Even if the lab leak theory was true and some irresponsible handlers were responsible for it, so what? Science moves and lives on. If we had to throw out every concept that committed some catastrophic failure we'd have nothing - no governments, no religions, etc.
This is only an attack on science if you are already anti-science.
I think a lot of people in the lab leak community are looking for someone to blame, purely out of retribution, which is ultimately pointless.
Ignoring that contingent, it's still important to do a full postmortem after a catastrophe. If a bridge collapses, people don't say "oh well, life moves on". They figured out why it collapsed, and then design the next generation of bridges to not fail in that way. If you don't do the analysis, you can't do the mitigation.
> purely out of retribution, which is ultimately pointless.
If a mad scientist was making a better bomb design, and accidentally blew up a million people through negligence, would your perspective be different? What about a bridge that collapses and kills people? Engineers go to prison for that. There needs to be accountability for, demonstrably, one of the most dangerous acts that can be done.
I would be perfectly ok with the the lab being shut down/redesigned, if a flaw in its design were found, and any negligent scientists and safety officers being removed/prosecuted.
Blaming process failures on individuals rarely yields any results. Can you give me one example of a time it worked; where merely punishing an individual without making any process changes has prevented a class of accidents since that incident to now?
My take is that any process relying on a single individual is ultimately a failure. All sorts of things happen to individuals, including losing the ability to fear the consequences (think degenerative brain disease; cancer, Alzheimer's, etc.) With the fear of consequences eliminated, your process fails open and retribution accomplishes nothing. If some scientist at a bomb lab wants to kill 1 billion people, including themselves, no punishment is going to deter them. "An eye for an eye", while appealing to our reptile brains, can't scale beyond a single murder. So your process for preventing mass murder can't include it if it's to be effective.
Punishment doesn't bring your loved ones back from the dead. All we can hope for is a system that doesn't fail so easily next time.
I actually assume the policy is fine. Part of policy is, necessarily, enforcement. In any safety critical policy, there is someone that holds final accountability. That accountability is the pressure, the policy, that guarantees the policy is followed. This is why we have the enforcement of laws, and not just the laws themselves. Criminal negligence is a possibility, happens frequently, and is enforced often, around safety critical systems. If there’s no enforcement, then the policy is fiction.
I highly recommend you look into accountability, in safety critical systems. There are many many decades of policy/data that show accountability is a necessary component. Is what keeps them honest/careful.
(I’ll try to be back with references and a good example)
There is no chance, that this is just a call for reform, for working oversight, for not outsourcing to the cheapest bidder, for a outside inquisition to have visits and quality control. For reproduceability? For a limiting of potentially exponetially dangerous research, like we are perfectly willing to push it with nuclear weapons? No, every one opposing my oppinion is a absolute enemy, there is only black and white and the institutions we have are perfect, right now, at this very moment.
All those yells, just from touching the pots.
Sorry, but this absolutist, finalist stating of facts, is verz unscientific in itself. Were does that sentiment, that yelling the loudest and ascribing every oppossition evil motives come from?
Its not very democratic. Not very scientific either.
This is only an attack on science if you are already anti-science.