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.
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.
Note that Ralph Baric, a prominent scientist who has done gain of function research on SARS-like betacoronaviruses and was on the DEFUSE proposal lead by Daszak, signed an open letter with Jesse Bloom, Alina Chan, and others calling for further investigation of the lab leak hypothesis than had been done previously. So Daszak is apparently not so powerful that he's able to silence the whole field.
people could dissent
But I don't think this is how normies work. They don't first believe the truth, then strategically decide to lie about it to keep in good standing with the high-status people, then when you ask them anonymously revert to their true belief.
No, they don't look for truth at all. They look for what the high-status tribal belief is, then they go and believe that honestly and earnestly.
This is why we needed a 500k+ word sequence of blog posts to teach people what truth even is.
In addition to Roko's point that this sort of opinion-falsification is often habitual rather than a strategic choice that a person could opt not to make, it also makes strategic sense to lie in such surveys.
First, the promised "anonymity" may not actually be real, or real in the relevant sense. The methodology mentions "a secure online survey system which allowed for recording the identities of participants, but did not append their survey responses to their names or any other personally identifiable information", but if your reputation is on the line, would you really trust that? Maybe there's some fine print that'd allow the survey-takers to look at the data. Maybe there'd be a data leak. Maybe there's some other unknown-unknown you're overlooking. Point is, if you give the wrong response, that information can get out somehow; and if you don't, it can't. So why risk it?
Second, they may care about what the final anonymized conclusion says. Either because the lab leak hypothesis becoming mainstream would hurt them personally (either directly, or by e. g. hurting the people they rely on for funding), or because the final conclusion ending up in favour of the lab leak would still ref...
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 publish...
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...
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)
Imo mildly misleading. I expect large parts of the 85% to just not have read their mails, or to have been too busy to answer what may look to them like a mildly useful survey.
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. 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 :
I have no way of knowing if the a...
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?
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 compe...
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:
The Global Catastrophic Risks Institute conducted an anonymous survey of relevant experts on whether they thought COVID was more likely caused by a lab accident (aka lab leak) or zoonotic spillover. Their summary, bolding is mine:
Link to the main report is here, and link to their (much longer) methodological and analytical annex is here.
[EDIT: I currently think there are enough problems with the survey that they should be mentioned alongside the results.
Firstly, the sample seems to have been based on personalized outreach, rather than mass emails. This runs the risk of selection bias. [EDIT 2: I'm told that 'personalized outreach' looks more like "sending individual emails to everyone on a big list" than "the authors emailing their friends".] Also, some participants were recruited by recommendations from other participants, which may reduce the effective sample size by over-drawing from pools of people who agree with each other. [EDIT 2: But this was mitigated to some degree by disciplinary and geographic diversity.] [EDIT 3: See this comment and replies by one of the authors of the report on the survey.]
Secondly, the survey asked people if they were familiar with a few different papers that analyse the evidence for or against a lab leak. They also included a fake paper to see how often people lied about their familiarity. A third of the sample claimed to be familiar with a fake study, more than were familiar with one relevant piece of evidence, the DEFUSE proposal, but much fewer than were familiar with most other pieces of relevant evidence.]