Most experts believe COVID-19 was probably not a lab leak

There is a risk that such a survey includes Peter Daszak and his friends and collaborators, who may have been the ones responsible for the covid-19 lab leak.

Or, that it includes people who have been influenced by Daszak via spreading false information and so on, or are collaborators or are otherwise incentivized to lie for personal and career advancement. The field is small enough that personal relationships are essential to getting funded, hired, published and so on.

Plus, there are effects like information cascades and respectability cascades; everyone updates towards the more respectable opinion rather than the true one. And surveys like this are part of that effect.

I personally think that the chance that covid-19 was created in a lab in Wuhan is exceptionally high, perhaps 93%, and there are various skeptical experts who think it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the Wuhan Lab created covid-19.

As such I would label this entire exercise as mistake, akin to asking a sample of organized criminals whether organized crime is a problem in their area, and having 90% of them saying it isn't.

People often parse information through an epistemic consensus filter. They do not ask "is this true", they ask "will others be OK with me thinking this is true". This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it.

In Feb 2020 Anthony Fauci convened a bunch of virologists to assess SARS-CoV-2 origins. The initial take from the group (revealed in private Slack messages via FOIA requests from 2023) was this was likely engineered. In Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research's view, it was "so friggin likely because they were already doing this work." 

The same month, Fauci held an off-the-record call with the group. After that, everyone's tunes changed and shortly after (in a matter of weeks) we got the Proximal Origins paper, with Kristian Andersen doing a 180 as the lead author. The paper posits that there is "strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation." I encourage you to read the paper to determine its merits. Their evidence as I understand it is a) the structure of the spike protein is not what a computer would have generated as optimally viral, and b) pangolins. Pangolins were ruled out as carriers shortly after the paper's release. (a) can be dismissed -- or at least mitigated -- by the fact that serial passage can naturally develop what a computer may not. Andersen's Scripps Research coincidentally got a multi-million dollar grant shortly after publishing Proximal Origins, but again, that's merely coincidence.

Some in the comments seem stuck on the fact this virus could have been obtained in the wild, and thus is zoonotic in origin. That is ignoring the substantial work the Wuhan lab undertook to take natural viruses and create chimeric viruses that were optimized for human contagiousness. 

Fauci took the Proximal Origins paper on his circuit of 60 Minutes interviews, NYTimes podcasts, and Congressional testimonies, declaring, "the leading virologists say this was most likely of natural origin". 

This rhetoric undoubtedly has a massive chilling effect on any "experts" who would otherwise posit that this could be lab origin. The High Minister of Science has declared it was zoonotic, definitive proof will probably never be established either way, so you better be on the side of the High Minister of Science.

If there were an omniscient arbiter of truth that could make markets on this issue, I would take lab leak >50% in a heartbeat, and have it closer to 85%. Alas, there never will be such an arbiter, and we'll have to rely on the experts who are heavily reliant on government research grants, gain of function research as the way of the future, and generally not rocking the boat. 

This reminds me of a passage in Richard Feynman's memoir "What do you care what other people think?". Four pages into the chapter Gumshoes, (page 163 in the Unwin Paperback edition):

Then this business of Thiokol changing its position came up. Mr. Rogers and Dr. Ride were asking two Thiokol managers, Mr. Mason and Mr. Lund, how many people were against the launch, even at the last moment.

"We didn't poll everyone," says Mr. Mason.

"Was there a substantial number against the launch, or just one or two?"

"There were, I would say, probably five or six in engineering who at that point would have said it is not as conservative to go with that temperature, and we don't know. The issue was we didn't know for sure that it would work."

"So it was evenly divided?"

"That's a very estimated number."

It struck me that the Thiokol managers were waffling. But I only knew how to ask simpleminded questions. So I said, "Could you tell me, sirs, the names of your four best seals experts, in order of ability?"

"Roger Boisjoly and Arnie Thompson are one and two. Then there's Jack Kapp, and, uh ... Jerry Burns."

I turned to Mr. Boisjoly, who was right there, at the meeting. "Mr. Boisjoly, were you in agreement that it was okay to fly?"

He says, "No, I was not."

I ask Mr. Thompson, who was also there.

"No. I was not."

I say "Mr. Kapp?"

Mr. Lund says, "He is not here, I talked to him after the meeting, and he said, 'I would have made that decision, given the information we had.'"

