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Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
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4 Jul, 5 tweets, 2 min read
This is a🧵of🧵s organizing the early datapoints we have on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. After starting a thread for open-ended datapoint gathering I realized there is too much to follow up in one place, so I'll be starting individual 🧵s and collecting them all as replies to this.
The intent of this thread is to gather different types of datapoints, and eventually attempt to stitch the different types together into a coherent story we can have more confidence in.

If you're curious about the original thread, it can be found here:
Wuhan Military World Games thread:
Scientific origins studies thread:
Wastewater detection in 2019 -

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More from @alexandrosM

Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
5 Jul
Why do I find the lab leak conversation suppression interesting?

Where else can we see our sensemaking fail in real-time, this clearly?

- Govenment
- Academia
- Medicine
- Journalism
- International orgs
- Factcheckers
- Tech Companies
- Wikipedia

All getting it wrong at once.
Wikipedia should never have classified the lab leak hypothesis as "misinformation", but even now it's still "debating" whether to correct: cnet.com/features/wikip…
Here's how fact checkers, Facebook, and YouTube have handled it. Facebook in particular had to pull an about-face after deleting over *one million* posts.
Read 15 tweets
Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
5 Jul
A🧵on retrospective wastewater (aka. sewage water) studies that attempted to pick up early signs of SARS-CoV-2

<epistemic status: gathering datapoints, not drawing conclusions>
Santa Catarina (Florianopolis), Brazil🇧🇷, November 2019 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Milan & Turin, Italy🇮🇹, December 2019 - euronews.com/2020/06/19/cov…
Read 5 tweets
Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
4 Jul
A🧵on studies attempting to infer the date of origin of the virus

<epistemic status: gathering datapoints, not drawing conclusions>
Scientists from UK and Germany attempted to genetically map the earliest strands of SARS-CoV-2 in order to create a picture of the virus' evolution. Estimates first infection between mid-Sep and early December. cam.ac.uk/research/news/…
This analysis from Harvard Medical School uses satellite imagery and Baidu search logs to infer the time of first infections at around mid-August or September 2019 dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42669…
Read 6 tweets
Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
3 Jul
A🧵on athletes reporting illness at the Military World Games in Wuhan, October 18-27

<epistemic status: gathering datapoints, not drawing conclusions>

Sources:
[1]@BillyBostickson's thread:
[2]My thread:
[3]research from @Iseravi1
Mathieu Brulet, 🇫🇷 runner. Got bronze at Wuhan, but says he was ill.
[1] lechorepublicain.fr/chartres-28000…
[2] fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathieu_B…
[3] intensite.net/2009/actu2019/…
Elodie Clouvel, 🇫🇷, pentathlete
[1]dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8…
Read 23 tweets
Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
2 Jul
When you have a truly new idea, you *will* get pushback solely because the idea is new or different. While you should heed other feedback, you should immediately discard this kind. It exists only to stop you. It is so predictable I can list it without even knowing the idea: 🧵
"if it's so good, why isn't everyone doing it already?"

This implies that everyone is looking for great ideas and adopting them as fast as possible. But if everyone assumes it of everyone else, and treats absence of adoption as evidence of fatal flaws, who will do any adopting?
"We've been doing things this way for ever. Why change?"

Because leaving improvement on the table is creating ever expanding vacuum for a competitor to step into and crush you. And because on some level if you're doing worse than what's possible, you're failing your customers.
Read 16 tweets
Alexandros Marinos Profile picture
2 Jul
Say you're the Chief of an anti-corruption agency. You're trusted with broad decision-making authority.

Your agency has a large budget, staff, career ladder, pension plan, union, &c

One day, a scientist shows you a button that will end corruption forever.

Do you press it?🧵
This thought experiment shows a number of things at the heart of our current civilizational predicament.

On some naive level, you'd expect the Chief of an anti-corruption agency not only to press such a button immediately, but to have been desperately seeking it already.
The fact that it seems intuitively obvious that the Chief would be motivated to find a reason not to press the button, even if it was someone deeply honest and caring, shows you how our system is structured in such a way to force good people to do bad things.
Read 8 tweets

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