Unfortunately the way that taboos work is by surrounding the whole topic in an aversive miasma. If you could carefully debate the implications of X, then that would provide an avenue for disproving X, which would be unacceptable. So instead this process tends to look more like “if you don’t believe Y then you’re probably the sort of terrible person who believes ~X”, and now you’re tarred with the connotation even if you try to carefully explain why you actually have different reasons for not believing Y (which is what you’d likely say either way).
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.
Tbc: It should be fine to argue against those implications, right? It’s just that, if you grant the implication, then you can’t publicly refute Y.
Unfortunately the way that taboos work is by surrounding the whole topic in an aversive miasma. If you could carefully debate the implications of X, then that would provide an avenue for disproving X, which would be unacceptable. So instead this process tends to look more like “if you don’t believe Y then you’re probably the sort of terrible person who believes ~X”, and now you’re tarred with the connotation even if you try to carefully explain why you actually have different reasons for not believing Y (which is what you’d likely say either way).
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.