"And the fourth man?"

"Jerry Burns. I don't know what his position was."

"So," I said, "of the four, we have one 'don't know,' one 'very likely yes,' and the two who were mentioned right away as being the best seal experts, both said no." So this "evenly split" stuff was a lot of crap. The guys who knew the most about the seals --- what were they saying?

That is the end of that section of the chapter and Feynman turns to the infra-red thermometer and the temperatures on the launch pad.

That was my introduction to this aspect of bureaucratic infighting. The bureaucrat asks his technical experts, the one closest to the issue. If he gets the answer that he wants, it is accepted. If not, he widens the pool of experts. Those too close to the issue are at risk of ignoring the social cues to the desired answer, but the wider pool of experts can be more flexible at responding to the broader social context. Then the bureaucrat gets to take an unweighted average (that is not weighting the original experts more highly). Which boosts the probability of getting the desired answer and reduces the probability of getting the correct answer.

Back in 1988 this was perhaps a busted technique. But that was many years ago. The notion of broadening your survey of experts seems to be back in fashion.

A better headline would be: "85% of experts are not willing to answer a survey about whether or not they think COVID-19 was a lab leak"

Out of 1,138 experts invited to participate, the survey ultimately collected usable data from 168 participants across 47 countries (15% completion rate)

A relevant tweet from Nate Silver on the methodology used to conduct the survey:

This is not a scientific way to do a survey. The biggest issue is that it involved personalized outreach based on a totally arbitrary set of criteria. That's a huge no-no. It also, by design, had very few biosafety or biosecurity experts.

The tweet has some screenshots of relevant parts of the paper

If you just want the bottom-line number (emphasis mine):

When asked how likely it is that COVID-19 originated from natural zoonosis, experts gave an average likelihood of 77% (median=90%).

Okay, so this is another instance of plenty of high-status people with a lot to lose declining to say they believe something that would get them fired and/or ostracized. Do you believe it has any bearing on whether or not it is true?

This isn't much of an update; talking about lab leak was effectively banned from polite society during 2021, and most credentialed AI experts today still don't think AI is much of a risk [LW · GW]. This study is more of a measure of what to expect from credentialed people, who were generally slow to update on X-risk related topics until too late (nuclear as well as AI), and at critical thinking in general.

The personalised outreach mentioned just means that the respondents were initially sent a stock email and then when they didn't respond, they were sent a more personalised message. It doesn't meant that the surveyors emailed their friends. The survey was based on mass outreach from a list from professional societies

Snowballing contacts does introduce a risk of bias but that is mitigated by the disciplinary and geographic spread in the target sample. Respondents in non developed countries gave a higher chance of zoonosis, so the prospect that the survey was biased because it was sent to eg Kristian andersen who then recommended people who knew favoured his opinion seems low.

It is true that the survey showed low familiarity with the relevant literature. First, this is an interesting finding in itself. Second, in many expert polls the field experts may not have read much of the literature on some specific question.eg this is likely true of the igm poll of economists, which is nevertheless useful.

Competing claims have been made about what virologists in general actually think about this topic. We now have some information on this

A bunch of people in the comments section are skeptical that we should care about the consensus of experts on this question. One thing I'm curious to get people's opinion on: late last year, Rootclaim did a series of debates with Peter Miller on whether COVID was a gain-of-function lab leak or a zoonotic spillover, you can watch the videos here. Two judges were mutually agreed upon, and for each judge that's convinced one way or the other, the loser (according to that judge) has to pay the winner $50,000. As a result the debates were pretty extensive - they went for a total of 17 hours, and the judges were pretty engaged, including asking written questions between rounds. The judges haven't released their decisions yet, but they will later this month.

For people who are inclined to disregard this survey: if the judges rule in favour of a zoonotic origin, would that count as relevant evidence in favour of zoonosis? Alternatively, if they rule in favour of a GoF lab origin, would that count as relevant evidence in favour of a lab leak?

This post makes me thankful the scientific method doesn't have a step for "survey a bunch of experts" or "do an anonymous opinion poll."  

I find very little to trust or value in a broad opinion polls about contentious, politically charged issues if the goal is to enlighten understanding of the root science involved.  

