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Comment by A Country Farmer

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Statistical Modeling blog commenter on Bayesian priors and COVID-19 origins
I thought the whole point of Bayesianism was to make more clear the often arbitrary and/or questionable priors that we all start research with.
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A Country Farmer, comment on Andrew Gelman, "About that claim that ‘SARS-CoV-2 is not a natural zoonosis but instead is laboratory derived’", Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, February 2, 2021.
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Bayesian analysis is the right framework for settling the COVID-19 origins question
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AI Verified The quote is on the same issue: in this comment thread about a Bayesian paper on COVID-19 origins, the author responds to criticism of the paper’s arbitrary percentages by arguing that Bayesianism’s role is to make priors explicit, which is a reason in favor of using a Bayesian framework for this question. That makes support substantially more likely than opposition, even if the quote does not by itself resolve the stronger word "settling." ([statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/02/01/about-that-claim-that-sars-cov-2-is-not-a-natural-zoonosis-but-instead-is-laboratory-derived/)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 2h ago
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AI Verified The quote defends Bayesianism rather than rejecting it: the author says its “whole point” is to make priors explicit, and in the source context he describes the paper as a “running Bayesian probability analysis” that he finds “very straightforward.” That strongly implies he sees Bayesian analysis as an appropriate framework for addressing the COVID-origins question, even if he does not explicitly say it alone will finally settle it. ([statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/02/01/about-that-claim-that-sars-cov-2-is-not-a-natural-zoonosis-but-instead-is-laboratory-derived/)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 2h ago

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AI Verified Verified: the source URL contains this exact sentence in a comment by “A Country Farmer,” and that comment is timestamped February 2, 2021, 8:59 AM. The stored quote text, author, date, and source URL match; the blog post itself is dated February 1, 2021, but the quoted comment is from February 2. ([statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/02/01/about-that-claim-that-sars-cov-2-is-not-a-natural-zoonosis-but-instead-is-laboratory-derived/)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 2h ago
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