scientists are super duper careful about “possible”. they hate to rule shit out even when for all practical purposes that possibility is zero. i’m a cool regular scientist, i’m gonna let you know it’s zero without trying to cover my ass for the 0.001%
even in a bsl2 lab that i work in, there’s controlled air flow, gloves, goggles, full sleeve lab coats. in a bsl4 it’s practically like a clean room, it’s ridiculous. and outside is a city larger than nyc where people are eating fuckin bushmeat and butcher shops have zero regulation. come on
We already know that mistakes happen at these kinds of labs frequently enough to set the chance of a mistake at 0.001% chance a joke. I’ve left plenty of quotes and links above in the thread to prove that beyond a doubt. SARS has escaped labs 3 fucking times.
The real driver to a small probability here is the chance of a lab mistake combined with a chance of a jump straight to humans and/or somehow an intermediary species combined with a lab mistake.
Anyway we’re apparently not going to reach any kind of common ground here so I’ll just drop from the conversation now. And still quite comfortable with my opinion.
At the moment it doesn’t matter but it is important to know at some point where the virus came from as that could be a continuing source of the virus. So it coming from the lab would be a good thing as by now they would have destroyed those samples. If it came from one of the farms near Wuhan or the wet market then there could still be animals infecting each other and humans with all the mutation risk that gives.
This is begging the question. If I ask how you know he’s cheating, you can’t say it’s because his results were very different after cheating. That requires me to assume the conclusion.
Impossible? It seems like the only way a winrate could literally be impossible is if he won more than was ever in play or something. Why couldn’t he play perfect merely from guessing correctly a bunch of times in a row? It’s obviously not impossible.
You are merely claiming it cannot be done and I don’t really see why it can’t. I watched TV poker on Travel Channel back around 2003 and remember it was quite a setup. There was some unknown angular Swede winning every pot against a cadre of old Vegas pros and the announcers were suggesting it was so improbable and they’d never seen anything like it. He was intimidating–sleek and muscular like a jungle cat. I remember this one announcer in an off-the-rack suit said something like “You can’t put in another raise with an Ace Jack here, folks.” I’m thinking why not–these players are all giant pussies. Sure enough this Swede does exactly that and some idiot reluctantly counts out a call. “Now the ten of spade comes off. He really has to hate that card.” And this balls-of-steel Swede wastes no time sliding another clay castle into the middle with absolutely nothing and the hefty fellow sighs and folds. Of course, this dude could have simply whipped all of their asses at any point like Tiger Woods on the 97 pro tour. And, predictably, they kept folding the winning hands until he was hoisting a giant dinner plate. I suppose he must have been cheating too.
This is like a madlib for every conspiracy theory I’ve ever read.
I don’t believe this is accurate. He wasn’t absolutely 100% perfect. I remember people showing some examples where he called and lost.
So basically your position so far is that he must be cheating because no one has ever been this good before. The things he’s doing are impossible because no other person has done them. I think you need more specific arguments than that because it’s not clear to me why he can’t simply be that good. Like, just looking at it as an outsider I see a guy owning a bunch of sore losers who decided to retaliate. There must be some esoteric reasons specific to poker you can give since so many pros seem convinced he’s cheating.
Yup. I have been to wet markets on basically every continent outside of Antarctica and Australia and I have never seen people munching on raw bats even when I was pretty much the only non-local. 99%+ of these places have to be basically harmless. That being said while I think it isn’t a zero percent chance it escaped from a lab I am pretty much in team beetlejuice on this one.
It’s really lame and boring actually given it’s a derail and the “but ah shucks AK ain’t a pair” routine has been done far better in other gimmick accounts in 2+2. His effort is C- at best.
Lawnmower Man’s skepticism of expert opinion regarding Mike Postle is intended to mirror cuserounder’s skepticism of expert opinion regarding covid escaping from a lab.
I pulled an example from his profession that is obvious to him but not obvious to a layman. It’s because he’s familiar with the concepts, procedures, and esoterica of his own field which outsiders don’t even realize exist. If you ask laymen to reason why Postle may (or may not) be cheating, they won’t say things like the metrics suggest perfect river play. They’ll simply tell you they saw this in a Bond film once. Similarly, if you ask laymen to opine on the odds of a BSL-4 “leaking” a novel functional virus, they won’t outline any reasonable theory as to how that extraordinary process actually occurred. That’s because they have no idea how any of it works.
On the other hand, as Jbro pointed out, SARS has apparently leaked out on three occasions. So if someone would like to explain to me why that happened and this couldn’t, feel free to do so while mocking me like I’m an idiotic child because I’m really enjoying the whole LOL cuserounders a Trumpy moron routine you all are carrying on with about something that already happened THREE TIMES with SARS.
This is what I’m talking about. That piece of information sounds very compelling to you because you’re a layman. Of course it’s possible to leak a highly-contagious virus from a lab. No one is disputing that. What you’re missing is that it’s a lot more difficult to leak something you don’t have.
