IMO it's probable. The fact that I could conceivably create the next pandemic with the limited resources I have is disturbing. We no longer have journalism that can cover such information, or a populous that can hear it.
"The rate-limiting step on terrorist destruction is how many people think that it’s a good idea to cause a lot of damage for no particular reason." Tyler Cowen seemed unimpressed by Pinker's response, but I find it persuasive. It's not just a lucky stroke that people generally prefer cooperation to combat, it's a primary reason that the species is so successful. "The amount of violence that we see is not limited by costs of technology. It’s limited by the number of people who think that it would be a good idea to blow a lot of stuff up for no reason other than attracting publicity."
Pinker destroyed Rees in the first 2 line of the bet argument : cognitive bias to over estimate imaginary scenario, and society incentive for you to do so. That is a rational argument in face of Rees unfunded belief. And a jab at the dude bias. Who is right is almost irrelevant. Pinker had an explanation for his position, Rees, none
Lord Rees does not seem to believe that the pandemic meets his criteria for "bio error or bio terror."Rees won the bet.
Natural pandemics are a constant threat, but is it just scaremongering to raise concerns about human-induced risks from bio error or bio terror? Sadly, I don’t think so. We know all too well that technical expertise doesn’t guarantee balanced rationality. The global village will have its village idiots and they’ll have global range. The spread of an artificially released pathogen can’t be predicted or controlled. And that’s a nightmare. Whereas an atomic bomb can’t be built without being conspicuous or easily monitored, bio and cyber activities can. The rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups (or even individuals) by bio as well as cybertechnology will pose a big challenge to governments and aggravate the tension between freedom, privacy and security.
I think it's quite generous to describe the Rees side as a risk assessment. It's not even 100 words, 3% of which don't pass spell-check and one is an ill-defined coining that does not exclude asteroid strike. It mentions only two numbers, "thousands-even millions" of people, that's four [edit: 3] orders of magnitude of WAG. Neither of the two risk factors he assessed, organized terrorist groups and individual bio-hackers, were behind the pandemic. Rees argues with four sentences: one is an unsupported and non-measurable assertion, one is a novel definition, and two refer to his state of mind! If providing evidence for one's beliefs is a sign of irrational bias, well, I guess that explains a lot.
Covid19 might be due to an accidental lab leak, which seems to qualify here. I'm not saying that Rees has eloquently made a case here on his longbet. I'm saying that he won the bet, and he might be more correct in his thinking than Pinker. Your hypotheses don't have to be well-founded to be correct; the converse is true as well. Thus far, the experimental evidence suggests Rees is correct. Pinker had evidence for his hypothesis, but it led him to wager incorrectly. Of course, it's an n of 1, so we haven't disproved either.By "bioerror", I mean something which has the same effect as a terror attack, but rises from inadvertance rather than evil intent.
If providing evidence for one's beliefs is a sign of irrational bias, well, I guess that explains a lot.
Much higher. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/ That's from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2008. There are many more crumbs on that path.However, the ACE2-binding activity of SL-CoVs was easily acquired by the replacement of a relatively small sequence segment of the S protein from the SARS-CoV S sequence, highlighting the potential dangers posed by this diverse group of viruses in bats. It is now well documented that bat species, including horseshoe bats, can be infected by different CoVs. Coinfection by different CoVs in an individual bat has also been observed (26, 29, 39). Knowing the capability of different CoVs to recombine both in the laboratory (2, 14, 15, 32) and in nature (22, 41, 44), the possibility that SL-CoVs may gain the ability to infect human cells by acquiring S sequences competent for binding to ACE2 or other surface proteins of human cells can be readily envisaged.
