As one of your resident PhD scientists (molecular biology and genetics), I would like to heartily endorse your concluding paragraph (outtake below).
I started actively using Twitter (just reading, not posting) for the first time during the pandemic primarily to see how other scientists were evaluating the primary literature on covid. This allowed me to see how quickly “consensus” was generated on particular topics and then transmitted to the media, and how all the same scientists — the ones active on Twitter — are always quoted. Since this is a domain where I am able to evaluate the primarily literature on my own and come to my own conclusions, the curtain was pulled away from the media interpretation of “The Science.” It was easy to see that what was represented as The Science was often (not always) a sensationalized version of what a handful of prominent scientists who are active on Twitter are able to transmit in 140 characters. Now I know that Twitter wags the dog in a field I have sufficient professional experience to evaluate on my own, I have become quite skeptical of reporting of any issue at all! Bc chances are high it’s just the reporter repeating a Twitter consensus.
It’s one of reasons I come and read here — at least we are referred to some data and we can check Matt’s work a bit.
Outtake I endorse:
“ Then if you secure your impression of what “the scientists” think about something from scanning Twitter, you will perceive a consensus that is not really there. If something is a 70-30 issue but the 30 are keeping their heads down, it can look like a 98-2 issue.”
It’s not it was zero twitters question about the lab leak hypothesis. Razib Khan was a center of some discussions. It just the loudest voices vs the quiet considerate voices.
I was taken by Matt's 70/30 -> 98/2 point, but then I thought about the people I mostly followed on Twitter about COVID. They were Ashish Jha and Scott Gottlieb, with Andy Slavitt thrown in there. They're pretty good!
Are we sure there's a Gresham's Law effect there? Or maybe the most popular voices were also the most believable and accurate?
Yeah, there isn’t NO nuance on Twitter. One thing about science-as-it’s-happening, aka science the process (as opposed to science in textbooks, aka science as “truth”) is that since it’s in progress, the nuance is always present: “this is how we understand this topic in this study, right now, in relationship to these other studies, to the best of our ability.” Transmitting that level of nuance uses up too many characters on Twitter! So the theme I saw repeatedly was nuanced and imperfect movement towards more complete knowledge becoming translated into a un-nuanced Tweet that was more easily understood, and then passed up and out to the media. It’s less a person at fault, and more a system I see at work. And now I suspect that system is at work at just about anything else I read about that requires specialized knowledge to understand.
I recall Scott Gottlieb usually giving pretty nuanced answers on the origin story. I've probably heard 70%+ of his TV appearances (I've seen every single appearance on Face the Nation). I don't recall him ever saying lab leak was a conspiracy or casting aspersions on that line of inquiry. But I might be misremembering the earlier days.
Another important issue is the role of expert virologists dunking on the lab-leak theory. This is a glaring conflict of interest-acknowledging that COVID may have been one big screw-up jeopardizes the continued practice of this entire scientific discipline as we know it.
Right. I think the MSM hasn't caught up to the fact that if this was a lab leak, the story isn't really about China at all.
Rather, it's about the entire scientific establishment misjudging the risk of research that is happening all around the world and causing the worst industrial/scientific accident in the history of humanity.
Bingo. I’d add that it may not be the entire scientific community with clouded judgment. The references to dissenting scientists in the article were interesting (and new to me). Instead, I see this—in part—-as disciplinary failure. We can’t leave it to virus researchers who are applying for Federal grants to do more virus research to give a fair assessment of the inherent danger of their work.
I don't know how else to tell you this, but even if COVID-19 is the result of a leak of culture from a research lab (it conclusively isn't, according to it's genetics) and that somehow indicates virologists all over the world have mis-estimated the level of risk their research produces - nature is still evolving human pathogens as well, and that isn't going to stop just because you make it utterly untenable for people to anticipate them, look for them, and develop treatments and vaccines against them. You simply have to accept the elevated level of risk from scientific study of potential pathogens.
1. It simply isn't true that it is conclusive. If it was there wouldn't be scientists arguing it could have leaked.
2. The blind deference to scientists is no more reasonable than blind deference to police officers. Both have important jobs. Both improve society. Both have to be accountable for their actions.
If this research did lead to COVID catasthrophe, and there were no safety protocols that could have prevented, scientists will need to be able to demonstrate enormous value or this research should be banned.
There aren't any scientists arguing it could have leaked; they're just arguing the investigation wasn't thorough enough. I dunno, maybe that's true although it seems to have arrived at the correct conclusion nevertheless so I don't agree.
But they also implicitly seem to be saying that the virus could have leaked from the lab without being cultured there, and to my knowledge no scientist has put forward an operating theory whereby that could have happened, and that seems to simply betray an ignorance about how microbiology works in the lab.
"If this research did lead to COVID catasthrophe, and there were no safety protocols that could have prevented, scientists will need to be able to demonstrate enormous value"
One of these signatories to a letter stating that the lab leak theory remains 'entirely viable' is Ralph Baric, one of the world's foremost experts on coronaviruses, who has worked with WIV scientists on SARS in the past.
If the research led to the pandemic, the vaccines would only justify it if they had been available prior to the outbreak. Gain-of-function research is supposed to lead to ways to combat new threats *before* those threats actually arise and take their toll.
>> "You simply have to accept the elevated level of risk from scientific study of potential pathogens."
That's not how I see it. If scientists have mis-estimated the risk, it may mean we should be prepared to pay a much higher cost to mitigate the risk than we were willing to pay previously.
For example, perhaps this research should only be conducted on a remote island or at sea with researchers completely isolated from society for long periods of time, with a quarantine/isolation period before return.
I bet it's impossible to completely eliminate all risk, but there are reasonable mitigation approaches well beyond what's currently being done today that might make sense once we adjust the inputs to the cost/benefit calculation.
Hey I was thinking about this a few days ago! The alternative to ban gain of function research: sequester the researchers on an island with quarantine protocols to enter and exit. Seems smart.
It's an article of faith that we have to accept that risk, but why? How useful was the information we learned from that research when COVID-19 hit? All the practical knowledge for treating COVID-19 seems to have come from research on COVID-19 itself or other known human pathogens.
If virus research on pathogens with pandemic potential (unknown infectiousness among humans) is that important, it can be done in extremely isolated locations with strict quarantine procedures before leaving. The expense of doing that is absolutely trivial compared to the cost of a pandemic leak.
It was extremely useful - the genome was sequenced and distributed within days of conclusive identification and that's the basis on which they were able to develop the vaccines.
