Comment by happymellon
20 hours ago
> I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Ever since we started studying autism, we found it! Therefore studying causes autism.
I might not have been the best student, but I wouldn't call studying "extraordinarily improbable".
So it's not improbable research lab that was testing off runs from a wet market found the stuff they were searching for?
The Wuhan institute was the world leader in bat coronavirus research. They were not studying random animals from their local wet market, they were studying bats with coronavirus which they shipped in from the only location in the world where they could be found, thousands of miles away. Then, coincidentally, coronavirus broke out in Wuhan.
> Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Not really; "there is probably a connection" probably was supposed to mean "could be studied, maybe a correlation is found", rather than "surely there must be a causation", which is what some people seem to want to take it for.