opaque

This is the critical question and the answer is no, as far as I'm aware. Like many such suggestions it's "A great tool for telling you things you already know" as my professor used to say. Physics should be judged on its predictive power.

This article is a general critique of the reward system in academia, bolted on the lab leak hypothesis for clickbait. "The Science Game" is a thing and often discussed on HN, but I don't see any causative link here.

> All to say: scientists create dangerous synthetic viruses to achieve “high-impact” scientific output.

Does gain of function research yield more high impact papers than more benign types of virology research? The article seems to suggest so, but provides no citations indicating that. Were the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology publishing their research to general acclaim up until now? Given how little we know about it, doesn't seem so. Are these scientists driven by the same invectives as western university research academics? They're probably state employees on stable contracts for a start, not the PhD students and itinerant PostDocs of the university system, who are the main players of the Science Game.

I don't know the answers to these questions, but the article would be more persuasive if it did.

Interesting article, but some of the arguments are pretty weak.

>“Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.”

>"Capitalism led to the creation of monopolies ..., to food lines, and to war"

The author seems to think these two statements are a damming contradiction, which proves

> "When it came to recognizing unpalatable truths, it seems that Orwell had as much difficulty as the next man."

However, both Capitalism and Communism can be flawed (and are), there is no contradiction here. The ability to critique both is probably why Orwell's work endures.

> It seems to me that if we all weren't constantly dividing ourselves by an increasing number of characteristics that are not socioeconomic class, then we would have an enormous group of people working towards the problems that result from socioeconomic differences.

That's why some on the left believe that the elites (of both the NYT and Fox news persuasion) welcome and encourage identity politics. Marxists would say class is the important divisor and the rest is a distraction.

> She says she didn't publish this model for glory, but she also named it after herself.

She didn't name it after herself, the users did:

> collegues ... began using it and addressed it as "Tai's formula"

As is typically the way with eponymous scientific works, people citing the work add the author's name e.g. Maxwell's equations or Higgs' boson. The author doesn't typically declare "I have discovered X, which I shall call ${self.name}"