Making stealth edits was Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of Truth.
Please someone write an unstealthing service, a cross between Wayback Machine and diff, that outputs a feed of such edits.
I'd love to see a trend of sites surfacing changes themselves and serving up a per-article history like Wikipedia or GitHub. Bonus if they annotate the changes. In this case they could just write something like "the lab escape theory still looks unlikely but we're now less certain of that".
If only it existed for the content too, when I had the unpleasant experience of being interviewed by them they changed the article many many times.
In fact, in my whole career the NYT journalist was the most unprofessional, unethical one. They knowingly took things I said out of context and portrayed them to mean the opposite things.
Startup founders, I advise you to decline NYT interviews, they are extremely unscrupulous.
I wish there was a way to know how much exposure each version of information received. Retractions often don’t have the corrective effect of setting the record straight because few read an older article that got an update but isn’t on the front page anymore.
Basically cases of covid had occurred before the cluster reported from the Huanan wet market, and no connection could be established between these cases and the marketplace
Vox's "innovation" is having undated, occasionally-updated articles that present the current state of a topic, kind of like Wikipedia. They see this as a feature.
They could have easily made the edits as corrections showing both original and corrected content. That they did not warrants the assumption of intent to deceive.
I'm severely lacking in the virology department, but what I have read is that it clearly is, without a doubt, not man made.
That leaves the escape from lab hypothesis. Which is certainly has not been disproved. Maybe the scientific community should just ask themselves, how could it have happened and how could it have been avoided?
I don't believe at all in blaming China, that is just xenophobia in disguise. Would you blame India for the Indian variant, or the UK for the British variant?
Like or dislike the Chinese government, question how much it cares about saving face versus protecting the international community, sure.
But name a time since the dawn of commercial air travel 1950-2019 where a country, much less the country with the largest population on earth, suspended all air travel for any reason, much less a flu they'd only discovered a few weeks prior.
I have my doubts on how many other countries would've isolated their entire population and suspended travel in and out if given the same time line and information.
Do you really think if a flu outbreak had been detected in the US that we would have suspended ALL travel in and out of the country in December of 2019 only a few weeks after becoming aware of it?
It's been a century since this last happened, no one alive in 2019 really had any memory of such a catastrophe unfolding. I think China would've been called alarmist, totalitarian, and an unreliable business partner, had they taken the full measures of lockdown early enough to possibly prevent it spreading internationally.
I certainly dislike the Chinese government for many reasons, among them the handling of human rights. But I do agree with you on that one.
Especially when you look at the actual timeline, where COVID was already unfolding in China and Western countries were still hesitant to do anything. It was a whole month from COVID becoming an non-issue in some far-away place in China to a global poandemic. China was already building field hospitals while the world did nothing.
> I have my doubts on how many other countries would've isolated their entire population and suspended travel in and out if given the same time line and information.
The rest of society is easily the shittiest thing to peg your morality against.
You can find echoes of your hypothetical in the laments of those who firmly believe that Trump's response was both inadequate and authoritarian/racist. There is no winning.
Here at [internet company] we care deeply about fact checking, so we are pleased to announce that we no longer consider [x] to be a debunked conspiracy theory, so you are now permitted to post links to news articles about [x] without being banned from our platform for spreading disinformation.
I don’t really care, as a reader, if Vox claims to treat their articles as “living” articles. This feels like a cover up for the past aggressive shutdown of the lab leak hypothesis, pushed by journalists and activists, who often did so only to attack Trump in an election year where they were desperate for any leverage. Such stealthy edits are avoidance of accountability that is long overdue for the journalism industry. Don’t let them get away with it: https://spectator.us/topic/media-u-turn-lab-leak-coronavirus...
It seems like a lab leak was always the most parsimonious explanation. Now that we aren’t in the middle of Covid and don’t have a distractingly incompetent administration I think we are going to see a re-estimation of probabilities and a lot of attempts to rewrite history. The Lancet and quite a few other really respected institutions published things I suspect they’ll now need to try walk back.
This is whole story is absurd! For this to be true the following should have all been lying:
- researchers
- the most influential science magazines
- China, the USA and many other governments
- the WHO and other health organizations
- the media
- people on HN, Reddit and any social media platform that made me believe that the lab leak was never an option.
Many responsible adults jumped on the 'it can't be man made' bandwagon out of instinct.
It feels like the kind of narrative that could lead to destabilization and may be fueled by xenophobia.