Again the natural reservoir of this virus is all of southeast Asia and south China. You're going to quarantine everyone? Billions of people?
Ralph Baric, one of the world's foremost experts on coronaviruses, has publicly stated that the lab leak hypothesis remains entirely viable and must be investigated (though he continues to believe natural origins are likelier).
There is absolutely not any "conclusive" determination that this pandemic could not have stemmed from gain-of-function research.
It's easy enough to always call for "additional investigation" no matter how much has already been done, and also note that Baric has a patent interest in making you think it's possible to do "seamless no-see-um genetic manipulation."
What would a sign of it being under culture look like? Maybe we're talking past each other, but even most experts don't discount the possibility of a leak entirely.
…if my “qualification” was a BS from low-tier university with no relevant research, I would not accuse others of being too ignorant to have worthwhile opinions
I guess I can't follow here why at least a story wouldn't be about China - if even just in a Watergate sense (e.g., What did they know? When did they know it?). I think the leak inself could be a series of unlikely and unfortunate events but if that was hidden ... that would be a big deal.
IMO, this isn't very much like Watergate, where the coverup was arguably worse than the initial crime.
In the case of an accidental lab leak, the harm from China's lack of cooperation on the investigation is insignificant compared to the harm of the actual incident.
Wouldn't there be - or probably better said ... couldn't there be a relationship between those two though? To what extent is the actual global harm reduced with a very public acknowledgment of a lab leak in say January. Would travel restrictions have been the immediate default rather than a much later exception?
Good point. Without any evidence, I was thinking of China's involvement in a coverup being more likely as an after the fact thing rather than a real-time thing. I thought that was the case with the pandemic in China in general. Local leaders downplayed the problem to national leadership at first.
OTOH, if this was a concerted national coverup from the start that is a bigger deal because it means we could have taken different steps earlier as you say.
A good analogy is expert virologists dunking on the lab leak theory are similar to the police officers who investigate a cop shooting and come back saying it was justified.
Both the police and virologists aren't neutral investigators and shouldn't be viewed as such.
I think if lab-leak is true, it would be super easy for the scientific community to say “China bad” and move on. The world already doesn’t trust China much and would just roll Chinese scientists in with that. I don’t see how it would damage the scientific community at large
I think that forcibly excising 1/6 of the scientific community from within the scientific community would be a huge trauma to the community. The non-scientific world might think it's easy, but it's hard to do when the community itself is so globally integrated.
So, while I agree that the discussion around lab outbreak in the early stages might have been unfair to the lab leak hypothesis, I think that by the time most of the right wing ecosystem picked up and began shouting about lab leak stuff was when it was apparent that the Trump administration had failed to contain the virus and the US was gonna get nailed.
Nearly every time a right winger tried to kick up lab leak dust, it was not to be helpful, it was to distract from the body count in the US by getting folks mad about China.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be mad about China, but these guys gave away the game by not also being helpful about stopping the virus while shouting about lab leak.
Also, Tom Cotton is a notoriously bad faith spewer of right wing lies. The man has no integrity. I can't exactly fault the media for thinking a bad faith actor was acting in bad faith and using the lab leak theory as cover for something more sinister. A broken clock is right twice a day.
I fault the media for making sweeping statements without checking to ensure that the science actually backed up their statements. Just b/c your enemies lie and mislead doesn't mean you should to.
There are no angels here, but right wing bad faith has so corroded the discourse that it is hard to take anything they say or any narrative they're pushing seriously. That's corroded the discourse far more than any media errors in judgement.
Basically, I think the media operates from a place of good faith, where they are at least trying to get it right, and the mainstream right wing operates from a place of bad faith, where truth matters far less than the narrative they feel is more useful to them in any given moment.
Think about the information ecosystem of 2020. You have the right trying to gaslight everyone on nearly any topic, so when notoriously uncharismatic weirdo Tom Cotton starts going on about lab leak, and you don't have complete information yet, but you do have a pretty plausible natural origins hypothesis don't think it's unreasonable in that context to assume Tommy is trying to pull the wool over your eyes again.
The problem here is how to correct when the cranks happen to be right about something. But honestly the cranks are so often wrong and nearly always malicious, it's not a bad idea to take everything they say with a few pounds of salt.
The dynamic you describe, and not being willing to say "maybe pushing back on Cotton isn't our too goal as journalists, and we should wait and do reporting instead", is part of the reason we have this very ecosystem you decry.
"The problem here is how to correct when the cranks happen to be right about something."
This is only a problem if you just reflexively believe the opposite of what cranks say. The right response is to not let cranks influence what you believe. Figure out what you believe and then figure out how to respond to the cranks. It seems like the media goes about it the other way around figuring out how to respond to the crank and then using that to figure out what they believe.
But it does seem to me that if the GOP was 100% accurate with all facts starting tomorrow, the media would correct pretty quickly. I do not think the reverse of this is true.
I mean, Matt, and I'm not trying to harp here, but sometimes some actors have so thorougly discredited themselves that they don't really deserve nuanced analysis of what they'e saying. They can't be trusted. Tom Cotton can't be trusted. He's a fashy crank who thinks he's going to be president someday and he will say anything to get there.
I agree, I have definitely updated my priors at this point to where lab leak is just as if not slightly more probable than 100% natural origin, but man, getting upset about not giving Tom Cotton serious consideration? Really? He did that to himself.
I think it’s fine if you don’t want to give Tom Cotton serious consideration. When he first spoke at a congressional hearing everyone ignored him. Fine. Senators say things that get ignored all the time. But then what happened over the next several weeks isn’t that he was ignored, it’s that he was *criticized for saying something he didn’t say* and I don’t understand how that’s acceptable.
You pointed it out in the piece, but this is really a large problem within media itself at the moment, yeah? I've lost count of the number of times over the past few years where the media (and especially media Twitter) breathlessly reports something, and then I track the original quote (or whatever) down and it bears almost no resemblance to what's being reported. And then you see it become a talking point across the various ecosystems and you begin to feel like you're taking crazy pills.
I agree it's a bigger issue. I think the bigger issue is that there is not one scientific journal that has said definitively where the virus originated. And that should be enough for the media. It wasn't and the letter by scientists asking for reconsideration of 'definitive' reports is only now making that clear to the general public. Instead, the liberal media became complicit with Trump and the conservative media in letting partisanship over-ride objectivity.
