Thread by @PhilippMarkolin

This is a fun example how lab leakers are anomaly hunters but goddamn lousy thinkers with no knowledge how anything works (and of course conspiracy prone).

In their 'quest' to 'uncover' #lableak, these geniuses looked at metadata tables for suspicious 'activity'.

They found
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https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1512939363168047112

An apparent mismatch between the date when a sequence was deposited by WIV researchers and another data of when the access ID was created at a database (earlier).

So of course instead of wondering if there is a system explanation for this, they immediately went towards
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the most suitable explanation for their pet theory: 'everything was covered up and THEY are the heros who found evidence that the WIV had these sequences before the outbreak'

Now had they just checked the documentation of the database, they might have found (as OP ⬆️) that the
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Access slot IDs are just created regularily in batch by the database so that researchers can then deposit their sequnces there.

The reason these dates was moved into the metadata is because it is useless for researchers and confused them more than helped.

No conspiracy...
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Just some usability perk and quite common knowledge and practise for database system engineers.

For us, it's yet another example of how lab leakers just don't know or care to learn about the things they abuse to cherry-pick their data from.

They are not critical thinkers.
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Anomaly hunting in itself is quite prone to create false 'leads' even with the best of intentions, because sampling outliers from an (often) unknown background distribution is a shoddy way to investigate and does not produce scientific evidence.

But that's the meta-take on
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why scientists are usually not excited (... rather roll their eyes) when those online randos come along with yet another 'smoking gun' based on some cherry picked anomaly.

Scientific evidence has a completely different quality, and all of it goes towards zoonosis & against LL