Everyone should be skeptical of Nate Silver

Originally posted July 24, 2023

Duane Tolbert Gish was a biochemist who earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1953. He was more famously a Young Earth Creationist — a fundamentalist Baptist who believed God created the Earth in exactly six days, six thousand years ago, and a professional opponent of evolutionary theory. Gish’s signature move was to challenge evolutionary scientists to an open-ended debate in front of a live audience, then unleash a series of rapid-fire arguments with no regard for accuracy or rigor. As soon as the evolutionist would try to refute one fallacious argument (“There are no ancient fish fossils!”), Gish would confidently leap to another (“So-called Neanderthals were just modern humans with rickets!”). This would fluster the evolutionary scientist, to the delight of the crowd. Eugenie Scott, the head of the National Center for Science Education, nicknamed this tactic the “Gish Gallop.”

Gish’s other signature move was to cherry-pick quotes from respected scientists questioning elements of evolutionary theory, such as noting gaps in the fossil record to date. Those scientists were, of course, just doing science — questioning their work and the work of their colleagues, examining new data, revising their conclusions, and pointing out further avenues of inquiry. But Gish knew that, in the eyes of a motivated audience, such quotes would undermine his opponents’ position — making it look as though they secretly knew or suspected that the audience’s preconceived notions were true, and trying to deceive them. This is still a common tactic among creationists. Let’s call that the Gish Gambit.

Over the weekend, stats guy and uneven elections prognosticator Nate Silver made a Gishian leap into the debate over COVID’s origins. In a Substack post headlined Journalists should be skeptical of all sources —including scientists, the former editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight.com made a bold claim: that “a group of prominent scientists spread misinformation about COVID’s origins.” “I’m not usually one for scandals,” Silver wrote. “But I’m going to make an exception here, because we have a scandal where the facts are relatively simple and clear.”

The basis for Silver’s confidence was another set of Substack posts — these by Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Leighton Woodhouse at Public — in which the authors shared screenshots from a trove of Slack messages between four prominent scientists at the start of the COVID pandemic. Those messages, obtained from anonymous sources (possibly linked to the bloggers’ allies in the House GOP majority) showed the scientists, in the blogger’s words, “conspiring — by which we mean they made secret plans to engage in deceptive and unethical behavior and — to spread disinformation” about the origins of the pandemic.

Before getting into the details of Slack itself, let’s put this all in the context of the ongoing Gish Gallop that is the lab-leak “theory.” It’s barely been a month since Shellberger, Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi dropped what they previously promised would be the big bombshell: that the “Directorate of National Intelligence” was poised to reveal that three specific scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were the first to be sickened by and hospitalized with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, and that these allegedly infected workers would be confirmed to have been “working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it.”

Roughly a week later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the exact opposite: that it could not confirm that anyone at the WIV had COVID-19¹ , that to their knowledge no one at the lab was hospitalized due to symptoms consistent with COVID-19, and that the Intelligence Community had “no information … indicating that any WIV genetic engineering work has involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic.”

You might think that having the very source you promised was about to confirm your scoop come out and publicly shoot it down might be an occasion for some journalistic soul-searching. But not the lab-leak crew! Shellenberger, Taibbi, & Co. instead responded by accusing their own purported source of lying. Then they immediately changed the subject. This fits with Shellengberger’s general M.O. in his other fields of expertise: being an apologist for climate change on behalf of fossil fuel companies and for homelessness on behalf of corporate landlords.

It is also a well-worn pattern in the lab-leak debate. Back in February, the lab leakers were giddy about a report that the Department of Energy had changed its assessment of the pandemic’s origins from uncertain to leaning in favor of a “laboratory-associated incident.” When CNN reported that the lab the DOE suspected didn’t seem to be the WIV at all, but the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention² , they then immediately changed their focus to a Fox News interview with FBI director Christopher Wray in which he repeated that agency’s position from a year earlier that the WIV was likely somehow involved.

The fact that the DOE and FBI’s theories contradict one another — and that each represents a distinct minority view among the intelligence agencies, who still, on the whole back a natural origin of the virus — is of no concern to a Gish Galloper. They know their intended audience isn’t going to take the time to parse such details or keep track of which specific arguments have been proffered and discarded in the past. What they care about is creating the illusion of a snowballing argument — a rolling, growing mass of “new documents!” and “new evidence!” that “they don’t want you to know about!”, disjointed and contradictory as they may be — that only a fool would try to step in front of. Like the creationists, it is also meant to detract and distract from the real growing body of evidence: for evolution on one hand, and the theory that COVID emerged from a wildlife market on the other.

Likely in hopes of fostering that illusion of inevitability, as well as of transparency, the Public crew made the Slacks and a separate document trove containing scientists’ emails available for download. This is also a well-worn tactic seen, for instance, in the mass release of hacked emails from Democratic staffers during the 2016 presidential campaign: You put out a document dump of hundreds of pages³ that few will have time to read, cherry-pick the lines that best serve your narrative, then set a legion of fans loose on the internet to scream “READ THE SLACK MESSAGES” at anyone who disagrees.