"it’s that he was *criticized for saying something he didn’t say* and I don’t understand how that’s acceptable."
Agreed. And that's why even though I'm right of center, I read your commentary. Because even though we don't always agree I think you're arguing in good faith, and not twisting stuff to serve a political narrative.
It seemed to me at the time that the lab leak coverage was pretty clearly intended to preemptively discredit anything crazy Trump may have done regarding China's role in the outbreak. A lot of us--maybe you too?--were pretty worried that he was going to use the lab leak theory to declare it an act of war or justify sketchy behavior around the election. I suspect editors were saying "doesn't matter if its right the impact of this reporting might be horrific" in the midst of what I remember being a pretty fucking fearful time.
I work in life sciences real estate, and we have a number of BSL facilities of different levels up to 3Ag. It NEVER surprised me that something got out of the lab, but at the time I didn't think it would be helpful to talk about this.
I think you inadvertently hit upon the root of the problem. What (good or bad) purposes information will be used for is not relevant to whether the information is true/accurate or not. Argue against the resulting policies, not against allowing people to hear the information itself.
This is exactly what climate change deniers do: I don't like the policy implications if climate change exists, therefore I will argue that the information itself should be discarded, I don't care whether it is true or not. There are plenty more examples on the left side of the aisle too.
Once you add who/whom into the mix, you get yourself further from the truth. It's one thing to say that you need to see the source material because you distrust the person presenting the information. It's another to say that the information cannot be true because you distrust the person presenting it, and therefore we should prevent the people-who-are-not-as-smart-as-me from hearing it.
I'm all for pointing and laughing people who make declarative statements that turn out to be bogus. Preventing them from speaking because someone in my tribe might face negative consequences from resulting policy or attitudes is just plain censorship.
Who’s giving up the own goal: Matt in pointing out that people were wrong about what Cotton was saying or the people who were wrong in their rush to attack Cotton? It seems to me the latter.
Speaking as someone who profoundly disagrees with Cotton on most issues, Cotton is far better informed on China foreign policy than probably 99% of Americans, and it showed in this instance.
The single greatest predictor for whether or not you were taking COVID seriously in February 2020 was whether or not you followed China foreign policy discussion online. China hands understood how much of a BFD it was that the CCP had essentially ground its entire economy to a halt and started ringing the alarm bells, Cotton included.
This I fully agree with. It's why a lot of people from all across the spectrum were getting extremely nervous in early 2020 -- it's why I was freaked out traveling through Heathrow in February and seeing no masking, no public health measures of any kind.
I was totally wrong about what kind of tsunami was about to hit us -- I thought it would come crashing down, kill a lot of people, and then be gone in a month or so, which clearly did not happen. But I remember being very scared, and the Chinese reaction was definitely what scared me.
Yes, I definitely underestimated the duration of the crisis as well (I figured about a year domestically and it was definitely much longer than that) but completely agreed regarding the sense of impending dread throughout February. I was riding the train into NYC for work five days a week and I was dreading it every single day by the end of the month. I don't think I'll ever forget that period from like mid-February to early March right before everything in the city blew up.
I have Chinese students in my lab who were starting to wear masks in January and warning us what was coming. I humbly admit that I didn't fully internalize the possibility until about one week before everything went down.
I think there is....something to this, of course. Credibility is a finite resource, and Sen. Cotton depleted his stores of it long, long ago.
That said, I think we people who would like to consider ourselves nuanced critical thinkers have to be more careful about falling into the trap of dismissing points from partisan cranks just because they are, in fact, partisan cranks. Broken clocks, etc.
Not to my mind, no -- the CCP is objectively worse than Cotton in their credibility, their policies, their ideological rigidity, and so on. It's possible that I may prefer Xi's haircut to Cotton's, but otherwise the CCP is worse in every way.
However, most people who distrusted Cotton were not taking the CCP's word for anything here. Instead, they were trusting (what they took to be) the consensus of American scientists. So raising the issue of the CCP's credibility is kind of a red herring.
Sorry, but the CCP is not worse in "every" way. It's not worse on climate change. It's also not worse on public health. I doubt it's worse on immigration, either. Or on trade. On the use of state power to crush dissent, I'd say they're about equal.
This is just objectively wrong to the point that it would make a Chinese state propagandist blush. There are more immigrants currently living in New York City than the entirety of China, which has like 150x the population. Even if Cotton had unlimited dictatorial powers and could completely halt illegal immigration and cut legal immigration by like 80% the US would still admit many orders of magnitude more immigrants each year than China.
"On the use of state power to crush dissent, I'd say they're about equal."
My goodness, I hope you're not serious about this. Cotton wrote an op-ed advocating for active duty troops to suppress violent rioters (not that I agreed with him). The CCP has over a million ethnic minorities in concentration camps.
Bad people can be right. And often bad people have biases that are odious to us but can influence them to perceive what are inconvenient truths to us. If you like China or think it isn't all that bad, you should pay more attention to what people who don't like China are saying to check your own bias.
"Trust but verify" is actually good advice, despite the source. FWIW I more often apply it as "Distrust but verify."
As to Cotton specifically, "Interesting question about the lab but so what, COVID is here and we need to deal with it" is a much more honest and ethical rebuttal than "You're crazy talk about extra-terrestials which you never mentioned makes you sound crazy." I'd guess the latter gives the target audience more of a thrill, however.
That's called a prior and it's not just the media saying in the past that Tom Cotton can be discredited, there was copious evidence of his dishonesty and disingenuousness.
Are there any policy disagreements that you think discredit people? For example, if I said I'm an antivaxxer are you not allowed to make any other assumptions about whether my ideas on taxes are good or not?
The groupthink is awful, and Matt and others are right to point it out. But I think it is weird that the actual content of Twitter discourse (or lack thereof) is weirdly underexplored in this article and in the many others on this topic.
Matt’s postmortem largely scans as “Twitter is tribal and elevates the sensationalized stories that may be inaccurate”, but at some level one should ask how 140 characters is supposed to convey the complexity and nuance of a story. The issue here is less that nefarious actors are able to mislead the majority of high integrity journalists on Twitter, and more that high integrity journalists have convinced themselves that screwing around on Twitter is the same as journalism.
This a rather idealized picture of newsroom practices in the past. Maybe does not apply to William Randolph Hearst's newsrooms? Here in the States, the relation between papers and political parties used to be closer to the model current in the UK, where papers are openly and explicitly partisan, and their reporting is, too.
