Well, I suppose I'm "agnostic," too. That's my point. I have no need to be certain one way or the other, so it's better to have "good enough" confidence, which I prefer to get from a (well-informed!) "gut feeling," rather than delegating my confidence metrics to some authority who can deliver me the latest proclamations of truth from on high.
Did it actually impact me in any way to decide whether I thought a natural or lab origin was more likely? No, probably not. But I'm an avid internet commenter and so naturally I spent time reading and posting about this stuff.
But there is one tangible benefit to the time I invest in researching controversies like this when the news story first breaks: I can save time in the future when the narrative changes, by skimming stories to see if they contain new information or merely reframe existing data. At least, that's how I justify the amount of time I spent reading about this stuff in 2020...
Fun fact, I created this pseudononymous HN account to post wrongthink about Covid origins - one of my first posts [0] about it was flagged (and unflagged about a year later when I complained about it in a similar comment to this one).
Did it actually impact me in any way to decide whether I thought a natural or lab origin was more likely? No, probably not. But I'm an avid internet commenter and so naturally I spent time reading and posting about this stuff.
But there is one tangible benefit to the time I invest in researching controversies like this when the news story first breaks: I can save time in the future when the narrative changes, by skimming stories to see if they contain new information or merely reframe existing data. At least, that's how I justify the amount of time I spent reading about this stuff in 2020...
Fun fact, I created this pseudononymous HN account to post wrongthink about Covid origins - one of my first posts [0] about it was flagged (and unflagged about a year later when I complained about it in a similar comment to this one).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22912353