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Comment by ShinyLeftPad | Hacker News Reader

It's a result of political division in US. If you are on the left then you have to see lab leak as a racist rightie conspiracy theory or you will have issues fitting in. Also lab leak is rejected as a side effect from being confused with intentional leak/bioweapon theory, which is entirely radioactive.

Political right is the other way around.

It is not conclusively proven one way or the other, but most people just made their conclusion: left that it's the market, right that it's the lab (or bioweapon for especially out there).

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It is both a racist rightie conspiracy theory and a plausible possibility worthy of serious consideration. Any reasonable person needs to recognize it as both simultaneously and will have no trouble fitting in among anyone outside the fringe at either end of the political spectrum.

It can't be two mutually exclusive things simultaneously.

I don't think it's just the fringes, at least it wasn't the case in 2022, now it's just not something many people talk about anymore

What is mutually exclusive about those two things?

"conspiracy theory" specifically means choosing the crazy explanation while more reasonable explanations exist. If you say the explanation is NOT crazy because it deserves investigation then it's automatically not a conspiracy theory.

"choosing" is the keyword here. You have to reason probabilistically. There was a point at which lot of people would have put 100% or 99% confidence that covid came from a lab leak. That's the conspiracy theory side.

A lot of more reasonable people would have put 1% or 5% confidence on covid coming from a lab leak, saying roughly "It's unlikely, but hard to rule out because China isn't being transparent". And then ask for more investigation, which is exactly what happened.

So at no point was it rationally worth a 99% probability estimate, but it was worth investigation.

What validity do you put on earth being flat? So that's the validity some people put on covid lab leak theory. You may be surprised.

Calling something a conspiracy theory means rejecting its validity for investigation out of hand. Maybe you don't use it like that but that's how most people apparently use it.

> There was a point at which lot of people would have put 100% or 99% confidence that covid came from a lab leak

Why was? Now it is a point at which a lot of people put 100% confidence that covid came from a lab leak. And a lot of other people put 100% confidence that it was Wuhan market bat. And that's the problem I tried to express.

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