The idealized vision of non-partisan papers is mostly a post-WWII creation -- rather like the idealized view of non-partisan legislation in Washington DC (i.e., when both parties bonded over segregation).
I agree with your perspective but would change the phrasing.
It's less about "objectivity." The criticisms about a view from nowhere are convincing to me. Rather it's a level of detachment that's missing. If you're a proud journalist/activist, how are you different from a PR Flak who's trying to push a narrative? You're not. In fact, in many cases, you're adopting the style of detachment to gain credibility without disclosing that you have an obvious axe to grind.
Graham is right in that journalists will fret about the political implications of their stories. There's no detachment between reporter and subject. That's bad. And it's so obvious. That's why they basically have no credibility. That's how you get logic like "Tom Cotton is a right-wing liar so whatever he's saying must be a lie."
Those are both differences, yes. And newsrooms ought to do the first and avoid the second. We're not disagreeing about that.
My point was only about what is "common" in newsrooms, and how long it has been common. Many US papers in the 19th century and beginning of the 20th c did not try to be objective, and made up facts. If anything, the worst excesses now (e.g. Fox News) are more like a return to that model than some sort of new departure from what used to be common.
I basically agree. Even if the "lab leak" hypothesis turns out to be true, the argument most proponents of it were actually making - that we should blame China and not Trump for all the bad things about COVID - is clearly not. When Trump, Pompeo and various Fox News hosts and guests made this argument, they were not really concerned about "ethics in virus research."
I wonder if decades from now history textbooks are going to discuss GamerGate as significant historical event, along the lines of bleeding Kansas or the Zimmerman telegram.
That's exactly my point rwlesq. In politics/influencing public opinion, why you make an argument is often just as important as the argument you're making. Like, if you are arguing a true thing, but there's a good chance you're arguing the true thing to advance a bad thing, you're still kind of doing a bad thing, and everyone involved has every right to question your motives.
Ethics in video games journalism, but her emails, benghazi, lab leak all this crap is like...technically true in some sense, and not as debunked as some media writeups would have you believe, but the people pushing that narrative don't actually give a shit, they have some other dumb goal like owning the libs.
What's happened is that it's become a fairly accurate heuristic to reject out of hand what some actors say because they are always trying to mislead you. When they happen to be right, (again, not because they care to be techncially correct, but because broken clock, etc.) it can cause problems.
>> "if you are arguing a true thing, but there's a good chance you're arguing the true thing to advance a bad thing, you're still kind of doing a bad thing, and everyone involved has every right to question your motives."
IMO, this is the crux of what's wrong with journalism today.
Many journalists feel that part of their job is to discern which arguments/narratives are more likely to advance good things and which are likely to lead to bad things. Of course, because they're human, their discernment is inherently flawed and likely to be wrong as often as it's correct.
Then they use flawed assessments of likely good or bad outcomes, with the moral certainty of any crusader, to justify slanting/hiding the truth or making unfounded claims about motivations of supposed bad actors.
> What's happened is that it's become a fairly accurate heuristic to reject out of hand what some actors say because they are always trying to mislead you.
It's such a dumb heuristic. When Cotton or Trump says something, the proper move is to ignore them because they are unreliable, not to immediately start believing the opposite.
The worst part of this argument is that so many believe the other side of the coin:
Like, if you are arguing a [false] thing, but there's a good chance you're arguing the [false] thing to advance a [good]thing, you're still kind of doing a [good]thing...
I'd quarrel with this a little bit in this instance, because as Matt shows, Cotton didn't necessarily come up with this idea all by himself.
The concerning element, from a journalism standpoint, is that the establishment media ignored other establishment, credible sources to dunk on Cotton.
I think he deserves to be dunked on, repeatedly, but not for this. Just like Republicans have lost credibility when it comes to their tinfoil theories, the media will lose (whatever is left of) its credibility with indiscriminate accusations of conspiracy theorizing.
That's fine, and a fair point. It's a tough bind dealing with cranks. I would concede that the dunking was not productive, and the better response would have been to ignore Cotton or just emphasize that we don't have a clear picture rather than going hard in the other direction.
It is indeed. I think one way to do this is to deconstruct the bad faith basis of the argument for what it is, but then address the merits of it with that in mind.
It's a tightrope act and requires tact and credibility that is being sacrificed.
I think he gets branded as a liar partly because his "Send in the Troops" op-ed last summer associated him in many people's minds with a genre of conservatism that was characterized by fascist tendencies (and therefore, misinformation). Reminds me of a viral Tweet where some 18 year old Kamala Harris staffer was called a "War Criminal." I call it the "Birds of a Feather" effect.
So he completed ranger school which their expert says earns him the right to call himself a ranger. But even though it would be accurate for him to call himself a ranger, he should not do so in the context of referring to his military service because he wasn't part of a ranger unit. That seems less like a lie and more like stupid army drama about who gets to call themselves what.
Many actual service people have spoken up to say that the definition of what constitutes a "Ranger" is pretty nebulous and that they have seen Ranger school grads call themselves "Rangers" and have no issue with it. This is a situation where basically different vets have different opinions and there's no clear "guide" to follow, so I don't think it was misleading for Cotton to apply the tag to himself, especially given that he served in combat.
Maybe you picked at random, but if this is the most consequential example of lying that can be attributed to Tom Cotton, I really struggled to see how his trustworthiness should be meaningfully differentiated from that of an average politician.
As one of your resident PhD scientists (molecular biology and genetics), I would like to heartily endorse your concluding paragraph (outtake below).
I started actively using Twitter (just reading, not posting) for the first time during the pandemic primarily to see how other scientists were evaluating the primary literature on covid. This allowed me to see how quickly “consensus” was generated on particular topics and then transmitted to the media, and how all the same scientists — the ones active on Twitter — are always quoted. Since this is a domain where I am able to evaluate the primarily literature on my own and come to my own conclusions, the curtain was pulled away from the media interpretation of “The Science.” It was easy to see that what was represented as The Science was often (not always) a sensationalized version of what a handful of prominent scientists who are active on Twitter are able to transmit in 140 characters. Now I know that Twitter wags the dog in a field I have sufficient professional experience to evaluate on my own, I have become quite skeptical of reporting of any issue at all! Bc chances are high it’s just the reporter repeating a Twitter consensus.
It’s one of reasons I come and read here — at least we are referred to some data and we can check Matt’s work a bit.
