Scott Alexander recycles a phrase he seems to have invented.
The whole process was a very clear example of a respectability cascade. There’s some position which is relatively commonly held, but considered beyond the pale for respectable people. In the beginning, the only people who will say it openly are extremely non-respectable people who don’t mind getting cast out of normal society for their sin. Everyone attacks them, but afterwards they are still basically standing, and their openness encourages slightly more respectable people to say the same thing. This creates a growing nucleus of ever-more-respectable people speaking openly, until eventually it’s no longer really that taboo and anyone who wants can talk about it with only minor stigma.
We may be witnessing a respectability cascade for the view that the virus probably escaped from a lab in Wuhan. I hope that someday we witness a respectability cascade for the view that anti-racism is baloney sandwich.
Russiagate hoax, Wuhan lab leak, Hunter Biden and then Brian Sicknick.
Mainstream media is walking around with egg on its face, a couple of black eyes, and pantsed.
Even worse, who can anybody blame a segment of the US population for believing in “fake news.”
Why do we care if the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan?
I can’t think of anything, but I’m open to someone giving some suggestions as to why. I can understand that politics of it but since I don’t care about that stuff I’m not sure why it matters to me. What would anyone do differently if it escaped from a lab?
I’m mostly just really annoyed that people weren’t allowed to even talk about it. That kind of thing is a really bad development.
We would ideally try pretty hard not to do this type of research in the future. Though I’m not sure we would win even that battle given the political pull of ‘Science.’
It doesn’t sound all that different from the arguments against bio-warfare research in general.
Sure, like a meltdown turns people against nuclear this might turn people against bio warfare research, but this was always a possibility before and it wasn’t enough to win the argument.
Maybe I’m personalizing this, but what your saying is that if it became public knowledge it might possibly but probably not have an impact on some arcane aspect of defense research I can have no impact on. That’s great for people specifically involved in that area, but its not the kind of thing I really care what was true personally. It’s out. It happened. I have to deal with it either way.
It’s not just defense research but biomedical research. Most gain-of-function virus research is for medical purposes rather than to make bioweapons.
The way I see it, if it was a lab leak, it means maybe we should respond to this kind of research the way people respond to nuclear meltdowns, only in the latter case the response is generally ridiculous, whereas now it may make sense, since this one instance of hypothetical virus-research-gone-wrong would be like 5 orders of magnitude as bad as all the nuclear meltdowns in history.
I+1
So the bottom line is that if its a lab leak that might cause specialist in some technical areas to do thing differently.
None of that will involve me or effect me. It requires no input on my part, and what I’ve had to deal with as a result of COVIDs leak is the same no matter where it came from.
Well, many reasons. But after we accept the “escape” theory, a “released” theory is right around the corner.
Yep. Note that was written in April last year, and that site was quickly banned by Facebook and shadow-banned from Google search.
I think the fear is that if the Chinese can be seen as responsible for the virus as opposed to nature (read: “no one”), anti-Asian violence would skyrocket, at least in the U.S. I can’t remember where I read it now, but I recall that at least one of the scientists involved in the ‘official’ investigation expressing that sentiment.
Countries other than China have leaked pathogens in the past and the 2014 moratorium on some types of research might be connected to belated suspicions of a different lab leak many years ago. The 2001 anthrax attacks might have used material deliberately removed from a lab. Plenty of blame to go around. It’s a technological protection deficiency and regulation problem. Why was the moratorium lifted in 2017?
I suspect the “Anti-Asian violence” narrative is largely bogus. There was a broad crime spike in 2020 in cities across the US (and Canada?) affecting all races, including Asians. That crime spike was probably due to the wave of riots and the lockdowns. The narrative that Asians were specifically being targeted due to the virus coming from China or the phrase “China Virus” are politically motivated narratives and not true.
What would anyone do differently if we knew for sure it was a lab leak?
