Don’t Let Them Retcon the “Not a Lab Leak" Consensus

 Something truly bizarre is happening right now. For a year, it was seen as some kind of overwhelming consensus that the SARS-COV-2 virus emerged from nature. The notion that it may have emerged from a lab in Wuhan (that happened to be studying coronaviruses in bats) was seen as some kind of off-the-wall conspiracy theory. Now, all of a sudden, the hypothesis that this emerged from a Wuhan lab is respectable, with even President Biden demanding an investigation. In my opinion, the evidence that it emerged from a lab was quite strong (incredibly suggestive at the very least) very early on. See this episode of the Dark Horse Podcast with Yuri Deigin as guest, from early June of 2020. He lays out the evidence as he saw it at the time, which he wrote up in Medium here. All of this might be wrong, but it's not the kind of thing that can be dismissed out of hand. And it's not the kind of knowledge on which a "scientific consensus" is relevant. The story is too complex, and at the time too new with too many unknown, for "consensus" to even be a coherent concept. (BTW, Yuri Deigin and the host of Dark Horse, Bret Weinstein, are clear that they want to be wrong about this, that they wish it were an accident and not something for which human beings are culpable. One doesn't get the sense that these are shock-jocks seeking attention for attention's sake.)

I'm not going to stand for the great masses of the chattering class pretending that some kind of new evidence emerged. They need to do some kind of soul-searching. It seems to me that they got a major question wrong for over a year, when they were either loudly shouting how certain they were or allowing their colleagues to get away with the same. I want to hear lots of people saying, "I got this one totally wrong." (And they might, in fact, turn out to be correct. If we discover incontrovertible evidence that the virus emerged from nature, they will have been "right," but only in the sense that a stopped clock is sometimes right. They'll still have had no justification whatsoever for their near certainty.) I don't want to just hear, "I showed an uncharacteristic lapse of judgment." I also don't want to hear a facts-only explainer of why a lab leak is plausible without any nod to the false consensus that dominated for over a year. I want to hear, "My epistemology is complete shit. My approach to discovering truth is deeply broken, and you should trust me less in the future." Something really is broken here. A perfectly plausible hypothesis was taken off the table then reinstated as a candidate, all without any of the underlying facts changing. My casual sampling of major media outlets does not look promising. The Washington Post did a "just the facts" timeline of when various facts about the virus emerged. The New York Times published an "explainer" by David Leonhardt. These pieces seem fine in isolation, but there's no contrition. It's weird that they're suddenly putting out pieces that effectively say, "Here is why this was a plausible hypothesis all along" when they have been dismissing it out of hand this whole time. Changing one's mind is always welcome, and it's a sign of a healthy intellectual diet. On the other hand, it's troubling when people rewrite or ignore history to mask that a change has occurred. 

There are some people who don't need to re-evaluate their epistemology. If you are extremely well versed in the facts of this story and you thought early on that the facts rule out a lab leak, you're probably on solid ground. You have good reasons for your opinion, even if it turns out to be wrong. If you dismissed the lab leak explanation because evil people like President Trump and other Republicans were favorable to it, then your epistemology is broken and you need to do some serious re-tooling. Those are bad reasons for holding an opinion, if it's all just a performance to set yourself apart from people you don't like. If you dismissed the lab leak explanation because you read somewhere that a bunch of very serious scientists said it wasn't likely, then your epistemology is broken. This shows an unhealthy reliance on "consensus." Consensus is a social reality, not a physical reality. (And in fact we're seeing this social reality shift without the introduction of any new information.) If you can't evaluate the information that the consensus is based on, then you don't really have an informed opinion. Simply repeating that such-and-such a proportion of "experts" agrees with some proposition doesn't contribute anything to the discussion. 

A Failure Mode of Really Smart People

Dim people have an obvious failure mode. They aren't good at taking in or processing information. So they have a lot of wrong beliefs about the world. 

Smart people have a less obvious failure mode. They tend to know how smart they are, so they assume that any conclusions they hold are the result of careful reflection. They've applied their big brain with it's impressive horsepower to an issue, so their resulting opinion on it must be well informed. Unfortunately, in most cases no such quiet reflection ever took place, no careful study of the facts, no exegesis of the relevant literature. They just assume they must be right because they're so smart. It's almost a form of moral hazard: they are less careful because they are in some sense more capable of reaching the truth. Call it overconfidence. 

I see this all the time. I want to say, "Dude, you're a physicist. We value your big brain because it's good at solving physics problems. You're not a tax policy expert. (Or an expert on employment regulations such as the minimum wage, or an expert on healthcare policy...) The things you're saying about it don't make any sense, you don't have even a tenuous grasp of the relevant economic theory, and you're trying to shoehorn the problem into your existing toolbox (which has impressive methods for solving physics problem, but they just aren't relevant to policy problems, sorry). It's okay, nobody values you for being 'right' about things outside your realm of expertise. We'll come to you when we have a physics problem that needs solved." It's not exactly "stay in your lane," and by the way I hate that phrase and the sentiment it implies. It's more like, "You didn't even bother to check what's happening in this other lane before spouting off." 

I also want to slap some sense into these Silicon Valley data scientists and software engineers who have appointed themselves the arbiters of truth. They're taking down or tagging social media content that they have "fact-checked" and found wanting (by their standards). Obviously these people are not qualified to decisively appraise claims about, say, virology or immunology. When there are dueling experts who disagree about what's true, they are likewise not qualified to anoint one side of the dispute the "winner." And yet this is precisely what they are doing. I see it as another example of smart people being overconfident and thinking they have a direct line to cosmic truth.