any one time remained small. Then somebody with the disease but prior to getting symptoms gets on their bicycle, and rides into the local town. There, it spreads to quite a few more people, but still not enough to make a big splash. But this town has more connections, more people travelling longer distances and meeting lots more people, so it spreads to all the nearby towns. Gradually the numbers creep up. Most people just get a fever, and never go to the doctor, but one in ten get more severe symptoms and go to hospital. Ten people get it, one person in hospital, nobody notices. A hundred people get it, ten people in hospital, but spread around, still nobody notices. A thousand people in one town get it, fifty people in the same hospital all at once with the same symptoms, and various doctors maybe even in various towns say “Hey! What’s going on?” And if there happens to be a big virology lab in the same town, they send them samples and ask them what it is. The virology lab sequences it, identifies it as all one disease spreading as an epidemic, and finds it 96% similar to a sample they took from a cave full of bats a thousand miles away in Yunan, but mutated (by natural selection) to be able to affect civets, pigs, pangolins, cats, cows, buffalos, goats, sheep, pigeons, and humans. (Note, assuming they are telling the truth, that implies they didn’t have an exact match stored there. So they couldn’t have released it by accident.)
Thus, it could have spread a long way in the bats. It could have spread further in some other farm animal like pigs or pigeons. It could have spread slowly among humans for a while, only bursting out into larger clusters when it hit the bigger towns. And when it was finally identified, it was identified in the town with the big virology lab because it was the big virology lab that identified it.
Pure speculation, of course. But we know from our own experience with it that it spreads a long way and for quite a long time before the spike of deaths in any one place becomes noticeable. We only located cases so quickly because we were looking for it. But it was already all over the country before we did.
However, I’m well aware that such a story will convince no one, when the alternative is so much more juicy and less boring and mundane. A virology lab found a sample of another SARS-like coronavirus that could infect humans, didn’t mention it to anyone, didn’t do anything about the original virus floating around out there in the wild in the middle of China, stored it in their facility, then somehow lost it out of a level 4 biolab, then lied about having done so, and lied about having had a sample in the first place. Much more dramatic.
I can just see all the Hollywood scriptwriters, currently languishing in lockdown, all sharpening their pencils ready for the resumption of business and the new fashion in ‘yellow peril’ spy thrillers! 🙂
Nullius, I’m so desperately hoping you’re female.
Because, if so, you’d be great in bed… since you’re such a frickin contortionist.
NiV
Of course what you say is possible. Unfortunately only the Chinese are in a position to determine patient zero and they’ve incinerated the evidence. So we just have to go with the balance of probability which gets less and less likely the further you get from Wuhan. Personally I couldn’t care less whether it came from a lab, a market or a vampire bat because it was spread around the world from Wuhan. That’s the key point.
Well, to be fair to NiV, since we don’t have signed golden tablets descended from a shining cloud, notarized by the deities of all major faiths, which detail the precise truths of the origin of KungFlu, we must therefore concede that we don’t know anything.
And therefore, it seems impossible to decide between the virus originating in the area where the outbreak was first detected, or originating in the kitchen of the White House residence via the evil biochemical experimentation of OrangeManBad. There just isn’t any way to be sure 🙂
This thread is a particularly choice example of Nullius-in-Verba’s strange (il)logic: call the evidence of Wuhan origin “no evidence”, put the idea on a level with genuine no-evidence conspiracy theories (US-spy-agency, lizards, etc.) – but do so under the literary form of resisting conspiracy theories, not adding to them. Nullius presents as critiquing our susceptibility to them, as if our bigotry, not our rationality, was ordering them by political usefulness, not by supporting evidence or lack thereof.
As I’ve said quite recently, the opportunity to engage with this stuff has value, and I have also enjoyed studying the technique over a number of threads (mingled, of course, with more rational observations from NiV on some matters). In this thread, however, I’m particularly noticing that it makes the thread all about Nullius. Perry’s OP quote sits forlornly at its head, no longer regarded. So I will now comment on that instead.
