Bayesian Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 Origin feat. 'scientific consensus means scientists are biased against my conspiracy'
(https://zenodo.org/record/4477081#)
posted on February 03, 2021 05:22 PM by
u/loquinatus
50
u/loquinatus36 pointsat 1612373049.000000
“The starting probability for origin of SARS-CoV-2 was set with the
zoonotic or natural hypothesis at 98.8% likelihood with the laboratory
origin hypothesis set at 1.2%. The initial state was biased as much as
possible towards a zoonotic origin, with the starting point selected as
the upper bounds of the 95% confidence interval for the mean and
standard deviation of three independent estimates, including one by
Daszak and colleagues. Each piece of new evidence for or against each
hypothesis was then used to adjust the probabilities”
See if you use the average of other people’s ass-pull numbers as the
starting point for your ass-pull numbers, that makes them science
actually.
It's ridiculous. Near the very end he has "data" for his claim that Chinese-published sequences from a patient in Wuhan matched the start and end pieces of some adenovirus based vaccine, something that could have happened for a wide variety of reasons even if he isn't outright lying about that finding.
The notion is frankly bonkers. If they were doing a super secret vaccine challenge trial, presumably on army volunteers, there's no way any genetic sequences from that trial are going to end up public on the internet, or you'd even know that there was such a patient.
Fucking up when screwing around with this kind of research (e.g. researching bat coronaviruses, accidentally get a lab worker infected) is of course always a possibility. Not particularly likely and it is silly in the extreme to point fingers at the nearby BSL what ever level facility with their bunny suits when there's a market of people buying bats to cook in soup while not wearing any PPE whatsoever, but whatever.
Doing top secret vaccine challenge trials and just accidentally uploading genetic sequences to the internet, that's utter bullshit.
Then also as far as "Bayesian" goes there is a fuck ton of evidence against it being lab made. There's a lot of research facilities in the world, and it happens to be released anywhere near the market selling bats and other wildlife, and incidentally those bats have a similar virus? Not likely (edit: that is out of all the lab / disease combinations possible, only a small fraction is going to be even remotely consistent with non lab origin).
edit: also he got a bunch of links to those genetic sequences *in a screenshot*. The basic idea is to make it too much work to directly try to replicate his steps and call his bullshit. I'm thinking there isn't even a match to that adenovirus, and if there was, then he should've cut and pasted links instead of having them in a screenshot like sort of captcha.
>it is silly in the extreme to point fingers at the nearby BSL what ever level facility with their bunny suits
That's not just some random facility; it's at the main center for research on bat coronaviruses in China, and probably in the world. These are the people who traced the bat origin of the original SARS virus to a cave in the south of the country. Their known samples already included RaTG13, now the closest known natural relative of SARS-CoV-2.
The nearby market included a plenty of weird wildlife, and no one on that market wore a bunny suit, and wildlife got taken to kitchens for food preparation, which is probably the closest it gets to an opposite of wearing bunny suits.
And i bet you the facility also had a lot of other cool stuff from all around the world or at least all around China. But its that one thing which people nearby happen to be eating, that escapes.
Bottom line is, while they could have fucked up there is a number of different ways in which they could have fucked up which would stand in some obvious way like, say, releasing MERS straight off a camel 6000km away, releasing verbatim something that they had published a paper on, etc.
edit: instead there's this weird idea that they were doing a secret live challenge trial, and then put sequences from that secret trial on the internet. Instead of any of realistic possibilities of screwing up, like writing a few papers about something then releasing that very thing, it's this post hoc nonsense and for the source data, a list of links in a screenshot.
Are you under the impression that the wet market was the source of the outbreak? That was [debunked months ago](https://nypost.com/2020/05/27/chinese-scientists-say-wuhan-market-isnt-where-coronavirus-began/).
Presumably it would have first passed to humans either in one of the people who grow/catch animals to sell there, or one of the people who buy animals there. Then you get a cluster at the market because those people still go to the market.
What they excluded was the idea that some animal at the market infected a bunch of people at the market, which was very far fetched to begin with.
edit: additionally, everyone knew those markets to be a problem *long* before 2019: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14738798/ . We aren't talking of some out of the blue post-hoc hypothesis of a top secret vaccine challenge trial when it comes to the market.