My guess would have been 5% or less, but I don't know anything about it other than from a few rumors so I am not very confident. We have seen plenty of previous pandemics that presumably did not require any human intervention to get started, but now thousands—even millions—of people have access to biotech tools and information. The Washington Post says it's doubtful that the virus came from a lab, but the evidence provided suggests that we don't know where it originated. The expressed concern about terrorists and weirdos made me exclude well-intentioned researchers who accidentally release a virus, but that's just what Rees meant by "bioerror." Pinker seems to have accepted this bet without a definition of that term.
The early samples have reportedly been destroyed. It would be trivial to determine if the virus originated from the lab if the effort was made. Shi was doing gain-of-function experiments with SARS-Cov in a lab without sufficient safeguards, and epidemiological data shows it did not originate at the wet market, but nearby. I don't think it is fully appreciated what types of experiments Shi and others were conducting. They were taking coronaviruses, and making them infect human cells efficiently, both by driving random mutations, and by engineering them to do so.In March, Shi told the Scientific American that in the early days of the outbreak, even she wondered whether coronaviruses were to blame. “Could they have come from our lab?” After all, her lab had collected and sequenced tens of thousands of coronaviruses over the past decade. (She has since adamantly denied that the new coronavirus could have emerged from her lab. Her boss and the WIV issued similar denials.)
The Scientific American article is pretty amazing. The description of Shitou Cave is just as creepy as Kitum Cave was in The Hot Zone. "Editor’s Note (4/24/20): This article was originally published online on March 11. It has been updated for inclusion in the June 2020 issue of Scientific American and to address rumors that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from Shi Zhengli’s lab in China." There are many differences between the March 11 article and the current version, mostly editorial.
Interesting. After:The genomic sequences of the viral strains from patients are, in fact, very similar to one another, with no significant changes since late last December, based on analyses of 326 published viral sequences. “This suggests the viruses share a common ancestor,” Baric says.
Since then, researchers have published more than 4,500 genomic sequences of the virus, showing that samples around the world appear to “share a common ancestor,” Baric says.
Unfortunately, I think it's possible that we have reached a point where it could be enough to result in systemic instability. If the equation is something like this: where m = available modes of destruction k = necessary know-how c = chance of getting caught beforehand d = instances of terrorist destruction then I think we are seeing an increase in m and a decrease in k. p * m * 1/k * 1/c = d p = people willing to destroy society
"Systemic instability" is classic mk-ese. What's wrong with systemic instability versus systemic stasis? If you call it "dynamism" it sounds like a good thing. If you measure actual incidents, like plane bombings, it's harder to justify concern. p * m does not account for the fact that psychopathic misanthropes have a harder time functioning in society, which usually limits access to m, the resources and assistance needed to accomplish big tasks. Ted Kaczynski lived in a hut. Bin Laden was the exception, inheriting millions, but he also had to live as a fugitive. He's probably the most tragically successful psychopath in modern times, but by body count he hardly rates historically. c may be increasing, as tools for surveillance and law enforcement are more powerful than ever.
I mean events that cause disruption like this pandemic. We can probably tolerate monthly plane bombings without regression. However, if we had a shock like the pandemic on an annual basis, I think we could see the decline of our current civilization by multiple metrics that can widely be agreed upon, something like the Dark Ages trajectory. I'm using broad terms like 'systemic instability', because I trust that you know what I mean. Rome suffered 'systemic instability'. I don't propose that we are there atm. I just think that we have moved closer. It's possible we are there, but unlikely."Systemic instability" is classic mk-ese. What's wrong with systemic instability versus systemic stasis? If you call it "dynamism" it sounds like a good thing. If you measure actual incidents, like plane bombings, it's harder to justify concern.
I don't know who's right, but many people argue that the cure is worse than the disease. If we had a response like 2020, every year, it wouldn't be Dark Ages right away but it would be bleak. If we only had the novel virus and let it run wild, it would cause a slight (and very tragic) bump in the baseline mortality rate. Influenza and pneumonia could be ten times deadlier, and they would still be less deadly than heart disease and cancer are individually.events that cause disruption like this pandemic
if we had a shock like the pandemic on an annual basis