Thread by @PhilippMarkolin

While the #lableak theory is scientifically dead, the lableak conspiracy myth will never die out.

This has everything to do with #asymmetric forces on social media, and the self-serving influencers and information combatants abusing them.

A thread:
1/

How does one go about when trying to find out what is true in a world segmented by echo chambers and fragmented reality perceptions?

I cannot say that there is a formula, but I can share what steps I took.

When I started, I believed lableak likely..

https://twitter.com/PhilippMarkolin/status/1568003007429623811

2/

Science is constantly evolving and the scientific literature gets updated when new evidence comes in.

So if you do not want to start out with your intuition, maybe check the status of current scientific literature science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

3/

Once a baseline of evidence and scientific thinking has been familiarized, it becomes way easier to spot where actual uncertainties lie.

This is then the basis for having more nuanced discussions with domain experts to deepen understanding.


4/

Once understanding has deepened, one might be able to engage with opposite viewpoints and hear out the strongest arguments.

In the case of lableak, many "smoking gun" arguments did not pass the sniff test. This is troublesome & should cause rethinking.
medium.com/advances-in-bi…
5/

Obviously, a scientific questions needs a scientific answer, and it is hard not to get distracted by ultimately irrelevant speculations about cover-ups and conspiracies, when there is no evidence.

scientificamerican.com/article/the-la…
6/

My #scicomm colleague @Samuel_Gregson and I spend hours interviewing experts who published on the origin question, and many experts were happy to explain their data and reasoning.

Here we talked to @angie_rasmussen @stgoldst about #lableak arguments

https://twitter.com/Samuel_Gregson/status/1555561690368032773

7/

Here we talked to @K_G_Andersen and @MichaelWorobey about their work mapping the time, location, environmental samples, epidemiology and phylogeny to multiple #zoonotic spillovers in late November at the #Huanan market.

https://twitter.com/Samuel_Gregson/status/1553048623713222658

8/

Here we talked to @cmmorel , a member of the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of pandemics, a group that is tasked with assessing the evidence for natural spillover vs #lableak (among other things)

https://twitter.com/Samuel_Gregson/status/1554139787266768899

9/

The more we learned and talked to experts like @AliceCHughes , the more it became clear that #zoonotic spillover is an often underappreciated risk and all evidence points to SC2 being of unequivocal natural origin.

https://twitter.com/PhilippMarkolin/status/1561060817537302532

10/

Given my personal preference to write things down to make sense of them, I collected all the input from scientists, domain experts and scientific papers to then form my own opinion on the topic and hopefully save everybody else some time 🔽
protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-negl…

11/

While this has been an interesting journey towards epistemic clarity on the #lableak controversy, today I came to report that it was mostly for receiving online harassment.

See, scientists only know how to fight fictions with facts

And that is a disadvantage on social media
12/

Social media (and truly, more and more establish media too) is subjected to attention economy incentives, and that results in multiple #asymmetries of how information propagates & how we encounter, consume and use information.

Information has a special function in society...
13/

... it does not only inform our choices and beliefs, it also shapes our perception of reality.

Many of the frictions in today's connected online societies boil down to a fragmentation of our perception of reality, and these fragmented realities drive our epistemic crisis.
14/

(An epistemic crisis is a crisis where people lose the ability to assess what is real or true)

This epistemic crisis makes us incredibly vulnerable to the asymmetric forces, actors & behaviors that shape online conversations, and with it, empower engaging #conspiracy myths

15/

Understanding the appeal and power of #conspiracy myths is easy, combating them is incredibly hard when the deck is stacked against truth.

I mean, just look at the endless misses of #lableak claims versus the accumulating evidence for #zoonosis 🔽

Science deserves our trust
16/

I've been investigating how to even the information battle field for science. The sad reality is that there are no short-term solutions on offer.

That's why I said, the #lableak conspiracy myth will never die, much to the relief of people currently profiting of from it
17/

So while this is my frustrating preliminary assessment, I have no intention of #conceding reality to the malicious charlatans, shysters and political players profiting from the epistemic crisis, and neither should you.

It just means we have to take on a bigger challenge.
18/

A challenge to #reclaim our public spheres from tech giants, to treat information as a #public good and not a commodity, to fight asymmetric forces, actors and behaviors that poison our public good for personal gain.

How to do this will be my focus in the near future.

/end