you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
14 points (93.8% liked)
TechTakes
2755 readers
134 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I feel like it plays to their aesthetic, which is partly built on their insecurities. Oh, humans aren't smart enough to handle all this advanced research (read: very few of these people were committed enough to get bio or chem degrees, let alone follow through with research careers), but the superintelligent AI surely will be able to! If we submit to the AI god now, it will make up for the gaping voids of meaning and skill inside ourselves.
I think it's more that someone made a Bayesian analysis and concluded with 60% certainty or something that it was a lab leak. Can't remember the link now but I believe it was widely discussed at the time.
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 priors 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.
edit: https://awful.systems/post/1088988
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 calling the covid pandemic artificial became a community shibboleth along with suspicion about EVERY FREAKING DISEASE specifically and only because it gave them something to point to about the Dangers of Research!!!!!!!oneoneone
That's the link I was thinking of , thanks for digging that up.