Never understood the lab leak stuff, why is that intuitive? What are some other lab leaks? What are some other man made viruses? Can we even make a virus? What are some labs working on man made viruses, and for what purpose?
Duh there are bats there. There’s a facility to study bat viruses there. What DO YOU THINK happened. Do your own research
JFC Nate, it’s the morons in the media that reinforce and amplify this shit. All the objective data says one thing. I SEE FOUR LIGHTS. You can make up whatever number it is you like. Some say 3 lights, others 5. Who can be sure, but it certainly seems like it’s not four.
What’s loathsome about it isn’t the statement itself so much as putting it in context with all his other statements, where this is a continuation of his “the media (not GOP crankery shouting it from the rooftops of every newspaper and TV channel) is the reason why people believe in the lab leak” crusade
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There’s a lot to unpack here, so strap in for a long poast:
First off, any time a pundit tells you “the public holds this view quite strongly” without citing numbers, they’re 100% just telling you their personal take. Nate is just laundering his own views with Trump-style “lots of folks are saying” bullshit.
Next, “a lot of effort to convince them otherwise” is pure conspiracy theory bullshit. It’s Alex Jones idiocy. Nate is trying to push his own hot take and he assumes that must be what grownup reporters are also doing when they report stories.
So translating from Nate into English we have “I personally have a STRONG INSTINCT on the lab leak theory despite what responsible reporting says because it is an INTUITIVELY LEGIBLE theory.” OK? Nate did a vibe check and the lab leak theory gave him strong vibes? Who cares?
It’s like they say on 5-4, these chuds always want to skip ahead from talking about the story to talking about the meta-narrative around the story. So we’re not talking about whether the lab leak theory is bullshit or not, we’re skipping ahead to some dumb Twitter pundit-brain conversation about how the public isn’t buying the stories the Lizard Men are trying to convince them of.
AND THEN maybe we need to consider that the public is open to fringe theories is that Nate and Yggy and all the other reply guy jizzbags have been aggressively pushing this theory and burying actual science for three years now?
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tl;dr:
“The public believes this despite the media trying to convince them otherwise” is a statement with two claims that need to be backed up with actual data!
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JFC
experts are often bad at probabilistic reasoning.
Again, shit like this needs facts and stuff behind it. Which experts? What kind of probabilistic reasoning are they bad at? Are professional epidemiologists really worse at interpreting epidemiology statistics than crowds? He’s just waving his hands around and making up whatever he wants.
God he’s such a fucking dunce
he seems to be saying the opposite, though, he’s arguing that despite the media yelling “no evidence for lab leak and that’s racist” people still believe it
I’m not sure the media really been putting in “a lot of effort” to convince the public otherwise tho
He just means people in his twitter feed.
has nate not cited numbers on this at all? clearly he doesn’t in this tweet, I don’t read all his tweets. The thing that I’m usually rolling my eyes at are responses like this one
https://twitter.com/hiltzikm/status/1636413318251569152
like, nate isn’t “analyzing a scientific issue” here, he’s analyzing a public opinion issue. If the actual numbers are telling you that people believe X, the fact that Y is actually true doesn’t change the fact that people believe X.
this is similar to the J&J vaccine pause, when it was announced, Nate said this would harm public opinon about vaccine safety and would probably negatively impact vaccination rates, a bunch of scientists got mad at him for “not being an expert on vaccines” which was completely misplaced since he wasn’t opining on whether the J&J vaccine was actually safe or not.
the end result is that vaccination rates (even for moderna and pfizer) did in fact plummet after the pause and never really recovered.
That’s taking this statement in a vacuum, though. He’s made it clear in the past that he thinks the media reporting on the lab leak theory is responsible for public opinion on it, and that distrust of the media is valid:
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1633917093325225984
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1629876115480141824
This is along the lines of what Trolly’s talking about, where Nate the numbers guy just wants to skip past the data entirely and give his (probably wrong) THOUGHTS and capture some of that Yglesias contrarian Substack money.
I don’t think that
equals “distrust of the media is valid.” It’s more like “distrust of the media is a thing that exists.” I don’t see that tweet as controversial. You’ve got a virus, it first becomes news in a big city that happens to have a virology lab. Lab leak is a very intuitive theory. And I don’t think most media outfits are savvy enough to educate people on something like this where the evidence actually points in a different direction than what feels right because the media’s incentives are to deliver digestible sound bites, there are very few outlets that are actually equipped to lay out a complex case in a manner than the general public will abosorb.
I guess the real question is this, is
incorrect?
“Distrust of the media is valid” is more the second tweet. Like the coherent theory Nate has expressed across his body of work here is,
- dirty scientists, helped by their uncritical mouthpieces in the media, SUPPRESSED the very reasonable lab leak theory
- the public, gobsmacked by this dishonesty, had no choice but to fall into the loving arms of the preferred GOP narrative
So like, I don’t think it’s that useful to pick out a tweet in isolation and be like “but is this statement right” when its placement in the broader Nate oeuvre supports a narrative that is actually wrong.
I would need to see those tweets because the stuff presented here isn’t showing that
lol at these fragile fucking crybabies, can you imagine the OMG CANCEL CULTURE bellyaching if some blue-haired librul posted a video like this about not hiring people wearing red maga hats
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saw some comments on this video describing it as “cosplaying a small business tyrant” lol
If Nate’s just going to say “People find the lab leak compelling because a Chinese bioweapon is a cooler story than food safety issue,” then sure, okay I guess. That’s not new information or interesting, but w/e.
Instead Nate has to engage in Alex Jones conspiracy nonsense about how the media is trying hard to SUPPRESSING DISCUSSION but people see through their bullsiht with crowd instincts and vibe checks and it’s all stupid and completely unfounded. If anything, the media has been waaaaaaaaay aggressive in pushing lab leak stuff far beyond the evidence.
And all of it is dumb meta-discussion about how people are talking about how people are talking about the pandemic. It’s Twitter pundits fixating on how mean the media is to them instead of where the damn pandemic came from, which is actually important.
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