Post by @Architeuthis@awful.systems

2026-10-29 08:53 UTC

There was a rat startup that was aiming to become a sort of ground truth arbiter by putting up bet money if you could win a debate against them on a controversial topic. Lab leak was the first such debate with them on the pro side and they lost like 100K over that to a random acx poster who took them to school. Anyway I’m mentioning this because “60% certainty” reminded me that when arguing for the side of the lab leak all sorts of rationalist accepted truths type stuff emerged, like how they posited a bunch of other incidents as lab leaks and it turned out nobody else actually thought that and it was just arbitrary prior wrangling because it turns out that having we are better than any experts that haven’t read the sequences type contrarianism as a pillar of faith encourages conspiracy brain. Also Sam Altman is a lab leak truther but it’s not like it’s possible to take anything he says at face value.

Replies (2)

@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-10-29 09:40

That’s the link I remembered, thanks for digging that up.

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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-10-29 15:31

It’s not like it’s a verboten hypothesis. The 1977 flu pandemic definitely WAS leaked from a freezer, probably Chinese or less likely Soviet, probably from a study on the effectiveness of H1N1 flu vaccines on young 18 year olds who were just coming through the demographic pipeline who had no immunity to H1N1 because it had been pushed out of the population by the 1957 H2N2 pandemic. It was a reassortment between a known human circulating strain that from 1950 and a second laboratory workhorse strain from the late 40s, paused for 27 years with zero evolution since their isolation, and re-emerged right when you would have human subjects available to test the effects of challenging adults who had no immune memory against H1N1 in an area that was heavily militarized and the earliest publicly known cases among military recruits. (Amusingly enough this flu pandemic was the one and only reason that the 2009 swine flu pandemic was a nothingburger, the population had immune memory against a strain similar enough to prevent severe disease) It just seems like this became a community shibboleth along with suspicion about EVERY FREAKING DISEASE because it gave them something to point to about the Dangers of Research!!!oneoneone

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