Are the people who insisted the lab leak theory was some kind of case study in media groupthink ever going to turn the same microscope on themselves, now that it’s increasingly clear that lab leak mania was itself evidence-free groupthink on their part?
foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab…
foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab…
Seems to me that if you’re going to write about how media refusal to take this theory seriously is a “fiasco” that reveals institutional biases, and then it turns out you yourself fell for a bunch of shaky non-evidence, it’s time for some reflection! slowboring.com/p/the-medias-l…
If you’re scared of groupthink, shouldn’t “I embraced a bunch of very tenuous evidence, often sourced to officials in a highly untrustworthy previous administration, that validated certain priors of mine” be the sort of thing that merits self-examination nymag.com/intelligencer/…
If the lab leak theory was exactly the same long-shot speculation in May 2021 that it was in May 2020, maybe we could consider whether anything was really gained by the tidal wave of self-righteous lecturing on epistemology we endured washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
There was so much of this stuff! All of it the same! And all of it both premised on the idea that a lab leak was growing in likelihood (false) and that it was objectively somewhat likely (also false) npr.org/2021/06/03/100…
And it’s not just that it’s annoying. It’s that it’s almost impossible to read this stuff and not come away with the impression that maybe the Trump people were right about China, and that there’s a decent chance COVID is somehow manmade. nytimes.com/2021/05/31/opi…
In the end, the people who claimed to be engaged in some kind of important narrative correction on lab leaks have mostly just misinformed the public and promoted far-right conspiracies, all while participating in the same kind of closed-loop conversation they claim is the problem
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