@traders poll is up https://manifold.markets/Cvill/what-of-the-following-conspiracy-th?r=Q3ZpbGw

Fell free to make markets around it if you want and post em here I would love to see some

extend the market yeh or neh?

@Cvill I'm in favor, as proposed below (extend market to half the poll's duration), but either option is acceptable.

@4fa i wont extend the market with the poll being open as in the description i added that i would start the poll once the market was closed

@Cvill In that case, I misunderstood, and I'm in favor of closing.

@Cvill I don't see a need to extend, we got a nice list already. I'm curious to see the poll results!

@Cvill This is not a valid option, correct?

@AhronMaline nah it cant be a group of them

an organization has developed an extremely effective protocol to get its members to adhere to perfect opsec, but it works so well that no one has ever leaked evidence about its existence.

@Cvill I take it that this one means the outbreak was started deliberately? Not just the virues created as an experiment and then leaked. So it should be clarified to avoid confusion

@comicstosteal I think this technically only qualifies as a conspiracy if this fact was intentionally hidden (presumably by CCP authorities), rather than just that it happened unbeknownst to popular opinion.

But even then, I'm not sure this should be included; it is an established fact (at least outside China) that China routinely orchestras "conspiracies" of this sort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation_by_China

If the theory is that the US or other actors like WHO created it or concealed the release, then yes, I would consider that as a conspiracy. But that's an entirely different question.

@DylanRichardson If it was made in a chinese lab, China would probably know. The conspiracy is that China does know and hid it. And Chinese authorities have tried hard to advocate that it wasn't from a lab.
And I don't see how China silencing medical workers and arresting citizen journalists reporting on sicknesses at the beginning of Covid has any relevance to whether the lab leak/intentional leak is a conspiracy or not.

@comicstosteal I mean that counting this implies counting 1000 other things china has done, including IP theft, monitoring of students studying abroad/Confucian clubs, spies, etc. If you click the wiki link, you'll see that it refers to international CCP COVID 19 origins misinformation, not what you assumed.

@DylanRichardson I see the part I missed. I don't really get what you're saying though.

Why can't a question like "The chinese government uses Confucian clubs to organize and advocate their national interests in foriegn universities" be allowed?

Why is evidence of China engaging in other conspiracies reason that this shouldn't be a question on this market?

N/Aing the question is out of my hands at this point though. I guess if the creator wants to remove it, I won't take issue. I probably just do not understand. And I see that I should have called the question: "China knew Covid originated in their labs, and hid it for PR reasons"

@DylanRichardson it is widely believed that several American researchers & officials, including Anthony Fauci, were involved in supporting the GOF reasearch in question and then helped in covering it up. That should count as a conspiracy. But maybe that part needs to be added to the description?

@DylanRichardson if you want i can just edit it to say the CCP covered it up

@benmanns uhh autocorrect from “psyop”

@benmanns Genuinely thought this was true lol, but very low conviction. Seeing it at 2% is enough for me to now believe it is not true (without any further investigation)

@Gen remember that this isn't meant to be the probability of it being true. It's estimating the probability that this option will get the most "agree" votes on the poll. As long as there's another option that's more popular, the chocolate one will lose. And that could happen simply because ppl haven't heard about this SEO story, even if nobody denies it!

FWIW I also have never heard of this story, and I don't care enough to look into it

@AhronMaline oh, interesting. I didn’t read the criteria lol

@benmanns what does this mean in lay terms?

@TheAllMemeingEye patio is an autocorrect from “psyop”. @Cvill would you mind fixing?

@benmanns fixed

@AdamSpence, that's not a conspiracy theory....

@Cvill depends what "scam" means? if the claim is that many doctors knowingly lie about suppesed health benefits of circumcision, and support one another in doing so, then that would be a conspiracy

@AhronMaline that would be a conspiracy. I can unresolve it and reword it to something like that

@AhronMaline oh never mind i cant

@Cvill unresolved for you

@Stralor oh ty