Not clear from the above whether you think it likely the facts were checked. If you don’t think they were checked, why not say so? And give your reasons, of course, as I did.
If you’re saying that important facts can be omitted, or that they may not support the argument they are being used to make, that’s certainly true. That’s true of all facts and all arguments. The best response is to point out with particularity the failures you believe exist with respect to these facts and this argument.
I do draw one meta-conclusion from the appearance of this piece in the Times: Lab leak as a possible cause of the pandemic has now gravitated from Rogan and the WSJ to an organ read by the nation’s intelligentsia. You couldn’t say that a year ago, much less three years ago.
I have seen enough op-eds containing objectively counterfactual claims (especially those written by politicians, across ideologies) across gobs and bunches of newspapers that I can say with confidence: Yes, I disagree.
The USA does not have an “Intelligentsia”, nor does any Western country. Not only is there alienation between the top people in science, humanities, and the arts, but within each, social sciences, life sciences and engineering barely interact, and writers, performers, and musicians barely interact.
Worse, each is in a bubble that thinks itself superior to the rest.
NYT opinion section has, in the past, been a platform for real pseudoscience, as well as for fringe and unsupported theories.
I agree with the rest of your post, but this? No. The OED’s definition is
The part of a nation (originally in 19th-cent. Russia) that aspires to intellectual activity and political initiative; a section of society regarded as educated and possessing culture and political influence.
while Wikipedia’s lede is more specific with
The intelligentsia is a status class composed of the university-educated people of a society who engage in the complex mental labours by which they critique, shape, and lead in the politics, policies, and culture of their society; as such, the intelligentsia consists of scholars, academics, teachers, journalists, and literary writers.
with citations pointing to a number of sources.
Under those definitions, the USA (along with pretty much an industrialized or industrializing nation, at least) clearly does have an intelligentsia. After all, even in the original Russian use it wasn’t a monolithic group, just one that could be conveniently pointed to as if it were monolithic and thus be more easily demonized.
I will not claim anything for sure, but the track record of opinion pieces (on anything) is generally that fact checking tends to be much less than for non-opinion news, or none at all.
But even if facts are fully checked to weed out actual lies, opinion writers can mislead with facts out of context, omission of facts counter to their arguments, and speculative assertions that are not outright lies (“X may be true” is not a lie as long as X has more than a 0% chance of being true, even if it is highly unlikely).
For the term “intelligentsia” substitute “knowledge-workers” or “the professional-managerial class” or simply “the highly educated.” Or just survey the readers of the NYTimes and listeners to NPR and then compare that crowd with the people that hang out at speedways and listen to Rogan.
This debate on nomenclature isn’t important in itself, but the concept underlying it is very relevant to our present discussion - a discussion which otherwise seems to have petered out. As @mwolf says, the classes in America have developed tribal attitudes to almost every conceivable issue of public interest. I’m sure I don’t need to prove this point. As to the origins of covid, it’s a matter of plain observation that the knowledge class signed up early and en masse to a natural-origins explanation. No big surprise then that the Talladega class went the opposite direction. Or maybe the sequence was the reverse of this. The divide on both sides was a matter of self-definition and tribal solidarity as much as any greatly pondered understanding of the science. There were good scientific reasons to give cosideration to both theories, but most of us educated types made it a point of honor and pride not to involve ourselves in the xenophobic know-nothingism of the guys who work on cars and never read the papers. Yet in this specialized field most of us don’t know much more than any of them. However, we do know the class to which we belong. That’s the magnet that polarizes all things, including this one.
For this reason the piece in the Times is important: a theory tarred with the brush of the unwashed and uneducated is for the first time getting a repectful hearing, or at least a neutral hearing - well, any hearing at all - inside the highly defended walls of an institution seldom breached by the hoi polloi. That’s a significant cultural moment in my book. Such breaches of the walls between us are remarkably rare. In that respect, at least, I find myself in agreement, no doubt to his horror, with @mwolf.
You are looking at a very narrow view of the intellectual landscape of the USA. Most college educated Americans work in middle class jobs. The colleges-educated Middle class does not fit within your division of the USA. Teachers, nurses, even most academics are in that mid-income group, living in suburbs and small cities.
Then there are the people who are younger than 30, most who aren’t White, many who are kids of immigrants, who also don’t fit in either of these “classes”.
I would go so far as to say that the " the readers of the NYTimes" and " the people that hang out at speedways and listen to Rogan" together do not even make up half of the population of the USA.
Until the Pandemic, antivaxxers were upper income, left-leaning, and educated.
You are also ignoring the fact that a wide swath of the population don’t talk about the origins of the Pandemic, because they don’t believe that there was a pandemic.
