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Turns out Altman is a lab-leak covid truther, calls virus 'synthetic' according to Spectator piece on AI risk. (archive.is)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (44 children)

Wait, I've been out for a bit - what was the actual consensus on Covid? I genuinely thought there was a Wuhan Lab that this all originated from?

I'm not a nut job, I can be reasoned with, i just need to update my beliefs with new info

[–] [email protected] 82 points 10 months ago (18 children)

I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.

The "lab leak theory", while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China's fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The racist connotations about the lab I knew about, but I didn't think it made it less true.

That being said, I just checked wikipedia:

Most scientists agree that, as with many other pandemics in human history,[1][2][3] the virus is likely derived from a bat-borne virus transmitted to humans via another animal in nature or during wildlife trade such as that in food markets.[11] Many other explanations, including several conspiracy theories, have been proposed.[12][13][14] Some scientists and politicians have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory. This theory is not supported by evidence.[15]

SARS-CoV-2 has close genetic similarity to multiple previously identified bat coronaviruses, suggesting it crossed over into humans from bats

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_COVID-19

and I think I remember seeing a study that showed the similarity of the sequence to other known sequences and it wasn't that dramatic a change.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

In the absence of any actual evidence, it does make it less true. Believing otherwise means ignoring all the obvious (but admittedly circumstantial) evidence that racism is super-fucking-popular. So Occam's Razor says if two theories have equal levels of zero evidence and one is inherently appealing to lizard brain, that one will gain prevalence so if you want to correct for that bias you have to bias in the opposite direction. How hard? Roll dice.

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