There's also later model studies that still implicate the market: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7264924/
Ultimately what we see is that there's the lab where people wearing PPE work with animal samples, and there's the market where you have some animals themselves, you have people who have a lot of exposure to said animals at another location, etc. And the initial cluster of cases is around the market, and not around, say, the lab's cafeteria.
We'd have ignored "technically, it was the cook at the lab's cafeteria that infected most of the workers at the lab; many of those workers never worked with bats" if there was a lab centered outbreak. We'd (in that alternative, rightfully) have blamed the lab regardless. That should extend to non lab instances of messing around with animals that the virus came from; the possibility of a more complex chain (e.g. a vendor of exotic animals gets infected from an animal somewhere else, infects people at the market) doesn't absolve the market.
The author's name is Steven C. Quay. I was a bit worried that it's off topic since he's not a known character, but I figured "massive essay with horrible misuse of bayes to support your pet theory" was on topic enough (apologies to the mods if it isn't though!).
I jumped down the rabbit hole.
His self description from his website is, "pioneering physician-scientist, inventor, author, TEDx speaker, and serial entrepreneur. Founder of Seattle-based [NASDAQ-listed medical company]."
As president and CEO of that medical company, he earned $900k in salary+bonus in 2019, plus ~$4.9m in stock options.
The company has no revenue and is entirely investment-funded, working on breast cancer and now COVID-19 treatments. Looks like it's raised anywhere from $70m to $115m since 2010. It burned through $11m last year. They haven't delivered much yet - one of their few public announcements relates to a "single-patient study" of their breast cancer treatment.
Top 10 shareholders include Vanguard, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Two Sigma, Renaissance, and Citadel - a who's who of big investors. The draw for investors here, as The Motley Fool puts it, is:
> ...the biotech sector is still a stomping ground for some of the most mind-numbing and heart-stopping gains you'll ever see. For example, if you had ridden clinical-stage cancer drug developer Pharmacyclics up from the market bottom in 2009, you'd have an eye-popping 16,671% return as of Friday's close.
However, as of December, an analyst at Simply Wall St. has raised concerns over the company's highly volatile share price recently, substantial dilution of shareholders, lack of profitability expectation within the next 3 years, and less than 1 year of cash runway.
Basically what happens is that someone makes a 166x return and then the big money starts investing in things that they (in their total ignorance of the subject) estimate have an 1% chance of a 166x return.
Right, although all these companies have analysts who try to figure out which companies are more or less promising. The problem, though, is that weeding out the wrong company can mean missing out on one of those windfalls.
It's the same principle behind venture capital, except VCs tend to get more involved in the management of the companies they invest in.
If you're smart (enough), suitably credentialed, and good at selling you can create a story that'll keep the money flowing for years (*cough* MIRI *cough*). But you do have to actually attempt the thing you say you're going to do and be able to demonstrate some sort of progress. Like, for example, getting approval to try your drug on just one patient, as in this case.
He is reportedly an MD PhD, but...
He describes himself as a 'serial entrepreneur.' Until covid started, all his work was about breast cancer. In the linked paper, he thanks a twitter group which is nominally headed by a [pseudonymous chimpanzee and blockchain enthusiast](https://twitter.com/BillyBostickson/status/1354106185121726465). And, uh, this is his very [infomercialesque personal site](https://drquay.com/).
It might sound like a duck.
“The starting probability for origin of SARS-CoV-2 was set with the zoonotic or natural hypothesis at 98.8% likelihood with the laboratory origin hypothesis set at 1.2%. The initial state was biased as much as possible towards a zoonotic origin, with the starting point selected as the upper bounds of the 95% confidence interval for the mean and standard deviation of three independent estimates, including one by Daszak and colleagues. Each piece of new evidence for or against each hypothesis was then used to adjust the probabilities”
See if you use the average of other people’s ass-pull numbers as the starting point for your ass-pull numbers, that makes them science actually.
Some people say Bayes has no practical use, but this international incident says otherwise.
193 deranged pages typeset in Microsoft Word, I know what I’m reading today!
Conclusive evidence that “Bayesian analysis” should be outlawed
Is this any dumbass in particular?