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I watch TV in a pretty focused way where I take things in.

But I wasn't suggesting you watch it like a TV show; just that's a similar time commitment (ie not an unreasonable one).

For the claim that people generally seem to have updated towards zoonotic origin as a result of the debate? No formal evidence, of course, but do you spend much time on LW/ACX/other rationalist internet spaces? It seems an unavoidable conclusion, if a difficult one to produce evidence of.

Only the other day there was a significant debate on /r/ssc about whether the emphatic win for the zoonotic side meant that we were logically compelled to update in that direction, due to conservation of evidence (I argued against that proposition, but I seemed to be in the minority).

Evaluating arguments is easier to do when they are done via text.

Isn't there a transcript? In any case, this seems to be highly subjective, and in my opinion not hugely relevant anyway. To extend the analogy, your expectation of someone's having read foundational texts before making strong claims would hardly be lessened by the objection that the texts were hard to read.

I don't think anyone has shown that the debate contains specific arguments that Roko is unfamiliar with. 

Do we need to positively show that? As I mentioned, many intelligent, thoughtful people who were already very familiar with this question and its relevant facts updated significantly based on the debate. And Roko certainly hasn't explicitly addressed all of the arguments therein. Isn't that enough to suggest that he should at least watch it?

It's equivalent to watching a season of a TV show- is that really such an onerous requirement for making incredibly strong, potentially libellous claims about a contentious issue with serious real-world ramifications?

My source for that was Wikipedia, which in turn cites this article in the South China Morning Post:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3047238/why-wild-animals-are-key-ingredient-chinas-coronavirus-outbreak

Having now actually read the article, I didn't see the claim that it was the largest, so that may actually be made up.

But the article does make it clear that there was much more than seafood, with all sorts of animals including foxes, wolf cubs, snakes, hedgehogs, rats, frogs and palm civets.

The problem with "lab-leak is unlikely, look at this 17-hour debate" is that it is too short an argument, not a too long one.

It isn't an argument, it's a citation. 

I don't think a 17 hour debate is "inaccessible" to someone who is invested in this issue and making extremely strong, potentially very seriously libellous claims without having investigated some of the central arguments on the question at hand.

A foundational text in some academic field might take 17 hours to read, but you would still expect someone to have read it before making a priori wild claims that contradicted the expert consensus of that field very radically. I don't think you'd take that person seriously at all if they hadn't, and would in fact consider it very irresponsible (and frankly idiotic) for them to even make the claims until they had.

That's not to say that this debate should be treated as foundational to the study of this question, exactly, but... well, as I said elsewhere:

This debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly."

I think that makes familiarising yourself with those arguments (whether from the debate or another equivalent-or-better source) a prerequisite for making the kind of strong, confident claims Roko is making. At the moment, he's making those claims without the information necessary to be anywhere near as confident as he is.

This is fair, but as I said elsewhere:

I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly. I think it's reasonable to expect someone to consume that information before claiming near-certainty on the question.

The arguments there seem like they have to be worth at least familiarising yourself with and considering before you claim as high a confidence as you are claiming (especially given that most people seem to have been swayed in the opposite direction to your claim).

In other words: yes, you have to select a finite subset to engage with, and I think there is good reason to include this debate within that subset.

That seems to generalize to "no-one is allowed to make any claim whatsoever without consuming all of the information in the world".

I would say that it generalises to 'one shouldn't make a confident proclamation of near-certainty without consuming what seems to be very relevant information to the truth of the claim'. Which I would agree with.

I think what is missing here is that this debate has been cited repeatedly in rationalist spaces, by people who were already quite engaged with the topic, familiar with the evidence, and in possession of carefully-formed views, as having been extremely valuable and informative, and having shifted their position significantly. I think it's reasonable to expect someone to consume that information before claiming near-certainty on the question.

Isn't the fact that it's the largest wet market in central China relevant here? Surely that greatly increases the chance of it travelling to Wuhan specifically in a zoonotic origin scenario, because animals are brought there from all around.

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