Matt Taibbi's COVID reporting

To take some version of the opposite side: If we managed to figure out that, say, there was an X% chance per year of lab-leaking something like COVID, and a Y% chance per year of natural origin + wet market crossover producing something like COVID... that would determine the expected-value badness of lab practices and wet market practices, and the respective urgencies of doing something about them.  It wouldn't matter which specific thing happened in 2019.  (For an analogy, if the brakes on your car stopped working for 30 seconds while you were on the highway, this would be extremely concerning and warrant fixing, regardless of whether you managed to avoid crashing in that particular incident.)

That said, it seems unlikely that we'll get decent estimates on X and Y, and much more unlikely that there would be mainstream consensus on such estimates.  More likely, if COVID is proven to have come from a lab leak, then people will do something serious about bio-lab safety, and if it's proven not to have come from a lab leak, then people will do much less about bio-lab safety; this one data point will be taken as strong evidence about the danger.  So, getting an answer is potentially useful for political purposes.

(Remember: SARS 1 leaked from a lab 4 times.  That seems to me like plenty of evidence that lab leaks are a real danger, unless you think labs have substantially improved practices since then.)

I don't get the downvotes, this post is just agreeing with the OP.

I think the motivation to suppress the lab leak theory was to avoid compounding the crisis at the time with anti-Chinese sentiment, including racist attacks on Chinese Americans. Emotions were running really high.

I think we'll now see little energy for continuing that bias, and more energy for correctly identifying the source to prevent future pandemics from similar origins.

TBF, I predict that the public debate will still resemble a dumpster fire, as do most complex human affairs. Humans are cute, not smart.

 only one would involve investigators missing something?

Investigators always miss something and we are likely going to find more information in the future. 

That doesn't change the fact that we have overwhelming evidence.

If you look at the article in Public, it makes the case: We know that the people at the WIV put a Furin cleavage side via gain-of-function modification into a Coronaviruses and we know that they did their research without the safety precautions that you would need and we know that one of the first patients was one of the people working with Coronaviruses at the WIV.

That's already a quite good argument and I can see why it alone isn't enough for 99.9% confidence but we are not limited to it. 

Meta question: If you think there is a 1 in 1000 chance that you are wrong

I don't think that credence is well thought of that way. Attempts to change my mind might change my credence even if they don't change it to me thinking that a natural origin would be the most likely. 

I don't trust Seymour Hersh's anonymous sources more than 70/30, even when The New Yorker publishes his pieces.   

My own beliefs don't rest on a single piece. I don't think that anyone should hold credence that is as high as mine just because they read this article. 

Like, what are the odds that the anonymous sources are members of the intelligence community who are saying it now as part of the [CIA's, NSA's, whatever's] current political strategy relative to China?

Is that's the CIA position they could have just changed the official CIA position and say "We uncovered new evidence and now believe that the lab leak theory is more likely" there would have been no reason to tell a story about how they overruled their own analysts to hide the lab leak theory.  The story as it stands damages the reputation of those agencies and I think "The CIA does what's good for the CIA" is a good heuristic to think about their actions. 

Sarcastically: Some uptick in the betting markets on Ron DeSantis ...

But actually? I doubt any consequences. I agree that we'll continue with "gain of function." I'm more worried that secret labs developing biological weapons will be (re)started based on "gain of function" given that there was such a successful demonstration. A lab leak from someplace like that is even more likely to be a civilization killer than anything bats and pangolins were ever going to do to us.

What are some of the real-world consequences to this?

It seems that Fauci and Collins already saw the writing on the wall when the Republicans got the majority in Congress and decided to end their careers. That means they can't be fired for it. 

After misleading the public in the Iraqi WMD case, there was some accounting in the media and an attempt to improve structures to avoid getting lied to by authorities. It's possible that our media institutions aren't completely lost and will do some accounting of why they failed to inform us. 

It's highly inconvenient for the establishment because it means that the establishment was wrong to censor the lab leak theory.

It's also highly inconvenient for all those inside of the establishment who want to to gain of function research or cover up past gain of function research. 

Matt Taibbi's reporting suggests that it was inconvenient enough that a three-letter agency decided to overrule their analysts. 

The names of the WIV employees are new information. The WIV actually putting Furin cleavage sites into Coronoviruses in 2019 is new information. An US intelligence agency overruling their own analysts is new information.

The article you links to says:

But in its report, which arrived belatedly on June 23, the U.S. Intelligence Community, or IC, does not substantiate any of these details. 

[...]

The 10-page report, which does not name any individuals, says the IC “continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19.”

Interestingly, the article leaves out the fact that they IC is in violation of the law by not naming the individuals given that they have been tasked with declassifying all the information. 

I see no reason to leave out that crucial fact if your intention is not to misinform the reader. The fact that the IC is willing to violate the law and does not declassify the information is indiscriminating evidence.   

If they would have nothing to hide, why would they violate the law?