Outtake I endorse:
“ Then if you secure your impression of what “the scientists” think about something from scanning Twitter, you will perceive a consensus that is not really there. If something is a 70-30 issue but the 30 are keeping their heads down, it can look like a 98-2 issue.”
It’s not it was zero twitters question about the lab leak hypothesis. Razib Khan was a center of some discussions. It just the loudest voices vs the quiet considerate voices.
I was taken by Matt's 70/30 -> 98/2 point, but then I thought about the people I mostly followed on Twitter about COVID. They were Ashish Jha and Scott Gottlieb, with Andy Slavitt thrown in there. They're pretty good!
Are we sure there's a Gresham's Law effect there? Or maybe the most popular voices were also the most believable and accurate?
Yeah, there isn’t NO nuance on Twitter. One thing about science-as-it’s-happening, aka science the process (as opposed to science in textbooks, aka science as “truth”) is that since it’s in progress, the nuance is always present: “this is how we understand this topic in this study, right now, in relationship to these other studies, to the best of our ability.” Transmitting that level of nuance uses up too many characters on Twitter! So the theme I saw repeatedly was nuanced and imperfect movement towards more complete knowledge becoming translated into a un-nuanced Tweet that was more easily understood, and then passed up and out to the media. It’s less a person at fault, and more a system I see at work. And now I suspect that system is at work at just about anything else I read about that requires specialized knowledge to understand.
>>And now I suspect that system is at work at just about anything else I read about that requires specialized knowledge to understand.
There's even a name for this: the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, coined by Michael Crichton.
I recall Scott Gottlieb usually giving pretty nuanced answers on the origin story. I've probably heard 70%+ of his TV appearances (I've seen every single appearance on Face the Nation). I don't recall him ever saying lab leak was a conspiracy or casting aspersions on that line of inquiry. But I might be misremembering the earlier days.
Another important issue is the role of expert virologists dunking on the lab-leak theory. This is a glaring conflict of interest-acknowledging that COVID may have been one big screw-up jeopardizes the continued practice of this entire scientific discipline as we know it.
Right. I think the MSM hasn't caught up to the fact that if this was a lab leak, the story isn't really about China at all.
Rather, it's about the entire scientific establishment misjudging the risk of research that is happening all around the world and causing the worst industrial/scientific accident in the history of humanity.
Bingo. I’d add that it may not be the entire scientific community with clouded judgment. The references to dissenting scientists in the article were interesting (and new to me). Instead, I see this—in part—-as disciplinary failure. We can’t leave it to virus researchers who are applying for Federal grants to do more virus research to give a fair assessment of the inherent danger of their work.
I don't know how else to tell you this, but even if COVID-19 is the result of a leak of culture from a research lab (it conclusively isn't, according to it's genetics) and that somehow indicates virologists all over the world have mis-estimated the level of risk their research produces - nature is still evolving human pathogens as well, and that isn't going to stop just because you make it utterly untenable for people to anticipate them, look for them, and develop treatments and vaccines against them. You simply have to accept the elevated level of risk from scientific study of potential pathogens.
1. It simply isn't true that it is conclusive. If it was there wouldn't be scientists arguing it could have leaked.
2. The blind deference to scientists is no more reasonable than blind deference to police officers. Both have important jobs. Both improve society. Both have to be accountable for their actions.
If this research did lead to COVID catasthrophe, and there were no safety protocols that could have prevented, scientists will need to be able to demonstrate enormous value or this research should be banned.
There aren't any scientists arguing it could have leaked; they're just arguing the investigation wasn't thorough enough. I dunno, maybe that's true although it seems to have arrived at the correct conclusion nevertheless so I don't agree.
But they also implicitly seem to be saying that the virus could have leaked from the lab without being cultured there, and to my knowledge no scientist has put forward an operating theory whereby that could have happened, and that seems to simply betray an ignorance about how microbiology works in the lab.
"If this research did lead to COVID catasthrophe, and there were no safety protocols that could have prevented, scientists will need to be able to demonstrate enormous value"
The vaccines are the enormous value.
"There aren't any scientists arguing it could have leaked;"
This is disinformation.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
One of these signatories to a letter stating that the lab leak theory remains 'entirely viable' is Ralph Baric, one of the world's foremost experts on coronaviruses, who has worked with WIV scientists on SARS in the past.
If the research led to the pandemic, the vaccines would only justify it if they had been available prior to the outbreak. Gain-of-function research is supposed to lead to ways to combat new threats *before* those threats actually arise and take their toll.
>> "You simply have to accept the elevated level of risk from scientific study of potential pathogens."
That's not how I see it. If scientists have mis-estimated the risk, it may mean we should be prepared to pay a much higher cost to mitigate the risk than we were willing to pay previously.
For example, perhaps this research should only be conducted on a remote island or at sea with researchers completely isolated from society for long periods of time, with a quarantine/isolation period before return.
I bet it's impossible to completely eliminate all risk, but there are reasonable mitigation approaches well beyond what's currently being done today that might make sense once we adjust the inputs to the cost/benefit calculation.
Hey I was thinking about this a few days ago! The alternative to ban gain of function research: sequester the researchers on an island with quarantine protocols to enter and exit. Seems smart.
Are you aware that viruses evolve naturally in every single location on the surface of the Earth, including deep-sea vents?
It's an article of faith that we have to accept that risk, but why? How useful was the information we learned from that research when COVID-19 hit? All the practical knowledge for treating COVID-19 seems to have come from research on COVID-19 itself or other known human pathogens.
If virus research on pathogens with pandemic potential (unknown infectiousness among humans) is that important, it can be done in extremely isolated locations with strict quarantine procedures before leaving. The expense of doing that is absolutely trivial compared to the cost of a pandemic leak.
It was extremely useful - the genome was sequenced and distributed within days of conclusive identification and that's the basis on which they were able to develop the vaccines.
Again the natural reservoir of this virus is all of southeast Asia and south China. You're going to quarantine everyone? Billions of people?
Ralph Baric, one of the world's foremost experts on coronaviruses, has publicly stated that the lab leak hypothesis remains entirely viable and must be investigated (though he continues to believe natural origins are likelier).
There is absolutely not any "conclusive" determination that this pandemic could not have stemmed from gain-of-function research.
It's easy enough to always call for "additional investigation" no matter how much has already been done, and also note that Baric has a patent interest in making you think it's possible to do "seamless no-see-um genetic manipulation."
How is it conclusive?
The viral genome has none of the expected signs of being under culture, or incubation in hosts besides humans and bats.