For decades, under the nationalist government, Taiwan did indeed present as the legitimate government of China, treating the communist revolutionaries as still revolutionaries. The nationalists were as the royal governments in Ireland, Scotland and (last to fall) the Scilly isles were in the first years of Cromwell’s rule in London. For decades, the US saw practical as well as ideological reasons to maintain this – then “Nixon went to China”. (And the US media were delighted about it – which should have been a warning sign to him. Kissinger’s fatuous try-to-be-threatening complaint at the end of the Vietnam war was both an admission Mao had taken them and the ultimate comment on ‘the cleverest man in the world’.)
When Mao was given China’s permanent veto-empowered seat on the UN security council in 1971, Taiwan was expelled from the UN altogether. The fact that Taiwan is not a member of the WHO relates to that (wikipedia summary here for those interested).
Were it thought proper to reprove the ChiCom government for its failure to be more honest about the outbreak, one easy approach would be to make Taiwan a member of the UN, something which seems achievable by a non-security-council route, so regardless of the inevitable veto. The political feasibility of this is quite another matter – but making China spend its influence simply on repeatedly assembling enough UN votes to prevent it would be one way to diminish their world influence.
A much more emphatic reproof would be to deprive China of its permanent veto-empowered seat, on the excellent UK constitutional principle that anything an already-existing organisation has done it can likewise undo, unlike making changes to its founding structure which it could not do so. However the political feasibility of that would inevitably be far less than just admitting Taiwan as a separate nation. And having a most excellent constitutional argument against saying that the way China was deprived of its permanent seat could be a precedent for the UK ever being so deprived is good – but just might one day prove a weak reed against the mere arrogant power of some majority of third-world kleptocracies. And the argument above – that China would expend its world influence just to prevent Taiwan’s membership – makes a reverse argument that if we weakened China enough in the UN, the ChiComs would devote their influence to other ends.
The idea that a movement supported by Taiwan could one day rule all China is more worthy of discussion than some ideas presented in the thread above, but China’s worry may go beyond the calculating. Israel exists: ‘next year in Jerusalem’ became this year in Jerusalem. Taiwan lacks divine prophecy, but ChiCom secular ideology is all about how a weak few can flee to a distant area and one day return. They feel sure they could invade and conquer Hong Kong openly if all attempts to do the same less overtly fail. Taiwan is just that bit more troubling to them.
I thought a Chinese doctor first spotted it, in his patients in Wuhan. When he tried to warn people, the Commies told him to stop spreading rumours. He later died, probably from the Coronavirus.
This raises an interesting point about the statistical allocation of deaths to causes. If you die of a heart attack, when coronavirus inflammation has exacerbated an existing heart condition, have you died of a heart attack or from coronavirus ?
Likewise, if you die from a bullet in the head, brought on by the government being irritated by what you say about coronavirus, have you died from – a bullet in the head, from government dyspepsia, from a big mouth, or from the coronavirus ?
Personally I couldn’t care less whether it came from a lab, a market or a vampire bat because it was spread around the world from Wuhan. That’s the key point.
I beg to differ. I list illustrative causes and assign marks :
1. a vampire bat that just happened to be flying over Wuhan, and sneezed on a peasant. Null points.
2. a natural mutation in a wet market in Wuhan, from live bats / pangolins / snotdoodles. Two points.
3. an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab, researching bat viruses for peaceful medical purposes. Five points.
4. an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab, researching, and genesplicing, bat viruses for peaceful medical purposes. Eight points.
5. an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab, researching bat viruses for biological weapons purposes. Fifteen points.
6. a deliberate release from a Wuhan lab of a bioweapon. Fifty points.
The points relate to the culpability of the Chinese government, and consequently indicate the proportion of the response. (Extra points are obviously awardable for the helpfulness / unhelpfulness of the Chinese government response.)
Shit happens and no one is to blame (sneezing bats.) People do non malevolent but risky things. But risky behaviour runs from a bit risky to batshit crazy. And then there’s malevolent behaviour.
