Sure, but the real news is it used to be taboo to say this - Sinophobic even. A lot of people are owed a serious apology.

The people who are owed an apology are the people who did nothing more than to believe that the wuhan coronavirus outbreak originated from the wuhan coronavirus research lab.

That was situated in a region known for coronaviruses

in which an evidence for zootipic origin couldn't be found.

Is that even true? Because I recall the opposite.

Why was it so stigmatized before and now it's the preferred hypothesis for FBI and DOE?

Good question! Perhaps 'Deep Trump'? Certainly even the 3 letter agencies are not immune to what at best we might call the reactionary right, at worst proto-fascism.

If you had actually read the article that you are supposed to be commenting on,you would realize that this statement of the title is done in "low confidence"

No one is gonna apologize to you if you are unable to parse information

I can parse fine, can you?

From the article:

> The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak

People used to be called racist for saying this!

I think it's different in that I think when the lab leak strategy was first introduced, it was introduced in an explicitly political manner, i.e. by a politician vs an (arguably) apolitical institution. There wasn't evidence presented to support this theory beyond the political pundits footballing the theory around, who were most certainly not medical research experts about this. At least this is how I saw it as a layperson who didn't do any serious research myself, so it all seemed like a load of political bs trying to score points instead of a seeking of actual truth.

So at first it did look like just plain ol' xenophobic politics to me. Only one party, the party that politically campaigned on xenophobia, was the one spreading the theory widely on their mainstream media.

I'm more than happy to accept lab leak theories from actual researchers who understand how to analyze outbreaks and not politicians trying to score points with voters. It just wasn't that at the beginning, probably because the researchers had to take the time to come to their conclusions.

Regular people here without a known political affiliation were ridiculed relentlessly for even mentioning the lableak hypothesis. Same goes for merely questioning lockdowns. I hope many of you are doing some serious reflection.

IDK what you mean by "here". I wasn't ridiculing anyone relentlessly and I didn't see relentless ridicule, mostly because dang generally bans people for bad faith/hostility/etc. So idk what you mean by "many of you", since you're clearly not talking to me.

I mean many people here on this forum during the worst of the pandemic. No, they weren’t modded or banned that I could tell.

It was not introduced with any political intent. It was introduced by people noticing that, wait a minute, that wet market you say the virus came from is right next to a huge virus lab, and you expect me to believe that it's a coincidence? The idea that this was a political statement is itself a piece of political propaganda.

If it's possible to greatly improve our species via gene editing, then it's grossly unethical to stand in the way if that progress.

Convince me I'm wrong.

"Progress" is something that emerges only in hindsight, and is a value judgement that embeds a perspective from which it is made. What we have in the present are choices, and possibilities, and estimations of their outcomes.

You could oppose this because you think it's unlikely to work at all, and so is a dead end and wasted effort. You could oppose it because you think it will work, but that the changes are not likely to be improvements.

Is a procedure that creates a new form of smarter, healthier, longer lived human progress? For them it certainly is. If they deny me that technology for my descendants, is it progress for them?

It is simply not going to break down so easily into "this is progress and progress is good." It will have consequences, some of them negative, many of them unexpected. It will be better for some people some of the time and worse for some people some of the time, like almost all changes are. Resisting change simply to slow it down and better understand and predict the effects is a valid stance as well. None of these things are inherently unethical.

Would you volunteer your child for experimental gene therapy to make them HIV resistant, a therapy that has never been proven to work and has an unknown risk of permanent side effects?

No, because the chance of my child getting HIV is ridiculously low.

If you shift it to make my child really smart or really pretty, the answer might be different - especially if the parents aren’t especially smart or good looking themselves.

Imagine laws that sanction mandatory "improvements" on the future subjects. To me, in that context, this "it's grossly unethical to stand in the way if that progress" is where the true (as in hardcore) politics begins. (Compare to that, the current politics, which deals in easy amendable decisions, feels like child play.) Then there is this dynamic we can all see in software development, with haste of feature addition and not much regard for other lesser aspects (in the marketable sense), that may cross into gene development. There are many more interesting angles that will pop up if you give it a thought...

Google is winding down and that's ok! There many exciting things to work on, and those things should be owned by the engineers working on them.

I understand, from a project management perspective, the need for a concerted, coordinated push to penalize widespread discrimination against a particular category of people. But I do not understand, from a legal perspective, why some groups are protected from discrimination while others are not.

> I believe the opposite position (that all discrimination against all people based on race is racism) is the underhanded approach

Your position is racist and perpetuates racism.

> most UK companies participating are not returning to the five-day standard, and a third are ready to make that change permanent

This is a confusing sentence.

I understand why you would do this, but I don't understand why you would admit to it.

> Except that half the code was made-up. One of the API calls that it was using doesn't exist (I wish it did!)

I've also been using ChatGPT to generate code for a specific library, and had the exact same experience. It uses an API that should exist, but not the one that does exist.

No it's not.

I've always thought consciousness is basically just feedback (like with microphones). Sensing yourself sensing yourself etc.

That's self-awareness. But it doesn't explain qualia like the sensation of the color red.

I suggest you look into Roger Scruton's interpretation of Wittgenstein's private language argument. I think it might go something like this:

You want an explanation for the sensation of the color red? Alright, I'll try, as long as you help me out: what exactly is the sensation of the color red? I need to have a good grasp on what we're talking about here.

Can you describe it? It's okay, take your time.

FIN

If you're trying to suggest qualia don't exist or don't have anything to do with consciousness, then sure you'll find some people who agree. But it's not a mainstream position.

And of course the entire point is that qualia are ineffable. That's part of the definition. It's the feature, not a bug. But if you want to deny that you have conscious sensation then go ahead. ;)

At some point I figured that "everything has qualia" and "qualia doesn't exist", when taken to their logical conclusions, are actually identical beliefs. Though I suspect I'll need quite a lot more crack cocaine to figure out how.

This argument is so empty of meaning it is itself ineffable.

What I'm saying is different from self awareness. Self awareness could arguably just be having a model of yourself. I'm talking about a sensory feedback loop.