That's conclusive - if the lab didn't culture it, it can't have escaped from there.
What would a sign of it being under culture look like? Maybe we're talking past each other, but even most experts don't discount the possibility of a leak entirely.
“Arrogance” is when you think you can have a worthwhile opinion on a topic without any qualifications in the field.
…if my “qualification” was a BS from low-tier university with no relevant research, I would not accuse others of being too ignorant to have worthwhile opinions
I guess I can't follow here why at least a story wouldn't be about China - if even just in a Watergate sense (e.g., What did they know? When did they know it?). I think the leak inself could be a series of unlikely and unfortunate events but if that was hidden ... that would be a big deal.
IMO, this isn't very much like Watergate, where the coverup was arguably worse than the initial crime.
In the case of an accidental lab leak, the harm from China's lack of cooperation on the investigation is insignificant compared to the harm of the actual incident.
Wouldn't there be - or probably better said ... couldn't there be a relationship between those two though? To what extent is the actual global harm reduced with a very public acknowledgment of a lab leak in say January. Would travel restrictions have been the immediate default rather than a much later exception?
Good point. Without any evidence, I was thinking of China's involvement in a coverup being more likely as an after the fact thing rather than a real-time thing. I thought that was the case with the pandemic in China in general. Local leaders downplayed the problem to national leadership at first.
OTOH, if this was a concerted national coverup from the start that is a bigger deal because it means we could have taken different steps earlier as you say.
A good analogy is expert virologists dunking on the lab leak theory are similar to the police officers who investigate a cop shooting and come back saying it was justified.
Both the police and virologists aren't neutral investigators and shouldn't be viewed as such.
I think if lab-leak is true, it would be super easy for the scientific community to say “China bad” and move on. The world already doesn’t trust China much and would just roll Chinese scientists in with that. I don’t see how it would damage the scientific community at large
I think that forcibly excising 1/6 of the scientific community from within the scientific community would be a huge trauma to the community. The non-scientific world might think it's easy, but it's hard to do when the community itself is so globally integrated.
So, while I agree that the discussion around lab outbreak in the early stages might have been unfair to the lab leak hypothesis, I think that by the time most of the right wing ecosystem picked up and began shouting about lab leak stuff was when it was apparent that the Trump administration had failed to contain the virus and the US was gonna get nailed.
Nearly every time a right winger tried to kick up lab leak dust, it was not to be helpful, it was to distract from the body count in the US by getting folks mad about China.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be mad about China, but these guys gave away the game by not also being helpful about stopping the virus while shouting about lab leak.
Also, Tom Cotton is a notoriously bad faith spewer of right wing lies. The man has no integrity. I can't exactly fault the media for thinking a bad faith actor was acting in bad faith and using the lab leak theory as cover for something more sinister. A broken clock is right twice a day.
I fault the media for making sweeping statements without checking to ensure that the science actually backed up their statements. Just b/c your enemies lie and mislead doesn't mean you should to.
There are no angels here, but right wing bad faith has so corroded the discourse that it is hard to take anything they say or any narrative they're pushing seriously. That's corroded the discourse far more than any media errors in judgement.
Basically, I think the media operates from a place of good faith, where they are at least trying to get it right, and the mainstream right wing operates from a place of bad faith, where truth matters far less than the narrative they feel is more useful to them in any given moment.
Think about the information ecosystem of 2020. You have the right trying to gaslight everyone on nearly any topic, so when notoriously uncharismatic weirdo Tom Cotton starts going on about lab leak, and you don't have complete information yet, but you do have a pretty plausible natural origins hypothesis don't think it's unreasonable in that context to assume Tommy is trying to pull the wool over your eyes again.
The problem here is how to correct when the cranks happen to be right about something. But honestly the cranks are so often wrong and nearly always malicious, it's not a bad idea to take everything they say with a few pounds of salt.
The dynamic you describe, and not being willing to say "maybe pushing back on Cotton isn't our too goal as journalists, and we should wait and do reporting instead", is part of the reason we have this very ecosystem you decry.
"The problem here is how to correct when the cranks happen to be right about something."
This is only a problem if you just reflexively believe the opposite of what cranks say. The right response is to not let cranks influence what you believe. Figure out what you believe and then figure out how to respond to the cranks. It seems like the media goes about it the other way around figuring out how to respond to the crank and then using that to figure out what they believe.
"Just b/c your enemies lie and mislead doesn't mean you should to. "
Agreed. But the first problem is that the vast majority of the MSM believes that Republicans are their enemies.
Kind of hard to report objectively when you consider one of the major political parties, (and half the country) to be your enemies.
But it does seem to me that if the GOP was 100% accurate with all facts starting tomorrow, the media would correct pretty quickly. I do not think the reverse of this is true.
I mean, Matt, and I'm not trying to harp here, but sometimes some actors have so thorougly discredited themselves that they don't really deserve nuanced analysis of what they'e saying. They can't be trusted. Tom Cotton can't be trusted. He's a fashy crank who thinks he's going to be president someday and he will say anything to get there.
I agree, I have definitely updated my priors at this point to where lab leak is just as if not slightly more probable than 100% natural origin, but man, getting upset about not giving Tom Cotton serious consideration? Really? He did that to himself.
I think it’s fine if you don’t want to give Tom Cotton serious consideration. When he first spoke at a congressional hearing everyone ignored him. Fine. Senators say things that get ignored all the time. But then what happened over the next several weeks isn’t that he was ignored, it’s that he was *criticized for saying something he didn’t say* and I don’t understand how that’s acceptable.
You pointed it out in the piece, but this is really a large problem within media itself at the moment, yeah? I've lost count of the number of times over the past few years where the media (and especially media Twitter) breathlessly reports something, and then I track the original quote (or whatever) down and it bears almost no resemblance to what's being reported. And then you see it become a talking point across the various ecosystems and you begin to feel like you're taking crazy pills.
I agree it's a bigger issue. I think the bigger issue is that there is not one scientific journal that has said definitively where the virus originated. And that should be enough for the media. It wasn't and the letter by scientists asking for reconsideration of 'definitive' reports is only now making that clear to the general public. Instead, the liberal media became complicit with Trump and the conservative media in letting partisanship over-ride objectivity.
"it’s that he was *criticized for saying something he didn’t say* and I don’t understand how that’s acceptable."
Agreed. And that's why even though I'm right of center, I read your commentary. Because even though we don't always agree I think you're arguing in good faith, and not twisting stuff to serve a political narrative.