You might take the view, as Roue’s comment implies, that the result is the same whatever the cause. Which is true. But the probability of repetition is greater as one traverses the scale from just a fluke, to sloppy lab work, to ve are trying to keell you.
But what is the point of making a virus that largely kills old people, and / or those that would be dead within six months anyway or another fatal condition?
At the moment most of the damage is now caused by the lockdowns and panic… and that would be difficult to predict, or plan for.
Also what is the point of destroying the economies of the people that buy the stuff your country makes?
“Never attribute to malice what can easily be caused by incompetence…”
Just for the avoidance of doubt, TJ, I am not suggesting that the coronavirus is a bioweapon. I am trying to refute what I took to be Roue’s point that the cause doesn’t matter. I think the cause does matter, and if it were a bioweapon that would argue for a different response than if the cause were a sneezing bat overflying Wuhan. Purely at the level of illustration.
But moving on to the points you raise…..
1. if you are designing rockets to deliver a nuclear payload to New York, the likelihood is that you’ll succeed with your nineteenth effort. Prototypes 1 through 18 may include versions that merely emit the smell of bad eggs, or which do three rotatations above the launch site before shooting off over the horizon and landing on a fishing smack. Not everything works first time.
2. trying to use the enemy’s compassion to military advantage is a very old military tactic. see the Siege of Alesia for an early documented example. In a confrontation between say China and the US, which side do you think is more likely to suffer from the bigger (military) disadvantage in wanting to employ resources to protect the unproductive members of its society ?
3. it is true that although there is a lot of malice in the world, there is a lot more incompetence. But always assuming the absence of malice is a mistake. That rustle in the bushes over there is probably just a bird, or a breath of wind. But there is a small chance that it’s a tiger. We are programmed by evolution not to discount the tiger possibility. Those who always assumed there was nothing to that rustle in the bushes, though almost always right, did not feature among our ancestors.
Lee,
To clarify, when I said I didn’t care, I meant to emphasise to NiV that I wasn’t arguing in favour of any particular theory, not that the source didn’t matter.
However, serious actions should be based on what is known, not what is suspected. The virus spread from Wuhan, and that should he the basis for the international response.
“Well, to be fair to NiV, since we don’t have signed golden tablets descended from a shining cloud, notarized by the deities of all major faiths, which detail the precise truths of the origin of KungFlu, we must therefore concede that we don’t know anything.”
Well done! 🙂
“This thread is a particularly choice example of Nullius-in-Verba’s strange (il)logic: call the evidence of Wuhan origin “no evidence”, put the idea on a level with genuine no-evidence conspiracy theories (US-spy-agency, lizards, etc.)”
So give a logical presentation of your evidence, one that stands up to even the most cursory challenge. That’s how debates work.
“In this thread, however, I’m particularly noticing that it makes the thread all about Nullius.”
The thread got derailed in the first comment, and that wasn’t me. If everyone had nodded at my comment and said “Yes. Obviously.”, the debate would have stopped there. It takes more than one person to hold a debate, which was (from my point of view) about nutty evidence-free conspiracy theories. If you want to make it about me, that’s your decision.
“(mingled, of course, with more rational observations from NiV on some matters)”
🙂 All my comments are rational! Just because you disagree doesn’t mean it’s irrational!
You think demanding evidence before holding beliefs is a ‘technique’?
“Perry’s OP quote sits forlornly at its head, no longer regarded. So I will now comment on that instead.”
Sorry. My thought on that was “Yes. Obviously.” But I’m not much into saying “I agree!” without adding anything material. I only speak if I’ve got something to say. However, if it helps: I agree!
“The points relate to the culpability of the Chinese government, and consequently indicate the proportion of the response.”
If it can be shown that the Chinese were developing it as a bioweapon, I agree absolutely that makes a difference. But it’s like when the local police suspect you’re a criminal – it’s critical to insist on actual *evidence* before you start talking about how to respond. Fair trial? Presumption of innocence? Proven beyond reasonable doubt? Blackstone’s ratio? All that sort of stuff?