Well, I did read the Slack messages. And it seems my skepticism of Silver, Shellenberger, and their cohort was well-founded. Here’s how Silver summarizes his argument:

Again, this is the second creationist tactic — the Gish Gambit — asserting that the scientists know the truth (“the Bible is inerrant!”/ “COVID didn’t come from nature!”) and secretly admit this to each other while deceiving the public. The core piece of evidence for this is a comment made by Andersen on Feb. 1, 2020: “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Here’s a screenshot, with a little tell-tale shadowing, shared on both Public and Silver’s posts:

That line, especially the “friggin’ likely,” has been the standout quote from the 140-page document. (Taibbi headlined his summary, “‘So Friggin' Likely’: New Covid Documents Reveal Unparalleled Media Deception.”) But there are a few things that the screenshot quote elides. One is the specific context in which was said. If you read here (and I’m sorry the font size is so small, that’s how it’s formatted in the document Public provided), you can get a better sense of the conversation:

I don’t read this as a conversation between people who all know, or even suspect, that COVID didn’t come from nature. It’s a searching discussion — an argument in some ways — about the structure of the virus itself: whether it looks like it was engineered in some way or a product of natural evolution. Andersen, at this point, thinks “both [are] really rather plausible,” though his gut at this point seems to favor the lab. Holmes seems to have favored the opposite position, though at this moment he’s having his doubts: “I thought ‘can’t be true’ but …” Rambaut seems more incredulous. He keeps asking: Why would someone do this insertion? How would it be done? The “friggin’ likely” is not a secret admission of wrongdoing. It’s a scientist talking to himself and his (skeptical) peers, saying, this is my assumption, this is what we need to test.

Now, again, this is Feb. 1. It is also, one might note, page 3 of the Slack document. If you keep reading though, a funny thing happens: the scientists get new data and start revising their conclusions. For instance, by, Feb. 8 — a week later — Holmes is back in the natural evolution camp (from the emails, p. 146):

As is Rambaut (as quoted in a later email):

This conviction seems to have grown among the authors over the course of February. On Feb. 25, Holmes sends new data about a virus in a Yunnan bat from March 2019. Garry says: “Holy crap.” Andersen, revising his conclusion, says it “provides a template for how all of this happened in animals.” Garry responds that it is not wholly dispositive between the models. Andersen retorts: “I think this lends pretty strong support for an animal origin of the ‘confusing’ features of the virus, so I think it’s important to include.”

A day later, Andersen is feeling it even more strongly:

“I don’t think this data necessarily argues against accidental infection/release,” he notes, “however, it shows something very important — insertions at this site can happen in nature, making the need to reach for a non-natural explanation much diminished. This is new important knowledge that would need to be introduced in our commentary and lends significantly stronger support to the ‘natural’ scenarios we’re describing.”

Holmes says: “I’m now very strongly in favour of a natural origin.”

“I was always in favor of the pre-adapted jump from animals hypothesis …,” Rambaut notes.

Holmes notes that he is about to talk to Clare Thomas, the virology editor of Nature Medicine. The paper in question, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” is published on March 17 — over two weeks later.

In that paper — a letter to the editor, actually — the scientists infamously (among lab-leakers, at least) argued:

Now read that passage in light of the snippets from Slack and emails above. Are they “contradict[ing] their true beliefs about COVID’s origins,” in a way they “knew to be misleading” — as Silver claims? Was there “an enormous gap between what the authors believed privately and what they stated publicly?” Sure doesn’t seem like it.

The Public guys go even further with their Gish Gambit. They cite Andersen still sitting somewhat on the fence in mid-April — saying, “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved” and that “we also can't fully rule out engineering (for basic research).” Shellenberger & Co. add: “If Andersen wasn’t convinced that no culturing was possible, why did he rule out ‘any type of laboratory-based scenario’ in his paper?”

Because, guys, it wasn’t just his paper. There were five scientists on the “proximal origins” letter, and the others didn’t agree with him. In fact, in response to that very Slack post, Eddie Holmes emphatically rebuts Andersen’s “culture” question — stating, again, that in his professional estimation, people getting “naturally spill-over infected by bat coronaviruses” remains “far, far more likely than the lab escape scenario”:

But look, I know that none of this will matter to the lab-leak dead-enders. Most won’t bother to actually read past the first few pages of the Slack. And if they do, and if they somehow set aside their motivated reasoning to see what was actually happening in there — not a conspiracy to deceive the world but scientists arguing with each other and themselves about science — then they’ll just shrug and move on to the next gambit, and the next one, and the next one after that.⁴

1  Specifically: “While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19.”

2  A facility that is a) on the other side of the city and b) by all accounts does not perform the kind of bio-engineering research that most lab-leak proponents insist is the heart of their case.

3  140 pages in the Slack document, 163 in the emails

4  For instance, I can already imagine the responses to this post: Why didn’t you deal with the scientists saying they wanted to “mislead” New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil?

Because I don’t think that’s a fair reading of that part of the conversation. Seems fairly clear that Garry is saying that McNeil may had been misled by his editors or other sources, not that Rambaut should lie to him:

And again, Rambaut’s proposed response matches his position throughout the Slack conversations. He also then gives McNeil a more thorough answer to detailed questions:

Ymmv.