That’s an easy question. It’s a technological protection deficiency issue and a regulation issue. This means that if we knew for certain that it was a lab leak we would invest more in research in how to better contain dangerous materials while still working with them. We would do that research sooner and with more money. We would regulate it more severely.
The type of research done there aims to teach humanity how to prevent viruses from animals causing epidemics.
I the research itself has caused a global pandemic, then don’t you think that tells us a but about the cost-benefit balance?
To flip it around: If we didn’t care, why bother to squelch the question?
Let’s assume it was just a lab accident. What was the lab doing with it? Did the lab apply the usual safeguards? Are the usual safeguards adequate? Even if it’s not our business to sanction the people involved, lots of places run labs like that and we should wonder.
Respectability cascade sounds like the old story about how anything positive that departs from the conventional is first greeted with “that’s crazy,” then “there may be something to it, but it would never work,” and finally “I was for it all along.”
“Baloney sandwich”, too true.
It is strange that a lab leak could possibly be considered beyond the pale by anybody at any time in history. I don’t know what you have been reading and hearing that would lead you to the opposite impression.
People have always been terrified by deployment and experimentation with technology. There is especially a fear around things we cannot see, like gases, radiation, pathogens, and carcinogenic molecules. We have laboratory fume hoods and laboratory gloveboxes. We have cleanroom suits because we fear pathogens and that our semiconductors become contaminated. We quarantined Apollo astronauts. We have workers making very short shifts at the Fukushima reactor. We had Honey Ryder rinse off her contamination before being allowed to meet Doctor No. In my opinion a lab leak has always been a respectable hypothesis and our reality and our fiction illustrate that we have always had a healthy fear of the invisible.
Wokism seems designed to cause “reverse respectability cascades,” backed not only by cancel culture and unjustified shaming campaigns (major media backed by big tech) but also violence (Antifa/BLM) against anyone who tries to stop or reverse the cascade. This is how it worked in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and it is happening here too.
I believe to stop the bad cascades and allow the good ones to happen, we will have to fight back with the same means that both types of enemy are using. Thus we need both more Project Veritases and more Kyle Rittenhouses.
Intellectual virtuosity such as you are trying to foster via the FITs seems to me mostly useless because mobs won’t listen to it and institutions (government and media) are mostly controlled by malicious bad guys. Defeating them may or may not require physical violence but it at least requires both political campaigning and the aggressive use of lawyers and courts.
” I hope that someday we witness a respectability cascade for the view that anti-racism is baloney sandwich.”
Not likely. Notice that almost all of Scott’s examples are basically just one triumph of progressivism after another, often just the removal of unprincipled exceptions in the most politically expedient path of least resistance, and usually following the logical implications of supporting strong state interventions to liberate the oppressed from their oppression and remedy the inequities resulting therefrom.
Somehow a respectability cascade never works to shift the Overton Window to the right, which is how you know these aren’t isolated instances of random fashions, but instead all part of the same big phenomenon. That why one should be alarmed and not sanguine about these things burning themselves out or whatever, when we never see them reversed, and every struggle is just a mild speed-bump on the way to the next struggle.
In the case of anti-racism, it’s pretty clear why. The trick was to have eliminated the possibility of there being any culturally respectable way to explain why the premises of anti-racism are provably, empirically false. Murray is probably going to say it in his new book, which, if it is even actually published and stocked in hard copy in brick and mortar bookstores, I will have to buy in person with cash, because I can’t afford to have that disrespectable purchase in my financial records.
And if you can’t explain this, then your anti-anti-racism doesn’t make sense. Anti-anti-racism cannot be validated except in terms of finding ‘natural thus innocent’ explanations for undeniable and incredibly large racial disparities that thus don’t justify the obnoxious remedial efforts to achieve ‘equity’ (i.e., ‘identity quotas’), the shaming struggle sessions, and the rest of the Cultural Revolution toolkit.
