It goes beyond Twitter. Take a look at what happened at Evergreen State College in 2017 [1] and you will find close parallels with the Red Guards mentioned in this thread. This is just one incident.

Multiple people are telling you they have personally lived through similar things, and they are scared because these things did not end well. These people are aware of the events you believe pose the greater threat, and they disagree with you.

> I find it bizarre that comments like these seem to think the main battle ground for free speech is young people like myself "cancelling" people on twitter

I truly don't mean to be patronizing, but I will say the following because I believe there is a lot at stake and I'm trying to get you to see the other side of this. If you find this view "bizarre", maybe there is something important you are missing. Is there something these people see that you are missing?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_State_College#2017_p...

> But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!!

This statement is a distraction from the main question. The question is: conditional on being in a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what is the probability that the virus arose through purely natural processes, vs. the probability that it escaped from a lab.

I am not equipped to assess the biological evidence, but I do know this: The virus came out of Wuhan, the location of a top safety level (BSL-4) lab that experiments on coronaviruses. It is China's first BSL-4 lab, and one of a small group of such labs worldwide. This alone suggests that the probability of a lab escape is not negligible and should be taken seriously. In fact, without considering additional evidence I would argue this puts the probability of a lab escape above 50%. But again, I am not familiar with nor am I equipped to assess the biological evidence.

In addition, if the virus did escape from a lab, both the Chinese government and the bio scientific community are clearly and highly incentivized to keep this fact a secret. Therefore, when a member of one of these groups argues that this is not a lab escape, this serves as very weak evidence in favor of natural evolution. The incentive to keep such an outcome a secret is so strong, that I would argue we should discount such statements altogether and focus on the actual evidence.

There is something about this way of reasoning that seems faulty to me.The reason the Wuhan laboratory was studying coronaviruses in the first place is that there is a large reservoir of the virus in the area. In other terms: diamonds are hard to find, but where you find diamond mines you also find diamonds, ergo: diamond mines must create diamonds.

Diamonds coming out of a mine is of course no surprise. But let’s look closer at these “diamonds”.

It’s said that diamonds are like snowflakes as each one’s minute imperfections make it absolutely unique.

So in this case we have a diamond mine pumping out “natural” diamonds but turns out they all have a very specific structure which exactly matches a manual published a few years earlier on making lab created diamonds which are almost indistinguishable from natural ones.

It might lead you to suspect that the diamond mine in fact provides the perfect cover story to ship as many lab-made diamonds as you want and sell them with the natural diamond markup.

I have no way to gauge for myself how definitive these genetic abnormalities are, but if they’ve found published research painting a trail directly toward these specific unique and highly unusual sequences which are also specifically responsible for the extremely contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2, then I think at least we are beyond the simple fallacy of believing “mines make diamonds”.

This is why I prefer thinking about the goal of this discussion as estimating probabilities, rather than as coming up with a logical argument that has a definite conclusion. I agree that the presence of a large virus reservoir in the area shifts the probability in favor of a natural process. I don't think it is enough to make the probability of a lab escape negligible.

As a followup, I would ask: How many such reservoirs are there, how close are they to human population etc., and therefore what is the probability that the virus came out of this particular one? How many of these BSL-4 labs are located next to such reservoirs? etc. All with the goal of estimating how likely a lab escape was.

I would like to emphasize that (1) it is important that we know the truth, because it will inform our preparation for future pandemics, and (2) there is sufficient evidence that warrants a serious look at the possibility of a lab escape. Instead of dismissing it as a "conspiracy theory", or leaving it all to the biologists, I suggest taking considering all the evidence and trying to estimate these probabilities.

> I am not equipped to assess the biological evidence [...] I would argue this puts the probability of a lab escape above 50%.

That's exactly the faulty reasoning right there.

It's not faulty reasoning, it's how probabilities work. I am estimating the probability of a lab escape given the above information, and without evaluating the biological evidence. It's a prior. By evaluating the biological evidence we can update this probability, but I didn't do that. I'm saying that because the prior is high, it is worth to go ahead and evaluate all the evidence. And I know that when experts who I respect looked at the biological evidence, they came to the same conclusion, namely that a lab escape is likely.