It seemed to me at the time that the lab leak coverage was pretty clearly intended to preemptively discredit anything crazy Trump may have done regarding China's role in the outbreak. A lot of us--maybe you too?--were pretty worried that he was going to use the lab leak theory to declare it an act of war or justify sketchy behavior around the election. I suspect editors were saying "doesn't matter if its right the impact of this reporting might be horrific" in the midst of what I remember being a pretty fucking fearful time.
I work in life sciences real estate, and we have a number of BSL facilities of different levels up to 3Ag. It NEVER surprised me that something got out of the lab, but at the time I didn't think it would be helpful to talk about this.
I think you inadvertently hit upon the root of the problem. What (good or bad) purposes information will be used for is not relevant to whether the information is true/accurate or not. Argue against the resulting policies, not against allowing people to hear the information itself.
This is exactly what climate change deniers do: I don't like the policy implications if climate change exists, therefore I will argue that the information itself should be discarded, I don't care whether it is true or not. There are plenty more examples on the left side of the aisle too.
Once you add who/whom into the mix, you get yourself further from the truth. It's one thing to say that you need to see the source material because you distrust the person presenting the information. It's another to say that the information cannot be true because you distrust the person presenting it, and therefore we should prevent the people-who-are-not-as-smart-as-me from hearing it.
I'm all for pointing and laughing people who make declarative statements that turn out to be bogus. Preventing them from speaking because someone in my tribe might face negative consequences from resulting policy or attitudes is just plain censorship.
"He and his party would be perfectly happy to have a media that only parrots their own party line."
You mean kind of like what the Dems have now with the MSM?
Who’s giving up the own goal: Matt in pointing out that people were wrong about what Cotton was saying or the people who were wrong in their rush to attack Cotton? It seems to me the latter.
Speaking as someone who profoundly disagrees with Cotton on most issues, Cotton is far better informed on China foreign policy than probably 99% of Americans, and it showed in this instance.
The single greatest predictor for whether or not you were taking COVID seriously in February 2020 was whether or not you followed China foreign policy discussion online. China hands understood how much of a BFD it was that the CCP had essentially ground its entire economy to a halt and started ringing the alarm bells, Cotton included.
This I fully agree with. It's why a lot of people from all across the spectrum were getting extremely nervous in early 2020 -- it's why I was freaked out traveling through Heathrow in February and seeing no masking, no public health measures of any kind.
I was totally wrong about what kind of tsunami was about to hit us -- I thought it would come crashing down, kill a lot of people, and then be gone in a month or so, which clearly did not happen. But I remember being very scared, and the Chinese reaction was definitely what scared me.
Yes, I definitely underestimated the duration of the crisis as well (I figured about a year domestically and it was definitely much longer than that) but completely agreed regarding the sense of impending dread throughout February. I was riding the train into NYC for work five days a week and I was dreading it every single day by the end of the month. I don't think I'll ever forget that period from like mid-February to early March right before everything in the city blew up.
I have Chinese students in my lab who were starting to wear masks in January and warning us what was coming. I humbly admit that I didn't fully internalize the possibility until about one week before everything went down.
Yep, when I saw China locking down a city I new it was going to be serious. But 10 boxes on N95 masks in January or February.
I think there is....something to this, of course. Credibility is a finite resource, and Sen. Cotton depleted his stores of it long, long ago.
That said, I think we people who would like to consider ourselves nuanced critical thinkers have to be more careful about falling into the trap of dismissing points from partisan cranks just because they are, in fact, partisan cranks. Broken clocks, etc.
Does CCP really have more credibility than Cotton?
Not to my mind, no -- the CCP is objectively worse than Cotton in their credibility, their policies, their ideological rigidity, and so on. It's possible that I may prefer Xi's haircut to Cotton's, but otherwise the CCP is worse in every way.
However, most people who distrusted Cotton were not taking the CCP's word for anything here. Instead, they were trusting (what they took to be) the consensus of American scientists. So raising the issue of the CCP's credibility is kind of a red herring.
Sorry, but the CCP is not worse in "every" way. It's not worse on climate change. It's also not worse on public health. I doubt it's worse on immigration, either. Or on trade. On the use of state power to crush dissent, I'd say they're about equal.
"I doubt it's worse on immigration, either."
This is just objectively wrong to the point that it would make a Chinese state propagandist blush. There are more immigrants currently living in New York City than the entirety of China, which has like 150x the population. Even if Cotton had unlimited dictatorial powers and could completely halt illegal immigration and cut legal immigration by like 80% the US would still admit many orders of magnitude more immigrants each year than China.
"On the use of state power to crush dissent, I'd say they're about equal."
My goodness, I hope you're not serious about this. Cotton wrote an op-ed advocating for active duty troops to suppress violent rioters (not that I agreed with him). The CCP has over a million ethnic minorities in concentration camps.
"On the use of state power to crush dissent, I'd say they're about equal. "
The people in China in actual concentration camps would disagree I'm sure.
1. Immigration: China's Hukou system limiting internal migration for 1.4 billion people is worse than Cotton's external immigration policies.
2. Climate: Cotton's bad but China emmissions are spiraling upwards and all they offer is platitudes.
3. State Power: We don't know what Cotton would do with the power but he hasn't reached CCP level.
Bad people can be right. And often bad people have biases that are odious to us but can influence them to perceive what are inconvenient truths to us. If you like China or think it isn't all that bad, you should pay more attention to what people who don't like China are saying to check your own bias.
"Trust but verify" is actually good advice, despite the source. FWIW I more often apply it as "Distrust but verify."
As to Cotton specifically, "Interesting question about the lab but so what, COVID is here and we need to deal with it" is a much more honest and ethical rebuttal than "You're crazy talk about extra-terrestials which you never mentioned makes you sound crazy." I'd guess the latter gives the target audience more of a thrill, however.
That's called a prior and it's not just the media saying in the past that Tom Cotton can be discredited, there was copious evidence of his dishonesty and disingenuousness.
Ah yes, if we just refer to our unfair biases as "priors," it makes them respectable and scientific!
Any citations, or should we just take your word for it?
Note disagreements about policy are not equal to dishonesty.
Are there any policy disagreements that you think discredit people? For example, if I said I'm an antivaxxer are you not allowed to make any other assumptions about whether my ideas on taxes are good or not?
Reporters who spend all day on Twitter marinating in groupthink tend to lose their bearings and priorities as reporters.
