The Death of Nuance

 On 20 Jul 2023, Alex Gutentag, Leighton Woodhouse and Michael Shellengberger published a piece titled Covid Origins Scientist Denounces Reporting On His Messages As A “Conspiracy Theory” (archived) which contains links to two documents, one containing Slack comments and the other containing emails between Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry – the authors of “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” (archived pre-print | published).

 

The existence of this was hinted at by JP (of climate denial fame, see earlier posts that started in earnest at Ice Extent Challenge).  He didn’t, of course, just say “interesting piece at this website”.  Oh no, it was a single SMS, “And now we have covid-gate.  Grist for the mill.”  I actually thought it was a joke.  Unfortunately no.  About two hours later I dug a little and found the article mentioned above.

 

And, naturally, he wasn’t going to actually read the slack messages and emails.  He’s too busy, but he was nevertheless convinced that the paper (The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 – let’s call it “Proximal Origins” as Shellenberger etc do) should never have been published.  He wasn’t even going to read the paper (although he later said he had skimmed it and knew the main conclusions, which on cajoling he summarised as “Lab leak is bunkum. Only explanation is zoonotic source”).

 

Ok.  So, I am not going to go into detail of why it’s probably better to look at original documents than rely on videos that come up in your YouTube feed.  This post is about the death of nuance.

 

JP is all about nuance.  There’s no grand conspiracy, it’s all social contagion, social pressure.  You just need to listen to the heterodoxes for your serving of truth, but you need to be discerning because sometimes even the most brilliant people might say something that isn’t 100% true.  So, you know, nuance.

 

My view on nuance is a little different.  Things are complicated.  Some things we simply can’t know.  Sometimes we know that we can’t actually know something for sure, but we can take a balance of probability approach.  The story which by necessity involves large groups of people acting together to deliberately and effectively hide the truth from us is probably not the real story – even if you can convince yourself that they are doing this organically rather than deliberately.

 

JP is also into narratives, whereas I prefer to deal in facts, despite knowing that sometimes those facts are not available.

 

And that is a problem.  I worry that this sort of big reveal by Shellenberger and friends, like the University of East Anglia email saga (also known as Climate-gate) will have a chilling effect on research, and the discovery/confirmation of facts.

 

Science works best if there is an open exchange of ideas, including bad ideas and partially developed ideas and preliminary ideas.  Get the ideas out there, discuss them, test them and ditch those that don’t stand up to scrutiny.  Sometimes, possibly rarely though, what initially seem to be bad ideas turn out to be really good ideas, the sorts of ideas that revolutionise science.

 

In this instance, there were a few credible ideas about where Covid came from – directly from bats, from bats via another animal, from culturing of a natural virus in a lab (and then accidental release) and from genetic engineering of a virus in a lab (and then accidental release).  Plus some much less credible ideas – deliberate insertion of HIV into the virus (release mechanism unclear), deliberate engineering and release of the virus to target white (and black) people, and so on.

 

In the early weeks of Covid, the authors of Proximal Origins discussed the possibility of a lab leak.  They actually favoured a lab leak as the origin.  But as evidence mounted, they changed their minds and began to favour natural origin, without declaring the lab leak impossible.  Proximal Origins was pre-published almost a month before the declaration of a pandemic.  Even the formal publishing was less than a week after that declaration (and had been in the works for a while before that).

 

The authors did not know for sure, at that time, that Covid would become a pandemic, nor that it would be as serious a pandemic as it came to be.  The signs were there and I recall, perhaps erroneously now, that I thought it was going to be a pandemic well before the official announcement – at the very least I had set up a spreadsheet and was already tracking the numbers as early as 10 February 2020 and I had never done that before.  But nevertheless, it was very early days when the Proximal Origins authors started putting together the paper.  This was a very good time to be considering all options, discussing furiously what seemed to be a good idea to you and what ideas from others seemed to have massive holes in them.

 

However, if scientists know or fear that anything they say, in semi-private Slack chats, or emails, might be picked apart by hostile bloggers and commentators … they may well stay silent.

 

This won’t necessarily sound a death knell to all scientific collaboration, since it’s still possible to talk in person or over the phone, but as I said, it could have a chilling effect.  It’s often the case, for me at least, that it helps to get my thoughts down on paper, or in pixels, rather than trying to engage in a discussion which can often be hijacked by some other interest of the day (much as the intro to this post was, who the hell is JP after all? what do you care?)  I think many of us would lose a lot if we were badgered into not writing anything down for fear of some moron using it against us in the future.

 

A move away from being able to share ideas openly over email or other recorded mechanisms will only hurt us – all of us.

 

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And is there anything worrisome in the Slack messages and emails?  No, it’s just some guys talking about their work and one joke about the French.