[ExI] it's not? indeed?

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2024-01-20 15:02, Keith Henson via extropy-chat wrote:
> I find the lab leak theory to be exceedingly unlikely.  The wet market
> origin of the spillover is much more likely to me.

First off, it is a mistake to think that the lab leak theory and the wet 
market origin are mutually exclusive probabilities. There is no doubt 
that the wet market was the initial focal point of the pandemic. 
However, there are tens of thousands of wet markets all over South East 
Asia that deal with many of the same species of wildlife. It is highly 
unlikely that out of all possible wet markets where the pandemic could 
have started, it just happened to start in the wet market that was 
closest to one of the dozen or so biosafety level 4 virology containment 
labs in the entire world by sheer independent coincidence. Bayesian 
analysis suggests that the posterior probability of that occurring by 
chance alone is less than 0.00001.

Also, intelligence agencies have identified three people by name that 
they suspect to be the patient zeros in the pandemic, and all three work 
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and got sick *prior^ to the epidemic 
at the wet market.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/06/covid-origin-theories-rival-data-evidence/674495/

"Ben Hu, a high-level researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and 
two colleagues, Yu Ping and Zhu Yan, could have been the first people on 
the planet to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, according to anonymous 
sources cited first in the newsletter Public and then in The Wall Street 
Journal. These proposed patient SARS-CoV-zeros aren’t merely employees 
of the virology institute; they’re central figures in the very sort of 
research that lab-leak investigators have been scrutinizing since the 
start of the pandemic. Their names appear on crucial papers related to 
the discovery of new, SARS-related coronaviruses in bats, and subsequent 
experimentation on those viruses."

The evidence and the math suggest a non-trivial role by the Wuhan 
Institute of Virology in starting the pandemic in ADDITION to the wet 
market.

Stuart LaForge

> But it does not matter.
> 
> Keith

Why wouldn't the truth of culpability matter?

Stuart LaForge