[ExI] biggest winners in the shutdown

[The Avantguardian]

On Thursday, May 14, 2020, 06:00:08 AM PDT, John Clark via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote: 

> Both the virus and the shutdown provides lots of juicy red meat for conspiracy theories, just as every large world event does.

When a lab is performing gain-of-function experiments on viruses, an outbreak does not require a conspiracy. It just takes a single overworked and underpaid lab technician or graduate student to lose concentration or focus for a a tenth of a second and touch his face. Especially if as Rafal suggests, the lab is working with the virus at BSL 2 instead of BSL 4.

Wet markets have been part of Chinese culture for centuries. There are hundreds if not thousands of wet markets throughout China. Every city, town, and village likely had one. Level 4 biocontainment labs, however, are much more rare and there is only one in all of China. Assuming only one hundred wet markets in all of China and uninformative priors, the likelihood that the outbreak started in Wuhan because a virus escaped from the lab is greater than 99%.

Bayes Theorem calls bullshit on the official story. And it doesn't require a conspiracy, just a mistake. And anybody who funded the gain-of-function research, no matter how noble their intentions, shares the responsibility and the blame. That includes the U.S. government and the Gates Foundation.

Stuart LaForge