But throwing everything imaginable at the wall and seeing that a few things stick doesn't mean you have a special insight regarding sticking things to walls.

A conspiracy theory is an argument from first principles (rather than evidence, it is a claim based on capability and incentives). That is very hard to do right, and most conspiracy theorists have more misses than hits.

That being said, it doesn't invalidate the conspiracy theorists. They fill a useful role - public discourse has three unwritten rules. Assume everyone is speaking in good faith, assume consequences of their actions that they didn't advocate for are accidental and assume that they are only working with information in the public sphere.

All three of these assumptions are unsound, so public discourse is always slightly divorced from reality. We can't have discourse without those rules, but the crazies provide a helpful chorus of "but what if we assume bad faith/indirect action/private knowledge". These ideas need to be in the conversation, even if only peripherally. It is pretty obvious that there is a lot of that negative stuff going on, even if we don't know which specific cases are coincidence vs intent.

> public discourse has three unwritten rules. Assume everyone is speaking in good faith, assume consequences of their actions that they didn't advocate for are accidental and assume that they are only working with information in the public sphere.

What?

> slightly divorced from reality

It's often extremely divorced from reality. For instance the Israel / Palestine conflict.

I agree with your sentiment, but using your own anaolgy, someone who put the time into throwing everything at the wall likely is your best source for what sticks. Because, you know, they tried... everything.

You're right, the analogy is wrong because the conspiracy theorist is actually just yelling "this will stick" at every object they pass, and then doing strange analyses of their favourite objects to try to justify it, but never actually testing the results.

Yep! But there's also the chance that yelling conspiracy theory becomes kind of a social norm to address any issue that is uncomfortable to think about which I think is pretty lazy and probably hurts us long term, too.

Some people refused to believe, for example, that big tech firms work with the gov. The idea seems quaint now but some didnt even believe Snowden!

In the end, a balance is needed.

The question really is did the preceding theories help when Snowden came out? Like you said, some didn't believe him, but he brought his reputation and experience and evidence to eventually convince people. I'm not convinced that the decades of conspiracy theories in any way helped the process, and in fact may have invalidated his claims in the eyes of some.

"conspiracy", "nuts" -- perfect use of language to shut any discourse down, playing right into the hand of whatever someone with enough power wants you to think.

“Wuhan lab leak” is a far more realistic & plausible story than “animal market is actual source that sits next to a gain of function lab doing unknown research on corona virus”

Many academics have been a proponent of the leak theory, whats shocking is not the press picking it up now, rather how quickly it was discarded before.

Please don't add fire to the FUD. The lab research is neither unknown nor secret. Not only are there published research papers from their work but the WHO have also been there and seen the work and research they do. It might or might not be the source -I won't comment on that- but unknown it is not.

> “Wuhan lab leak” is a far more realistic

It absolutely is _now_ but try saying that between Mar 2020 and Mar 2021 you got downvoted into oblivion.

Did your comments back then add anything interesting that everyone else didn't already know or did you just fling mud at the wall? I absolutely did and still do down vote posts that try to point fingers without proof, no matter if it is for or against.

You and I both know that certain ideas just could not be entertained in any way shape or form. It had little to do with proof. And what would this proof look like exactly? We are all reading the same internet bs for the last year. All anyone could do was speculate, and certain speculations were off the table for political reasons. Discussion was shut down and now it's already been shown to backfire. You are trying to retroactively justify your agreement to silence certain opinions, which is wrong, dangerous, and you should be ashamed.

I'm not ashamed to not take part in the conspiracy theories and racism that is a part of all of these lab leak discussions and behind many of the comments. I see the situation the direct opposite than you: I have added proof to discussions about the virus and every single time it has been heavily downvoted if it wasn't anti-china or pro lab-leak. Only when adding sources that prove I'm right do HN stop downvoting (but of course by then most have moved on which is why it ends up in one-use account discussions). The ideas that couldn't and still can't be discussed is truth that doesn't agree with what most Americans believe and that haven't changed at all.

As it is now we have a huge majority in these discussions that believe that because we haven't found where the virus came from it must be from a lab for the simple reason that almost everyone "know" that we found the source in a few months last time (SARS-CoV) while in reality we have still not found the source after 15 years of hard work.

On top of that these discussions are political in nature when it becomes anti-china or pro-US or whatever and by then should be downvoted.

It is obvious to anyone that is truly objective that _anything_ to make Trump look bad was going to be pushed hard by the media during that time. He, like it or not, brought the lab leak to the forefront of mind and was summarily dismissed because the media couldn't stand him.

It's all up for debate now, but the wildlife hypothesis gains its plausibility from the similarity of SARS-CoV2's similarity to coronaviruses in pangolins sold in China's wildlife trade. The wild animal/bushmeat trade is considered responsible for the 2003 SARS outbreak as well as HIV, so it's certainly plausible it spread through wet markets (although probably not the specific Wuhan wet market it was initially discovered in).

TBH, the lab leak hypothesis should seem less damaging to the Chinese government's reputation than the wet market hypothesis. On one hand, you have an isolated failure of lab safety protocols, on the other, you have decades of government support of wild animal trade despite mountains of evidence for its risk of zoonotic disease outbreak, not to mention environmental costs.