But all those principles go out the window when it’s somebody on the other side we’re talking about, don’t they? “But it’s China,” we say. “It’s the sort of thing they’d do. We don’t need evidence. They don’t deserve a fair trial.” But remember, there are people who say the same about us.
“But what is the point of making a virus that largely kills old people, and / or those that would be dead within six months anyway or another fatal condition?”
Especially since they already had Ebola stored at the same facility…
“it is true that although there is a lot of malice in the world, there is a lot more incompetence. But always assuming the absence of malice is a mistake.”
So should I assume you’re being malicious? 🙂
We grant fair trials and demand evidence even for obvious criminals so that we can enjoy the same benefit. It’s tempting not to when that’s easier and more expedient, but I’d suggest that that is an even bigger mistake.
NiV : The thread got derailed in the first comment, and that wasn’t me.
No, it was me. But in my defence, bat-eating was specifically mentioned if only in jocular fashion.
Roue : serious actions should be based on what is known, not what is suspected
In an ideal world. In the real one however we usually have to deal with very incomplete information – see the purely domestic responses to the coronavirus. He who waits for certainty before acting is likely to remain inactive. Which I’m not knocking – I am a great devotee of inactivity. But when it comes to choosing courses of action, we often have no choice but to weigh up probabilities and expected values, rather than being able to bask in the luxury of actual knowledge.
If(when) this happens again by pure accident and/or act of Confucius in China (or anywhere else)
1. Will they try and lie like this again
2. Will Western governments keep borders wide open
These seem to be the fundamental issues under all the conspiracies and fascinating scenarios.
What will the WHO do (China having debased it more than the BBC did to their WHO)
What will happen in third world shiteholes? Most of the (being charitable) discussions are West (US largely) vs China. Millions die regularly in said holes through famine etc. Would the world notice, say, 10 million more from Fu Manflu?
The main third world fall out may be Africa bitching about their Chinese overlords, which will likely be just that. Few more bungs should sort it ( the likely first port of call)
“No, it was me. But in my defence, bat-eating was specifically mentioned if only in jocular fashion.”
No problem! I took it thus. And I was only kidding about the Knights Templar… Friends?
“But when it comes to choosing courses of action, we often have no choice but to weigh up probabilities and expected values, rather than being able to bask in the luxury of actual knowledge.”
That’s what the police say! 😉
Agreed.
Formosa (“beautiful island” in Portuguese) was historically inhabited by various tribes – the President of Taiwan is, in part, descended from one of these tribes.
The tribes were NOT under the rule of China – the island was NOT part of China. The place is 80 miles away from China – over the sea.
The island tribes were first put under the rule of Portugal and later of the Dutch.
Then the Manchus invaded China and lots of Chinese people fled to the island – eventually these immigrants became so great in numbers they took over the island (people please note – mass immigration has its down side, if you are not one of the immigrants).
Ironically this led to the island being taken over by the Manchus – the very people the Chinese had fled from.
Then, in 1895, the Japanese took over.
After World War II anti Marxist Chinese fled to the island – claiming it to be the true Republic of China (the only part left).
Today the people of the island have voted for a pro independence party – both for President and for the Legislature.
As for the Communist bandits in Peking – they have no right to the island at all, and they have no right to rule anywhere else either.
Somebody seems to be confused by the concept of evidence. An observation is evidence for a proposition if the proposition is more plausible in light of the observation than it would be without the observation. Evidence isn’t the same thing as proof.
Obviously the fact that the virus was first observed in Wuhan is evidence that it originated in Wuhan. Not proof, but clearly it is more probable that the virus originated where it was first observed than that it originated any other particular place. In fact, it pretty much couldn’t have originated anyplace which didn’t have any observed cases until long after it was rampant in Wuhan.
The fact that the virus was first observed near the most advanced lab in the world for the study of that sort of virus doesn’t prove the virus came from the lab, but of course it is evidence. It would be a remarkable coincidence if the virus just happened to first show up right next to the lab.
Incidentally, the fact that the virus was first observed in Wuhan is actually evidence against the virus being deliberately released from the lab. Because if there were deliberate plans to release the virus, that’s the last place they would do it.
