The Origin Of The SARS-Cov-2 Virus And The Decoy Effect

Exhuming a body long buried

After months of seemingly universal satisfaction that the SARS-Cov-2 virus originated in the Wuhan wet markets, having crossed over from bats to humans through some intermediary species, there is now renewed interest in ascertaining its true origins.

The "Natural Origins" hypothesis has the virtue of being the simplest explanation that fits the facts, what is popularly known as Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor doesn't refute other hypotheses, but merely favours the Natural Origins hypothesis as the simplest explanation.

A new hypothesis gaining ground in some circles is that the virus was a genetically-engineered species that may have accidentally escaped from a research lab, more specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Given that the virus was first detected in the city of Wuhan, this hypothesis has immediate appeal. The paper that discusses this idea in detail, and which most of its proponents point to, is one by British author, journalist and science writer Nicholas Wade. [Mind you, Wade is not a scientist but a popular science writer. His paper was not published in a peer-reviewed science journal but on Medium.com. Still, he has a certain amount of credibility thanks to his past writings, and the paper makes a compelling case.]

The "Lab Leak" hypothesis posits that the escape of the virus from a controlled environment into the wild was the result of slipshod systems and insufficient governance.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this hypothesis is that it does not ascribe malicious intent to any party.

There is another hypothesis that does.

This one is known as the "Bioweapon" hypothesis, and postulates that the Chinese government deliberately created and released the virus to bring the rest of the world to its knees while China's economy alone would remain untouched. Most commentators refer to this as a conspiracy theory and do not give it much credence.

Conspiracy theorists would love to believe that the nefarious Chinese establishment (symbolised here by DC Comics's villain Egg-Fu) deliberately created the virus to bring the rest of the world to its knees.

A fourth hypothesis owes its origin to Chinese researchers and authors, who postulate that the virus did not originate in China at all. They point to studies by Italian scientists to argue that the virus was detected in Italy long before the first detected outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan. For obvious reasons, this hypothesis is not taken very seriously by non-Chinese, since the nationality of its proponents seems to provide an explanation of why they would seek to disclaim a link between the virus and China.

So that's the landscape of competing hypotheses on the origin of SARS-Cov-2:

A. "Natural Origins"

B. "Lab Leak"

C. "Bioweapon"

D. "Not from China"

Which hypothesis do you favour?

All hypotheses are not created equal (or for the same purpose!)

I have an interesting meta-hypothesis of my own about these hypotheses.

There is a well-known tactic in Marketing known as the Decoy Effect. Given competing products A and B from two companies, how can either of the companies nudge consumers towards its own offering, apart from obvious techniques like advertising and sales promotion?

The Wikipedia example describes two products, each of which has an advantage and a disadvantage compared to the other.

A popular tactic is to introduce a third option that functions purely as a "decoy". In other words, the company introducing this third product does not expect customers to buy it. Its purpose is solely to reposition its existing product and the competitor's in order to make the former appear much more attractive.

As the Wikipedia example shows, the decoy can be designed in such a way that one of the products now appears superior to the other.

The Wikipedia entry also shows how a decoy can be designed to have exactly the opposite effect.

The Wikipedia examples above illustrate the general principle that a decoy must appear comprehensively inferior to the company's favoured product, but only partially inferior to the competitor's product (the principle of asymmetric dominance). Then a prospective customer will tend to favour the company's main product (because it is comprehensively superior to the decoy) over the competitor's offering (because it is not as comprehensively superior to the decoy).

The Decoy Effect as it applies to SARS-Cov-2 origin hypotheses

Given this quick introduction to the concept of the Decoy Effect, we can see a certain pattern to the four hypotheses on the origin of the virus.

"Natural Origins" was the original product. We could consider it to be the "Chinese" product, because China seems to be comfortable with this hypothesis.

"Lab Leak" is a competing product introduced by the West. It is meant to put China on the defensive while taking pains not to appear as a political attack. After all, the hypothesis involves elements such as Western funding and involvement by Western researchers, so accountability is diluted. Further, malicious intent is explicitly ruled out.

These two hypotheses are "products" looking to persuade prospective "customers". Which of these two would an unbiased customer buy?

To nudge the customer along, each of the competitors has introduced a "decoy".

The "Bioweapon" product is a decoy introduced by the West. It's introduced with disclaimers of its being a ridiculous conspiracy theory, so it was never intended to win supporters anyway. It's only intended to make the "Lab Leak" hypothesis appear more credible than "Natural Origins".