Also, it’s easy to see these as “respectability cascades” from the perspective of someone who supports such changes, but in reality, they were at least as much “disrespectability cascades” in the sense that opposition to such changes was seen as low status at best, or more often stupid, irrational, bigoted, and evil. The gradual shift in opinion against tobacco cigarette smoking was a disrepectability cascade, which amusingly happened at the same time as increased tolerance for smoking cannabis. Vaping nicotine juice is a lot safer than smoking an unfiltered joint, but attitudes don’t quite line up with the paternalistic nanny-state ‘public health’ rationale.
What might persuade me to change my mind about this is a good example of something in post-war era that started as respectable, became seriously disrepectable, and then switched direction and became perfectly respectable again.
the backlash against anti-racism is already gaining steam, even (especially?) in reliably progressive districts like West Los Angeles. I think this has all the markings of a moral panic that will eventually, maybe even quickly, subside
Anti-anti-racism cannot be validated except in terms of finding ‘natural thus innocent’ explanations for undeniable and incredibly large racial disparities…
“The conservative establishment cannot say ‘race doesn’t matter’ while having no plausible explanation for huge race disparities. This is why ‘colorblindness’ as a political ideology is a failure, and why all the energy on issues of race is on the left and the far-right. (I’m not talking about ‘colorblindness’ at the micro/individual level, but rather at a macro/social/ideological level.)”
– @a_centrism
https://twitter.com/a_centrism/status/1394723466574811138
Does Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening count as a shift of the Overton window to the right? Granted that is a terrifying precedent of how much damage the left has to do before people will reconsider and change directions.
Wow, that’s spot on. I hadn’t connected those dots, but if you read that McNeil thing you can clearly see it in action. It has nothing to do with new information. All the basic facts are essentially the same as last year. Most of what’s in Wade’s article was in the NYMag (Nicholas Baker) article from earlier. Both Wade and McNeil are former NYTimes reporters because of left wing heresies. (Wade wrote a book on population genetics that deviated from the extreme-blank sate position.) I wonder if McNeil would have written the same article had he not been defenestrated. Did his loss of respectability bring him close enough to Wade to bridge between the latter and the right thinking public?
Robert Wright pointed to something similar in a recent substack essay. When Jimmy Carter called Israel an apartheid state, he was roundly denounced. But then prominent US intellectuals like Peter Beinart started using the term and now Human Rights Watch and even Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem are making the claim.
Note that I think the claim is specious, but it does seem to represent a “respectability cascade.”
Brett Weinstein has a good tweet thread on this topic: https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1394773053180059649
In 2020, most “respectable” establishment voices were focused on branding Trump and Trump-adjacent figures as radioactive; and were not concerned with accurately investigating the Wuhan lab leak theory.
Brett Weinstein isn’t my FIT pick: but he and the people he cites should be scored well. Tom Cotton most of all, for being the leading public voice advocating this early on. Here’s Cotton’s April 2020, WSJ op-ed. He was saying this at least in February 2020, but this is the op-ed I can find. Cotton’s version was widely covered as “debunked” by respectable establishment media.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-and-the-laboratories-in-wuhan-11587486996
Perhaps because a significant portion of your tax dollars was funneled to the Wu Han Level 4 Containment lab by Dr. Anthony Fauci when the US gain of function labs were shut down. One would hope that these funds would have been used for containment protocols (their alleged purpose) and the doling out of these funds carefully scrutinized to make sure that the protocols were sufficient and enforced. I remember early when there was a discussion about possible escape vs. wet market origin that an American scientist assured reporters that the escape was impossible. Turns out she worked in the Level 3 lab and knew little or nothing about the Level 4 lab protocols, since it was under CCP military control.
So protection of St Fauci was at least partially behind the squelching of the initial idea, and for the Chinese, the disappearance of several knowlegeable medical personnel who had hinted at the possiblilty.
This is a good article about some of the political issues surrounding the “lab leak” hypothesis:
https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-scientists-sacrificed-scepticism/