Incidentally, the fact that the virus was first observed in Wuhan is actually evidence against the virus being deliberately released from the lab. Because if there were deliberate plans to release the virus, that’s the last place they would do it.
Nyet. If the CIA had discovered that the Wuhan lab had been engineering viruses, then naturally they’d have sent Stefan Halper over there to ninja his way in and release the virus in Wuhan, so as to pin the blame on China.
You’d be hopeless at dezinformatsiya 😎
Because, if so, you’d be great in bed… since you’re such a frickin contortionist.
Maybe, but good lord can you imagine the pillow dissertation afterwards?
Yes, thank you. The phrase “no evidence” has been used quite loosely here.
Paul Marks,
That’s “Taiwanese Peking”, please.
Thank you.
“Somebody seems to be confused by the concept of evidence. An observation is evidence for a proposition if the proposition is more plausible in light of the observation than it would be without the observation. Evidence isn’t the same thing as proof.”
Thank you! That’s an excellent and really intelligent reply!
I must apologise in advance for the length of this comment. But it’s a good point worth answering in detail, and more importantly, one I had fun writing. 🙂
The usual interpretation of evidence is based on an inversion of Bayes theorem as follows:
We define two hypotheses H1 and H2 with prior probabilities P(H1) and P(H2). That’s our prior belief in the two hypotheses before we see the evidence. We then define conditional probabilities P(H1|O) and P(H2|O) to mean the probability of each hypothesis being true given the observation O – this is our belief in each hypothesis after seeing the evidence. We also define the conditional probabilities P(O|H1) and P(O|H2) to mean the probabilities of seeing observation O given that either H1 or H2 respectively is true. And I’ll also define P(A & B) to mean the probability that both A and B are true.
Then Bayes theorem combined with the definition of conditional probability gives us:
P(H1|O) = P(H1 & O) / P(O) = P(O|H1) * P(H1) / P(O)
P(H2|O) = P(H2 & O) / P(O) = P(O|H2) * P(H2) / P(O)
Unfortunately, we usually don’t know what P(O) is. But we can get round this and cancel it out by dividing one equation by the other.
[P(H1|O) / P(H2|O)] = [P(O|H1)/P(O|H2)] * [P(H1)/P(H2)]
And we can get a more intuitive relationship is we convert multiplication into addition by taking logarithms.
log[P(H1|O) / P(H2|O)] = log[P(O|H1)/P(O|H2)] + log[P(H1)/P(H2)]
This says
[posterior belief (after evidence)] = [evidence] + [prior belief (before evidence)]
The term log[P(O|H1)/P(O|H2)] plays the role of the evidence in favour of hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2. Because of the difficulty with evaluating and accounting for P(O), evidence is always treated comparatively in practice. The evidence for a hypothesis is not simply the increase in plausibility of that hypothesis, but its increase relative to all the alternatives.
So, lets get back to our Wuhan example. I’ll offer three possible hypotheses to start with:
H1: The virus was accidentally released by the Chinese from the lab into the Wuhan locally.
H2: The virus was intentionally released by the CIA into Wuhan to discredit the lab and disrupt China’s trade.
H3: The virus had been spreading unnoticed in the wild for some time previously in the surrounding area, and sped up only when it hit the big cities there such as Wuhan.
And the observation:
O: The virus was first identified at the major virology institute at Wuhan.
So, P(O|H1) is the probability of it being spotted in Wuhan after an accidental release. On the one hand, if the release is into Wuhan and travel outside is limited, its spread would be more advanced there. On the other hand, there is a long lag between initial infection and first detection, Wuhan is not all that isolated (unlike rural areas) so it could easily get to neighbouring towns, and expansion rate is probably highly variable. And the Wuhan hospital is most likely to send samples there to be tested. There’s a high probability of being detected there first, but not certainty.
