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'.
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
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#lableak
This⬇️is a deliberate lie and toxic garbage.
Scientists are not 'ignoring the possibility of a lab leak' for fucks sake. And you know this MJ, given that I don't know how many virologists have explained to you over the last two years why they think LL is unlikely. 1/
Why are you deliberately lying?
Why are you creating a false narrative that 'scientists are losing credibility with the public?' Nope.
Scientists have become more trusted overall, despite you LL lot firing on the Frankenstein trope and sowing doubt like it's seeding season.
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Lab leakers drawing the conspiracy prone into their echo chambers to bombard them with disinformation and manufactured doubt is not evidence of scientific dishonesty, but of effective propaganda you fuckwits have been engaged in (and were empowered by algorithms).
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It would be almost hilarious if it wasn't so pernicious to society.
The biggest spreaders and amplifiers of misinformation for profit turn around and claim that factual reporting about a scientific topic by the 'mainstream media' is actually the real misinformation.
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The last few days I've written a few things about Alina, so not worth wasting another word on her specific type of grifting.
However, what is worth noting is that she, like all other grifters we have seen in recent memory, converges predictably on the same topics as the
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audiences she entertains with her shtick.
It's not enough to be critical of the science that runs against her opinions (or that of her audiences) and sling mud at the scientists every chance she gets.
No, she also has to tell her audience that the big bad 'mainstream media'
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Her long thread of false statements and misrepresentations starts directly with a dramatic falsehood in tweet 1:
The pre-prints do not claim CERTAINTY. And I've seen no reporting in Nature, Science, NYT or elsewhere claiming certainty either 1/
Alina is doing this deliberately too, because she knows, that neither the scientists nor the reports claim certainty; she also purposefully conflates strong statements calling the 'market' as the starting point with = 'natural origin'
These are related but not identical
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In fact, many scientists and reporters have gone through great length and over-careful reporting to put the strong evidence for a market start of the pandemic in the proper context, for example, @stuartjdneil article here ⬇️
I don't know if it is an American-confidence thing, a social media thing, a @NateSilver538 thing or a mixture of all of these, but the sheer arrogance of this is just astounding.
Are all of his followers complete suckers who do not understand how science works?
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Just for the numbsacks in the last row:
Science is not about the trust into individuals.
It is about evidence.
The evidence establishes a scientific consensus behind it because scientists are part of a community of people who value coherence over convenience.
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