Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Everything Wrong with Roko's Claims about an Engineered Pandemic, published by EZ97 on February 23, 2024 on LessWrong.
Premises
Here I tackle some bold claims made by Roko in three separate posts about SARS-CoV-2 being an engineered virus (Brute Force Manufactured Consensus is Hiding the Crime of the Century, The Math of Suspicious Coincidences, and A Back-Of-The-Envelope Calculation On How Unlikely The Circumstantial Evidence Around Covid-19 Is).
A first rebuttal to Roko's post is already out, and since I have been preparing this post for some time, certain arguments are going to be similar.
The purpose of this post is not to incontrovertibly demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 was of zoonotic origin, as I myself believe a laboratory leak to be somewhat plausible, but rather that the degree of Roko's confidence in the engineered-pandemic belief is terribly overstated in light of the presented evidence.
I believe that the RootClaim debate is a great way to familiarise oneself with core arguments from all sides, it is exceedingly comprehensive and up to date. I also found Wikipedia articles on the lab-leak hypothesis and adjacent topics to be pretty informative.
I definitely drew inspiration from many comments to the main post, if you recognise a comment in this post please let me know and I will link it.
A Set of Explainable Coincidences
Roko asserts that there the odds of zoonotic spillover are 1 in 80,000,000.
What are the chances that the bat coronavirus which caused a once in a century pandemic managed to navigate its way all the way from a Yunnan cave and home in on the city with the lab having the top Google hits for "Coronavirus China" and also the location of China's first BSL-4 lab? Well, that would be approximately 1 in 200, since that is the fraction of China's population in Wuhan.
'One-in-a-century' pandemic
The '1 in 200' figure is restated here as
Coincidence of Location: Wuhan is a particularly special place in China for studying covid-19; the WIV group was both the most important, most highly-cited group before 2020, and the only group that was doing GoF on bat sarbecoronaviruses as far as I know. Wuhan is about 0.5% of China's population. It's a suspicious coincidence that a viral pandemic would occur in the same city as the most prominent group that studies it.
First of all, a global pandemic is much more likely to start in a large city with high internal and external traffic, most of which are bound to have research centres for virology research, especially if one is referring to a fast-growing megacity of 11 million inhabitants. Secondly, a zoonotic spillover requires frequent and direct human-animal contact, and wet markets are strong candidates for this.
The cities with highest presence of wet markets with live animals per-capita are located in large Chinese cities in the centre-south (see the section 'From Yunnan to Wuhan' for more on this).
Roko writes that (italic added)
Coincidence of timing: several things happened that presaged the emergence of covid-19. In December 2017, the US government lifted a ban on risky pathogen research, and in mid-2018 the Ecohealth group started planning how to make covid in the DEFUSE proposal.
A natural spillover event could have happened at any time over either the last, say, 40 years or (probably) the next 40 years, though likely not much before that due to changing patterns of movement (I need help on exactly how wide this time interval is).
As explained throughout this post, global pandemics require a specific set of simultaneous circumstances, that is why most natural spillovers end up not being pandemics: because it is a rare combination of factors.
In China alone, natural spillovers of various kind take place quite literally all the time, which should lead to a much higher prior probability of zoonosis. A five-...