P(O|H2) is the probability of it being spotted in Wuhan after a deliberate release by the CIA. The CIA would naturally want to make sure it got associated with the Wuhan lab, so would put the initial infection somewhere that it would likely stay local. But otherwise, it’s pretty much the same as H1. The Wuhan hospital is still most likely to send samples there to be tested. There’s a long lag, some probability of it spreading and expanding somewhere else first, but also a high probability – higher than H1 because of the deliberate targeting – of it being found there first.
P(O|H3) is the probability of it being spotted in Wuhan when it’s circulating naturally in the wider community. If there are lots of other big cities around, and expansion rates in them is very variable, then the possibility of some other city getting hit badly may be quite high. On the other hand, it’s still true that the virology centre is in Wuhan, and so it’s more likely to check there and pick it up first. And it’s still true that big towns are where it’s going to spread and be picked up. So again, the probability of it being detected first in Wuhan is very high. But probably lower than for H1 and H2, because it’s less targeted.
I should note, the statement “In fact, it pretty much couldn’t have originated anyplace which didn’t have any observed cases until long after it was rampant in Wuhan” isn’t true, unless you assume it was spreading equally fast everywhere. But rural and urban environments give rise to huge disparities and ‘lumpiness’ in transmission rate. And the Chinese own about eighty cars per thousand population – very different long-range dynamics to the West.
If all three probabilities are high, then the ratios between them will necessarily be close to 1. If they were 80%, 90%, 70%, for example, the biggest ratio of 90/70 is about 1.3, which is about 0.36 bits of information (taking logs to base 2). You only get lots of evidence when some of the probabilities are tiny compared to others. If an observation is likely under *all* alternative hypotheses, it doesn’t do anything distinguish them. If they’re all high, then there’s only mild evidence in favour of the CIA theory, followed by accidental release, followed by natural spread, but there ain’t a lot in it. Less than half a bit is not much to hang your hat on. Scientific results are often not even considered worth reporting until they get to about four or five bits, and many set higher standards of around 10 or 20 for declaring a ‘scientific discovery’.
Furthermore, this is not the only evidence we need to consider. Another observation is the nature of the virus. As other virologists have commented, the original bat coronavirus is not a logical place to start when engineering a bioweapon. The original is less virulent than other known coronaviruses, and the changes that make this one so much more dangerous are not at all obvious to the human way of thinking. It shows hallmarks of natural selection, and of having been in a non-bat animal population for some time to have adapted this way. For the CIA’s purposes you would want something far scarier but less transmissible, like MERS or SARS, so it counts considerably against that hypothesis. And it implies that there must be a population in the wild somewhere for it to have evolved this way, so that’s massively in favour of the natural hypothesis. To be an accidental leak implies that Wuhan found it (unlikely, there are lots of viruses, ~0.01) and didn’t tell anyone (very unlikely unless they were thinking to weaponise it, in which case it’s still pretty unlikely as it’s a bad choice, or didn’t realise it could affect humans, which would be both dangerous and incompetent, ~0.01), lost it out of a level 4 containment facility (extremely unlikely, assuming they’re not idiots, which given they’ve got Ebola there is itself extremely unlikely, ~0.0001), and then lied about both the possibility of losing it and about having a sample already (more likely, given the Chinese government’s propensity to shoot the messenger, but still would take a lot of foresight and nerve to know which lies to tell and stick to the story, ~0.1).
On the grounds that this is direct evidence that a natural population exists, and on the basis that accidental release from a high security lab (built with Western help) is very unlikely, this *is* a decent amount of evidence in favour of the natural population hypothesis. Not absolute proof, but the best supported of the options on offer. And that’s what most of the independent virologists in the West think, too.
“Yes, thank you. The phrase “no evidence” has been used quite loosely here.”
I hope this answer fixes that complaint? 🙂
By the way – and even further off topic – but the first results are out on hydroxychloroquine clinical trials.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v1.full.pdf
I thought people might be interested.
Tibet wasn’t a Chinese province either. How much good did that do them?
NiV, not an expert but my reading of that study is that it was not a randomized trial, which would lead me to believe that hydrochloroquine was likely given to those who were the most gravely ill, while those who started recovering on their own were not given those drugs.