The groupthink is awful, and Matt and others are right to point it out. But I think it is weird that the actual content of Twitter discourse (or lack thereof) is weirdly underexplored in this article and in the many others on this topic.
Matt’s postmortem largely scans as “Twitter is tribal and elevates the sensationalized stories that may be inaccurate”, but at some level one should ask how 140 characters is supposed to convey the complexity and nuance of a story. The issue here is less that nefarious actors are able to mislead the majority of high integrity journalists on Twitter, and more that high integrity journalists have convinced themselves that screwing around on Twitter is the same as journalism.
"didn’t used to be common thinking in newsrooms."
This a rather idealized picture of newsroom practices in the past. Maybe does not apply to William Randolph Hearst's newsrooms? Here in the States, the relation between papers and political parties used to be closer to the model current in the UK, where papers are openly and explicitly partisan, and their reporting is, too.
The idealized vision of non-partisan papers is mostly a post-WWII creation -- rather like the idealized view of non-partisan legislation in Washington DC (i.e., when both parties bonded over segregation).
There is definitely at least one Republican reporter at one of those papers, come on. This claim gets more extreme every time you make it.
I agree with your perspective but would change the phrasing.
It's less about "objectivity." The criticisms about a view from nowhere are convincing to me. Rather it's a level of detachment that's missing. If you're a proud journalist/activist, how are you different from a PR Flak who's trying to push a narrative? You're not. In fact, in many cases, you're adopting the style of detachment to gain credibility without disclosing that you have an obvious axe to grind.
Graham is right in that journalists will fret about the political implications of their stories. There's no detachment between reporter and subject. That's bad. And it's so obvious. That's why they basically have no credibility. That's how you get logic like "Tom Cotton is a right-wing liar so whatever he's saying must be a lie."
Those are both differences, yes. And newsrooms ought to do the first and avoid the second. We're not disagreeing about that.
My point was only about what is "common" in newsrooms, and how long it has been common. Many US papers in the 19th century and beginning of the 20th c did not try to be objective, and made up facts. If anything, the worst excesses now (e.g. Fox News) are more like a return to that model than some sort of new departure from what used to be common.
I basically agree. Even if the "lab leak" hypothesis turns out to be true, the argument most proponents of it were actually making - that we should blame China and not Trump for all the bad things about COVID - is clearly not. When Trump, Pompeo and various Fox News hosts and guests made this argument, they were not really concerned about "ethics in virus research."
Oh, GamerGate - a simpler time.
I wonder if decades from now history textbooks are going to discuss GamerGate as significant historical event, along the lines of bleeding Kansas or the Zimmerman telegram.
That's exactly my point rwlesq. In politics/influencing public opinion, why you make an argument is often just as important as the argument you're making. Like, if you are arguing a true thing, but there's a good chance you're arguing the true thing to advance a bad thing, you're still kind of doing a bad thing, and everyone involved has every right to question your motives.
Ethics in video games journalism, but her emails, benghazi, lab leak all this crap is like...technically true in some sense, and not as debunked as some media writeups would have you believe, but the people pushing that narrative don't actually give a shit, they have some other dumb goal like owning the libs.
What's happened is that it's become a fairly accurate heuristic to reject out of hand what some actors say because they are always trying to mislead you. When they happen to be right, (again, not because they care to be techncially correct, but because broken clock, etc.) it can cause problems.
>> "if you are arguing a true thing, but there's a good chance you're arguing the true thing to advance a bad thing, you're still kind of doing a bad thing, and everyone involved has every right to question your motives."
IMO, this is the crux of what's wrong with journalism today.
Many journalists feel that part of their job is to discern which arguments/narratives are more likely to advance good things and which are likely to lead to bad things. Of course, because they're human, their discernment is inherently flawed and likely to be wrong as often as it's correct.
Then they use flawed assessments of likely good or bad outcomes, with the moral certainty of any crusader, to justify slanting/hiding the truth or making unfounded claims about motivations of supposed bad actors.
> What's happened is that it's become a fairly accurate heuristic to reject out of hand what some actors say because they are always trying to mislead you.
It's such a dumb heuristic. When Cotton or Trump says something, the proper move is to ignore them because they are unreliable, not to immediately start believing the opposite.
The worst part of this argument is that so many believe the other side of the coin:
Like, if you are arguing a [false] thing, but there's a good chance you're arguing the [false] thing to advance a [good]thing, you're still kind of doing a [good]thing...
I'd quarrel with this a little bit in this instance, because as Matt shows, Cotton didn't necessarily come up with this idea all by himself.
The concerning element, from a journalism standpoint, is that the establishment media ignored other establishment, credible sources to dunk on Cotton.
I think he deserves to be dunked on, repeatedly, but not for this. Just like Republicans have lost credibility when it comes to their tinfoil theories, the media will lose (whatever is left of) its credibility with indiscriminate accusations of conspiracy theorizing.
That's fine, and a fair point. It's a tough bind dealing with cranks. I would concede that the dunking was not productive, and the better response would have been to ignore Cotton or just emphasize that we don't have a clear picture rather than going hard in the other direction.
It is indeed. I think one way to do this is to deconstruct the bad faith basis of the argument for what it is, but then address the merits of it with that in mind.
It's a tightrope act and requires tact and credibility that is being sacrificed.
What has Cotton lied about?
I think he gets branded as a liar partly because his "Send in the Troops" op-ed last summer associated him in many people's minds with a genre of conservatism that was characterized by fascist tendencies (and therefore, misinformation). Reminds me of a viral Tweet where some 18 year old Kamala Harris staffer was called a "War Criminal." I call it the "Birds of a Feather" effect.
His military service. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tom-cotton-army-ranger/
So he completed ranger school which their expert says earns him the right to call himself a ranger. But even though it would be accurate for him to call himself a ranger, he should not do so in the context of referring to his military service because he wasn't part of a ranger unit. That seems less like a lie and more like stupid army drama about who gets to call themselves what.
Many actual service people have spoken up to say that the definition of what constitutes a "Ranger" is pretty nebulous and that they have seen Ranger school grads call themselves "Rangers" and have no issue with it. This is a situation where basically different vets have different opinions and there's no clear "guide" to follow, so I don't think it was misleading for Cotton to apply the tag to himself, especially given that he served in combat.
Maybe you picked at random, but if this is the most consequential example of lying that can be attributed to Tom Cotton, I really struggled to see how his trustworthiness should be meaningfully differentiated from that of an average politician.