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To be worth using, a detector needs not only (A) not get very many false positives, but also (B) get…
Everything you say is true, but what is the alternative? I don’t think people are advocating a return to in-class…
The discussion here assumes an institutional context where returning to supervised in-person assessment is at least theoretically feasible, a reasonable…
Cyber security professional here -reliably determining when a computational artifact (file, etc.) was created is *hard*. This is sorta why…
Agreed with the other commentator. It is extremely unlikely that Pangram’s success is due to its cheating by reading metadata.
I see this question as a bit naïve. There is metadata on every document created by a modern word processor…
There’s a simple way to test. Open a pre-2022 essay and copy-and-paste it into a new file.
This looks to be a balanced evaluation of the evidence; bottom line is that the evidence doesn't rule out a leak from a virology lab, but the evidence is also compatible with a natural origin.
(Thanks to Dr. Roger Albin for the pointer.)
I was surprised to read the following: "Although lab leaks have never caused an epidemic, they have resulted in small outbreaks involving well-documented viruses.
This really ought to have received some kind of qualification. The origin of the 1977 H1N1 epidemic is still unknown, but the main contenders involve non-natural origins: namely, that it was used during a vaccine trial, or that it leaked from a lab: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
That said, I really did appreciate the section "Is it Suspicious that the WIV is in Wuhan?" as it spoke to one of the main questions I've had about how to think about the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis; how surprising is it for a pandemic with a zoonotic origin to have its first outbreak in a city with labs devoted to studying similar diseases? This is the first place I'd seen somebody explicitly make the case for "not particularly", and it sounds pretty plausible to me. That said, I would like to see somebody really show their work on the question (e.g., go through the initial outbreaks of previous zoonotic pandemics and find the closest labs studying similar viruses, to see whether this looks like an outlier or not).
My first thought at seeing the name of an influenza strain is always, "Get that horse off the H-file! Knights on the rim are dim!"
The Nature article explains carefully and thoroughly that there's no real evidence for the lab-leak theory, and the animal-transmission theory is a perfectly plausible and natural explanation. So why are we even here? Would people still be going on about the lab-leak theory, without any evidence, if this lab were in any other country than China? Or is this just a combination of racism and geopolitical game-playing?
I read the Nature article as showing that the evidence for the lab leak hypothesis can be explained in other ways, and that the existing evidence underdetermines the origin of the virus. I'm surprised by the suggestion that racism might account for the continued worries about the origin of the virus: the authoritarian government in China has a history of dishonesty and, more importantly, there is no free press in China, of the kind that often exposes government dishonesty here. It is important to get to the bottom of this: if an accidental lab leak is responsbile for the world-historic catastrophe we've been living through, then steps need to be taken to prevent a recurrence wherever labs are doing work on viruses.
@Daniel Greco: Both arguments in the section "Is it Suspicious that the WIV is in Wuhan?" are based on equivocating "nearby" or "the same region" with "being in the same country." Many coronaviruses have been found in caves in Yunnan, 1800km away from Wuhan. An analogy would be a lab in Chicago specializing in the study of viruses found in Florida. Wuhan is indeed a large city and a major transportation and trade center, but on any normal construal of the word "region," coronaviruses are not usually found in the region of Wuhan, just as alligators are not usually found in the region of Chicago.
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