The problem isn't that our authorities are changing their beliefs based on new evidence coming in. The problem is that our authorities are changing beliefs based on the current political situation, pretending that that reflects shifting evidence and, worst of all, not admitting that they've changed their views.
Let's take the current debate over the "lab leak" hypothesis as an example. A large amount of the evidence, both for and against the lab leak hypothesis dates back to March/April/May of 2020. Yet, when the lab leak hypothesis was raised around that time period, it was immediately and vociferously dismissed by the media as a racist ploy to distract from the government's shambolic handling of the pandemic. When the hypothesis was raised again, this year, it was treated as a serious possibility that deserved a full and thorough investigation.
What changed? It wasn't the evidence -- the evidence has been present all along. What changed was the political environment that suddenly made it possible to speak of a lab leak without sounding like tinfoil-hatted crackpot. As a result, now this previously unmentionable hypothesis is now getting its due consideration by the media.
However, the media isn't admitting that a change occurred. Instead, what the average person is seeing is mainstream media outlets shifting seamlessly from, "The lab leak hypothesis is a racist lie," to "The lab leak hypothesis is a serious allegation that deserves a thorough investigation." It's like the scene from 1984, where the Inner Party representative switches seamlessly mid-speech from discussing the ongoing war against Eurasia to the ongoing war against Eastasia.
We saw a similar phenomenon take place last year over masks. There were warnings about the virus being airborne as far back as January of 2021. As late as March, you had Time magazine saying that wearing a mask was "superstitious behavior" [1]. Over the next two to three weeks, the advice rapidly shifted, from "masks are a sign of unreasonable paranoia" to "masks are mandatory, and anyone not wearing them is putting everyone around them in danger". Was that due to a shift in the evidence? No. As noted above, there was ample warning that the virus was airbone, and many people were taking appropriate precautions even in the absence of official guidance. What shifted was the political environment.
Moreover, then, just as now, no media outlet ever admitted that it had given incorrect advice. There were individual journalists who (to their credit) admitted a certain level of responsibility, but, as far as I know, no major mainstream media outlet has come forward and said, "You know what? We screwed up, and we apologize." Instead , we see silent corrections that rewrite the past without admitting any kind of fault. Heck, just compare the headline on the Time article today [2] to the headline on the archived version. The headline was silently updated with a much more moderate point, and a caveat about changing CDC guidance was added. But there was no formal correction published anywhere that said, "You know that article we printed last week about masks being bogus? Yeah, that was wrong, and we're sorry."
Honestly, after seeing the performance of the media in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, I'm surprised that more people aren't as cynical about the "official story" as the cashier in the sibling thread.
At the time, i was asking myself why the lab-leak was rejected. I mean, its obviously not human-made, but why couldn't it be a contagion inside the lab from an already made virus.
Now, maybe its reactance, but i believe the zoonose more likely.
Yes, for the record, I believed then (and still believe today) that the virus has zoonotic origins. The primary point of evidence that the lab-leak advocates point to, the fact that the animal reservoir hasn't yet been identified, isn't convincing to me. It took more than a decade to find the animal reservoir for SARS. We still don't know where the animal reservoir is for Ebola.
Similarly, the presence of the "furin cleavage site", which supposedly makes the virus ideal for spreading in humans is less significant than it appears. There are numerous other coronaviruses which have the same feature, and it's plausible that SARS-COV-2 picked up the feature via recombination somewhere on its way to becoming a virus that spread primarily among humans.
But all that is beside the point. The point is that many voices that took on the air of authority during the pandemic changed their view for no reason other than shifts in the broader political climate. It has made people suspicious and frustrated with the experts, which then leads them to embrace crackpot theories peddled by those who (correctly) point out that the authoritative sources in the media have been lying to them.
The solution, as I see it, isn't that the media should get its facts and story right the first time. That's impossible, especially in a fast-changing situation like the early stages of a global pandemic. What the media (and by "the media", I mean major newspapers like the New York Times, and major news outlets, like CNN) ought to be doing is stating clearly when one of their stories contradicts a story that they've published in the past, and stating clearly the reason for the contradiction. "We were wrong about masks, because we misinterpreted a directive to preserve masks for emergency workers as meaning that masks were ineffective," would have gone a long way towards helping convince mask skeptics about the need for masks when the media suddenly reversed its advice.
