My interpretation is that is not better for communication than putting the same random number in two envelopes, sending them somewhere and then opening both at the same time.
It seems to be a little out of fashion with the HN crowd, but maybe meditation can help you a little on your way. It is taught that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Trained Buddhist monks can endure immolation, see for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4...
Helped me too. I still deal with pain but it totally changed my mindset about it and relieved a lot of the suffering associated with the pain. I saw an associate of Sarno’s who co-authored one of his books, she looked at my imaging and was like, I’ve seen way worse than this, you’ll be fine long term, which was a huge concern of mine. That was a decade past now.
It is a little suspicious, but also not too far fetched: Where would you put a lab researching Coronaviruses? Somewhere near where it exists in the wild.
No. It’s not where they exist in the wild. The closest related virus (RATG-13) to n-cov-2 come from northern china (Yunnan), where they were imported to the Wuhan virology lab to study. What a coincidence!
Secondly, other Coronaviruses have appeared in southern China -- notably the original SARS' first known case was in November of 2002 in Guangdong.[1] Wuhan is well-placed (relatively centrally) to do that kind of research.
Thirdly, RaTG13 likely isn't the closest related known virus anymore.[2][3]
Quality comment. That person is confused about a couple things, but the main point that Wuhan is 1-2000km from the most likely places to find such a virus in the wild.
It could have been brought to Wuhan in a human, in an animal to eat, in an animal to study, or in a culture. I don't see how newer evidence eliminates any of those possibilities.
It's also confused about that - there are tons of horseshoe bats in Hubei Province including in caves 60 miles from Wuhan[1] and there are absolutely sars-like coronaviruses in the horseshoe bats in Hubei.
RM1 and RF1 in this paper are sars-like bat coronaviruses isolated from horseshoe bats in Hubei:
The horseshoe bat's range spans from Japan to Portugal. That doesn't change the fact that all the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 we've discovered have been found in the far south of China and Cambodia, 1-2k miles away, nor does the presence of more distantly related SARS-like coronaviruses.
If we find a closer relative near Wuhan, that will change the hypothesis. But we haven't.
That’s not especially convincing to me because the closest relatives we’ve found aren’t actually very close relatives. Ratg13 is decades removed from the SC2 lineage, so knowing that it was found closer to Laos is a very weak signal in my opinion about the origins of SC2.
As one of the parent comments has already noted, RaTG13 is no longer the closest known bat virus. BANAL-20-52's spike is only 16 AA substitutions away from SARS-CoV-2, and that was found in Laos.
No one expected spillover in Wuhan, including Dr. Shi, per the quote from her that I've replied with elsewhere. Even those very confident in natural zoonotic origin are typically proposing something like SARS-1's wildlife trafficking conduit, not spillover in Wuhan.
Well, the level of coincidence also depends on the number of coronavirus research facilities, and the number of cities. If there aren't very many coronavirus research facilities, and there are many cities, it becomes an unlikely coincidence.
There is an episode of Lex Fridman's Podcast with Jamie Metzl on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I
Metzl is highly confident of a lab-leak. However, lab-leak doesn't require that the virus has been tampered with and I somewhat agree that is important to know if the virus escaped due to inadequate lab safety.
Exactly. People yelling "censorship" forget that the lab leak theory was mostly about how COVID was engineered as a bioweapon, which still remains a conspiracy.
On the other hand, existence of this conspiracy has been used to shut down perfectly reasonable discussion around a less outlandish lab leak for months.
Even in this post opponents of the lab leak theory are still bringing up this bioweapons conspiracy - but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon.
The issue is the existence of this outlandish fringe theory was used to censor all reasonable discussion on the lab leak.
> but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon.
Interesting perspective. On the other hand, just like the comment below, I never saw a single person raise the lab leak theory as an alternative explanation to a naturally occurring disaster. It was always in the context of "COVID is a weapon to control and kill us".
Thank you, apparently raising this simple distinction is enough to get downvoted out of circulation. The problem wasn't that people questioned the status quo, it's that people went too far in ascribing cartoonish-like evil to actors that simply were trying to cover up something embarrassing.