But beyond the responsible adults there are few people in the world that can study the genome and they never really had internal consensus. They had internal consensus to downplay the 'its made in a lab' conclusion, but there is no clear evidence of the opposite.
Keep in mind at that moment in time this would give ammunition to general public to harass random asian looking individuals.
You can imagine that's a not a conclusion you want to exist in the head of your common hooligan.
You can also imagine that most people convinced of anything are just, ehm, idiots. Because if you can't do the science yourself, or if you can't but haven't, it would be foolish to believe any kind of consensus where most of the people talking also can't or haven't done the science themselves. The majority is always wrong, and scientific consensus of a new event becomes insightfully about 10 years in after a few revolutions of ideas like the one currently happening.
It is in the end just a economic system of gatekeeping by a cabal. A cabal very much in a situation of economic dependency on political structures. So there can't be a scientific consensus about this in the media. Only a political one.
> Many responsible adults jumped on the 'it can't be man made' bandwagon out of instinct.
A common error or misrepresentation seemed to be conflation of "lab escape" with "man made." They're not the same thing; a virus from nature (smallpox etc.) could still escape from a lab.
A lot of people spoke authoritatively without authoritative knowledge.
That's certainly a type of lying, but perhaps not an extremely willful kind. Making false statements because you wholeheartedly believe them to be true is still lying, perhaps wholly unbeknownst to the speaker.
It would seem that we're collectively dialing back to "origin still inconclusive" instead of kneejerk "definitely NOT criminal negligence by $COUNTRY".
That appears reasonable, and probably would have been the original take if not for all of the extreme anti-China agitprop that is the norm seemingly everywhere in the USA's mass media these days.
TBH the source does not matter one bit, any more than the identity of Satoshi. Covid is here and must be addressed as it exists; the origin story is just narrative fuel. People eat that irrelevant shit up, because we're still basically "They did WHAT? to WHOM?!" narrative-obsessed little monkeys.
Just to confirm whether I interpreted your post correctly, are you saying that even if a containment breach occured, understanding the source and how it occured does not matter at all? Procedures would not need to be reviewed, facility design not reconsidered, people or organization not disciplined for failing to adhere to protocol. No learnings to be gained?
I feel the exact opposite. If the source of exposure ended up being proven to be lab-leak (beyond a reasonable doubt), I would want to understand how it happened and what measures needed to be taken to prevent this event re-occuring, even if it only occured due to gross-negligence and not malice.
I assume you are being ironic, and the point is an interesting one.
It's worth examining what caused a confluence of information sources to aggressively discredit a theory they are now presenting as plausible, and how they are handling what seems like a dramatic shift in perspective, as well as the causes for the shift.
Moreover, it's worth considering how we can better analyze and verify news media and other information sources. I notice many errors and misrepresentations in areas where I have personal knowledge and expertise, but I tend to accept news reports at face value in areas where I have little expertise or knowledge.
Organisations and people will happily go with their side's narrative, regardless of scientific accuracy.
Most likely, in this specific case, there was a political reason to save the face of the Chinese Communist party (who omitted information, so it's likely at fault here); someone probably got paid in some form, circulated fake news and the rest of the media / political machine just repeated their side's safe source.
This is why you can't just "trust the experts" and that's why the scientific process is a continuous work in progress which needs multiple people thinking and debunking each other.
Sure, the experts consensus is a safe default - certainly safer than believing random individuals saying the opposite on the internet - but experts can be wrong and conspiracy theories sometimes turn out to be true.
In other news UK government along with Boris Johnson claims that UK policy was not initially based on reaching herd immunity through uncontrolled spread of the virus.
Part of the reason “conspiracy theories” are more popular than ever is the media’s a bunch of vomit-encrusted lying shills without the self awareness to even pretend they’re unbiased any more. The media in general will never recover from Trump, he broke them thoroughly and completely, forever.
Doesn't Vox consider articles living artifacts and regularly change them as they become more informed? More like a wiki that's meant to be highly relevant in search results?
I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but it's their self-inflicted mode of operation.
Please someone write an unstealthing service, a cross between Wayback Machine and diff, that outputs a feed of such edits.
I'd love to see a trend of sites surfacing changes themselves and serving up a per-article history like Wikipedia or GitHub. Bonus if they annotate the changes. In this case they could just write something like "the lab escape theory still looks unlikely but we're now less certain of that".