> But all that is beside the point. The point is that many voices that took on the air of authority during the pandemic changed their view for no reason other than shifts in the broader political climate.
Not only did they take an air of authority, they also actively censored contrary opinions. Twitter, facebook, youtube...
Because, if there was a non-human made virus being studied in a lab which was human-infectious...then that virus would already be out there in the wild unless you'd made a specific effort to eradicate it like we did with smallpox.
"Lab-leak" is non-sensical in all forms which don't begin with "lab evolved/bioengineered" and while not completely implausible, the methodology for selective rapid-evolution of a virus requires the exact same conditions as are trivially recreated in the population and human-animal contact regime of greater China.
> "Lab-leak" is non-sensical in all forms which don't begin with "lab evolved/bioengineered"...
That's exactly the allegation circa March 2020 though: scientists collect various bat-borne coronaviruses (e.g. RaTG13) in Yunnan province around 2013, evolve one of them at the Wuhan Institute of Virology though gain-of-function research, and then due to lax safety protocols end up accidentally leaking an evolved virus in late 2019. For example, see this podcast from a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug
> ... no media outlet ever admitted that it had given incorrect advice... Instead, we see silent corrections that rewrite the past without admitting any kind of fault.
As I read this I was overcome with the realization that I have more discipline editing my 2-3 point HN comments--labeling new remarks, striking out original text instead of deleting it outright, and so on--than do professional journalists from the New York Times or Washington Post editing national news stories. Unbelievable... and unforgivable.
Let's take the current debate over the "lab leak" hypothesis as an example. A large amount of the evidence, both for and against the lab leak hypothesis dates back to March/April/May of 2020. Yet, when the lab leak hypothesis was raised around that time period, it was immediately and vociferously dismissed by the media as a racist ploy to distract from the government's shambolic handling of the pandemic. When the hypothesis was raised again, this year, it was treated as a serious possibility that deserved a full and thorough investigation.
What changed? It wasn't the evidence -- the evidence has been present all along. What changed was the political environment that suddenly made it possible to speak of a lab leak without sounding like tinfoil-hatted crackpot. As a result, now this previously unmentionable hypothesis is now getting its due consideration by the media.
However, the media isn't admitting that a change occurred. Instead, what the average person is seeing is mainstream media outlets shifting seamlessly from, "The lab leak hypothesis is a racist lie," to "The lab leak hypothesis is a serious allegation that deserves a thorough investigation." It's like the scene from 1984, where the Inner Party representative switches seamlessly mid-speech from discussing the ongoing war against Eurasia to the ongoing war against Eastasia.
We saw a similar phenomenon take place last year over masks. There were warnings about the virus being airborne as far back as January of 2021. As late as March, you had Time magazine saying that wearing a mask was "superstitious behavior" [1]. Over the next two to three weeks, the advice rapidly shifted, from "masks are a sign of unreasonable paranoia" to "masks are mandatory, and anyone not wearing them is putting everyone around them in danger". Was that due to a shift in the evidence? No. As noted above, there was ample warning that the virus was airbone, and many people were taking appropriate precautions even in the absence of official guidance. What shifted was the political environment.
Moreover, then, just as now, no media outlet ever admitted that it had given incorrect advice. There were individual journalists who (to their credit) admitted a certain level of responsibility, but, as far as I know, no major mainstream media outlet has come forward and said, "You know what? We screwed up, and we apologize." Instead , we see silent corrections that rewrite the past without admitting any kind of fault. Heck, just compare the headline on the Time article today [2] to the headline on the archived version. The headline was silently updated with a much more moderate point, and a caveat about changing CDC guidance was added. But there was no formal correction published anywhere that said, "You know that article we printed last week about masks being bogus? Yeah, that was wrong, and we're sorry."
Honestly, after seeing the performance of the media in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, I'm surprised that more people aren't as cynical about the "official story" as the cashier in the sibling thread.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200305052928/https://time.com/...
[2]: https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/