Imho calling the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory is a form of gas lighting. It is telling people that it isnt legitimate to use basic common sense to question why the bat coronavirus outbreak happened down the street from the lab studying bat coronaviruses. You must deny what is plainly in front of your eyes.

This term has always bugged me. It seems to me that thinking "conspiracy theory" is a meaningful concept is guaranteed to make you dumber. Truth is an incredibly complex concept, and while we need to use greatly-simplified models of it to function in everyday life, the notion that there's a useful _binary_ distinction between theories that should be taken seriously and those that shouldn't does has a way higher epistemic cost than it does a benefit.

It's particularly bad as a thought-terminating cliche because so much of what defines the label is aesthetic: when figures or institutions in the cultural mainstream speculate wildly, the term is never used (guess how many outlets covered Hillary Clinton's description of Tulsi Gabbard & Jill Stein as "Russian assets" as a "conspiracy theory").

Every theory can be considered with the same tools, parametrized by fundamental factors like how far it is from your current model of the world, what the implications are, etc etc. I freely admit that I've never looked into Flat Earth arguments enough to thoroughly debunk them, but a combination of 1) the amount of things I'd need to change in my model of the world for it to be true and 2) the minimal impact on my life if it were mean that I don't really care to look into it. I can apply the exact same process to every other bit of constructed knowledge, without needing to hand off my critical thinking ability to lizard-brain pattern-matching and mood affiliation like "conspiracy theory".