Thread by @PhilippMarkolin

Here is a twist, I am getting the "@K_G_Andersen treatment". 😂😂

Stick around, it is a teaching lesson.

#Lableak trolls just realized that I thought a leak plausible when I entered the discussion right after the Nicholas Wade Op-ed, and think that is a 'gotcha'

1/

I have often proclaimed that I came late to the discussion, and also, that I was initially favoring #lableak, just based on my personal experience with how quickly lab accidents might happen.

When the Wade Op-ed hit, I thought well, respectable outlet, maybe its true?
2/

It certainly felt intuitive.

But here comes the lesson:

I did not want to leave it to my #intuition, I wanted to know the #truth.

Very soon (~2 weeks) after, I realized that the scientific #evidence tells a very different story, even at a time when uncertainty was higher.
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Having been a bit annoyed at myself how easily I fell to the shoddy manipulative Nicholas Wade article, I decided to collect my thoughts and write a debunk #scicomm article. 🔽

In that, I addressed Wade's main arguments, all of which were garbage.

4/

medium.com/advances-in-bi…

My blog article was published in June 21, mere weeks after the Wade article came out.

I guess my little #origin story (😅) shows that even a trained scientist can be fooled by intuition and #misplaced trust.

More importantly, however, it should show that once scientific
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evidence becomes available (or one is made aware of it), that we ought to #change our mind with the evidence.
It should also show that this can happy very #quickly, in my case, a few weeks

Now let's return to our dear #lableak proponents, who, after spending years commenting
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still have not managed to look at the #evidence (which has become overwhelming in ruling out all #lableak scenarios)

They are perpetually stuck in #talking points from early 2020, desperate to the sad point of quote mining me a few hours ago to feed their #confirmation bias
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Not realizing that they actually just achieved the opposite, confirming my #authenticity in the endeavor while exposing their ineptitude. 😂

I hope they will use this little thread as #inspiration to look at the evidence, and maybe find it in themselves to go with it too.
8/

Again, it is not bad to change one's mind when the #evidence demands it, it is laudable. Everybody should do it.

There is no #shame in changing one's mind, the wonderful thing about having a belief disproven by science is that it #freed us of a bad idea.

That's it.

/end