> It seems like you believe American law should be changed...
Probably yes, especially since the rest of the world still often takes inspiration from what the US does.
But frankly, I don't live in the country in which I was born, and neither of those are the US. It would be enough for the law to be changed in my relevant jurisdictions
and then, if news.ycombinator.com but especially other sites with user generated content (e.g. Facebook) are not compliant, they could just be blocked (forcing me an others to use a VPN, if we'd still want to interact with these sites)
> Censors are humans, and censorship is subject to the same mistakes and corruption as any other human endeavor, especially those affecting the flow of political power. All of this requires human judgment; and once the wrong humans get the job, any apparatus designed to suppress falsehood works just as well to suppress truth.
Definitely true, but not censoring anything is not a neutral decision (just like deciding to censor is not a neutral decision). There are risks either way.
To tie back to your previous point:
> The performance of those politicians is ultimately judged by the voters. Without open discussion, I don't see how the voters could make an informed choice.
But do they make an informed choice, on aggregate?
Are people like Trump and Biden legitimately the best that the US could muster? Isn't this facet of democracy mostly a popularity contest, in which popularity is hugely affected by which claims are most often repeated in the media (and less on the actual compentences, policies espoused and reliability track record of those political figures)?
I think democracy can be achieved in a different way (but this is getting out of topic)
That's very informative, thank you. I knew about the BSL-{1,2,3,4} rating... But I didn't know that the Wuhan labs were only BSL2
I'll look up more info now, but this is definitely something that should be addressed (and I'd be surprised if something hasn't been done about it already)
Edit: the issue of the BSL level of the laboratories in question seems to have already been addressed:
If you think there's a way to have a democracy without an informed electorate, then it makes sense that you'd be less concerned with censorship. I don't see how that could work, though. I'm not impressed with Biden, and significantly less so with Trump; but I'm also unaware of any system that works better. I didn't grow up in the USA, and I'd prefer a parliamentary system to the USA's republic; but that's a minor question compared to democratic vs. nondemocratic systems, and we're depending--however fragilely--on an informed electorate either way.
> Edit: the issue of the BSL level of the laboratories in question seems to have already been addressed:
I'm not sure what you think is addressed there? In that interview, Dr. Shi confirms that they were working with bat coronaviruses at BSL-2. Various papers published by her group before the pandemic also confirm this. They also had a BSL-4 lab for animal experiments, but experiments on the viruses in cultured cells were continuing at BSL-2. That's what Lipkin thought was "screwed up" (i.e., presented an unacceptable risk, regardless of whether it actually caused this pandemic).
As far as we know, all of Dr. Shi's work was performed in compliance with her institution's safety standards. The question is whether those safety standards were adequate, though--her standards were already a step below Ralph Baric's, and long before this pandemic academics like David Relman thought Baric's experiments were at or beyond the edge of acceptable risk:
Baric and the WIV later submitted a proposal to perform exactly the same kind of research as in Relman's hypothetical, not with SARS-1 and MERS but with novel bat viruses collected by the WIV:
> “We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,” referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.
That proposal was rejected by the American government for safety reasons, but there's no way to know what work continued in the WIV with other funders.
Probably yes, especially since the rest of the world still often takes inspiration from what the US does.
But frankly, I don't live in the country in which I was born, and neither of those are the US. It would be enough for the law to be changed in my relevant jurisdictions
and then, if news.ycombinator.com but especially other sites with user generated content (e.g. Facebook) are not compliant, they could just be blocked (forcing me an others to use a VPN, if we'd still want to interact with these sites)
> Censors are humans, and censorship is subject to the same mistakes and corruption as any other human endeavor, especially those affecting the flow of political power. All of this requires human judgment; and once the wrong humans get the job, any apparatus designed to suppress falsehood works just as well to suppress truth.
Definitely true, but not censoring anything is not a neutral decision (just like deciding to censor is not a neutral decision). There are risks either way.
To tie back to your previous point:
> The performance of those politicians is ultimately judged by the voters. Without open discussion, I don't see how the voters could make an informed choice.
But do they make an informed choice, on aggregate?
Are people like Trump and Biden legitimately the best that the US could muster? Isn't this facet of democracy mostly a popularity contest, in which popularity is hugely affected by which claims are most often repeated in the media (and less on the actual compentences, policies espoused and reliability track record of those political figures)?
I think democracy can be achieved in a different way (but this is getting out of topic)
> https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...
That's very informative, thank you. I knew about the BSL-{1,2,3,4} rating... But I didn't know that the Wuhan labs were only BSL2
I'll look up more info now, but this is definitely something that should be addressed (and I'd be surprised if something hasn't been done about it already)
Edit: the issue of the BSL level of the laboratories in question seems to have already been addressed:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201206204844/https://www.scien...