[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.