The "Bioweapon" and "Lab Leak" hypotheses support each other by claiming that the virus was deliberately engineered, and so they together exert a psychological influence that seems to outweigh the "Natural Origins" hypothesis, relying as it does merely on Occam's Razor.

Between these two hypotheses, though, Occam's Razor applies once again. Malicious intent requires a higher burden of proof than an accident or a mistake. And so the Lab Leak hypothesis is comprehensively "better" in terms of plausibility than the Bioweapon hypothesis. After all, apart from hardcore conspiracy theorists who want to believe the worst about China, most people would prefer the explanation of an innocent mistake rather than malicious intent. 

And that's the Western gambit. Introduce a decoy in the form of a conspiracy theory, and people will gravitate towards the more reasonable-sounding (but still China-blaming) Lab Leak hypothesis.

The Chinese decoy, on the other hand, is the hypothesis that the virus originated outside of China, much before it was detected in Wuhan. This hypothesis turns the seemingly damning indictment of first detection into a virtue. The virus had been circulating in other countries for months, according to this hypothesis, but it was China, with its superior scientific abilities, that was first able to detect it!

Analogously to the other decoy that we saw, the "Not from China" and "Natural Origins" hypotheses support each other in ascribing a natural origin to the virus. They thus exert a psychological influence away from the idea of a human-engineered virus. Between the two, the "Not from China" idea seems less credible because non-Chinese observers would ascribe a nationalistic motive to the argument of its proponents, and so the only credible hypothesis left standing is the "Natural Origins" one.

The Chinese gambit is therefore to introduce a decoy in the form of an overly defensive claim, so that people prefer the more reasonable-sounding Natural Origins hypothesis, which absolves China of any responsibility for the pandemic.

Is there an objective truth at all?

In sum, I believe that the search for the origins of the SARS-Cov-2 virus is not a search for truth, no matter what pious protestations we may hear, because such a search is compromised from the start. Two sophisticated marketers are engaged in a battle for the mind of a prospective customer, and that customer is all of us.

Knowing what you now know about the Decoy Effect, which hypothesis would you believe now?

My Hopes For The World, Post 2020

It's the last day of 2020, a year many will be glad to see the back of. The last year has been associated with some of the most unpleasant memories, mainly because of the Covid-19 pandemic that disrupted normal life, impacted livelihoods, and -- not least, took many lives. For many families that lost loved ones or suffered economic hardship over the past year, the very sight of the number "2020" will forever retain a negative connotation.

The Tamil culture that I'm a part of has the astrological notion of the shani-dasai (period of Saturn), a phase of life that is associated with suffering, hardship, trials and tribulations. Importantly however, this period is believed to lead one to ultimate success by putting one through a test. Further, when the shani-dasai ends, Saturn is believed to leave one with a gift.

While I'm hardly superstitious, I like to take the positive from every example and allegory, and so this is what I wish will happen to the world once 2020 is but a memory.

The Way the World Works

I believe that we are on our way to the Leisure Society, but until we get there, work will continue to be a major part of our lives. Having said that, there is no reason why the nature of work should not make a clean break from the past.

I hope the culture of working from home forced by the pandemic has helped both employers and employees understand its benefits enough to want to retain this new culture. So much wasted time and effort has been eliminated from society these past few months. People haven't had to commute, and have saved at least a couple of hours every day. They could afford to get more sleep and spend more time with their families. So much energy has been saved and pollution avoided because of the virtual elimination of rush-hour traffic, especially its wasteful waits and crawling pace. For employers too, the opportunity to permanently save on commercial real estate would not have gone unnoticed. This also has knock-on effects. Employees can afford to move away from congested urban centres to more spacious homes in regional areas. The counter-magnets that urban planners have long been searching for have made their appearance at last.

We are 20 years into the 21st century. The world should not continue to work as though it is still in the 20th.

Some professions cannot operate remotely. Hairdressers, physiotherapists, care-givers to the elderly or the handicapped, all of these will have to continue working on site. But these professionals can also operate in local clusters, without unnecessary centralisation in CBDs.

Employers have to learn to embrace tools that give them the ability to set tasks and measure deliverables without having to physically watch over a roomful of employees like a strict schoolteacher.

