01.03.2026 21:59
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They Built It. Now They're Bombing It.
The 1980 October Surprise didn't just put Reagan in the White House. GOP operatives also sided with repressive Islamists who took control of the Iranian revolution and squashed the forces of secular democracy.
open.substack.com/pub/craigung...
But the problem is that the lunatic RFK Jr already has a much, much bigger platform and presence than e.g. Hotez. So debating him would seem to have potential upside and little downside.
Admittedly, I had low priors for Bayes' theorem appearing in a Superbowl ad.🧪
Agreed. As you know, it's not easy to avoid that habit. E.g. your (previous?) views on covid origins. But meanwhile, keep up the good work in MN!
Many of my science colleagues are not speaking out-I suspect due to the fear Phil notes, that they'll targeted for loss of funding. I hope they read this account of what happened at a faculty meeting at Frankfurt University in 1933 as the Nazi's took control 🧪
www.facinghistory.org/resource-lib...
Ioannidis pulled a neat trick in that one. He combined a low-ball IFR obtained from overestimating the infection rate with a very-low-ball estimate of how many would end up infected. The latter was, so far as I could tell, just pulled out his ass. Minimizers who should have known better liked it.
JB is a master at weaving together broad truisms, specific truths, and, at crucial points, evasions and lies into a coherent-sounding narrative. Even the sympathetic right-wing interviewer, Douthat, tries to break through the evasions at points, but doesn't succeed.
To repeat: It is highly improbable that I would agree with Bill Kristol.
I agree with him 100%. ICE has become the gestapo. They need to go.
Just saw a Minneapolis protestor yelling at ICE, near shooting site, "We will not forgive you." Correct.
In 1987 when the Norwegians picked Arias over Gronlund, Kogut, Wright & me for the Nobel Peace prize, we were disappointed but too slow-witted to threaten to start a war in response.
Yep. Some false positives. Zero false negatives.
Hard to tell if you're doing a deliberate statistical parody.
An outlier point can dominate Pearson but not Spearman.
Both sides, it seems. Drives me nuts.
That just indicates that it's not all from outliers. It's the arrows pointing to species that are important.
I guess your point is that the negative association with suspected potential non-human hosts isn't surprising because it's respiratory. But it's also respiratory in humans, with whose mtDNA it's positively associated.
I've been willing to disrupt consensus when I thought it was wrong. Insisting that the public change its (correct) opinion on SC2 origins as part of the package of persuading them to change their largely incorrect views on masks, vaccinations, and air quality is counterproductive.
Maybe he means the DEFUSE grant application and its preliminary drafts.
s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21...
usrtk.org/wp-content/u...
Thanks, perhaps it would help to talk with your UWA colleague, Jesse Bloom.
Meanwhile, you might have a look at my Bayes analysis and see what you think is right or wrong.
michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconve...
2/2 You're trying to argue for vax, NPIs, etc. Good stuff. Why go out of your way to drag in a claim (zoonosis) that is overwhelmingly disbelieved by the population you're trying to persuade? It may signal group identity but it undercuts persuasion. And, as it happens, it's wrong.
1/2 Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the Bayes factors (outbreak location, type of virus, lack of detected or even plausible prior host, pre-adaptation, unusually coded FCS insert, rare restriction enzyme site pattern) weren't conclusive. So drop "far-fetched".
But perhaps most important, if our goal is to encourage good interventions (vax, clean air, appropriate masks...), then unnecessarily tossing in a claim that the vast majority of the population thinks (correctly) is BS undermines our effort.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
A paper that I think uses weak methods pointing toward LL:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38488186/
My own detailed Bayesian analysis of many factors, using standard hierarchical/robust Bayesian methods.
michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconve...
On the specific case for a lab leak, a mild version leaning slightly toward lab:
www.bfmtv.com/sante/le-cov...
3/? On how the Worobey and Crits-Christoph papers got the mtDNA-RNA link backwards:
academic.oup.com/ve/article/1...
2/?
More on Worobey
academic.oup.com/jrsssa/artic...
On Pekar 2022, which is absolutely flat-out wrong mathematically See my eletter at the bottom of the Science paper, or for more exposition
arxiv.org/abs/2510.01484
(peer-reviewed version early next year, I hope)
or arxiv.org/abs/2502.20076
1/too many
Let's start with papers showi9ng that the key zoonotic papers range from flat-out wrong to extremely shaky.
On Worobey (shaky, invalid)
doi.org/10.1093/jrss...
outside paywall
arxiv.org/abs/2401.08680
At eye doc now Stay tuned
Your important points about predictions and interventions are undermined by being tied to the increasingly far-fetched claim that it wasn't a lab leak. Why not leave nonsense claims to Ioannidis et al. rather than make an unforced error?
🧪I prepared some highly organized tutorial lessons for MDs on Bayesian differential diagnosis. They just cover the very basics but I hope somebody (not just MDs) finds them useful.
michaelweissman.substack.com/p/bayesian-d...