Which I read as, “this analysis is very complicated because these are not randomly selected groups of patients, so we tried to extract something useful from very messy data.”
I think I am going to hold my judgment about the efficacy of these treatments for now.
“I think I am going to hold my judgment about the efficacy of these treatments for now.”
Agreed. Me too.
I think you’re taking the objections too widely. The complaint, from my side, was simply the misuse of the term “evidence.” You said when there’s no evidence, one can believe as one likes. There is evidence. Not very strong evidence, but it’s there. (Take this as my inner-pedantic-ex-lawyer speaking to my beloved terms of art.) I think you agree with me – you say in your recent post “(f)urthermore, this is not the only evidence we need to consider.”
If I run a red light in clear view of twenty witnesses, who all testify that the light was red when I went through the intersection, my testimony that the light was green is, in fact, evidence.
Not very convincing evidence, of course . . .
O/T, but I am curious now about whether NiV is on the fence about the location of the sun … a giant ball of incandescent gas 93 million miles away, or a bright disc painted on to the inverted bowl of the sky?
I am assuming that he has never personally been to the sun …
“I think you’re taking the objections too widely. The complaint, from my side, was simply the misuse of the term “evidence.””
You’re quite right. When I said “no evidence”, I actually meant “utterly trivial, statistically insignificant evidence”, for which any scientific paper would say “no evidence”.
“I am assuming that he has never personally been to the sun …”
Well, now.. 🙂
Really? You give that little weight to the idea that the place a virus pops into attention has some relation to the place of origin of that virus? You ascribe a higher probability of P(O|H1) above than “statistically insignificant.”
Good grief! all this exhaustive and exhausting reasoning to show that the evidence for human transmission having started in or near Wuhan is circumstantial rather than direct. Something that I would have thought should be obvious to anyone thinking about the matter for more than 30 seconds. Well at least it passes the time!
David N,
In these difficult times, people are kind and feed the trolls.
Aside from gathering huge amounts of valuable and very detailed data on how various power blocs, individuals and other state and non-state actors behave in a particular type of perceived crisis, you mean?
Though less difficult now than it was this time last year, perhaps?
I make no claims as to the likelihood of what this implies, I merely observe that it is one possibility.
I did read that bats were not on sale in the Wuhan market. But their Corona viruses were held at the Wuhan Virology Institute. How interesting. I can remember when an accidental release of Variola virus and a lab acquired infection causing small pox resulted in all samples being destroyed world wide apart from one batch at the CDC in Atlanta and one other batch held in Moscow.
Wasn’t there also a third batch? In an unlocked fridge, in a public corridor at UCH, iirc.
The data from the virus, the induced panic, the lockdown countries, the non lockdown countries and the rest are gonna be any kind of infectious diseases academics dream for the next twenty five years.
Qui bono? I blame Doctors…….
The thing is, I imagine most Taiwanese don’t want anything to do with China. Business trips to the land of Mordor are generally regarded as something to be endured, not enjoyed. When Beijing decided to “punish” Taiwan for the 2016 election of the DPP by forbidding Chinese tourists from coming, most people cheered. No more rude, loud Chinese pushing in line, spitting everywhere and allowing their kids to piss and shit in airport foyers.
Taiwan managed, mostly, to keep the virus out of the island – by not allowing people with the virus to go to the island.
This is the one government intervention that has been shown to be beneficial – and it is the one thing that the British government did NOT do.
All the utterly useless (indeed horribly damaging) “lockdown” totalitarianism was done in the United Kingdom – but NOT in Taiwan.
And a policy of keeping out people with the virus was done by Taiwan – but NOT by the United Kingdom.
To anyone who actually is interested in an “evidence based” approach it is clear that the policy of Taiwan was better than the policy of the United Kingdom.
Anyone who continues to support the policy of the United Kingdom, basically – let the virus in, and then use it as an EXCUSE for the totalitarianism the “experts” have long wished to impose, deserves nothing but contempt.
Heartening news from Taiwan.
And the BBC somehow found this news.