Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Original post here. Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.

First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post on the Rootclaim blog.

Second, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were sort of trolling, but he’s convinced me they were 100% trolling. Many people held these poorly-done calculations against Peter, so I want to make it clear that’s my fault for mis-presenting it. See 3.1 for more details.

Third, in my original post, I failed to mention that Peter also has a blog, including a post summing up his COVID origins argument.

Thanks to some people who want to remain anonymous for helping me with this post. Any remaining errors are my own.

1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis — 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses? — 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught? — 1.3: 92 early cases — 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater — 1.5 Biorealism’s 16 arguments — 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 arguments — 1.7: How much should coverup worry us? — 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked? — 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases — 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats — 1.11: Rootclaim’s response to my post

2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak — 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation?

3: Other Points That Came Up — 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds — 3.2: Tobias Schneider on Rootclaim’s Syria Analysis — 3.3: Closing thoughts on Rootclaim

4: Summary And Updates

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7