I expect this effect to be weaker than you’re suggesting, especially if Y is something you in fact independently care about, and not an otherwise unimportant proximal detail that could reasonably be interpreted as a “just asking questions” means of arguing for ~X. I’m struggling to think of a particularly illustrative X and Y, but consider X=”COVID was not a lab leak”, which seemed lightly taboo to disagree with in 2020. Here’s a pair of tweets you could have sent in 2020: 1. “I think COVID was probably a lab leak.” 2. “I don’t know whether COVID was a lab leak. (In fact for now I’m intentionally not looking into it, because it doesn’t seem important enough to outweigh the risk of arriving at taboo beliefs.) But gain-of-function research in general is unacceptably risky, in a way that makes global pandemic lab leaks a very real possibility, and we should have much stronger regulations to prevent that.”
I expect the second one would receive notably less push back, even though it defends Y=”gain of function research is unacceptably risky”, and suggests that Y provides evidence for ~X.
I expect this effect to be weaker than you’re suggesting, especially if Y is something you in fact independently care about, and not an otherwise unimportant proximal detail that could reasonably be interpreted as a “just asking questions” means of arguing for ~X. I’m struggling to think of a particularly illustrative X and Y, but consider X=”COVID was not a lab leak”, which seemed lightly taboo to disagree with in 2020. Here’s a pair of tweets you could have sent in 2020:
1. “I think COVID was probably a lab leak.”
2. “I don’t know whether COVID was a lab leak. (In fact for now I’m intentionally not looking into it, because it doesn’t seem important enough to outweigh the risk of arriving at taboo beliefs.) But gain-of-function research in general is unacceptably risky, in a way that makes global pandemic lab leaks a very real possibility, and we should have much stronger regulations to prevent that.”
I expect the second one would receive notably less push back, even though it defends Y=”gain of function research is unacceptably risky”, and suggests that Y provides evidence for ~X.