![Wuhan 400 in 1981 [712x480 - 894KB]](https://pic8.co/sh/buLCGV.png){kind=link}
Interesting.
They aren't even denying it, haha.
It's partly false because "that's where the similarities between them stop"? Note the clever trick used here. If something is partly false, that also means it is partly true. Now, if we consider only what is relevant to the claim made, we'd think that the part to emphasize here would be its mostly being true. In fact, nobody claimed that the book made any other comparisons. The Reuters article confirms that the only things demonstrated were true, but it goes on to say it is partly false by setting up a straw man which nobody claimed (that there were more similarities). Nobody is saying that. So by using the phrase 'partly false', they're just banking on the fact alone that seeing the term 'false' is going to activate a circuit in the average person's brain that makes them afraid of going against authority. So the automatic response becomes to see the word 'false' and automatically activate the: "muh conspiracy theorist" response.
It isn't irrelevant that this trick could be used to insert the phrase partly false into any analysis of any claim. All you need to do is add on straw man details to a claim, which nobody ever actually said, and then you can list it as partly false.
It's their way of trivializing some pretty staggering facts (and I think that is an understatement). The probability of the confluence of: (a) 2020, (b) Wuhan, (c) bioengineering, (d) global scale pandemic, and (e) respiratory ailment, is nearly zero. There is no possibility, in my mind, this is a pure coincidence. It doesn't need to go beyond that. Holy shit. The book was published in 1981.
I wanted to ping you in light of the bit I was saying to Helena about the cultural cues, although I used films as the example.
Yeah that is disturbing as shit. I hadnt actually read the passage before.
Let’s try to get a handle on the odds, roughly.
Chance that Koontz would select 2020 out of the years 1990 to 2090: 1 in100
Chance that Koontz would select China rather than another plausible world power with bioweapons capabilities Russia (i know it was russia in the first print.), US, UK, Israel, Pakistan , Iran.....etc: 1 in 10
Chance that Koontz would pick Wuhan over several other large chinese cities: 1 in 20
Chance he would pick a respiratory illness over hemorrhagic or pox like illness etc: 1 in 5
Chance that someone named Li is a whistle blower: 1 in 10
I dont think its remarkable that he descibes a treatment resistent illness, he just likes to employ drama and suspense.
100 * 10 * 20 * 5 * 10 =1,000,000
1 in a million that any particular work of fiction dealing with a “plague” plot would get this much right, roughly.
But how many books of this genre were published in the last 50 years? Probably thousands although few as widely read as Koontz. So that increases the probability of this “coincidence”.
So maybe it’s not as improbable as it would immediately seem.
Maybe there are some other probability defying commonalities here that I have missed. Im sure there’s room to pick on my assumptions, but Im aiming for order of magnitude estimate.
, like to play with probabilities? (Fuck I pinged the wrong goat, sorry not goatfromvoat)
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