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Wasn't it still low confidence by the CIA plus the actual gov shit that deals with disease still thinks it was wet market?

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Low confidence is more of a technical term in this situation than an assertion of probability. Basically, it's a way of saying the theory is plausible, but they don't have any hard evidence. They could believe it was 99% likely, and it would still be "low confidence" of there's no smoking gun, so to speak.

There's also a lot of political maneuvering involved here; it isn't really politically expedient to say it came from a lab unless you plan to do something about it, so even if they did have a reasonable amount of confidence in the theory, they probably wouldn't acknowledge it unless there was a political benefit in doing so.

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Low confidence is more of a technical term in this situation than an assertion of probability.

Having spent hundreds of hours reading CIA analysts' reports: This is bullshit. When they make a claim they're very careful to say what level of confidence they have in it. I can't remember off the top of my head but they've got terms they use medium levels of confidence too.

it's a way of saying the theory is plausible, but they don't have any hard evidence

They make guesses all the time without any hard evidence. This isn't a court. In their line of work you can't go over ask the witnesses. You have to look at different bits of circumstantial evidence: satellite photos, NSA intercepts, reports from double agents we don't trust, newspapers, something a guy just openly said to our military attache at a party. You put that together with your knowledge of the history of the place and make a guess. That's the whole point of their job. If we insisted on having hard evidence behind everything, why would we need analysts?

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