Slack / Private Message Drop — page 234

[2020-10-27 10:08:21] [Kristian Andersen] She's so deep in now that there's no coming back - if I was the Broad I'd make a clean cut. [2020-10-27 10:21:27] [Andrew Rambaut] It really doesn't make any sense what she thinks she will get out of this - I assume this is entirely a genuine belief that she has discovered a truth and soon she will be celebrated for it. It is not like she is just giving the right wingers what they want either. [2020-10-27 10:24:23] [Kristian Andersen] I think she strongly believes that she has uncovered something that the scientific world hasn't managed to do - fueled by a ton of crackpot followers on Twitter. The main problem, of course, is that she does not understand evolution or genomics - experience is pretty key here.... It's just really dumb - but after she started accusing scientists of covering this up, she no longer has my sympathy. [2020-10-27 10:36:19] [Robert Garry] Beyond the accusations that the bat and pangolin sequences are fraudulent is the whole FCS is a :unicorn_face: BS and that no one has ever seen a FCS generated that way before. [2020-10-27 10:37:13] [Kristian Andersen] You can't fix stupid. :man-shrugging: [2020-10-27 13:31:53] [Eddie Holmes] I will write to Eric (cc Pardis) today. Enough is enough. [2020-10-27 13:34:09] [Eddie Holmes] How many times have we seen this: people start to believe their own tweeter hype that they are some sort of profound insight. There needs to be a new syndrome - tweeter-induced delusions. [2020-10-27 13:35:36] [Eddie Holmes] I like the way she says 'top experts' which is a sort of tacit admission that she's not one. [2020-10-27 14:46:40] [Kristian Andersen] "TWitter Associated Triumph delusion" - aka TWAT. [2020-10-27 15:35:46] [Andrew Rambaut] [thread - ID: 2020-10-27 15:35:46] If you look at all the replies that these people get every time they tweet - it is just a flood of validation saying how brilliant they are, thanking them for telling the truth, how brave they are. Because they are on that side of the fence they get none of the abuse. It clearly just feeds the delusion. [2020-10-27 15:37:48] [Eddie Holmes] Just emailed Lander: Dear Professor Lander, I apologise for troubling you, but I wish to raise my very strong concerns about the online behaviour of one of your employees at The Broad Institute - Dr. Alina Chan. Over the past few months Dr. Chan has used Twitter to make increasingly strong claims about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, in particular that it may be of lab rather than natural