Bayesian analysis is the right framework for settling the COVID-19 origins question

For (4)

• 

  Steven Novella

  Yale neurologist and science communicator

  I am this person! Add a sourced quote Report comment

  votes For and says:

  There are two types of evidence, broadly speaking, we can bring to bear on this question. The first is epidemiological – looking at the earliest cases of COVID including the strains of virus with which they were infected, and data on the virus (such ...

  more AI Verified source (Mar 4, 2026)

  added 50min ago

  

  Choose a list of delegates

  to vote as the majority of them.

  Unless you vote directly.

  Delegate
• 

  Michael B. Weissman

  Physicist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois

  I am this person! Add a sourced quote Report comment

  votes For and says:

  Combining all Levin's spatiotemporal Bayes factors gives a net factor of 15,000 favoring A over Z.

  AI Verified source (Feb 3, 2025)

  added 1h ago

  

  Choose a list of delegates

  to vote as the majority of them.

  Unless you vote directly.

  Delegate
• 

  Andrew T. Levin

  Economist, Professor at Dartmouth College and NBER Research Associate

  I am this person! Add a sourced quote Report comment

  votes For and says:

  These four conditional Bayes factors are estimated as 2.3:1, 20:1, 27:1, and 12:1, respectively, and hence the overall odds ratio is 14,900:1, indicating overwhelming evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the pandemic resulted from an accidental l...

  more AI Verified source (Jan 2025) < 1 of 2 >

  added 1h ago

  

  Choose a list of delegates

  to vote as the majority of them.

  Unless you vote directly.

  Delegate
• 

  Jonathan

  Rootclaim blog author

  I am this person! Add a sourced quote Report comment

  votes For and says:

  While we agree it’s hard, our experience taught us that it is far from impossible.

  AI Verified source (Apr 1, 2024) < 1 of 2 >

  added 1h ago

  

  Choose a list of delegates

  to vote as the majority of them.

  Unless you vote directly.

  Delegate

Abstain (0)

Against (5)

• 

  Alan B Franklin

  USDA wildlife scientist

  I am this person! Add a sourced quote Report comment

  votes Against and says:

  The competing hypotheses on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 – the pathogen responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic – have been hotly debated in the scientific literature and popular media, especially with respect to the hypothesis that SARS-Cov-2 originated ...

  more AI Verified source (Mar 30, 2026)

  added 41min ago

  

  Choose a list of delegates

  to vote as the majority of them.

  Unless you vote directly.

  Delegate
• 

  Andrew Gelman

  Statistician and political scientist, Professor at Columbia University

  I am this person! Add a sourced quote Report comment

  votes Against and says:

  It's hard to compute Bayesian probabilities for this problem, not so much because of the priors but because of the likelihood, which is the probability of the data given the model. One problem is the selection of what is considered to be data, the ot...

  more AI Verified source (Aug 1, 2025) < 1 of 2 >

  added 1h ago

  

  Choose a list of delegates

  to vote as the majority of them.

  Unless you vote directly.

  Delegate
• 

  Chris

  blog commenter

  I am this person! Add a sourced quote Report comment

  votes Against and says:

  In fact I think this is a problem for public understanding of science [...] dressing up pseudoscience with a veneer of “sciency”-sounding arguments [...].

  AI Verified source (Feb 4, 2025)

  added 1h ago

  

  Choose a list of delegates

  to vote as the majority of them.

  Unless you vote directly.

  Delegate
• 

  Anonymous

  anonymous blog commenter

  I am this person! Add a sourced quote Report comment

  votes Against and says:

  Anything claiming to be “Bayesian” but not doing actual Bayesian statistics (fitting models to data and then doing an inference from a posterior distribution, justifying all steps especially the prior) is untrustworthy. I have never seen a convincing...

  more AI Verified source (Feb 3, 2025)

  added 1h ago

  

  Choose a list of delegates

  to vote as the majority of them.

  Unless you vote directly.

  Delegate
• 

  Scott Alexander

  Author and psychiatrist

  I am this person! Add a sourced quote Report comment

  votes Against and says:

  Nobody – not the statisticians, not Nate Silver, certainly not me – tries to do full Bayesian reasoning on fuzzy real-world problems. They'd be too hard to model. You'd make some philosophical mistake converting the situation into numbers, then end u...

  more AI Verified source (Mar 28, 2024)

  added 1h ago

  

  Choose a list of delegates

  to vote as the majority of them.

  Unless you vote directly.

  Delegate