Experts know what the general public knows, plus knowledge and experience. An infinite number of experts but who still only have publicly available information should not increase your confidence over polling a single median unbiased expert. (All the polling of n experts does for you is smooth out biases and errors)

A single piece of strong evidence would trump all experts, such as :

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2023/06/15/covid-19-patients-zero-in-wuhan-identified-boosting-lab-leak-theory/amp/

I have no way of knowing if the above rumor is true, just if the lab staff were patient 0 that is a smoking gun for the lab leak theory.

I would be curious about how valuable people think knowing the origins would really move the dial on predicting or preventing some future event. 

I would think we have relatively good sample size for both zoonotic and lab-leak origins. Was there really something special about SARS-Cov-2 that getting the answer would really move our knowledge forward? If not, is it possible that the marginal step forward we might get is too little for all the political aspects that have existed?

Also I have just been made aware that only 22% of the experts claim to be aware of the DEFUSE grant proposal, versus 33% who claim to be aware of the nonexistent/fake Hanlen et al, 2022 study.

I think it's reasonable to just completely disregard the opinions of experts who haven't even heard of DEFUSE as it is such a crucial piece of evidence. Are these just bored virologists who read a few NYT articles and repeated the orthodoxy back? How could these people claim to be informed experts and not have heard of DEFUSE?

https://gcrinstitute.org/papers/069a_covid-origin-annex.pdf

Does it matter? The more important point here is that both zoonotic virus jumps and lab leaks are at-large risks that humanity should seek to reduce!

Surprised to read these threads without any reference to the Defuse proposal, documents of which were recently revealed to include even more detailed descriptions of features found in COVID-19 than the ones known previously.

Another thing that continues to surprise me in this discourse is not to have seen spelled out in terms of Bayes factors what to me seems the most straightforward way of thinking about the significance of the Defuse proposal as evidence, namely, that instead of thinking about the likelihoods of the features of the virus, we ask the competing hypotheses to explain the existence of the proposal itself and try to assess the Bayes factor P(Defuse|lab)/P(Defuse|natural).

Specifically, this involves estimating the probability that there exists a grant proposal, written less than 2 years before the outbreak by collaborators of the lab located in the city where the outbreak was first detected, proposing (among other things) to engineer a feature found in the natural virus:

• not seen before in closely related viruses
• defined by a 12 nucleotide insert when compared with closest relatives (i.e. the closest know relatives were not in any way close to evolving such a feature)
• in the same location as the feature appears in the natural virus in the spike protein at the S1/S2 junction

These are not the only detailed correspondences between the supposedly natural virus and the grant proposal, as is made clear in the US right to know piece. To me, the existence of such a plan seems to be a fluke of cosmic proportions under the natural hypothesis and totally unsurprising under a lab engineering hypothesis.

The typical likelihood based argument I have seen argues (correctly in my view) that the likelihood|lab of certain features mentioned in Defuse is vastly elevated when conditioning on Defuse and that therefore P(feature|lab, Defuse) >>P(feature|natural). One thing about this form of reasoning that many people don't seem to get is that the argument for P(feature|natural) being small is not based on some general view of what evolution is capable of achieving; instead it is based on the specificity of the feature in question. With Defuse, the challenge for the natural origin hypothesis is to argue for an elevated probability of a very specific outcome under the natural origin hypothesis. This can't be done by appealing to the general awesomeness of evolution, as this form of argument only underscores the vastness of the sample space of natural viruses of which the subset of the viruses with the specific feature is a tiny subset.

What becomes clearer if instead of P(feature|lab, Defuse) we use up the Defuse evidence by thinking about P(Defuse|Hypothesis) is that the lab engineered virus hypothesis is the only hypothesis H one can think of under which P(Defuse|H) is not tiny. 

I don't doubt that a lab leak is possible, but I would be curious to hear arguments about how, if it was leaked from the lab in Wuhan, it was spreading in Italy and Brazil months earlier: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122013068

It does make sense to me that a lab working with similar pathogens would be on the lookout for clusters of new disease and would be likely to sequence any new disease clusters. 

"more likely caused by a lab accident (aka lab leak) or zoonotic spillover"

False dichotomy.

One thing you can be sure of in Establishment "debate": the truth is not among the proffered options.

This video from 2019 of a Wuhan lab tech taking off his mask in a cave filled with bats certainly caused me to update my priors: