[panxyh]

But the aggressiveness with which this theory was dismissed and ridiculed is unbelievable. In the beginning i had often to double-check that I got the context right - that in fact it's about an accidental leak, not intended, but still treated like some tinfoil hat preaching, a conspiracy theory. If anything, that kind of response could push me to believing conspiracies i otherwise wouldn't. I lost a lot of respect for the general population and even the crowd here.

[hairofadog]

I think the issue with the early messaging on the lab-leak theory is that it was bundled with anti-immigrant messaging, which was somehow presented as an alternative to actually doing anything at all about controlling the spread of the virus.

Which is to say, it appeared to me that the messaging was along the lines of

* There's a virus, but it's no big deal and it's going to disappear, and you're an idiot if you wear a mask

* However, the virus was started in a lab in China

* Therefore, we should put more resources toward border security and remove avenues to citizenship and work visas

* And people who appear to be of asian descent should be harassed on the street for good measure

If someone gives you a message that's 75% bullshit, it can be difficult to sort out the other 25%.

[meowface]

Some people certainly spread such messages, but on HN and other places in early 2020, I saw many reasonable, scientific-minded, likely left-leaning people discuss the possibility soberly.

My own stance shifted a bit due to an early/mid-2020 HN thread, where I kind of naively assumed there was already a conclusive consensus around a zoonotic origin and that the sequence didn't indicate any human meddling. I presented that side of it, and also how the presence of the lab has to be considered in a Bayesian sense; e.g. what if the lab was built there due to an existing concentration of new viruses or virus-carrying species in that area. After reading some thoughtful replies, I realized it was pretty irresponsible and not completely rational of me to dismiss the theory out of hand, and ended up editing my post and have been continuously considering and weighing all of the circumstantial evidence on either side since then. (At the moment I'm pretty much agnostic or 50/50 on it.)

The problem is that anything unorthodox is inevitably going to have lots of crazy and ill-intentioned people associated with it, serving as ideal "weak men" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...).

In some cases deliberately, but usually inadvertently and due to bias, those positions will be painted with the brush of the craziest, least credible, and most assholish of the sources. I'm an armchair conspiracy theory (attempted) debunker so I've seen this and have tried to keep myself from doing this many times, because it's actually a failure mode that's not as severe as but not quite unlike the pervasive confirmation bias of conspiracy theorists themselves. This kind of pattern matching often does work well, which is what makes it even more epistemologically fraught when applied to new, controversial events and ideas that are developing in real-time.