Once more concerning the lab leak hypothesis for the origin of COVID19, I thought aloud the other day:

In a similar vein, but more pithy, I saw a tweet that I cannot seem to find any more, but was close to:

Letting scientists that work on gain-of-function research decide whether or not it is worth the risk is like letting the oil industry decide over climate change policy.

While I would not put it as strongly myself, I think the point is valid. The stakes are too high and eventualities too hard to judge for individual research groups or even funding agencies.

Which is why I am happy to note that this kind of discussion is being had within the field, an example being this conversation.

Another quote from yesterday's podcast:

I do often get the sense that there is a wide sense of malaise about future human potential, whether humanity itself is even a good thing, within wider culture. And again, this is purely anecdotal. It’s not based on any kind of data, but responses to articles that I write online where there’s a comment section, it’s often people saying, “Oh, extinction would be good.”

I have encountered this too, and it drives me nuts! The naturalistic fallacy in action. Maybe there is something to this analogy, as an explanation for this attitude:

Humanity is kind of in this almost adolescent phase, where it has for the first time realized that it can wreak consequences on the world. And by necessity, therefore wreak good as well as bad. And I think you can analogize it to this juvenile state of mind I’m sure everyone’s gone through, when you first become aware of the responsibility of your own actions and you do something really awful. And then maybe you feel really dejected and really awful about yourself and you feel that maybe it would be better off if you weren’t around.

Let's all grow up together, shan't we? And become responsible stewards of our planet, and beyond.

This interview is extremely fun to listen to. They discuss historic views of how people thought the world worked, and how that got changed over the centures. Lots of fun and wacky ideas, like fossils being rock that tries to become animal!

And the meta-question:

When you’re studying the way that people very far in the past conceived of the world, what they thought about the natural sciences, you just constantly encounter ideas that seem very misguided, kind of batty from our modern point of view. And I think people go in different directions in their aesthetic about how to react to this. Like one strain of thought is that this just shows how hard it is for humans to reason at all. It shows the fallibility of our ability to make sense of the world. And so it should make us extremely humble, and we shouldn’t dismiss the way that they thought about things because we will probably be just as mistaken as they were by the lights of people in the future.

I think another take you might have — which is, I think, less fashionable, but it’s my instinct perhaps because of my personality — is to say, wow, they just thought really stupid stuff. I can’t believe how misguided they were. And I understand how they got there. And if you send me back in time, I would be just as misguided. Absolutely. But nonetheless, this just shows how much progress we’ve made, and how much better we are at figuring things out today.

I am with Rob here, in that we should not have false humility and assume that we are as wrong as our ancestors. We clearly have made progress and can explain the world better than ever before today.

Putting the axe into the right spot and then hitting it with a sledgehammer turns out to work nicely for splitting larger logs. Small ones are easier to just chop.

Since I just claimed that plastic bags are good, in spite of their bad reputation, here is a video that goes through some numbers.

The only thing I can add is that the pollution aspect very much depends on where you are in the world. If that place has a working system of garbage collection and management, then it is very unlikely that a plastic bag ends up in the oceans. So maybe we should spend the money that plastic bans cost on helping poorer places improving their waste management to pollute less.

In any case, I'll happily continue to buy plastic bags, reuse them a few times before they become garbage bags. And pay the counterproductive tax that would rather have me buy something worse.

I got nuthin for ya today! Sleep tight!

I still listen to the excellent podcast with German virologist Christian Drosten and in the latest episode (transcript), he puts the recent media attention for the lab leak hypothesis into context.

Lots of intersting bits of information there! I tried to run some paragraphs through automatic translations, but the result did not do it justice. So brush up your German, if you know some, and do listen or read!

The photo does not do it justice, the magical fog early this morning, when the sun was just about to break through it.

Our two new hop plants, the old Swedish varieties Grimsarbo and Olarsbo, seem to be growing nicely. For the first year, I dont't expect them to make it all the way up their 6m high poles, or produce any amount of cones that will be worth harvesting.

North Face, the outdoor clothing brand, apparently refused to sell to an oil company jackets with their logo on it. Which prompted this quite funny response, which shows that 90% of North Face's product line is made out of petroleum products.

I think it is fair to point out such hypocrisy, assuming that the story is indeed as told. Coming from the oil industry, the video of course makes it sound like a good thing to produce clothes out of oil based raw materials, thus #ThankYouNorthFace.

This could easily be spun into a campaign of shaming the company for that very fact. But that would be an example of well-meaning environmentalism gone bad, because contrary to energy production it is often much less resource intensive, and therefore environmentally friendly, to make things from plastic, compared to "organic" materials.

The prime example of this are plastic shopping bags that have been banned or taxed in many places after an outrage some year ago. Never mind that the paper bag that replaced it takes ten times more resources to produce and cannot have a second use as waste bag.