Most importantly, people are ignoring the fact that the NYT has allowed politically-motivated fringe science to be presented as though it was something that people should consider seriously.
Here is a 1996 NYT article lauding a Climate Change “skeptic”:
Alina Chan had a heavily promoted (co-written) piece published simultaneously in the NYT and WSJ in early 2021 on precisely this topic.
It was, of course, also promoted by Chan and other op-ed writers in those and other newspapers with a highly educated readership skew going back into 2020.
So please don’t pretend that this latest article being published in the NYT is some sort of big deal from a cultural standpoint.
@dfbdfb , could you point me to the piece by Alina Chan (and a co-author) you say was published in the Times in 2021. I couldn’t find it. I did find a piece from that year (August 24) describing Ms Chan’s travails from being “caught in the crossfire over covid’s origins” and saying in its subtitle that “critical reaction [to her published views] was swift and harsh.” To be fair, that piece by a Times journalist not only details Ms. Chan’s woes but captures a good deal of the debate on both sides of the question that caused her the trouble. It reminded me of the debate on this thread. I also took note of other NYTimes reportorial pieces that have dealt with the controversy, generally placing a finger on the scales, it seemed to me, in favor of natural origins.
In this context it did seem to me there’s something different in this more recent piece and something more significant in its appearance in the NYTimes. In it Ms Chan gets to have her full say at some length, accompanied by the glossy graphics that @MWolf so much deplores. You may disagree that this marks any kind of elevation of the lab theory to respectability. Fair enough. But why do you feel it necessary to say I’m only “pretending” to believe this? That’s simply a gratuitous insult, the customary rhetorical mode of true believers.
But let’s get to the real point. I take from the cavils of you and mwolf that you don’t acknowledge any correlation between espousing the spillover theory and being a Times-reading member of the knowledge class. Is that correct?
Thanks, but I see it’s no more than an “Open Letter” by Ms Chan and twenty-four other concerned researchers advocating for an independent review of the Chinese data, given what it alleges are the conflicts and pressures that exist in China. I didn’t detect that it took any position as between lab leak and spillover except to say that we need more information from independent researchers to reach a conclusion. Publication of the letter by the Times hardly seems anything like publication of this recent piece by Chan, though it’s worth pointing out that she maintains even in it, in which she lays out the case for lab leak, that more information is required in order to make a definitive finding.
I would also like to point out that there are two separate issues here, not one. A, is the virus “man-made”, and B, was it a lab leak.
It is true that if it is man made, that means that it has to be a lab leak. However, even if it is a lab leak, that doesn’t prove that it is man-made.
So the statement “If A, then B” is true. However, “If B, then A” is not true.
Conversely, “if not-B, then not-A” is true. Of course “if not-A, then not-B” is not true.
So the fact that the virus did not spread as though it were a lab leak (not-B) does provide strong support that the virus was also not man made (not-A). However, even if the spread of the virus looked like a lab leak (B), this provides no support for the claim that it was man-made (A).
Conversely, I will admit that disproving the man-made theory (not-A) does not disprove the claim that it may have leaked from the lab (not-B).
And considering that all of the news coverage of that particular piece presented it as promoting the lab leak theory, I don’t see how you can, with a straight face, claim that it’s neutral.
I suggest a novel idea here - reading the plain words. If certain unspecified news coverage was characterizing it “as promoting the lab leak theory” that’s on them, not in the letter. Perhaps it would be useful to name those news sources. Whatever they were, they went overboard to condemn any possibility that the party line - that the pandemic could only have been caused by a spillover - needed further consideration. And why, again, the personal slur - “with a straight face”? Can’t people disagree without accusing each other of bad faith?
Really? Have you met any scientists? I have been in that world for four decades, and you cannot get scientists to agree on lunch, much less on theories. If you have ever attended an actual meeting of any scientific professional society, you would know just how much everybody disagrees with everybody else about everything.
If the majority of scientists in ANY field are in agreement about something, that means that the “something” has extremely compelling support.
So no, nobody is “toeing the party line”, because there’s no such thing as a “party line” in science. The only people who ever refer to “party line” in science are people like antivaxxers, climate deniers, and various other pseudoscientists. They use it when when referring to the consensus of actual experts in the field.
Since you are not part of that crowd, don’t get caught up in that type of rhetoric.
And I’ll go further to point out that someone who can find solid evidence that the overall consensus on anything significant is wrong? Yeah, that makes a career right there.
The incentives in science since about, say, 1955 have been precisely in the direction of going against the consensus, if possible. The thing, though? The consensus is usually correct.