The Public Health Landscape

I believe Covid-19 has permanently altered some aspects of public health. With the awareness that this is by no means the last pandemic we are going to see, the world has doubtless improved its ability to respond with alacrity to the next one. The admirable capability that East Asia as a whole has demonstrated this year (thanks to the experience of past regional outbreaks) will eventually be par for the course worldwide. Quarantining, social distancing norms, the habit of wearing facemasks, the infrastructure for contact tracing and alerting, all of these will become embedded in the hardware and software of society. The next pandemic will not take us by surprise the way this one has. We will take it in our stride, with little disruption to our daily lives.

Victory Over the Pathogen

Let me be even more ambitious in my predictions. I believe that the threshold of tolerance breached by this year's pandemic has finally forced humankind to stop seeing viral pathogens as merely a nuisance to be tolerated year after year. The flu vaccine of recent years has been a hit-and-miss approach with partial success against the ever-new strains of influenza that attacked every winter, but the tide has now decisively turned. I believe the forced research into the details of how viruses work will result in the the development of a super-vaccine, one that will end, once and for all, the threat of all viral diseases in humankind, including the flu and the common cold. In a few short years after 2020, we will not remember what a cold or the flu was like.

I think medical research in general has received a boost because of the urgency of the search for treatments for Covid-vulnerable people. I would not be surprised if cures for autoimmune diseases as well as other conditions classed as co-morbidities are also found in the very near future.

In short, while I agree with most people that 2020 has been a year like none other, I prefer to interpret that in a positive sense. I hope and believe that 2020 will mark a turning point in the fortunes of the world, because of the gift that Saturn is going to leave behind.

We are entering the future now. Cheers! 

Sage Advice For A Confucian Civilisation

China's mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis, especially its heavy-handed threats against those who have demanded an enquiry into the pandemic's origins, betrays a blindness born out of hubris.

Clearly, China's current leadership believes the time has come to discard Deng's advice to "hide your strength and bide your time" (itself a well-known Chinese idiom "韜光養晦、有所作為 (tāo guāng yǎng huì, yōu suō zuò wéi)" ("Hide strength, bide time, amount to something")).

The mask of China's "peaceful rise" is off, and the dragon has bared its fangs.

I think it's a terrible miscalculation on China's part.

All that China's threats have served to achieve is strengthen the arguments of those who have long warned of the dangers of allowing China too much leverage over their economies. Since China has now shown that it is willing to use trade and economic levers to punish those who question its actions, other countries cannot but take steps to reduce their dependence on China. It will be a change in policy forced by China's own intemperate actions, and even its many allies and sympathisers in foreign countries will now be forced on the back foot. China's decades-long push to inextricably weave itself into the fabric of the world's economy will now receive a permanent setback, and this will be a needless crisis of China's own making.

I can only conclude that for all the vaunted wisdom of a 5000-year old civilisation, hubris has blinded China's current leaders, rendering them short-sighted and stupid.

Did they fail to comprehend the profound wisdom of this old saying?

A soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger
-- Proverbs 15:1

If a foreign source of wisdom is too much to swallow, then a home-grown one would have served just as well.

When anger rises, think of the consequences
-- Confucius

All wise counsel would have been essentially the same - Think many times before lashing out in anger. But China's current leadership completely disregarded it.

When the first mutterings about China's errors of omission and commission with regard to the spread of Covid-19 began to be heard, China should have moved with alacrity to disarm its critics, not to threaten them.

A simple apology along these lines would have taken the wind out of their sails:

"We're sorry that a virus that originated in our country has devastated so many others around the world. We mistakenly assumed that we could contain the spread of the virus within our borders without causing panic to our trading partners, but we acknowledge that this delay in communication was a miscalculation on our part. We are willing to work with the WHO and other multilateral agencies to evolve systems to ensure that a repeat of this tragedy does not occur. We will also provide medical aid, supplies and other support to societies impacted by the SARS-CoV-2 virus."

And that would have immediately put to bed any incipient inquiry that anyone around the world had begun to demand. Why bother to investigate the origins of the pandemic when China itself had readily acknowledged its origins and owned up to its failings?

In due course, China would have been forgiven, and the world would have moved on. China's position in the world's supply chains would have been intact and unchallenged. Further, China's image as a benign and responsible power would have received a boost.

Now the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back in. The sight of China as a bully cannot be unseen, and every one of the countries that China deals with must now be reworking their policies and strategies to reduce China's leverage. They will also be cooperating more among themselves in this endeavour, disadvantaging China geostrategically.

Deng must be tut-tutting in his grave.