And there are three completely plausible explanations for why Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak's research could have led to the outbreak:
(a) It was successfully created in the lab using gain of function research they were developing
(b) It was accidentally or purposefully cultured naturally from one of the many strains they had collected from the field
(c) A researcher, assistant, or contractor was infected in the field as they were doing field work
Option (c) is particularly compelling because it doesn't require much additional complexity beyond the "official explanation". It still maintains that the origin of Covid-19 was a zoonotic spillover event, but points to the research as the direct cause of that event. And it's not necessarily the case that if the virus was in the bat population already that it necessarily would have spread. Rural populations might become briefly infected with a pandemic-level virus, but the spread is naturally quarantined since they have little contact with major metropolitan areas.
It's the totality of the evidence taken together, not a series of things to be considered independently. When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences. Or, at the very least, if there's no serious investigation by the people in charge of something so significant, an injustice is being done.
Also, factory farming is far safer than all other forms of farming. If the outbreak was unrelated to WIV and centered in Wuhan, wet-markets and exotic animal markets are the likely culprit.
Because all of the major players, the Chinese Communist Party, the US government (DARPA & the NIH), and several universities and their IRB boards (UNC-Chapel Hill, WIV, and others), all had a hand in this, and the second they give legitimacy to this theory--that the hubris and recklessness of scientists and bureaucrats led to the deaths and suffering of millions--then they'll never be able to put the cat back in the bag.
They also know that if it was their fault, the CCP did a good enough job of scrubbing the evidence that we'll never meet the standard of evidence that would satisfy many of those who choose to take the authority at their word. We're seeing this first-hand in this thread.
And the novel technology to create novel viruses was being actively developed in this lab. They've proudly and openly published results to this effect. Further, they were trying to get tens of millions in grant funding to develop the technology further.
"Zero evidence", huh? The epicenter of Covid-19 was the middle of a major metropolitan city (instead of a rural area near lots of animals), blocks away from a major virology lab which was specifically studying these viruses, collecting hundreds of wild strains from field operations, in research DARPA said before the fact endangers the local community and was banned by NIH, trying to specifically create this virus as closely as possible for the research to be successful...
It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames. Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.
Seeing a link like this at the top of HackerNews is deeply disappointing. Regardless of the accusation or the status of a person, everyone deserves due diligence when it comes to attacks on people's character and reputation.
A brief 200-word blurb is gossip, even if she provides links. The fact that she couldn't be bothered to write any more is indicative of how little she cares about whether her criticism is legitimate or not, whether there's important context left out, or whether the statements are supportable by concrete evidence and not just rumor.
We need to take stuff like this more seriously, and not just take the words of some random gossip writer at face value.
Wouldn't the most parsimonious explanation be that the NSA got spooked by "unknown unknowns"? You've got a lot of researchers working in private on cloak-and-dagger projects, no doubt some of them get paranoid in the same way the public cryptography community blew a seemingly innocuous statement out of proportion.
The article supports this notion, noting many times that the Snowden leaks, despite being extremely damaging and thus unlikely to be intentional, did not reveal a back door into ECC.
A stochastic optimal control problem can be interpreted as a free energy minimization problem [0], but this is a more general result than what is looked at in the paper OP linked.
I'm not sure the "reverse SDE" is technically doing this sort of minimization since it seems like it's just trying to reconstruct an unknown forward process. It's possible there's some sort of minimization going on here over some slack variable though.
Although the application is interesting, as someone who studies SDEs the notion of "reverse SDEs" is frustrating to me, as Brownian motion really isn't reversible. The citation provided is from 1982, but I'm not convinced the theory can't be situated in the more modern interpretation of "backward SDEs" which became more popular with Peng's work in 1992.
Backward SDEs aren't time-reversed, but satisfy conditions at the end of the time interval instead of the beginning. The idea of time-reversing Brownian motion is like saying that you're running thermodynamics backward--it only makes sense if you sample them forward, then move backwards along the forward sampled motion.
It feels like (2) is just a backward SDE arrived at via the Feynman-Kac theorem applied to the Kolmogorov backward equations.
(a) It was successfully created in the lab using gain of function research they were developing
(b) It was accidentally or purposefully cultured naturally from one of the many strains they had collected from the field
(c) A researcher, assistant, or contractor was infected in the field as they were doing field work
Option (c) is particularly compelling because it doesn't require much additional complexity beyond the "official explanation". It still maintains that the origin of Covid-19 was a zoonotic spillover event, but points to the research as the direct cause of that event. And it's not necessarily the case that if the virus was in the bat population already that it necessarily would have spread. Rural populations might become briefly infected with a pandemic-level virus, but the spread is naturally quarantined since they have little contact with major metropolitan areas.